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Merry Wives, Act 3, April 1
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Candy
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Feb 11, 2022 10:31PM
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Shallow declares in scene 1:"I have lived 4 score years and upwards".
I take this to mean that he is in his 80s. I find this surprising. Very surprising. How old is Falstaff meant to be then?
Yes, Shallow is really old, old, old isn't he? It adds some extra humour (and perhaps poignancy), to him comparing now with the good old days."In these times you stand on distance, your passes, stoccadoes, and I know not what: 'tis the heart, Master Page; 'tis here, 'tis here. I have seen the time, with my long sword I would have made you four tall fellows skip like rats."
To what extent his youthful exploits are in his imagination only, who can say, but they are real to him. When he says "'tis here, 'tis here" he is no doubt beating his breast, as he remembers the old style of using the sword and compares it with taught methods of today.
The idea of a sword fight seems to excite him greatly ...
The duel is a bit of a puzzle, as one would have supposed Evans, being in holy orders, would have been forbidden from fighting one. Evans seems to be holding a sword and a book. If the book is of a devotional nature he does not read from it, and on the Elizabethan stage you couldn't have read from the Bible anyway. Instead he sings snatches from Marlowe.I have a Muse's Library reprint of Englands Helicon of 1600, and here is Marlowe's melodious poem in full, with the original spelling and pointing. I've italicised the bit Evans sings,
COME live with mee, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Vallies, groves, hills, and fieldes,
Woods, or steepie mountaine yeeldes.
And wee will sit upon the Rocks,
Seeing the Sheepheards feede theyr flocks,
By shallow Rivers, to whose falls,
Melodious byrds sing Madrigalls.
And I will make thee beds of Roses
And a thousand fragrant poesies,
A cap of flowers, and a kirtle,
Imbroydred all with leaves of Mirtle.
A gowne made of the finest wooll,
Which from our pretty Lambes we pull,
Fayre lined slippers for the cold:
With buckles of the purest gold.
A belt of straw, and Ivie buds,
With Corall clasps and Amber studs,
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with mee, and be my love.
The Sheepheards Swaines shall daunce & sing,
For thy delight each May-morning,
If these delights thy minde may move;
Then live with mee, and be my love.
In Englands Helicon this is the one poem attributed to Marlowe, and there is a single poem of S's, from Loves Labours Lost. In The Passionate Pilgrim of 1599 a garbled version of the poem is attributed to S, but the work is pirated, and most of its attributions to S are known to be fake. Is its inclusion here a Shakespeare tribute to Marlowe?
Evans seems to be forgetting the poem as he tries to remember it, even throwing in the Biblical "When as I sat in Babylon" suggested by the waters of "shallow rivers". "By the waters of Babylon" is of course very singable, youtube links unnecessary!
Do you notice he keeps blanking on the word "shallow"? Very Freudian. It is because of his plan hatched with Shallow that he finds himself fighting this duel.
This view in Google maps is useful,https://www.google.com/maps/@51.47014...
Windsor and Windsor Castle are central, Old Windsor to the southeast is a separate village, as Simple says,
"... old Windsor way, and every way but the town way."
-- the town being Windsor itself. You can see the Thames winding across the map. Datchet is on the Thames about a mile east of Windsor, but I guess Datchet Mead was on the Windsor side, and connected with the river for the washing and bleaching done there. Windsor Great Park is a few miles south of Windsor itself.
Mod
O jusst wanted to add this bit because I was interested in how "meta" it was...how self-referential
MISTRESS FORD
Do so. Go tell thy master I am alone.
Exit ROBIN
Mistress Page, remember you your cue.
MISTRESS PAGE
I warrant thee; if I do not act it, hiss me.
The dialogue is self-referential to a play. I love that.
"Metafiction is a form of fiction which emphasises its own constructedness in a way that continually reminds the audience to be aware they are reading or viewing a fictional work. Metafiction is self-conscious about language, literary form, and story-telling, and works of metafiction directly or indirectly draw attention to their status as artifacts.[1] Metafiction is frequently used as a form of parody or a tool to undermine literary conventions and explore the relationship between literature and reality, life, and art
"Although metafiction is most commonly associated with postmodern literature that developed in the mid-20th century, its use can be traced back to much earlier works of fiction, such as The Canterbury Tales (Geoffrey Chaucer, 1387), Don Quixote (Miguel de Cervantes, 1605), The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (Laurence Sterne, 1759), Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray, 1847), as well as more recent works such as House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski, 2000).
Metafiction became particularly prominent in the 1960s, with works such as Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth, "The Babysitter" and "The Magic Poker" by Robert Coover, Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut,[ The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles, The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, and Willie Master's Lonesome Wife by William H. Gass.
