Read the following quotation, then declaim it aloud, then answer the questions:
“Blenkinsop! Blenkinsop! Fain wert thou embrinaged there at the harbourside! No turncoat cutpurse at the ducking stool sought to jar thy chaps. Was it but a toughening that smudged such gobby vexations, or was a man o’ poultry glutted on bream ‘n’ minnows? Fie! But how could that be?, you keen, spitter of pips with puppy-tears in grand cascade! Know ye that there are fires now blasting the barbicans? Well may thee prate ‘neath a stickleback sneer, ipso facto, dear goosey that thou art whose heart fluttereth in spring and, yea!, in winter’s hawthorn cracklings too.”
1. The speaker is clearly a courtier. What foul corruption gnaws at the heart of the court he serves?
2. Were you able to bring your own experience of embrinage to express empathy with Blenkinsop in your recitation?
3. Are you now or have you ever been subject to gobby vexations?
4. Do you think this speech would pack more punch if it was delivered on an apron stage littered with corpses, as was the playwright’s original intention?
5. Why do you think the playwright has a “man o’ poultry” eating fish?
6. Should the part of Blenkinsop be played by a lumbering, thick-set, bear-like man, or by a spindly, weedy type?
7. If asked, would you say these are honeyed words?
8. Now devise a rejoinder to be put into Blenkinsop’s mouth.
BLENKINSOP replies:
Abaft! What wrangling cotquean thus stuns the waxy ear of day with sauce-fed tracasseries? Belikes ‘tis some felt-tongued bee-sucker, some goose-legged insolvency practitioner of Dis who rodomontades me thus! Embrinage me who will, delustrate me who can! Let the nine lids o’ the sky bear everlasting witness: Blenkinsop is no glutinous sea-hag, no whiskered lamprey o’ the estuarine debouchments. Yea and again yea, in all previous studies involving the behaviour of the cushion star Pteraster tesselatus the possibility that this asteroid’s copious secretions of honey-brown mucus are defensive in nature has been suggested, but never bruited abroad to th’infernal spheres of Dagdagdiel and Gargophias! Let that eclipsed and inky deep close o’er the Blenkinsopian noddle e’er asteroid-consuming sea-stars trump his grand demise! Let moss-trooping spunkies calibrate the vortex of his doom, even to excessive levels, let threnodies expire in the frore and frosty air, let bleak fish with menstruous gills attend his grand kernicterus, his last and final ensarcophagation! Ah let be, let be.
Well there’s no answer to that.
Oh, I don’t know… if someone wants to add a rejoinder to that rejoinder, and then someone else a rejoinder to that, and so on, we could have a collaborative drama on our hands that would be a surefire West End hit (especially if set to music).
“Andrew Lloyd Webber takes unexpected new direction with latest musical; Spin-off reality show ‘How do you solve a problem like Blenkinsop?’ is ratings flop, produces strangest auditions yet”
FK / JL: Forwarded both to the OED where the cite-mongers will descend on it all with cries of delight.