Thursday, December 01, 2005

Ah Shakespeare

Back when I was working on the Fascination, the Carnival Cruise ship I was on from January through May of this year, I made a pretty incredible find in a book shop in Key West, Florida (our every Tuesday morning stop on the way from Miami to Cozumel): a hard cover edition of the complete works of Shakespear (including the sonnets) for $3.50 American! (I later also found in the same place a hard cover edition of the complete writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson for a whole $5.) Since then I've been reading a lot of the Bard. So much great writing. Here's a quote from Richard III:

"But then I sigh, and with a piece of scripture, tell them that God bids us do good for evil. And thus I clothe my naked villainy with odds and ends stol'n forth of Holy writ and seem a saint when most I play the devil."

By no means do I mean to imply anything self-descriptive by me posting this, but what a perfect description of the pure (though apparently historically inaccurate; the demonizing of Richard being a production of the later Tudor kings that succeeded the York dynasty that Richard had been the last King of England from; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_III_of_England) evil that Shakespeare charaacterized so brilliantly in that play. Ian McKellen's (of Lord of the Rings Gandalf fame) film version is well worth seeing if you're at all interested.

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