What Did Hamlet Show Us?
Before I broke for the fest, I wrapped up Turning Points Hamlet breakdown. Let’s see what if anything can be concluded from the process.
First of all, thanks for everyone who hung in with it, and everyone who went back and caught up once the exercise was over. If I’d stopped to realize how many posts this would take, I might not have done it. Yet the readership drop on Hamlet Fridays was not so steep as I worried it might be. In fact, it might have been the Friday part and not the Hamlet part that accounts for the slight dip in hits.
As I expected, when we map the play according to its emotional up and down beats, we get a line which differs significantly from the standard one you see in high school English class. That’s the one that measures the escalating stakes of the narrative, like so:
It’s also a different curve than the contemporary three-act screenplay, with its notoriously over-worked end of act two low point:
What we get is a line closer to a stock tracker measuring the progress over time of a slowly deflating security. The overall movement is downward, but there are continual ticks up and down along the way. It’s these continual modulations of tension vs. release and vicarious pleasure vs. fear & pity that keep us engaged with the story as it unfolds.
(This doesn’t mean that the other two lines are wrong, so much as they’re measuring different things. But I guess I am arguing that the rhythm of up and down beats is the more useful line, for RPG purposes and perhaps in general.)
The overall line might be spikier if I assigned a separate quantitative value to each up and down moment. As it is I’ve only made a few very big disastrous turning points larger than the others. I’m not sure the level of added complexity would have told us much, though.
It did not surprise me to see that we rarely see more than three beats in a row with the same emotional direction. This happens only once, during the sequence at Ophelia’s grave, where I count four consecutive downward beats. Interestingly, this is the moment when our sympathy for Hamlet is at its lowest ebb. We can afford to see him lose a lot because we’re no longer sure we’re with him.
I was surprised, but should not have been, to see that the lowest point occurs not with Hamlet’s death, but with Gertrude’s. After this, an upswing occurs, starting with Laertes’ confession and implication of Claudius. This enables Hamlet the certainty he has always needed to fulfill his goal and kill Claudius.
Another surprise was the series of post-mortem victories Hamlet scores, leading me to think he’s more of a doomed hero than a tragic one. He redeems himself in death, which is an anagnorisis more appropo to the end of a John Woo movie than to the classic Aristotelian model. This was the most significant change this exercise brought to my understanding of the play. Before I started I’d always assumed he was a tragic hero, though in an oblique and incomplete way. Now I see him as a sacrificial hero: you can’t kill a king and get away with it, so he must die. But it is equally imperative that he kill Claudius to restore order. You can’t say the same thing about Macbeth’s decision to kill Duncan, or for that matter, Lear’s decision to abdicate in favor of his insincerely flattering daughters or Othello’s to strangle Desdemona.
Part of me wants to explore other famous works in this manner-perhaps a straight procedural like Dr. No or Star Wars, followed by a full-on drama like The Graduate or Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf. Then there are the genre-specific cases: horror stories probably show a different curve than the norm, as do comedies. However with the extra time investment required to both study the source material and then make and copy and upload the diagram, I don’t plan on jumping back in those waters anytime soon.
Next up, instead of doing that crazy thing, I’ll zoom in to take a look at the various types of scene outcome.