Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Split in Two
- 2 Hypocrisy and Jesus
- 3 Antihypocrisy: Looking Bad in Order to Be Good
- 4 Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy
- 5 Naked Truth: Hey, Wanna F***?
- 6 In Divine Services and Other Ritualized Performances
- 7 Say It Like You Mean It: Mandatory Faking and Apology
- 8 Flattery and Praise
- 9 Hoist with His Own Petard
- 10 The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self
- 11 At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew
- 12 Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not
- 13 Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?
- 14 The Alchemist: Role as Addiction
- 15 “I Love You”: Taking a Bullet versus Biting One
- 16 Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb
- 17 Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills
- 18 False (Im)modesty
- 19 Caught in the Act
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
9 - Hoist with His Own Petard
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Introduction: Split in Two
- 2 Hypocrisy and Jesus
- 3 Antihypocrisy: Looking Bad in Order to Be Good
- 4 Virtues Naturally Immune to Hypocrisy
- 5 Naked Truth: Hey, Wanna F***?
- 6 In Divine Services and Other Ritualized Performances
- 7 Say It Like You Mean It: Mandatory Faking and Apology
- 8 Flattery and Praise
- 9 Hoist with His Own Petard
- 10 The Self, the Double, and the Sense of Self
- 11 At the Core at Last: The Primordial Jew
- 12 Passing and Wishing You Were What You Are Not
- 13 Authentic Moments with the Beautiful and Sublime?
- 14 The Alchemist: Role as Addiction
- 15 “I Love You”: Taking a Bullet versus Biting One
- 16 Boys Crying and Girls Playing Dumb
- 17 Acting Our Roles: Mimicry, Makeup, and Pills
- 18 False (Im)modesty
- 19 Caught in the Act
- Afterword
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
There's letters seal'd, and my two schoolfellows
Whom I will trust as I will adders fang'd
They bear the mandate, they must sweep my way
And marshal me to knavery. Let it work,
For 'tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petar, an't shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines,
And blow them at the moon.
(Hamlet 3.4.203–210)Earlier we met those words and phrases that made no sense to us when we were little and not so little, the “plejallegiance” or the “forgive us our trespasses” of the Lord's prayer. Without checking the gloss on the bottom of the page, few of us know, or remember if we did check, what exactly the image of being hoist with a petar(d) is. When we read Shakespeare we are so often faking reading Shakespeare. Many think the image of petards means being run up a flagpole or tossed in the air and impaled on your own spear (and to justify this the line is often misremembered as hoist on his own petard). Even misunderstood in that way, the metaphor is properly conceived as having something to do with plots recoiling on the plotter in ways he never foresaw, of having himself become the inadvertent object of his own machinations intended to undo another. To be hoist with your own petard really means to have the mine or shell you intend for the enemy explode in your own face.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Faking It , pp. 109 - 120Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003