It came to me during English. We're reading Hamlet, and for those of you who don't know...my teacher this year is quirky to say the least. He's memorized every single line in the play, over dramatically acts out each dialogue, and sometimes I even get the feeling he knows what he's talking about (which is a rarity in my school). But as we were tearing apart Shakespeare's puns, such as in Act I, Scene 2, Hamlet's pun on the word "seems" and his pun on the word "common", I couldnt help but think, isn't there a possibility that were just looking into this a little too much?
"Seems"? Okay, because that actually is a pun. But "common"? Hamlet replies to his mother, "Ay it is common." Somehow, my teacher got that common meant "regular people" which meant "lower class" which meant "disgraceful action" which Hamlet meant to direct at his mother marrying his uncle, rather than "common" being the response to her question.
But let me digress a moment: Have you ever wondered why we analyze books to the point where every word is a foreshadow or irony or allusion, but we never look into movies? We put artistic value in books but not in movies. How come no one ever tears apart a movie, and analyzes the dialogue of the characters, their movements in the scenes, the use of music to portray moods or foreshadowing, how the camera angle suggests the perspective that we view it in? How come no one cares? The highest level of recognition for movies, the Academy Award, bases it on production and reception value, how much everyone enjoyed it. But awards for novels go much deeper.
So back to my original point, hey scholars, here's a question for you: has it ever occurred to you that Shakespeare, like all the scriptwriters and authors, just wrote a line because theres no other way to say it, and they didnt put 100 meanings behind a simple word? Is it entirely unfeasible that the word "common" means "common" and not some arbitrary meaning you put to the word because it might make sense? Has it ever occurred to your ignorant literary minds, that Shakespeare, like writers today, was paid on what he wrote, and maybe, just maybe, he was in a rush to finish a play? Is Shakespeare infallible to the point where his writing is perfect? Isn't it possible a guy who wrote hundreds of plays in his lifetime (barring the Christopher Marlowe conspiracy) didn't put his heart and soul to every single word he ever wrote? I will never understand why we are trying to understand Hamlet and Laertes and Claudius's subconscious thinking and what their ulterior motives when we watch Lion King for the music, Pirates of the Caribbean for Johnny Depp. Even if you take among the best movies of all time: Gone with the Wind, Titanic (statistically), we watch them for the actors and the story. Nobody cares why DiCaprio frowns his face in the 18th scene of the movie or why he parts his hair to the left, or what he might be thinking as he's freezing and Rose is chilling on a floating device. Nobody looks at the allegories and metaphors in the movie, so why do we do that to Shakespeare? It is foolish to put him among the Gods and concede that everything he ever wrote is brilliant, just because one play is. So please, let's exercise a little common sense when dealing with fields of study with little substantive worth.
Oh and uh screw this class
