That "Page 123" meme.
Apr. 28th, 2008 01:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capri0mniI caught this from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lizbee. The original asks to tag five people. But she doesn't believe in tagging (and neither do I). So I got infected with a different variant.
Grab the nearest book, open to page 123, find the fifth sentence. Then post the next three sentences. Then post a comment (that last bit is new, since I last did this meme).
Just so happens, I went and got a "new" book to reread, and brought it into my computer room just yesterday:
Shakespeare's Imagery and what it tells us by Caroline Spurgeon (argh! I wish this book would stay open without me holding it!):
There! As you can see from the length of those sentaces, her fondness for extended lists, and of embedding actual quotes from Shakespeare within them, those lines actually came from Page 124, even though I started counting on 123.
The thesis for this book is an interesting one: that Shakespeare's attitudes about life, and his experiences, sort of "leak out" for the world to see through the images he uses to explain things when the explicit topics his characters are speaking about are something else altogether. She focuses on the plays, and skips the poetry, because in poetry, the poet is consciously looking to extend a metaphor. But in the plays (which were being written and produced at what would be breakneck speed for us), there's must less time for that. She's basically playing the psychologist's game of "Free association" with Shakespeare. But instead of having him lying there on the couch, we have his plays.
Oh, and once she she got the idea, she went through every play, line by line, and cataloged all the images he used, and in what context, and the attitude he expressed about each of them in 1935, before computers or search engines even existed, so I bow before her mighty research-fu.
In typing up that last bit about sewing and needles, however, it occurs to me that that might have been a professional interest, rather than his acute sensitivity to the "fairer sex." After all, women were discouraged from taking part in the theater life, so when a costume is in need of repair, the actor himself would have to fix it.
lizbee. The original asks to tag five people. But she doesn't believe in tagging (and neither do I). So I got infected with a different variant.Grab the nearest book, open to page 123, find the fifth sentence. Then post the next three sentences. Then post a comment (that last bit is new, since I last did this meme).
Just so happens, I went and got a "new" book to reread, and brought it into my computer room just yesterday:
Shakespeare's Imagery and what it tells us by Caroline Spurgeon (argh! I wish this book would stay open without me holding it!):
If we add to this, what we all know, that skim milk struck him as a poor drink, while cakes and ale seemed good to him, that ginger and a cordial appeared to him of more comfort than cold porridge, it is but one more proof of how completely he shared in the tastes and weaknesses of our common and suffering humanity.
Shakespeare also noticed the women's sewing and mending which he saw going on round him, and there is clear evidence of his observation of and interest in needlework in the many images he draws from it and things pertaining to it, such as a bodkin, a silken thread, a twist of rotted silk, or an 'immaterial' skein of sleave or floss silk and needles, threaded and unthreaded. The tiny size of the eye of the latter is used with effect by Thersites when he declares--in spite of Ajax--that Ajax has not so much wit 'as will stop the eye of Helen's needle, for whom he comes to fight,' and the sharpness of its point lends vividness to Imogen's assertion that she would have watched Posthumus waving farewell in his ship..........til the diminution
Of space had pointed him sharp as my needle.
There! As you can see from the length of those sentaces, her fondness for extended lists, and of embedding actual quotes from Shakespeare within them, those lines actually came from Page 124, even though I started counting on 123.
The thesis for this book is an interesting one: that Shakespeare's attitudes about life, and his experiences, sort of "leak out" for the world to see through the images he uses to explain things when the explicit topics his characters are speaking about are something else altogether. She focuses on the plays, and skips the poetry, because in poetry, the poet is consciously looking to extend a metaphor. But in the plays (which were being written and produced at what would be breakneck speed for us), there's must less time for that. She's basically playing the psychologist's game of "Free association" with Shakespeare. But instead of having him lying there on the couch, we have his plays.
Oh, and once she she got the idea, she went through every play, line by line, and cataloged all the images he used, and in what context, and the attitude he expressed about each of them in 1935, before computers or search engines even existed, so I bow before her mighty research-fu.
In typing up that last bit about sewing and needles, however, it occurs to me that that might have been a professional interest, rather than his acute sensitivity to the "fairer sex." After all, women were discouraged from taking part in the theater life, so when a costume is in need of repair, the actor himself would have to fix it.
