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With these three items staring at me, the question naturally arose: how much more Shakespeare might be in the Basement Tapes? Maybe every wacky Dylan song on the Tapes encapsulates a nugget of Shakespeare?

...I now reach for a Shakespeare concordance (Google be praised!--there is one online!) to start looking for word-matches with Dylan. It is tedious slogging...

...Timon of Athens has more instances of "dog" than any other Shakespeare play, generally a speaker using "dog" to insult someone, which rather fits Tiny Montgomery drawling "gas that dog." No need to call PETA.

Dylan's "Odds and Ends" begins it's second stanza: "You take your file and you bend my head" and I'm guessing you can guess where this oddity originates.

...here I"ll stop calling Dylan's lyrics curious, weird, odd, bizarre, peculiar, goofy or non-Euclidean, and merely note when they are normal, which is almost never.

...when Dylan asks his Molly, "What's the matter with your mound?" the answer might be that there are asp-fangs latched onto it.

As to the "herd of moose" in the song, I'm still trying to locate the democratic critters...

... for now suffice to say: a) Dylan's "cheeks in a chunk" belong to the dead Lord Salisbury in Henry VI Part 1, b) the mythical alter ego of the "big dumb blonde" (Venus, if you must know) can be ascertained by searching "gorge" in the concordance and matching "wheel" to "tires" (ah, more wordplay), c) "Turtle, a friend of hers" is yet another punning reference, to the short bird-poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle" (electrifying, since the poem is a pet concern, and funny as Bob cracks an egg joke), and d)  the metaphoric "Million Dollar Bash" is plainly the collected works of Shakespeare, and the song a sly fanfare thereof.

What the heck WAS Dylan trying to do in baking this bountifully bent batch of Bard bits?

...a routine disclaimer: this essay contains no accusation that our 60s legend shoplifted stuff. His Shakespeare sources having gone almost undetected for 47 years, it is obvious Dylan metabolized his materials well. And of course Shakespeare too was a consummate borrower.

The first big sideways discovery was that the lyrics to "Duquesne Whistle" are basically a commentary on, or reference to--heck, let's muster bafflegab and call it a McLuhanesque extension of--that Basement Tapes peripheral "Mighty Quinn"...

Why else would Dylan caricature Prince Hamlet blaming Ophelia for her own drowning?

More astonishingly, (the Beatles') "Come Together" artfully and playfully recognizes two related Shakespeare sources that Dylan uses--can you spot them?

The Shakespeare in Bob Dylan's basement

    -or-

Who is the Mighty Quinn anyway? (a rascal from Quebec??)

...and, um, why did Dylan perform a sex-change operation on him before slipping her across the border?

Now, when someone offers me a joke,

I just say no thanks,

I try to tell it like it is,

And keep away from pranks.

                              - Bob Dylan, "Going to Acapulco" 1967

Any attempt to render sense from the published lyrics to these (Dylan's 1967 Basement Tapes) songs just strikes me as against the whole spirit of the sessions.

                              -Clinton Heylin, Revolution in the Air

The why is plain as way to parish church:

He that a fool doth very wisely hit 
Doth very foolishly, although he smart, 
Not to seem senseless of the bob...

                            - Shakespeare, As You Like It

He got the voice that speak in riddles...

                                  -John Fogerty, "Old Man Down the Road" 1985

The lights of my native land are glowing,

I wonder if they'll know me next time 'round.

                             -Bob Dylan, "Duquesne Whistle" 2012

You ain't never going to figure out what Bob's going to do next. Only God knows what's going on in his mind.

                 -Ronnie Hawkins OC, 2014      

Behold the sizzling 60s, now largely reduced to a dusty diorama of hippies and Woodstock (or in the April Walrus magazine, a rehash of the Port Huron Statement in dishwater-dull terms). But poke around the area, hotspots may surprise you.

    For starters, try a little-visited YouTube snippet of the Beatles in studio circa January 1969, messing briefly with Bob Dylan's "Please, Mrs. Henry"--just a minute-long audio-clip with a photo slapped on, but it features John strumming guitar and mock-rasping a bit of the chorus--"Please, Mrs. Henry! Mrs. Henry, please!"--a few people chatting around him, then George talking about "playing the tapes" (those famous long ago Dylan Basement Tapes) and almost-laughing, "The words!..."

    Ah yes, the words. Stuff like "I'm a thousand years old, I'm a generous bomb/ I'm T-boned and punctured, I've been known to be calm"--to quote the song's romping discombobulation (which the Beatles only toyed with, though "I Am the Walrus" approaches its zany spirit).

    What can possibly be said about those Bob Dylan lyrics? In fact two entire books have recently been devoted to the Tapes, one by senior rock-music critic, Greil Marcus, who wrote the liner-notes to the official Basement Tapes album finally released in 1975. His book The Old, Weird America wraps the songs in every tangent from "the great Harvard scholar" F. O. Matthiesson to Appalachian coal-mining history, but neither it nor Sid Griffin's Million Dollar Bash get very far into the screwball lyrics, whose mystery endures. A befuddled critic today might still echo George Harrison's speechless wonder at them. Or like Dylanologist Scott Heylin postulate they have no rational meaning. Or maybe they are "automatic writing" or "patched together out of scraps."

    The story behind the Basement Tapes is that Bob Dylan, after a July 1966 motorcycle accident and/or collapse from overwork and drugs, retreated to his home in upstate New York, and for much of 1967 recuperated by woodshedding with his 80%-Canadian back-up band from an arduous 1965-66 world tour, in the basement garage of their nearby West Saugerties house, dubbed Big Pink (and iconicized in 1968 when the band became the Band and released their first album Music from Big Pink).

    The Saugerties crew fixed up Big Pink's basement for sound-recording (another YouTube clip has Robbie Robertson recalling how this pioneer home-studio came about) and cellarside they recorded a staggering number of songs. The casual sessions (often attended by a dog named Hamlet) began with covers of old American folk tunes, and over time drifted to Dylan originals with a similarly antiquated "Americana" flavor, as well as stray tidbits from the Band, for a total of 100+ songs.

   Mostly it was done for the sheer joy of making music, although it is now credited with starting the roots-music and alt-country genres. But Dylan also had the idea of putting 14 of his songs onto a demo-tape and circulating copies for other artists to record. The Beatles, as noted, didn't bite. But another British band, Manfred Mann grabbed "Mighty Quinn" (aka "Quinn the Eskimo") from the tape and made a big hit of it (#1 in Britain).

    Which is where your Edmonton kibitzologist comes in--on Christmas 1967 at the age of 14, I received a tiny portable reel-to-reel tape recorder, and one of the songs it soon captured from the radio was "Mighty Quinn."

    Aside from being a catchy singalong song, two things stood out: first, its odd lyrics, e.g. "Let me do what I wanna do, I can't decide on my own"--huh? Actually, the end-lyric is "I can't decide 'em all" as research determined, but the correction clarifies nothing, the words remaining as cryptic as the following line: "Just tell me where to put 'em, and I'll tell you who to call"--huh?? Again, the chorus of "You'll not see nothing like the Mighty Quinn" to my young ears sounded like "You'll Nazi nothing."

   The second eyebrow-raiser was flipping through a purloined-from-dad Playboy magazine and seeing, amid more comely Hollywoodites, a photo of actor Anthony Quinn as an Eskimo with fur-edged hood in some film. Surely this was a clue, but what sort?? My Hardy Boys Detective Handbook hadn't prepared me for this at all.

   Despite being a junior music fanatic, at that age I was unaware of Dylan's authorship, and barely registered Dylan himself, despite digging his midsize hit "Rainy Day Women #12 and #35" a year earlier (which also stumped me with its chorus of "But I would not feel so all alone/ Everybody must get stoned!")

    Succeeding years, however, especially college with its discovery of the tabloid Rolling Stone, planted Dylan firmly in my consciousness, up to the mandatory heavy contemplation of his lyrics. It was a jolt, for instance, when I read Joseph Conrad's Victory and realized Pedro in the novel matched "faithful slave Pedro" in Dylan's "Tombstone Blues" (albeit Conrad's Pedro lacks a "fantastic collection of stamps/ To win friends and influence his uncle"). And a bigger triumph deducing that the highway in "Highway 61 Revisited" neatly symbolizes faith.

    But Dylan wasn't my light on the road to Damascus; critic H. L. Mencken supplied that. Still, fate delivered plenty of Dylan epiphanies to tuck into my karma, from seeing him in concert in Nuremburg in 1978, to reading a Rolling Stone item about a costume-party where attendees came as something in a Dylan song (hugely successful, e.g. a partygoer who "dressed/ With 20 pounds of headlines stapled to his chest") to debating another aficionado as to which Dylan album was best--he chose Blonde on Blonde, I voted the Basement Tapes. On such questions reasonable fanatics may differ.

