while, perhaps, still marveling at the cleverness of the male actor who portrays a woman who portrays aman.
At Belmont the clown Lancelot is speaking with Jessica and tells her …
This is an extremely famous quote, and the source of it comes from theOld Testamentof theBible(specifically, chapter 20 ofExodus). The great Greek writer of tragedies,Euripides, also wrote a similar line: "The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children" (in a surviving fragment of a lost play entitledPhrixus).
The line from the Bible is actually awarning: fathers who commit sins teach, by example, their sons to commit the same sins. And, so, the sons commit the same sins when they grow up. The line in the Bible, then, is actually a suggestion to all fathers that they should lead sinless lives so that their children will then become sinless as well.
Superstitious people of early times, however, interpreted the passage as a kind ofcurse. That is, they believed that God cursed the sinful