Mason explains, though without his precise reason for it, that, for the past Year or more, it has been his practice to attend the Friday Hangings at that melancholy place, where he was soon chatting up Hangmen and their 'Prentices, whilst standing them pints at their Local, The Bridport Dagger, acquiring thus a certain grisly intimacy with the Art.
* * * * * * * * * *
Line 107 Vulgarized:
Mason just met Dixon so he's not willing to bare every dark, depressed, macabre recess of his soul to him but he does open up about how something in him has been drawing him to Tyburn every weekend for the last year for the hangings where, afterward, he would wind up in the local pub buying drinks for the executioner and his apprentices who would, in turn, tell him all about their lives as hangmen, and the morbid stories they've gathered because of it.
Subtext:
Mason is obsessed with his mortality and eventual death. Maybe he doesn't quite know it himself yet. Maybe holding back "his precise reason" for attending the public hangings isn't purposeful but inevitable in that he doesn't exactly understand why. But he's definitely dark and depressed, the original Harold or an early modern goth.
A Bridport Dagger is a gallows term for the hangman's noose. So naming the local Tyburn pub "The Bridport Dagger" is pretty much a hat on a hat.
No comments:
Post a Comment