(29) Hamlet

Well, I’m back after a particularly vile illness. It was wonderful (thanks for asking), the kind of quick-hit illness that makes you reevaluate your place in this cold, dark universe. Talk about suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Anyway, I’m back and better than ever (or at least not throwing up every 20 minutes) and I do want to finish out this Hamlet business.

Interestingly, as I lay dying in bed, thoughts of this play certainly floated around in my infected mind, imparting whole new (and certainly unwanted) dimensions of meaning. To be or not to be and poor Yorick indeed. So right now, to me, this is a play about mortality, obviously and above all. I’m sure if I read it a year from now it will mean something else entirely, which is of course one of the reasons why it is so great. But anyway, some final bullet points:

• The movie version by Kenneth Branagh is really very good, excellent even. It provides a full performance (4 hours) with great acting across the board. As noted earlier, nothing beats seeing the play (as opposed to simply reading it). Never more true than in this case.
• Speaking of the movie, it’s interesting to point out that Branagh directs the play and is the lead actor. Additionally, the play-within-a-play, directed by Hamlet in the play, is also directed by Branagh (playing Hamlet of course). Everybody is directed by Shakespeare. Got it?
• It is cliché to say (oh well), but this is easily the best Shakespeare play I have yet read, and I have a hard time believing it will be supplanted by any of the others I have yet to read (and I have some pretty stellar ones left). It’s just that good. You could spend a lifetime studying this one play and, on your deathbed, find some new angle to it. Daily I think about something from it in the context of my day and wonder, when will all this noticing stuff stop? Hopefully never.
• One of my favorite scenes in the play is when Hamlet first encounters the ghost of his father, especially the father’s speech in this scene. This gives me the chills every time I read it. There are some hauntingly great lines in there. Also, it is clearly pivotal to the play in that before this scene, Hamlet is simply a grieving son. After this scene, he’s an unhinged, doomed, murderous maniac (of sorts). Also, for what it’s worth, this scene is done especially well in the Branagh movie. I showed my 10 year old son and he was totally enthralled so that must mean something, right?
• In some respects, this play boils down to an exploration of the “domino effect” that bad deeds almost always incur. Karma’s a bitch.
• The Sparknotes test (something I take and usually ace after reading every play) was particularly difficult this go around. I missed four questions (gasp!) to only earn an 84%, which is B work. I suck. Particularly irksome was missing the question about who was the first character to speak in the play…something I recorded in my own post only days earlier. In my defense, they offered both Bernardo and Francisco as answers so you had to remember which one went first in this tight scene, which is asking a lot. So eff them.

Hamlet – Act V

Well, I just finished Act V. It's a total bloodbath, in case you haven't heard. Almost everyone dies. That's it for now (brevity is the soul of wit, right?). I hope to finish the four hour Kenneth Branagh version tonight (very good so far) and publish some final thoughts soon after.

Hamlet – Act IV

Act IV. Let’s review where we are. Claudius “proves” his guilt by reacting to the play-within-a-play, freaking out when the king is murdered. Gertrude, Hamlet's mother and the queen, summons Hamlet to her chambers to angrily ask him what’s up. Polonius, an old noble, hides behind the chamber curtains, keeping an eye on things. Hamlet bursts in and berates his mother, discovers Polonius and kills him, generally acting all sorts of crazy throughout. Hamlet leaves and finds Claudius alone, in prayer. Almost killing him, he backs down (again).

After Hamlet drags Polonius’ dead corpse around a bit, Ophelia wanders in, mad as a loon. She commits suicide soon after. Laertes, her brother and Polonius’ son, is totally distraught over all this murdering and vows to kill Hamlet, with Claudio’s urging. The method: a swordfight with a poison-laced sword and, if that fails, a stiff drink from a lethally poisoned beverage.

Quite the soap opera, eh? The action is rising for sure; things are going from bad to worse, and how. That’s it for now, just along for the ride at this point. All set for the final act.

Oh yeah, one other thing. The first post on the blog was exactly one year ago. Imagine that.

