The title of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country is taken from Hamlet's soliloquy.
The film features a Klingon, Chang, played by Christopher Plummer, who quotes extensively from Shakespeare, including:
"The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
"No traveler returns..."
- from this soliloquy.
In Poul Anderson's "Pele," 15, Ghrul-Captain remembers a kzinti academy teacher apparently quoting from the soliloquy. Anderson does quote from the soliloquy and imagines that the academy teacher independently speaks a corresponding phrase in the Heroes' Tongue although with a different significance:
"'What they call conscience makes cowards of them all.'" (p. 87)
Two human beings trying to rescue the injured Ghrul-Captain do not mean to cause him pain when they lift his badly burnt body. Knowing this, he feels not gratitude for their obvious compassion but contempt for their supposed cowardice. Hamlet refers to our fear of death, not to our concern for others.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
If this Kzin academy teacher was indeed quoting from HAMLET, then he showed a singular lack of perceptiveness to think compassion in an enemy meant he was a coward. Witweet, in "A Little Knowledge," mentioned the philosophic error of "it does not follow." That is, it does not necessarily follow that compassion makes a person lacking in courage.
Witweet was shrewder than this Kzin teacher!
Ad astra! Sean
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