Using Quotes From Shakespeare Plays Correctly.

You've got to be careful with Shakespeare quotes. They don't always mean what you think they mean. At least not always and to everyone. I always thought it would be cute and funny if a Shakespearean scholar, let's say from Oxford University in the UK, was ordering ice cream in front of me in line at an ice cream parlor. And I said to him "Knew you not Pompey?" from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" Act I, Scene 1. Because I remember in my Sophomore HS literature class, our text book told us Marullus meant the Roman plebes were being fickle. Julius Caesar, Crassus and Pompey formed the First Triumvirate of Rome in 55 BC. And when Marullus said that, Pompey had just been disposed. Marullus was telling the crowd they were being fickle and should be ashamed and just go home. So in other words I'd be telling the Shakespearean scholar. "Vanilla? Yesterday it was Strawberry." Now you're being fickle. Just like the Roman masses in the play.

But I recently read on SparkNotes and No Fear Shakespeare that whole quote goes

"O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climb'd up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney-tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day, with patient expectation,
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome.
And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made an universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks,
To hear the replication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?
And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way
That comes in triumph over Pompey's blood?
Be gone!"

In other words they were dishonoring the memory of Pompey, by putting garlands and other things on Caesar's statue, and forgetting the memory of their once-beloved Pompey. So the Oxford scholar would think, "I'm dishonoring the dead by enjoying ice cream now? Someone who died recently? He means Hal, my fishing buddy, who died last week? Hal and I went out for ice cream all the time. And besides, Hal would want me to move on and remember him that way!"