[lit-ideas] Re: "She sate, like Patience on a Monument, Smiling at greefe"
- From: Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:00:07 EDT
In a message dated 9/14/2004 2:05:26 PM Eastern Standard Time,
ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx writes:
if an audience was expected to understand what
"Patience on a monument" looked like, people must have had some image of
Patience in their heads. ... I'm guessing that
Patience meant, for a Shakespearean audience, some kind of Pieta figure, but
I'm now really wondering whether I have understood.
----
Well, one thing we know is that the female is _sitting_ ("she sate, like
Patience") -- and then The Pita _also_ is -- but unlike the Pieta, this one in
_smiling_ (if not 'laughing').
Maybe there _was_ a specific statue of 'Patience', near the Globe Theatre --
and Shakespeare knew that his audience would know that:
"[She] sat, like Patience
on [that] monument
[on Lambeth Walk],
smiling at grief."
Theatre is full of such local, 'indexical' clues, and current audiences are
bound to miss some of them.
The fact that Shakespeare uses the indefinite article, "a monument", rather
than "the" monument, suggests that he may not have had a specific statuesque
personification in mind.
cfr. "There's a bridge near the Tower" -- vs. "That's the Tower Bridge".
Cheers,
JL
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
- » [lit-ideas] Re: "She sate, like Patience on a Monument, Smiling at greefe"
