“It is ten o’clock; Thus we may see,” quoth he, “how the world wags; ’Tis but an hour ago since it was nine; And after one hour more ’twill be eleven; And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe, And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale.”<\/blockquote>\n
The observation is that in 1600 or so, the word hour<\/i> would have been pronounced more or less oor<\/i>, identically to the word whore<\/i>. Thus it’s more obvious that when Touchstone talks about rotting, he’s talking about venereal disease, and more obvious that the whole thing is a dick joke. On the other hand, even if a performer were to use the O.P. of hour<\/i>, I don’t know how an audience member would know the O.P. of whore<\/i>, or know it well enough to make the connection quickly on one hearing.\n
Nor do you really need the hour\/whore<\/i> pun to make the joke work—Ben Crystal gives a bad Received Pronunciation presentation of the joke, but of course there can be good ones as well. If I were doing it, myself, I would play up the hands of the clock—it was nine, arm straight out, soon it will be eleven, arm up. Then bring the arm back in for the world-wagging so you can start it at nine again for ripe and ripe<\/i>—the erection of your hour hand can be accompanied by a pelvic thrust, if the audience doesn’t seem to get the point—and then the hand droops from twelve to three on rot and rot<\/i> and then is completely limp and detumescent as the tail hangs. I think the visual pun of the clock’s rising and setting hand works better to explicate the hour\/whore<\/i> pun than actually using the O.P., with which the audience presumably is altogether unfamiliar.\n
This brings up another problem with the video, and this one I suspect really is a problem I have with the Crystal’s attitude. They seem to be saying that people don’t really get<\/i> Shakespeare, the sonnets or the plays, unless they get them in the Original Pronunciation. Empirical observation, though, seems to indicate that lots of people enjoy and are moved by the plays and poems in Received Pronunciation, in American Stage Standard, in broad Yorkshire, in Southern Drawl, and even in translation. Are those people wrong? Do they fail to understand that they are failing to understand properly? Is their experience not, you know, central to their experience? I don’t like any discussion of Shakespeare in performance—any discussion of any playscript in performance, actually—that doesn’t put the audience in the center of things. I don’t find it persuasive, not because I don’t believe in their linguistic evidence, but because their dismissal of the evidence of the audience makes me very skeptical that they are judging their other evidence fairly.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger just likes dick jokes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14644","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-theeyater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14644","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14644"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14644\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16668,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14644\/revisions\/16668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14644"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14644"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14644"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}