Status: Not Shakespeare

I woke up this morning to this quote making Twitter’s “Top Retweets” section of my feed – that’s when somebody says something that gets repeated by over 100 other people.

Yikes.

This expression is much older than Mr. Shakespeare. To be fair, it was popularized in the West when Abraham Lincoln used it, and he was known to quote a fair bit of Shakespeare.  But Lincoln apparently cited his source (somewhat), and it wasn’t Shakespeare he referred to:

 

(You need to scroll down a bit, the embedded Google books reader will only take us to the page, not the exact paragraph we want.)

So the expression is at least as old as “Jewish folklore” or perhaps a Persian Sufi poet circa 1200A.D.  Either way it’s much, much older than Shakespeare.

Status: Not Shakespeare

Saw this one fly by on Twitter the other day, attributed to Shakespeare.  Luckily it’s an easy mistake to correct, as it is all over the net that the actual author was Plato, specifically in his dialogue The Banquet.

Here’s William Gerber writing about the topic from his book “Love, poetry and immortality : luminous insights of the world’s great thinkers”:

I’m always torn when reviewing a major piece of work, like Richard Burton’s Hamlet.  On the one hand I want to watch it straight through, taking notes, and do one long and detailed review.  But I watch it so piecemeal over time, spotting and then forgetting crucial moments I want to specifically call out, that I feel the need to put up a post every time I have an idea.

Right now I want to pursue that second idea.  You know the scene where Horatio meets up with Hamlet, and they go through the whole “I saw him once”, “I think I saw him yesternight” exchange?  Hamlet has a line where he says, simply, “Saw? who?” and Horatio answers “My lord the king your father.”

I’ve seen it done with confusion, as if Hamlet has no idea what Horatio’s talking about. I’ve seen it done more throwaway, like Hamlet’s only half paying attention to Horatio, too busy daydreaming about his father.

Burton’s version has this great long pause between “Saw” and “who” where the whole scene comes together, and I think it’s just wonderful.  It’s like he starts the thought not really paying attention (not even looking at Horatio), “Saw….” and then as he says it, he realizes what Horatio means.  And then the whole tone of the scene shifts because now he’s not sure he wants the answer.  He turns to face Horatio, and the “Who?” is scared, defensive, like “I think I know what you’re about to tell me and I’m not sure I like it.”  Which really makes sense, when you think about it.  Someone doesn’t just tell you they saw the ghost of your dad and you just get all excited and say “Oh good I hope I get to see him too.”

The rest plays out like an interrogation, and I have to watch it again but I could swear that Hamlet in this instance isn’t too crazy about the idea of his father coming back, he’s terrified.  There’s even a great moment where Hamlet, seated, is asking his questions – “Armed? Top to toe?” when he suddenly jumps up and *states*, as if he’s a lawyer trying to prove his case, “Then saw you not his face!” This was surely a Hamlet who would have been happy to discover that this was not, in fact, his father.

Anyway, I’m not too much farther into the movie so I can’t go deep, but I wanted to stop there with an idea.  Can you spot another scene, preferably in a movie version so it’s captured on film, where there’s a moment *between the words*, one of those moments that’s entirely on the actor and not the words, that turns the scene for you?  A facial expression, a physical posture, what have you.  Something that, without any words, says everything?  I looked for a YouTube version of this particular scene to embed, but I can’t find it.  There are several other Burton clips online, so hopefully I can make use of those in later posts.

Status: Misquoted.

I am guessing that this quote is actually a casual paraphrase of this one, from Henry VI Part 3:

For trust not him that hath once broken faith

So what should we call these?  Technically not Shakespeare, but a pretty clear case of just paraphrasing what was originally said.

So I go on vacation for three whole days, and the Shakesphere asplodes when Sarah Palin compares herelf to Shakespeare.  Wonderful.

Specifically, for those that haven’t seen it (or don’t care as much), she made a post using the interesting word “refudiate”.  When people pointed out that this was probably not the word she meant, as it was not actually a word, she a) changed the original Twitter message to read “refute”, and b) said that Shakespeare liked to coin words, too.

Three thoughts.  We’ve brushed against political topics here in the past without much ado, but I get the feeling that these days you pick the wrong target and everybody goes absolutely batshite nutty. 

First, in defense of Mr. Shakespeare (as if he needs it), the man deliberately constructed new words for the purposes of his poetry, not because he simply didn’t know the right word.  

Second, either defend your apparently deliberate coinage of a new word, or change the word to something else, but how can you do both? If it was the word you meant, why did you change it? If you legitimately made a mistake to be corrected, why try to cover it up?  Plenty of politicians, past and present, Republican and Democrat alike, have misspoken and made up words.  That’s not the thing that bothers people, it’s the refusal to acknowledge it as an honest mistake.

Third, “refute” (“Peaceful New Yorkers, please refute the Ground Zero mosque plan …”) is still not the correct word to use, since it means “prove to be false or erroneous.”  She may want you to prove that it’s a bad idea, but that’s not the same thing as proving that there is no such plan.  She may have meant “repudiate”,  which means something more akin to “refuse to acknowledge, or to disown.”  That’s my guess.  I think the refute thing is the red herring, and that she just misspoke repudiate.  No biggie.

Then again this all happened on Twitter, so perhaps the real problem is that she really did mean both words, and just ran out of characters?

Ok, I’m going back to vacation.   Flame away, I’ll be on the beach.