He was a man, take him for all in all,

I shall not look upon his like again.

This quote from Hamlet is a little funny if you know the play. Hamlet remarks on his father, the king, that he was such a great man as to never be equalled by anyone. Hamlet mourns the fact that he’ll never see anyone like him again. As it turns out, however, he does. The king appears to him later as a ghost.

It’s actually kind of cruel from the author of the play. Have the character portray great sorrow over losing someone and deliver touching words of idolation. Then bring the deceased person back, to drive the knife in deeper.

I suppose, to Roger Stritmatter’s mind, this would be the 17th Earle of Oxenforde lamenting about his disappearance into the shadows of history. I vaguely recall that was his main interpretation of Hamlet, but I should check that some day. It’s just that I stacked away all my Shakespeare notes underneath hundreds of others, so the task of retrieval seems a little daunting right now. I guess there was some logic in putting heaps and heaps of corpus data on top of them, so I’ll go through those first. In fact, I would love to, but I won’t let myself. No play before I’ve completed my degree.

I did allow myself a small trip to the English section in the library. Only to remind myself that the only way I can ever start defining my research topic is by going through all that damn data first! Gahhh. I wouldn’t mind though, if I didn’t know I wouldn’t do anything else for a long time.

As for Mr. Strimatter, I actually find it hard to be hard on this guy. He’s among the most genius of the Shakespeare heretics, even if also one of the most vehement and overly assertive. When he accuses orthodox Shakespearians of misinterpeting Shakespeare completely in utilising Cartesian logic, you can’t help but tip your hat at him. (I wonder how he personally resisted its charms.)

We should truly take him for all heretics, all heretics in one person. He is a man the like of which we shall not look upon again when he’s gone. Before that, though, there’ll be plenty more entertainment to come.

Seriously, I’m not being sarcastic. He’s a great writer. His personal empire of hereticism is growing by the day like a newborn. A small part of me hopes I could just jump in the bandwagon and enjoy the ride.