when the melancholy Dane meets the Oncoming Storm
What with the Greg Doran interview and the first promotional photo of David Tennant as Hamlet floating around, I figured I might as well go ahead and post this thing I wrote back in August but wound up not posting, for one reason or another. It's an odd, disjointed ramble about why I love Ten (which I haven't posted about really; so many of my posts have been about my frustration with him re: Martha), which is also, sort of, why I love Hamlet:
So last night I had a slightly traitorous realization, which is that I now love Ten more than Nine. David Tennant's Ten interested me from the start (I believe my reaction at the time was "Okay, Ten. You can stay"), but I spent season two of Doctor Who convinced that while I really enjoyed Ten, Nine was always going to be *my* Doctor. He was my entry to the show, after all, and I loved what Christopher Eccleston had done in the part. But something happened this season--or several somethings, really--to change that. Part of it is that I've just known Ten as a viewer for twice as long as Nine, since Christopher Eccleston only did the one season, part of it that I like Ten better without Rose, and part that I love the Ten-Martha relationship.
But I think most of it is just my realization that Ten works for me on a level that my fondness for Nine and my slight romanticizing of S1 can no longer disguise. There's something manic and bewitching about Ten, about the way he plays with words and names, relishes them, tastes them, even (tactile with words as he is with everything else)--which is why I found it so wonderfully apt that Ten's enthusiasm for Shakespeare took the form of "He always chooses new, beautiful, brilliant words," because of course he'd love that. And there's the air of the odd, distracted scholar about him, too, with the rumpled hair and black-framed specs and the rapid-fire delivery, processing knowledge almost too fast for speech--and with the pinstriped suit and the Chuck Taylors, a nice bit of sartorial insouciance that never fails to please.
That was a side trip down an alley of why I love Ten that I didn't actually intend to take. The thing I actually meant to write about was the fact that Ten, far more than Nine was, is a man who can play parts, and that's a type of character that I always like: he can play the idiot, the postman, the babbling scatterbrain, the drunken fool, the exuberant child--using those different personae (which are in some ways also ramped-up versions of himself) to put up a screen of words that can hide his pain as well as his plans. (Which is why, again, it's so right that Ten should love Shakespeare so much, why he should be the one to say "All the world's a stage"--how many parts has the Doctor played, in his ages that are far more than seven? And how many does Ten consciously put on?) And it's that ability, which David Tennant plays so well, that makes me think that David would be a really good Hamlet--why I keep saying that he would get the "antic disposition" right--but more than that, I also think that this is part of why I love Hamlet so much, in contrast to the other tragic heroes. They tend to be stubbornly singular, inflexible, unable to imagine change outside of the sudden action that can never be recuperated; but Hamlet has that ability to imagine, to enact, to create personae to hide behind or to try on. It's why I'm so uninterested in the question of whether Hamlet ever really becomes mad, because for me it's *always* a performance; I've never seen that moment in which the balance tips into real madness (especially because I think we see real madness in Ophelia, and it's nothing like Hamlet's articulate, conscious, layered act).
And to the extent that I'm interested in my fields topic of "disguise" or "multiple identities," it's because I find that ability so dazzling, at least when it's not in the service of villainy (Richard III leaves me cold, at least on the page)--because it's not so much the tension between seeming and being that I'm interested in, which is the straightforward path of villainy, looking like the innocent flower but being the serpent under it; but the possibility of being many things at once, of playing many parts, and of learning from them; of creating and defining those personae and then getting people to believe in them. It's what I love about Rosalind, too, incidentally, and perhaps Edgar in King Lear. And I think David has that ability to turn on a dime between personae that Hamlet needs: one of my favorite moments in "Family of Blood" is when he's John Smith, and Tim asks him why the watch spoke to him, and everything about John Smith changes into Ten, with the slightly smug technobabble and the easier cadences of speech--and then he's John Smith again, and horrified.
And I like watching episodes in which an actor on a show plays a different character than usual (as when David Duchovny plays Eddie Van Blundht), because you get to think about what creates identity for a fictional construct, and define the original character by what the new one is not--but with Ten we get that from the very beginning. In "The Christmas Invasion," the thing that appeals to me there is that Ten is a character who's very much consciously invested in working out what his identity is, and I think he does that through performance and costume. RTD had to differentiate Ten from Nine in some way, of course, but he chooses, with Ten, to make it a conscious process. Starting with clothing: Nine's look is very utilitarian and nondescript. The sense I get from his first episode is that he doesn't even know what he looks like until he's in Rose's flat, so I doubt he spent a lot of time putting his look together. But Ten has that whole sequence where he figures out what he's going to wear, looking at and rejecting possibilities--which of the many people in the TARDIS wardrobe he wants to be. (And now "Song for Ten" is going to be in my head all day. Just watch.) Clothes are important; there's a reason that when Hamlet goes "mad" for the first time, Ophelia is so focused on what he's wearing when he does it: "his doublet all unbraced, / No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, / Ungartered, and down-gyved to his ankle, / Pale as his shirt" (2.1). Disordered clothing bespeaks a disordered mind--or can at least represent one. And "Pale as his shirt" just makes the elision of clothing and identity even clearer here. Which is why it matters, what suit Ten chooses, if clothing makes you who you are.
