Department of Regrettably Discarded Technology

Radio Bogblog's Sad Episode of the Imaginary Popinjay

{I Henry IV 1.3.28ff}

HOTSPUR [to the King]  My liege, I did deny no prisoners;
But I remember, when the fight was done,
When I was dry with rage and exteme toil,
Breathless and faint, leaning upon my sword,
Came there a certain lord, neat and trimly dressed,
Fresh as a bridegroom, and his chin new-reaped, 
Showed like a stubble-land at harvest home.
He was perfumed like a milliner,
And 'twixt his finger and his thumb he held
A pouncet-box, which ever and anon
He gave his nose and took't away again —
Who therewith angry, when it next came there
Took it in snuff — and still he smiled and talked;
And as soon as the soldiers bore dead bodies by,
He called them untaught knaves, unmannerly
To bring a slovenly unhandsome corpse
Betwixt the wind and his nobility.
With many holiday and lady terms
He questioned me; amongst the rest demanded
My prisoners in your majesty's behalf.
I then, all smarting with my wounds being cold —
To be so pestered with a popinjay! –
Out of my grief and my impatience
Answered neglectingly, I know not what —
He should, or should not— for he made me mad
To see him shine so brisk, and smell so sweet,
And talk so like a waiting gentlewoman
Of guns, and drums, and wounds, God save the mark!
And telling me the soveriegn'st thing on earth
Was parmicity for an inward bruise,
And that it was great pity, so it was,
This villainous saltpeter should be digged
Out of the bowels of the harmless earth,
Which many a good tall fellow had destroyed
So cowardly, and but for these vile guns
He would himself be a soldier.
This bald unjointed chat of his, my lord,
Made me answer indirectly, as I said,
And I here beseech you, let not his report
Come current for an accusation
Betwixt my love and your high majesty.

It came to us that no matter how charming a means of codifying song, the piano roll had long since peaked and passed into the valley of the shadow of the popularity it once owned, perhaps to the point where a fair sized crowd might popularly insist on tearing down the club that played the things as incessantly as our business plan required. Though they might have paused briefly to consider if the same roll was going to be played over and over again, adjusting their ferocity slightly on discovering the rolls refreshed on a regular basis (depending of course entirely on the club's choice of licensing plans with Radio Bogblog), undoubtedly they'd make a grim determined bunch at the very least should they set about to lay the club low as a measure of their current disdain for the things.

As a precaution, plans were drawn up to interrupt the otherwise continuous transmission of piano rolls, to send along facsimiles of other material entirely. Pages from Shakespeare, read aloud to the clubgoers, might sooth the savages among them for a time, redirecting their retaliatory attentions away from the piano rolls and on to something else at just the crucial moment.

Such fodder as Hotspur's first long speech in Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I was proposed, along with all the other usual lengths of it lifted from that same or some other one of the plays, all by long agreement considered speakable to a crowd. There were at one time a few dozen or so speeches in the proposal, interventionary things, comparable to station breaks or commercials, and, depending on the speaking style of their enunciator, no lengthier to deliver.

It was clever the way the crowd itself would be, by design, encouraged to participate in the reading, with all the subtle and not-so-subtle signals that one of them, yes, one of the crowd, should come up front and read the thing out loud in public, though, misdirected toward speaking instead of singing, it's not the progenitor of karaoke that some Barry Family apologists maintain.

Inadvertently, in trials, when time seemed ripe to rest the crowd from the piano rolls, the first long speech of Hotspur was eight times more likely to be transmitted to the clubs than any other of Shakespeare's sayings. Immediate groans of, "Aw, the popinjay!" began to greet the too-oft-repeated stirrings of Hotspur's first words. The effect was to enhance rather than to redirect the acrimonies of the crowd, an outcome at variance with and clearly considered harmful to the express interests of the business plan, which was rather to paliate the populace than to embolden it further by providing both the gathering place and the literary-critical grounds for a crowd's disruptive mischiefs.

For more on Shakespeare's Hotspurs' popinjay