"My words fly up; my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to Heaven go"(Hamlet, III, iii, 97-98).
After giving an honest try at understanding the twisty-turny words of Shakespeare, I must admit there is some level of connection between the reader and this ancient 1600s play. My freshman self wouldn't have believed it. I remember all too painfully the first time we attacked Shakespeare with what was presumably his funniest work: A Midsummer Night's Dream. How awkward it was, not only for me but for the teacher, as we skimmed through many of the "dirtiest," "funniest" lines with blank, confused eyes and a lack of understanding (on the students' part). But I've realized that really giving the time to analyze these words that Shakespeare is construing and misconstruing gives much more meaning than giving a straightforward, simple dialogue (which I guess is the case for all good literary work). Throughout my freshman and sophomore years, Shakespeare always made me angry. Since we never actually focused on the meaning of the words (which we're doing now), all Shakespeare meant to me was a writer for the lame stories we've come to base our pop culture around--forbidden love from Romeo and Juliet, the struggle for kingship in Macbeth, bundled up in an obsolete form of English language that I was too lazy to look into. There was an emphasis on the plot instead of the diction, and for that reason No Fear Shakespeare became my best friend.
Geez, starting on a tangent before even addressing the quote. It's there for a reason, I promise. Reading the last two rhyming lines of the third scene of the third act of Hamlet gave me slight chills because of how incredibly relevant that sentence is. Relevance? In a Shakespeare work? Forget about it. And yet here we are, gasping and reeling at Claudius's hideous crime and getting extremely annoyed with Hamlet's indecision to do anything about it (in my opinion, at least). Everybody knows the basic story to this tragedy--if you've seen The Lion King, that is. Why bother reading it then? Suddenly it isn't about the plot anymore, but rather the relationships between the characters and the way they speak.
But this specific quote is my personal favorite in Hamlet so far, mainly because it rings so true in my head for some reason. To simplify, Claudius says that his 'grief' and 'need to repent' is empty and false since he doesn't truly think or believe in the words he says. For this reason, any prayer he sends about his murderous deed or his dead brother-king isn't light enough with truth to float to heaven and be "heard" by God, or whoever it is that lives there and decides our mortal fates. It can be taken two ways, now that I think about it; his words may be fake without the input of thought, which disables him to get to heaven. Or, the heaviness behind the words due to his true murderous thoughts make it too heavy for it to go to Heaven. When I read these lines, I felt like I've learned something extremely important, even though a part of me knew this information already. It's almost like whatever I feel is moral and immoral has just been verbally described by Shakespeare. Me, connect with Shakespeare? Yeah, right.
But it happened. The desperate measures I take to avoid boredom during a snow-in are astounding, but I gotta say it paid off somehow.
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