    But like many of the hypnotized, I fled Dylan after his late-70s leap to Christianity. My love of literature, however, eventually led (long story) to becoming an amateur Shakespeare shamus, mainly of his lesser-known play Troilus and Cressida. Which is how I happened to wake one morning in August 2012, a week after downloading the 1975 Basement Tapes, with a peculiar line from its "Crash on the Levee" serenading my groggy brain: "You can train on down to William's Point/ You can bust your feet, you can rock this joint"--and wondered, did this refer to William Shakespeare?

    A preposterous connection. And yet the song's minimal lyrics do seem to be a distorted echo of Prince Hamlet lashing out at his mother: "Mama, don't you make a sound"--and/or Ophelia: "If you go down in the flood, it's gonna be your own fault"--although the scrambled state of the words (bookish Dylan playing hillbilly-illiterate, it seems) keeps a clear verdict just out of reach. But really, what the heck is "It's king for king, queen for queen/ Gonna be the meanest flood anybody's seen" doing on an all-American levee? Eh?

   Furthermore, as any Bobphile knows, Ophelia has already had a surreal cameo as an "old maid" in 1965's "Desolation Row." And in Dylan'sTarantula (a stream-of-anything book also from the mid-60s) he taunts a middlebrow for getting good grades in easy literature, but not in Hamlet, indicating Dylan knows its status as a enigmatic "problem play" among the profs. Again, "Shakespeare he's in the alley/ With his pointed shoes and his bells" saunters through "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" in 1966, the same year Dylan, on the European leg of that grueling concert tour, visited Hamlet's Kronborg Castle, where, as Howard Sounes notes in his Dylan-bio Down the Highway, "Bob was interested to learn all he could about the fabled Prince of Denmark." So, if every auteur from Goethe to Lincoln to Kurosawa has succumbed to Shakespeare-fascination, why not Dylan? And why not another go at Hamlet in 1967?

    But while glumly contemplating how short the song is (under two minutes) and the need for more evidential verses, I notice only one song on the Basement Tapes is shorter, the rousing opener "Odds and Ends" at a mere 1:48; a favorite song among favorites, but now idly rehearsing its lyrics in my head, it hits me like a wallop: Dylan berating a lady (again) sounds like Prince Troilus watching Lady Cressida in the climactic tent-scene in Troilus and Cressida.

    "I stand in awe and I shake my face/ You break your promise all over the place" (as the song starts) perfectly describes Troilus's initial shock, the idiosyncratic "shake my face" depicting his subsequent rage and hinting at you-know-who. And the couple did pledge love-vows to each other.

    Going to Dylan's official website to verify the "Odds and Ends" lyrics delivers a second, larger wallop: the revisionist Dylan, who often tweaks his poetry in perplexing ways, has changed the intro line--instead of awe and shaken face we get "I plan it all and I take my place." This is now CLEARLY the Troilus and Cressida tent-scene.

    For those unfamiliar with the play, Troilus and Cressida is Shakespeare's reconfiguration of the Trojan War tale, borrowing heavily from medieval sources (especially Chaucer) who added a love-story to the skeleton of Homer's Iliad. In Shakespeare's version, as the long war festers, on the Trojan side Lady Cressida's uncle Pandarus arranges a tryst between her and Prince Troilus, but the day after it is consummated Cressida is traded to the Greeks in exchange for a Trojan prisoner. In a hasty farewell, Troilus tells Cressida he will come to the Greek camp and surreptitiously visit her (the plan). When a group of Trojan warriors goes to the Greek camp to watch a single-combat, Troilus slips away to, nope, not have a romantic moment with her, but merely eavesdrop--"take my place" unseen in the tent where she stays. What he sees (as per Dylan) is Cressida flirting with her Greek guardian Diomedes. Cue the jealous fury.

    Atop these two play-echoes, I recollect a third, well-known hint of Shakespeare in the Basement Tapes song "Tears of Rage"--"What dear daughter 'neath the sun/ Would treat a father so?/ To wait upon him hand and foot/ Yet always answer 'no'"--this is widely seen as a reference toKing Lear. With these three items staring at me, the question naturally arose: how much more Shakespeare might be in the Basement Tapes? Maybe every wacky Dylan song on the Tapes encapsulates a nugget of Shakespeare?

    The next step is familiar: just as I consult a Bible concordance to ferret out religious allusions in Shakespeare (Troilus and Cressida is riddled with them), I now reach for a Shakespeare concordance (Google be praised!--there is one online!) to start looking for word-matches with Dylan. It is tedious slogging and 19 times out of 20 a searcher draws a blank, but slowly bits of Shakespeare begin to emerge. One of the first is the rocked "joint" from "Crash on the Levee"--it connects with (causes?) "the time is out of joint" in Hamlet. As the song contains zero indication what "joint" Dylan is singing about (let's not speculate in the marijuana direction) the word is added to our Hamlet hints, filed under wordplay, alongside a certain levy/levee pun.

    "Odds and Ends" yields even better links to Troilus and Cressida. Its chorus of "Odds and ends, odds and ends/ Lost time is not found again" resonates with the play's "Speech on Time," and more deeply with the "arrival scene" in which the traded Cressida is led to the Greek camp, where resident highbrow Ulysses proposes that the Greek princes greet her with each a kiss. Three princes, old Nestor, Achilles and Patroclus do so, Patroclus most suggestively, explicitly acting Paris embracing and kissing Helen, the very cause of the war. Next comes Menelaus, the cuckolded husband who began the mobilization of a thousand ships to get his Helen back:

Menelaus: I'll have my kiss, sir. Lady, by your leave.

Cressida: In kissing, do you render or receive?

Menelaus: Both take and give.

Cressida: I'll make my match to live,

The kiss you take is better than you give,

Therefore no kiss.

Menelaus: I'll give you boot, I'll give you three for one.

Cressida: You are an odd man; give even or give none.

Menelaus: An odd man, lady? Every man is odd.

Cressida: No, Paris is not, for you know 'tis true

That you are odd and he is even with you.

Menelaus: You fillip me o' the head.

Cressida: No, I'll be sworn.

A "fillip" means a tap, on the head indicating Cressida has posed a riddle; her reply is a puzzle too; one solution being that her odd/even riddle is easy, another overlooked possibility that she would marry before she kisses. Either way, her odd/even riddle has a plain answer: Paris is a rapist, and Menelaus is ditto for attempting a kiss. But while this is clear enough, the academic dimwits, most of whom hallucinate Cressida as a coy slut here, have altogether missed the veiled accusation of rape for 405 years. You saw it first in this newspaper.

    Dylan's "Odds and Ends" begins it's second stanza: "You take your file and you bend my head" and I'm guessing you can guess where this oddity originates. Other intimations of the play also speckle "Odds and Ends" but by now I'm chomping toward the rest of the Basement Tapes.

    To make a long research short, every Dylan song on the 1975 album shows signs of tapping into Shakespeare, as do peripheral Basementsongs like "I Shall Be Released" and "I'm Not There." A lesser example is "Tiny Montgomery"--checking the word "dog" reveals that Timon of Athens has more uses of "dog" than any other Shakespeare play, generally a speaker using "dog" to insult someone, which fits Tiny Montgomery drawling "gas that dog." No need to call PETA. The two titles resonate too, eh?

    Likely there are more parallels, but frankly I haven't read the play. Still, I'll bet Dylan's curious and inexplicable listing of the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) in the song comes from the discussion between poet, painter, jeweler, merchant and mercer which opens the play. But here I"ll stop calling Dylan's lyrics curious, weird, odd, bizarre, peculiar, goofy or non-Euclidean, and merely note when they are normal, which is almost never.

    A major connection would be Dylan's song "Lo and Behold" with Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra. The two are linked by such words as hook, behold, shame and seat, which quickly raise parallels. For example, Dylan's lines:

The coachman, he hit me for my hook,

And he asked me my name

I give it to him right away,

Then I hung my head in shame

This evokes Cleopatra's talk of catching Antony on a hook, Antony being chided for submitting to her, and hanging his head at the reproof. Again, "I give it to him right away" suggests Antony whipping Thyreus (and asking his name just before).

    Yet again, Dylan's "count up to thirty" and "6:30 flat" signal the couple's end in 30 BC; his mock-illiterate "of course I knew she will" (changed to "would" on website) suggests Shakespeare's name again; Dylan's "found myself a vacant seat" replicates Cleopatra's upstaging of Antony in scene II ii (where Antony "did sit alone" and there was almost a "vacancy"--nice pun!--of atmospheric air gone with the crowds to see Cleopatra); and finally, the chorus's plea of "Get me out of here, my dear man!" is easily Antony's plea to a servant to help finish his (Antony's) botched suicide.

    Oh yes: and when Dylan asks his Molly, "What's the matter with your mound?"--the answer might be that there are asp-fangs latched onto it. Let Greil Marcus (who pontificates on this song in terms of a train trip, de Tocqueville and democratic etiquette) take note of all this. As to the "herd of moose" in the song, I'm still trying to locate the democratic critters--the Egyptian fleet at Actium perhaps?

