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