Hamlet – Act III

For today’s post on act III, I thought I would lean on Shakespeare’s words, not mine (a good general policy, eh?) and do what everyone else seems to do when commenting on this act. If you recall from an earlier post, I mentioned the multiple and sometimes conflicting versions of each play floating around out there. First quartos (Q1), second quartos (Q2), bad quartos, good quartos, foul papers, first folios (F1), and so on, all different in their own unique ways and all part of the conversation, again each in their own way. There are so many versions that sometimes it's really hard to know which one is the “real” version (if this even matters…but more about that later).

This applies very much in the case of Hamlet, and the story is kind of interesting. Apparently, the first printed version to appear was a memorially reconstructed version in the summer of 1603, stolen by a hard-up actor looking for a buck. Recalled entirely from memory, this first version comes across as (surprise, surprise) corrupted and peculiar, with strange inconsistencies later “corrected” in the subsequent “cleaner” versions. Unlike other bad quartos, Q1 is thought to have come from the brain of an actor playing a minor character in the play (Marcellus?), which would make matters worse, wouldn’t it, in that one would question how much memory was correctly served by a character with only a few lines (relatively speaking)?

By all accounts, later versions (Q2 and F1) seem to provide a much more sensible play, from many perspectives (sequence of action, character consistency, language, etc.). Consider the famous “To be, or not to be” speech, as compared between Q1 and Q2. The Q1 version is very different (and placed differently in the play) as opposed to the later versions:

Q1 Version:
814: To be, or not to be, I there's the point,
815: To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all:
816: No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes,
817: For in that dreame of death, when wee awake,
818: And borne before an euerlasting Iudge,
819: From whence no passenger euer retur'nd,
820: The vndiscouered country, at whose sight
821: The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd.
822: But for this, the ioyfull hope of this,
823: Whol'd beare the scornes and flattery of the world,
824: Scorned by the right rich, the rich curssed of the poore?

Q2 Version:
1603: To be, or not to be, that is the question,
1604: Whether tis nobler in the minde to suffer
1605: The slings and arrowes of outragious fortune,
1606: Or to take Armes against a sea of troubles,
1607: And by opposing, end them, to die to sleepe
1608: No more, and by a sleepe, to say we end
1609: The hart-ake, and the thousand naturall shocks
1610: That flesh is heire to; tis a consumation
1611: Deuoutly to be wisht to die to sleepe,
1612: To sleepe, perchance to dreame, I there's the rub,
1613: For in that sleepe of death what dreames may come

Clearly, the Q2 version is way better, right? However, some say no, inasmuch as the purpose of this first version may have been different. It has been suggested that Q1 was maybe an alternate version, shortened and simplified for use by a small number of actors out and about on tour. This of course begs the following questions: What is the “real” version? What should we read and see as Hamlet and does this depend on purpose and context? What single version did Shakespeare intend (if any)? The answers to these questions have very interesting implications for how we experience Hamlet.

Or not. As an end note here, if you pick any modern version of Hamlet off of the shelf of any library or bookstore, it is almost definitely going to be a careful conglomeration of all the versions known, based on centuries of scholarship and consideration (with extensive notation all along the way). This is good, because I like that second version of the speech a lot better.

Hamlet – Act II

“The play’s the thing, wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.”

At the end of act I we found Hamlet anguishing over the apparent assassination of his father by dear old Uncle Claudius. The guy has a big problem. Does he follow through and seek revenge by killing Claudius? The answer is, for now, no. Hamlet, patently indecisive, only plans to add a few lines to a play to be presented at court that evening. These new lines change the play into a murder-the-king affair that, Hamlet hopes, will strike too close to home and elicit a reaction from Claudius. Hamlet will “catch the conscience of the king” by watching his reaction, meaning I guess that if the guy flinches or something then he is guilty.

