I'm hardly one to talk ...

... about the misuse of Shakespeare's lines and language. I was slow--very slow--to come to an appreciation of the Bard and his works. We read Julius Caesar and Macbeth in high school, and to say I was clueless is to underestimate the dimensions of cluelessness. I just flat did not get it. And if I didn't "get it," it's pretty evident that I also hated it!

In college, I avoided Shakespeare, though, in English 101 (Hiram College, summer session, 1962) I again hacked my way through Macbeth under the tutelage of Dr. Charles F. McKinley, who must have thought I was the Dyer boy who'd been left too long in the sun as an infant. (Or in the freezer.)

I didn't take a Shakespeare course in college. The professor who taught it--Dr. John Shaw--was on sabbatical the year I could have taken it, and although I was an English major, I was thrilled to avoid another encounter with yet more texts that would demonstrate to me that I was unworthy.

Later, though, I waded back in Lake Bard, discovering it was the Sea of Bard instead--and nearly drowned. But I eventually dog-paddled, then swam a bit. By the time I retired from teaching I had read all the plays (some multiple times) and poems and sonnets, and Joyce and I had seen every one of his plays onstage in venues all over the place.

So ... what I'm saying: I was slow to come to the Bard, slow to understand, and so I "get it" when I see/hear people quoting things in ways that demonstrate that they, also, don't quite "get it."

Here's a few examples:

• In Hamlet, the prince arranges for a group of traveling players to perform a play whose plot mirrors the murder of his own father (he knows details because the ghost of his father has told him). The players act right in front of Claudius, whom Hamlet suspects of murdering his father; Hamlet stares at him relentlessly to see how he will react. At one point, Hamlet asks his mother, the queen, now married to Claudius, how she's enjoying the play (he's not sure if she's involved in the murder), and Gertrude (Mom) says, in a way that's a bit ... strained:

The lady doth protest too much, methinks (3.2).

Now ... just today I read a character in a novel, a character saying that a woman had protested too much--meaning, complained, argued. And I've seen this over and over again throughout the years. But all Gertrude is saying, basically, is that the woman is talking too much--declaring too much.

• Also in Hamlet ... Hamlet is annoyed with Ophelia, his gf, because he believes she's betraying him--not in a romantic way but by letting others use her to spy on Hamlet. Angry, the prince cries this:

Get thee to a nunnery (3.1).

I learned years later that nunnery does mean what you think (a retreat for nuns)--but it could also mean a, uh, "house of ill repute." A bit harsh to say to the woman you supposedly love, eh?

• Finally--in Romeo and Juliet: Juliet, on the balcony, cries out:

O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo? (2.2)

She is not wondering where Romeo is--she's wailing about why he has to be Romeo. If he were someone else--not a member of a family in conflict with her own--then they could safely be together. But now ... being together spells t-r-a-g-e-d-y.

There are countless other examples of this sort of thing--in Shakespeare and just about everywhere else.

One of my favorites? The pen is mightier than the sword.  Everyone know this isn't literally true (If I have a choice of weapons, I'm taking the sword!).

But it's also out of context. The complete quotation comes from 1839 in a play by Edward Bulwer-Lytton: Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy. and goes like this:

Beneath the rule of men entirely great,

The pen is mightier than the sword.

So ... only in a place ruled by someone "entirely great" is the pen mightier than the sword. Everywhere else? Gimme a sword!