Saturday, May 22, 2010

"To be or not to be" Shakespeare in the Sookie verse

I'm sure you all noticed in the latest Sookie Stackhouse book "Dead in the Family" that Shakespeare opens the books and closes the book, not only Shakespeare but particularly the play, Hamlet.

On page 10 we read ....
“There’s the rub,” Eric said. Somewhere along the line, my Viking honey had read Shakespeare.
Pg 10
The quote was fromShakespeare's Hamlet. "To sleep--perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub."

Then on the last few pages..

“This is positively Shakespearean,” I said, looking around at the remains and the blood soaking into the ground.
Pg 217

“You were right,” Eric said, still in that very slow voice. “This is just like the end of one of Shakespeare’s plays.”
“We’re the people left standing. Yay for us.
” Pg 218

And in the play, Hamlet that scene reads like this .....

Horatio says at the end of hamlet amidst the carnage
And let me speak to the yet unknowing world
380 How these things came about. So shall you hear

381 Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
382 Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
383 Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
384 And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
385 Fall'n on the inventors' heads: all this can I
386 Truly deliver.
Good night sweet prince


There is only a few additional Shakespearean reference in the Sookie books:

Club Dead
Eric began to grin. "You offed Lorena?" He had a good grasp of the vernacular, for a very old vampire. It was hard to interpret Bill's expression. "Sookie staked her," he said. "It was a fair kill." "She killed Lorena in a fight?" Eric's grin grew even broader. He was as proud as if he'd heard his firstborn reciting Shakespeare. "Very short fight," I said, not wanting to take any credit that was not due me. If you could term it credit.

Dead and Gone
I was standing out in my backyard hosing down fairy blood and making melodramatic statements all to myself. Next I’d be doing the Hamlet soliloquy that I’d had to memorize in high school.
This afternoon had brought me down hard, to a real bad place.

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