Shakespeare digression

“Forever in bluejeans.”

Jabs I am not even a cougar, That fashion is a bit young for my tastes. Although it is more seemly than the 70s spandex fad :slight_smile:

I had to read in a dictionary what you meant by cougar.

By the way in the USA do builders have a reputation for showing a bit of their bums as they bend down whilst working, it is commonly referred over here as builder’s bum, it is a kind of fashion as well. :smiley:

Carpenter crack, mechanic’s breather, there are different names for that little show :slight_smile: It all depends upon what region you are in. The older they get the more is shown with out care. It cracks everyone up :slight_smile: :slight_smile:
The size of the belly decides how much gets shown. We work for a fence company. I am walking to the office to report in, I get a comment from one of the guys " Hey Kris your husband needs to put a fence around that crack." I look over and there is my love kneeling and bending over a tractor repairing it. Yep, crack city. I could only smile and reply that I am just his wife not his keeper, that would be our boss’s job. :slight_smile:
It is nice to know some stlyes are worldwide

Ok but, Shakespeare was a cad and irreverent, You cannot deny our play on words while a tad shoddy are in Shakespearean mode. What would Shakespeare do with the crack? His works influence humor. Come on Magsj, come up with a Shakespearean comment about cracks :slight_smile: :slight_smile: You know you want to :wink: :slight_smile:

That would depend on which moderator is breathing down your neck at the moment you want to make a joke.

Oh for god’s sake pipe down and take your bans like a man, ok some of them are probably wrong, but let’s face it we are all human, they make mistakes like we do. When you get banned stop making it so personal, there is no conspiracy to hate you, you act bad you get banned, it happens, deal with it. Look at it this way, if you are going to get banned and you will, trust me (no one who is remotely human and has emotions can live up to forum rules anywhere ever) do it right, make it a nice long rant, and make it stick, go out with a bang not a whmper. Get banned like you love the smell of napalm in the morning, with ride of the valyries playing. Stop whining about it, it happens to everyone, me more than most. Breathe in that petroleum and orange juice and smile. :slight_smile:

In that case the average university professor is a moron. When you’re writing books, you don’t just have access to your own limited language, you have acces to a myriad of people’s language you use as sources in a myriad of prose, so when you read their material your word base increases by the amount of books you have read, plus of course the fact that you mix with great writers who inspire you. Shakespeares command of words in literature was average at best, his ability to write prose, mediocre at best considering his peers, his diversity of work well less than even mediocre, but what he did have was imagination, a rich wife and access to lots of material with lots of verbosity.

Is there actually a method to test a writers vocabulary, over a common or day vocabulary? Is there a VQ? Do you have that test to hand? If you gave me the ability to draw all the words in all the books sitting on my bookshelf would my VQ go up?

These arguments are frankly asanine, moribund and worthless, an author who was no more prodigious than most, with no more vocabulary than most, with no more adriotness than most except in one area - to have imagination - wrote a small amount of texts, who the hell cares. It’s not a conspiracy that Shakespeare didn’t write so little, it’s a conspiracy of people who really cannot fathom how many people could of done so. Hell Phillip Marlow would of beaten him if he had lived. What sort of vocabulary did he have? If there were both Shakespeare and Marlow would we be having this discussion? You don’t like Shakespeare, boo fricking hoo, but don’t dislike a man because you cannot fathom someone ordinary who did something great, that was because he had so many sources.

what does “to be or not to be that is the question” mean? does it mean whether we have to decide to be a true person or not?

The way I read it suicide is what it means. Its what the rest of the soliloquy implies at least.

Is that so? well I could not be more wrong could I? Anyway I am not going that way. With my Bipolar-I, current state of GAD, well into my fifties and no chance of ever finding work, I nevertheless prefer to stay alive.

No Hamlet is considering suicide.

To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,…

Thanks Hobbes, I am actually quite obsessed with this aspect of split personalities so I associated with to be or not to be. Don’t you think it would have interesting if Shakespeare was addressing this point? or does Shakespeare at any point addresses this point? Apart from Twelve Night which I did 40 years ago at school and I understood very little of it, I have not read any of Shakespeare.

I don’t think Hamlet is in a split personality as such.
But he is torn about the fact that uncle Claudius and killed his dad and married his mother.
He feigns madness, but the madness seems to over take him.
w3.org/People/maxf/XSLideMaker/hamlet.pdf
As for reading him - I don’t think it is as good an option as seeing in on stage.
If you have no theatre were you live, there are lots of good film versions and TV productions to look out for.

Agreed, I think if you get the chance you should see all the plays on stage, but for me the chance seldom comes. Films are of course a medium. I think some plays are actually better put into film because of the technical difficulty of actually staging grand scenes on a small stage. Henry V springs to mind, the vasty fields of Agincourt perhaps could never be conveyed as well on a mere stage.

You must say he gave it a good go though. :slight_smile:

On one level it has to do with whether to kill himself. On Another level it has to do with really entering Life, participating full - which scares Hamlet, because he is afraid that if he enters fully into Life, he will lose objectivity, humanity, and be just Another beast - like his uncle - carried away by passions.

This is very interesting. I suspect that the play it is like his uncle, in real life it is like all of us.

We all become beasts, no exception.

Absurd…

The dilemma is to face what he sees as the truth of the murder of his father, but his uncle. Nothing whatever to do with “objectivity”.
Facing that is to agree that the ghost of his father is real, and that he will have to challenge King Claudius and his own mother, bringing ruin to the kingdom, as in fact happens.

It’s not absurd. And the to be or not to be soliloquey is clearly about suicide on the surface and not about whether to murder his uncle. The latter may be hinted at, but only as one example of many in a world of slings and arrows.

So seriously, I have no idea what you are talking about.

If you think suicide and engaging in life are not what the to be or not to be speech is about, you are going against the vast bulk of lit crit on it. This doesn’t mean that general consensus must be right, but it is hardly absurd or so many intelligent poeple in so many eras and cultures would not have thought it was the case.

As far as the play as a whole: There are many things Hamlet says that indicate he fears entering life and being like others, pulled along by their passions. And what you write here neither contradicts nor is contradicted by what I said. In fact they complement nicely. He was seeking evidence, beyond the word of the ghost and his own distaste for his uncle and hatred of him. Objectivity is arguably not quite the right word. A kind of detachment, less subjective.

It is not a mere style choice to say
to be or not to be
rather than
to live or not to live.

It is beyond question that suicide is a major theme of the play

There is also the that this o too sullied flesh would melt soliloquy

Then the O what a rogue and peasant slave am i

where he berates himself for not being able to engage and be pressed in action in the world, even as much as an actor pretending to have certain feelings.

The speech about how all occasions do inform against me continues this theme of control vs. action, reason vs. passion.

And in his reactions to the other characters we see his disdain for people led around blindly by their passions.

But none of what I am arguing goes against what you said. In terms of pure action he is indeed trying to decide.

But he could have killed his uncle in the second scene, or whatever scene comes after the ghost scene, 3rd fourth. But he goes to enormous verbal and action lengths bemoaning his lack of action, but clearly concerned about what it would mean, about him to act or not act. And the radical difference between Hamlet and Laertes, which Hamlet himself notes and mulls over also. Laertes thinks he is wronged and is ready to kill directly, none of this mulling and talking and trying get proof via the gymnastics of a play. He is a magnificent figure, Hamlet, far more interesting than Laertes, but part of what makes him interesting is a problem and he cannot see the way out of the dilemma and neither does Shakespeare give an answer.