Random Hamlet sighting.

Random instance / Hamlet being used as metaphor:

I found this article from the newspaper The Hindu, (or as it says under the paper's logo) "India's National Newspaper." The article uses Hamlet as a metaphor throughout, in this case about the content of the World Bank's flagship publication, the World Development Report -- published once a year with recommendations about reducing poverty. In this case, the report was apparently controversial, since although it did talk about economic growth, it presumably didn't emphasize growth enough to placate the U.S., but rather focused more on the need for greater asset equality/redistribution (yeah--god forbid).

Quotes:

"In a speech last March, Mr. Lawrence Summers, U.S. Treasury Secretary, said 'discussions of poverty reduction that do not lay primary emphasis on economic growth are like Hamlet without the prince.'"

"In the intervening months, the head of the team preparing the WDR quit because of pressures from inside and outside the World Bank to change the emphasis in the report. We now have, in a manner of speaking, Hamlet with the Prince of Denmark."

"All that we have by way of evidence is a reference to just two research studies. (One of the two - 'Growth is Good for the Poor' - was prepared at the World Bank in March 2000, i.e. after the draft WDR was put out, and is widely believed to have been an in-house criticism of the Hamlet-without-the-prince version.)"

Favorite Hamlets.

Ben Brantley reminisces about the Hamlets he's seen. Cool interactive feature with sound & pics, from NYTimes.

Blog on hiatus....

(except perhaps for an occasional entry).

Country Hamlet

Country songs from Hamlet:

It Is Most Retrograde to Our Desire (I.ii.114) , modern translation = Honey Don't
Grapple Them to Thy Soul With Hoops of Steel (I.iii.66) = Never Let 'Em Go
Hot Love on the Wing (II.ii136) = Hot Love on the Wing
Bisson Rheum (II.ii.496) = Tears
His Occulted Guilt (III.ii.76) = The Guilt He's Hidin' Away
She'll Tax Him Home (III.iii.31) = She's Gonna Get Him
Do Not Spread Compost O'er the Weeds/
To Make Them Ranker (III.iv.175-58) = Don't You Be Spreadin Shit on Shit
Country Matters (III.ii.110) = Fuckin

Hamlet is back and he is not happy.

"To be or not to be...."
(pause, light a cigar, explosion in background)
"Not to be."

Memento Mori part 2

I found a short, interesting essay (by Elizabeth Brunner, "graduate student in English at California Polytechnic") about Hamlet, Yorick and memento mori. A few excerpts:

"Shakespeare's Hamlet wallowed in death -- facing his father's ghost, contemplating suicide, planning deadly revenge, and playing in a graveyard."

"The contrast between the memories of 'merriment' and the realities of disintegrating bodies traps both the audience and Hamlet somewhere between amusement and regret. Shakespeare plays on the appearance of skullbones, the exposed jaw pulled back as grin or grimace."

She relates this grin/grimace dichotomy to her own mother's death. For the funeral, she, at seven, and her sister were dressed up in pink dresses, matching her mother's dress: "We had posed in these matching outfits for a holiday photo just weeks before, with my mother propped up in a hospital bed, wearing a wig to cover the ravages of chemotherapy, and with chocolate bunnies cradled in our arms. For me, death will always be associated with pale pink dresses, a color made horrid but soon faded to nothing in a San Jose cemetery. I remain fascinated by this bizarre and tragic scene from my childhood, by this symbolic joining through shared pinkness of still living daughters with a dead mother."

"...Yorick's skull represents definitive knowledge: bodies rot after death. Religious explanations cannot compete with evidence from the graveyard."

Pic above: Hamlet und Horatio auf dem Friedhof by Eugene Delacroix (1839)

Memento Mori

I've been reading about "memento mori."

From UCLA: "A memento mori is a form of image that urged a European person of the late Middle Ages to "remember thy death." To do this, a memento mori might represent death as a human skeleton--perhaps as the Grim Reaper gathering his harvest--or it might depict human bodies in an advanced state of decay. Its purpose is to remind the viewer that death is an unavoidable part of life, something to be prepared for at all times. Memento mori images are graphic demonstrations of the fact that death was not only a more frequent, but a far more familiar occurrence in medieval Europe than it is today."

Shakespeare was writing during the era of memento mori. I've written before about the plague and Hamlet. Lots of death in Hamlet, of course. Hamlet is haunted literally and figuratively by the death of his father, he gives several speeches about how death is the great equalizer: about how we all wind up food for maggots, or how even the great Alexander dies and decays into earth. Etc.

