The Reading Room

Tsundoku

00:00

"These damned serial-comma users, they can thank their parents the Earl of Oxford and Hortense Spillers."

The Oxford Comma Is Pretentious.

I think this requires a limerick.

bobble

North, I just got Fanatic here

Prince North Læraðr

DDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD:

cries

Tsundoku

Yes, it's true. Congrats, @bobble!

Prince North Læraðr

cries some more

Tsundoku

This is not a good moment to mention that North is 51 edits away from the Copy-Editor badge, I guess.

Prince North Læraðr

00:08

Hey, 51 is not that far away~!

bobble

3 x 17

Tsundoku

00:19

I have reworded this question about whether Hamlet is a misogynist.

Where to start reading George Orwell.

^ Not in Room 101.

Penguin should really reprint Orwell's Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. Even second-hand copies cost an arm and a leg. This offer costs €240 for the four volumes.

And this copy of volume 1 on Amazon.de costs over € 1300.

Prince North Læraðr

00:38

O_o

Tsundoku

And Orwell is not exactly outdated...

Prince North Læraðr

groans in copyright laws

Tsundoku

While researching my answer to that Celan question, I came across the Wikipedia article Opium and Romanticism. And after that sleep-inducing subject, I think it is time for me to go to bed.

Those comma wars aren't happening anyway.

Prince North Læraðr

Question: is there a suffix meaning the word "of"

Like a word meaning "god of" or "of wood"?

Napoleon Wilson

The possessive apostrophe?

Prince North Læraðr

00:53

Hm

Rand al'Thor

05:32

@PrinceNorthLæraðr What a random question ;-)

@PrinceNorthLæraðr I also vote for, use, and support Oxford commas.

verbose

06:36

@Tsundoku Telling that the only evidence you could find is a poorly written op-ed from a student newspaper 😛

And the Federalist, which is far-right propaganda.

@bobble Congratulations! I missed a day some days ago, apparently.

@Tsundoku It's still a junk question. 🤷🏽‍♂️ Subjective opinion-based.

Well, it begs the question. Is there evidence in the play that Hamlet is misogynist?

And it treats characters as though they were real people.

It seems that a conclusion has been reached: Hamlet is a misogynist; and the answerer is tasked with finding evidence for that conclusion.

@PrinceNorthLæraðr In English? Or in any language?

@Randal'Thor Speaking of Gilles, he's another person who used to be active in Lit SE and isn't any more. Sad.

Rand al'Thor

07:11

@verbose TBF, the OP's original post said "Would you say Hamlet is/isn't a misogynist?" The question-begging was introduced by other editors later.

I've edited to restore some of that neutrality.

verbose

07:47

@Randal'Thor Thing is, if one wants to take a feminist approach to Hamlet, there are so many more interesting questions to ask. For example, here is Elaine Showalter:

> Insofar as Hamlet names Ophelia as “woman” and “frailty,” substituting an ideological view of femininity for a personal one, is she indeed representative of Woman, and does her madness stand for the oppression of women in society as well as in tragedy?

> Furthermore, since Laertes calls Ophelia a “document in madness,” does she represent the textual archetype of woman as madness or madness as woman? And finally, how should feminist criticism represent Ophelia in its own discourse? What is our responsibility towards her as character and as woman?

She raises these questions in the first paragraph and then proceeds to explore them through the rest of the essay. To ask whether Hamlet himself is misognynist is so reductive given the myriad ways feminist scholars have shown us to interrogate how misogyny operates in culture.

And Showalter's essay is from 1994, IIRC; not even a recent one.

A question like "Is Hamlet misogynistic or not?" boils down to asking whether he had or escapes a character flaw. Or if the conclusion is that "Shakespeare is at fault for making a misogynist out to be a hero," then it's the playwright's fault. Or if the conclusion is that Shakespeare is showing us Hamlet's misogyny and we're meant to condemn it, then Shakespeare is a good man. To me, all these don't seem like interesting readings of the play at all.

Wait, not the first paragraph, it's the third paragraph. Sorry

Rand al'Thor

08:57

OK, if one knows about all the existing studies on Hamlet and on feminism, then this question seems simplistic. But we can't expect a first-time asker to necessarily have all that context. From the point of view of a non-expert who's just read or seen Hamlet, is it such a silly question?

Apr 15 '20 at 7:17, by Gareth Rees

Even poorly expressed questions are of value to literature.se because they provides a hook on which to hang a good answer. In the case of the Hamlet question, it could have been better phrased, it could have been more specific, it could have quoted relevant passages, etc. But that wouldn't make much difference to people writing answers -- the essence of the question is quite clear as it stands

^ heh, I was going to link this as a general principle, and then realised it's this very question that Gareth was talking about back then!

Even if a question seems silly or simplistic to someone with knowledge of the relevant topics, it can often be rescued with a frame-challenge answer or even just an answer that shares the expertise the OP doesn't have.

-1

Q: Was Harry Potter the first magic series to use wands?

Was Harry Potter the first magic series to use wands? I can't really think of any other series that used them.

verbose

09:16

@Randal'Thor I dunno, I think of the Hamlet question as not even wrong. LC Knight's essay arguing that characters in literary works are not to be treated as real people dates back to 1933. Maybe, as Gareth says, "the essence of the question is quite clear"; but answering it on its own terms is superficial.

And reframing it would take too much effort, because it's so far from any defensible approach to the play. How does one explain long division to someone who can't subtract?

Rand al'Thor

09:31

Well, you certainly know more about this topic than me, so I can't strongly argue the case :-)

I guess my point of view is more that of a non-expert to whom it seems like a not terribly unreasonable question.

verbose

09:45

@Randal'Thor I'm not sure that's how I want to frame this discussion: me the expert, you the non-expert? I hang out here for fun, not to indulge my expertise. I learn a lot from the questions and answers here, including from yours.

