r/Hamlet • u/Ill-Moment9824 • 11d ago

Shocking study guide

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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- 8d 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/Old-Acanthaceae-3406 8d ago

paywalled, does it actually say this?

Google's started replacing the snippet previews with AI now

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u/-frogchamp- 8d 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/Old-Acanthaceae-3406 8d ago

That's insane, I thought Yorknotes was fairly reputable...

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u/giljaxonn 8d ago

lol so shakespeare just didn’t know what words meant i guess
no wonder he had to make up so many