The First Five Spoken LInes in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline

In the First Folio, Cymbeline begins:

Enter two Gentlemen.

I imagine that one is already courteously turned to the one just behind him, and frequently pausing in his walk while regaling him with this description of the king’s court:

You do not meet a man but Frownes.
Our bloods no more obey the Heavens
Then our Courtiers:
Still seeme, as do’s the Kings.

Those are the first four spoken lines of the First Folio edition of Cymbeline, from which all other editions of Cymbeline derive. (Its fifth line, spoken in desperation by the amused but bewildered Second Gentleman, is: But what’s the matter?)

Editors transfer Our bloods to the end of the first line to regularize it into a ten syllable line, as they have always done (and will always do unless they read this and are converted). They believe that this bit of blunderbuss regularization contains an inherent (to-be-taken-for-granted and never-in-need-of-being-justified) virtue, though such an obvious anomaly as a short line starting a speech at the very beginning of the play should have given them pause. It could hardly have escaped the attention of the typesetters and overseers of the First Folio Cymbeline, who must have kept it short deliberately. After all, it’s no big thing to add words from the second line. They could have done it. Anyone could do it, especially those editors who, even when bright, lapse into inappropriate robotlike repressiveness (which includes de-ca-pit-a-li-za-tion and re-punc-tu-a-tion) of the litheness and liveliness of Shakespearean lines.

No, the first line must have only eight spoken syllables because its speaker, who is bent on entertaining the visiting Second Gentleman, as the playwright is on entertaining us at the very beginning of the play, will regularize the line by ending it by screwing himself into a lightning caricature of someone frowning like mad, in the time it would have taken to say an additional two or three end-of-line syllables. So that tacking this wordless frowning on to the end of the startling information provided by that first line, that everyone is frowning so much that they have mutated into a new non-human species of beings called Frownes, makes the Second Gentleman, and some or all of those with a sense of humour among the audience, grin or laugh. That’s acting, that’s stagecraft, that’s Shakespeare.

By the way, the razing of the unusual capitalization, in this and other plays of Shakespeare, from the face of edited editions, as thoroughly as the razing of the capital city of Carthage from the face of the earth by repressive ancient Romans, prevents directors and actors who use the edited versions from even knowing that there were words that started with capital letters from which they could sometimes at least intuit the need for follow-up wordless actions. So the result of that thorough piece of editing restricts what the actors can do and to some extent changes the play, as will now be shown again, and as has been shown at length in my shortish magnum opus, on Hamlet, which I have been told cannot be published because it breaks so many scholarly conventions.

As a reminder, the first five First Folio lines are:

1 Gent.
You do not meet a man but Frownes.
Our bloods no more obey the Heavens
Then our Courtiers:
Still seeme, as do’s the Kings.

2 Gent.
But what’s the matter?

After this has been edited into:

You do not meet a man but frowns: our bloods
No more obey the heavens than our courtiers
Still seem as does the king.

or into something very similar, the meaning, according to its editors, is: Just as the stars indisputably influence our temperaments, so is the expression of the king’s face reflected in his courtiers’ faces. Pretty good, lucky to get a meaning, considering the mess they’ve made by their editing. Rightly presuming on their inability to read that piece of Shakespeare as it was, they wrongly presumed it was at fault, whereas the old legal adage about being innocent till proven guilty applies to the piece, and also the humane adage that what cannot be understood is not necessarily wrong.

Their interpretation, if accepted, would leave one wondering why an unneeded simile aspiring to the cosmic grandiose would be used by Shakespeare as a cover-up for having nothing to say at that point and not saying it. But of course it wasn’t his simile, but an artifact forged by editors in the slag-heaps of their editions and attributed to him.

Let’s reason about the original "Kings," and before finding it intractable and changing it to "king," as some editors do, let’s assume "Kings" was supposed to end with its ess, and let’s bear in mind that the possessive apostrophe was not yet in use and that there is only one king in question. Then the only meaningful way to retain the ess in "Kings" is to treat "Kings" as a possessive form of "King," which we would nowadays write "King’s." So far, so good. But what does he possess — man, Frownes, bloods, Heavens, or Courtiers?

Still good. But by not following the paths of reason step by step from now on, our answer will avoid the tediousness of the process of eliminating each unsatisfactory contestant. Let the winner be declared. It is "Frownes," the King’s "Frownes."

And like a good butler of the arts, let us polish off the King’s line:

Still seeme, as do’s the Kings.

The six syllables in this line seem to leave room for a couple of frowns. "seeme" means "appear to be but aren’t" and "deeply wrinkle as in some frowns," do’s, a printed form of our verb "does," is probably spelt with an apostrophe to stop its readers from confusing it with the word for female deer. The frequency of the hunting and eating of does in Jacobethan times, sometimes made the printed word for them a likely source of visual confusion with the printed verb, though the sound of it probably differed from the verb’s as much as ours does now.

Since the verbal do’s is in the singular, the First Gentleman gives no more than one frown after saying Kings. The first two unspoken syllables are used-up by the First Gentleman indicating the Kings head by circling a hand round his own before using the time of the last two syllables for his frown. Would only a pedant disallow a frown after seeme, the circling of the Kings face on Kings, and then another frown?

The comma after seeme serves more than one purpose, without which it isn’t needed and would not exist. By dividing the phrasing in the line it makes not only the courtiers into dissemblers but even the king’s frown into a dissembling (and it soon turns out that the king, though outwardly angry, is really "touched at heart"). (The omission of the comma in the edited versions slurs this over like a raked-over footprint in a murder mystery.) It also points to not just outward mimicry of the king but the practice of deliberate hypocrisy by the courtiers (a disobeying of the Heavens).

