Wherefore Rejoice?

Here at Russian Boot Camp, pronunciation and intonation are taken very seriously. By some. To prove how serious pronunciation and intonation are, every student is required to make two recordings of "The Kartina Text," or in plain English, "The Text about a Pig Painting a Picture." It's always heart-warming to hear the halls resounding with a Stalinist critique of modern art, that, however, is another post. The second tape is due tomorrow and currently the language lab is full of Russian-Boot-Camp attendees attempting to make the perfect tape featuring flawless pronunciation and native intonation patterns. If I were not a Russian-language student who had just made her tape, this swarm of odd intonation patterns would merely annoy me. Since I am a Russian-language student, the background hum of a dozen students muttering "The Kartina Text" is beyond annoying because I want to finish every bloody sentence. This situation takes me back to highschool. The memorization exercise in Drama I, which everyone took because the teacher was cool, was Marullus' speech from act 1 of Julius Cesar. Over the course of a week, everyone in the class memorized this speech in four-line chunks. Once the entire speech was committed to memory, everyone in the class then recited it in its entirety three times: once in the little theatre, once in the little theatre in front of a video camera, and once in the auditorium, the rest of the class perched in the nosebleed section. At any time, you could enter any classroom in my highschool, ask, "Wherefore rejoice?" and listen to ten-odd students finish the speech. Since the majority of my readers don't know Russian, I won't reproduce "The Kartina Text," instead, here is the one part of Drama I that I still carry around in my brain. Over ten years have passed and it's still lodged there, which I find comforting.

Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?
What tributaries follow him to Rome,
To grace in captive bonds his chariot-wheels?
You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!
O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climb'd up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day, with patient expectation,
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome:
And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made an universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks,
To hear the replication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?
And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way
That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood? Be gone!
Run to your houses, fall upon your knees,
Pray to the gods to intermit the plague
That needs must light on this ingratitude.