Friday, March 4, 2011

Homebaked Shakespeare



It's National Grammar Day!!!

Good thing Shakespeare didn't pay much attention to things like grammar, though. Otherwise, we would have missed out on this gem of an incomplete sentence from Ophelia's broken lament:

"The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword, / Th'expectation and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mould of form, / Th'observ'd of all observers, quite, quite down!"

Not to mention Richard Gloucester's deliciously creepy plan to marry Anne, the woman whose father and husband he's just killed:

"The readiest way to make the wench amends / Is to become her husband and her father, / The which will I —not all so much for love, / As for another secret close intent / By marrying her which I must reach unto."

That dangling preposition at the end would get him arrested by the Grammar Police today, but what better way to express Richard's overreaching than with an excess "unto"?

So, go ahead, break the rules. Make some magic. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.

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