Oh cursed spite: The Half-Blood Prince of Denmark

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?

Are Fred and George really different people?

Which do you prefer: Fred or George? One lost an ear, the other lost his life. Other than that, the Weasley twins appear identical, not just in appearance but in every other way.

I'm sure someone somewhere has conducted a study to see if J.K. made any effort to write them even slightly differently throughout the course of the seven novels. You know: does Fred have a habitual turn of phrase? does George focus more on feelings than Fred does? is one more prone to act first and ask questions later? That kind of thing.

In the novel Lord of the Flies, the twin brothers Sam and Eric are so indistinguishable that the author, William Golding, actually reduces them to a single entity which he calls "Samneric". In the play Hamlet, Rosenkranz and Guildenstern are inseparable and indistinguishable too. They're not twins but they, together, fill a single role in the play.

Are Fred and George portrayed in such a similar way that they are little more than a single character in two bodies?

Even Mrs. Weasley has trouble telling them apart. Can we?

Certainly in my incomplete Rowling-world novel, The Way Forward, which follows the lives of George Weasley, Aberforth Dumbledore and Miverva McGonagall after Voldemort's downfall, I am forced to imagine George as an independent person, dealing with the loss of his twin brother, but did Rowling make any attempt to make them different in her books?

I may just have to do some looking to figure this out.

You can find that incomplete novel, by the way, here: http://wordsby.walma.org/page59/page59.html.