Hamlet

[bookwormsarah]

I saw Hamlet for the first time on Saturday, and I have been left with lots of thoughts and a burning desire to find my GCSE English teacher and camp out on his doorstep until he gives me a terms worth of Eng Lit lessons on the subject.

Comments

[antisoppist]

I did Hamlet for A-level. The problem was that we saw it with Tim McInnerny and we were too busy working out whether that really was the bloke from Blackadder to notice much else. He was a very sort of gangly droopy Hamlet and at 17 I didn't have much patience with Hamlet anyway. Your production sounds a much better first Hamlet to have seen.

[bookwormsarah]

Tim McInnerny can be very drippy, and I can see how Hamlet could be interpreted like that. I'm going to have to find some dvds or online footage to compare.

We studied Macbeth in the fourth year. We watched a video of an RSC production, but were distracted by the fact we had been told Judi Dench showed up nude at some point. The following year we studied Julius Caesar, in which Patrick Stewart had hair.

[azdak]

It sounds like a wonderful production! Suggesting Ophelia has been raped is a brilliant solution to her mad scene which otherwise makes no sense at all to modern audiences.

[bookwormsarah]

I think they played with the order of a couple of scenes, so it may be that they aimed to imply this. I would be very interested to hear if anyone else came out of the production with the same thought. Hamlet rattling on about Ophelia's purity seemed to suggest knowledge that this wasn't actually the case, and was a particularly nasty form of bullying.

[azdak]

It makes all sorts of sense - Laertes warns her that Hamlet is a sexual threat and that as a prince he's above the law, and then Polonius and Claudius dangle her in front of Hamlet like bait and Hamlet suspects she's playing him. I could see him taking it out on her.

[heliopausa]

That sounds wonderful! I'd love to have seen it. And yeah, I'm with you on that feeling of wanting to nab some learned person and talk it all through, when some literature/theatre has just opened up lots of ideas and questions.

That point about madness (and group madness?) is interesting - do you mean that Hamlet had raped Ophelia? :( There's certainly plenty of set-up for that.

I'd be sorry to lose the politics part, because that's part of the point of the play for me, that Hamlet is not just himself but the future (ha!) of Denmark. But I can see that dropping it would bring the focus right in to the personal. And what's wonderful about theatre is that it allows for full immersion in someone else's understanding of how the play works.

Thanks for sharing this. :)

[bookwormsarah]

I'm not sure whether I believe Hamlet had raped her, or possibly she had slept with him after pressure. The scene where he kept asking if she was pure/good seemed to imply this to me, and seemed like a particularly viscious piece of bullying on his part.

I have downloaded Hamlet to my ereader and I look forward to discovering what was missing. I have also borrowed a book about Shakespeare's tragedies. I could be on this subject for some time!