Whoa, first of all: what's this about the forthcoming Discworld adaptation, The Watch, being "cyberpunk"? In, for example, The Guardian.I'm really not seeing the cyberpunk connection? Possibly the word they're looking for is "punk"? There are many punks to choose from, and we don't need to drag cyber into it. Secondly ...
An Unpopular Opinion. Yes, I think this is one of those.
First of all: among those criticizing the adaptation, there are definitely a few who just want Vetinari to be male and Lady Ramkin to be white. And who don't like the look of Cherry either. That's not you of course. You've got legit reasons for being annoyed by the production. It might at least give us pause for thought, when our outrage provides cover for misogyny, racism, and transphobia.
And secondly: Terry Pratchett's Discworld is a story about stories and how stories change. The Discworld partly sprouted from Pratchett's earlier novel, Strata, which involves a flat Earth floating in space and a mash-up of science fiction and high fantasy tropes. Strata is itself a pastiche of Larry Niven's Ringworld, one of those pastiches that is maybe a teensy bit better than the original. Pratchett's mock heroic The Carpet People, which also took place on a plane, and which Pratchett extensively revised for the second edition, was also a kind of prototype Discworld.
The Discworld series then grew through a complex and mostly increasingly assured array of parodies, pastiches, reimaginings, imitations, and take-offs, most stunningly of Shakespeare (in books like Wyrd Sisters and Lords and Ladies) but also Christopher Marlowe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jorge Luis Borges, Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, Michael Moorcock, Gaston Leroux, Ingmar Bergman, Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and many others. Sometimes you had to know the original to get the joke, but more often you didn't. Pratchett's antennae could gather up and elegantly regurgitate that garbled background hum of familiar tropes that don't really belong to anyone in particular. He was good at that.
The Discworld was also a bit of a pioneer in transmedia storytelling, with novels, plays, digital and analogue games, the wonderful the Science of Discworld popular science collaborations, a tabletop roleplaying game, a cookbook, an almanac, and all kinds of miscellaneous works and merch and mischief. In the novels, the sustained commitment to making the stories work as stand-alones also produced a distinctive intertextuality: the Discworld became a world with many entranceways, and that meant that Pratchett needed to tell us certain things again and again. He did this by skilfully varying those things, or by turning them into running jokes, in order to entrance newcomers and devoted fans simultaneously.
History, especially of the European industrial revolution, is also remixed throughout the Discworld series and especially in the Ankh-Morpork strand. The medieval, the early industrial, and the modern are constantly colliding and spurting sparks of fizzing narrativium. Pratchett always told these stories just as he saw fit, twisting, trimming, flipping things on their heads. He was always fabulously, provocatively unfaithful to his source material. He didn't stick to the facts about the founding of the Bank of England (Making Money), for instance, or the French Revolution (Night Watch), because he wanted to make these stories meld and resonate with his world, not the world where they first happened to happen. Besides, as most good Menippean satirists would agree, sometimes you can glimpse the truth more clearly in a carnival funhouse mirror. There is a certain kind of pesky fact that can just get in the way of the truth.
There was perhaps a smidge of unease about so much borrowing, blending, and bending, which Pratchett sublimated into a sustained reflection throughout the Discworld on the nature of storytelling:
Narrativium is not an element in the accepted sense. It is an attribute of every other element, thus turning them into, in an occult sense, molecules. Iron contains not just iron, but also the story of iron, the history of iron, the part of iron that ensures that it will continue to be iron and has an iron-like job to do and is not, for example, cheese. Without narrativium, the cosmos has no story, no purpose, no destination [...]
And then, of course, there's the way the Discworld gradually reinvented itself again and again, examining and reimagining its politics and its peoples over and over, over the course of its more than thirty year history. So what's all this to do with the new series The Watch, about which many Pratchett fans are up in arms?
In short, I cannot think of another storyworld where an appeal to the True and Authentic Version is quite so vigorously contradicted by the source material itself. The Discworld is a story about stories having lives of their own.
So, I don't mean to defend the creative choices or the commercial wisdom of this production, exactly. Nor do I really mean to celebrate the poetics of postmodernism or metafiction, or anything like that — that's an adjacent conversation. Nor even do I want to predict that the production is going to be any good — honestly, from that short trailer, I have no idea!
