Hamlet's Soliloquy

Subject: Fwd: Mel Gibson - Hamlet's Soliloquy

http://youtu.be/ei0fnP9s0KA

For those who attended Grammar School, or the few who attended Private School, a grounding in Shakespeare was obligatory. The Bard was seen as holding a spell over our language with  flighty phrases, well remembered soliloquies and ominous reflections on the state of the nation and the principle characters in our history. English history written not by a historian but a dramatist who brought to life and equally quickly, cast into death the main players and their deeds which litter our history books.
It is written in a language and which uses phraseology no longer used today and yet we still thrill to the cut and thrust of the dialog. The rapier sharp precision with which he uses words to wound or praise, the descriptions of intrigue and deceit within the baronial power base of largely England, written in 1600 it is as fresh today as when it was first performed in London. I suppose it was in some ways a commentary a satire on the depths people will go to obtain power.
Today I watched Hamlet, that sad story of a prince brought close to madness by his father, the King, who's  death at the hands of the dead kings brother, his uncle was made more bitter by his mothers willingness to lie with the uncle in their conjugal bed.
Ridden with pain and angst he broods and reflects in the famous soliloquy "To be or not to be" about the meaning of life.
There are many lines from his plays which are homespun colloquialisms, if not used in the modern idiom at least remembered as a sort of linguistic baseline.
What was called a 'well rounded education' (not for the likes of me, educated as I was in the backwaters of a Secondary Modern educational slag heap) youngsters found in the literature of Shakespeare all the pathos and Machiavellian intrigue that any author since has struggled to convey.
Take the clip I have enclosed. The desperate nature of a troubled mind translates to today's world perfectly once one takes the time and trouble to understand the words and phrases which were used four centuries ago.
Of course modern youth (and the not so young) see no benefit in exposing themselves to a bit of work. Why with Google around and its disconnected channelling of thought, to answers without reference, the proverbial quick fix favoured by most these days.