Shakespeare's Hamlet r0x0R3z tH3 hIZZoU5e

Cafe Society
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This post is long, but don’t feel like you have to read any or all of it. In short, this thread is for anything you feel like saying about Hamlet.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is my all-time favorite single work of literature, book or play, and I believe that we have had no good threads on its behalf. I realize that for generations past great scholars with an insight keenly crafted and a knowledge base that far surpasses mine have wandered through the labyrinthine tapestry that this play so deftly makes real, but I must most shyly admit that all too seldom have I laid eyes upon their writings, which give new meaning to the work I love so well. Therefore any thoughts I have thereon stem almost solely from my constant readings and rereadings (if such a work can be said to be read, rather than consumed and breathed and lived), and maybe a little bit from Reduced Shakespeare too. But given my disclaimer to ineptness and unfamiliarity, perhaps it will amuse any veteran Shakespeareans reading my post to hear what childish thoughts I have to give.

For one I have yet to see a portrayal of Hamlet, whether on stage or screen, which I have not enjoyed wholeheartedly. It continues to amaze me the sheer number of possibilities that the story offers, so many different ways have the lines been brought to life. I love each character the play presents, and none of the major roles are two-dimensional or meaningless. The story strays from the main theme just the perfect amount. The intersecting conflicts and motivations are equisitely laid out. The drama of the untouchable dialogue is patterned so elegantly and brilliantly I don’t see how anyone could get it wrong.

Nearly every scene holds at least one unforgettable speech. My favorite can be found in the singularly large Act II, scene ii, the first half of the “What a piece of work is man?” speech, delivered by Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:

How often have I felt the exact same sentiments, and sought the words to give them form which I could tell to all the world, yet found my struggles hopeless but for this speech I know all too well.

I also don’t think Hamlet’s really crazy. But then again, I don’t think I’m really crazy, either.

So, any other Hamlet fans here? Any haters? Any favorite lines? I often feel that there is a passage from Hamlet to fit any mood, any situation that may arise. But far too long have I gone on. I will adjourn, for now.

For your reference: Hamlet, courtesy of The Tech

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What did you make of Strange Brew?

As for my favourite line, it’s Hamlet’s quip about the secret parts of fortune. She is a strumpet, damnit.

Rosenkrantz & Guildenstern are my favourite characters, even though they are so peripheral. They’re like the sixteenth century’s answer to Boba Fett, that way.

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I saw an experimental production of “Hamlet” in D.C. a few years ago…where four different actors, two male, two female, played the character. They all moved together on the stage, but would take turns actually playing the character, one person acting while the other three hovered about. For the most part, each actor would do an entire scene, and then switch as a new scene came on, but for the climax, they were switching at every line.

It was different, I guess.

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Hmmm, never heard of it, but I’ll check it out. A comedy based on Hamlet sounds right up my alley. :slight_smile:

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No less a personage than Abraham Lincoln was a closet “Hamlet” freak. He wrote a letter to an actor (it may even have been Edwin Booth) when he was in the White House that said something on the order of, “Unlike most of the members of your profession, I find the soliloquy that commences, ‘Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ to be superior to the ‘To be or not to be’ speech.” That a melancholiac responded powerfully to the best literary treatment of profound depression ever produced is not surprising at all to me, and that the play is one of the top achievement of human artistic endeavor speaks not only to the effortless, mature craft of the writer, but also to the ubiquity of Hamlet’s experience. All of us have been knocked off our pins at one point or another, and what viewers and readers respond to over and over again in “Hamlet” is not the thrilling, quasi-Greek tragedy plot, but the absolutely unforgettable, unmistakable portrait of someone undergoing a suicidal bout with crippling depression–a disorder that wasn’t even recognized as an illness when the author wrote the play.

I think there’s a reason why the most-recognized work by the race’s top dramatist has been popular since about fifty years after it was written, and has become the gold standard in both acting and literature, and that’s because you simply can’t not identify with somebody undergoing a major bummer. Depression has been called the common cold of mental illness (a term that still scares us, the way the word “polio” did our parents), and the portrayal of the episode in “Hamlet” resonates both with the author and the nodding audience, all of whom sit there going, “Yeah, bro, I been there.” It’s the Delta blues in iambic pentameter.