    Going down the list of other Dylan songs on the Basement Tapes, our entry-level "Please Mrs. Henry" connects to and contorts Henry IV Part 1, with Falstaff naturally being the "generous bomb" (link-words are eggs, knees and of course Henry; Falstaff also encores as "Vice-president" in Dylan's "Clothes Line Saga"--a rejigging of Shakespeare's laundry-rich Merry Wives of Windsor); "Apple Suckling Tree" echoes Taming of the Shrew (link-words: Bartholomew, seven years); "You Ain't Going Nowhere" channels The Winter's Tale (Dylan's "Get your mind off wintertime" proving to be as good a joke as his "railing's froze" pun); "Going to Acapulco" starts from As You Like It (and it is "plain as way" and/or "plain as day" that Dylan's Rose Marie parallels Shakespeare's Rosalind, with the Forest of Arden being "big places"--not to mention a certain time-joke; but more on Dylan's vast array of time-jokes anon); "Yea, Heavy and a Bottle of Bread" taps Measure for Measure, etc.

    As I'm figuring that Dylan has a one-play-per-song program, however, "Million Dollar Bash" arrives echoing a variety of plays and poems. Another long story, but for now suffice to say: a) Dylan's "cheeks in a chunk" belong to dead Lord Salisbury in Henry VI Part 1, b) the mythical alter ego of the "big dumb blonde" (Venus, if you must know) is ascertained by searching "gorge" in the concordance and matching "wheel" to "tires" (ah, more wordplay), c) "Turtle, a friend of hers" is yet another punning reference, to the short bird-poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle" (electrifying, since the poem is a pet concern, and funny as Bob cracks an egg joke), and d)  the metaphoric "Million Dollar Bash" is plainly the collected works of Shakespeare, and the song a sly fanfare thereof.

     Having unearthed this great tangle of Shakespeare roots, however, I am loath to merely hatch what English Department bores call a source study, suitable for burial in a dreary scholarly journal. Moreover, since Dylan was recently accused of plagiarizing a yakuza (Japanese gangster) book, let me issue a routine disclaimer: this essay contains no accusation that our 60s legend shoplifted stuff. His Shakespeare sources having gone almost undetected for 47 years, it is obvious Dylan metabolized his materials well. And of course Shakespeare too was a consummate borrower.

    Rather, as a critic I grasp for the overarching artistic intent and total effect in all this. What the heck WAS Dylan trying to do in baking this bountifully bent batch of Bard bits? Maybe just scrambling his poetic ingredients in the disorienting manner of French poet Rimbaud and American dice-o-matic William Burroughs? (as Dylan has done before). Or launching a sort of avant-garde "Cheech and Chong puff Shakespeare up in smoke"?

    Months later another possibility clicks: one of Dylan's early heroes was Hank Williams Sr., whose adept wordcraft earned him the title of "the hillbilly Shakespeare"--and Dylan, after an especially potent toot and/or annoyance at being compared with Shakespeare himself, may have decided to REALLY produce some hill-Will. Or perhaps Dylan was just doing a relatively easy writing exercise??

    Failing an ESP into Dylan's brain, does he at least display some critical awareness of what Shakespeare is about? Is there ANY conception of Shakespeare behind the unrelenting surrealism, absurdity and hick-schtick?

    Such open-ended questions take me hither and yon--including the three-decade gap since "Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar" floored me. A big game of catch-up, but at least I'm aware Dylan has gotten good reviews in recent years, and is considered a long-distance runner. Nosing around, indeed, I find plenty of Dylanology both online and in old-fashioned books (and for the worshipful a "box set" of replica Dylan mementos). Even scouting Dylan's 60s heyday, an area I thought I knew fairly well, turns up surprising discoveries.

    My procedure, if it can be called that, is to digress and approach things sideways, a time-consuming but rarely unrewarding tactic. For example, pulling a Penguin edition of Erasmus's Praise of Folly from my shelves circa 1999 (where it did little but gather dust for 20+ years) gave me a prime clue what Cressida means when, after initial resistance, she finally accedes to uncle Pandarus's entreaties to have a fling with Troilus, telling Pandarus, apropos the pending adultery, "I dedicate my folly to you"--a statement that flabbergasted one Victorian editor of the play. Erasmus in fact dedicated his Folly (a satire) to Sir Thomas More, so Cressida is winking that she will be a bad girl for satiric purposes. You read it first in this newspaper.

    With the Basement Tapes, the crabwalk includes downloading Dylan's 2012 album Tempest. And hitting the jackpot. The title, of course suggests Shakespeare's The Tempest (and a key line in the Sonnets). But aside from digging the latest Dylan, my main reasons for buying the album were a) its single, "Duquesne Whistle" is a seductive jig (with a freaky video), and b) I was curious about the album's notably late-arriving John Lennon tribute "Roll On, John" and Dylan's exact relation to Lennon (you will recall that as Dylan and crew were setting up at Big Pink, the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's, featuring Dylan's face among luminaries on the album cover).

   The first big sideways discovery is that the lyrics to "Duquesne Whistle" are basically a commentary on, or reference to--heck, let's don bafflegab and call it a McLuhanesque extension of--that Basement Tapes peripheral "Mighty Quinn" (two Dylan versions of "Quinn"--mournful as Manfred Mann's is cheerful--have shuffled onto compilation albums over the years, but not the 1975 Basement Tapes, whose cover-art nevertheless features an "Eskimo" in its freak-show tableau). Indeed "Duquesne Whistle" would better be titled "Da Quinn Foshizzle." But this conclusion rather catapults over a long zig-zag trek through scads of "Quinn" and "Duquesne" evidence, gathered while bouncing haphazardly between other Dylan areas.

    First came a Shakespeare-test for "Mighty Quinn." Result: "despair" a multiple hit, and "mighty" snagging Shakespeare's "a mighty queen"--bingo!--among many clear links to Richard III, the infamous medieval British king whose remains were recently discovered under a parking lot. But from there to "Duquesne Whistle" is such a wild hopscotch of clues I can scarcely remember which one first hitched "Quinn" to "Duquesne"--despite having cited clues on my blog and Twitter.

    Perhaps the linkage came in November 2012, when I tweeted that the guitar-figure that graces the slow intro to "Duquesne Whistle" is a near-identical melody to the perky flute-figure which opens Manfred Mann's "Quinn" (so memorably perky that Wikipedia mentions it) and that this bracing woodwind is the "whistle" that is "like a time-bomb in my heart" to Dylan. "Listen to that Duquesne whistle," indeed. "Blowin' like it's gonna blow my blues away... blowin' like it never blowed before"--Dylan no doubt wryly describing his own mopey and fluteless original.

    But other clues arrive with glacial slowness. It is January 2013 and many earfuls of Manfred Mann, for instance, before a frustrating, unconnected-to-anything line in "Duquesne Whistle"--"I can hear a sweet voice gently calling/ Must be the mother of our Lord"--which I initially quick-pegged as an offhand Christian quip, till my slow-brains realized Dylan had sort of shelved Christianity in the 80s (hey, if there had been a media frenzy over this...) finally yielded to another listen. As Manfred Mann sings "When Quinn the Eskimo gets here/ Everybody's gonna jump for joy"--there it is!--a high, pure, aah-ing voice sliding in harmony behind the lead singer. Bingo again.

   But why would Dylan be rehashing the 45-year-old "Mighty Quinn" in "Duquesne Whistle"? And the goofy questions this raises--e.g. would Quinn be "you old rascal, I know exactly where you're going"?--and where is the rascal going exactly?--and why does Dylan promise "I'll leave you there myself at the break of day"? Again, doesn't the "Duquesne" question "I wonder if that old oak tree's still standing" allude to "that old oak tree" in Tom Jones's hit "The Green, Green Grass of Home"?--a 1967 (hm!) song that starts with "...as I step down from the train"--and how significant is that?

    Answers eventually come, surprisingly tidy ones, but not from these songs, and only indirectly from Shakespeare. Rather, they emerge from Dylan's new Lennon tribute "Roll On, John" and another wayward digression: an anti-documentary film-sequence of Lennon and Dylan cruising stoned in the back of a limousine through London in May 1966.

    The limo sequence is part of a film about Dylan and the Band's harsh '65-66 tour, titled Eat the Document, instigated by Dylan, commissioned by ABC but rejected by them as incomprehensible (or scandalous) when completed, and never generally released. But it has occasionally been screened, and parts, including the limo-ride have wandered onto YouTube. Most Dylan and Lennon biographers mention the backseat summit, but ascribe little significance to it. Nor did I initially (and have left posted an Oct. 26, 2012 tweet dismissing it as "stoned-banal" to prove just how wrong critics can be).

  What I discovered--gobsmacked--on repeated viewing is that Dylan is kicking around pretty much all the ingredients of "Mighty Quinn" in the limo. Probably the song wasn't written at that point, more likely Dylan watched the limo-sequence afterward--he was actively involved in the film-editing after his motorcycle accident--and the pieces of the song came together in his head somewhere between the cutting-room and Big Pink.