Interesting that there isn't much talk in terms of any after-life. Two exceptions: 1) Hamlet's father (the ghost)--the fact he exists, and he makes reference to coming from a hell-like world and 2) Claudius expresses (some) remorse as he prays; Hamlet sees him praying & decides not to kill him, believing he'll be sending him to heaven.

But believing in "heaven" doesn't figure in, say, the "to be or not to be" speech; what lay in the undiscovered country is not "heaven," but a mystery. (One that has endured, obviously--death is still the great mystery/great equalizer it was then, still the same undiscovered country.).

I'm very curious how Shakespeare's audiences took Hamlet's death-speeches. If a play like this were to be written today, or a movie, it would be surely be perceived as gloomy and macabre. But in a time when theaters were still being closed during plague-outbreaks, I wonder if it wasn't just perceived as normal (not overly dark); our version of macabre = utterly normal back then.

The idea of memento mori fascinates me, having gone through cancer. I was shocked, shocked, shocked by my diagnosis--in a very basic way, I was shocked by the idea, even, that I was mortal.

The three images above are from the "Final Farewell: The Culture of Death and the Afterlife" exhibit at the University of Missouri, featuring artworks with memento mori iconography.

Top image is "The Card Game of Death," by Giuseppe Erts, 1663.

The second image is an engraving by Philip Galle, no date, but sometime in the late 1500s-early 1600s.

About the third image: "Beginning in the later seventeenth century, undertakers supplied the living with objects concerning the recently deceased. Printed ephemera, such as this funeral invitation, were common. They often featured popular memento mori text and iconography, such as the phrase “Remember your death,” the skull and crossbones, and the winged hourglass. Similar to other works in this exhibition, this invitation shows allegorical figures of Death and Time (a skeleton holding an arrow and a winged man, respectively)."

Muslim Hamlet, II

I was flipping through the Voice on the train the other day and found an article about Sulayman Al-Bassam, a director staging a Muslim Richard III at BAM this summer. (Called "Richard III: An Arab Tragedy.")

Prior to Richard III, Al-Bassam re-envisioned Hamlet as "Al-Hamlet Summit." It won awards at both the Edinburgh Fringe Festival & the Cairo International Festival of Experimental Theatre. Read an interview with Al-Bassam about Al-Hamlet Summit here.

The names of each act in Al-Hamlet Summit are those of the five daily prayers in Islam. Ophelia is re-imagined as a suicide bomber.

From one of the reviews: "The moral conundrum posed by the ghost in Shakespeare (is he to be believed, and what is his provenance?) finds its ingenious equivalent in the People's Liberation Front, which claims that the old king was murdered by his successor. Instead of a visitor from beyond the grave, this Hamlet (the handsome, intense Mohammed Kefah Al-Kous) is waylaid by a suited Western arms-dealer, who, in the fashion of such folk, is quite promiscuous about whom he's prepared to deal with."

Al-Bassam has directed/written other Hamlet variations as well: "Hamlet in Kuwait" and "Arab League Hamlet," all through his London-based theater company, Zaoum. Three Hamlets. So fascinating.

From his notes about Al-Hamlet Summit:

"Hamlet as an expression of politics…

This has been the driving force behind this work as it moved through its various stages of development that began in January 2001. The following text is a cross-cultural piece of writing in which I have tried to capture a sense of geographical context and contemporary resonance.

As performed by my London-based theatre company, Zaoum Theatre, it aims to allow English-speaking audiences a richer understanding of the Arab world and its people, and how their fates are inextricably linked to that of the West's.

I have endeavoured to avoid the polemic; favouring a concrete and poetic formulation of an Arab viewpoint.

The style of writing combines aspects of the Arab oral poetry tradition with the rhetoric of modern-day politics.

In directing the piece, I sought to bring out a precise and grotesque hyperrealism in the work. The conference chamber that gradually slides into a war room directly illuminates the political setting of the piece. It is a huis-clos that parodies the so-called 'transparency' of today's political processes and it is a deadly arena of internal conflict.

It is not a piece about any specific country in the Arab world.