And we also get that dizzying speech to distract the Sycorax, in which Ten imagines different possibilities of personality--but even before that, when Ten gets asked "who are you?" he responds with "I don't know"--unlike Nine, who tells Rose in answer to the same question that he can feel the turn of the earth, etc. So then we get the speech (which as I said before is one of my character buttons, distracting the enemy with words, especially seemingly silly ones), which has its plot purpose, but which is also about this "new new Doctor" working out who he is: "Is that the sort of man I am now, am I rude? Rude and not ginger?"
I also think that Ten remains a performer throughout because he's also hiding so much behind that performance. He's all hugs and grins on the outside, but on the inside he's incredibly dark: "No second chances--I'm that sort of a man." And I think "TCI" sets that up really well--and then they back off of it for most of the season, for some reason, but it's still there. So part of what I like about Ten in S3 is that we see more of that darkness--and not just his innate Ten darkness, but the greater inability to hide from all the Time War stuff that he pushed to the side in S2. A lot of his "yay! I am Ten! Love me!" stuff is "laughing on purpose at the darkness," as gets said of him in "Smith and Jones." And that's just a character type I like.
=======
Reading back over this during S4 was interesting, because part of what I loved about S3 was watching the facade fall apart--the Gridlock conversation; the recklessness with his own life, relying on Martha to catch him--even though I love the facade. And it's interesting to think that the Doctor we're getting now, who seems to be so much more at ease with himself in many ways, had to go through that process of crumbling in order to get to where he is now. What I didn't write about here was that cruelty Hamlet has, inexplicable and scary, which we get in flashes with Ten sometimes, particularly in "FoB"--though my refrain for that episode is not from Hamlet, but from Measure for Measure: 'it is excellent to have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.' Is Ten finally moving past that? Because Hamlet moves *into* it, is constantly trying to gear himself up for it: "From this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!" To reject the scholar and the courtier, and leave only the soldier, so that he can finally be in a position to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and say no more than "They are not near my conscience" while Horatio (in my personal canon) looks on in horror.
So last night I had a slightly traitorous realization, which is that I now love Ten more than Nine. David Tennant's Ten interested me from the start (I believe my reaction at the time was "Okay, Ten. You can stay"), but I spent season two of Doctor Who convinced that while I really enjoyed Ten, Nine was always going to be *my* Doctor. He was my entry to the show, after all, and I loved what Christopher Eccleston had done in the part. But something happened this season--or several somethings, really--to change that. Part of it is that I've just known Ten as a viewer for twice as long as Nine, since Christopher Eccleston only did the one season, part of it that I like Ten better without Rose, and part that I love the Ten-Martha relationship.
But I think most of it is just my realization that Ten works for me on a level that my fondness for Nine and my slight romanticizing of S1 can no longer disguise. There's something manic and bewitching about Ten, about the way he plays with words and names, relishes them, tastes them, even (tactile with words as he is with everything else)--which is why I found it so wonderfully apt that Ten's enthusiasm for Shakespeare took the form of "He always chooses new, beautiful, brilliant words," because of course he'd love that. And there's the air of the odd, distracted scholar about him, too, with the rumpled hair and black-framed specs and the rapid-fire delivery, processing knowledge almost too fast for speech--and with the pinstriped suit and the Chuck Taylors, a nice bit of sartorial insouciance that never fails to please.
That was a side trip down an alley of why I love Ten that I didn't actually intend to take. The thing I actually meant to write about was the fact that Ten, far more than Nine was, is a man who can play parts, and that's a type of character that I always like: he can play the idiot, the postman, the babbling scatterbrain, the drunken fool, the exuberant child--using those different personae (which are in some ways also ramped-up versions of himself) to put up a screen of words that can hide his pain as well as his plans. (Which is why, again, it's so right that Ten should love Shakespeare so much, why he should be the one to say "All the world's a stage"--how many parts has the Doctor played, in his ages that are far more than seven? And how many does Ten consciously put on?) And it's that ability, which David Tennant plays so well, that makes me think that David would be a really good Hamlet--why I keep saying that he would get the "antic disposition" right--but more than that, I also think that this is part of why I love Hamlet so much, in contrast to the other tragic heroes. They tend to be stubbornly singular, inflexible, unable to imagine change outside of the sudden action that can never be recuperated; but Hamlet has that ability to imagine, to enact, to create personae to hide behind or to try on. It's why I'm so uninterested in the question of whether Hamlet ever really becomes mad, because for me it's *always* a performance; I've never seen that moment in which the balance tips into real madness (especially because I think we see real madness in Ophelia, and it's nothing like Hamlet's articulate, conscious, layered act).
