Tuesday, November 4, 2008

Shakespeare on Election Day: Who will Pop in Between the Election and Whose Hopes?

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. 2nd. ed. London: Arden, 1982.
If you'd like to know the outcome of today's election, it's all right there in Shakespeare. 

Here's Hamlet's dying speech from Act V:
But I do prophesy [gasp, choke] the election [labored breathing] lights / On . . . [garbled & inaudible speech at this point]. / The rest is silence.
However you vote, let's hope we don't end up like the crowd in II.iii of Coriolanus. As you remember, they all cry together,
. . . almost all
Repent in their election!

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Unless otherwise indicated, quotations from Shakespeare's works are from the following edition:
Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Gen. ed. G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.
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The very instant that I saw you did / My heart fly to your service; there resides, / To make me slave to it; and, for your sake, / Am I this patient [b]log-man.

—The Tempest