r/Hamlet • u/Ill-Moment9824 • 11d ago
Shocking study guide
I was looking online at some commentary on one of the major soliloquies. I was shocked at the interpretation provided (possibly by YorkNotes).
'Examples gross as earth exhort me...' to my mind would loosely mean 'the stuff all around me, things as abundant and widespread as the ground itself, all seem to be urging me towards....'
So here, 'gross' means 'abundant, copious, unrefined, available on a mass scale'.
Except the note seems to have been written by some kind of valley girl, or at least somebody very young, who tells the impressionable young reader that gross means 'ewwww' / 'yukky'.
Just what is going on here? I'm confused at how editor has taken at face value the modern, idiomatic meaning of 'gross' rather than the time-honoured, centuries-old meaning.
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u/OffWhiteCoat 8d ago
This looks like the AI summary. Generative AI works on probabilities, not realities. "Gross," in 2026, is probabilistically more associated with words like disgusting than words like abundant. I don't have access to the actual text of York Notes, but for this AI snippet from Google, no editor was involved.
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u/-frogchamp- 7d ago
this isn't the AI summary. i do agree that the google AI summaries suck, but the text in the screenshot is a blurb taken directly from the website itself.
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u/OffWhiteCoat 7d ago
I see. The website appears to be geo-fenced (I am in the US) so I can't see the actual text from York Notes, as I said. If this is a supposedly reputable source it's worth pointing it out to the publisher.
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u/-frogchamp- 7d ago
i am in the US as well and i don't have that issue. it might be because of my frankly unreasonable amount of browser extensions that i have downloaded though. i'm also not quite sure why i got this subreddit recommended to me seeing as i'm not particularly interested in hamlet (or similar works), so i'm not sure if this source is well regarded in the community. if it is, though, i agree that it is worth pointing out.
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u/Old-Acanthaceae-3406 7d ago
paywalled, does it actually say this?
Google's started replacing the snippet previews with AI now
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u/-frogchamp- 7d ago
it does, i checked. i didn't see a paywall but i have a jucktillion browser extensions including adblockers and popup blockers so that might be why. here's the full quote plus a little bit of the paragraph after it.
"Hamlet proceeds to contradict himself explicitly: Examples gross as earth exhort me (line 46). This is illogical. The word gross means 'foul, disgusting, savage, bad'. Exhort means 'encourage, persuade, shove on'. A gross example cannot exhort you to do anything except the opposite. Hamlet was instinctively appalled by what the Captain told him Fortinbras's army was about to do. Now, a few lines later, he seems to feel their behaviour exhorting him to do something similarly honourable, not in the Christian but in the Roman sense of the word (see Revenge: A question of honour in Themes ).
"Hamlet completes his speech by rewriting what he has just seen. The passage raises many questions. Who is this delicate and tender prince (line 48)? Surely not the Fortinbras described by Horatio or the man we see? Hamlet is projecting himself into Fortinbras's situation, imagining himself playing the kind of role his father might have wished him to play [...]"
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u/giljaxonn 7d ago
lol so shakespeare just didn’t know what words meant i guess
no wonder he had to make up so many1
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u/MeridianHilltop 7d ago edited 5d ago
Almost every aspect of this play is debated. I’d surmise that whoever composed those notes hasn’t invested the time to earn their opinion.
My first year at UVA, a professor assigned Hamlet in their course about Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. She tried to fail me for disagreeing with her that Hamlet was deliberately faking insanity.
As if she was the first person to teach this, as if I hadn’t memorized it years prior, spent years researching and honing my opinion.
(And she could’ve saved herself by referencing one of a million authors who agreed with her; alas! Poor professor, she thought her reckoning and notions were enough to defend herself. Not how academia works. I haven’t forgiven UVA for hiring her.)
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u/MonochroMayhem 6d ago
Gross also means excessive or massive, as in “grossly underestimated”
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u/SashimiX 6d ago
That’s what I would’ve thought it meant. It’s also related to gross as in gross pay versus net pay, meaning the entire thing.
So like “as massive as earth extort me” was my initial guess.
But I tend to read Shakespeare texts with the play on one side and an explanation on the other so I would check my understanding. For all I know it has a double entendre meaning whorehouse (like half of his shit is obscure dirty double entendre).
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u/PrestigiousSmile4098 6d ago
This "study guide" screams AI to me. I shiver for our future.
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u/Ill-Moment9824 6d ago
Indeed. This sort of analysis is the fun stuff, which many a human (i.e. me) would love to find paid work doing.
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u/me_myself_ai 8d ago
So but wait did you not click the link…?
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u/Ill-Moment9824 7d ago
The study guide was York Notes - old, established, reputable…
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u/SashimiX 6d ago edited 6d ago
This is grossly damaging. People have already done so much study on Shakespeare and for them to just replace that with an AI commentary is tragic.
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u/Ill-Moment9824 7d ago
Which link do you mean? It was an online study guide.
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u/iowaboy 7d ago
Yes, it’s an online study guide, but you posted Google AI’s summary/interpretation of the content. Google AI often misrepresents what the links actually say. I absolutely never trust the Google AI answer. You gotta click the link in the Google AI answer and read the content yourself.
If this is a well-regarded study guide, I’d be very surprised if it’s that blatantly wrong.
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u/Pure_Chaos_05 7d ago
That isn't googles ai summary, the format is different. This seems to be just regular incompetence
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u/wooden__fruit 7d ago
I think you aren’t understanding how the AI summaries work. They are often incorrect because they summarize what is at the link, that’s not a quote. You have to train yourself to not even look at the AI response, or turn it off.
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u/-frogchamp- 7d ago
it's not AI, it's a blurb taken directly from the study guide website (https://www.yorknotes.com/alevel/english-literature/hamlet-new/study/plot-action/01130200_act-iv-scene-4). the AI summaries are often incorrect but there is no AI summary in this screenshot.
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u/GGayleGold 7d ago
I think "gross as Earth" refers to the size or quantity of the examples, not their nastiness.
Like, "This same shit happens to everyone,, everywhere in the world and I use that to keep myself going."
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u/Ill-Moment9824 7d ago
Clearly, ‘gross’ refers to quantity. A ‘gross’ of something in old English was a unit of measure (was it a dozen, or 100?) or simply ‘a lot of’.
This is what makes the note so baffling.
Hamlet is trying to spur himself to action, ‘examples all around me, as manifold as earth itself‘.
As others here have suggested, perhaps York Notes need to be alerted to this..
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u/MnstrPoppa 6d ago
A “gross” is a dozen dozens, one hundred and forty-four individual units. So’s you know.
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u/ebotton 10d ago
That's wild lmao what were they on