Rather, it presents a composite of many Arab concerns that affect peoples from the Arabian Gulf to the Atlantic and beyond…"

From his notes about Arab League Hamlet:

"I will try to describe briefly the concerns which I myself was trying to address in the shaping of the piece:

We are living in an age of political charades, where the emphasis on 'spin', public opinion focus groups and the so-called transparency of government hides a callous agenda of economic and political barbarism. In the recent scramble to unite world opinion behind 'America's War on Terrorism', the slogan mentality that pitches good against evil, crusade against jihad presents us with a world split into two halves each baying for the other's blood.

The politicians that surround us are actors, grotesque frontmen for corporate interests and venal puppets of sham democracies.

This Hamlet is about these things, but also about a world where televised diplomacy reigns supreme, where the terrible paralysis of political discourse reaches epileptic heights, from which it is impossible to conceive what damage is being done to human beings on the ground.

Inside the Kingdom of Denmark, the delegates are consumed by vanity, overwhelmed by their own sense of self-importance, insouciant of the dangers threatening them from outside their borders and concerned uniquely with in creasing their stockpile of armaments to defend themselves against each other."

Yorick for kids.

Read about the Animaniacs. Thanks to the bard blog for this.

B or not a B.

Thanks to the bard blog for this.

Sex.

Hamlet about to watch the play Mousetrap, acting crazy-sexy w/Ophelia (III.ii):

Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean my head upon your lap.
Ophelia: Aye, my lord.
Hamlet: Or did you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That's a fair thought, to lie between maid's legs.
Ophelia: What is, my lord?
Hamlet: Nothing.

“Country Matters” = sex. Love this. And not so unusual, in terms of sex slang--like saying “the birds & the bees,” in use today, or using the word “rutting” sexually-- putting sex in the animal realm, etc. (James Ellroy used “rutting” a lot in the Black Dahlia, one of my all-time favorite books.) According to Shakespeare's Bawdy, "country matters" is also a play on "cunt" -- cunt was slang for vagina back then, as now. So the phrase is a pun wrapped in a euphemism. Excellently doubly-smutty.

Incidentally, "country matters" is not the only phrase in the above exchange that refers to female genitalia--"nothing" was also slang for vagina. More on that later.

Read about the etymology of the word cunt here--an interesting blog by a "recovering medievalist" and a former linguistics teacher. Also, here: this guy has an entire (and elegantly designed) site dedicated to the word "cunt," which includes etymology.

The above pics: The top is of King Henry VIII (note codpiece), the bottom is one his suits of armor (note codpiece), on display at the Tower of London. The exhibit is called "Henry VIII: Dressed to Kill." He died in 1547, almost 20 years before Shakespeare was born. But, codpieces were worn in Elizabethan England as well.

All about rock out with your cock out back then apparently.

"Denmark's a prison."

From This American Life: "We devote this entire episode to one story: over the course of six months, reporter and TAL contributor Jack Hitt followed a group of inmates at a high-security prison as they rehearsed and staged a production of the last act—Act V—of Hamlet. Shakespeare may seem like an odd match for a group of hardened criminals, but Jack found that they understand the Bard on a level that most of us might not. It's a play about murder and its consequences, performed by murderers, living out the consequences."

Listen to the show here. It's fascinating, chilling, poignant.

One chilling moment: The man who plays The Ghost is in prison for murder. He talks about how when he first read the Ghost's opening speech--describing his own murder--he felt it was his own victim speaking through the lines, about the horror his victim had endured. When he delivers this speech, he says it his victim is speaking through him.

The program also talks about Claudius--in particular, the soliloquy Claudius delivers, admitting the horror of his crime (III.iii: O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven...). Claudius admits to the abject horror of what he is done, and also admits he will not give up everything his foul crime has brought to him: the queen, the kingdom. Says the director of the play, when that soliloquy was performed in front of an audience, "You could hear a pin drop. These are guys with deep regrets."

At one point the reporter says, "The actors tell me they've been practicing their lines whenever they can, often shouting them from cell to cell."

The most poignant moment for me was listening to one of the Hamlets (there are four) speak about grappling with Shakespeare's language. We hear him stumbling over the lines, Up from my cabin,/My sea-gown scarfed about me (V.11.13-14). The director tells him "sea-gown-scarfed" means "fog" (in my version it says this actually means a kind of sailor's uniform--but anyway). The inmate is really struck by this image, then talks about Shakespeare's language, about how wonderful it is. Sounding surprised, he says, "he's actually really good."

Yes.