    The limo sequence starts with Dylan asking Lennon, "Are you excited?" (jumping for joy maybe?) Then Dylan addresses the limo-driver: "Tom, y'gotta sleep, y'gotta sleep" ("nobody can get no sleep" and "everybody's gonna wanna doze" of course inexplicably appear in "Mighty Quinn"--the limo-ride taking place in the early morning after a Dylan concert and a night of partying). Then Dylan looks out the window and comments, "There's the mighty Thames, that's what held Hitler back..." (incredulous "What?!" from someone on the film-crew side)... yes, the mighty Thames. Winston Churchill said that." (Winston was John Lennon's middle name, he was born during the Blitz and named after Churchill). A few minutes later Dylan cites "the mighty Thames" a third time).

    All this may pop a hypothesis or two. Maybe John Lennon is the Mighty Quinn?? And maybe that "You'll not see nothing" in "Mighty Quinn" actually IS a deliberate Nazi pun from our serial punster? In the limo Dylan wishes out loud that he could speak English, praising Lennon's ability to speak American, which brings us again to "You'll not see nothing"--which clearly melds Brit-phrasing and all-American double-negative (although double-negatives do occur in British; checking H. L. Mencken's The American Language reveals that Shakespeare commits one in--ding!--Richard III). One might also note, as our Grade 8 teacher did, that the two negatives cancel each other, so "you'll not see nothing" means you will see something.

    Or how about Dylan's intent questioning of Lennon on the name of the Beatles' publishing company, Northern Songs (there is some frustratingly vague discussion of Lennon's suggestion--joking?--that an unspecified Dylan song would go well in the Northern Songs catalog). Then later in the ride comes Dylan's mock-question "So, you're just a new cat (pause) from Canada?" (Lennon promptly concedes he is from Quebec; something about the flatness of this exchange suggests it is rehearsed, tired, or just stray cannabis--both Lennon and Dylan of course came from northern hometowns). Not too hard to see where surrealist Dylan might take all this northness. Or consider how Dylan praises Lennon's acting ability, and mock-proposes to turn driver Tom into a Hollywood star. From there it is a short absurdist hop to transfiguring Lennon into a kraft durch freude film Eskimo.

    Indeed, the Quinn-is-Lennon idea, having soaked in for a year, just seems right (hey, all the pigeons DID run to the Beatles,right?) and it surely explains the juxtaposition of pigeons with a John Lennon poster in the opening frames of the "Duquesne Whistle" video. What the theory also does is foreshadow and organize the "Roll On, John" tribute that closes the Tempest album. For if Dylan in "Duquesne Whistle" announces he is taking Quinn-Lennon to a definite destination, "Roll On, John" is where he makes the surreal delivery. To Canada.

    Yes, Canada. Where else would our unlikely undertaker take a Liverpuddlian quasi-Inuit for a decent burial? And although it has escaped the notice of the critics, "Roll On, John" is a journey-song, whose Canadian destination Dylan hints at repeatedly.

1) The chorus's refrain of "moving on" may well refer to Canadian Hank Snow's country hit "I'm Moving On" (never mind that Yoko wrote a song with nearly the same title) and a doubly Canadian reference may be signaled when Dylan urges John to "roll through the rain and snow."

2) Many critics, in their haste to belabor the obvious, have noted that "Roll On, John" contains a gamut of Lennon lines (and borrowed lines from elsewhere) but fail to guess that Dylan might twist lines to bring out odd meanings. Dylan? Jokerman? Twist things??

    In fact "Come together right now over me" is a straight Lennon quotation, but in the geographic context of "Roll On, John" (which repeatedly stresses location, from "the red-light Hamburg streets" to "you've been cooped up on an island far too long"--which might be Britain, Manhattan, or a Long Island pun), from Dylan's Yankee perspective "over me" is Canada. Check a map and see. And note again those "native land" lights in the topside epigraph.

3) At 5:49 of the song Dylan expands the chorus's "moving on" phrase to "moving on north"--although you need a top sound system and sharp ears to hear the understated addition.

4) Adding to his vast hoard of ultra-baffling lines, Dylan instructs Lennon to "Take the right-hand road and go where the buffaloes go." Right-hand road? Buffaloes?? In a rambling rhapsody on the Atlantic website (where he calls Dylan a "Holocaust-denying maggot") Dylan-stalker A. J. Weberman asserts that "right-hand road" shows Dylan waxing right-wing, and for perhaps the fifth time in his long kabbalistic kareer our happy crackpot may actually be in the vicinity of the truth. Surely the educated Bob, who tracks everything from yakuza memoirs to Falstaff's thousand-year old origins (including medieval drama's Vice figure) would know that Canada in 2012 has a Conservative government. Again, from Wood Buffalo Park to Buffalo aircraft to Buffalo Springfield, Canada has clearly attained global dominance in shaggy bovines...

I could further explain why Dylan's appropriation of Blake's "Tyger, tyger, burning bright" for the "Roll On, John" climax is also Canadian (and jaw-dropping), but the word-count grows alarmingly high, so let's make it a wrap. An appalling amount of stuff remains to be sorted out, e.g.the time jokes (hint: "quarter to three" in "Going to Acapulco" and its "soft gut" are both filched from Shakespeare's "Seven Ages"). Again, there's the status of Dylan's "This Wheel's on Fire" as a grab-bag of the Tragedies (e.g. "confiscate your lace" from Othello, "unpack" from Hamlet, "wheel's on fire" from King Lear and/or G. Wilson Knight's study of the Tragedies, The Wheel of Fire).

    Yet again, a half-essay must be written on Dylan deriving "I Shall Be Released" from Richard II (and how, as with "Odds and Ends" and Troilus and Cressida, his distillation proves Dylan a razor-sharp critic). Indeed, I would argue that in "Crash on the Levee" Dylan has, implicitly at the very least, solved the centuries-old mystery of Hamlet, perceiving that the play is no tragedy (as Voltaire also argued) and that Prince Hamlet is no tragic hero but a downright vicious schmuck--which is how Dylan plays him. Why else would Dylan caricature Hamlet blaming Ophelia for her own drowning? And then sneering, "You're going to have to find yourself another best friend somehow"--a downright spiteful, nay lunatic thing to say. Isn't it time we scholars stopped making excuses for the unhinged Prince of Denmark? (Voltaire notably didn't go quite so far; instead veering off into the notion that Shakespeare was a wild barbarian who ran amok over the rules of drama. The French satirist never quite caught Shakespeare's deadpan satire of nutbar Hamlet, as Dylan does).

    But all this will require two or three more essays to delineate, considering the plethora of satellite concerns, like Dylan and Lennon's obvious rapport (versus Atlantic critics who argue the infatuation was nearly all on Lennon's side) followed however by the two drifting apart in the 70s--an on-off relationship not much studied, although a late-breaking brain spasm jolts me to the realization that the Beatles' hit song "Come Together" is OBVIOUSLY (how did we miss it??) Lennon's absurdist response to Dylan's absurdism, from the flat-top guitar to the "joker" selfie. More astonishingly, "Come Together" artfully and playfully recognizes two related Shakespeare sources that Dylan uses--can you spot them? (hint: knees, and hair used as a regal pun). Compare Robbie Robertson's puzzled reactions to Dylan's lyrics, also artful and playful, but less perceptive methinks (albeit Dylan may have discussed Shakespeare with Lennon but not Robertson--perhaps?)

    Then there is Joni Mitchell's recent accusation--as mysteriously dropped as raised--that Dylan is all fake; mostly off the mark, but having a dash of truth, and being climax to some extensive historical interplay between the two songwriters (including a sort of absurdist dialogue-of-lyrics, unless I'm just hallucinating).

    Moreover, Mitchell likely nurses some puzzlement and suspicions about the Basement Tapes. After all, she has publicly sung "I Shall Be Released" at least twice--a song rated #6 among Dylan's "Top 100" songs by Rolling Stone's assembled poohbahs--and she must have wondered at "I see my light come shining/ From the west unto the east." Not a Cold War metaphor, Ms. Mitchell (and poohbahs). A crucial Shakespearean one.

    Again, much else on the Tempest album also deals with John Lennon, e.g. the gender-bent (like Mrs. Henry or Sweet Loretta Modern) "fairy queen" in "Soon After Midnight"--is she mighty?--or "that woman in my bed" in "Duquesne Whistle"?--did she emerge from John and Yoko's tongue-in-cheek press release announcing both were about to undergo sex-changes? Did Dr. Robert perform the operation on John? Okay, admittedly other candidates for "that woman" exist, Dylan having left the options cutely ambiguous.

    Then there's the eyebrow-raising researches of another Dylan sleuth, Scott Warmuth, hero of David Kinney's new-published book The Dylanologists, who has uncovered (slowly as myself) reams of Hemingway and other literature between the lines of Bob the Borrower Bee.

