I stay up too late. And am addicted to this.

The following is a discussion board post I just wrote for my Shakespeare class. We're reading Henry IV Part 1. It probably won't sound half as intelligent to me in the morning as it does right now:

Falstaff's speech in Act V Scene 1 intrigues me. I marvel at Shakespeare more and more. As a Communication major, we study the concept of socially constructed reality as well as semiotics (touching on some linguistics) - how and why words and symbols have come to mean what they mean. Whether or not there were names for any of these concepts then, Shakespeare knew them all. In Romeo and Juliet, the famous "That which we call a rose / By any other word would smell as sweet" makes it plainly obvious that Shakespeare knew that language was arbitrary, which was probably not a popular belief when he was alive. If I'm not mistaken, the religious and traditional overtones of Elizabethan society meant that most people believed that language was inspired - that we call a rose a "rose" because there is something inherently in that specific flower which made it a "rose" and not a "lily." How forward-thinking of him to have the character of Juliet shatter this perception and clue Elizabethans in to the fact that language is arbitrary. Likewise, as I read Falstaff's speech, I clearly saw Shakespeare toying with the sociological concept of social constructionism. I honestly wonder how many other people in Shakespeare's time could have seen that "honor" as they understood it does not have one absolute definition. Honor, to some extent, has similarities between many cultures, but not all cultures hold the same definition. Falstaff examines the notion of "honor" and all of its socially constructed value, coming to the conclusion that it is, in fact, useless. He decides this because, by the culture's definition, you don't have it until you're dead. Then you can't enjoy it or benefit from it because you're dead, but it won't live on in the minds of the living either because slander will remove the last shred of it from your name, meaning that it's really just a word to throw around and make people feel better about themselves. A useless decoration. A hood ornament. I would venture to say that to most Elizabethans, honor was everything. Case in point: the wedding catastrophe in Much Ado About Nothing. Even today, we still have a notion of "honor." So is it just an empty word? Or is there something to it? Shakespeare, you are such a tricky little sneak.