I
will return again into the house, and desire some conduct of the lady. I am no
fighter. I have heard of some kind of men that put quarrels purposefully on
others, to taste their valour; belike this is a man of that quirk.
-Viola
Twelfth Night Act III, Scene iv,
Line 241
Okay, no idea what’s going on here. But when did that ever
stop me? Lets just take a crack at the paragraph, and context be damned for
today.
First off – long scene! It keeps going and is almost 400
lines before it’s done. Again, this is not a play that I know. I only know bits
and bobs from doing this screwy random line thing. another observation is
that this scene flips back and forth between prose and verse. We’re in prose
right here.
Secondly – For those of you who are always complaining about how hard Shakespeare is to read, and that's it's written in middle English or something (it's not), this is pretty understandable. The only particularly
odd word is ‘belike’. But given the context within this paragraph, I think we
can assume it just mean’s ‘it looks like’ (I looked it up on Google and on my
Shakespeare lexicon and it’s in both as ‘perhaps’). We may not be quite sure
what conduct she’s referring to in ‘some conduct’, but that’s okay.
And finally, it’s got the word ‘quirk’. Now I’m a big fan of
the adjective form of that word, ‘quirky’. I’ve been referred to as quirky, and
generally I take that as a compliment. I’m not sure why. But I guess just the
fact that I take being described as quirky as a compliment is self-evident of
the truth of the statement. N’est pas? Just to be clear though, I do not find
myself to be a person of the quirk described above; that is, to pick a fight
with someone just to see if I can get them to fight. In fact, I’m much more
like the speaker today’s lines: I am no
fighter.
And just to prove that I'm no fighter, here's the last guy I got in a fight with. Well, almost. That's Kevin Collins on the left and me on the right. This is fifth grade, Sister Mary Paul's class (that's her in blue). The truth is that I ended up walking away from this fight, but at least I almost got in a fight with him. So, yeah, I am no fighter. Quirky, but no fighter.