    Nor should we forget Dylan's long-simmering hostility to the media and celebrity-journalism (check Tempest throughout, e.g."They chirp and they chatter/ What does it matter?" Or "rags on your back" if you catch THAT double-meaning). Or the possible upshot of Tempest's best song "Scarlet Town" (a defense of surreal folk music?--a veiled rejoinder to Joni?) 

    Or Dylan's epilogue to the Shakespeare project in a suddenly less mysterious "All Along the Watchtower"--cue the Bard as "the thief he kindly spoke"--and maybe the critics as "plowmen dig my earth" eh? (you read it first in this newspaper). Or a full decoding of "Mighty Quinn"--line by line, including variants (the animal-noises variant arguably tags the animal noises on the Beatles' "Good Morning")..

    And so on, until a final wallop floors me: finding Dylan in John Fogerty's "Old Man Down the Road"--a discovery that kills an orderly end to this essay (but check the official video of Fogerty's hit; isn't that dude in black a Dylanoid doing "I Walk the Line"?) Finally, any Dylan follow-ups will have to answer aggrieved experts and irked layfolks (hey, everyone is a licensed critic) who will insist that some or all of the above is a load of hooey.

    Before such accusations fly, yes, I do admit failure in divining Dylan's general strategy in contriving his musical cryptograms, unless it is--let me take a wild stab--satiric intent. In the all-important matter of pigeon-holing, Dylan ultimately does seem to be a satirist.

    But having let this essay lurch schizophrenically between his conjuring of Shakespeare and Lennon, let me join the two together in a final lateral, to remind everyone that inside Bob Dylan's poetry are many mansions.

    Try this logical inference from "Roll On, John": if John Lennon a) rolls on, and b) burned so bright, as Dylan keeps telling us in the chorus, then Lennon, like King Lear, was bound to be a wheel of fire, wasn't he not?

Jens Andersen launches tweets from @frameofmind, where he salutes Dylan with a triple-negative in his bio. Scrambling to research this article, he somehow acquired two different editions of Andy Gill's Classic Bob Dylan--The Stories Behind Every Song 1962-1969, both illustrated with a picture of Hubert Humphrey as Vice-president ("No, no, NO!") and is offering the oversize book (and a big call-out) as an alleged "prize" to the first tweep to tweet the correct deduction of which Shakespeare play and whose point-of-view is taken by the Dylan song "I'm Not There" (saying, "This is an easy one, folks!") 

 DYLAN/BAND Lo & Behold!

Preview YouTube video Coulson, Dean, McGuinnes, Flint 

Double-shot of recycling

Having plunked nothing on the blog for nearly a year, and needing to maintain the fiction that I'm a bustling, producing writer, cranking out the critical stuff at a dizzying rate, let me publish a double-barrelled post--largely an extrapolation and expansion of some recent tweets on Twitter (where your super-annuated kvetch really does maintain a deplorable productivity) and somewhat a consolidation thereof. Namely:

1) "Journey to the land of make-believe"-- an article written in 1982 while Arts Editor of the student newspaper Gateway (original here, and here) after surviving a junket to Hollywood lavishly funded by 20th Century Fox (adventure mentioned in passing on Twitter). Yes, I stole nearly all the hotel-room stationery at the Beverly Wilshire (it's meant to be stolen, right?) but left the towels, since I'm a writer of integrity. And hey, your critic did promise you oldies reprints, way back yon...

2) "Bob Dylan's Hellbound Buick"--a compilation, consolidation and expansion of some tweets about Dylan's "From a Buick 6" and what the song's wacky-as-usual lyrics might mean. No, NOT "another of Dylan's paeans to his female ideal" as Mr. Gill would have us think (gawd, I wonder what Dylan must think when he reads crap like that--perhaps he just laughs himself silly...)


          *       *       *

(Jan.-Feb. 1982)

Journey to the land of make-believe

    Arts Editor Jens Andersen went to Los Angeles last weekend on a junket sponsored by 20th Century Fox, who are attempting to promote three upcoming films through campus papers in Canada and the States. The following is his report.

Friday, 6:15 AM MST

Made it to the International Airport on time, confirmed my reservation, checked bag, and now I am waiting to board the plane that will take me to Hollywood, Home of the Stars.
    I should be thinking of the three films I am going to preview prior to their release in February and March, but somehow my mind dwells on other details. Is our plane a DC-10? How well have the mechanics checked it over? How slippery is the runway?
    And how will I recognize the Fox representative at the L.A. airport? Will he/she be a glad-hander? Are beige cords appropriate attire for the Beverly Wilshire? (The promo sheet for the Wilshire, which came with the itinerary, shows a doorman in red coat and tophat greeting an arriving Rolls Royce). Will the Great Overdue California Earthquake strike during my stay?
    Such thoughts raise an obvious question: why am I going on this junket in the first place? Certainly not for a good time, for I am by nature a workboy, not a playboy, and even if I weren't, I could have a much better time (I believe) at tonight's unassuming Gateway party than at the scheduled orgies among strangers and publicity agents. Nor am I going because I get to see Quest for Fire, Porky's and Making Love before anyone else, for that is a cheap distinction, and one that will last only a month or two. And it certainly isn't for the plane ride, because I have a holy terror of flying machines.
    No, the reason why I instantly fell for the junket is explainable in a word: curiosity. Are the films as bad as the advance publicity leads me to believe? How will 20th Century Fox attempt to sell them to us? What are directors, actors and whatnot like in the flesh? And is L.A. really the gaudy, vulgar place of legend?

Friday, 3 PM PST

After five hours of gut-wrenching fear in the skies (caused by nothing in particular) I am in Los Angeles. A servitor with a walkie-talkie greets me at the plane, guides me to baggage pickup, and then departs to rescue another delegate. My travel bag is the first off the belt. I stuff my ski-jacket into it and step out onto the sidewalk, as my guide has instructed me to do. The sun is shining in a clear blue sky, the temperature is 61F and palm trees flutter idly in a light breeze. After a minute or so, another young man with a walkie-talkie comes along and guides me to a waiting van. One delegate is already on board, and we cruise around the airport complex for another hour or so, picking up seven more arrivees one by one as they fly in.
    At every curb are loudspeakers droning, "The white zone is for immediate loading and unloading only; no parking." The message is repeated alternately by a male and female voice, over and over again. Just as we junior journalists are running out of small talk, and just before the "white zone" mantra begins to seriously affect our sanity, we get the last person aboard and head for the hotel.
    Along the way the van driver talks about the stars he and his friends have met. A delegate mentions that he saw William Kunstler ("the famous defense attorney") at some airport. I mention the Gateway seizure by the police. Another delegate relates how some army officers seized a whole press run of one of their papers containing a story about the ROTC on campus.
    At the Beverly Wilshire we are met by Fox representatives who help us get room keys, and bestow a canvas shoulder-bag on everyone. In the bag are two t-shirts, one for Quest for Fire and one for Porky's, and a second set of press-kits for all three films. We are allowed two hours to settle in before hors d'oeuvres at 4:30.
    My hotel room is a surprise. It is large, has two single beds (giving rise to interesting questions) and is furnished with the ego in mind. There are three telephones in the suite, one by the bed, one on the desk and one in the bathroom; each one has a notepad and pencil nearby. The bathroom itself has a white marble floor, grey marble walls, and a seven-foot-long grey marble vanity complete with stool, seven-foot-wide mirror and make-up lights. It is also equipped with recessed kleenex-dispenser, a shoeshine rag, a plastic imitation-tortoiseshell shoehorn, a package of needle, thread and buttons, two glasses with paper covers bearing the coat-of-arms of the hotel, an ashtray with a matchbook, each bearing the same coat-of-arms (there are four more ashtrays with matchbooks in the suite), and two soapboxes (with coat-of-arms) containing two different kinds of soap. There are also enough towels to make a window-escape from the fifth floor, though they are probably intended for some other purpose, since I am only on the second.
    The rest of the suite is rather posh too: a dormer window opening onto a foliage-secluded balcony, an antique writing table with stacks of stationery, postcards and pens, an ante-room to the bathroom containing another make-up mirror, a third full-length mirror, a huge chest of drawers and a small fridge, four Los Angeles guidebooks and magazines, a leather easy chair and ottoman, color TV, etc. etc., etc. On the walls are two flashy but cheap bits of heraldry, a banner with a coat of arms (different from the standard one) depicting an anatomically preposterous arm holding a flag, and opposite this two eagles fashioned from stamped sheet-metal which surrounds a fourth small mirror.
    I am almost beginning to believe I am a person of consequence.