The pic above is the prison cast, part of Prison Performing Arts. Their trailer is spooky, especially in the first half--the guy who plays the ghost is scary. You can see razor wire in the background

Tiny Hamlet

Love this poster, from Tiny Ninja Theater's production of Hamlet. They've also produced Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, all to very good reviews. From the group's site: "Tiny Ninja Theater is a New York City-based company dedicated to the principle that 'there are no small parts, only small actors.' It was founded in 1999 by company director Dov Weinstein."

The Ghost is played by a mouth with a ninja in it.

Excerpts from Curtain Up's review:

"Tiny Ninja Hamlet, oddly enough, is just what it sounds like -- Hamlet performed with tiny plastic ninja figurines, all manipulated by Dov Weinstein. It's just what every eight-year-old boy does with his toy soldiers, only this is, you know, Hamlet."

"It's one of the most inventive shows I've ever seen. Using televisions, small pin lights and smaller cameras, the tiny plastic world is writ large for the audience. The figures (mostly ninjas, but there are other sorts of figurines) are moved about on three briefcase-size stages."

"Weinstein does an excellent job of maneuvering the ninjas, and of providing clear, distinct voices for each one even though each is no more than an inch tall."

DIY Hamlet

"Monologue by Craig Bazan in Camden NJ." He does the rogue/peasant slave speech. Cool.

Bits of language excellence.

These are fantastic, much prefer them to their contemporary counterparts:

unfold yourself = identify yourself (I.i.2)
with martial stalk = stealthily (I.i.75)
keeps wassail = parties (I.iv.10)
drabbing = hanging with hookers (II.i.28)
sift = question to figure out what is going on, as in "we shall sift him" (II.ii.62)
candied tongue = flattering/fawning manner (III.ii.56)
envenom = fill with anger/embitter (IV.vi.93)

I like them better because:

unfold yourself is just lovelier than identify yourself.
martial stalk is stronger & spookier.
drabbing -- for some reason feels like there's some onomatopoeia in there, word sounds kind of funky.
keeps wassail -- "wassail" originated as a drunken pagan tradition & suggests awesome debauchery, while "keeps" gives it a ceremonial feel, like "keeping kosher," something done with prescribed intent.
candied tongue is more unctuous-sounding.
sift and envenom = pitch-perfect in terms of what they mean.

The pic above: from The Tragedie of Hamlet Prince of Denmarke
Weimar: Cranach Press, 1930.

Poster

Poster by Polish designer Leonard Konopelski, 1974

Of our time...For our time.

Wow. I was doing a random Hamlet image search and found this. From 1969. I'm netflixing this. Looks like Hamlet is a vampire, like this could've been a poster for a Hammer film--Hammer studios in England churned out lots of vampire flicks in the 60s & the women were always shagadelic-Brit-chicks in diaphanous wench-type-dresses. With cleavage for days. Like in this poster.

I found one review through imdb, from Time Magazine. The review is hilariously gushing.

On Williamson: "His eyes sear the viewer. He is not speaking to the air; he is speaking to you. As far as Williamson is concerned, elocution be damned. Poetry be damned. Meaning is all. Never has Hamlet been rendered with more clarity or more biting timeliness, and that includes Gielgud, Olivier and Burton. Shakespeare held the mirror up to nature. Williamson holds a mirror up to the soul."

On Marianne: "Marianne Faithfull's Ophelia is remarkably affecting. She is ethereal, vulnerable, and in some strange way purer than the infancy of truth." (ed. note: ummmmmmm)

I have to say, though, I love the opening paragraph of the review. The guy who wrote it obviously just loves Hamlet and is effusive from the start. This is lovely:

"Hamlet has obsessed the Western mind for 369 years. Why? It is not because most people love great works of art. On the contrary, most people find great works of art oppressive, since such works invariably center on the nature of human destiny, and that destiny is tragic. Quite simply, Hamlet is a world, and like the world, it cannot be ignored. Every man has lived some part of the play, and to be a man is to be inextricably involved in the play. Hamlet probes and grips the profound themes of existence—death, love, time, fidelity, friendship, family, the relationships of a man and a woman, a son and father, a mother and son, murder and madness. Above all, it probes the value of existence, man's most anguishing question put in the form that every man knows from the time he first hears and ponders it—to be or not to be."

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern = players

So I'm re-reading Hamlet. Shakespeare's language is scraping a crust off my brain.

