Hamlet--8 (more matter with less art)

Let's speed things up a little. Polonius continues an ass. He even tries the patience of Gertrude, who probably owes him for her continued queenhood. It hurts me to skip "brevity is the soul of wit" and the nonsense surrounding it, because people too often don't realize how funny parts of this play are, but I am heeding Gertrude's advice.

So, the scene with Hamlet and Polonius. This is the first we see of "crazy Hamlet." Of course he's extremely sane, here. Claudius and Polonius could save themselves a lot of trouble and dying if Polonius could only tell when he's being made fun of. This scene provides a couple of possible alternate titles for the play:
1. Words, words, words (Hamlet)
2. Though this be madness, yet there is method in it (Polonius)

Finally, Polonius "takes his leave" of Hamlet. Hamlet responds with a line I'd love to say to someone at my job today: "You cannot, my lord, take from me anything I would more willingly part withal."

Of course, I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be--but I'm not Polonius either (sorry Prufrock), and today the feeling of being surrounded by vulgar idiots is particularly trying (I say this with a bit more humility than it sounds like). Let me sum up my problem:
1. Hamlet
2. Marx
3. Weber
4. Camus (but only in small installments and only admired, not endorsed or followed, you civilization-destroying hipsters).
Oh, now he's just trying to show off. Change the channel, honey.

Hamlet--7 (by the mass, i was about to say something)

In Scene One of Act Two, we get the second indication that Ophelia is cool. Before that, though, we see Polonius as both clown and villain. He's sending this guy to go spy on Laertes in France. The idea is that the guy will find someone who knows Laertes and then will say "oh yeah, he's really wild, big into gambling and fencing and whoring and drinking." Then his interlocutor will say "I'll say. Why, yesterday I saw him drunk, betting on a fencing match while having sex with a whore (and playing tennis)." This is clownish because Polonius is so long-winded and he loses his train of thought, gets totally befuddled. This is so good.

Then Ophelia charges in. Hamlet has just been acting crazy in front of her and she's really upset. As Polonius told her to, she's been ignoring him, so then he comes into her room half-naked and stares at her, looks crazy, then does a kind of Exorcist head spinning thing and walks out without looking. This is important. For the first time, Hamlet is really acting nuts, but Shakespeare doesn't show it to us. Instead, he entrusts Ophelia to report it. She does it really well, in what must be a challenging scene for any actress to pull off.

The first time that we see the craziness, we see through someone else's eyes. And then Polonius immediately misinterprets it. He decides that Hamlet is mad for Ophelia's love. So, again, before we see him behaving in this way, we get a report of it and an interpretation of it that we know to be wrong. I think that's interesting.

Here's a bullet point summary of scene two. Tomorrow I'll focus more closely on part of it. Claudius has brought to Denmark two of Hamlet's school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and assigned them to try to cheer Hamlet up and to spy on him. They agree. The guys who were sent to Norway about Fortinbras come back and report that all's cool now, and Fortinbras, chided, is going to attack the Polacks (Shakespeare's word, not mine) instead. Polonius tells Claudius and Gertrude that Hamlet is crazy because of Ophelia and they hatch a plan to throw the two together and observe them. Hamlet shows up, Polonius tries to talk to him, Hamlet ridicules him in a kind of crazy way, but with method. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern show up, getting Polonius out of an embarrassing encounter. Hamlet's glad to see them. He knows they're spies and tells them so. Hamlet's favorite band of actors from Wittenberg show up at the castle to perform. Hamlet has them do a quick scene and commissions a play that is very like how he knows Claudius killed Old Hamlet. Exeunt except Hamlet, who berates himself for staying pretty cool, compared to a player who weeps for Hecuba.

Hamlet--6

Things really pick up in Scene Two. I have to make a decision whether I'm going to keep up with the one post per scene thing, which will mean some very long posts, or split some of the scenes into multiple posts, which will take forever, or start breezing over some things. Hmmm, not sure.

But, I forgot two things from Act 1. First, I really like the ghost. He's such a weirdo. He's "offended" when Horatio first sees him. Then, he gestures to Hamlet to follow him with "such courteous action." I love it. He's dead, but really stands on ceremony. Are there manners in purgatory?