Much has been made of Hamlet’s inability to do anything for a long, long time after he finds out how his uncle got his big break. In my more facetious moments, I say it’s because Shakespeare had five acts to fill, but when I think about it more deeply, I realize it’s because, for whatever reason, the author was really interested in turning a magnifying glass on his hero. The stuff that happens around Hamlet is, in many ways, just a plausible excuse to watch him react. My wife points out that if Shakespeare had started the action about six months before the play opens, he could’ve just called it “MacBeth”.

For whatever reason, “Hamlet” appears to have been Shakespeare’s most intimately-crafted piece. He stuffed it full of philosophizing about all kinds of things: the craft of acting, ruminations on the nature of existence, the point at which love and sex intersect, how hatred can become powerful enough to corrode everything good in life, the troubled relations between parent and child. The author wrote the play after the death of his son, and near the end of a life of exhausting effort marked by riotous success and extreme personal heartbreak. He appears to have thought of his black-clad hero as an avatar for himself in a way that he didn’t with the rest of his characters, and Hamlet has a voice at once much younger and much older than his apparent age in the play. However you present “Hamlet” (on the page, in a theater, played by a man, a woman, a child, or a squadron, taking place in Elizabethan times, during World War II, during the Russian Revolution, during the classical Greek era, in space, in the wilderness), there’s no way to keep its universality and power from resonating with the audience.

I’m more of a “Lear” freak myself–there’s something in it that just rings my bell–but I cannot deny the appeal of the sublime achievement of drama in English.

Good thread, thanks.

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For a college writing assignment, I once set Hamlet in a Wal Mart. It was called “Dane’s Discount City.”

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Then you MUST see this.

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I saw something sort of like that at as an undergrad at Michigan a couple of years ago – only they had two actors (one man and one woman) instead of four, and they sort of interacted with one another as they said their lines (the two spent most of the early scenes clinging to one another, actually). I thought I’d hate it, but it worked reasonably well, because both actors were excellent. Unfortunately, the rest of the production was at best mediocre.

What I really hated was having the ghost played by the entire ensemble under a big black piece of fabric, alternating lines. There was no emotional connection at all.

Actually, for that matter, all of the weakest stage productions of Shakespeare I’ve seen have been Hamlets (I saw a bad production in St. Louis a few weeks ago, in fact). I suppose that’s because it’s just so famous that nobody knows what to do with it anymore.

I still love the play though. It’s not my favorite Shakespeare, though it used to be, but it still resonates, and this is where I compliment McJohn’s post. Go McJohn!

Oh, and to respond to one particular point, I think that Hamlet’s supposed delay is overstated – who was it who called it “the biggest red herring in English literature”? He delays because he’s not sure he can trust the ghost; once he finds out he probably can, he’s pretty active (though it turns out to be directed against the wrong people).

And also, it wasn’t exactly near the end of his life or career – it’s conventionally dated around 1600 (first appeared in print, in highly corrupted form, in 1603), and it marks the start of the period of the great tragedies.

And did you mention Shakespeare’s son was named Hamnet?

Oh, and while we’re bringing up favorite lines, mine is –

If ever thou didst hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity a while,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.

I just think “Absent thee from felicity a while” is such a beautiful line, for the sheer sound of it…

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Dammit… thanks for reminding me. I keep meaning to see that, and I keep not seeing it! :slight_smile:

Hamlet is certainly my favorite Shakespeare play, and one of my favorite literary works in general. My favorite line is one that has found meaning for me at many points in my life… from Hamlet’s short “fall of a sparrow” speech, near the end of the play:

In the context of the play, he’s talking about his own impending death… I interpret it as him talking about change, and being ready for change, which is inevitable. Better to accept change than to fight it. It will come whether you like it or not.

Next question, what is your favorite adaptation of Hamlet? On the stage or screen, or elsewhere? I have only seen it performed once on a live stage, and I think it wasn’t that great of a production, so my personal favorite is the Kenneth Branagh film version. My least favorite is the Ethan Hawke futuristic film version which, despite having an innovative take and some neat tricks to it, was totally devoid of the emotions so necessary to the story.

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Anyone ever hear the theory that Hamlet’s “To be or not to be…” soliliquy was not specifically written for the play but was actually written years earlier as a stand-alone poem? The theory speculates that Shakespeare, facing a deadline, simply recycled some of his old stuff for the play?