Is it just me, or does this strike you as a rather unreliable way to determine someone’s guilt? What if Claudius frowns just because he doesn’t like the play? Or, what if he gets a backache at some crucial moment and rubs his neck, inadvertently grimacing out a confession? Or, more likely, what if he is the consummate stoic and sits there like a rock, unmoving. Then he’s innocent? By hatching this harebrained scheme, Hamlet comes across as a little weird, which is probably the point. When I first read this, I imagined the Bard trying to write this scene, way back in 1600, sitting there, quill in hand, gazing upward, thinking deeply, trying to develop his Hamlet. Suddenly, in one of his many ah ha! moments, the idea strikes him: a play-within-a-play (we’ve seen this before), the play as a mechanism for obtaining the truth, albeit in a most ambiguous, peculiar, and flawed way (just the way the Bard likes it). Strangeness everywhere, which is of course pure Shakespeare.

Besides this bizarre plan, there is a whole lot else going on in this act, the longest in the play. Roughly speaking, the action proceeds through Polonius’ conversation with Claudius and Gertrude (on political matters and on his theory of Hamlet’s madness), Hamlet’s subsequent conversation with Polonius (with Hamlet feigning madness), Hamlet’s bright reunion with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (where he doesn’t seem to feign any madness), the bit with the arrival of the theater company (players), and finally Hamlet’s long soliloquy at the end where his famous plan is hatched. In all this, I found the language at times very complex, obscure, and hard to follow. There’s a lot going on here, with copious footnoting, so I probably missed a pun or two. Nothing new there of course.

The play-within-a-play, the complex language, the deep and detailed characters, and the developing themes…this one is a biggie. You really have to pay attention or get left behind. We’ll see what the next act brings.

Hamlet – Act I

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

I love this line from act 1 of Hamlet. It just works, doesn't it? It is one of many famous lines from act I. Indeed, this one act probably contains more famous Shakespearean one-liners than any other act in any other play (or maybe any other play entirely). Besides this one, we have:

“Frailty, thy name is woman!”
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“Neither a borrower nor a lender be;”
“To thine ownself be true,”

There are others I’m sure. The point is that this play, right out of the gate, feels “bigger” than anything I have yet read and it’s easy to see why it is so prevalent and ingrained into our canon (culture?), even from the very first lines. The language, the characters, and the intrigue carry you off and transport you into another world, like all good art must.

Speaking of the very first lines, they are perfect. I agree wholeheartedly with Bill Bryson, one of my favorite writers, who describes in his book on Shakespeare (a great book by the way, one of my favorites easily) that you can feel the darkness and tension right away, right off of the page. Here's the opening lines:

ACT I, SCENE I.

Elsinore. A platform before the castle. FRANCISCO at his post. Enter to him BERNARDO

BERNARDO

Who's there?

FRANCISCO

Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.

BERNARDO

Long live the king!

FRANCISCO

Bernardo?

BERNARDO

He.

FRANCISCO

You come most carefully upon your hour. 

Can’t you just see the two guards, standing outside the castle walls in the cold darkness, their breath steaming from their mouths, hand buried deep in their tunics, bobbing up and down on switching feet to stay warm? And can’t you just sense that something is wrong, a palpable and nervous tension? I don’t know why but I get a very strong image in my head of what this looks like, right away and throughout. Maybe it’s just ingrained into my subconscious, this setting (I have read and seen this play already. Who hasn't?), but I’ll be damned if I don’t feel some kind of magic here. And the ghost of the king…such a spooky and unnatural presence woven into and out of the act perfectly, like the wandering, immaterial wraith that it is meant to be.

The first act sets up so much of the rest of the play. Hamlet is upset that his uncle married his mom (Claudius and Gertrude) barely a month after his father, the old king, dies. A ghost appears, multiple times, and turns out to be the ghost of the murdered father. The ghost informs Hamlet that Claudius murdered him. The ghost demands revenge.

A revenge tragedy, this one then, but light years better so far than Titus Andronicus. So much more layered nuance here, so much more skill and so much more art. So anyway, can you tell I like this play yet? As a special treat (okay, maybe not), I decided to post separately for each act because a) it will be fun and b) I feel like there is plenty to write about. So, five posts in five days. The five post challenge. Exciting, right?