But the Discworld is already much larger than this one adaptation. This is not a matter of Hollywood execs bungling some cult favorite that will henceforth slip into obscurity. So long as civilization survives, and probably even when it doesn't, there will be Discworld adaptations. In the darkness, amid the stars, the turtle swims on.
And when those future adaptations do appear, they will kindle Pratchett's satirical spirit within new social and cultural contexts. Pratchett's satire will achieve its long term significance in the context of future evolving understandings of many of his perennial themes: gender roles, science and technology, diversity and difference, coloniality, justice and the police. Maybe we should get off to a good start? Make some choices about just how precious we want to be about this already effervescently mercurial and intertextual source material?
So maybe ... we could just be cool about it? Wait and see? Judge it according to what it's trying to do and how well or poorly it does that, not according to how closely it correlates with the images we have already built up in our mind's eye? I am OK with a version of Vimes in eyeliner. I am OK with things being different to what they are in the books. The books are already different to the stories they borrow, to the history that inspires them, and even to themselves. The Discworld was a universe where time was always slipping out of joint, where stories circulated independently of storytellers and took on lives of their own. If this adaptation is bad, then it's bad, but let it be bad for the right reasons. And Bunk as Death? I'm here for that.
That said, Terry Pratchett the human being is not long gone, and there is a whole ethics and emotional intelligence around including his loved ones in shaping his legacy. Most of us are pretty bad at death, and one of the few things we know how to do is cherish the counterfactual: they would have loved that. That's what they would have wanted. So there is that.
We playtested this thing I apparently wrote (although I can't remember doing so) as a submission for the forthcoming Conjured Games Soft Apocalypse anthology. It was fun! And stable. I hope to run another playtest soon, so get in touch if you're interested. (And/or if you play it, let me know how it goes).
It is about the darkening of the digital dream and its rapid mutation into a voracious and utterly novel commercial project that I call surveillance capitalism. These prediction products are traded in a new kind of marketplace for behavioral predictions that I call behavioral futures markets. Users provided the raw material in the form of behavioral data, and those data were harvested to improve speed, accuracy, and relevance and to help build ancillary products such as translation. I call this the behavioral value reinvestment cycle, in which all behavioral data are reinvested in the improvement of the product or service.
Surveillance capitalism’s command of the division of learning in society begins with what I call the problem of the two texts. The first text, full of promise, actually functions as the supply operation for the second text: the shadow text. Everything that we contribute to the first text, no matter how trivial or fleeting, becomes a target for surplus extraction.
Behavioral surplus must be vast and varied, but the surest way to predict behavior is to intervene at its source and shape it. The processes invented to achieve this goal are what I call economies of action. The scientists and engineers whom I interviewed identified three key approaches to economies of action, each one aimed at achieving behavior modification. The first two I call “tuning” and “herding.” The third is already familiar as what behavioral psychologists refer to as “conditioning.” This new level of competitive intensity characterized by scope and action ratchets up the invasive character of supply operations and initiates a new era of surveillance commerce that I call the reality business.
There are many buzzwords that gloss over these operations and their
economic origins: “ambient computing,” “ubiquitous computing,” and the
“internet of things” are but a few examples. For now I will refer to this whole
complex more generally as the “apparatus.” Although the labels differ, they
share a consistent vision: the everywhere, always-on instrumentation,
datafication, connection, communication, and computation of all things, animate
and inanimate, and all processes—natural, human, physiological, chemical,
machine, administrative, vehicular, financial.
This chapter and the next draw our attention to the gap between experience and data, as well as to the specific operations that target this gap on a mission to transform the one into the other. I call these operations rendition. We have seen that the dispossession of human experience is the original sin of surveillance capitalism, but this dispossession is not mere abstraction. Rendition describes the concrete operational practices through which dispossession is accomplished, as human experience is claimed as raw material for datafication and all that follows, from manufacturing to sales.
In this way, surveillance capitalism births a new species of power that I call instrumentarianism. Part III examines the rise of instrumentarian power; its expression in a ubiquitous sensate, networked, computational infrastructure that I call Big Other; and the novel and deeply antidemocratic vision of society and social relations that these produce. Thanks to Big Other’s capabilities, instrumentarian power reduces human experience to measurable observable behavior while remaining steadfastly indifferent to the meaning of that experience. I call this new way of knowing radical indifference. It is a form of observation without witness that yields the obverse of an intimate violent political religion and bears an utterly different signature of havoc: the remote and abstracted contempt of impenetrably complex systems and the interests that author them, carrying individuals on a fast-moving current to the fulfillment of others’ ends.