I've been trying to pay attention to a number of things, including what phrases in Hamlet survive today (so many). I came across one I hadn't expected—the use of the word "play" in the same slang sense we use it today. As in, I got played. I have no idea about the etymology of this particular use of "play." But there it was, in Hamlet.

A little set-up: everyone has finished watching The Mousetrap, the play Hamlet has on-the-sly arranged to reenact his father's murder (the idea being to watch King Claudius watching The Mousetrap, in order to figure out if he is in fact guilty). Sure enough, Claudius gets really upset, says stop the play (Give me some light: away!) and storms off.

Rosencrantz & Guildenstern approach Hamlet, telling him his mother wants to "to speak with you in her closet" (uh-oh). Hamlet believes, rightly, that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are working for Claudius, keeping an eye on Hamlet/getting in his shit. Hamlet asks Guildenstern, "will you play upon/this pipe?" referring to a recorder. Guildenstern is puzzled, and repeatedly tells him, no, I can't, I don't know how. But Hamlet is insistent. (III.ii.337-353)

HAMLET
I do beseech you.

GUILDENSTERN
I know no touch of it, my lord.

HAMLET
'Tis as easy as lying: govern these ventages with
your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your
mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music.
Look you, these are the stops.

GUILDENSTERN
But these cannot I command to any
utterance of harmony; I have not the skill.

HAMLET
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of
me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know
my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my
mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to
the top of my compass: and there is much music,
excellent voice, in this little organ; yet cannot
you make it speak. 'Sblood, do you think I am
easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what
instrument you will, though you can fret me, yet you
cannot play upon me.

As in, you're trying to play me asshole but you can't.

The pic above: "Rosenberg and Goldstein," neighbors of Harold & Kumar in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Hamlet references in stoner flicks = love.

The Plague

So I was talking about rot and disease in Hamlet and I started wondering about what sickness/death was like back in Elizabethan England. The plague was still around, after all—not the way it was during The Black Death, but there were outbreaks in England in as late as the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries. (However, from what I glean, exactly what the “plague” was is in debate, perhaps it was a number of things, etc.). Shakespeare was around the plague; it was a reality. At least twice during Shakespeare’s tenure as London’s the-shit playwright, outbreaks occurred, during which theaters were shut down for extended lengths of time; in 1593 something like 10,000 people died.

The plague. How fucking utterly grim. No cure, no one knew what caused it. Humours? Magic? Sin? “Miasma” (bad air)? The plague = oozing, fist-sized "buboes" that turned red, then black. Your house would be sealed. Death came in days. I really wonder what the average Elizabethan’s attitude towards death was, and how Shakespeare’s festering imagery played to those audiences. So much use of the word "rank." And "pestilent." Words rooted in the reality of the time.

...the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours (II.ii.302-304)

I used to work with a man who was HIV-positive. He had been since the eighties, but had never gotten sick. I remember him telling me about what his doctor had said--that there was a theory going around having to do with people who were descended from survivors of the Black Plague. Descendants may have inherited the same gene mutation that had allowed their ancestors to survive; this same mutation, the theory went, might have been what was allowing my co-worker to stay healthy.

The pics above = garb of the “plague doctor.” Robe, black-brimmed hat, gloves, long black overcoat; the beaked mask was filled with aromatic herbs/spices/stuff, presumably to camouflage the smell of sickness. Scary as hell. Not sure what century this garb was in use, though, given all the semi-facts loose on the web.

I think the engraving above is from an Italian broadside warning about the plague. (Note the children running away from the creepy doctor in the bottom left hand side).The photo above is from the Danish Museum of Science and Medicine.

Incidentally, I have a student who “freelances” as an assistant funeral director around Queens. I really can’t tell if he’s 25 or like…40. He told me that as an assistant funeral director, he specializes “in removal.”

Rotten in etc.

Top painting by Eugene Delacroix, "Hamlet Before the Body of Polonius," 1855. Bottom by Dali, "Hamlet Stabs Polonius," 1973

Class last week: we discussed the repeating imagery of rot, decay & disease in the play. I asked class: what could it mean? Why all this rot stuff? Tried presenting Shakespeare like a cool & intricate puzzle to be solved. Lively discussion ensued about the various ways characters are rotten, or are beginning to rot/corrupt. What is the source of infection? Claudius and his murder most foul? Or could there be more than one source—the ghost’s mandate-for-blood, perhaps? Hmmmmmm.

