Tuesday, December 25, 2007

 

Merry Xmas to all, including dread sovereigns

Woke up at 8:15 with the predictable hangover and hazy recollections of running around Don Quixote at nigh on 3 in the a.m. on some damn fool present challenge. Got stuck into the first of my literary stocking-fillers: Edward III: a new play by Shakespeare.

(For those scratching their heads and wondering if they have forgotten how to read: the play itself is NOT new. However, Shakespeare has only recently been confirmed as the author by learned beards of literature.)

The play itself seems Shakespearean enough: the French and Scottish take an absolute pounding.

The title character, King Edward, is everything one might expect of royalty: capricious, lecherous and, best of all, completely above the law.

The KING is having his secretary, LODOWICK, write a poem.

KING: Forget not to set down how passionate,
How heart-sick and full of languishment
Her beauty makes me.

LODOWICK: Write I to a woman?

KING: What beauty else could triumph on me?
Or who but women do our love-lays greet?
What, thinkst thou I did bid thee praise a horse?

***


It hardly needs to be said that the poem being composed is not to his wife: it's to someone else's wife.

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Comments:
"It hardly needs to be said that the poem being composed is not to his wife: it's to someone else's wife."

But of course.

I take back my hate of the Bard.
--vmm
 
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