Happy New Year!
“Would not this, sir, & a forest
of feathers,
if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me, with provincial
Roses on my raz'd shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players?”
if the rest of my fortunes turn Turk with me, with provincial
Roses on my raz'd shoes, get me a fellowship in a cry of players?”
Hamlet 3.2.~286
‘Turn Turk’ means "go bad," in plain
reading. ‘Provincial’ means "from the
provinces," that is, from out of town, from someplace in the country away
from the big city. Roses were ribbons that protected shoelaces and
kept them tied. Roses would vary with fashion; a rose on a country shoe would
be different from the latest fashion in roses in the city. A razed shoe is one
that has been cut to allow a colored sock to show through. That was done for
decoration and fashion. This is on the Fashion theme. Razed puns with
"raised," referring to a chopin.
Hamlet means, if he pretended to be a country boy, bringing such a good play to a city players' company, they'd let him become part of the company. He'd get the share on the quality of his writing, not because he was a Prince. Hamlet, the aficionado of acting, is revealing his fantasy of being a playwright.
From
a Baconian standpoint that seems very close to what the author was getting at.
Bacon, who was under pressure to
sell his woods at his
Gorhambury estate, said: "I will not be stripped of my feathers!" from
Aubrey's Brief Lives
Bacon
was particularly known for the elaborate roses on his ‘raz’d shoes’.
Could
William, assuming he was ‘Shakespeare’, have been referring to this?