Second, my favorite thing about these scenes. Just after Hamlet hears the whole twisted story of his father's murder and his mother's marriage, and is commissioned to take revenge, Hamlet yells "My tables! Meet it is I set it down that a man may smile and smile and be a villain!" The ghost says: your uncle killed me and your mother, now kill him. Hamlet immediately goes to paper and pen, to take note about hypocrisy. This is a pretty good indication that the revenge will not go well.

Weather in Wisconsin was unbelievable today. Almost 60 degrees, sunny. But, there was an apocalyptic wind. So, I'm talking with a customer about how it sucks to be at work on such a day, and how he took the day off for it, when he says "Well, I guess the bums and homeless get to enjoy it all the time." Yes, those who survived the negative thirty degree temperatures from two weeks ago probably did enjoy today's weather. This kind of insanity, I don't know.

Hamlet--5 (murder most foul)

Read Act 1 Scenes 4-5. I think these should be considered one scene. I don't really have anything to say about it, I guess, which would seem to make this a poor post.

Or, we could view it as reasserting the blogginess of this blog. I don't have anything to say, but blah blah blah, I have a crush on so-and-so.

Here's a summary in case you're covering Hamlet in class and didn't do the reading for tomorrow: the ghost of Old Hamlet shows up and tells Hamlet that Claudius killed Old Hamlet by pouring poison into his ear while he slept, then seduced Gertrude. He then tells Hamlet to take revenge, but not to "taint his soul" or to harm Gertrude. This is a lot to ask: commit regicide/steppatricide/unclecide, but don't taint your soul. Oh yes, and your mother is a trifling whore, but don't hurt her in the murderous rage you'll have to whip up in order to kill your uncle. "Sure dad!" Suddenly any parental pressure I may have gone through as a kid doesn't seem so bad.

Hamlet's friends catch up right after the ghost disappears. He tells them that he's going to act crazy, but not really be crazy, and makes them swear about fifteen times not to tell anyone what they've seen, or to let on that he's not really crazy. The ghost chips in from underneath the ground, kind of moaning "Swear" all the time. Hic et ubique?

There's actually a lot more to say here than I thought. I really let this play permeate the old life this weekend, to the point that Jackie, who is always very patient with my nonsense, got a little bit fed up when I asked if we could buy a record player so that I could play these old records of recordings of Hamlet that we have at the store. So, really I just needed today off.

But the action of the play is now in motion. Hamlet has his mission, has assumed the crazy character, and we know what the situation is in the rotten state of Denmark. We'll need to notice the theme of corruption/garbage that's running through the play, started by Hamlet and taken to whole new levels by the ghost, who vividly describes his wife and brother exercising on a bed of garbage. If you're going to shower afterwards anyway...

Is anyone reading this play along with me? And, oh yes, Scolari out at Chelsea.

Hamlet--4

Shakespeare usually names his tragedies and histories after the main character or the highest ranking character. This is boring. What are some alternative titles for Hamlet? Here are a couple suggestions to get you started:
1. Things to Do in Denmark When You Wish You Were Dead
2. The Revenge of the English Major
3. Natural Born Soliloquizers
4. Batman

Hamlet--3 (Affection! pooh!)

Milwaukee is in many ways an old an ugly city. This might be my favorite thing about it. This morning Jackie had an appointment in what was an old, run-down part of town but has now been renovated into the uber-cool Third Ward, full of boutiques and art galleries. I went with her so that I could be all artistic sitting by the river, just at the point where the solid sheet of ice that covers it downtown breaks off into deadly cold water.

So, alright, I still have a bit of post-Ginsberg Romanticism, even if it is shot through with irony and a carefully controlled critical self-awareness. There, see, I'm even suspicious about my own irony. Anyway, from some of the prettiest parts of the city, you can look across the river and see dilapidated industrial neighborhoods, complete with abandoned factories with busted windows and rusted railway bridges.

Maybe it's appropriate that I'm at the river when we first meet Ophelia. Life provides extra foreshadowing.

Ophelia is a really interesting case, in terms of her cultural impact. We all know Ophelia--she has penetrated our cultural consciousness in a way that Shakespeare's great female characters haven't: Rosalind, Portia, Olivia, Cleopatra. These are great roles and in a couple of cases are even leading roles. But of Shakespeare's women, only Juliet is more widely known than poor Ophelia, who has a small role that lacks the spark of those other characters.

