Wicked

I bought Wicked, the new edition, not the old one, which has a picture of a green witch smirking while the white witch is whispering something in her ears.

From what I've read about it (though I haven't read it yet), I'll see whether Ephabel's philosophy is similar to that of Shakespeare's.

I know, I always bring him up. But Shakespeare wrote that it was better to be bad than to be thought of as being bad. If other people already accuse you of being bad, then it's better to let your badness reign than to try to convince other people that you're good.

I'll reprint a stanza below:

’Tis better to be vile than vile esteem’d,
When not to be receives reproach of being;
And the just pleasure lost, which is so deem’d
Not by our feeling, but by others’ seeing:

In other words, other people's imaginations of the worst of us causes us not to enjoy ourselves. The speaker in the poem continues his exhortation, asking rhetorically why we should let other people dominate our feelings, talking about our supposed failures that "in their wills count bad what I think good?"

Eventually, the speaker settled on claiming that he might be good and others are have their own faults in their attempted suppression of his perceived evil.

Will it be that the Wicked Witch of the West also think the same way? Who knows? It may be just the opposite: People want to be thought of as worse than they really are. I must start reading.