(no subject)
Thirty Days of Shakespeare meme!
Day #2: Your favorite character
This is an incredibly difficult question for me, because I want to say 'EVERYONE, YES, EVEN THAT ONE' and be done with it. Even if I were to apply more discerning standards, I would still come up with a massive list--Angelo and Isabella, I love because they're trying desperately to be good in the face of incredibly difficult temptations, and their rubric for 'goodness' is so deeply troubled that it forces them to make terrible choices. Coriolanus, I love because of his profound, compelling aloneness. Hamlet, I love because he grapples with his sense of duty and his sense of right, what he knows and what he feels, and ties himself into knots trying to get the two to align. Hotspur, I love for his fire and his wit and his rebellion and his naked-but-implicit need for a father (any father!) to love him. Kate, I love because in the face of such a man and his terrors, she has love and mockery both--in another century (and perhaps our own), she'd be a pure and quiet helpmeet, an underscoring line beneath her man's terrors, but in this one, his pain never overshadows her.
I suppose it's a bit strange, then, to say that Laertes is my favorite character--but no other character so reliably hits every kink of mine. Part of this is, I suspect, because he's so very open to his actor's interpretation. Does Ophelia lecture-or-tease him on hypocrisy and dalliance because she knows that he can't help but dally, or because their father has trained them to police one another? Does Polonius send Reynaldo after him in France because he has reason to believe that Laertes is gambling and dueling and carousing, or because he simply can't stop himself suspecting? Hamlet guides us through his family's speculations, but Laertes is absent and silent for much of the meat of the play. This eerie openness makes his armed return to Elsinore all the more fascinating--is he coming to avenge his father as a reformed libertine, made sober and clear-eyed by the shock of grief? Has he never been the man that Polonius suspected him to be, and does his unswerving honor necessitate vengeance even at the hazard of his life and his homeland? Has he, too, received a spectral visitation--and if so, what did Polonius tell him, and did Laertes believe it? (More importantly, how long did it take?)
Laertes also parallels Hamlet in a cunning way, and one that I feel is too little remarked upon. There are the obvious parallels, of course, in their matched obsessions with vengeance (fairly recent) and policing sobriety and chastity (more long-standing); they are men of similar worlds and similar sentiments, anxious for their honor and their families'. My mother's copy of Hamlet, marked all through with marginalia from her college lit class, read that Hamlet is all thought and no action, and Laertes is 'not a thinker'--and much as I like to prevaricate and say that everyone's interpretations are equally plausible, I want to say categorically that this is NOT THE CASE. Shakespeare is doing something much more subtle with Laertes; rather than being the 'all action and no thought' to Hamlet's 'all thought and no action,' he's instead the person who does everything that we have been screaming at Hamlet to do from the very beginning. He gathers intelligence about his father's murder, and chooses to act on it--but not unthinkingly; when he has Claudius in his power, he gives the king a chance to plead his case, and what's more, he actually listens. He defers vengeance, just as Hamlet does, because he recognizes that there will be better requital later--because he acknowledges, at the very point of 'let[ting] the great axe fall,' that he is a fallible agent who might have judged in error. (Why does he do this? Because he detects the sincerity in Claudius's entreaties? Because he's gullible, and Claudius is persuasive? Because he, like Hamlet, can't yet bring his hand to the task of slaughter?) What we see here isn't unthinking action, but the direct violence and acclaim-or-pretensions to kingship that we long to see in Hamlet--and as with Hamlet, mercy and doubt and thought stay Laertes's hand.
It's also worth noting that, when he's meant to be castigating the king for his father's murder, far more of Laertes's critique is leveled at himself:
That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard,
Cries cuckold to my father, brands the harlot
Even here, between the chaste unsmirched brow
Of my true mother.
(and yet he's calm enough to stay his hand!), as well as this:
I’ll not be juggled with.
To hell, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil!
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation. To this point I stand,
That both the worlds I give to negligence,
Let come what comes; only I’ll be reveng’d
Most throughly for my father.
Like Hamlet, Laertes is concerned with the ramifications of vengeance, of unavenged death, of murder, of regicide--it isn't that these matters don't occur to him; it's that he has considered them, and chosen Hell over dishonor.
It's his honor, though, that touches me most and makes me adore him. Like Hamlet, he must make a terrible choice in order to avenge his father--like Hamlet, he chooses treachery to combat treachery, a poisoned blade rather than a doctored missive; however, I read his motives very differently, and the difference fascinates me. Hamlet betrayed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to save his life, but for Laertes, I can't think that his own life is so very great a consideration. He knows that he is a celebrated fencer, and Hamlet admits to Horatio that his own fencing skills more or less appeared out of nowhere. Laertes chooses the poison, then, not to safeguard himself, but to safeguard his father's honor--how could he not, with Claudius using the term 'father' no fewer than six times in IV.vii alone? The thought that Hamlet should not die, that his death should be left to chance (as Claudius's almost appears to be), is insupportable. Laertes is goaded into dishonorable conduct in order to defend honor; he makes a choice inimical to his own code to defend that code. It's my very favorite ethical conundrum.
