“Twere is a contraction
of a form of the verb to be. In full, it is written as it were, a subjunctive form. I bring it up because it is used in a
scene in the Coen Brothers’ movie, Hail,
Caesar.
In that scene, a movie
director becomes increasingly frustrated by an actor’s inability to say a
simple line: “would that it ‘twere so simple.” The actor has a history of
playing westerns, but he has been thrust unwillingly into a British drawing-room
drama, where he obviously is out of place.
The problem is that
‘twere already contains the pronoun it
as a contraction. So the line literally reads, “would that it it were so
simple.” A double it? That’s redundancy.
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