[Vocabulary] "o'ercast"

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patran

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Dear Teachers

In the following sentence, what does "o'ercast" mean? Please advise

Now is the summer of our sweet content, made o'ercast winter by these Tudor clowns ... an I that am not shaped for black-faced war...

Anthony the learner
 
Overcast. Cloudy.
 
Where does this come from. It sounds like a pastiche of Shakespeare:

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York
...
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Richard III, Ii1-2

The squashing of 'overcast' into only two syllables is a rather lame attempt at preserving the metre.

As to the second one, I think it may be a more direct quote from Falstaff in one of the Henrys (with 'and' for 'an'). I leave tracing the exact line reference as an exercise for the reader. ;-)

b
 
"Made overcast by clouds" makes more sense than "made overcast by clowns."
 
It sounds like clouds to me.
 
BobK said:
Where does this come from. It sounds like a pastiche of Shakespeare:


Richard III, Ii1-2

The squashing of 'overcast' into only two syllables is a rather lame attempt at preserving the metre.

As to the second one, I think it may be a more direct quote from Falstaff in one of the Henrys (with 'and' for 'an'). I leave tracing the exact line reference as an exercise for the reader. ;-)

b
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Shakespeare is well known for 'squashing' words into 1/2 syllables throughout his work in order to preserve the metre. I wouldn't exactly class it as a 'rather lame attempt'. :D


I had the misfortune of reading a great deal of Shakespeare in my first semester at university...It's daunting, but his word play is spectacular. :)
 
:up: I was a bit unkind to Richard Curtis (the writer). When I appeared with him and Rowan on the Edinburgh Fringe his party piece was to do pastiches of Shakespeare. I admit it's prety good. ;-)

And perhaps that clowns/clouds doubt is intentional - reflecting Shakespeare's Sun/son pun.

b
 
Dear Haniball

I don't understand what does " preserve the metre" mean. Could you elaborate? Many thanks

Regards

Anthony the leaner


HanibalII said:
Shakespeare is well known for 'squashing' words into 1/2 syllables throughout his work in order to preserve the metre. I wouldn't exactly class it as a 'rather lame attempt'. :D


I had the misfortune of reading a great deal of Shakespeare in my first semester at university...It's daunting, but his word play is spectacular. :)
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"Preserve the metre" = "preserve the rhythm".

Regards
R21

PS It's a long time since I dipped into iambic pentameters.
 
patran said:
...

I don't understand what does " preserve the metre" mean. Could you elaborate? Many thanks

...
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Most of Shakespeare's work in verse is in what's called iambic pentameter -

iambic because each bit (it's called a 'foot') is made up of two syllables: dee-dah (called an 'iamb')
pentameter because there are five of these feet in each line

For example, from Portia's speech in the Merchant of Venice,
The qua/lity / of mer/cy is / not strained
It dro/ppeth as/ the gen/tle rain /from heav'n'
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Different editions have 'heaven' or "heav'n", but it's clear that Shakespeare wanted the actor to pronounce 'heaven' as one syllable.
In this case, there's a convention in all poetry that 'heaven' is usually pronounced as one sylable (find a site with hymn tunes on it); but in other cases Shakespeare would often drop a syllable so that the elided word would fit in to the metre.

(Note for the interested: by no means all his plays are in iambic pentameter. Sometimes he changes from prose to verse as a signal of what sort of character it is: a king would speak in verse, but a porter wouldn't. Sometimes a person starts to speak in prose, but it becomes verse-like (it has the rythm, but isn't laid out as verse) to mark a change of mood.)
 
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The dactyl is an interesting foot (honest). It get its name from a metaphor based on a skeleton: diddy dah - short-short-long, like the bones in the finger (think of pterodactyl, which means wing-finger) . OK, lecture over ;-)

b
 
Dimeter (originally dimmeter)is an interesting word. It's a hybrid from the old Norse dimmr (two short planks) and the Greek metron (that by which something is measured). If you get people to voice their opinions of poems into it, it tells you fairly accurately just how thick they are.


Take the above twice a day with large pinch of salt.
 
I "wandered lonely as a cloud" through English Literature (Wordsworth, Henry IV-1 and H G Wells' Mr Polly). The trouble was - I never emerged and failed it abysmally!

R21

PS I was more into English language, Pliny, Virgil, Homer and Xenophon.
 
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BobK said:
The dactyl is an interesting foot (honest). It get its name from a metaphor based on a skeleton: diddy dah - short-short-long, like the bones in the finger (think of pterodactyl, which means wing-finger) . OK, lecture over ;-)

b
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Maybe that's where I went wrong. I thought feet were "dum(b)" - as in:
Didum didum didum
Didum didum didum
Didum didum di didily dum
Didum didum didum
:)

R21
 
Route21 said:
Maybe that's where I went wrong. I thought feet were "dum(b)"
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No, feet are combinations of dums, dies, didums and dididdies. You'll find examples of several types of foot in the first eleven lines of this post.
 
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