The movelessness of the Still of Still seeme anticipates the soon-to-be-mentioned tumultuous gladness the courtiers feel under their sad settled surfaces, and of course shows that all this is going on and on without a break. All this (and perhaps more), physically-capable actors will bring out, without having to try to, because they have understood what they have read. What has been edited out, they cannot read, and cannot render.

Well now, now for:

Our bloods no more obey the Heavens
Then our Courtiers:

The spelling of Then suggests that the vowel in "than" was pronounced like the vowel usually is in the definite article, "the." For the purposes of the play, it should still be pronounced like "the." Not the slightest possibility of a momentary pun on "van," meaning "forefront," and so causing the courtiers to be put at the head of the Heavens, should be allowed to distract anyone in the audience.

Nor is it appropriate versification to stress one (or both) of the two unstressed syllables of "Then our." Stresses would slow down the unruly flow of the disobedient "bloods," and disturb the smooth flow of the obedient bloods. But this obedience and disobedience belong to the preceding line, which I’ve not dealt with yet. Let me finish this one first. The capitalization of the grammatically possessive "Courtiers" encourages us to have two or three lookalike kingly frowns after it, but done by the First Gentleman as if they were made by courtiers physically and temperamentally very different from each other. What a part for the virtuoso actor.

And now for the line:

Our bloods no more obey the Heavens

bloods can refer to the temperaments of people, and to hot-tempered people before age or illness tames them. Or isn’t Our bloods preferably a distancing of the speaker (and those of his class) from the courtiers. Or could Our bloods mean Our blood does, in that colloquial way of speaking that sounds so natural and right, and mockingly refer to the speaker only? It makes these four lines very easy to understand when spoken, and strong, no matter how difficult they look in print.

the Heavens are the deities or Diety, or the planets and stars that were held to influence people’s behaviour.

The vee in Heavens is elided (as it usually is in Shakespeare), and Heavens is pronounced as one syllable. Grammatically, it can be a possessive. It becomes the eighth syllable, followed by a frown.

no more obey, modified by its connection with the courtiers, splits into "do not obey" and "obeys as much as," and results in:

Dismissal of the idea, so grandly put forward by redeless editors, that it means that the behaviour at court has the inevitability of a temperament’s obedience to its stars.
The entertainment of the idea that the courtiers’ temperaments obeying the influence of their stars to the full could not have resulted in a more faithful rendition by them of the king’s frowns.

And 3. with the next two lines adds up to: "Everything has gone wrong at the court, and yet everyone at court is behaving as they should, even the wild bloods, by following the court conventions in exemplary fashion, though only by not obeying the heavenly command "Thou shalt not bear false witness."

But the combined lines:

Our bloods no more obey the Heavens
Than our courtiers:

yield the additional meanings that our bloods no more obey the Heavens than they obey the courtiers, and that our bloods no more obey the Heavens than our courtiers obey the Heavens. Which, along with the first and fourth spoken lines, means that whichever way you look at it, nothing at the court is what it seems to be.

All this the actor packs into himself. How much of it can he let out at need?

So now we have reviewed the First Gentleman’s first speech, the first four spoken lines of the First Folio, which in their correct order are:

You do not meet a man but Frownes.
Our bloods no more obey the Heavens
Then our Courtiers:
Still seeme, as do’s the Kings.

C. Fitzmaurice has pointed out that Our bloods can refer to gentlemen who are not courtiers, so that there are three levels at court, non-courtier gentlemen, courtiers, and the king, which provides a sort of progress within the speech.

There remains the fifth First Folio line, which is:

2 Gent.
But what’s the matter?

When the First Gentleman finishes speaking, I imagine the Second Gentleman suppressing his own laughter by compressing his lips and shaking his head slowly from side to side and then wiping a tear from between each eye and the bridge of his nose before demanding in a voice weakened by laughter: "But what’s the matter?" which means "Why? What’s happening? What’s wrong?" and above all, "But what’s it all about? What’s the cause?" a question which he is made to ask on our behalf, as well as for himself, by a playwright who habitually, figuratively though never in fact, kills two birds with one stone.

Timing is important. The First Gentleman should be played by an experienced natural comedian. And no doubt was. He is probably trying to suppress his own laughter (at the whole situation). The laughter and the attempt to suppress it hinder his rendering of the frowns, interfere with the continuity of his speech, and eating up the time left in this speech for explanation, make him speak faster as he goes along.

Each of the four lines has the exact time-length of every line of poetry in the play, like a well-drilled line of chorus girls kicking up their legs at precisely the same time. Yes, but within the rigid time limits of the poetic line, running on or end-stopped, all is fluidity, individuality, and nothing is the same. The poet applied a sense of meaningful proportion and not a measuring tape to the length, pitch, and volume of the ten or eleven syllables of each line. Which by a commodious "vicus of re-circulation" brings us back to editors who follow each other like doomed caterpillars in a circle and, condoned by custom and indifference, "instinctively" and with a lack of awareness for what they are doing in the name of the regularization they firmly believe in, in practice deregularize lines which are already regular but different.

"What!" I hear someone exclaiming, "Seven pages to explain five lines of Shakespeare. Then Shakespeare is lost to us, even if you are right." But I reply, "In those seven pages, not just five lines but the entirety of his work is at stake."