Daily Dialogue — August 4, 2012
WILL: Words, words, words. Once, I had the gift… I could make love out of words as a potter makes cups out of clay love that overthrows empires, love that binds two hearts together come hellfire and brimstones… for sixpence a line, I could cause a riot in a nunnery… but now…
DR. MOTH: And yet you tell me you lie with women?
WILL seems unwiling to respond. DR. MOTH refers to his notes.
DR. MOTH: Black Sue, Fat Phoebe, Rosaline, Burbage’s seamstress; Aphrodite, who does it behind the Dog and…
WILL: (interrupting) Aye, now and again, but what of it? I have lost my gift.
DR. MOTH: I am here to help you. Tell me in your own words.
WILL: I have lost my gift. It’s as if my quill is broken. As if the organ of my imagination has dried up. As if the proud tower of my genius has collapsed.
DR. MOTH: Interesting.
WILL: Nothing comes.
DR. MOTH: Most interesting.
WILL: It is like trying to a pick a lock with a wet herring.
DR. MOTH: (shrewdly) Tell me, are you lately humbled in the act of love?
— Will (Joseph Fiennes), Dr. Moth (Anthony Sher), Shakespeare in Love (1998), written by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard
The Daily Dialogue theme for the week is subtext suggested by lizswan.
Trivia: Writer Marc Norman got the idea for the film when his son Zachary called him from Boston University and suggested doing something on William Shakespeare as a young man in the Elizabethan theatre. It took two years for Norman to come up with the idea of having Shakespeare struggling with writer’s block on “Romeo and Juliet.”
Dialogue On Dialogue: A Freudian field day.