Polonius' Homily

The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold. 

Watched about 30 minutes of Franco Zeferelli's Hamlet last night. Blown away by the language. Shakespeare's got a hell of a way with words. I loved the fatherly advice of Polonius to Laertes:

Give thy thoughts no tongue,

Nor any unproportioned thought his act.

Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.

Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,

Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel;

But do not dull thy palm with entertainment

Of each new-hatch'd, unfledged comrade. Beware

Of entrance to a quarrel, but being in,

Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.

Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;

Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.

Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,

But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;

For the apparel oft proclaims the man,

And they in France of the best rank and station

Are of a most select and generous chief in that.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be;

For loan oft loses both itself and friend,

And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.

This above all: to thine ownself be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.

Wasn't that just refreshing? If only sermons could sound more like this! Who needs explanations but if you want you can find some here. 

Still, couldn't keep my eyes open for long. I'm used to watching killers saying, "Die, mother-f*cker!" so I guess I'm a little unused to people saying things like, "A little more than kin, and less than kind." I'll watch it act by act, methinks. Should be fun studying one of the best-known dramatic tragedies ever (I just found out from Wiki that The Banquet, Zhang Zhi Yi's latest, is a Chinese adaptation of Hamlet). One eye on Gibson, Close, Bonham Carter and gang, and another on sites like Open Source Shakespeare ("An Experiement in Literary Technology") and SparkNotes with its loads of online study guides (FOC).

You just gotta admire the 'sentence-construction'. How did the man think of these things? And I thought people like Mitchell, Roy and Naylor were verbiose. Shakespeare makes their works look like Ladybird books.

Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat in this distracted globe...Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records, all saws of books, all forms, all pressures past that youth and observation copied there...And thy commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain, unmixed with baser matter. 

You have GOT to be high to be able to write thousands of pages of stuff like this. Like Livingstone searching for the Nile's source, I'm in for the ride. I wish I had taken this stuff in A-Levels (except at that time I'd probably end up hating it - so, yeah, no point)