October 16, 2006
Dissecting Frogs II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:00 PM EST I have nothing against analyzing works of art if that’s your wont, let alone your profession. I don’t disdain it (to disdain: “to look with scorn on”); it is merely something for which “I have no appetite.” I find that when taken apart too thoroughly, the whole is usually diminished.
I was thinking specifically of modern works, such as High Noon. With Shakespeare’s plays, written 400 years ago when the English language was quite different from modern English, it is often necessary to analyze to some extent simply to understand what he was talking about.
But not always. My personal favorite among the history plays is Henry IV, Part I, most especially Prince Hal’s soliloquy in Act I, Scene 2. It seems to me as clear as its language is glorious:
I know you all, and will awhile uphold
The unyoked humour of your idleness:
Yet herein will I imitate the sun,
Who doth permit the base contagious clouds
To smother up his beauty from the world,
That, when he please again to be himself,
Being wanted, he may be more wonder’d at,
By breaking through the foul and ugly mists
Of vapours that did seem to strangle him.
If all the year were playing holidays,
To sport would be as tedious as to work;
But when they seldom come, they wish’d for come,
And nothing pleaseth but rare accidents.
So, when this loose behaviour I throw off
And pay the debt I never promised,
By how much better than my word I am,
By so much shall I falsify men’s hopes;
And like bright metal on a sullen ground,
My reformation, glittering o’er my fault,
Shall show more goodly and attract more eyes
Than that which hath no foil to set it off.
I’ll so offend, to make offence a skill;
Redeeming time when men think least I will.
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