Bleh, here I haven't posted in months and now I'm back just to write another pointless literary observation that's too long for FaceBook and GoodReads. But there's another purpose to this post: it's for my fellow tragic Shakespeare heroine, my friend Hannah. (Pay her blog a visit now, it's awesome and it updates way more frequently than mine.) Hannah is playing Ophelia in Hamlet, and of course, the best speech in the whole play is the one where Ophelia walks in with flowers in her hands, insane and beautiful:
OPHELIA: There's rosemary, that's for remembrance, pray, love, remember: and there is pansies, that's for thoughts...There's fennel for you, and columbines: there's rue for you; and here's some for me: we may call it herb-grace o' Sundays: O you must wear your rue with a difference. There's a daisy; I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died: they say he made a good end...
The other day I was reading Wuthering Heights, and after Cathy, who grew up on the moor, goes similarly mad (for similar reasons), she starts pulling the feathers out of a pillow:
"That's a turkey's," she murmured to herself; "and this is a wild duck's, and this is a pigeon's. Ah, they put pigeons' feathers in the pillows--no wonder I couldn't die! Let me take care to throw it on the floor when I lie down. And here is a moor-cock's; and this--I should know it among a thousand--it's a lapwing's. Bonny bird; wheeling over our heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted to get to its nest, for the clouds had touched the swells, and it felt rain coming. This feather was picked up from the heath, the bird was not shot; we saw its nest in the winter, full of little skeletons. Heathcliff set a trap over it, and the old ones dare not come. I made him promise he'd never shoot a lapwing after that, and he didn't..."
Insane minds think alike, methinks. Either that or Cathy is a total Ophelia wannabe. ^_^ (Seriously, there's no way that the feather speech wasn't inspired by the flower speech. Back when Wuthering Heights was written, everybody read Shakespeare.)