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My annual Hamlet rant
Oh boy, am I glad to be shot of Hamlet for another year. Not Hamlet, mind - I do like the play, for all its manifold faults - but Hamlet himself. Today we were concentrating on Act 5, which shows the bratty prince acting badly from beginning to end. Viz:
1) Hamlet bores for Denmark on the unheard-of notion that people die at the end of their lives, and that no matter how powerful or jolly they are, they'll eventually be reduced to skulls and dust. Horatio humours him with many 'You don't say?'s, but is looking at his watch the while. Hamlet is in danger of making Polonius look like Dorothy Parker here - if he hadn't already done so with his embarrassing 'advice to the players', so redolent of Prince Charles lecturing architects on the art of building design.
2) In passing, he mentions that he's engineered the murders of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ("no shriving time allowed"), whose major fault seems to be that they obeyed the king's summons to come to Elsinore, and his request to try and find out what was upsetting Hamlet. Capital crimes indeed.
3) Within two seconds of realizing that Ophelia is dead - primarily as a result of his own actions - Hamlet is shouting at her grieving brother and fighting him. His reason? He dislikes Laertes' extravagant diction! (Or, more accurately, the fact that for once Hamlet isn't the centre of attention.)
4) Within a couple more seconds he says (the first and only time he expresses such a sentiment), 'I loved Ophelia'. After that it's all about him and how much more he can grieve than Laertes. '40,000 brothers' love' wouldn't equal his, insists this enemy of hyperbole. (At no point in the play is Ophelia alluded to again by either of them - even when they are forgiving each other for various other misdeeds.)
5) He takes time out to practise his favourite hobby of humiliating people who aren't in a position to answer back. Osric is an acceptable substitute for Polonius in this regard.
6) He denies his responsibility for killing Polonius by telling Laertes that he was mad at the time. (That, we remember, was the scene in which he told his mother: "My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time, / And makes as healthful music: it is not madness / That I have utter’d: bring me to the test, / And I the matter will re-word; which madness / Would gambol from.") Hmm.
7) Finally, when he is already mortally wounded, he does what he should have done at the end of Act I and kills Claudius. But even then he forgets his Princess Bride so far as to omit any mention of the fact that Claudius killed his father, concentrating instead on his supposed incest with Gertrude (at least in Q2, our copytext: in F he calls him 'murderous' but doesn't specify his victim). The whole thing is a mess, with bodies good and bad falling everywhere, and any sense of satisfied justice being wholly dissipated.
8) At the end of the play he argues for Fortinbras to become King. This passing of Denmark to a foreign power was what his own father had fought old Norway to prevent, and what the Danish army was guarding against at the start of the play - but Hamlet gives his country away, just because he likes Fortinbras's abs.
In sum, he is a self-centred, entitled, manipulative, untrustworthy, prevaricating, callous, incompetent little shit.
Now, bring on Paradise Lost!
1) Hamlet bores for Denmark on the unheard-of notion that people die at the end of their lives, and that no matter how powerful or jolly they are, they'll eventually be reduced to skulls and dust. Horatio humours him with many 'You don't say?'s, but is looking at his watch the while. Hamlet is in danger of making Polonius look like Dorothy Parker here - if he hadn't already done so with his embarrassing 'advice to the players', so redolent of Prince Charles lecturing architects on the art of building design.
2) In passing, he mentions that he's engineered the murders of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ("no shriving time allowed"), whose major fault seems to be that they obeyed the king's summons to come to Elsinore, and his request to try and find out what was upsetting Hamlet. Capital crimes indeed.
3) Within two seconds of realizing that Ophelia is dead - primarily as a result of his own actions - Hamlet is shouting at her grieving brother and fighting him. His reason? He dislikes Laertes' extravagant diction! (Or, more accurately, the fact that for once Hamlet isn't the centre of attention.)
4) Within a couple more seconds he says (the first and only time he expresses such a sentiment), 'I loved Ophelia'. After that it's all about him and how much more he can grieve than Laertes. '40,000 brothers' love' wouldn't equal his, insists this enemy of hyperbole. (At no point in the play is Ophelia alluded to again by either of them - even when they are forgiving each other for various other misdeeds.)
5) He takes time out to practise his favourite hobby of humiliating people who aren't in a position to answer back. Osric is an acceptable substitute for Polonius in this regard.
6) He denies his responsibility for killing Polonius by telling Laertes that he was mad at the time. (That, we remember, was the scene in which he told his mother: "My pulse, as yours, doth temperately keep time, / And makes as healthful music: it is not madness / That I have utter’d: bring me to the test, / And I the matter will re-word; which madness / Would gambol from.") Hmm.
7) Finally, when he is already mortally wounded, he does what he should have done at the end of Act I and kills Claudius. But even then he forgets his Princess Bride so far as to omit any mention of the fact that Claudius killed his father, concentrating instead on his supposed incest with Gertrude (at least in Q2, our copytext: in F he calls him 'murderous' but doesn't specify his victim). The whole thing is a mess, with bodies good and bad falling everywhere, and any sense of satisfied justice being wholly dissipated.
8) At the end of the play he argues for Fortinbras to become King. This passing of Denmark to a foreign power was what his own father had fought old Norway to prevent, and what the Danish army was guarding against at the start of the play - but Hamlet gives his country away, just because he likes Fortinbras's abs.
In sum, he is a self-centred, entitled, manipulative, untrustworthy, prevaricating, callous, incompetent little shit.
Now, bring on Paradise Lost!
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2) R&G definitely make love to their employ - they are puppets of Claudius and his police state. (OK, so I read Kott at an impressionable age. Wanna make something of it?) Furthermore Stoppard made evryone sorry for them, but they really are feeble and very ready to betray their childhood friend to Claudius.
