Reading the discussion on Mike Duran’s and Becky Miller’s blogs this past week, I had a walloping sense of deja-vu. Anyhow, it inspired me to mangle some Shakespeare. Below is Hamlet’s Soliloquy, as it might be delivered by one of the combatants in the most recent dust-up over profanity in Christian fiction. As for my personal take, you can find it here and here.

To swear, or not to swear–that is the question:

Whether ’tis a holier action to truly reflect

A culture prone to flinging arrows of coarse profanity

Or to take arms against a sea of vulgarity

And by opposing remain pure. To edit, to censor–

No more–and by censor to say we end

The conflict, and smooth the evidence of sin

That flesh is heir to. ‘Tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To clean, to sweep–

To sweep–perchance to sanctify: ay, there’s the rub,

For outside that sanctified space what turmoil yet remains

Unseen, slighted by such attempts to shuffle off our rude mortality,

Must give us pause. There’s the conflict

That makes calamity in writing of a fallen world.

For who would bear the whips and scorns of critics pro and con,

Th’ reviewer’s slight, the blogger’s enmity

The pangs of questioned faith, the law’s accusation,

The insolence of publishers, and the spurns

From churchmen convinced sinful characters spring from unworthy souls,

When he himself might his quietus make

By blotting out offensive words? Who would unvarnished dialogue bear,

To grunt and sweat under the burden of rejection,

But that the dread of something akin to death,

Of framing a false, undiscovered country, whose fresh-scrubbed paragons

Hear, see, and speak no evil, impels the will,

And makes us rather write as best we can of those ills we share

Than fly to a burnished fantasy that salves scruples yet fails integrity?

Thus primness in conscience’s name does make cowards of us all,

And thus the native hue of life, smudged, stained, and profane

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of fear,

And enterprise of great grace and redemption

With this regard is shown halfheartedly

And loses the force of honesty, and the name of action.