One student made an interesting point about how alike/corrupt/rotten or rotting both Hamlet and Claudius are. Both have creepy “unnatural” desires surrounding Gertrude. Both are cunning. Both are contemplative (we do see Claudius in soliloquy, considering his crime). And, as she pointed out, both are stone-cold murderers: Hamlet seems to feel nothing after accidentally killing Polonius; after that murder, Hamlet dispatches Rosencrantz and Gildenstern with nary a guilt-twinge. Yes I said nary.

In groups, students identified all the rot/etc. images from III.iv, the scene in which Hamlet confronts his mother in her bedroom, why are you screwing my uncle, etc., killing Polonius, etc. My favorite images:

In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed,
Stewed in corruption

Hamlet is referring to the bed his mother shared with Claudius.
Enseamèd = greasy

It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,
Whilst rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen

Hamlet says this right after telling his mother, and I paraphrase, Don't comfort yourself by telling yourself I'm crazy and that you don't know what the hell I'm talking about (that your slutty gross behavior is an atrocity). Doing so will "but skin and film the ulcerous place..."

Mmmmmm...the ulcerous place.

Graphic Hamlet

Two pages from No Fear Shakespeare's graphic novelization of Hamlet. Very cool art by Neil Babra. The second page is the beginning of Hamlet's famous "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I" (II.ii.535) speech -- would have much preferred to see this in its original language:

Is it not monstrous that this player here...
instead of
Look how this player here...
etc.

Why not use the original language? Plenty of room in a project like this to allow visuals to flesh out meaning (and in that way make the language more accessible, as opposed to "translating" the language into present-day English).

But, love the art.

Yorick.

From the Brothers Brick,"a LEGO blog for adult fans of LEGO." Caption above the pic:

“Alas, poor Yorick…”
Legohaulic created a cool looking skeleton for yesterdays Halloween.

Yorick.

From Corbis. Caption: David Bowie sings in concert during his Serious Moonlight Tour in 1983. He is holding a skull while singing, a reference to the "Alas, poor Yorick" scene of Hamlet.

Yorick.

From on-site at a hyena dissection. The caption beneath the pic:

Alas, poor Kodiak. We knew her, readers. A bitch of infinite hunger, of most excellent construction; she hath devoured me in her imagination a thousand times; and now, how devoured in my imagination she is! My curiosity rises at it. Here hung those lips that have laughed at me I know not how oft. Where be your yelps now?

Yorick.

From "Cowboy Bob's Home Spread."

The pic's caption:

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.... Cowboy Bob does his version of Hamlet -- with a horse skull! (A special thanks to Jay Johnson for his help in cutting the skull!)

taH pagh taHbe'

Hamlet is available in Klingon.

Reviewed at Siskoid's Blog of Geekery. Available through Amazon.

DIY Hamlet for kids

Beautifully done. And so simple. From the creator's website:

"An 8-minute, animated short for kids, adapted from Shakespeare’s play. This film has been shown in film festivals around the world, including Chicago International Children’s Film Festival, Redcat Film Fest, Nashville Independent Film Festival, Toronto Images Festival, the Boston Museum of Art, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and more. I made this film in three weeks in 2001 for a high school project."

Hamlet, Grant Morrison, Superman

From Act II, one of Hamlet's famous speeches:

“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals!” (II.ii.293–297)

The sentiment in the speech (according to falling-apart Shakespeare books crammed into the bookcase near my desk on campus) is based upon one of "the major texts of the Italian humanists," Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man. I just found it online.

I found a related interview with comics writer Grant Morrison (who I fucking love); seems he based his All Star Superman on the same text.

Morrison on the Doctrine:

"I see Superman in this series as an Enlightenment figure, a Renaissance idea of the ideal man, perfect in mind, body and intention.

A key text in all of this is Pico’s ‘Oration On The Dignity of Man’ (15c), generally regarded as the ‘manifesto’ of Renaissance thought, in which Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola laid out the fundamentals of what we tend to refer to as ’Humanist’ thinking.

(The ‘Oratorio’ also turns up in my British superhero series Zenith from 1987, which may indicate how long I’ve been working towards a Pico/Superman team-up!)