The withdrawal of agreement [from surveillance capitalism] takes two broad forms, a distinction that will be useful as we move into Part III. The first is what I call the counter-declaration. These are defensive measures such as encryption and other privacy tools, or arguments for “data ownership.” Such measures may be effective in discrete situations, but they leave the opposing facts intact, acknowledging their persistence and thus paradoxically contributing to their legitimacy. For example, if I “opt out” of tracking, I opt out for me, but my action does not challenge or alter the offending practice. The second form of disagreement is what I call the synthetic declaration. If the declaration is “check,” the counter-declaration is “checkmate,” and the synthetic declaration changes the game. It asserts an alternative framework that transforms the opposing facts.
I just wanted to put this into the world. It was some cover artwork by the amazing Alice Duke, commissioned for a novel I wrote called I Have Seen You in Forever. In the end it didn't work out with the publisher (in an amiable and mutual way, and we may publish a different book together if I ever get them the manuscript), and I'm not sure if the novel ever will go out into the world. It might just hang out in its own world. But I love this strange picture and the secret story it's about that almost nobody knows.
I have a short story out at the pretty wonderful Fireside Fiction, including a lovely podcast version narrated by Hollis Beck.
'Please Don't Let Go' is workers' comp, medico-legal speculative fiction. It is about Ms. Wolfboy and it is a true story. I'd like to dedicate it to my dad, Dr Dad.
So this is what I've been writing recently. The Shrike is an oracle-based RPG system for solo, co-operative, or GM-guided play. It's about fantastic voyages. You can access a pre-alpha version here:
The Shrike is also potentially part of something a bit new, in the sense that the voyages are mostly procedurally generated. I am slightly hitting a wall (or really more like diminishing returns) in my pseudo-coding abilities, so I'll be developing it as more-or-less a standard RPG for now. But if you happen to be a games developer who might be interested in collaborating on a bigger, more innovative version of it, get in touch.
This review originally appeared back in Interzone 272. Mind Seed
Ed. David Gullen and Gary Couzens
T Party Books
Nine stories, mostly originals, by members of London writers’ group the T Party. The anthology is in memory of Denni Schnapp, who died in 2013. An introduction by Denni’s husband John Howroyd tells us a bit about her life. The last story, “Mind Seed,” is her own.
Perhaps there are two kinds of tale of possession. One kind is all about craving a uniform community. It’s about fear of interlopers, fear that others are secretly fundamentally different to you. Helen Callaghan’s “Sex and the Single Hive Mind” is closer to the second kind. It’s about craving plurality – desiring to become, under the rubric of compassion, fundamentally different from yourself. (Even if you don’t become, as Callaghan’s protagonist(s) puts it, “nice people”). It’s an engaging, agile opener, sparkling with sleaze rather than polish.
Fox McGeever’s “Evolution” is post-apocalyptic survivalism pared down for parable-esque force. The protagonist Cara is all alone, save some invasive xenomorphs and a wombful of weird son. The indistinct mechanisms of apocalypse – silver ships and white fire – convey an aura of rapture and end-times. Like any parable worth its salt (of the earth), “Evolution” accommodates many interpretations. It could just be about the remorse of isolated young parents, trying to live up to their received ideas about what Nature intends (e.g. breastfeeding). It could be about human’s eternal capacity to adapt, and yet also to evolve new chauvinisms, new borders (“antibodies” (p.35)). In one aching image, Cara sleeps beside her husband’s body, waking with one hand on her bump and the other on his chest: this story could be about the ethics of creating new humans, when there is no world left to nourish them.
Rosanne Rabinowitz’s “Living in the Vertical World” is pieced together from real ingredients of that crumbling world: maybe Bosco Verticale in Porta Nuova, Milan (or more speculatively, Dickson Despommier’s “skyscraper-as-spaceship” research and advocacy) plus a crumb of Occupy, a crumb of Maker hipsterdom, a crumb of malevolent Monsanto IP litiginousness. It finishes on a “what-would-you-do?” and hints at the relationship between social bonds and foundational acts of violence.
