Two evenings off, going into tech, and I’ve put The Bard on, in lovestory succession.
Tonight: “Loves Labours Lost,” and “Much Ado.”
…The words ring in my head…some sticking for a while to stay and rest there. Ideas and plot lines I know as well as the back of my hand, being reintroduced in new ways only cuz I’ve been living in the headspace of it for little over a month now.
…Great feats of wooing, and anger, lust, jest, mock, and clowning. A sense of humor is necessary for the journey…and a balance of it and the drama. Finding the perfect give and take to engage. That, I think, is the secret and separation ‘tween “well done” Shakespeare, and “not.”
…Then: the lines. Comparisons, metaphors, sworn oaths, and poetry…some set at a pace, some slow to chew…
…In Love:
“…And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.
Never durst poet touch a pen to write
Until his ink were temper’d with Love’s sighs;
O, then his lines would ravish savage ears
And plant in tyrants mild humility.
From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive:
They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;
They are the books, the arts, the academes,
That show, contain and nourish all the world:
Else none at all in ought proves excellent.”
~ LLL
“I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest.”
~ Much Ado
“I would forget her, but a fever she
Reigns in my blood, and will remembered be”
~ LLL
***
…In Anger:
“Is he not approved in the height a villain, that hath slandered, scorned, dishonoured my kinswoman?
O that I were a man! What, bear her in hand until they
come to take hands; and then, with public
accusation, uncovered slander,
unmitigated rancour,
–O God, that I were a man!
I would eat his heart in the market-place.”
~Much Ado
***
… In Metaphor:
“Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical; these summer flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation: I do forswear them.”
~ LLL
“Is it not strange that sheep’s guts could hail souls out of men’s bodies?”
~ Much Ado
” He hath not fed of the dainties that are bred in a book;
He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink.”
~ LLL
” Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,
Men were deceivers ever,
-One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.”
~ Much Ado
“Many can brook the weather that love not the wind.”
~LLL
“Therefor brave conquerors, for so you are
That war against your own affections
And the huge army of the world’s desires”
~ LLL
***
…In Insult:
“They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.”
~ LLL
“O, she misused me past the endurance of a block.
She told me, not thinking I had been myself,
that I was the Prince’s jester, and that I was duller than a great thaw,
huddling jest upon jest, with such impossible conveyance upon me,
that I stood like a man at a mark, with a whole army shooting at me.
She speaks poniards, and every word stabs.
If her breath were as terrible as her terminations, there were no living near her,
she would infect to the North star.
So indeed all disquiet, horror, and perturbation follows her.”
~ Much Ado
“He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument.”
~ LLL
“Out on thee! Seeming! I will write against it:
You seem to me as Dian in her orb,
As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown;
But you are more intemperate in your blood
Than Venus, or those pamper’d animals
That rage in savage sensuality.”
~ Much Ado
“Your wit’s too hot, it speeds too fast, ’twill tire.”
~ LLL
***
…In Comedy:
“Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of
the brain awe a man from the career of his humour?
No, the world must be peopled. When I said I would
die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till
I were married.”
~ Much Ado
“A jest’s prosperity lies in the ear
Of him that hears it, never in the tongue
Of him that makes it.”
~ LLL
“For which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?”
~ Much Ado
“The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen
As the razor’s edge invisible,
Cutting a smaller hair than may be seen”
~ LLL
“I do much wonder that one man, seeing how much
Another man is a fool when he dedicates his
Behaviors to love, will, after he hath laughed at
Shallow follies in others, become the argument
Of his own scorn by falling in love.”
~ Much Ado
***
…In Drama:
“Every one can master a grief but he that has it.”
~ Much Ado
“O, she is fallen Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea
Hath drops too few to wash her clean again
And salt too little which may season give
To her foul-tainted flesh!”
~ Much Ado
***
…Cue-to-Cue tomorrow…(or today, by-the-clock.) A long weekend ahead, but the company is excellent, so onward into Hell Week…with gusto!
~D
