Paul and I both laughed a lot over this scene. He warbled all the songs in funny voices, and we both enjoyed the Weekly World News-like descriptions of the ballad subjects--the usurer's wife who gave birth to twenty moneybags and afterwards ate a meal of grilled toads, the "fish that appear'd upon the coast on We'n'sday . . . and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids." I also appreciated Mopsa and Dorcas's solemn and innocent wonder: "Is it true, think you?" though I was less charmed by Perdita's prim "Forewarn [the peddler] that he use no scurrilous words in's tunes." But perhaps priggishness is one of the signs of being a real princess.
Nonetheless, although this section was fun to read, it does remind me how much writers' approach to plot has changed over the centuries. Shakespeare is so willing to meander into distraction, and so are the early novelists, such as Laurence Sterne in Tristram Shandy. Cervantes's Don Quixote is one long distraction. In a way, I find this ambling approach pleasant; in a way, it bores me. But what do you think?
2 comments:
I am just plain eager to get on with the story. The meandering, while pleasent reading annoyed me. Of course I know what will happen, like many avid readers, I read ahead, but I now just want the action to resume. Perhaps were I seeing the play I would not feel this way. When I go to the opera, another of my loves, the action usually stops for the aria and that doesn't bother me one iota. So maybe Shakespeare has written this as an opera with all these meaderings as the arias.
Though others in my family love finding puns in reading, I always think they are a trick for my eyes, though I like them sometimes on my tongue. So I skimmed, but just got tired of all the silliness. I'm happy to explore any word that someone is just interested in, that game I like, though at work we just had to banish the 1947 dictionary to an odd nook.
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