So far I make Mind Seed sound very serious. But it’s also great fun. Stasis pods! Ship AI! Rovers! Thrust! Identities are rickety and unsound in “Sex and the Single Hive Mind,” and boundaries between individuals are unusually permeable. So there’s a small serendipity at the frontier between Callaghan’s story and McGeever’s “Evolution”: a character called Mark appears in each story, and for a moment, they feel like they are one overlapping, overspilling person. Something similar – only it’s deliberate – occurs in the most elegant moment of Ian Whates’s “Darkchild.” With the line “Darkchild sat alone” (p. 71), identities dovetail and meld. And here’s a spoiler: Darkchild is the prisoner of a dread trinket, a sort of Cthulhic desk ornament timewaster. You wonder: is the puzzle is solvable? “Water dripping somewhere” (p.61) is Darkchild’s only stimulus, obviously reminiscent of so-called Chinese Water Torture. A drip also suggests chaos theory: the deterministic but unpredictable coalescence and collapse of liquid at the lip of a tap. Obviously to escape, Darkchild must solve this non-linear function: but how to input her answer? Via varying the rhythm of her foetal-pose back-and-forth rocking of course! I bet your average Interzone reader would be out of there in a jiffy.
Deborah Walker’s myth-like “The Three Brother Cities” doesn’t give us a critique of the creeping surveillance requirements or algorithmic hubris of the contemporary smart city, so much as the sublime thrill of cosplaying Cair Paravel or Gormenghast or Ambergris (. . . in space!). If my eyebrows weren’t zotzed by all that rocket thrust, I might cock one at the hokey gender dynamics of Owton & Couzens’s pleasantly mercurial, Golden Age-ish “Rockhopper.”Anybody stasis pod stowaways who awaken in the Twenty-Third Century, don’t fret! – it’s still 100% fine to slip into something more feminine and melt into a nearby burly chest. But listen, if you thought “Rockhopper” was the biggest jolt of gee-whizz space opera retro you’re likely to guzzle all year, that’s because you haven’t yet read Markus Wolfson’s “Alien Invaders.” Wolfson’s “Alien Invaders” is, for starters, entitled “Alien Invaders,” and it’s a heady cocktail of unload-my-space-pistol-right-in-your-tentacles capers, pulpier than a pineapple, with a twisty straw of what-if-the-true-monsters-are-dot-dot-dot-us?
Perhaps it’s the relatively cosy contributor-base that gives this anthology such bracing variety – even a genuinely unpredictable variety of varieties. There are patterns however. There’s a lot of First Contact – or at least Still-In-That-Awkward-Stage-Of-Getting-To-Know-You Contact. There’s fruitfulness, verdant abundance. No story is explicitly elegaic, but many – and above all, Schnapp’s own “Mind Seed” – take acceptance for their theme. With humour, bluntness, and effervescence, “Mind Seed” tells the tale of Leia’s cancer treatment by full brain emulation (“A toddler aged thirty-two and a half [...] I spun Leia in my arms”), and of her sister Zif’s transition from luddite-ish anti-cyborg hold-out (“stone ager” (p. 166)) to cyborg and, ultimately, to intrastellar voyager.
Several stories unite an immoderate intensity of desolation with an equal intensity of hopefulness. Nina Allan’s “Bird Songs at Eventide” is one gorgeously honed example. Humanity manifests in a detached, almost hardboiled manner. Whimsical associative shifts are deployed with clinical precision. The prickliness of the prosody, and the sumptuousness of sense-data, are self-consiously inadequate compensation for a loss without any clear boundaries: loss of a lover’s love, of a planet, of something. Meanwhile, the living cosmos teems.
Profits from the anthology go to Next Generation Nepal, an anti-child-trafficking charity supported by Denni Schnapp.
Starting Prompt: You live on the edge of a vast lake. The lake is salt water. You are perhaps ten years old. You're not sure. There's a well in the village. Your father is a fisher. The forest is dark and full. You hate the lake, which is as vast as a sea, because you think it fake. You think it is full of shadows, more shadows than water, and that the fish hide there, and perhaps walk about. The people in your village have two names, depending on the season. Tomorrow, everyone will change to a new name.
AI Dungeon 2 Instructions:
Enter actions starting with a verb ex. "go to the tavern" or "attack the orc."
To speak enter 'say "(thing you want to say)"' or just "(thing you want to say)"
The following commands can be entered for any action:
"revert" Reverts the last action allowing you to pick a different action.
