'Shrimp' collocates with 'child' and 'Hercules' on both of its occurrences, setting up a David and Goliath pattern of appearance and reality. The Countess of Auvergne, seeing the legendary Talbot for the first time, is not impressed:
5 Is this the scourge of France?
16 Is this the Talbot, so much fear'd abroad
17 That with his name the mothers still their babes?
18 I see report is fabulous and false.
19 I thought I should have seen some Hercules,
20 A second Hector, for his grim aspect
21 And large proportion of his strong-knit limbs.
22 Alas, this is a child, a silly dwarf!
23 It cannot be this weak and writhled shrimp
24 Should strike such terror to his enemies. (1H6 2.2.5-24)
In the final show of the Nine Worthies at the end of Love's Labor's Lost Holofernes introduces Moth as the infant Hercules:
588 "Great Hercules is presented by this imp,
589 Whose club kill'd Cerberus, that three-headed canus;
590 And when he was a babe, a child, a shrimp,
591 Thus did he strangle serpents in his manus.
592 Quoniam he seemeth in minority,
593 Ergo I come with this apology."
26 July, 1999
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