Today’s Totally Random
Lines
The
queen, the courtiers: who is that they follow?
And
with such maimed rites? This doth betoken
The
corse they follow did with desperate hand
Fordo
its own life: ‘twas of some estate.
Couch
me awhile and mark.
Hamlet
Hamlet Act V, Scene i, Line 225
Quick vocab check: corse
is corpse and couch is lie hidden. And,
by the way, MW has one modern meaning of couch as
to lie in ambush. I’m just saying. Maimed
rites simply means that the burial they’re watching is not being performed with
the proper rites and of some estate
means rich and/or important.
Okay, with all that, you shouldn’t need Pete’s Version. See, it's written in plain, modern English. Almost.
Obviously what Hamlet and Horatio are witnessing is the burial of Ophelia. They just don’t know, yet, that it’s Ophelia. That information's not going to go over well with our titular hero.
2 comments:
Didn't Shakespeare spell corpse as such in his writing? So why spell it as corse now?
No, he left out the p. I don't know why.
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