Bill Kerwin's Reviews > Hamlet
Hamlet
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I don't have any earth-shattering insights to share from this most recent of god-knows-how-many readings, but this time through I was struck by:
1) what a damn fine piece of stagecraft this is, from the suspenseful, moody opening on the castle battlements to the solemn dead march carrying the prince offstage, and
2) how Shakespeare seems to want Hamlet's personality--particularly the wellspring of his actions (and lack of action)--to remain an enigma, and that he achieves this by infusing the character with so much of himself--so much wit and poetry, so much despondency and savagery--that the result is that the audience simply bows before the great mystery of human personality, and that this reverence for the unknown lurking in the heart of an extraordinary man intensifies the sense of pity, horror and waste that fills us at the end of the play.
by
I don't have any earth-shattering insights to share from this most recent of god-knows-how-many readings, but this time through I was struck by:
1) what a damn fine piece of stagecraft this is, from the suspenseful, moody opening on the castle battlements to the solemn dead march carrying the prince offstage, and
2) how Shakespeare seems to want Hamlet's personality--particularly the wellspring of his actions (and lack of action)--to remain an enigma, and that he achieves this by infusing the character with so much of himself--so much wit and poetry, so much despondency and savagery--that the result is that the audience simply bows before the great mystery of human personality, and that this reverence for the unknown lurking in the heart of an extraordinary man intensifies the sense of pity, horror and waste that fills us at the end of the play.
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Reading Progress
May 12, 2007
– Shelved
Started Reading
January 1, 2011
–
Finished Reading
March 14, 2011
– Shelved as:
16th-17th-c-brit
March 14, 2011
– Shelved as:
weird-fiction
August 20, 2012
– Shelved as:
tudor-drama
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Evan
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Jan 28, 2011 01:56AM
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The worst I ever saw was in those wonderful experimental '60's. It was set in the present, and opened on the basketball court of Wittenburg U. where Hamlet, a star player, receives a telegram telling him of his father's death. When he gets back to Denmark, he takes LSD and sees his father's ghost. I still remember him holding up a sugar cube for Horatio and the boys to see, and saying "This bids me to go away with it." There's also a psychedelic dream dance sequence with Hamlet and Gertrude umbilically connected by a rope. I forget most of the rest, except that when Laertes returns, hellbent on revenge,he comes back with a bunch of bearded buddies dressed in brown fatigues and carrying machine guns, looking like Fidel and Che.
I'm glad you liked it.
Tis a fault to heaven,
A fault against the dead, a fault to nature,
To reason most absurd, whose common theme
Is death of fathers
I was struck numb. How completely inconsolable, incomprehensible the loss of a child would be. How totally out of the 'common theme' to lose one's only son. How 'words, words, words' would ring hollow - how much the paragon on animals would appear but the quintessence of dust.
The production had me breathless throughout - and I've seen and read the play, as you say, many, many times. You are so right, Bill, a damn fine piece of stagecraft.
What I think is more interesting is how powerfully-wrought language like Shakespeare's may move us, even when the way we are moved is far from a passage's most obvious meaning. Poetry after all is a net for catching meaning, and the most powerful poetry casts a very wide net. And certainly the loss of a child is horrifying, and seems like a violation of nature.
I have always loved this monologue and the one immediately before for it for its obvious purpose and clear irony. What gall Claudius has! This incestuous fratricide rushes his unseemly and probably illegal marriage, imposing this violation of common norms on everyone merely because he can, dishonoring the mourning period of the brother he has murdered, and then accuses his nephew of engaging in behavior "against nature" because he still chooses to wear black for his father and refuses to cheer up! What a vile man! It makes me want Hamlet to kill him right now! This very minute!
But then, what a wonderful play we would lose...
Yes. My last time through Shakespeare, this play, Lear, Measure for Measure and Troilus and Cressida offered the most interesting changes in my own viewpoints.
Hamlet's hesitation and inability to act before he has proof beyond a reasonable doubt ends in catastrophe. In other words, great leaders must often take action intuitively before all the facts of the matter are in. In that regard, Plato's "philosopher" king or queen seems an oxymoron, since like Hamlet their "conscience" (over-thinking a problem of life and death and failing to take decisive action) would make cowards of them all.
A thought-provoking interpretation. Thanks!
You're welcome. And thank you for another thought-provoking review!
Yes. It is deep and poetic...but it is also exciting with a lot of action and a bunch of murders at the end! It was after all the popular entertainment of its day.
Helen wrote: "Ooh. Great analysis. I have chills."
Thanks!
I think part of the reason I have a hard time reading Shakespeare comes from the vernacular he uses. Most common in his day, but unfortunately doesn't translate well for me in a much more modern time.
Maybe you can suggest ways for me to read Shakespeare that would assist in making it easier for me to comprehend in my brain?? I know it is a case of Lost In Translation for me. Or maybe suggest something "remedial" to start off with and then work up from there?? Any assistance or advice is appreciated as I feel COMPLETELY ignorant of some of the greatest works ever committed to paper.
Excellent observations. And you are exactly right: it is the bleakness of Hamlet's "thoughts," not Hamlet himself, in his totality, that seem so bleak. The soliloquy pretty much nails it his "native hue of resolution" is "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." Hamlet is "melancholic," as Shakespeare's contemporaries would say, or "depressed" or--even better--"bi-polar"--as we would say today.
One of my favorite of Hamlet's speeches is the one where he tells his old school buddies R & G about his attitude toward things. The whole speech is wonderful, but the end is particularly illuminating:
"What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! Iin apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet, to me,
what is this quintessence of dust?"
He shares the Renaissance vision of the nobility of humankind, but cannot feel it, not right now, not the way he is: felled by the shock of his father's death and the aftershock of his mother's marriage. But that is his tragedy. Now is precisely the time in which he must act, and he--magnificent prince though he might be at some other time--is not now ready for the challenge.
For me, it depends on the day, mood, what I’m looking at.
Both are the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays and tragedies.
I lean more to Hamlet in terms of entertainment value and ubiquity, but King Lear might be his grandest, weirdest, most pitiless, “sublime” of masterpieces.
It was utterly fabulous. The hair literally stood up on my neck when they plucked out the vile jellies!!!