A Pseudo-Intellectual Guide to Quoting Shakespeare
I don’t know who she is, but I know that WhirlyGirl is smart. I’ll tell you why. She busted me for the unattributed Shakespeare quotation in my How to Be a Soul Blogger post. That means she not only reads my dreck, but when she came across the line:
Had I but served my God with half the zeal that I have served Denton [the original reads ‘my king’], He would not in mine age have left me naked to mine enemies.
She wrote:
This sentence is a pristine example of wordsmithery. It quite literally flows from the mind and mouth.
She not only read the dreck, but when she came across the Shakespeare she saw the pearl in the mud. There is no shame in not knowing that quote because it comes from Henry VIII, and nobody has read Henry VIII, not even people who have read a lot of Shakespeare.
You may be wondering how I know that quotation. The answer is, “I got it from a relative.” It was also a favorite of James Michael Curley’s.
That’s the essence of privilege, folks. If you have a couple of generations of people who have had private school education and university…
