[lbo-talk] Shakespeare

Robert Wrubel bobwrubel at yahoo.com
Mon Dec 10 19:08:03 PST 2007


Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> > Your low-laid son our godhead will uplift: His comforts thrive, his
> > trials well are spent.

The material C.G.E. quotes may contribute to explaining both the power of much in Shakespeare _and_ this sort of response (which is fairly common, just not often voiced so vocifereoulsy). "His comforts thrive" _does_ force a fairly concscious shifting of mental gears. "Comfort" is not usually plural, and comforts are not the sort of thing that, usually, "thrive" (with its marginal sexual force). And after taking this in, one has to mentally first reword "'trials well are spent" as "trials are spent well," then again sort our the senses of "trials" and "spent" that make sense of the conjunction. But that kind of complex response is about as "natural" or "spontaneous" as the butterfly stroke in swimming. (And to follow it on stage is yet another matter; since my hearing has degraded I get nothing from Shakespeare on stage or screen -- but a good deal from Shakespeare on TV with close captioning. You have to hear and take in _all_ the words: "His drawl is pent" would not quite do it.

There is a technical matter too, beyond my capacity to analyze, but there is something to be said about (a) the vowel progression in the first line as a whole and (b) in particular in the last three words, combined with the stress there. The line is in some (weired?) way uplifting. And the second line rests at the end.

Carrol

(BW)

We have a kind of linguistric double helix here, of sound, syntax and sense intertwined, going in different directions --an Escher staircase of language.

Shakespeare and Joyce are the only English writers I know with this imperious power of language (maybe Melville?). But Joyce had to labor at it, while apparently Shakespeare tossed off the bulk of it in one draft.

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