Quote Originally Posted by Grey_Wolf_c View Post
There is also the fact that the line itself is using nonstandard grammar, presumably for artistic/poetic reasons:
"All this is comfort; wherefore weep I then?"

That "wherefore" is also practically a false friend is also an issue

Grey Wolf
That was roughly a point I was also going to mention. "Oh but how could the sentence make any sense if we don't read it the way it was meant?" It's Shakespeare, none of it makes any sense to most people who are experiencing it!
Shakespeare himself didn't even know how to spell his name at the time. He invented new words or for the first time in writing put down words in the a guise that in a couple of centuries only will be familiar to most readers. And the text is already "poetic". It is a bit like reading Norse stuff with kennings.

It is all theses and thouses hastes. So if we already have to shorten and rearrange letters to make words into normal English, an drearrange words into proper sentences why wouldn't we do it here when we have a word that seems like we know what it should be.



I come back to my earlier point about having to know that there is something we should be missing here. I would also like to emphasize that taking the position that everyone who gets it wrong is willfully ignorant and dumb (to bring it to it's point). It may not exactly be what some posters mean exactly, but that is how it tends to read. That's how you really get people's backs up and gets us the position the OP was also puzzled about, the "I don't want to learn am proud of it" problem.

There are 5 pages of discussion with a lot of people agreeing on how it could easily be misunderstood and providing logical chains of thoguht of how we end up from A to C. Please accept that it is a possibility, and has happened often. Often enough to be it's own trope in Bugs Bunny. Where of course half of us heard it in the first place.