Great Quotes

The Dane: That it should come to this!
Gabibot: Well, there’s your problem. I’m not a virgin anymore.
The Dane: Well, good-night.
If you do meet Horatio and Mercellus, the rivals of my watch, bid them make haste.
Gabibot: Ancient and inflexible rules governing moral behavior were harmed during the production of this chat.

Azureon: So tell me about yourself, what do you like to eat, what do you like to do,?
Not I: eon after eon, eon after eon
. And yet I like to glide above the clouds.
I am just skin and bones,
like an old pelican.
Azureon: Interesting that you are just skin and bones.tell me more.
Not I: What do you want to know about more?
Azureon: I want to know the secrets of the universe.
Not I: Soon it will be over. What more would you say?
Azureon: That's it in a nutshell.

Bev:

Finally getting over Xena, is she?
Not a great choice of guy, though... look what happened to Ophelia! People often make bad choices on the rebound.

Gabby was always bi, however, if you note, the dane was hitting on her, until she told him she was not a virgin. Then he left, suggesting she may please two other men in that insulting way some men can have when a women makes choices they don't like. She then made fun of his rules.

That was my take anyway

Ah, I see. What a male-chaivinist twerp! I'm glad he gets poisoned in the end!

No kidding, Irnia. If he were only playing mad, why didn't he let Ophelia in on it? Jerk. Why does the woman always end up dead or ruined because of some idiot guy and his big plans?

Cos otherwise it wouldn't be a tragedy?

Oh Corwin, can't people have tragedies just by taking revenge on their mom and uncle without screwing over someone innocent?

I bet you are going to tell me that Greek men who fooled around on their wives and destroyed the lives of young women who fell for them were "heroes". No wonder Cybele turned the lot of them into pigs. Seems to be little change, really.

That has always disturbed me a bit about Hamlet. Among other things. The best defense I can offer, at the moment, would be this: Hamlet is a real person who has been subjected to a terrible trauma, discovering that his mother has successfully conspired with his father's brother to murder his father. It is of course totally irrational and unjust of him to take this out on Ophelia, who is apparently unconnected with the crime. Being a real human being and not an ideal rational being, he responds in irrational and unconstructive ways. One of his responses is to generalize from his mother to all womankind; another is to overgeneralize to as to condemn all sexuality ("take thee to a nunnery). Shakespeare is not saying, "If you find out that your mother has done something like this, you should take it out on your girlfriend." he's saying that in fact, alas, people will do this sort of thing, sometimes. This is a tragic fact about the human condition: we have the ability to have deep moral insights, but under stress, we can radically fail to live up to them. Hamlet's trauma causes him to question everything, even the value of human life itself. He is clearly very bright and serious, and given time and peace, he might have eventually worked his way out of it, but events move too fast.

I would add that I would hesitate to draw any conclusions about men in general from the story of Hamlet, just as I would not draw conclusions about women in general from the fact that Medea makes soup out of her children.