Misunderstood Shakespeare
Famous But Frequently Misapplied Quotations from The Bard
Shakespeare's lines are being quoted all the time, but not always in the sense in which he meant them...
The words Shakespeare wrote have become part of our language as well as our literary heritage. There are 33,000 quotations from Shakespeare in the Oxford English Dictionary, and it is surprisingly difficult to carry on a conversation for long without using one of his phrases. In fact we regularly quote Shakespeare without knowing we are doing so when we speak of loving "not wisely but too well" or declare that "the play's the thing".
The drawback to being so quotable, however, is that not everyone always understands what he meant. Some of the most famous, and frequently cited, lines from Shakespeare are regularly misunderstood. Here are a few of the top contenders:
O Romeo, Romeo. Wherefore art thou Romeo? (Romeo and Juliet, II.1)
Often used as if it meant “Where are you, Romeo?” this actually means “Why are you called Romeo?” Juliet is not summoning Romeo (in fact, she has no idea that he has sneaked into the garden and is listening to her soliloquy), but lamenting the fact that he is a Montague, and therefore one of her family’s enemies. Her point, which she makes later in the speech, has become another famous quotation: that “a rose/ By any other name would smell as sweet”
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy (Hamlet, I.5)
An apparently straightforward line, said by Hamlet to his old friend Horatio, but Frank Kermode has suggested in his book Shakespeare’s Language that the use of “your” has been misunderstood. Rather than “your” referring to Horatio, Kermode argues that its meaning may be closer to “the”. Hamlet is thus not criticising Horatio’s earthbound world-view, but saying that philosophy itself does not encompass all that mankind may come across. In fact this sense of “your” still appears in modern speech, though it is often contracted to sound more like “yer” or “yuh” – in for example, the phrase “You see, the problem with your Russians is...”
The quality of mercy is not strained (The Merchant of Venice, IV.1)
The beginning of Portia’s famous speech is often quoted, but it is so familiar that many people never consider what it actually means. It’s often vaguely assumed to mean “mercy can spread a long way”, or “it’s not difficult to be merciful”, but I would suggest that in fact the meaning of “strained” is closer to our modern sense “restrained”. In its context, the line would therefore mean “mercy is not subject to control by man’s laws.”