"quit" Quits the game and saves
"restart" Starts a new game and saves your current one
"save" Makes a new save of your game and gives you the save ID
"load" Asks for a save ID and loads the game if the ID is valid
"print" Prints a transcript of your adventure (without extra newline formatting)
"help" Prints these instructions again
Generating story...
You live on the edge of a vast lake. The lake is salt water. You are perhaps ten years old. You're not sure. There's a well in the village. Your father is a fisher. The forest is dark and full. You hate the lake, which is as vast as a sea, because you think it fake. You think it is full of shadows, more shadows than water, and that the fish hide there, and perhaps walk about. The people in your village have two names, depending on the season. Tomorrow, everyone will change to a new name. One day, they'll all be called by their true names
> Run into the forest
You go to the forest. It is cold and dark. You see no one. No one has ever been here before. You can't find anything. You look around for something to eat, but there is nothing. You feel hungry, though. You want to eat something. Something sweet
> Feel afraid
You feel scared. You are alone. You are scared. You don't know what to do. You need help. Help is coming soon.
> Sing a song
You begin singing a song. The world becomes brighter. You feel happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..
> Climb a tree together
You climb up a tree with your friend. You are so happy. Your happiness fills you. You love each other. You are happy. You will never die
> Pick a fruit
You pick a fruit. You are so happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..
> Bite into the persimmon. The fruit runs down my chin
You bite into the persimmon. The fruit runs down your chin. You are so happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..
> Find a giant bird
You find a giant bird. You are so happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..
> Climb on the bird's back and fly to the snowy mountain
You climb on the bird's back and fly to the snowy mountain. You are so happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..
> Feel unhappy
You feel unhappy. You are alone. You are sad. You cannot find anyone. You must find someone to make you happy. Someone must come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..
> Be happy even though I am alone
You be happy even though you are alone. You are happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..
> Melt the snow and drink it
You melt the snow and drink it. You are so happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..
> Carve a magic rune
You carve a magic rune. You are so happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will..
> Restart
You restart. You are happy. You have found someone. Someone will come soon. Soon you will be free. Soon you will.
> restart
Please rate the story quality from 1-10: 9
Game saved.
To load the game, type 'load' and enter the following ID: ec6be256-1888-11ea-b8cb-0242ac1c0002
What is going on here? From Shakespeare's Henry V:
etc.
The Folger edition exemplifies general editorial indifference to Pistol's diatribe. The endnote to "O viper vile!" reads, "Pistol's speech is characterized by scraps of poetry, archaic language, and echoes of ranting speeches (sometimes from other plays)." The editor's subtext seems to be: "This guy is really annoying, there is something that needs an explanation, but we just can't bring ourselves to do it." Pistol, it's worth mentioning up top, has a strong connection with Greece and Rome, via the braggart stock figure of the miles gloriosus or more generally the alazṓn.
Context: Nym and Pistol have cause to quarrel. Nym is asking to speak to Pistol solus, i.e. alone, i.e. to step outside for a fight (or even a dagger in the guts). It is interesting that solus is gendered, so Nym is clearly speaking to Pistol. Nym definitely wants a word with his ex's new husband Pistol, not with his ex Mistress Quickly herself.
The editorial consensus seems to be that glossing Pistol further would just encourage him. Actors, audiences, directors, dramaturges may all be baffled as to what this guy's on about. But that's OK, because quite likely his interlocutor Nym doesn't know either. Dramaturgically, the scene still works even if Pistol's speech is just noise, flashing fire from a muzzle which misses its mark. "You cannot conjure me": Nym's comeback seems to be, "I'm not some fiend you can control with words." So he could mean that Pistol's words are mere gibberish meant to sound magically frightening.
Those glosses I've found so far helpfully point out that Pistol takes 'solus' as an insult. Thanks everyone. But really, it feels like there's more to be said here. What is so special about this word solus?
If Pistol takes solus as an insult, what insult does he take it as? Would solus have been a pretentious word for Nym to have used, perhaps? Or could there be a play on 'soulless,' cohering with Nym's mention of conjuring a fiend? Or even better, a variant on Stolas, the demon prince (and Twitter bot)? Or is Pistol pretending to interpret Nym's words "I would have you solus" as "when I am solus, I would have you, that is to say, when I think about you I touch myself"? Might there be a link to 'Sol,' the sun, perhaps playing into that "flashing fire"? Or "solicit" meaning concerned, keen, careful, anxious, solicitious, as in "He was verie soliste and kairful for his people" (James Dalrymple translated Jhone Leslie in 1596)?