"Since the 1980s, contemporary Latino literature has an abundance of self-reflexive, metafictional works, including novels and short stories by Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) Sandra Cisneros (Caramelo) Salvador Plascencia (The People of Paper),Carmen Maria Machado (Her Body),[ Rita Indiana (Tentacle), and Valeria Luiselli (Lost Children Archive)." Wikipedia
Mod
I found this a rather dark bit of ideas. Quite ghoulaih....
Falstaff:
Have I lived to be carried in a basket, like a
barrow of butcher's offal, and to be thrown in the
Thames? Well, if I be served such another trick,
I'll have my brains ta'en out and buttered, and give
them to a dog for a new-year's gift. The rogues
slighted me into the river with as little remorse as
they would have drowned a blind bitch's puppies,
fifteen i' the litter: and you may know by my size
that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking; if the
bottom were as deep as hell, I should down. I had
been drowned, but that the shore was shelvy and
shallow,--a death that I abhor; for the water swells
a man; and what a thing should I have been when I
had been swelled! I should have been a mountain of mummy.
Having his brains (sautéed) in butter...and fed to a dog! Interesting. So we have this ongoing canine motif.
But we also have a sort of cannibalism here...carried ina basket like butchers offal...is much more than "sort of cannibali" allusions.
And the ending "mountin of mummy" hints at the idea of medicine to eat mummified parts. Did we talk about this before?
"The eating of Egyptian mummies reached its peak in Europe by the 16th century. Mummies could be found on apothecary shelves in the form of bodies broken into pieces or ground into powder. Why did Europeans believe in the medicinal value of the mummy?"
https://www.sciencehistory.org/distil...
Mod
Mod
MISTRESS QUICKLY
By your leave; I cry you mercy: give your worship
good morrow.
FALSTAFF
Take away these chalices. Go brew me a pottle of
sack finely.
BARDOLPH
With eggs, sir?
FALSTAFF
Simple of itself; I'll no pullet-sperm in my brewage.
Exit BARDOLPH
How now!
MISTRESS QUICKLY
Marry, sir, I come to your worship from Mistress Ford.
FALSTAFF
Mistress Ford! I have had ford enough; I was thrown
into the ford; I have my belly full of ford.
MISTRESS QUICKLY
Alas the day! good heart, that was not her fault:
she does so take on with her men; they mistook their erection.
FALSTAFF
So did I mine, to build upon a foolish woman's promise.
MISTRESS QUICKLY
Well, she laments, sir, for it, that it would yearn
your heart to see it. Her husband goes this morning
a-birding; she desires you once more to come to her
between eight and nine: I must carry her word
quickly: she'll make you amends, I warrant you.
Candy wrote: "P.S. Titus and Julius Caesar both mention eating humans."Sir Julius Caesar was the MP for Windsor. No record of him eating anybody though.
https://www.geni.com/people/Sir-Juliu...
Ms Page: I warrant thee; if I do not act it, hiss me.Of course, she is "acting a role" for the sake of deception, within the part of Ms Page, but it still draws attention to the whole of Ms Page being an act. Well spotted Candy! In fact S's metafiction adventures are explored in a most interesting book which I see is on Candy's "to read" list, namely
Philip Edwards: Shakespeare and the Confines of Art
Edwards sees S as recognising the limitations of the medium in which he can express himself, and always looking for ways to go beyond it. TMWOW is roughly contemporaneous with Hamlet, where there is constant use of meta-fiction: Hamlet seeming to say of the player's "Pyrrhus" speech, "look at this imagined grief for Hebuca, and compare it with the real grief I feel" -- the player is acting, but Hamlet tells us he is not. Hamlet as actor (trying the beginning of the "Pyrrhus" speech himself) and Hamlet as mimic (mimicing Laertes' graveyard speech and Osric's courtly jargon), Polonius seeming to forget his lines ("what was I about to say? By the mass, I was about to say something, where did I leave?"), the internal play repeating to the whole on-stage cast the play we are watching.
There is a similar move in TMWOW from play to masque-within-play.
Trying to go beyond the confines of the medium is especially common in classical music of course, so much so it is hardly remarked on. Here are two striking examples, go to 21:00 mins (almost the end) of this clip,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQ9fy... (Les Noces)
and hear the bells of an Orthdox church celebrating a wedding, all done with percussion instruments, and the first 3 mins of
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrYg7... (L'Heure Espagnole)
for the sound of clocks and watches with their ticks and chimes in a watchmender's shop.
Mod
I'm actually very inspired to try to write a small essay on how I see them connected.