@PrinceNorthLæraðr argued, back in April, that the question was close-worthy as well. His point:

> part of the design behind SE is to generate good questions that provoke a thoughtful response.

I don't think he'd consider himself an expert either.

Rand al'Thor

I was thinking of that too, SE selling itself on "expert questions with expert answers". We certainly have some really well-researched questions here (like many of @Tsundoku's), but does anyone lose out from a poorly-researched or poorly-posed question which gets a good answer? If the point is to get a repository of knowledge, then a good answer can provide interesting knowledge regardless of the quality of the question.

I suppose some poor questions would have answers that don't really add any particular value to the internet (like "who's the main character of 1984", say). But Gareth's hook metaphor often does apply.

verbose

10:00

I don't think the way the question is framed is likely to lead to interesting answers. There are too many assumptions I'd want to challenge. For example, let's say for the sake of argument that we start by saying, yes, here is an example of Hamlet's behavior which is clearly misogynistic. Then the question becomes: Does the play present this uncritically, or is the play showing us Hamlet's misogyny and asking us to condemn it? So there's a frame challenge right there:

just because a behavior is depicted, it doesn't mean that the behavior is defended. However, that switches us to asking what Shakespeare's intentions were, which is another assumption to challenge: do Shakespeare's intentions matter? What matters is how the play engages with discourses around certain representations of /attitudes toward womanhood.

Then that in turn gets into historical stuff about Elizabethan representations of femininity generally, and what a feminist response would look like. By this point I'm beginning to find it an interesting question—but to get it to that point would require so much frame-changing, it's not an effort I feel like undertaking.

But clearly you, Tsundoku, and Gareth think the question is fine for the site, which is argument enough for me, actually. Just because I roll my eyes at the question doesn't mean it doesn't belong here.

Rand al'Thor

@verbose Why would we need to go into whether the play presents Hamlet's hypothetical misogyny critically or not? The question itself doesn't refer to how misogyny is portrayed or to Shakespeare's intentions, just whether it can be interpreted to be there or not.

Or you mean that's what would make it an interesting question in your eyes?

verbose

Yes, that's what I mean would make it interesting to me. Or at least, would give me a starting point to reframe it in a way that would make it interesting. It's the same sort of question as this one you asked, which I reframed in my answer.

Rand al'Thor

Fair enough.

verbose

Also, I don't think it takes any work at all to answer the question as asked. "Yes, there are examples of Hamlet's misogyny. Look at his lashing out at both Gertrude and Ophelia. Examples, here, here, and here. "

"Frailty, thy name is woman" is a pretty misogynist statement, I think we can agree.

One could defend it by saying Hamlet is sympathetic toward how social strictures make it impossible for women to be strong—except there's no evidence for that in the play. So one could defend it by saying Shakespeare is showing how social strictures, etc., but that again is sort of assuming that the point is to see what Shakespeare's intentions were.

@Randal'Thor So that contradicts what you said earlier:

> If the point is to get a repository of knowledge, then a good answer can provide interesting knowledge regardless of the quality of the question.

Just to say "here is an example of Hamlet's being misogynistic" is not a good answer; and to my mind, working up to a good answer to this question is well-nigh impossible because it's so superficial.

Oh well it's half past 2 a.m. o'clock in the wee hours of the night and I should betake myself to bed.

As a song my very Catholic elementary school taught us when I was in second grade went:

Rand al'Thor

10:19

Hmm, OK, if it's so clear from the play that Hamlet does display misogyny, then I can see your point.

(confession: I haven't read Hamlet properly, only some parts and a retelling years ago)

verbose

> Good night to you all, and sweet be thy sleep
> May the angels around you their silent watch keep

Rand al'Thor

Maybe then its usefulness is restricted to people who're writing an essay on Hamlet and need an easy list of examples demonstrating his attitude towards women. Which maybe isn't in the SE spirit of expert questions or expert answers.

On an entirely different note, I just found this answer. Since the OP explicitly says he's looking for what academics, scholars, and theorists have said about this, should that answer be NAA?

@verbose Sweet dreams!

Tsundoku

13:55

@verbose In case you would like to update some of the links: History of English as a Discipline, Shakespeare Studies, Samuel McClure Taylor writes, ...

... Richard Schur, Henry VIII (or Henry VIII).

I couldn't find a new link for "fabulously wealthy" on Time.com.

Bookworm

14:46

0

Q: If you descibe someone is like a one who would adorn a bench of bishops, what is the person like?

I’d like to ask about the sentence from the Illustrious Client by Conan Doyle. A butler, who would have adorned a bench of bishops, showed me in and… I wanted to know what impression the author wanted to give to the readers with the underlined metaphor. This part doesn’t mean like the butler wo...

phrase

Prince North Læraðr

15:48

When you're sleeping and get 8 pings :P

Tsundoku

16:53

@PrinceNorthLæraðr 8 pings? Not from this room, I guess.

Prince North Læraðr

17:48

Well, half of them were from here :P

Bookworm

19:53

0

Q: Children's Book Identification

I read a book to my cousin two years ago which i would like to revisit. It was a book about a girl whose mother goes to jail after being accused of stealing drugs from the pharmacy she worked at? I think the girl's name was Lucy, or maybe Lucy was her dog's name, but I'm not quite sure. Anyhoo, a...

identification-request short-stories physical-books

Bookworm

20:44

0

Q: Why couldn't the teacher become a doctor?

In The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it's mentioned that the schoolteacher had an anatomy book on his desk due to wanting to be a doctor at one point. That being said, why couldn't he become a doctor? What kinds of things could have prevented him from doing that? Was medical school difficult to get i...

historical-context mark-twain adventures-of-tom-sawyer

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