Harry bent over him; and Snape seized the front of his robes and pulled him close.
A terrible rasping, gurgling noise issued from Snape's throat.
"I am dead; thou livest; Report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied."
Something more than blood was leaking from Snape. Silvery blue, neither gas nor liquid, it gushed from his mouth and his ears and his eyes, and Harry knew what it was...
"Look ... at ... me .... " Snape whispered. "In this harsh world draw they breath in pain, To tell my story."
The green eyes found the black, but after a second something in the depths of the dark pair seemed to vanish, leaving them fixed, blank and empty. The hand holding Harry thudded to the floor, and Snape moved no more.
Sorry, a little bit of poetic license there. But every time I read J.K. Rowling's affecting description of Harry's last encounter with Snape and the Half-Blood Prince's death near the end of The Deathly Hallows, I am strongly reminded of the dying wishes of another Prince from another legendary English writer: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, by William Shakespeare.
And so I've taken the liberty of combining Rowling's scene with that written by Shakespeare. They fit together quite well, don't you think? Certainly the words Shakespeare provided to Hamlet to express his request that Horatio explain his story, his plight to the disbelieving world capture exactly what Snape, in his gasping last breaths, is asking of Harry Potter.
I know that the tendency must be to compare Harry himself with Shakespeare's tragic prince, and there are ample reasons to do so, but I think this scene, the last moments of Snape's rather tragic life, align the Half-Blood Prince quite closely with the Shakespearean hero.
I'll probably write more on Harry Potter and Hamlet in a later blog entry but, for now, I'm quite pleased with the blended passage I've created above. What do you think?
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