Mod
I was not able to play the Ravel...in USA I suppose...so I found this...which I hope is similar?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8ZFl...
It is fascinating to think of Shakespeare wanting to push his work. I think that we are seeing that challenge to be...avant gaurde (which is what I would call it in music, art, Jim, couture)
I found the next two ACts to be really pushing boundaries...boundaries that still seem to be advanced today.
By the way...I love avant grade...I seek it out.
Which reminds me your last message Martin reminded me of a very fun book..
"stranger Than We Can Imagine" discusses many interdisciplinary works that push their mediums...
"ABOUT STRANGER THAN WE CAN IMAGINE
In Stranger Than We Can Imagine, John Higgs argues that before 1900, history seemed to make sense. We can understand innovations like electricity, agriculture and democracy. The twentieth century, in contrast, gave us relativity, cubism, quantum mechanics, the id, existentialism, Stalin, psychedelics, chaos mathematics, climate change and postmodernism.
In order to understand such a disorienting barrage of unfamiliar and knotty ideas, Higgs shows us, we need to shift the framework of our interpretation and view these concepts within the context of a new kind of historical narrative. Instead of looking at it as another step forward in a stable path, we need to look at the twentieth century as a chaotic seismic shift, upending all linear narratives.
Higgs invites us along as he journeys across a century “about which we know too much” in order to grant us a new perspective on it. He brings a refreshingly non-academic, eclectic and infectiously energetic approach to his subjects as well as a unique ability to explain how complex ideas connect and intersect—whether he’s discussing Einstein’s theories of relativity, the Beat poets’ interest in Eastern thought or the bright spots and pitfalls of the American Dream." book jacket blurb
I've got to go track down that book by Phillip Edwardsa...."Shakespeare and the Confines of Art"and read it plus update my book list
Mod
Which I might as well add some other books I have in my immediate vicinity I'm reading..."The Human Stage" by John Orrell. English Theatre Design 1567-1640.
"Theatre of The World," by Yates ( I love her books, but unfortunately, she has never been considered hard history and hs little respect for her theories) I've read this book a number of times and its very dear to me. Am re-visiting it.
I got the John Orrell book mentioned above because I was so taken with a book I read a couple months ago by him "The Quest For Shakespeare's Globe"
"Mnemonic Methods" by Robert Fludd. Do you see a pattern here...reading on stage designs of Shakespeare's time.
Re-visiting "Shakespeare and The Comon Uderstanding" by Norman Rabkin. 'This excellent book combines sound scholarship with a contemporary sensibility so unpretentiously that its originality may not at first be apparent. Professor Rabkin has profited from the scholarship of his predecessors but uses their criticism to provide striking new combinations and perspectives. He shows us a Shakespeare who is certainly ‘our contemporary’ but who speaks to us from the frame of his own time and place.
The avenue by which Professor Rabkin approaches the plays is J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Science and the Common Understanding, from which the concept of “complementarity” is borrowed, the necessity in certain situations of employing apparently contradictory descriptions without embarrassment. In this view, human communication and understanding of ultimates must necessarily be paradoxical. Whether in fact this concept from atomic physics applies to the moral universe is an open question. Suffice it that Professor Rabkin has made very convincing use of it in this book.'
-- and it is time I read some Frances Yates. Her book on LLL to begin with ...How are Marlin and JamesD doing? I would be interested to get their overall view of this play.
Candy wrote: "I've caught up to Act 3. Finally LOLI found this a rather dark bit of ideas. Quite ghoulaih....
Falstaff:
Have I lived to be carried in a basket, like a
barrow of butcher's offal, and to be t..."
Yes this is an interesting passage for me too.
There is the social history described, that unused offal (some of it was definitely eaten, as it still is today) was in Tudor London dumped in the Thames to get rid of it. What a stinky old river it must have been. One can imagine that almost anything was dumped there.
I think that Falstaff would rather have been run through with a sword than be dumped as offal in the river. Rather demeaning.
And brains to be eaten. People still eat brains of diferent animals around the world today and lambs brains is to be got at raw for for pets stores as food for dogs today. I read that hunting dogs in medeival times would be treated with the brains of the deer that they had chased. The image of Falstaff buttering his own brains to feed to a dog takes some conjuring!
And back in Act 2 scene one where Pistol is engaging with Ford to get him invoilved in setting up Falstaff by scaring him with the Sir Actaeon story -
Pistol "Or go thou like Sir Actaeon, he with Ringwood at thy heels"
Sir Actaeon who was turned into a stag (to wear the cuckolds horns) and was then hunted and killed by his own dogs, one of them named Ringwood.
