"We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school."

When I was younger I was severely against Shakespeare. It wasn't that I disliked his writing, it was that I disliked Romeo & Juliet. A play written about two hormonal teenagers, who commit suicide due to a comedy of errors and their own teenage impulse to be completely idiotic. 

Of course, people didn't live so long back then anyway, so I suppose that following impulses did not leave you with as long lasting consequences. Eventually, I was forced to read yet another work by this most odious author. Okay, I thought, Macbeth wasn't so bad, but one decent work does not make a great author... Oh fuck me, I'm in love with Hamlet. Not the character. He's an emo, whiny little prick. The play, however, is one of my absolute favorites. I know that everybody is all up in the "to be or not to be" business, but my personal favorite of the Hamlet soliloquies is this one.


O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! O fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead!—nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother,
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month,—
Let me not think on’t,—Frailty, thy name is woman!—
A little month; or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body
Like Niobe, all tears;—why she, even she,—
O God! a beast that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn’d longer,—married with mine uncle,
My father’s brother; but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month;
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married:— O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not, nor it cannot come to good;
But break my heart,—for I must hold my tongue.

-Hamlet (act I, scene II) by William Shakespeare

(5 points for Ravenclaw if you recognized the title quote from play/movie Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard)

"The game's afoot..."

So apparently, this phrase, or a version of it, is used in just about every Sherlock Holms related anything and I never realized that there was more to it. The whole line was actually included when used in the first of the Robert Downey Jr. Sherlock Holms films. The entire quote is:


"The game's afoot: follow you spirit, and upon this charge cry 'God for Harry, England, and St. George!'"


It is part of the speech that starts, "Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead." from Act III of Shakespeare's Henry V
It is an amazingly stirring speech goading the British troops into battle to conquer France. To be honest I have only watched one rendition of the play, and I remember not being overly fond of how distracting it was in that particular version. I shall have to look up another. Although, for all I know, I could simply dislike the play. Reading is always preferable, of course, but the sad statement is that I am so bad at time management that I probably won't do that until summer.


In any case, I am always tickled when authors of fiction make reference to actual works. Especially authors who I admire on either side of the equation.