And to the extent that I'm interested in my fields topic of "disguise" or "multiple identities," it's because I find that ability so dazzling, at least when it's not in the service of villainy (Richard III leaves me cold, at least on the page)--because it's not so much the tension between seeming and being that I'm interested in, which is the straightforward path of villainy, looking like the innocent flower but being the serpent under it; but the possibility of being many things at once, of playing many parts, and of learning from them; of creating and defining those personae and then getting people to believe in them. It's what I love about Rosalind, too, incidentally, and perhaps Edgar in King Lear. And I think David has that ability to turn on a dime between personae that Hamlet needs: one of my favorite moments in "Family of Blood" is when he's John Smith, and Tim asks him why the watch spoke to him, and everything about John Smith changes into Ten, with the slightly smug technobabble and the easier cadences of speech--and then he's John Smith again, and horrified.
And I like watching episodes in which an actor on a show plays a different character than usual (as when David Duchovny plays Eddie Van Blundht), because you get to think about what creates identity for a fictional construct, and define the original character by what the new one is not--but with Ten we get that from the very beginning. In "The Christmas Invasion," the thing that appeals to me there is that Ten is a character who's very much consciously invested in working out what his identity is, and I think he does that through performance and costume. RTD had to differentiate Ten from Nine in some way, of course, but he chooses, with Ten, to make it a conscious process. Starting with clothing: Nine's look is very utilitarian and nondescript. The sense I get from his first episode is that he doesn't even know what he looks like until he's in Rose's flat, so I doubt he spent a lot of time putting his look together. But Ten has that whole sequence where he figures out what he's going to wear, looking at and rejecting possibilities--which of the many people in the TARDIS wardrobe he wants to be. (And now "Song for Ten" is going to be in my head all day. Just watch.) Clothes are important; there's a reason that when Hamlet goes "mad" for the first time, Ophelia is so focused on what he's wearing when he does it: "his doublet all unbraced, / No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, / Ungartered, and down-gyved to his ankle, / Pale as his shirt" (2.1). Disordered clothing bespeaks a disordered mind--or can at least represent one. And "Pale as his shirt" just makes the elision of clothing and identity even clearer here. Which is why it matters, what suit Ten chooses, if clothing makes you who you are.
And we also get that dizzying speech to distract the Sycorax, in which Ten imagines different possibilities of personality--but even before that, when Ten gets asked "who are you?" he responds with "I don't know"--unlike Nine, who tells Rose in answer to the same question that he can feel the turn of the earth, etc. So then we get the speech (which as I said before is one of my character buttons, distracting the enemy with words, especially seemingly silly ones), which has its plot purpose, but which is also about this "new new Doctor" working out who he is: "Is that the sort of man I am now, am I rude? Rude and not ginger?"
I also think that Ten remains a performer throughout because he's also hiding so much behind that performance. He's all hugs and grins on the outside, but on the inside he's incredibly dark: "No second chances--I'm that sort of a man." And I think "TCI" sets that up really well--and then they back off of it for most of the season, for some reason, but it's still there. So part of what I like about Ten in S3 is that we see more of that darkness--and not just his innate Ten darkness, but the greater inability to hide from all the Time War stuff that he pushed to the side in S2. A lot of his "yay! I am Ten! Love me!" stuff is "laughing on purpose at the darkness," as gets said of him in "Smith and Jones." And that's just a character type I like.
=======
Reading back over this during S4 was interesting, because part of what I loved about S3 was watching the facade fall apart--the Gridlock conversation; the recklessness with his own life, relying on Martha to catch him--even though I love the facade. And it's interesting to think that the Doctor we're getting now, who seems to be so much more at ease with himself in many ways, had to go through that process of crumbling in order to get to where he is now. What I didn't write about here was that cruelty Hamlet has, inexplicable and scary, which we get in flashes with Ten sometimes, particularly in "FoB"--though my refrain for that episode is not from Hamlet, but from Measure for Measure: 'it is excellent to have a giant's strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.' Is Ten finally moving past that? Because Hamlet moves *into* it, is constantly trying to gear himself up for it: "From this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!" To reject the scholar and the courtier, and leave only the soldier, so that he can finally be in a position to kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and say no more than "They are not near my conscience" while Horatio (in my personal canon) looks on in horror.