For all of his grand speeches on Hell, though, for all his vowing to slit Hamlet's throat in a church, at the moment of his death, Laertes recognizes the wrong that he has done--sin and dishonor coupled together, and for both (for both are inextricable, by now) he begs forgiveness, uncovering the last threads of scheming as he does. He casts Elsinore's machinations into light, and takes responsibility for his actions, and begs forgiveness--and he dies, never knowing whether Hamlet has forgiven him.
Laertes touches a raw nerve in me--the same raw nerve that makes me kill my failures; the same raw nerve that makes me fear myself. He is a man who tries to do good and agrees to do terrible things in order to protect whatever remains to him--and in so doing, he destroys it himself.
Day #1: Your favorite play
Day #2: Your favorite character
Day #3: Your favorite hero
Day #4: Your favorite heroine
Day #5: Your favorite villain
Day #6: Your favorite villainess
Day #7: Your favorite clown
Day #8: Your favorite comedy
Day #9: Your favorite tragedy
Day #10: Your favorite history
Day #11: Your least favorite play
Day #12: Your favorite scene
Day #13: Your favorite romantic scene
Day #14: Your favorite fight scene
Day #15: The first play you read
Day #16: Your first play you saw
Day #17: Your favorite speech
Day #18: Your favorite dialogue
Day #19: Your favorite movie version of a play
Day #20: Your favorite movie adaptation of a play
Day #21: An overrated play
Day #22: An underrated play
Day #23: A role you've never played but would love to play
Day #24: An actor or actress you would love to see in a particular role
Day #25: Sooner or later, everyone has to choose: Hal or Falstaff?
Day #26: Your favorite couple
Day #27: Your favorite couplet
Day #28: Your favorite joke
Day #29: Your favorite sonnet
Day #30: Your favorite single line
-- Gil
Side note: Love to little_lady_d, bewareofitalics, reconditarmonia, and rainbowjehan, for letting me learn to love this character as much as I do.
Day #2: Your favorite character
This is an incredibly difficult question for me, because I want to say 'EVERYONE, YES, EVEN THAT ONE' and be done with it. Even if I were to apply more discerning standards, I would still come up with a massive list--Angelo and Isabella, I love because they're trying desperately to be good in the face of incredibly difficult temptations, and their rubric for 'goodness' is so deeply troubled that it forces them to make terrible choices. Coriolanus, I love because of his profound, compelling aloneness. Hamlet, I love because he grapples with his sense of duty and his sense of right, what he knows and what he feels, and ties himself into knots trying to get the two to align. Hotspur, I love for his fire and his wit and his rebellion and his naked-but-implicit need for a father (any father!) to love him. Kate, I love because in the face of such a man and his terrors, she has love and mockery both--in another century (and perhaps our own), she'd be a pure and quiet helpmeet, an underscoring line beneath her man's terrors, but in this one, his pain never overshadows her.
I suppose it's a bit strange, then, to say that Laertes is my favorite character--but no other character so reliably hits every kink of mine. Part of this is, I suspect, because he's so very open to his actor's interpretation. Does Ophelia lecture-or-tease him on hypocrisy and dalliance because she knows that he can't help but dally, or because their father has trained them to police one another? Does Polonius send Reynaldo after him in France because he has reason to believe that Laertes is gambling and dueling and carousing, or because he simply can't stop himself suspecting? Hamlet guides us through his family's speculations, but Laertes is absent and silent for much of the meat of the play. This eerie openness makes his armed return to Elsinore all the more fascinating--is he coming to avenge his father as a reformed libertine, made sober and clear-eyed by the shock of grief? Has he never been the man that Polonius suspected him to be, and does his unswerving honor necessitate vengeance even at the hazard of his life and his homeland? Has he, too, received a spectral visitation--and if so, what did Polonius tell him, and did Laertes believe it? (More importantly, how long did it take?)
