Sterne/Shandy’s using an invocation to the Muse here, but it’s a mad, Shandean one: the Muse is identified with “ye powers”, implying pagan gods, and are less about spiritual inspiration than a list of instructions: what to write and what not to write, how to order it, and where to begin and end. These are ironically all rules which Sterne has been breaking from the beginning, as though to tell us that his novel is certainly not “a story worth the hearing”. Moreover, the invocation isn’t asking for inspiration and literary genius, more for a “guide-post” as though writing were all about solving a puzzle.

A freebooter is a pirate (hence the metaphor of “plunges” into the ocean of literary error): authors are like pirates, stealing others' words and stories as they come across them and using them for their own ends.

They have the right to remain silent. Anything they do say may be used against them in a court of law.

Presumably Isabella tries to interrupt Angelo at this point: this just means that he’s stopping her from speaking.

Isabella’s about to leave, so Angelo throws her a bone by placing a new reinterpretation on his words. Claudio must die – but so must everyone, and rather than sentencing him to death Angelo suggests that he was actually just musing on mortality. He’s toying with her, partly to keep her from leaving by opening up a possibility that her brother might live, and partly because that’s his idea of flirting.

Isabella has been summoned by Angelo, and here she’s just politely asking what he wants. But the word “pleasure” has a dark irony: what Angelo wants is to have his pleasure with Isabella.

Angelo’s experiencing the pangs of first love. Or maybe lust. Either way, we can safely assume that Angelo’s “other parts” include more than just his brain: he’s gonna need necessary fitness elsewhere if he wants to sleep with Isabella.

Angelo’s not asking the servant to sit down with a blackboard and give Isabella a lesson: ‘teach’ has its original meaning of ‘show’ here.

Titus is inconsistent here. In the last two lines he compared the grief of seeing his daughter mutilated to water being added to the sea, or another torch being thrown on a burning city – implying that his grief is already large enough to absorb any new troubles. But here he changes tack: he compares his grief to the river Nile (‘Nilus’ in Latin – Titus is a Roman, don’t forget) and imagines the new grief as like water causing the river to burst its banks (“bounds”). This is one of the many examples in the play of language going wrong: the images which Titus uses to describe his grief don’t add up.

Some people consider inconsistencies like this a weakness of Titus Andronicus, and it’s usually true that the play’s language isn’t as sophisticated or interesting as that of his later plays. But there’s an argument to be made that Titus is a play about language’s inability to deal with horror. Titus is inconsistent in the way he describes his grief because that grief is indescribable: there are simply no words that can help him come to terms with the figure of his daughter, handless, tongueless, and – as he’ll later discover – the victim of a double rape.

Like in the previous line, Titus uses an image of pointless accumulation, this time claiming that his grief is like the fire that burnt Troy and that the added grief of Lavinia’s mutilation is like a burning brand (“faggot”) brought to that fire. It’s implied that he’s no more upset than he was before; but the next two lines tell a different story…