I looked Roscius up and the short version is essentially this line. It answers the questions pretty succinctly. Who was Roscius? An actor. Where did he live? In Rome. And just by virtue of the fact that he’s getting referenced in a Renaissance play, we can work out that he was a pretty famous actor.

The only extra details aren’t so significant to the content of this scene. They are, however, interesting as history of the form. Roscius was a famous actor but since the actors were slaves in Ancient Rome, he was also a slave. He was a famous actor in a much different way than Robert de Niro is a famous actor and even in a much different way than Will Kempe was a famous actor in Shakespeare’s time. I guess there was no aspiring to be on the stage if you lived in Ancient Rome.

I have always seen this line performed with an emphasis on You. It is definitely the most logical choice. But it’s funny, in looking at it – it is really just the same line repeated – Hamlet could repeat Polonius’ line exactly as he said it. He could mock him as he says it. He could say it simultaneously or a fraction of a second after as a means of demonstrating how predictable Polonius can be. He could say it to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern still in their private circle.

It’s always nice to have more than one choice – even if you end up doing it the same way everyone’s done it for centuries.

I love Hamlet lying. I love the Hamlet that acts just like the rest of us and comes up with something innocuous to say when trying to convince someone we weren’t just talking about him. I love that there’s really no choice for this line but to raise your voice a bit and say it conversationally.

There’s no mystery. No complexity.

We could go about wondering what might have happened on Monday morning but since it is a fiction, it doesn’t really matter. I love a line like this for its dailyness and that it lives in the same scene as “What a piece of work is a man.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about words. The latest is a title that I realize no longer has any power. I’ve been trying to work out how to shift the power back into a word that has lost it. I’m not sure it’s possible.

Somehow it makes me think about who owns the words – not that owning words is technically possible but there are those that own the pipelines for disseminating those words. For example, I thought of this list  of the awards given for literature in 2013. One of them is a woman. Women appear in a very tiny percentage of reviews in the New York Times. The various structures that were created to deal with the imbalance of who owns the words are periodically plagued with “Why do we still need a separate prize for women?” Oh, that we didn’t.

I asked a friend what books he’d read if he had the time. It was a long list of very well respected writers and not one woman was on it. I don’t blame him for that one bit. If you want to find a woman on the list of well-known and well-respected writers, you’re probably going to be reaching pretty far back into history.

This is not to say that there aren’t well-respected writers in the current moment. I can name ten right now off the top of my head (Jeannette Winterson, AS Byatt, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Tea Albrecht, Jennifer Egan, Amy Tan, Jeanette Walls, Sarah Waters, Erin Morgenstern, Diane Setterfield) Or well known (JK Rowling, Charlaine Harris, Sue Grafton, etc) but somehow the lady writers don’t tend to qualify as Literature. They’re not Thomas Pynchon or Dom Delillo. Ladies don’t own the words. We’re just renting them somehow.

I think a lot about The Alphabet versus The Goddess. It might be bullshit. But it’s very interesting bullshit. It’s Shlain’s sense that the invention of the alphabet killed the Goddess – that is that the development of the written language (a left brained activity) created an imbalance of masculine energy, an abundance of left-brained linearity and cultures around the world became more patriarchal as they adopted the written word.

As a lover of the written word (and the read word and the spoken word) I hate this idea a little bit. I’d like to think of this language as my own. But it might not be.

I’d like to find every instance of the sentence, “Check it” that occurs in hip-hop and replace it with Mark It. I wonder what it would sound like- if the Mark It would change the effect of the song or the songs, after a while, have an impact on Mark It.
I watched a clip that stacked instance upon instance of the phrase “You just don’t get it, do you?” in films. There was some slight variety – things like, “You STILL don’t get it do you?” but the cumulative effect was of hearing this one phrase over and over again was remarkable. It started to sound crazy – a concerto of You Just Don’t Get It, Do You? I’d like to hear Mark It in a series like that.

Most prophecy is of this nature – a simple extrapolation of someone’s rather predictable behavior. We’d like to imagine that we are surprising mysteries when often, someone could set a clock by our patterns.

If you asked me, I’d say that my writing times are erratic – that you couldn’t predict when and where you’d find me with my notebook and pen. But twice now, when I set my alarm for timed writing, I’ve found that I am starting at the EXACT same time, like To The Minute. I am clearly much more predictable than I thought.

There was a period in my life in which I saw psychics fairly often. I can’t quite as easily explain their predictions and suggestions. I don’t know how they could have gotten enough information to make an educated guess. If they were somehow putting on a show, it was a very smart productive show for me. In one case, it led to my getting a job I then held for 14 years. No career counselor I ever had had as good a track record. I find I don’t much care where that psychic got her information. On balance she helped me so much that even if it had been on elaborate ruse, I wouldn’t feel betrayed at all, still just grateful.

Normally, I’m not such a giant fan of the Arden editions (just for reading anyway). It’s rare that most people want to know whether a line is from the first folio or the quarto or what editor made what decision about what. It feels like watching the DVD commentary while trying to watch the movie. I know it’s fashionable to say you love the Arden. It signals a certain geekiness. It signals “I am a Shakespeare Nerd.”

Well – I’m a Shakespeare nerd and 9 times out of 10, I don’t lean toward the Arden.
However, today is that 10th time. Right here, right now. I have always heard this line with “swaddling CLOTHES” which would make a great deal of sense, of course, but also seems like, given the presence of CLOUTS here, that it might be one of those changes made with some editorial license. Is it clouts in one version of the play and not the others? Is this line in only one version of the play?
I would hope the Arden edition might answer my questions about clout versus clothes but of course, there’s no guarantee that it will.
What does this edition say about it? Uh, nothing.