Every once in a while, I experience something that I call a "cultural convergence" -- perhaps an event reported in a daily newspaper that closely resembles something on the very page of the novel that I happen to be reading. A cross-genre overlap, let us say.
Here's in example of such a coincidence that amused me much.
Yesterday evening I watched the classic western The Magnificent Seven (1960) and this morning I read, once again, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. It's hard to believe but yes, there is a very brief moment where two such very distinct works brush against one another.
Unlike TN, The Magnificent Seven is a violent spectacle that steers clear of humor, or subtle characterization or extensive dialogue. After the climactic concluding battle to preserve the Mexican village has been both lost and won, the two surviving gunmen share a moment before trotting off on their separate ways. Chris Adams (Yul Brynner) inquires of Vin Tanner (Steve McQueen) if he has a plan for what comes next. Laconic Vin, cowpoke and gunslinger, responds, "driftin'.
In Twelfth Night, there's a similar question and a similar answer, but in a far different idiom. Antonio asks Sebastian, who has survived a shipwreck, about his plans. Sebastian's view of his future is essentially the same as Vin's, but there is none of that "ah shucks" minimalism in his reply. Instead, Sebastian responds, "My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy."
[While Vin's one-word answer is clear as clear can be, Sebastian's "mere extravagancy" requires a bit of a gloss. Nowadays, "extravagancy" (usually "extravagance") signifies a "lack of restrain in purchasing luxury goods." Not so in 1600, when "extravagant" remained much closer to its root etymological inheritance. The word descends from L. vagare, "to wander." Extra-vagance therefore means something like "wander beyond." Here's a more familiar example of the word at work: when Roderigo characterizes Othello as an "extravagant and wheeling stranger," he does not criticize Othello for spending too many ducats on his fancy get-up. He means that he's a rootless and wandering non-native. (Wheeling? my dictionary glosses wheeling as "roving, wandering, drifting"). And also: "mere" did not then connote triviality; its meaning is closer to "pure." "Determinate" meant and still means "decided.")
Therefore Sebastian's sentence --"My determinate voyage is mere extravagancy" -- is directly equivalent to Vin's "driftin''". Cultural convergence at its best.
It's just two ways of talkin'.
I sometimes wonder about Shakespeare's intent here. Why did he bother to put such a difficult sentence in Sebastian's mouth? For purposes of characterization, certainly. But at the expense of clarity. Wouldn't it have been more economical, more transparent, for Sebastian to say something plain, such as "I don't have a plan, I'll just wander." It's certain that some percentage of Shakespeare's audience, perhaps most, will not grasp the meaning of the sentence as written and will be left puzzled. Yet as he so often does, Shakespeare preferred eloquence to transparency.
In my opinion, Shakespeare delighted in his own fluency. And sometimes I think that Shakespeare wasn't just writing to be heard by his Globe or Blackfriars audience. He was writing to be read and studied -- although I doubt he could have imagined a future in which his sentences would be glossed with crowded inches of small-type footnotes.
It it possible that Shakespeare also had an inkling that, as Beethoven once put it, he was writing for "a latter age?"
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