Speech of the week: Hamlet, II,2

A lot of attention gets paid to the "to be or not to be" soliloquy, but I have discovered a new love. Hamlet delivers this monologue in Act II scene 2, in a conversations with his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who have just arrived "unbidden" to visit him at Elsinor Castle. (Do yourself a favor and read it aloud.)

...I have of late--but
wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises; and indeed it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted
with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to
me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how
express and admirable! in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the
world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not
me...

I haven't before now read Shakespeare as a writer. I fancied myself pretty good at words, but in 2010 wrote my first play and first novel (unpublished works, just for me, but accomplishments nonetheless). I sit here thinking of what it must be like to have a mind that can string things like the above together and find myself sorely lacking.

But it is an awfully big ruler with which to measure myself.