Yes, Gentle Readers, it’s still National Poetry Month, and here are a few more from the Faber Popular Reciter: William Shakespeare (links are to the scene, you’ll have to find the text in question, if you’re playing the home version) All the World’s a Stage, John of Gaunt speaks, Henry V before Agincourt, and Mark Antony Addresses the Mob: No, this is cheating. Let’s see, some of the highlights ... I’ll take a total of twenty: “All the world’s a stage”, “seven ages”, “mewling and puking”, “a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow”, “the bubble reputation”, “second childishness”, “sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”, “this sceptered isle”, “this blessed plot”, “England ... hath made a shameful conquest of itself”, “Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot ere...”, “We few, we happy few”, “we band of brothers”, “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears”, “I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him”, “Brutus is an honorable man”, “Ambition should be made of sterner stuff”, “if you have tears, prepare to shed them now”, “This was the most unkindest cut of all”, and “oh, what a fall was there”. Enough?
Thomas Campion
Jack and Joan (in The Home Book of Verse, about two-fifths of the way down the page, or use search the page): This is packed with familiar phrases as well, from “Tib is all the father's joy” and “Skip and trip it on the green”, to “scorn the home-spun gray” and “silly swain”. I assume this is a dance, as well, but it’s certainly a lute tune that’s been recorded by everybody in that particular business.
But the point here is that, you know, everybody knows that Shakespeare is quotable, and many Gentle Readers would have been able to identify all the quotes I pulled from the Shakespeare, if not the actual play, at least as Shakespeare. But here’s a short poem, thirty-two lines, and there are four phrases I couldn’t possibly have identified by poet or poem, but which I immediately recognized. And I’m, you know, American, and thirty-five. I expect there are other phrases that I fail to recognize that betray my ignorance; I half-think the bit about Jack making “the hedge which others break” is one of those, although I half-think that I’m thinking of “the children of Holland take pleasure in making what the children of England take pleasure in breaking”. Anyway, the point isn’t that Shakespeare is great, while Campion stinks (although, you know, Shakespeare is great and Campion stinks), but that regardless of whether anybody really liked either of them, there were generations of Britons who knew them, and assumed that any half-educated Briton would know them as well. And although I assume any half-educated Anglophone knows Shakespeare, as far as I know I’d never read the Campion before, and don’t expect anyone to have ever heard of it, and yet, I know that rich people scorn the home-spun gray.
In next week’s exciting episode: “Fond are life’s lustful joys”, “whose passions not his masters are”, “Sceptre and Crown/must tumble down” and many more!
Now you courtly dames and knights / that study only—,
-Vardibidian.