6) Hamlet killed Polonius thinking he was a spy - which he was. The version he gives Laertes saves the boy from learning what a manipulative shit and toady his father was.
1) He's not boring for Denmark, he's explaining to Horatio that he's finally ready for whatever comes. Necessary to show he's given up the whole delaying thing.
7) Corpses everywhere demonstrate that this is Serious Biz. Hamlet is only directly responsible for one of them, anyway. And I tend to take F1 as the final word on quite a lot of stuff. I know Q2 is more fashionable these days.
8) Who is actually left to take on the job, especially with a Norwegian army at the gate. He's dying and has to be a realist - at least this way he can ensure a peaceful hand-over of power.
Hamlet's the hottest, sexiest hero Shakespeare wrote, and you are neglecting the female viewpoint if you dismiss him so readily. Anti-feminist, you might even say. :-))
I love the lay, the way it gets students arguing. I did it with my A2 group last year and had a lot of fun. But I miss teaching
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1) He's been explaining that he's finally ready to give up the whole delaying thing for a couple of acts now! (e.g. in Act 4: 'From this time forth/ My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth' etc ad nauseam). All he's actually saying for most of this time is the hoary old cliche that dust hath closed Helen's eye, a commonplace since Lascaux, I'd imagine. That's okay, but he goes on and on and on, as if he's the first person ever to think of it.
2) Yes, R&G work for Claudius, who is their king - why shouldn't they? I don't see any evidence that they are 'betraying' Hamlet (e.g. that they knew the contents of the sealed letter they were taking to England). As for 'police state', yes I'm afraid that's Jan Kott talking. Show me the Renaissance court that wasn't a police state, in those loose terms. Certainly not Elizabeth's - and Shakespeare worked for her at times, so I guess that makes him a totalitarian puppet too!
6) Oh puh-leeze! Hamlet sparing someone else's feelings? Like he does with Ophelia, his mother, etc? No, I think not. All he needed to say to Laertes was that he was sorry for what he'd done. If he'd wanted to go into more detail (which might not have been wise with Claudius there) he might have added that it was a case of mistaken identity. Blaming it on his madness lets no one off the hook but himself.
7) Even in F, Hamlet fails to confront Claudius with his knowledge that he killed his father - and whoever's responsible for the corpses, the messiness of that last scene means that the centrality of his revenge to the action gets swamped in the general chaos.
8) There's no indication that Fortinbras's army is one of invasion, though, and one would hope that Denmark had a few soldiers about still, round about the palace! What makes Fortinbras a good candidate for king, I wonder? All we know about him is that he's a hothead who's been making trouble against Denmark, which the Norwegian king has to reprimand him for; and then that he's leading thousands of men to a futile war for a peace of land not worth the fighting, simply in order to soothe his bruised ego. Not a very impressive CV really, but Hamlet likes him because he's a man of action like his dad (and unlike Hamlet himself, or Claudius) - that's the long and short of it.
Oh, you can do better for yourself than Hamlet,
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Just on 1) - 'boring' for Denmark is a pretty harsh description of someone who's obsessively depressed, and with bloody good reason to be so. He's been betrayed by both his parents (and if he were a manipulative shit, by God he's learned it from the best in his father!), deprived of the opportunity to grieve for his father properly, and has nobody around who can give him the least bit of help in trying to keep it together.
It's very easy to pull out a quote to show he's lying about having been mad at any particular point, but you could do the same at other points to show those aren't any more reliable than his saying he is. I don't think he knows, because the play doesn't know. IMO the whole play is having - or possibly just IS - a psychotic break with reality. You're really going to blame Hamlet himself for having a skewed perspective and being a obsessively stuck in that position?
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Of course Hamlet is allowed to grieve, as he has been doing since his first appearance, though in this scene it doesn't make for great drama. (It's not quite true that he has no one to help him: he has Horatio, which is more than Laertes does.) Part of my problem is the way in which he and his 'insights' have been lauded over the centuries by critics, and that of course isn't really his fault, even if he is still a bore.
However, any sympathy I have for him on this score is more than wiped out by what he does to Laertes five minutes later. Laertes - who also has a father murdered, who also has not been allowed to grieve (remember how they hurried Polonius's funeral through 'hugger mugger'?), and now has a dead sister to boot, whom the priest is making nasty comments about - is allowed a total of thirteen lines to express his feelings before Hamlet leaps in, outraged at his excessive verbosity! There are gaping double standards at work here, both from Hamlet and his admirers over the years.
The quote I gave comes just a few lines after Hamlet kills Polonius: I didn't have to scour the play for it. Of course, we can say that Hamlet is not to be held responsible for any of his words or actions from the beginning of the play to the end, and that the play is a case study in psychosis rather than a tragedy as usually understood. I think we'd lose rather more than we'd gain through taking that view of it, but feel free to make the case!
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I must admit that is a very sexy name!
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He's stunning. I raved about the film here. And then I wrote a poem out of it. It kind of made an impression.
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That is very true. And the poem is lovely.
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(My complaint is not that there are subtitles; it's that the subtitles for the only version I could find on DVD have intermittently serious spelling issues and do not translate every line said onscreen, which annoys me in general; with Shakespeare, it's just silly. But there may be better versions which Netflix just doesn't know about.)
I approve very much of your icon.
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I have three different icons from that film, which I rotate from time to time. I actually ordered the DVD from Russia when it first came out!
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It is. (And the music is by Shostakovich.) I wish the transfer I'd seen had translated the Pasternak, so that I could have seen what he did with the language; instead it used abbreviated Shakespeare. I am due to rewatch the disc with a Russian-speaking friend, however, so with any luck she can tell me what has altered between great poets.
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conniving little machiavel
http://community.livejournal.com/rarelitslash/224729.html
Re: conniving little machiavel