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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 18.0840  Sunday, 16 December 2007

[1] 	From:	Larry Weiss <larry@lweiss.net>
	Date:	Thursday, 13 Dec 2007 17:20:16 -0500
	Subj:	Re: SHK 18.0833 Soliloquies - Truth or Lie...or Overheard?

[2] 	From:	Peter Groves <Montiverdi@bigpond.com>
	Date:	Friday, 14 Dec 2007 10:11:58 +1100
	Subj:	RE: SHK 18.0833 Soliloquies - Truth or Lie...or Overheard?

[3] 	From:	Edmund Taft <taft@marshall.edu>
	Date:	Friday, 14 Dec 2007 09:29:10 -0500
	Subj:	Soliloquies


[1]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:		Larry Weiss <larry@lweiss.net>
Date:		Thursday, 13 Dec 2007 17:20:16 -0500
Subject: 18.0833 Soliloquies - Truth or Lie...or Overheard?
Comment:	Re: SHK 18.0833 Soliloquies - Truth or Lie...or Overheard?

The point is not that tendentiousness is unique to Polonius. It is 
especially pronounced in him, but let that slide. The point is that in 
this instance it is *Ophelia* who delivers up a particularly trite 
rhymed aphorism about how one ideally should conduct himself; and that 
*is* peculiar to Polonius and, most significantly, foreign to Ophelia's 
nature and customary style of address.

[2]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:		Peter Groves <Montiverdi@bigpond.com>
Date:		Friday, 14 Dec 2007 10:11:58 +1100
Subject: 18.0833 Soliloquies - Truth or Lie...or Overheard?
Comment:	RE: SHK 18.0833 Soliloquies - Truth or Lie...or Overheard?

Scott Shepherd is to be congratulated on the subtlety of his ear. It 
hadn't struck me that all the sententiae in <Hamlet>are clumsily 
inappropriate to their context.

Peter Groves

[3]-----------------------------------------------------------------
From:		Edmund Taft <taft@marshall.edu>
Date:		Friday, 14 Dec 2007 09:29:10 -0500
Subject:	Soliloquies

Joe Egert asks whether "a failure to acknowledge" (Harry Berger's 
approach to _KL_) involves consciously or unconsciously filing something 
away in the back of the mind. Berger would be the best one to answer 
this question, but my sense from reading him is that the act of pushing 
away unwanted or unpleasant thoughts is conscious. If I read Berger 
right, that's the difference between the Renaissance notion of the mind 
and Freud's. Freud thought we unconsciously repress things that disturb 
us. Failure to acknowledge posits that we consciously bury and try to 
hide in our conscious mind what disturbs us. It's there, but we refuse 
to "acknowledge" it.

An example might help. When I was in 8th grade, I went to a high school 
football game and was surrounded by a bunch of bullies, one of whom, 6 
inches taller and 50 lbs, heavier than me, pushed me off a rocky cliff. 
I was in the hospital for about a week. T that time was the only period 
that I think I could have killed another human being in cold blood. I 
was so angry that if I'd had a gun, I would have used it on this guy.

Twenty years later, someone asked me if I had ever been mad enough to 
kill another person in cold blood, and I said "No." Then, about 5 
minutes later, I remembered the incident above. Everything was in my 
conscious mind, Joe, but at first I had "failed to acknowledge" what I 
knew. I hadn't unconsciously repressed it; I had so buried it in my 
conscious mind that at first, I skipped over it.

So there you are. End of personal confession.

Ed Taft

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