Is Pistol really misunderstanding or mishearing Nym, or pretending to? If he is pretending, are Nym and/or Quickly meant to be in on this pretence or not?
But it seems to be limited to printing houses, and connected with the sort of epic simile of the printing house as a chapel. See more about it here. On balance, I don't think it's relevant here.
Or perhaps there is nothing special about 'solus'! It's a standard bully move to pick something at random and hold it up for sneering inspection. So perhaps there is actually nothing odd about the word solus, but Pistol is messing with Nym, to make him feel like there is. That's a decent interpretation.
Unless ... could 'solus,' I wonder, be a play on 'solace', with its slightly larger contemporary sense of not only comfort but also pleasure, entertainment, delight, also with a theological and/or sexual energy? When Pistol says that he 'can take,' does he mean that he can 'take solace'?
A fifteenth century song about money:
In every place thou makeste solas,
Gret joye, sporte, and welfare;
If so, then could this be Pistol's conceit? "I will feed you your solus so hard it will end up in your ass, and then I will find solace [pleasure] in your ass with my dick?" I am not sure. I think it could well be.
'Solus,' egregious dog? O viper vile!
The 'solus' in thy most mervailous face;
The 'solus' in thy teeth, and in thy throat,
And in thy hateful lungs, yea, in thy maw, perdy,
And, which is worse, within thy nasty mouth!
Clearly part of Pistol's retort involves him stuffing this word back in Nym's face, feeding it to him till he digests it and perhaps even poops or pees it out. Cf. "gives me the lie in the throat / as deep as the lungs" in Hamlet and Touchstone going no further than the Lie Circumstantial in As You Like It. The conventional comparison of language to something edible was pretty well-established around this time, enough so that an audience could probably follow Shakespeare putting some kind of extra spin on it. Cf. e.g. Donne's 'Satire II':
But hee is worst, who (beggarly) doth chaw
Others wits fruits, and in his ravenous maw
Rankly digested, doth those things out-spue . . .
The meate was mine, th'excrement is his owne.
Is Pistol perhaps even tracing the alimentary canal as a hidden "viper vile" within Nym? Is there some sense of Pistol as a haruspex, poking about in Nym's entrails for omens? Is that what Nym picks up on in his demonology-themed comeback? Well, perhaps. But the key thing to recognise is the peristaltic quality of Pistol's speech: the word moves steadily downward, and the "nasty mouth" is far likelier the "mouth" in Nym's butt than the one in his face.
Then what? Might there even be a multilingual pun on solus and whole / hole? Perhaps that's a bit much? Solace can certainly be a euphemism for sex (or vice-versa). I'm not sure I can find Shakespeare clearly using it that way yet. However, cf. a Middle English Seven Sages of Rome:
Dame, sho said, bi Goddes grace,
Mi husband dose me solace. Þharfore no better nede I can Bot I most luf sum oÞer man.
And there are plenty of later examples too. And where has the 'solus/solace' ended up? Usually a word is thrown back in your face, or at most in your throat. But here:
I do retort 'solus' in thy bowels;
For I can take, and Pistol's cock is up,
And flashing fire will follow.
Now, we could suppose that Pistol introduces something new with this play on his name (the cocked pistol / hard cock bit), rather than continuing a thought that began in the lines before. Take is obviously a hugely polysemous word, so there are plenty of options to play with. (And since Pistol is apparently engaging on wordplay on his own name, it might be worth mentioning that "nim" could mean "to take, to nick"). Just possibly, Pistol has abandoned his previous thread, and is simply saying: "I can take you [in a fight]," or "I can take [aim]," or "I can take [i.e. strike, hit]," and the innuendo of "cock is up" may not even be that important.
But I think we might want to take Pistol's "For" seriously: the fixation on 'solus' is flowing into some kind of climax. And I think we need to take the innuendo seriously too. Is the "flashing fire" not just a gunshot, but cum? I mean, yes, it is cum. It's not like this is his first time: "I will discharge upon her, Sir John, with two bullets" (Henry IV part 1). Where is this flashing fire headed? Mistress Quickly (which we can call the "no homo-Nym" interpretation, a cuckold-energy brag)? Or toward somebody else? Is it Nym himself, a sort of threat of sexual violence?
