Sunday 13 November 1664

Annotations

• N jeannine on Wed 14 Nov 2007, 12:29am

  To be or not to be….(so you can read along with Sam!)

  
  To be, or not to be: that is the question:
  Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
  And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
  No more; and by a sleep to say we end
  The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
  That flesh is heir to, ‘tis a consummation
  Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
  To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
  For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
  When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
  Must give us pause: there’s the respect
  That makes calamity of so long life;
  For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
  The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
  The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
  The insolence of office and the spurns
  That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
  When he himself might his quietus make
  With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
  To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
  But that the dread of something after death,
  The undiscover’d country from whose bourn
  No traveller returns, puzzles the will
  And makes us rather bear those ills we have
  Than fly to others that we know not of?
  Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
  And thus the native hue of resolution
  Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
  And enterprises of great pith and moment
  With this regard their currents turn awry,
  And lose the name of action. - Soft you now!
  The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons
  Be all my sins remember’d.
  

• N jeannine on Wed 14 Nov 2007, 01:06am

  To bee or not to bee

  
  To bee or not to be
  But what bee did he see?
  Ortographizing bee?
  A bungling buzzing bee?
  A Castlemainish bee?
  A sweetly loving bee?

  
  No none of these you see
  No not a spelling bee
  Nor ev’n a bumblebee
  Not a diva queen bee
  But Bess his honey bee…..
  

• N Bunce on Wed 14 Nov 2007, 02:50am

  Jeanine
  You dispell
  The Bee
  is captured in the
  spell,
  of the sting of deaths
  sweet dreams,
  life is sometimes
  not what it seems.
  Nancy “B”

• N Robert Gertz on Wed 14 Nov 2007, 03:08am

  But Sam did it without book…

  Of course in these heroic warring times I’d’ve gone for Hal V’s “Once more onto the breech, dear friends…”

  Actually a little tragedy for Bard buffs that he didn’t give us just a bit more so as to give us a feel for how Betterton’s stage version went…Perhaps it was leaning more towards the original gore and guts revenge Hamlet.

  “Hamlet! Revenge!”

  “Sam’l? Must I keep saying that? Sounds ridiculous repeated over and over.”

  “Bess. In the original, Shakespeare wasn’t too proud to do it.”

  “But I like the updated version…I could do Ophelia. Or you could her…” grin “…and I’ll do Hamlet.”

  “Am I forever to be cursed by one bad casting?…Besides the updated one’s nice but the lad’s a temporizing bore after you’ve heard it a few times. This older one gets right down to the good stuff. Like ‘Adventure of Five Hours’.”

  
  

• N Australian Susan on Wed 14 Nov 2007, 04:23am

  “….to hear our clerke sing out of tune, …” so now we have it confirmed that Sam was used to listening to a sung or chanted liturgy. Or maybe this was just the psalm. Shows too, that Sam had a good ear - and was not above indulging in some schoolboy sniggering in the gallery.

• N Terry F on Wed 14 Nov 2007, 06:22am

  L&M explain that since 1644 St. Olave’s — how to say this without … — had been without an organ; what was needed was a song-leader with a good ear.

• N Mary on Wed 14 Nov 2007, 08:25am

  “getting ….. without book”

  i.e. learning it by heart.

• N Bradford on Wed 14 Nov 2007, 02:34pm

  And no rhymes to grab onto as mnemonics, with so many run-ons and sentences long as your tongue—-did Pepys count the syllables off on his fingers?

• N Wim van der Meij on Wed 14 Nov 2007, 02:45pm

  If I remember correctly Sam has seldom been appreciative of Shakespeare’s plays. Apparently the soliloque from Hamlet was even then a famous one and well-known enough for Sam to learn it by heart.
  I did the same here on the secondary school and often parts of it return on various occasions.

• N Ruben on Wed 14 Nov 2007, 02:46pm

  Today’s 3 sentences are wonderful. You do not have to be an English expert to feel that each word is exactly in the right and necessary place.
  I liked specially “…,he gone I to supper,…” What an economy! Coming from the Spanish prodigality with words, I just admire the phrasing.

• N JWB on Wed 14 Nov 2007, 02:58pm

  Shakespeare appreciation

  Perhaps it’s the run-up to war. A Shakespeare theme, in the history plays, is a call to civil harmony. We recently witnessed Sam’s like-mindedness on the 12th, in Jeannine’s annotation, where he stands up for Taylor v. sectarian division.

• N jeannine on Wed 14 Nov 2007, 05:18pm

  Homonyms

  Sometimes the Diary will hit something that is so pertinent to ‘life’ that it causes a smile. Sam’s entry today with ‘to bee or not to bee” hit that note for me. Last night my daughter’s spelling homework was to learn and differentiate the uses of different homonyms, and I am the at home quiz master. After 15 minutes of creating nonsense sentences such as “I went TO get toe shoes and bought TWO tutus TOO”, Sam’s use of “BEE” as opposed to “BE” was a delight to see!

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homonym
  

• N Terry F on Wed 14 Nov 2007, 07:39pm

  And there is the headline “Seinfeld’s Animated ‘Bee Movie’ Tops US Weekend Box Office” (drama of another ‘to bee or not to bee’ medium)
  http://www.voanews.com/english/Entertainment/2007-11-13-voa34.cfm

• N Carl in Boston on Sat 17 Nov 2007, 02:36pm

  Then came Donald Duck the aspiring actor, who declaimed:
  Who would fardels bear, and sink into the quagmire?

  Patrick Swazey did this speech, I think, and went:
  To die (slow down)
  to sleep (drowsily)
  to sleep (sleepily)
  (starting suddenly and speaking hastily) perchance to dream
  (pointing with alertness) ay, there’s the rub
  etc, etc.

  Patrick Swazey does my favorite Ebenezer Scrooge,
  declaiming before the Ghost of the Future
  Why show me these things if there is no hope of change?
  (quick point upwards at the Ghost, aha, I’ve got you on that point)
  etc, etc.