Vestry Vestry A vestry was a committee for the local secular and ecclesiastical government for a parish in England and Wales, which originally met in the vestry or sacristy of the parish church, and consequently became known colloquially as the "vestry". For many centuries they were the sole civil government of rural areas. At the high point of their powers, just prior to removal of Poor Law responsibilities in 1834, the vestries spent not far short of one-fifth of the budget of the national government itself. Their secular and ecclesiastical duties were separated under local government reforms in 1894. Their ecclesiastical
What a piece of work is a man they are essentially "dust". Hamlet is expressing his melancholy to his old friends over the difference between the best that men aspire to be, and how they actually behave; the great divide that depresses him. The speech was fully omitted from Nicholas Ling's 1603 First Quarto, which reads simply: This version has been argued to have been a bad quarto, a tourbook copy, or an initial draft. By the 1604 Second Quarto, the speech is essentially present but punctuated differently: Then, by the 1623 First Folio, it appeared as: J. Dover Wilson, in his notes in the "New Shakespeare" edition,