Friday 11:30 PM

Another shock as the 75 or so journalists get together for hors d'oeuvres: no alcohol. The legal age in California is 21, and since our contingent has some underage people in it, we must all suffer Coke and 7-Up.
    Also, I'm beginning to get an inferiority complex listening to all the delegates rattle off the names of actors and all their roles in every film they ever played in. My own opinion is that a good actor is like a good bricklayer, praiseworthy but infinitely inferior to the architect (i.e. the scriptwriter and director). Thus I have never bothered to keep track of them, and 80% of the names being mentioned mean nothing to me.
    The talk about various films is likewise depressing since I have probably seen less than 20 films made in the seventies, and missed everything from American Graffiti to Apocalypse Now. Usually the advertisements are enough to turn me off. I feel like asserting that I am proud of my avoidance of certain films, and that I don't give a flying puck about the stars, but why cause friction?
    Besides, as a reviewer I probably have a duty to examine even apparently pathological films.
    After the hors douevres we are bussed to the 20th Century filmlot where Quest for Fire is to be screened. At the theatre we are given a Quest for Fire button and a slick color brochure explaining the film.
    Quest for Fire, you see, is a film about primitive tribes living 80,000 years ago, who speak a language invented by Anthony Burgess, and gesticulate with gestures contrived by pop anthropologist Desmond Morris. Alas, one cannot read the glossary and watch the film at the same time, but thankfully one can, without the pamphlet, determine that the film is a Grade A, oven-ready turkey.
    The film centres on a tribe called the Ulam, who use fire but do not know how to make it. When their fire goes out, and wolves chase them into a swamp, they send out three tribesmen to fetch some. Their adventures as they search for some fire are improbable, unrealistic, and have the unmistakeable aroma of a B-flick.
    Take for instance the scene where the three fire-searchers are sitting around at an encampment, and suddenly a pack of nasty-looking Neanderthals appear over a hill and make menacing noises. What should happen but a pack of nasty-looking woolly mammoths appear on the opposite rise, and add their growling and trumpeting to the din. The film-makers, probably proud of their ingenuity in creating such a novel situation, full of dramatic tension, linger on it as long as possible, cutting back and forth between the nasty Neanderthals, the nasty mammoths and the knock-kneed tribesmen.
    Finally, having milked the basic setup for every last drop of suspense, the film-makers have one of the fire-seekers grab a tuft of grass and slowly climb towards the mammoths. It takes an eternity of screen-time for the fellow to reach the mammoths, with the cameras again cutting between the disgruntled mammoths, the quaking grass carrier, the other two pop-eyed tribesmen, the mammoths, the hesitant Neanderthals, an extreme close-up of the scowling brow of one of the mammoths, who lets loose with a savage honk every few seconds just to keep everybody on the edges of their seats, then back to the fellow approaching the beasts with the clump of grass, who has apparently only edged two feet up the hill, then cut to the Neanderthals, who look impatient to attack, then back again to the grass-carrier who has advanced another1/4th of an inch towards the ferocious mammoths, at which point I feel like getting up from my seat and screaming, "Enough of this crapola! Give the mammoths the grass for chrissake, so they can chase the Neanderthals away and we can get on to the next imbecility!"

    Or how about the  typical specimen of comic relief where one of the fire-seekers (the one typecast as a dumbbell, because who else would the tribe choose to accomplish a heroic feat?) is gathering some long cylindrical squashes to eat. He places them in the crook of his arm, but when he has half an armload he drops one, and as soon as he picks it up he drops another two.
    The sight-gag is far too hilarious to merely be repeated once or twice, so the film-makers repeat it over and over again until it becomes as interminable as the mammoth scene. It finally reaches a climax when Dumbbell returns to camp and finds one of the others discovering oral sex with a stray nymph from another tribe, whereupon he drops his whole load--and the audience is expected to explode in gales of laughter.
    It is my sad duty to report that some of the assembled journalists actually did so.
    Other flaws mar the film

Mystery solved: Prince Harry is totally vile, and his schtick altogether medieval

To clarify: not Britain's current Prince Harry, but "the madcap prince" Harry of 600 years ago, artfully resurrected by Shakespeare a little over 400 years ago.
    You may also know him as Prince Hal (and ultimately Henry V in Henry V) and perhaps you are familiar with his famed tavern-scenes with Falstaff in Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2. The mystery here concerns one of these: Act 2 Scene 4 in Henry IV, Part 1. Its oddball opening-portion has Prince Hal emitting largely incomprehensible babble, ostensibly drunken verbosity in a WTF-moment which has aroused the curiosity of quite a few scholars, including ***drum roll*** Great Canadian Critic Northrop Frye. The scene occurs just after the Gadshill robbery, and begins with HRH Harry and his henchperson Ned Poins waiting at the tavern for Falstaff to return, so they can badger him about his cowardice during the robbery. While they wait, Harry and Poins have some fun with a beer-slinging apprentice named Francis. Since we shall inspect this rollicking prelude with ye olde fine-tooth comb, let me reproduce it in full:

    Enter Prince and Poins

PRINCE: Ned, prithee, come out of that fat room, and lend me thy hand to laugh a little.

POINS: Where hast been, Hal?

PRINCE: With three or four loggerheads amongst three or four score hogsheads. I have sounded the very bass string of humility. Sirrah, I am sworn brother to a leash of drawers, and can call them all by their Christian names, as Tom, Dick and Francis. They take it already upon their salvation that, though I be but Prince of Wales, yet I am the king of courtesy, and tell me flatly I am no proud Jack like Falstaff, but a Corinthian, a lad of mettle, a good boy--by the Lord, so they call me!--and when I am King of England I shall command all the good lads in Eastcheap. They call drinking deep "dyeing scarlet"; and when you breathe in your watering they cry "hem!" and bid you to "play it off." To conclude, I am so good a proficient in one quarter of an hour that I can drink with any tinker in his own language during my life. I tell thee Ned, thou has lost much honour that thou wert not with me in this action. But, sweet Ned,--to sweeten which name of Ned, I give thee this pennyworth of sugar, clapped even now into my hand by an underskinker, one that never spake other English in his life than "Eight shillings and sixpence" and "You are welcome," with this shrill addition, "Anon, anon sir! Score a pint of bastard in the Half-Moon," or so. But Ned, to drive away the time till Falstaff come, I prithee do thou stand in some by-room while I question my puny drawer to what end he gave me the sugar; and do thou never rest calling "Francis," that his tale to me may be nothing but "Anon." Step aside and I'll show thee a precedent.        Exit Poins

POINS: (within) Francis!

PRINCE: Thou art perfect.

POINS: (within) Francis!

              Enter drawer (Francis)

FRANCIS: Anon anon, sir--look down into the Pomgarnet, Ralph.

PRINCE: Come hither Francis.

FRANCIS: My Lord?

PRINCE: How long hast thou to serve, Francis?

FRANCIS: Forsooth, five years, and as much as to--

POINS: (within) Francis!

FRANCIS: (calling) Anon anon, sir.

PRINCE: Five year! By'r Lady, a long lease for the clinking of pewter. But Francis, darest thou be so valiant as to play the coward with thy indenture and show it a fair pair of heels and run from it?

FRANCIS: Oh Lord, sir I'll be sworn upon all the books in England, I could find in my heart--

POINS: (within) Francis!

FRANCIS: (calling) Anon, sir.

PRINCE: How old art thou, Francis?

FRANCIS: Let me see, about Michaelmas next I shall be--

POINS: (within) Francis!

FRANCIS: (calling) Anon sir. Pray stay a little, my Lord.

PRINCE: Nay, but hark you, Francis: for the sugar thou gavest me, 'twas a pennyworth, was't not?

FRANCIS: Oh Lord, I would it had been two!

PRINCE: I will give thee for it a thousand pound. Ask me when thou wilt, and thou shalt have it.

POINS: (within) Francis!

FRANCIS: Anon, anon.

PRINCE: Anon, Francis? No, Francis; but tomorrow, Francis, or, Francis, o'Thursday, or indeed, Francis, when thou wilt. But Francis--

FRANCIS: My lord?

PRINCE: Wilt thou rob this leathern-jerkin, crystal-button, not-pated, agate-ring, puke-stocking, caddis-garter, smooth-tongue, Spanish pouch--

FRANCIS: Oh Lord, sir, what do you mean?

PRINCE: Why then, your brown bastard is your only drink; for look you, Francis, your white canvas doublet will sully. In Barbary sir, it cannot come to so much.

FRANCIS: What, sir?

POINS: (within) Francis!

PRINCE: Away, you rogue. Dost thou not hear them call?

    Here they both call him; the drawer stands amazed, not knowing which way to go.

    Enter Vintner.

VINTNER: What, stand'st thou still and hear'st such a calling? Look to the guests within.     Exit Francis    My Lord, old Sir John (Falstaff), with half a dozen more, are at the door. Shall I let them in?

PRINCE: Let them alone a while, and then open the door.     Exit Vintner   (calling) Poins!

    Enter Poins

POINS: Anon, anon, sir.

PRINCE: Sirrah, Falstaff and the rest of the thieves are at the door. Shall we be merry?

POINS: As merry as crickets, my lad. But hark ye, what cunning match have you made with this jest of the drawer? Come, what's the issue?

