Comments | steepholm: My annual Hamlet rant

steepholm

My annual Hamlet rant

Nov 02, 2009 19:28

Oh boy, am I glad to be shot of Hamlet for another year. Not Hamlet, mind - I do like the play, for all its manifold faults - but Hamlet himself. Today we were concentrating on Act 5, which shows the bratty prince acting badly from beginning to end. Viz ( Read more... )

books, hamlet

Comments 18

a_d_medievalist November 2 2009, 23:20:33 UTC

Wordy McWord.

gillo November 3 2009, 00:43:43 UTC

Nah. You betray Hamlet, I'll set my posse on you. Just because it's not historically accurate.
Or plausible.
Or possible...

gillo November 3 2009, 00:41:49 UTC

It's a point of view, I suppose ( ... )

steepholm November 3 2009, 09:35:43 UTC

No, no, no.

1) He's been explaining that he's finally ready to give up the whole delaying thing for a couple of acts now! (e.g. in Act 4: 'From this time forth/ My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth' etc ad nauseam). All he's actually saying for most of this time is the hoary old cliche that dust hath closed Helen's eye, a commonplace since Lascaux, I'd imagine. That's okay, but he goes on and on and on, as if he's the first person ever to think of it ( ... )

lady_schrapnell November 3 2009, 09:52:19 UTC

I can't believe you're still this unfair to Hamlet!

Just on 1) - 'boring' for Denmark is a pretty harsh description of someone who's obsessively depressed, and with bloody good reason to be so. He's been betrayed by both his parents (and if he were a manipulative shit, by God he's learned it from the best in his father!), deprived of the opportunity to grieve for his father properly, and has nobody around who can give him the least bit of help in trying to keep it together.

It's very easy to pull out a quote to show he's lying about having been mad at any particular point, but you could do the same at other points to show those aren't any more reliable than his saying he is. I don't think he knows, because the play doesn't know. IMO the whole play is having - or possibly just IS - a psychotic break with reality. You're really going to blame Hamlet himself for having a skewed perspective and being a obsessively stuck in that position?

steepholm November 3 2009, 10:21:18 UTC

Was old Hamlet a manipulative shit? Or do you mean Claudius ( ... )

sovay November 3 2009, 04:12:28 UTC

I still recommend Kozintsev's Hamlet unreservedly, if you can put up with the subtitles.

kalypso_v November 3 2009, 10:44:19 UTC

That's the one I imprinted on when I was about ten years old. I think the subtitles helped, in a perverse way, because I didn't have to worry about the dialogue and focused on the drama. And mm, Innokenti Smoktunovsky...

steepholm November 3 2009, 10:47:45 UTC

Innokenti Smoktunovsky...

I must admit that is a very sexy name!

kalypso_v November 3 2009, 10:53:39 UTC

One of the big regrets of my life was that I narrowly missed seeing Smoktunovsky on stage in the late 1980s. I was in Leningrad (I think it was still Leningrad at the time) and a Russian-speaking friend managed to get us tickets for The Seagull (which I'd seen very recently in English so I reckoned I could cope), and he was playing the doctor but they had alternating casts and I got the other one!

Thread 9

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steepholm November 3 2009, 18:56:28 UTC

I'm looking forward to PL, as I haven't read it from beginning to end for ages. I shall try to approach Satan with my trademark open mind!

conniving little machiavel eegatland November 3 2009, 15:51:09 UTC

you will probably enjoy this "rather odd twist on Hamlet" as much as I did:

http://community.livejournal.com/rarelitslash/224729.html

Re: conniving little machiavel steepholm November 3 2009, 18:54:49 UTC

I hadn't thought of that one!