I liked this a lot! Anthologies can be hard to rate, especially since I didn't rate each individual story in this collection, but I would say I really liked two third of the ones in here, and there were no bad ones in the lot. That grows to seed things rank and gross in natureīut once we reach the encounter with the Ghost, and Marcellus’ famous quotation, this rottenness has come to infect not just the royal marital bed but the whole ‘state’ of Denmark.*I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review* His first great soliloquy includes the lines: Hamlet himself had already begun to use such language, however, before Marcellus’ ‘Something is rotten’ line. In other words, ‘isn’t it more evil to let evil go unchallenged so it can enact more evil?’ To quit him with this arm? and is’t not to be damn’d, Too oft before their buttons be disclosed,Īnd Hamlet, discussing his revenge against Claudius, asks Horatio: The canker galls the infants of the spring, Meanwhile, Laertes tells his sister Ophelia: I’ faith, if he be not rotten before he die – as we have many pocky corses now-a-days, that will scarce hold the laying in – he will last you some eight year or nine year: a tanner will last you nine year.
So, in the famous ‘Gravedigger scene’ later in Hamlet, the title character asks one of the gravediggers, ‘How long will a man lie i’ the earth ere he rot?’ The gravedigger replies: This language is an important aspect of the imagery of the play, and it begins with Marcellus’ line. Jasper Fforde, the author of the hilarious Thursday Next novels (mystery novels set in the worlds of classic works of literature), wrote a book, Something Rotten, in which his female detective has to solve a new mystery with the help of the Danish prince from Shakespeare’s play.īut ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ is a significant line in Hamlet because it ushers in what will become a whole array of references to rotting, decay, corruption, and festering. ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ has come to mean ‘something is not right with this’, and is sometimes shortened to ‘something is rotten’.
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