Dan Hoey
Mar 25, 2007
Book Reports / Accident or Suicide? Ophelia Death (Hamlet) half done essay [3]
Just a couple of pieces of advice on this excellent piece, and a lead.
First, you need a first paragraph that states the topic of the essay and what it intends to demonstrate. You've not done bad introducing this in your posting, but if the essay starts with the term "Denied" it needs a beginning. Make the essay a work that stands on its own; don't take it in the context of an ongoing discussion with your teacher.
Second--you should mention (or footnote) that you've redacted the language (or cite your source for the redacted version). Third, as long as you're redacting, you might want to change the clown's "argal" to something more modern, though clownifying it requires some imagination on your part (which I'll not try to supplant).
Finally, the lead--if you look for the commentary note on Crowner's quest law at
leoyan.com/global-language.com/ENFOLDED/eh2hw.php?dir=HWORKS3200&query=3211,
you'll see a pile of commentary on the "Crowner's quest" case of Sir James Hales, the very case that Shakespeare was apparently satirizing with his gravedigger's hair-splitting nonsense. Hales's death was ruled a suicide, and his widow lost her inheritance. Moberly says that she lost "on the ground that 'an act has three branches, imagination, resolution, and execution,' and that consequently her husband's attainder and forfeiture were complete as soon as these three elements of the act were complete." This is only one of the features of that case that Shakespeare alludes to in the gravedigger's patter.
According to the preview, that URL doesn't appear correctly in this post. To see it, you take run the following together without the line break
Dan Hoey, haoyuep@aol.com
Just a couple of pieces of advice on this excellent piece, and a lead.
First, you need a first paragraph that states the topic of the essay and what it intends to demonstrate. You've not done bad introducing this in your posting, but if the essay starts with the term "Denied" it needs a beginning. Make the essay a work that stands on its own; don't take it in the context of an ongoing discussion with your teacher.
Second--you should mention (or footnote) that you've redacted the language (or cite your source for the redacted version). Third, as long as you're redacting, you might want to change the clown's "argal" to something more modern, though clownifying it requires some imagination on your part (which I'll not try to supplant).
Finally, the lead--if you look for the commentary note on Crowner's quest law at
leoyan.com/global-language.com/ENFOLDED/eh2hw.php?dir=HWORKS3200&query=3211,
you'll see a pile of commentary on the "Crowner's quest" case of Sir James Hales, the very case that Shakespeare was apparently satirizing with his gravedigger's hair-splitting nonsense. Hales's death was ruled a suicide, and his widow lost her inheritance. Moberly says that she lost "on the ground that 'an act has three branches, imagination, resolution, and execution,' and that consequently her husband's attainder and forfeiture were complete as soon as these three elements of the act were complete." This is only one of the features of that case that Shakespeare alludes to in the gravedigger's patter.
According to the preview, that URL doesn't appear correctly in this post. To see it, you take run the following together without the line break
Dan Hoey, haoyuep@aol.com