Oddly Enough, Reuters Blog (September 17, 2009)
"Yo Blog Guy, you know that hot actress Megan Fox? She's SO fine! Can you run some pictures of her for me? "Sorry, sir, this isn't that kind of a blog. We don't run exploitative photos of human beings just because they are 'hot.' My readers have loftier pretentions.
"I get it. Blog Guy, I am a huge fan of Shakespeare. Do you happen to know of anyone in show business with The Bard's quotations tattooed on them?..."
Oddly Enough's author found one: more-or-less over the actress's right shoulder blade. The words there are: "We will all laugh at gilded butterflies"
And yes, it's a quotation from Shakespeare's "King Lear" - almost.
"King Lear," in common with quite a few out-of-copyright works, is on the Project Gutenberg website: "King Lear by William Shakespeare" by William Shakespeare [Collins edition] (November, 1998) (Gutenberg Etext #1532)
The quote/paraphrase is from Lear, Act V, Scene III. The British Camp near Dover. Here's Lear's line. I put the tattoo's words in bold.
"...Lear.
No, no, no, no! Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing I'll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,--
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;--
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon...."
Oddly Enough worked the photo and a fairly common sort of interested in celebrities for laughs - rather well, I think.
The Oddly Enough post is funny - and I've seen quite a few discussion threads about that quote. Together with more-or-less well-informed pronouncements.1
And, although I haven't made up my mind about tattoos, this one shows a bit more insight than many I've seen. Quite a bit.
1For the record, the Gilded Age in American history was around the 1870s, 1845-1916, or something else, depending on who you read; and is said to have inspired novels like Henry Adams's "Democracy" and F. Marion Crawford's "An American Politician."
The term "gilded age" was coined by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their novel, "The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-day (1874).
Shakespeare pre-dates 1900 by about three centuries, and stopped writing plays when he died, in 1616.
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