As evidence, the author of this theory points to the line about death being “an undiscovered country…from which borne no traveller returns…” (I’m quoting from memory. Forgive me if this is not right). This line, the theory goes, makes absolutely no sense in the context of the play. After all, it his Hamlet’s father’s GHOST which starts the action!

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McJohn wrote:

I may be wrong, but I was under the impression that because he doubted his own sanity, he couldn’t quite believe his father’s ghost had really come to him with such a heavy request. Therefore, the machination of a play within a play to “catch the conscience of the king” was necessary. He had to have the proof of his uncle’s guilty reaction before he felt ready to off the guy.

Oops, should I have encased that last paragraph in a spoiler box?

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pugluvr, you bastid-- pouring 400-year-old spoilers in the porches of my ears.

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Awesome thread.

My dad used to teach Hamlet and I’ve pretty much grown up with the play constantly echoing in the background. I still love it and try to see as many versions as possible–has anyone here seen the Derek Jacobi version? It was a BBC type thing–made for TV–but just incredible. Watching Jacobi makes you see where Branagh took a LOT of lessons. It’s funny, but another version I really adore is the made-for-TV Campbell Scott version. He is INCREDIBLE. I love his reading of the ghost scene and the action afterwards–“Well said, old mole!” Really brilliant stuff.

As for my favorite lines, there are far too many. But I’ve always loved “Thrift, Horatio, thrift! The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” Good lord, my dad just came out here and it’s true–there are FARRR too many brilliant lines to pick from. lol try, THE WHOLE PLAY. I’ve always Hamlet’s opener too–“A little more than kin and less than kind.” Ah! shiver As for speeches, “What a piece of work is a man” and “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I” have always been my absolute favorites. “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?” Just exquisite.

Oh, and of course one can’t forget the BEST line EVER: “Very like a whale!”

As for the whole Hamlet-indecisiveness thing, I’ve never liked it. God, look at the subtext and situations and you’d never come to the conclusion that he’s some sort of wishy-washy Oedipal case (see Olivier). When they talk about him taking on the pirates single-handedly–boarding their ship, no less!–that’s not the work of a head-in-the-clouds weakling. Hamlet’s problem isn’t in a lack of strength; it’s in an overabundance of brains. His dilemma is one that only a brilliant character would have–one of duty versus morality, trusting reason versus taking fate into your own hands, and on and on. He doesn’t immediately take to actions because for him they are always governed by thoughts. A teacher of mine once made an observation I’ll always remember. He said “If Othello and Hamlet had switched places both of their plays might have ended happily!” It’s so true! Hamlet would have thought out the situation and investigated Iago’s claims–he never would have immediately jumped to the extreme action of killing Desdemona. And Othello wouldn’t have had a second thought about righteously killing Claudius as soon as his father said to do so. God, isn’t tragedy always a matter of the right character in the wrong place?

Spectacular thread again! Thanks so much. What an eternally brilliant piece of writing.

-epi

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Cogent and fascinating comments all… let’s face it, there’s just something about the bummed-out princeling that makes us all stop and watch.

It seems as though every modern production of “Hamlet” has to start with the question, “OK, how can we make this new?” We’ve been through several rounds of innovative approaches–as I recall, one very prestigious and high-powered touring company took it to the troops in the field in Word War II as a morale-booster–and Diane Venora’s turn in the lead resulted in a lot of ink that wasn’t on the Dane’s cloak. (Whatever happened to her, anyway?) Richard Armour commented in “Twisted Tales from Shakespeare” that “People who have seen Barrymore’s Hamlet feel superior to those who have not, but fortunately they grow fewer every year.”

I never thought about that whole undiscovered-country deal in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Hmm. You’re right. Later retrofit of existing material that suited the piece, or authorial forgetfulness? Did I happen to say that Shakespeare had five acts to fill? Oh, yeah, right, I mentioned that. (Some scholars think the dude who started James I’s badly-needed anti-witch campaign stuck the Hecate portions of “MacBeth” into the play, and indeed I must say that I seldom see them performed.)

Mmm… Derek Jacobi. Was that one part of the Shakespeare Plays project for the BBC?

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Since my New Year’s resolution is to stop trying to bring every conversation around to the subject of James Joyce, I’ll take this opportunity to quote from Ulysses while I can:

Apart from the question of how Hamlet came by a grandson, this idea is delightful to me. Mostly because of the implications about Stephen’s lineage, though, which really doesn’t have a lot to do with Hamlet.

I’ll shut up now.