(28) Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar is a play about politics, mostly ugly politics of the worst sort. The play is full of selfish, lying, cheating, and backstabbing (literally) aristocrats all vying for power and control. In this way, I found myself really annoyed with the characters, perhaps because I find politics so annoying to begin with. For example, in the play, right after Caesar is killed by the conspirators, Mark Antony give the famous “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” speech, a masterful piece of oration (and poetry) that stirs the crowd against the conspirators and is the beginning of the end for all of them. In the speech, Antony expertly “teases” the crowd with the mention of Caesar’s last will and testament, at first pretending to regret that he has mentioned it because he is so afraid (again pretending) of how the crowd will react when they hear how much Caesar loved them. In due course (and with specific timing for maximum effect), he reveals that the will specifies an inheritance to every citizen of seventy-five drachmas…and the crowd goes wild.

However, Anthony (in private) calls for the will soon after so that he can remove this bequeathment to the people, certainly because it no longer serves his purposes (and because he is greedy and wants Caesar’s inheritance for himself):

"But, Lepidus, go you to Caesar's house;
Fetch the will hither, and we shall determine
How to cut off some charge in legacies."

I was highly annoyed at the character of Anthony when I read this, but in retrospect I shouldn’t have been. The people in this play (the plebeians) are such sheep. Stereotypically fickle and dumb, they elicit very little sympathy. One minute they are cheering for this guy to be emperor, then the next minute some other guy. In fact, they are so easily swayed that their ignorance comes across as maybe the greatest evil of all, a liability both to themselves and to society, a liability that becomes an asset for those looking for power. Shakespeare is pointing out the dangers of such ignorance, which is interesting of course, but still annoying, probably because it is so true.

I’ll leave that bit of pontification off there (you’re welcome). Switching gears a bit, this play was one of the most straightforward plays I have yet read. It was a fast, comfortable read with a clear plot, consistent characters, and easy-to-follow language. It strikes me as the perfect “first play” to give to kids to read (perhaps I feel this way because it was the first Shakespeare play I read, way back when). There is something accessible about this one, at least compared to some of the others (Love’s Labor’s Lost, for example) that makes it easy...or maybe I’m just getting used to things.

Unlike Romeo and Juliet, I read a single version of this play, almost all in one sitting. This was the No Fear Shakespeare version, which prints modern day translations next to the original text. When needed, the modern text was useful and fun (although I disagreed with it sometimes). There’s nothing wrong with this of course, as long as the original text is the primary focus (Yes, I do see the irony in admitting to reading some modern day text, given my “no modern translations” rant at the end of the last post. However, I think that as long as it is presented along with the original text (and not replacing it) then it is more than okay, especially if it helps in understanding and appreciating the play).

I also watched the 1953 movie version which, like the play itself, is accessible and straightforward. It is very close to the original and appears to have very little emendation, which is the way to go with this one. Also, the movie has a great Mark Anthony in Marlon Brando, who absolutely overshadows all the other characters (save maybe James Mason as Brutus). He is electrifying in the role, so check it out if you want to see something great.

So, that’s Julius Caesar, a good one for sure but not one of my favorites, due to its overt, prevalent, and certainly intended political themes (still a top ten though, but just barely). Next up: Hamlet, which some say is his best work. I have read this one before (who hasn’t) but am looking forward to reading it again. I am sure I forget much about it and anyway, part of Shakespeare’s genius is being able to re-read any of the plays any number of times and find something new and interesting. So let’s have at it.

(27) Romeo and Juliet

Hey ho! Sorry for the relatively long absence (did anyone notice?), but I really wanted to spend some time on this one…and I’m glad I did. In case you haven’t heard, this is a pretty good play. It’s full of the typical Shakespeare fare: great characters, excellent language (including lots and lots of salacious puns), complex thematic threads, and so on. All the things we have seen before, except this time around it seemed just a bit sharper, especially the language; there are so many memorable and famous lines in this play:

“What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.”
“O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?”
“A plague o' both your houses!”
“O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you…”
“But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”
“A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life.”

