"Gloucester is known for calling Edgar, or other people, in his anger, a b******, a mongrel, a whoreson, and goodness knows what other insults and expletives would come out of his mouth."
"We see that Gloucester, now angrel......"
Damn it. King Lear has a lot of vulgar lines but that adds to all the fun. I mean, the words b******, son of a b****, mongrel, baseless, zed, whoreson, cur... they occur so frequently in Literature class (not like we're saying it to each other, but they come in the lines of King Lear like, several times). And that too, happens because there's this certain character Edmund, who is the illegitimate son of this other character called Gloucester (pronounced gloss-ter), and the b-word with seven letters actually means "illegitimate child" and well, Edmund is behaving like one... We were so caught up in the tension that even Ms Sunbeam made a slip of the tongue : she intended to say "angry" but instead, she ended up mixing it with "mongrel".
But what actually made us have fun today wasn't really the lines. It was one of those little things Ms Sunbeam did - reminiscent of the time she was in college.
Ms Sunbeam was a Literature student just like us, and she, too, had to do Shakespeare. It came to pass that on one occasion - Teacher's Day, I presume - she and the rest of the students took lines from several plays of Shakespeare's and manipulated them to their own advantage - to make the teachers amused. The lines won't be said in their real context, there'll be some sort of funny twist to it all. Here are a few examples:
Okay, for those of you who haven't read the story of Macbeth, Macbeth and his wife, Lady Macbeth were out to kill the King (Duncan) and a few other people of high rank. Lady Macbeth once sleepwalked and while she was doing so, she picked some blood from Duncan's body, and smeared it all over the soldiers to make people believe that they killed the King, not she. Macbeth was worried about being found out but Lady Macbeth said that all that blood would go away with one wash. Some time later, guilt set in and she started having hallucinations - she often saw and smelt blood on her hands. So she said something like this...
Lady Macbeth : Even all the perfumes of Arabia cannot wash away the smell of blood on my hands.
And immediately after her line :
Salesman : Why don't you try Lux soap ?
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Another example :
In the play Julius Caesar, after Caesar had been killed by Brutus and all the other conspirators, Brutus and Mark Antony make speeches during Caesar's funeral. Mark Antony starts his speech off with these lines :
Antony : Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears !
And here's the twist : immediately after that an insurance agent comes in with a bag and some insurance policies and says,
Insurance agent : Don't lend, don't even borrow. Invest in total security with Prudential !
I LOLed at those two. Man, if someday we could stage a play for charity (perhaps King Lear), we could do this stuff during the break. Like some sort of commercial. : )
P.S. Meanwhile, I know at the moment we're only in Act 2 Scene 4, and I know that Cordelia comes in in Act 3 Scene 7, but........ I truly want to play the role of Cordelia. I mean, in class, no one has been more passionate, more hot-blooded, more... um... French, than her character, shall I say ?
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