One Line, One Character

A great many people who have never seen Richard III can quote its first villainous declaration, and a great many who have never opened Hamlet know what the prince says to the skull, more or less, in the wrong order. Lines detach from plays and start travelling on their own. This page is about which ones do it, why, and what happens to them on the road.

What makes a line detachable

The lines that escape share a small set of properties, and none of them is beauty.

• Grammatical completeness. It has to survive being lifted. A line that depends on the previous speaker's sentence cannot travel, however fine it is.
• A first-person claim or a flat general statement. I am determined to prove a villain works because it asserts something about the speaker. All the world's a stage works because it asserts something about everything.
• Rhythmic self-sufficiency. Most travelling lines are a complete metrical unit with a hard stop, and many hang on a single repeated or paired word — double, double; words, words, words; tomorrow, and tomorrow.
• A picture or a physical object. Lines attached to a visible thing — a skull, a dagger, a pound of flesh, a horse — outlive lines that are purely abstract, because they can be illustrated. This is not a literary property at all. It is a printing property.

The reversal problem

Detached lines routinely change meaning, and the changes follow patterns worth recognising.

The archaic word. The lady doth protest too much now means she is objecting so hard she must be guilty. In the scene, protest means to promise or affirm: Gertrude's point is that the player queen is making too many extravagant vows. The modern reading is not wrong as English; it is simply a different sentence.

The lost question. Wherefore art thou Romeo? is not asked from a balcony to a man in the dark. Wherefore means why, and the question is not where are you but why must you be a Montague. The misreading is so entrenched that productions occasionally stage it wrongly on purpose to avoid confusing an audience.

The missing speaker. Some of the most-quoted advice in Shakespeare — be true to yourself, neither borrow nor lend — is given by Polonius, a windbag whose counsel the play treats as tiresome, to a son who is only half listening. Quoted straight, it becomes wisdom. In place, it is characterisation.

The excised context. Antony's opening at the funeral sounds like a request for quiet. It is the first move in a demolition. A line quoted without its speech is a line quoted without its purpose.

The pairing

Once a line and an image are printed together often enough, they fuse. The pairing then behaves like a single unit: showing the picture triggers the words, quoting the words summons the picture. This is the engine behind theatrical merchandise, examined in more detail on the printed character, and it explains why the same dozen lines recur across four centuries of prints. They are the ones that had illustrations.

It also explains the shape of the good ones. A pairing works best when the line means one thing to a passer-by and another to a reader who knows the scene. Mercutio's Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch is bravado on its own and a death sentence in place. That double register is the whole craft of the form.

Quoting responsibly, without being tiresome about it

Nobody needs a footnote on a T-shirt. But there is a difference between a line that has drifted and a line that has been inverted, and the second is worth flagging when it matters — particularly in teaching, where the reversed reading is often the only one a student has met. Checking a line takes seconds: the Folger's free texts are line-numbered and searchable, and the MIT complete works will find a half-remembered phrase in one search.

Lines that resist

The most interesting category is the lines everyone agrees are magnificent and nobody quotes. Lear's five repetitions of never over his daughter's body may be the most devastating moment in the language, and it cannot be printed on anything, because out of context it is a single word repeated. Some things only work where they are, which is the best argument available for going to the play.