Context

Usually, an author is nice enough to think of his future audience, such as a group of AP English students in backwoods Reno, Nevada, to make it easy for said students to pull a piece of text out of a bigger work and be able to analyze it. Heck, the entire structure of the class that is AP English Language and Composition is basically based on this assumption. But maybe this William Shakespeare dude, maybe you’ve heard; maybe he didn't get the memo. For our class while reading Hamlet, we are required to individually find a speech, memorize it, and discover the meaning of said piece of text. Drawing on the assumption that I stated above, I chose a speech that we had not come to, Hamlet’s “how all occasion’s” soliloquy, thinking I could figure it out. It’s been a literal and figurative “walk in the park” memorizing it, and I thought I was understanding it alright as well. When we finally got to that part of the play, Act 4 Scene 4 to be exact, I was enlightened by the fact that I could not have been more wrong. So it turns out that when reading Shakespeare, you have to read the speech in context with the rest of the scene and the plot to actually develop an understanding, who knew! And yes, this occurs every single time, fortunately and unfortunately. It was amazing what a difference it made, I thought the delicate and tender leading the army was Hamlet at first, but no turns out it was Fortinbras, whom I had thought we were able to forget about by now. So the moral of this story is, Shakespeare isn’t nice, one does not simply analyze just one part of a scene and fully understand without reading the rest of the scene.