So then . . . is this the conceit? "I will feed you your solus so hard it will end up in your ass, and then I will take solace in your ass?" On balance, I think yes. The two sections of Pistol's speech are neither totally separate, nor a smooth progression. There's a kind of sonnety turn at "For," once the notional solus is safely lodged in the notional bowels. Pistol's witticism is that he will make Nym eat his words and then shoot him in the butt, but this is overtly blended with the promise that he will take solace in Nym's bowels. Flashing fire will follow.
Are we missing anything? Let's also quickly run through some of the other words. Perdy is an asservation (like "by God" or "for real" or "done know"). Maw is a funny word which probably means "stomach" but could also mean "throat" or "jaws" or even "appetite." Nasty probably connotes more "loathsome, dirty" than it does "cruel, vicious." So the "nasty mouth" is credibly read as butt-hole, given the apparent progression of the "solus" through the digestive tract. Mervailous isn't too different from its modern sense, with a bit more emphasis on "wondrous, strange, striking," and a bit less emphasis on "great, lovely, splendid." Retort is "throw back." Bowels could certainly mean specifically the intestines, but could also mean abdominal organs more generally, or the insides of the body. Barbason: I can't see much on this, but evidently he's some fancy fiend (see note).
So if this is indeed Pistol's conceit, it's gross and kind of stupid, but also kind of ingenious. Crucially, it's not mere noise: it's noise and signal, a decodeable bluster, an extended witticism, a cohesive rhetorical performance that feels like it's going nowhere yet knows where it's headed all along. Indeed, it could even be a little more layered. Conjure seems to be roughly "bind, constrain, control with magic words." But it is very flexible, and the common modern sense of "magically summon" was certainly in use in Shakespeare's time. I think this passage affords potential for genuine flirtation. Macho, deniable, deranged, extraordinarily flamboyant flirtation. You want me by myself? How dare you. You two used to sleep together, now we're sleeping together, and now you want me by myself? Oh my god, you big brute, how rude is that! The three of us should be together. I'm joking obviously. Am I? I'm joking. Am I? I conjure you, Nym ...
And it might just be one more clue to help with recovering a character that, I have a hunch, has drifted beyond the interpretative resources of most modern readers, audiences, actors, directors and dramaturgs. It strikes me that the attitude that "braggarts are just liars and cowards" -- which underlies modern interpretations of Pistol, or rather, modern lack of interest in the character -- does not really reflect Shakespeare's typically nuanced concern for the nuanced relationships of linguistic virtue and moral virtue, of seeming and being, of war and finance, and of agency and chivalry.
For example, we may read into Nym's comeback, "I am not Barbason, you cannot conjure me," a rejection of an offer of verbal conflict, in favour of a deferred material resolution: a punch-up, maybe with a stabbing on the side. But the rejection is an uneasy one, and not based on on a simplistic distinction of words and deeds or things, of verba and res. Rather, Nym seems to entertain different potential modes of materiality in which language may be enacted: there may well be tenuous beings for whom language becomes so substantial that it can engage like ectoplasm with their very flesh, the clockwork gears of rhetoric and hearts and legs and arms and daggers all elegantly meshing and turning, only Corporal Nym -- so he insists, using words to do so -- is not one of those beings. What about Ancient Pistol though? Is he a demon who, knowing his own name, can use it to conjure himself? Ancient Pistol: is there a bit more to him?
Well, that's the best I can do so far. This speech remains a little mysterious to me. I'd welcome any suggestions about any of this, or more generally about early modern braggarts and their precursors.
Here's another bit of Pistol:
Note: "Evidently a fiend." I haven't found Barbason anywhere else, except in Merry Wives of Windsor, in passing, and very definitely naming a fiend there. But cf. Reginald Scot's 1584 The Discovery of Witchcraft:
Marbas, alias Barbas is a great president, and appeareth in the form of a mightie Lyon: but at the commandement of a coniuror commeth up in the likenes of a man, and answereth fully as touching anie thing which is hidden or secret: he bringeth diseases and cureth them; he promoteth wisdom, and the knowledge of mechanicall arts, or handicrafts; he changeth men into other shapes, and under his presidency or governement are thirtie six legions or divels conteined.
