Re: From Judy (Re: Is Flaming Evil not allowed here? ) --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Angela Mailander <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > You do not have my interpretation of Hamlet, only a very short snippet. > No judgment as the quality of the whole can be based on that. a
Disingenous (again). You (following Peter Brook) took a couple of lines of a very long play and *misread* them in a manner completely contrary to anything that's actually in the play, let alone in the lines themselves. And more disingenuity: You were most definitely putting forward an interpretation of the play. Here's the part that comes right before what I quoted from your post: "Rulers throughout history have never been bound by the distinction ordinary human beings naturally draw between good and evil. The Gita makes that perfectly plain. And so does Shakespeare's Hamlet. I imagine we're all familiar with the Gita, particularly with verse 45 of Chapter Two. Hamlet's theme can be understood as an elaboration of that verse." Not only does Shakespeare not make it "perfectly plain" that rulers are not bound by the distinction between good and evil, he explicitly *contradicts* any such notion, again and again throughout his plays: even his loftiest rulers are subject to the same terrible flaws, and especially to the same self-doubt, as the rest of humankind. Hamlet's theme can legitimately be understood in many ways, but one way it *cannot* be understood is as an elaboration of verse II:45 of the Gita. Bash away at the Gita all you like, but don't try to ensnare Shakespeare in your net through guilt by warped association. That's about as intellectually dishonest as it gets.
