The Home Front
BOHN, WILLIAM E.
THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Scholar In Motley This volume of spoofing by Dick Armour (Twisted Tales from Shakespeare, McGraw-Hill, $2.95) would serve as a good test to determine a...
...The HQ, of course, is the humor quotient...
...But the funniest quip in the volume is an extra-special image which doesn't really belong here...
...So our humorist comments that the aside is an Elizabethan device "which makes it possible to talk behind people's backs in front of them...
...If each of us had an HQ rating scientifically determined and conspicuously displayed, all sorts of embarrassing difficulties could be avoided...
...You would know what sort of stories to tell or not to tell...
...Then he proceeds: "Why Bernardo has folded is not explained...
...The solemn line, "There's a divinity that shapes our ends," our spoofer ascribes to a moment when Hamlet glimpsed Ophelia walking rapidly and gracefully away...
...THE HOME FRONT By William E. Bohn The Scholar In Motley This volume of spoofing by Dick Armour (Twisted Tales from Shakespeare, McGraw-Hill, $2.95) would serve as a good test to determine a reader's HQ...
...The IQ, or intelligence quotient, is about done for...
...In connection with the famous romantic line about wishing to be the glove that touches that cheek, our modern prosaist remarks coolly that Shakespeare or Romeo is "getting more and more impractical...
...A little later, he continues: "Romeo goes slightly daft mumbling about putting her eyes in the sky and replacing them with stars, probably two of the smaller ones...
...Our author speaks of Imogen, the lovely woman in Cymbeline, as such a perfect wife that critics consider her implausible...
...Then he takes a leap into the 19th century: "Tennyson, a Victorian with a high standard of womanhood, died while reading about her with a smile on his face...
...But he announces right at the start of this volume that he loves bad jokes...
...As it passes out, it would be useful to put the HQ in its place...
...Romeo remarks casually that Juliet "hangs upon the cheek of night like a rich jewel in an Ethiop's ear," and our commentator describes him as "a quick man with a simile, no matter how ridiculous...
...Othello refers to his approaching suicide as his "butt," and our author-humorist refers to this as an anatomical reference...
...Dick Armour, despite his underworld connection with the Saturday Evening Post, is in his daily life a professor of literature...
...The theatrical aside furnishes our friend Dick a good deal of amusement...
...To the rear of the rear stage," says our scholar in disguise, "were tiring rooms, where actors grew weary of putting on and taking off costumes...
...In The Merchant of Venice, Shylock spits out his hatred for Antonio and Bassanio in a remark which can be heard by the most distant ticket-holder and yet goes unnoticed by the characters whom he could reach out and touch...
...Shakespeare is "the beard of Avon...
...The periods into which the experts have divided the great playwright's works also turn out to be rather amusing...
...The notion that this book would serve as an HQ test came to me when I discovered that the jokes are on six different levels...
...The tradition was that if you were given the right distillation you would instantly die or be reduced to harmless unconsciousness, It was a convenient notion which helped no end with the working out of 16th-century plots...
...And then our humorist explains that these crude early works "are admirably suited for study in schools and colleges...
...He was caught "poaching something in a deer-park and it wasn't an egg...
...Another fine old set of conventions are those connected with the use of poisons as they are employed in Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet...
...A little later, Ophelia starts her tale to her father: "As I was sewing in my closet . . . ," and the author remarks that she failed to explain "why she had picked a place with such a poor light...
...The Comedy of Errors, bearing that title, was of course full of mistakes...
...First are the plain, old-fashioned puns of the sort to which the Bard was himself so deeply devoted...
...Speaking of the origin of the plot of Macbeth, our professor in disguise comments that in taking it from Holinshed's Chronicles Shakespeare changed it just enough so that no one would recognize the source...
...Then he explains in a note that the old boy didn't count on the resourcefulness of modern scholars, "who have to discover things like this in order to become associate professors...
...Competent educators pay less and less attention to it...
...The fun squeezed out of the contrast between 16th-century poetry and 20th-century prose fills most of the volume...
...But the author "was good-humored about it and promised to do better as soon as he got into his Second Period...
...In the resume of Hamlet, our author quotes Francisco's call to Bernardo: "Stand and unfold yourself...
...In speaking of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, a critic is quoted as saying: "The characterization is usually superficial, the psychology seldom subtle, and the dialogue inclined to be stiff, artificial and overlong...
...The fun on the next level results from mistaking the definitions of Elizabethan words...
...A man hiring a secretary or contemplating matrimony could avoid at least the major pitfalls...
...And to Dick Armour and his readers it affords many a hearty laugh...
Vol. 40 • November 1957 • No. 44