PRINCE: I am now of all humours that have shown themselves humours since the old days of Goodman Adam to the pupil age of this present twelve o'clock at midnight.     Enter Francis, hurrying across the stage with wine.   What o'clock, Francis?

FRANCIS: Anon, anon, sir.    Exit

PRINCE: That ever this fellow should have fewer words than a parrot, and yet the son of a woman! His industry is upstairs and downstairs, his eloquence the parcel of a reckoning. I am not yet of Percy's mind, the Hotspur of the North, he that kills me some six or seven Scots at a breakfast, washes his hands, and says to his wife, "Fie upon this quiet life! I want work." "Oh my sweet Harry," says she, "how many hast thou killed today?" "Give my roan horse a drench," says he, and answers "Some fourteen" an hour after, "a trifle, a trifle." I prithee, call in Falstaff. I'll play Percy, and that damned brawn shall play Dame Mortimer his wife. "Rivo!" says the drunkard. Call in ribs, call in tallow.

      Enter Falstaff...

    *       *       *

Okay, that's all we need. Anyone familiar with the play knows how the scene progresses to Prince Harry confronting Falstaff, as he has confronted Francis, by means of a certain brow-beating. Or rather Prince Harry attempts to brow-beat Falstaff, but unlike Francis our heavyweight buffoon possesses verbal sparring skills to hold his own--all of which culminates in the pair playing out a King-versus-wild-oats-son-Hal impromptu at the end of the long scene.
    A splendid one, most would agree, one of Shakespeare's best. But why not just start it with Falstaff's entry? As Ned Poins himself asks, what's the point of the escapade with Francis?--an especially intriguing question  given the curious "all humours" answer (or non-answer) that Hal delivers to Poins. Or to nobody in particular.
   The question intrigued Northrop Frye as well, in the aforelinked book, and Frye is where I plunged quite haphazardly into it. The year was 1995, I was taking a Historical Drama course (something of a pratfall in itself) at the University of Alberta, floundering, getting behind as usual (hey, married with kids!) and desperate for a topic for a final essay. Scrounging frantically around the Salter Reading Room my eye lit on the Frye book, where I found his "Bolingbroke Plays (Richard II, Henry IV)" and ultimately used it as starting-point to crank out an essay concerning Hal/Henry V's character and what Shakespeare may have been doing in resuscitating the celebrated monarch of England. NOT glorifying him, trust me!--nor do I subscribe, as Frye and many others do, to the theory of Hal's reform from his madcap ways (and it is a puzzle why Frye didn't proceed through to Henry V, which really does tie up his story with remarkable tidiness).
     But the thing that snagged my attention and ignited the essay was the Francis segment. Ultimately I deduced from it that Hal/Harry/Henry is a pretty aggressive fellow (and stays aggressive to the very end; but that's another story). Still, what the hell WAS he babbling about to Francis and Poins?? I must have read it and re-read it, stood on my head and squinted at it, peered three times at every footnote (let's see: "dyeing scarlet" might be urine-chemistry, a doublet is a tight-fitting Spanish-style jacket, Barbary is in North Africa--yeah, that's all a big help), and nearly went cross-eyed trying to figure it out. Nope.
    But luckily it was now burned into my brain. Luckily, because four years and several pratfalls later I lurched into a course in Medieval and Tudor Drama (surely "lurched" is the right word, because it was offered only rarely, as one of those Way-Obscure-If-Not-Pointless courses that regularly get snickered at by mainstream-media smarties, who would prefer to train another 10,000 computer programmers and attain the total robotification of humanity--and I was just "fortunate" enough to flunk a Biochemistry course the very semester before it was offered, then belatedly realized that my last course before graduating could just as well be in English as in Biological Sciences). So I jumped, and in that Medieval/Tudor course, and, thanks to the scorch-marks in my brain, discovered Shakespeare's source. Also perhaps a glimmer of his methods.
    Not that I was specifically looking for either. My impetus for taking the course in the first place was a burgeoning interest in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, a play that is regarded as the most puzzling of puzzlers, and which is known to have medieval roots. Reinforcing the importance of those roots was an article I stumbled on in a discarded scholarly journal (the U of A English Department has or had a pretty interesting used-books/periodicals table for charity) in which a professor (possibly Dr. Velz) had made an impassioned (by professorial standards) plea that Shakespeare was generally quite influenced by medieval literature and those roots should be investigated in detail. So, mayhaps I could clear up a few things in Troilus and Cressida? (shockingly, a lot got cleared up, but that's another story).
     But for the first part of the course, our little class of about 15 students was just struggling through that weird, archaic Middle English (somewhat modernized in our text, the massive Medieval Drama, ed. David Bevington; and keep an eye on his name--he's something of a punchline to this long story). The fact that medieval drama is largely religious is likely to send most folks scurrying thither, but once you get past the language-barrier the plays are actually a great deal of fun, and certainly the morals and messages in the plays are not flogged more obscenely than in your average crappy Hollywood flick. No, the medieval plays can be lively romps, possibly written by funky monks or clergypersons appealing to an even funkier agrarian audience, and it is quite possible to delight in them even now.
   Indeed, they have a legacy that continues today, in what is known as the comedy of evil. If some movie today, usually of the horror variety, shows it's chief bogeyvillain doing something humorous, a portion of the royalties should really go to an English monastery, if any still exist, or to a Doctor of Divinity program in Old Blighty. Those holypersons invented the schtick.
    And certainly the comedy of evil is present in the medieval play Mankind, which we plowed through about midway through the course. It portrays an everyman-protagonist named "Mankind" who tills the land like his fellow peasants. But into his allegorical onstage life comes those evildoers, Mischief, New-guise, Nowadays and a fourth oddball named Nought, a sort of straight-man-zany. Acting opposite these "Vices" and mediating things stands a Virtue named Mercy. The Vices are soon joined by their devilish boss, a gentleman titled Titivillus (Latin for all-vileness) whose costume is so horrifically awesome (including a metal tube of gunpowder flaming out his arse) that the Vices pass a hat through the audience for money before he is allowed to make his spectacular appearance (the first recorded admission-charge in English theatre). The bad dudes proceed to harass Mankind, placing a board in the soil to frustrate his digging, stealing his tools and seed-sack from behind his back, and so on. The Three Stooges with a mean streak.
    Shortly into the play's Middle English and Dog Latin, at line 122 I hit this:

MERCY: Mercy is my name and my denomination
I conceive you have but a little favour in my communication.

NEW-GUISE: Ay, ay! Your body is full of English Latin.
  I am afeared it will burst.
'Pravo te" quod the butcher unto me
  When I stole a leg of mutton.
Ye are a strong cunning clerk.

NOWADAYS: I pray you heartily, worshipful clerk
  To have this English made in Latin:
'I have eaten a dish full of curds
And I have shitten your mouth full of turds'
...

Very guffawsome, in the low, slapstick style of the Vices, but what caught my eye and pre-scorched brain was the "Pravo." Somehow it echoed with Shakespeare's Rivo, although the similarity is very faint, little more than a vaguely parallel Latin-ish spelling. I note that David Bevington, who has also edited an edition of Henry IV Part 1 did not make any connection between Pravo and Rivo, and why in hell should he? No, the imaginary echo was surely a trick of my lamentably digressive neural pathways. As the rational part of my brain told me, "It's just a coincidence, you moron!"
    Nevertheless, I stared at it. And if fading memory serves, the next thing I noticed was that both Latinates were grammatically almost identical ("Rivo" says the drunkard; 'Pravo te' quod the butcher). Then the fact that both exclamations are followed by butcher-shop references (ribs, mutton). Then the mutual use of the word cunning nearby.
    At that point my rational side was probably still pushing the likelihood of coincidence, but my paranoid lobe prevailed, and I placed the two texts side by side for what the scholars call close reading. Whereupon the parallels came tumbling in, most electrifyingly the contextual ones. It wasn't just the linkage between Goodman Adam and Good Adam, between anon anon and Mankind's anon anon anon (comic repetition also occurs in Mankind in such outbursts as anow anow anow, and nay nay, ser! nay nay! Or if you prefer Latin, hic hic hic hic hic). No, there was also the realization that Hal's suggestion to Francis to flee his indenture echoes Titivillus's insinuation to Mankind that he abandon his farm labours. Then, more joltingly, the realization that Hal's first speech actually describes Mankind: "three or four loggerheads" (i.e. Vices; it is unclear if Shakespeare shares my doubts about Nought's status, or just counts him arithmetically as zero) amongst three or four score hogsheads--these 60 or 80 kegs suggesting at first glance a staff/storage room in the tavern, but also matching a description of the staging of Mankind in an innyard, on a platform atop barrels (a picture of such staging is found in Bevington's Medieval Drama).
    Or what of Hal's statement that he is "of all humors that have showed themselves humors"?--pretty close to an admission of playing Titivillus, eh? (I confess my eyes popped a little at this correspondence). Note too that Mercy warns Mankind that Titivillus cannot be seen (line 295).
    So of course Mankind is the "precedent" that Hal is showing Poins.
    But the biggest adrenalin-shot was yet to come--arriving two-thirds-way through Mankind in the shortening-the-coat segment. In this action, Mankind has been duped into following the Vices, who arraign him in a mock-court, take his coat and drastically shorten it, until it verges on non-existence. The clip-job is done in two installments (for prop-purposes three coats are used) where the Vices take the coat offstage and return with a trimmed version (the entrances and exits from the raised platform are via steps; and Mankind too "is upstairs and downstairs" a few times).
    Here New-Guise has taken the coat away for the first trimming and the mock-court resumes:

NOUGHT: Hold, master Mischief, and read this.

