This is Part II of my Director’s Notes to Act 2, Scene 4. The music accompanying this piece will be in another post.
Curio returns with Feste.
Orsino beseeches Feste to sing that song from last night, that tells of old knowledge and simple truth that the spinsters and knitters, and even free maids, know and used to sing, back in the “good old days”:
Orsino:
O fellow come, the song we had last night:
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain;
The Spinsters and the Knitters in the Sun,
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones,
Do use to chant it: it is simple sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love,
Like the Old Age.
Feste does not try to complete Orsino’s queer pentameter, instead, wants to get this task done with:
Feste: Are you ready, Sir?
And, Orsino commands him to sing:
I prithee sing.
And, Feste sings a song whose tune is lost to our modern mess (though the variorum mentions “Mistres to the Courtier” has a line that goes like “fie away, fie away, fie, fie, fie), so I will get to compose a new tune just for this (see a forthcoming post):
Feste:
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress, let me be laid.
Fie away, fie away, breath,
I am slain by a fair cruel maid:
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew, O prepare it.
My part of death no one so true did share it.Not a flower, not a flower sweet
On my black coffin, let there be strewn:
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpses, where my bones shall be thrown:
A thousand thousand sighs to save, lay me where
Sad true lover never find my grave, to weep there.
Orsino offers coin, but what’s curious is that though Feste happily accepted Andrew and Toby’s coin last night, he seems reluctant to accept Orsino’s. He even stammers a bit, saying “sir”, twice.
Orsino: There’s for thy pains.
Feste: No pains, sir, I take pleasure in singing, sir.
Orsino seems rather insistent on paying. Feste apparently does not want to get paid — rather, it’s queer how Orsino can take the music so close to heart, and yet treat its voice like just another hired goon. Though both Olivia and Orsino are more well off (financially) than the person they offer coin to, this contrasts with Act 1, Scene 5, where Viola rejects Olivia’s coin, because Feste takes pleasure in performing, and Viola-Cesario, took the act as an obligation. Both, though, believe coin to be superfluous:
Orsino: I’ll pay thy pleasure then.
Feste: Truly, sir, and pleasure will be paid one time, or another.
The idea of a hired voice taking so much to heart, as to reject coin–even politely–is too much for Orsino:
Orsino: Give me now leave, to leave thee.
Feste then comments on Orsino’s fickleness, though in obscure riddle (that a tailor should make his doublet of silk of changing-colors, because his mind is opal-like in fleeting change). Feste would set these inconstant men out to see, so that they could do everything, everywhere, thus making a good trip of nothing (their constitution).
Feste: Now the melancholy God protect thee, and the Tailor make thy doublet of changeable Taffeta, for thy mind is very Opal. I would have men of such constancy put to Sea, that their business might be everything, and their intent everywhere; for that’s it, that always makes a good voyage of nothing. Farewell.
And, Feste exits with a formal Farewell.
(It looks like Viola could be Feste’s understudy, with Viola leaving, perhaps to sit in a hidden dept, still within the Duke’s court — so Duke yells out “Mark it, Cesario”. Viola is not present in this exchange–indeed, Viola and Feste might sound so similar, hence the Duke’s voice-confusion, the two might have been played by the same actor!)
Leave a reply