Laertes also parallels Hamlet in a cunning way, and one that I feel is too little remarked upon. There are the obvious parallels, of course, in their matched obsessions with vengeance (fairly recent) and policing sobriety and chastity (more long-standing); they are men of similar worlds and similar sentiments, anxious for their honor and their families'. My mother's copy of Hamlet, marked all through with marginalia from her college lit class, read that Hamlet is all thought and no action, and Laertes is 'not a thinker'--and much as I like to prevaricate and say that everyone's interpretations are equally plausible, I want to say categorically that this is NOT THE CASE. Shakespeare is doing something much more subtle with Laertes; rather than being the 'all action and no thought' to Hamlet's 'all thought and no action,' he's instead the person who does everything that we have been screaming at Hamlet to do from the very beginning. He gathers intelligence about his father's murder, and chooses to act on it--but not unthinkingly; when he has Claudius in his power, he gives the king a chance to plead his case, and what's more, he actually listens. He defers vengeance, just as Hamlet does, because he recognizes that there will be better requital later--because he acknowledges, at the very point of 'let[ting] the great axe fall,' that he is a fallible agent who might have judged in error. (Why does he do this? Because he detects the sincerity in Claudius's entreaties? Because he's gullible, and Claudius is persuasive? Because he, like Hamlet, can't yet bring his hand to the task of slaughter?) What we see here isn't unthinking action, but the direct violence and acclaim-or-pretensions to kingship that we long to see in Hamlet--and as with Hamlet, mercy and doubt and thought stay Laertes's hand.
It's also worth noting that, when he's meant to be castigating the king for his father's murder, far more of Laertes's critique is leveled at himself:
That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard,
Cries cuckold to my father, brands the harlot
Even here, between the chaste unsmirched brow
Of my true mother.
(and yet he's calm enough to stay his hand!), as well as this:
I’ll not be juggled with.
To hell, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil!
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation. To this point I stand,
That both the worlds I give to negligence,
Let come what comes; only I’ll be reveng’d
Most throughly for my father.
Like Hamlet, Laertes is concerned with the ramifications of vengeance, of unavenged death, of murder, of regicide--it isn't that these matters don't occur to him; it's that he has considered them, and chosen Hell over dishonor.
It's his honor, though, that touches me most and makes me adore him. Like Hamlet, he must make a terrible choice in order to avenge his father--like Hamlet, he chooses treachery to combat treachery, a poisoned blade rather than a doctored missive; however, I read his motives very differently, and the difference fascinates me. Hamlet betrayed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to save his life, but for Laertes, I can't think that his own life is so very great a consideration. He knows that he is a celebrated fencer, and Hamlet admits to Horatio that his own fencing skills more or less appeared out of nowhere. Laertes chooses the poison, then, not to safeguard himself, but to safeguard his father's honor--how could he not, with Claudius using the term 'father' no fewer than six times in IV.vii alone? The thought that Hamlet should not die, that his death should be left to chance (as Claudius's almost appears to be), is insupportable. Laertes is goaded into dishonorable conduct in order to defend honor; he makes a choice inimical to his own code to defend that code. It's my very favorite ethical conundrum.
For all of his grand speeches on Hell, though, for all his vowing to slit Hamlet's throat in a church, at the moment of his death, Laertes recognizes the wrong that he has done--sin and dishonor coupled together, and for both (for both are inextricable, by now) he begs forgiveness, uncovering the last threads of scheming as he does. He casts Elsinore's machinations into light, and takes responsibility for his actions, and begs forgiveness--and he dies, never knowing whether Hamlet has forgiven him.
Laertes touches a raw nerve in me--the same raw nerve that makes me kill my failures; the same raw nerve that makes me fear myself. He is a man who tries to do good and agrees to do terrible things in order to protect whatever remains to him--and in so doing, he destroys it himself.
Day #1: Your favorite play
Day #2: Your favorite character
Day #3: Your favorite hero
Day #4: Your favorite heroine
Day #5: Your favorite villain
Day #6: Your favorite villainess
Day #7: Your favorite clown
Day #8: Your favorite comedy
Day #9: Your favorite tragedy
Day #10: Your favorite history
Day #11: Your least favorite play
Day #12: Your favorite scene
Day #13: Your favorite romantic scene
Day #14: Your favorite fight scene
Day #15: The first play you read
Day #16: Your first play you saw
Day #17: Your favorite speech
Day #18: Your favorite dialogue
Day #19: Your favorite movie version of a play
Day #20: Your favorite movie adaptation of a play
Day #21: An overrated play
Day #22: An underrated play
Day #23: A role you've never played but would love to play
Day #24: An actor or actress you would love to see in a particular role
Day #25: Sooner or later, everyone has to choose: Hal or Falstaff?
Day #26: Your favorite couple
Day #27: Your favorite couplet
Day #28: Your favorite joke
Day #29: Your favorite sonnet
Day #30: Your favorite single line
-- Gil
Side note: Love to little_lady_d, bewareofitalics, reconditarmonia, and rainbowjehan, for letting me learn to love this character as much as I do.