MISCHIEF: [Reads] Here is-- 'Blottibus in blottis
Blottorum blottibus istis.'
I beshrew your ears, a fair hand!

NOWADAYS: Yea, it is a good running fist;
   Such an hand may not be missed.

NOUGHT: I should have done better, had I wist.

MISCHIEF: Take heed sir, it stand you on hand!
(continues reading) Curia tenta generalis,
In a place there good ale is,
Anno regni regitalis
   Edwardi nullateni.
On yestern day in Feverere (February) the year passeth fully.       685
As Nought has written, here is our Tully,
  Anno regni regis nulli.

NOWADAYS: What, ho, Newguise! Thou makest much [tarrying]  688
  That jacket shall not be worth a farthing.
 Re-enter Newguise with shortened coat....

Did you catch anything there? Something Shakespearean? It is surely helpful to have a scholarly note to tell us that "Tully" refers to Cicero, an exemplar of Latin composition, as Nought is not; but it wasn't exactly Tully that caught my eye, but the triplet rhyme fully/Tully/nulli, which could be expanded to a tetrad with Shakespeare's sully. And the proximity of another jacket, i.e. Francis's canvas doublet.
    When Prince Hal says, "Why then, your brown bastard is your only drink; for look you, Francis, your white canvas doublet will sully. In Barbary sir, it cannot come to so much"--scholars struggling through the semantic mess generally assume the "it cannot come to so much" refers back to the pennysworth of sugar, which has skyrocketed to a thousand pounds, whereupon the economic bubble burst. But the reference may be closer, to the doublet/jacket, which, like Mankind's coat, doesn't come to so much (a jacket not worth a farthing would not come to a penny, right?) Again, if this "it" does indicate the coat, it would not be the only case of Shakespeare playing fast and loose with a coyly ambiguous pronoun).
    Anyway, tentative parallels, but as yet no adrenalin shot. Somehow the allusion was too faint, barely there. Surely there had to be something else in the vicinity to reinforce it? But squint as I might, nothing came. Would monks even know of Barbary in North Africa? There were alehouses mentioned in Mankind, but no "brown bastard" (a sweetened wine, I recollect from somewhere). The word "doublet" hinted promisingly of double-meanings, but led nowhere.
    I was scouring the above extract for maybe the 20th time and cursing my habit of over-thinking things, when I idly eyed the word "tarrying" for the 20th time (actually it may be "taryynge" in my Bevington edition, which is currently misplaced). The word is in fact an interpolation by an earlier editor, of a word missing and/or illegible in the manuscript (specifically the Macro manuscript, where Mankind has its only surviving existence) and the editor's hypothetical word is based on the dramatic situation and a possible rhyme or near-rhyme with "farthing" (and maybe partly-legible letters??--the text didn't say. I have since found an undated (early-1900s) Chief Pre-Shakespearean Plays, edited by Joseph Quincy Adams, that reproduces the above Edwardi nullateni as  Edwardi millateni, and a reader has to sympathize with editors trying to decipher the fraying medieval penmanship).
    Alas, there is only a very short break while the coat is sent off to be tailored and returned, so "tarrying" seems a bit dubious. My brain, which on rare occasions actually writes poetry, and now was on auto-pilot and, lacking anything better to do, started checking for other possible rhyme-words that might fit the context better, which, in my brain's case means trying every consonant in the alphabet, from barthing to zarthing. It didn't have far to go.
    Bar... BARBERING!!!
    As I said, a shot of adrenalin. It was perfect! As every schoolboy knows, barbers in those days didn't just do haircuts, but most jobs involving sharp blades from surgery to hedge-trimming, and surely they could do a ripping job on a jacket, including making it resemble the tiny remnant of a pant-leg scissored up by Harpo Marx. Moreover, Shakespeare could do something similar in imaginatively slicing, dicing, and reassembling the pieces of Mankind into a little schtick in a historical scene. For a comparable achievement in literary carvery, you'd need to trot out some of Bob Dylan's wonky transfigurations of Shakespeare plays into folk-lyrics.
    Indeed, such was my 1999 delight in the discovery that, checking and finding David Bevington alive and kicking at the University of Chicago, I e-mailed him with the suggestion of "barbering"--minus the evidence, which you have to admit is rather long and convoluted. To my gobsmacked surprise he actually e-mailed back approving the emendation on its contextual merits alone. For 15 minutes I was in heaven.
    But of course every rose has its thorns. Mainly, what was now to be done with the detective work? I'm somewhat allergic to scholarly journals and their inexorable dulling-down, but eventually, possibly a year or two after the discovery, I relented and approached a journal of medieval studies with the idea for an article on how Shakespeare can be used to reconstruct a missing word in the Macro manuscript, but didn't even receive the courtesy of a "no thanks" from the theoretical thunkers. Prejudice reinforced!
    Still, the research sort of fits into my other Shakespeare snoutings, in a very small way. If my edition of Troilus and Cressida ever gets off the ground (debatable) the Francis bit will be included as an example of how Shakespeare does sneaky things. And he most surely did some wondrously sneaky things in his work. Sneakiness is almost a constant in his writing, at least until James I arrives on the throne, frowning at the rampant hidden meanings of those sly Elizabethan dramatists.
    But within the general area of Shakespeare and his Henry plays, the Francis-clarification adds a smidgen of clarification, reinforcing the notion that Shakespeare performs covert allusions like nobody's business--subterfuges that are plentiful, significant, and yet to be fully ferreted.
    In the meantime, some unfinished business has been tidied up, and another blogpost has been nailed to the cyberwall, bait for anyone who wants to hire an offbeat critic. Someday my editor will come. But that's another story.

Postscript: So yesterday, Friday Oct. 2, 2015 Anno Domini, the article is done. Consummatum est. Except for a thousand niggling, nagging afterthoughts, such as how I didn't manage to whiplash snidely about "give my roan horse a drench" being an obvious and structural sex-metaphor. Really, I could waste another week researching how ALL the studious scholars missed this easy one, even the compilers of thick tomes on Shakespeare's bawdy. Furthermore, Mankind has a sexual horse-metaphor too. Maybe such things are too common to comment upon? Or maybe nobody noticed that when Prince Hal says, "I'll play Percy, and that damned brawn shall play Dame Mortimer his wife." he is effectively saying, "I'm going to fuddle Falstaff the way Percy fuddles his wife, and the way I fuddled Francis." Come on, sleepyheads, WHAT DO YOU THINK PERCY AND WIFEY WERE DOING DURING THE HOUR BETWEEN QUESTION AND ANSWER?! Adjusting the dosage of Dr. Whinny's Oats Supplement??? Sigh.
    But having put far too much time and effort into this, I tweet out a blog-notice and wait hopefully for reverberations. The Blogger-stats tell me that within the first few minutes this baby has gotten about 8 visits. Then for the next 24 hours absolutely nothing. No visits, no replies, nada. Perhaps the entire interweb is all mega-data now, and the 8 clicks were just government computers routinely checking for indicators of terrorism, criminality, money-laundering, bullying, federal election polling, box-office trends, celebrity eruptions, economic growth, and the sustainability of buzzwords like sustainability (please note my helpful boost on that last one).
    Other than that, I just wait for... what? Godot? A literary prize? A good-paying gig at Esquire magazine? And while waiting, I neurotically tweak the article, trimming a word here, adding a phrase there, restructuring a sentence for more punch, etc. And double-check those "funky monks" that I cited from memory. Hm, seems that while Mankind is anonymously written, it is knowledgeable enough that a university-educated author is suspected. Were monks university-trained? Where did I hear about those monks anyway? Is it just false-memory syndrome??
    And is David Bevington still around?--heck, yes, and in 2015 even issued or re-issued a book he edited of essays on Henry IV Parts 1 and 2! Appallingly heavy on documentation, like his Arden edition of Troilus and Cressida. Wow, it even features a scholar named Ronald MacDonald! Seriously! Not doing fast-food Shakespeare but something called "speech act theory" which apparently postulates that Shakespeare can adjust his literary style. Oh yes!
    No word, however, on the significance of Henry V talking about his horse in tones reminiscent of his tavern hijinx, as he woos Katherine after Agincourt. Yep, first let's kill all the theorists.

PPS: And you could well describe the play Mankind as "the parcel of a reckoning"--a metaphor that fits Shakespeare's Second Tetralogy too.