Shylock’s Recantation

Shylock’s Recantation – a sonnet based on themes from “The Merchant of Venice”, considering that only once in the Catholic Church would Shylock have known the Tridentine Doctrine of Concomitance, which would have been his best defence against Portia’s Balthazar…

 

Had I but known the Roman Council’s art—

That Flesh and Blood are held in single bond,

And cannot by a legal blade dispart,

Nor split by cunning of a clever blonde!

For Trent decrees the Blood dwells in the Host;

Where Flesh is given, Blood must surely flow.

Had I then claimed what Rome exalts the most,

I’d kept my ducats and my daughter’s vow.

Instead I swore by Moses and my Law,

Relied on Venice and her narrow scale;

Unknowing that the Church’s doctrine saw

A grace that made my contract’s loophole fail.

Now, forced to bow before the altar stone

I learn the tricks they use to claim my own.

Introducing Alfie Mullard


Production date: 1 July 2006
Playout date: 1/7/2006
Camera: Logitech webcam
Post Production: None, single take.
Location: Home, Warsaw.

This is still the one and only film of Alfie Mullard, the Cockney culturalist, which has currently been seen 2222 times and has 10 thumbs up and 5 down, however some people really did like it and a few of my friends have been asking for more of Alfie Mullard. I was always going to do a series of him reading Shakespeares sonnets (or “songits” as he calls them) and then getting upset whenever he came across a word that he misunderstood as something rude, but I didn’t quite get to do it yet and that’s something that may well still happen one day.

Check out the insect buzzing across at one point in this – an Idiocerus vitreus, which we had a minor plague of that year.