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Merry Wives, Act 4, April 8
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Candy
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Feb 14, 2022 12:37PM
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WILLIAM PAGE: O, - vocative, O.
EVANS: Remember, William, focative is caret.
QUICKLY: And that's a good root.
Very saucy word play here. "focative"...sounds like "fuck" his pronumciation has to be clarified not a "u" sound...but an "O" sound. Very tricky stuff. "caret" is Latin...for "lack" But Mistress Quickly thinks he says "carrot"...which is phalic...so the bawdriness has not been cleaned up it goes round in circles.
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'Oman, art thou lunatics? hast thou no
understandings for thy cases and the numbers of the
genders
All I could find was an idea that numbers are masculaine or feminine in some societies.
And then just casual googling...found this study...a bit of a full read...
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/...
Mod
I'm guessing, or missed a reference, that this must be warm weather. Do we know the season of this play? The pyramids of giza were aligned with the three stars...or belt...of Orion.
A hunter in the night...Orion. He has two dogs canis major and minor.
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So this is very interesting that their is an ancient knowedge being portrayed here by Shakespeare for provincial persons. Falstaff has been dressed a woman. And now he will be a deer figure...referencing the night sky. What does the oak tree symbolize? This is a very profound mu=ystical pageant being planned!
MISTRESS PAGE
That likewise have we thought upon, and thus:
Nan Page my daughter and my little son
And three or four more of their growth we'll dress
Like urchins, ouphes and fairies, green and white,
With rounds of waxen tapers on their heads,
And rattles in their hands: upon a sudden,
As Falstaff, she and I, are newly met,
Let them from forth a sawpit rush at once
With some diffused song: upon their sight,
We two in great amazedness will fly:
Then let them all encircle him about
And, fairy-like, to-pinch the unclean knight,
And ask him why, that hour of fairy revel,
In their so sacred paths he dares to tread
In shape profane.
Mod
There's his chamber, his house, his castle, his
standing-bed and truckle-bed; 'tis painted about
with the story of the Prodigal, fresh and new. Go
knock and call; hell speak like an Anthropophaginian
unto thee: knock, I say.
Later..
Host
Thou art clerkly, thou art clerkly, Sir John. Was
there a wise woman with thee?
FALSTAFF
Ay, that there was, mine host; one that hath taught
me more wit than ever I learned before in my life;
and I paid nothing for it neither, but was paid for
my learning.
“I was a better man with you, as a woman... than I ever was with a woman, as a man. You know what I mean? I just gotta learn to do it without the dress. At this point, there might be an advantage to my wearing pants. The hard part's over, you know? We were already... good friends.” Dustin Hoffman in TOOTSIE
"For people to do drag and make it their profession in a male-dominated culture, they have to go through so much emotional tug-of-war, because society says, ‘You’re not supposed to do that.’ So, the strength and humanity it takes to maintain yourself and your dreams create many different layers of consciousness. That’s where the humanity comes from.” RuPaul
“Yes! It doesn’t have a political agenda in terms of policies in Washington. But it has a position on identity, which is really the most political you can get. It has politics at its core, because it deals with: how do you see yourself on this planet? That’s highly political. It’s about recognising that you are God dressing up in humanity, and you could do whatever you want. That’s what us little boys who were maligned and who were ostracised figured out. It’s a totem, a constant touchstone to say, ‘Don’t take any of this shit seriously.’ It’s a big f-you. So the idea of sticking to one identity – it’s like I don’t care, I’m a shapeshifter, I’m going to fly around and use all the colours, and not brand myself with just one colour.
“Drag loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it, because at its core it’s a social statement and a big f-you to male-dominated culture. So for men to do it, it’s really punk rock, because it’s a real rejection of masculinity.”RuPaul
Candy wrote: "Herne the hunter , is he related to "Green Man."? In astrology...The antlers relate to "lunar mansion" of Orion which is a deer. I'm guessing, or missed a reference, that this must be warm weathe..."
Herne the hunter is local to Windsor.
https://mythopedia.com/topics/herne-t...
The Green Man is a Pre-Christian guardian of the forest.
Quite a few pubs are called The Green Man.
https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK...
Orion is part of Greek mythology. In the Northern hemisphere it is a winter constellation and disappears from the night sky during June.
If you read Tim's first reference carefully , you can see that there is no evidence for Herne the hunter outside TMWOW. It seems to be a piece of English mythology created by S and elaborated further by others, including Ainsworth. We scoured the internet for Herne at the previous MWOW read I remember.There are lots of fun illustrations:
https://www.bing.com/images/search?q=...
Mod
https://www.etymonline.com/word/sacri...
And that they both are to me...allegorical, one with humour, one tragedy.
The sacrifices are literal and literary. Shakespeare offers up Falstaff as sacrifice removed from the Falstaff of earlier character development (and belovedness/wit/intelligence) in Henry.
And obviously sacrifice of a young highly potential benevolent king, with young prince Hamlet.
The other way I see sacrifice is that the method of allegory allows a character to stand in for something else, like a false king.
Substitute king, wikipedia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substit...
Candy wrote: "The other way I see sacrifice is that the method of allegory allows a character to stand in for something else, like a false king.'"Well, S develops it fully with Measure To Measure, written a few years (a a couple of plays) after Wives. And, of course (according to records) Wives is written directly after Hamlet. So it may be safe to assume, like most writers, Shakespeare was extending (if not actively developing) his thematic preoccupations. Course, in the interim between Wives and Measure the queen died, a Scottish king was crowned and The Gun Powder Plot threatened to take away the main source of his company's support (though it's interesting to consider how much revenue came from public vs. royal performances. Are there extant bookeeping records of The King's Men?).
Mod
Sir Hugh Evans a Welsh parson. I was curious about which books a parson might have. I found the inventory of William Massie, a vicar taken on 15 February 1587/8.https://community.dur.ac.uk/4schools....
