[lbo-talk] Shakespeare

[Robert Wrubel]

I dont remember the play either, but the lines sound like something Claudius would have said of Hamlet.  And the first line sounds like the sexual puns in the Sonnets. Weird indeed!  An eminent modern Shakespearean said Shakespeare's language didn't make sense in a conventional way at all. He seems to operate in a separate world of meaning, as Nureyev seemed to moved outside the laws of gravity.

   

  BobW

   

  Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:

  Shakespeare is weird. I was just browsing in the current New Yorker and
came across the two lines below, quoted from Cymbeline. It's been 54
years since I read that play, and therefore the lines are without
context for me, just two lines hanging in midair:

Your low-laid son our godhead will uplift:
His comforts thrive, his trials well are spent.

These lines owe _nothing_ to any profundity of content; the content
would fit a small-town weekly's report on a church bazaar. Yet they
really are wonderful.

Like I say, Shakespeare is weird. These two lines reflect his difference
from other poets in English: even when his words aren't saying much they
somehow stick together so perfectly.

Carrol

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