This must be because of her connection to this play and its leading man. She is the victim we most wish Hamlet would spare. And that's the thing--she is thoroughly a victim--as muted by the men in her life as any female Shakespeare character I can think of.

In this, her first scene, she is silenced by Laertes, who gives her a long lecture about how she shouldn't have sex with Hamlet. His speech is long. She responds briefly but well, saying okay, but don't show me the hard way to heaven while you take the easy way. This is the first of only two indications we get as to why Hamlet is (fatally) attracted to her. For the rest of the play, including the "to be or not to be" scene, she is completely muzzled by the men.

Sure enough, her father, that old wicked idiot Polonius, comes along in this scene and berates her, again with long speeches about not doing Hamlet. These speeches show us a recurring theme surrounding Polonius: espionage, sneaking. Polonius has "heard" about Hamlet's attentions to Ophelia, as he has heard everything. His long, slimy tentacles reach throughout Elsinore, having put Claudius on the throne already. His fatal mistake will be to think that Hamlet can be controlled and informed upon as easily as Laertes.

But Ophelia. We do not get to know her. She is a feminist rallying cry because she is completely silenced, not because of anything she says or is or does. All the men are culpable of this, Hamlet as much as anyone.

Hamlet--2 (whose common theme is death of fathers)

Heat wave in Wisconsin. Today was almost fifty degrees. Which means that it's warm enough to think. Which means more crackpot theories in this blog than usual, more bombast, more interpretation, pronounced with a phony French accent.

We finally see Hamlet (they guy, not the play) in Scene Two, after a long speech by Hamlet's uncle/stepfather/king Claudius. Claudius' speech is effective. He addresses Old Hamlet's death (and implicitly his succession), his marriage, a coming threat to the kingdom, and he passes out favors to his supporters (he lets Laertes, son of his chief adviser Polonius, go back to France). Then, he turns to Hamlet and asks him to stop being sad.

Addressing Hamlet in front of other people is probably a mistake by Claudius. Hamlet's first three lines are one-liner puns that eviscerate the formal stateliness of Claudius and Gertrude. We get two things from these first lines from Hamlet. First, Claudius is no match for him, at least when it comes to thinking and speaking. Second, Hamlet is intent on turning things on their head.

This is helpful in understanding what's going on with Hamlet. We have a right to ask: what is the root of Hamlet's sadness? Okay, his dad's been dead for about a month. That sucks. And his mom married his uncle. He's definitely upset about that. And he's been denied the throne, even though he's the late king's only son. So, I'm sure he's upset about each of these things. But, these opening lines, wherein he keeps turning people's words around, where everything he says has a double or triple meaning, suggest to me that it's a little bit broader.

I don't know. Geez, it's not like I can figure out Hamlet. But, it seems to me like he's realized that the world does not work well. The way the world, or at least the world of Elsinore, is set up is faulty. Claudius and Gertrude urge him to think of how common it is to lose a father, but this is stating a part of the problem, not alleviating the problem. Nature is poor. I may be transposing my own fixations onto Hamlet (and really, who doesn't?), but I think it's a kind of theodicy problem. At the beginning of Olivier's film, the narrator says "This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind." Olivier does violence to the play throughout his movie (he called it "an essay on Hamlet"), and nowhere more so than here. It's not a tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind. It's the tragedy of a man who has realized that his mind does not fit in the world he lives in. The time is out of joint, oh cursed spite, that ever I was born to make it right. Before we even hear from him, we hear from Claudius that Hamlet wants out of Elsinore. He wants to go back to college at Wittenberg, but is denied permission, unlike Laertes.

It's popular to say that Hamlet is too big for his play (popular among people who wear black clothes and berets, smoke bidi's, and are twelve credit hours away from using perfect grammar while taking your order at McDonald's, or asking if you'd like a bag at the used bookstore). This is true, but he's also too big and too good for this poorly constructed world, like so many people I know, including several of you. Some of you, however, well... Just kidding.

Also, I just saw a commercial for Long John Silver's promoting their new "London-style" fish and fries. First, I always thought that the revolution was in part so that we could have church-basement style fried fish, instead of London-style. Second, I imagine that when the queen hears this, she will dig herself a grave, just so that she can roll over in it.