And so on. Thus, given the much heralded pedigree of this play, I decided that I would read multiple editions, for a fresh take (and a proper treatment). Bouncing around between the different editions was interesting, giving me additional perspective and detail. So, in a list, I read the following:

Cambridge School Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet
The Applause Shakespeare Library: Romeo and Juliet
The Riverside Edition: Romeo and Juliet

I also saw the 1997 movie version starring DiCaprio and Danes, a version where “Romeo leads the thug life, Juliet packs a semiautomatic, and the Bard get a taste of “Pulp Fiction,” as per one reviewer, quoted on the back of the DVD case (more on this later).

Movie aside, these three text versions all had separate and interesting presentation goals. The Cambridge version presents the play in textbook fashion, describing and analyzing, on every right hand page, what’s going on with the verse printed on the left side, providing a running commentary throughout. So, one might find a list of coined phrases from the play (wild goose chase, on pain of death, star-crossed lovers, etc. There are about thirty in this play), which is kind of fun to know. Or this bit of advice around the famous “What’s in a name?” passage:

“So why do we call a rose a rose? Improvise what would happen if you went around calling things by different names (e.g., try calling you home “restaurant,” and so on). Or, choose a new name for yourself, maybe from a different ethnic group. What happens if you insisted in being called that name everywhere, or only in certain places.”

I like this, this weirdness and curiosity around an old Shakespearean line. In addition to this, the running commentary was accompanied by longer analysis at the end of each act and a lengthy analysis at the end of the play. My favorite from that was this: “Why did Romeo and Juliet die? Fate? Chance? Adolescent passion? The feud? Their fathers? Love? Friar Lawrence?” Good questions, and all explored well in the Cambridge edition.

The Applause version was different...and similar. Like the Cambridge version, it presented side-by-side analysis of the text. However, it also provided stage directions and directorial advice, for anyone interested in actually producing the thing. Reading these directions gives you the text as play, or at least what it could mean to exist as a play, describing all the decisions the director needs to make (endless decisions, really) to convey meaning. Subtle things, these decisions, and they all have to come together coherently or the play will be a mess. For example, the commentary might say:

 “Some productions interpret Shakespeare’s stage directions here to mean that Juliet actually hugs the nurse, which reinforces her youth and adolescence. However, in the 1994 Folger production, the director decided to have her only loosely grasp the nurse’s elbow, in order to anticipate her passage into adulthood later in Act II.”

Most of the comments were more complex (and better written) than this, but you get the point. I liked reading these bits of advice, because the only thing Shakespeare seems to have cared about (he never personally published anything) was theater production, not written text, so experiencing the play this way seemed more authentic. However, it was laborious at times, reading all this text along with the play, something that the last version I read (Riverside) handles well. Most of the plays I have read so far have been out of the Riverside, and there is a reason. I like the minimalism of the notes and the compactness of the text. It leaves you alone but still provides enough background, in the footnotes and endnotes, to support you when the meaning is too obscure. I like this. It’s more immersive experience, in a rhyming/poetic/right-brainy way.

As for the movie version (are you still with me?), it’s good, but different. I saw this in the theater when it first came out, way back when (1997) with my then-girlfriend (now wife) and I remember leaving the theater very impressed. It is interesting, an adaptation set in gangland Los Angeles. It does seem a little dated though, watching it now, in its jumpy “MTV-ness,” but it’s still good, mainly because the lead actors are so good (especially Claire Danes, Leonardo DiCaprio, and a very excellent Tybalt from John Leguizamo). They make you easily forgive the sometimes over-the-top showiness of the movie. They really nail their parts, so it works for me.

So that’s the post I guess…a sort of comparison between editions, something not new to these pages. I hope you weren't too bored. Just one final thing: it is important to note that all of these editions use Shakespeare’s language, something that shouldn’t bear mentioning. Unfortunately, there is a movement afoot to modernize Shakespeare’s text to make him more accessible, to modernize his words so that all of us “regular folk” get it, like in this recent movie production. Don’t do this, director-people. At the risk of sounding elitist, I think this is a big mistake. If you want the story without the real words, go watch West Side Story. If you want the real thing, read the play in the original text. So you may have to work a little. It’s worth it.