And:
Barbatos, a great countie or earle, and also a duke, he appeareth in Signo sagittarii sylvestris, with foure kings, which bring companies and great troopes. He understandeth the singing of birds, the barking of dogs, the lowings of bullocks, and the voice of all living creatures. He detecteth treasures hidden by magicians and inchanters, and is of the order of vertues, which in part beare rule: he knoweth all things past, and to come, and reconcileth freends.
"Barbason" was quite possible a mis-remembering or deliberate adaptation of one of these. "Barbason" could have been in Shakespeare's head because it was in his Holinshed: Barbason was a French knight supposed to have fought personally with Henry V in a countermine. This can't be the person Nym's talking of, surely: the timeline is all wrong.
But why Barbas, Barbatos, Barbason? The thing is, with fiends, you have so many to choose from, you'd think you'd select one with some significance. But what? Barbason might suggest 'barbarian,' as a counterpoint with the Pistol's weird complicated Roman energy. Barbason and Barbas and Barbatos could all suggest 'beard' (cf. barbate, maybe a later term), which at least feels vaguely relevant in some kind of proto toxic masc way. Cf. these beards: Henry IV: "No man so potent breaths upon the ground, / But I will beard him"; Othello: ""Good sir, be a man; / Think, every bearded fellow, that's but yok'd, / May draw with you: there's millions now alive, / That nightly lie in those unproper beds; your case is better." To cut someone's beard could be to outwit them, so perhaps a beardy demon is appropriate way to decline an invitation to a battle of wits. And in Merry Wives of Windsor, Ford laments: "Terms, names! Amaimon sounds well; Lucifer, well; Barbason, well: yet they are devils' additions, the names of fiends. Yet cuckold?" And then in Henry IV part I, Falstaff talks of how the Prince of Wales "gave Amamon the bastinado and made Lucifer cuckold." So there is a kind of very tenuous association between Barbason and jealous and controlling husbands, but that association is entirely created within scenes written by Shakespeare himself, so far as I've found. Another possible association is Barbary, perhaps bringing connotations of racialised power. And gendered power: 'Barbary hen' is slang for sex worker, used in Henry IV part 1. But can "I'm not Barbason" really retain even a tincture of "I'm not your Barbary hen," outside of an exigetical trance? I doubt it. I think it's more likely there is some reference I'm missing.
Maybe Shakespeare knows about some demons we don't.
Just one final possibility to consider: could Nym's retort be based on the idea that Pistol has been addressing him as Solas? Could he be saying, "Look, I'm not some demon called Solas or Barbason or whatever, forcefully and bodily interpellated by my secret name"? Also from Scot's Discovery of Witchcraft:
Stolas is a great prince, appearing in the forme of a nightraven, before the exorcist, he taketh the image and shape of a man, and teacheth astronomie, absolutelie understanding the vertues of herbes and pretious stones; there are under him twentie six legions.
And:
Saleos is a great earle, he appeareth as a gallant soldier, riding on a crocodile, and weareth a dukes crowne, peaceable, &c.
Quick note on a speech of Iachimo to Imogen (Innogen), which I think most editors have got wrong. Iachimo is trying to imply that Imogen's beloved Posthumus has been unfaithful to her.
What! are men mad? Hath nature given them eyes
To see this vaulted arch, and the rich crop
Of sea and land, which can distinguish 'twixt
The fiery orbs above, and the twinn'd stones
Upon the numbered beach, and can we not
Partition make with spectacles so precious
'Twixt foul, and fair?
"Twinn'd" might not mean what you think it is (more on that in a moment). There is also a textual crux to note: "th'unnumbered beach" or "the number'd" beach? (See Note 1).
A plausible enough reading would be something like, "Wow, how is it that certain men (not naming any names or anything) can distinguish really fine details, e.g. distinguish which star is which, or distinguish between two grains of sands that look identical from a distance ... and yet can fail to tell the difference between a foul woman and a fair one?"
Nosworthy's Arden Cymbeline seems a bit confused in this scene overall. Like most editors, Nosworth interprets "distinguish" as "distinguish orb from orb, and stone from stone." (See Note 2). The more recent Wayne Arden edition is way better and hugely useful, but it also goes with "the countless stones that the human eye can differentiate from one another."
But there's another strong reading here. It's not altogether different: the two readings are as different as two grains of sand, maybe?
