Like As You Like It or All’s Well That Ends Well, this seemingly proverbial title gives nothing away about the play’s subject matter. There were no spotlights in the open-air theatres of Shakespeare’s day, but this is a “spotlight moment” if ever there was one. Worse, this moment is typically confused with the “To be or not to be” speech! Why? Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor suggest “Hamlet-as-icon … has to be alone” – this is the moment of introspection, of facing death and mortality, of Hamlet-as-philosopher. There’s also an intriguing tendency to misremember the context in which this line is delivered.Īlthough the image of Hamlet contemplating the skull is one of the most iconic of all scenes from Shakespeare, the actor playing Hamlet is not alone during this moment: he is surrounded by the gravediggers and Horatio. Unlike the “To be or not to be” speech, the line about Yorick’s skull is the same in the three early printed editions of Hamlet. I knew him well”, whereas the correct reading is “Alas, poor Yorick. Completing this line is meant to be a trick question in quiz shows the contestant is meant to misremember it as “Alas, poor Yorick. This is from the graveyard scene at the start of Act V. This LEGO Hamlet looks like he is alone, but as Shakespeare wrote it, he should be surrounded by gravediggers and Horatio. No wonder, when the passage exists in such different forms. Was it Shakespeare’s first draft, which he subsequently improved? Was it a pirated text, written down from memory by an actor who only played a minor role in the play? Or is it actually, as Zachary Lesser has recently argued, the most coherent version of the speech? Critics are still debating whether this speech is about suicide (“to die, to sleep”), about the dreariness of life more generally, or about the merits of action vs inaction (“to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…”). This 1603 version is generally regarded as being somewhat inferior to the 1604- editions. No, to sleep, to dream, ay, marry, there it goes … To be, or not to be, ay, there’s the point, Unfortunately for Shakespeare purists, who insist a terrible crime has taken place if we change Shakespeare’s language in performance, the earliest printed edition of Hamlet (1603) has: “To be, or not to be, that is the question’’ is possibly the most famous speech in all of Shakespeare. In fact, Macduff is using a now obsolete adjective, which forms the root of the still-used term for a criminal, “felon”. The popular mistake is easy to understand: “fowl” as in “bird” (chickens, kite) or “foul” because the act is treacherous (and performed by a “hell-kite”). “Fell” in this context means “fierce, savage cruel, ruthless”, as the Oxford English Dictionary explains. In this image, Macduff’s helpless family members are figured as prey (pretty chickens) and Macbeth as a bird of prey (a kite) that swoops and attacks them. What, all my pretty chickens and their dam In fact, Macduff, learning that his wife and children have been killed by Macbeth, asks: People frequently say “in one fowl swoop” when they mean something happened suddenly. Romeo and Juliet was recently voted Australia’s favourite Shakespeare play. Her next line removes all doubt: “Deny thy father and refuse thy name” – in other words, don’t be a Montague. But “wherefore” means “why”, not “where” – she doesn’t want to know where he is she wants to know why he has to be a Montague, and the sworn enemy of her family. Juliet pines away at her balcony, forlorn and yearning for her lover who has disappeared into the night just moments after the two teens met at the masquerade ball. “ROMEO, ROMEO, WHEREFORE ART THOU ROMEO?” – Romeo and Juliet So let’s look at some famous Shakespeare quotes in their original context. On the other hand, most people who exclaim “What the dickens!” probably have a 19th Century author in mind (it’s actually from The Merry Wives of Windsor), and references to a “brave new world” are as likely to be to Aldous Huxley’s novel as to The Tempest. When a camping store mangles Richard III’s lines to produce the advertisement, “Now is the winter of our discount tents”, they are engaging playfully with a well-known Shakespeare quote. Many of the popular quotes are misunderstood, however. But is he rolling in his grave over the quotes we continue to get wrong? Picture: Eric Salard/Flickr Four hundred years since his death, William Shakespeare remains an ubiquitous part of modern life. Even my mechanic’s website boasts “A Brave New World in Accident Repair”. Hit TV shows Seachange (Australia), Outrageous Fortune (NZ) or Slings and Arrows (Canada) all take their names from Shakespeare quotations.Ī jester named by Shakespeare in Love’s Labours Lost adorns the bottle of a South Australian cabernet sauvignon. Shakespeare’s words are everywhere – sometimes you just don’t realise it.īen Affleck apparently believes that Batman is America’s Hamlet.
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