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Story Time
In *Hamlet*, the Danish court moved with careful **discretion**, though truth was never safe for long. Spies were planted to **disseminate** whispers, and plots of **espionage** festered in every corner. The prince himself, caught in an **existential** crisis, questioned life and death, pondering whether philosophy or blood could resolve his grief. His musings foreshadowed **existentialism** centuries before its time, weighing freedom and fate against action and paralysis.
Across the sea in *King Lear*, the family bond collapsed into **dissolution**. Once noble daughters grew **effete** in cruelty, while Cordelia remained **emancipated** from false praise, her honesty standing alone. Lear, blind to sincerity, banished her, only to find his torment **exacerbated** by betrayal. Philosophy could not save him, though **empiricism**—seeing and testing the truth—might have spared him from ruin. The tragedy became a lesson in **epistemology**, asking how men can claim to know truth when vanity clouds their sight.
In darker tales like *Othello*, charges of theft, jealousy, even **embezzlement** of trust became weapons. Iago spun lies so cunning that no law could **exonerate** the innocent in time. What remained at the end were only graves. The stage directions themselves seemed to beg for an **epitaph**: here lies a man undone by deceit, here lies love corrupted.
Through all of Shakespeare’s worlds, the wise are those who **eschew** vanity, who see beyond cunning, who measure power against justice. For without truth, whether in law or love, kingdoms collapse, and men are left with questions that no philosophy alone can answer.
Across the sea in *King Lear*, the family bond collapsed into **dissolution**. Once noble daughters grew **effete** in cruelty, while Cordelia remained **emancipated** from false praise, her honesty standing alone. Lear, blind to sincerity, banished her, only to find his torment **exacerbated** by betrayal. Philosophy could not save him, though **empiricism**—seeing and testing the truth—might have spared him from ruin. The tragedy became a lesson in **epistemology**, asking how men can claim to know truth when vanity clouds their sight.
In darker tales like *Othello*, charges of theft, jealousy, even **embezzlement** of trust became weapons. Iago spun lies so cunning that no law could **exonerate** the innocent in time. What remained at the end were only graves. The stage directions themselves seemed to beg for an **epitaph**: here lies a man undone by deceit, here lies love corrupted.
Through all of Shakespeare’s worlds, the wise are those who **eschew** vanity, who see beyond cunning, who measure power against justice. For without truth, whether in law or love, kingdoms collapse, and men are left with questions that no philosophy alone can answer.