Vagabond Footnotes

Here's my one sentence, facetious spoiler for how you can tell Apocalypto was made by Mel Gibson:

"Not a Jew in sight and the Catholics save the day!"

;-)

From 11/29/06.

Rejecting the idea of fate with wit, sarcasm and a laugh, the villain Edmund makes it clear that he is responsible for his own actions:

EDMUND
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that,
when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit
of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our
disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as
if we were villains by necessity; fools by
heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and
treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards,
liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of
planetary influence; and all that we are evil in,
by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion
of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish
disposition to the charge of a star! My
father compounded with my mother under the
dragon's tail; and my nativity was under Ursa
major; so that it follows, I am rough and
lecherous. Tut, I should have been that I am,
had the maidenliest star in the firmament
twinkled on my bastardizing. Edgar--

Enter EDGAR

And pat he comes like the catastrophe of the old
comedy: my cue is villanous melancholy, with a
sigh like Tom o' Bedlam. O, these eclipses do
portend these divisions! fa, sol, la, mi.

EDGAR
How now, brother Edmund! what serious
contemplation are you in?

EDMUND
I am thinking, brother, of a prediction I read
this other day, what should follow these eclipses.

You can read the whole scene here.

(I find Edmund one of Shakespeare's most fascinating and complex characters, enough so to write a few pieces on him.)

(This is a footnote for the post "The Knaves of the Bush Administration.")

KENT
Fellow, I know thee.

OSWALD
What dost thou know me for?

KENT
A knave; a rascal; an eater of broken meats; a
base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited,
hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave; a
lily-livered, action-taking knave, a whoreson,
glass-gazing, super-serviceable finical rogue;
one-trunk-inheriting slave; one that wouldst be a
bawd, in way of good service, and art nothing but
the composition of a knave, beggar, coward, pandar,
and the son and heir of a mongrel bitch: one whom I
will beat into clamorous whining, if thou deniest
the least syllable of thy addition.

[King Lear, 2.2. 11-22]

You can read the whole scene here.

(This is a footnote for the post "The Knaves of the Bush Administration.")