At its most basic, the ‘Oratorio’ is telling us that human beings have the unique ability, even the responsibility, to live up to their ‘ideals’. It would be unusual for a dog to aspire to be a horse, a bird to bark like a dog, or a horse to want to wear a diving suit and explore the Barrier Reef, but people have a particular gift for and inclination towards imitation, mimicry and self-transformation. We fly by watching birds and then making metal carriers that can outdo birds, we travel underwater by imitating fish, we constantly look to role models and behavioral templates for guidance, even when those role models are fictional TV or, comic, novel or movie heroes, just like the soft, quick, shapeshifty little things we are. We can alter the clothes we wear, the temperature around us, and change even our own bodies, in order to colonize or occupy previously hostile environments. We are, in short, a distinctively malleable and adaptable bunch.

So, Pico is saying, if we live by imitation, does it not make sense that we might choose to imitate the angels, the gods, the very highest form of being that we can imagine? Instead of indulging the most brutish, vicious, greedy and ignorant aspects of the human experience, we can, with a little applied effort, elevate the better part of our natures and work to express those elements through our behavior. To do so would probably make us all feel a whole lot better too. Doing good deeds and making other people happy makes you feel totally brilliant, let’s face it."

Muslim Hamlet

This is the CD cover of a Hamlet soundtrack--Bosnian director Haris Pašović's version of Hamlet, music performed by East West Orchestra. The music is "oriental/ambiental, improvisations based on classic Turkish themes."

Song number 3 is: "She's Conjunctive To My Life." (Sounds like a John Mayer title, if he wrote in Elizabethan.)

Claudius speaking about Gertrude (IV.vii.14-17):

She's so conjunctive to my life and soul,
That, as the star moves not but in his sphere,
I could not but by her.

Pašović's Hamlet is situated in a Turkish court instead of Danish. See a CNN World clip about this production here. From an interview with Pašović, on why he set it where he set it:

"It is a story about power, about rebellion, about human essence in all its greatness and all its irrelevance. Since this play is so universal that every epoch has its own Hamlet, I decided to refer to an empire that was a super-power during a certain period of history – the Ottoman Empire. It became interesting to me to view the whole story from the perspective of a powerful empire that encompassed several dozens of different peoples, cultural identities, and from the perspective of the Muslim world."

He continues:

"It may sound paradoxical, but I think that if he were to write Hamlet today, Shakespeare would set it in the Ottoman court . . . The structure of the Ottoman state is absolutely Shakespearian. That is something about which Shakespeare wrote in all his plays. I did not change the story, I have not changed anything in the story, I did not change the names, I only changed the titles; instead of king and queen, we use sultan and Valide-sultan, and where in the original there is a Christian religious reference, we have translated it into Islamic references."

DIY Hamlet

This is pretty great. Total DIY, zero-budget Hamlet. Done for a 10th grade English class. Hamlet meets The Godfather in eight minutes. They hit all the key points and are able to fold in "Godfather" elements pretty smartly, actually.

Instead of smoking Claudius out with a play that depicts the murder Claudius committed, Hamlet goes up to Claudius (who is now called Godfather) and asks him, hey I'm thinking about taking a hit on this guy by putting poison in his ear. What do you think?
I asked the star/director a few questions:

1. Your name.
Giordan Diaz

2. Where was this filmed?
This was filmed in Hialeah Gardens, Fl. In the house of the girl that plays Gertrude. In 2006.

3. Why Hamlet?
Well I didn't have any other choice. My 10th grade English teacher gave out the assignment. He wanted us to adapt and modernize Hamlet in any way we wanted.

4. Anything you like about the play?
I filmed this movie 3 years ago, and its been just as long sense I've read it, but I'll give it my best. I like the concept of a family slowly but surely destroying themselves little by little. The character of Hamlet himself is also very important to me because I don't think you can ever run out of ideas when analyzing this character. As an actor myself, I see why Hamlet is "the" role to play. I wish I would have known half the things I know now back then. I would have done this film differently.

5. What made you decide to give it the Godfather angle?
I'm a HUGE film buff. I really enjoy classic filmmaking more then the average person my age. So I had recently finished reading and seeing The Godfather that very same year. When this assignment came up I realized there are many similarities between a crime family and a royal family as far as titles of nobility and things of that nature. So I just decided to sit down and write down the main characters I needed and write down a very condensed version of Hamlet as if it were set in that particular world. Basically this little film is an Ode to the greatness of The Godfather.

A few (more) random words/phrases I love:

palmy state = Horatio is referring to Rome ("the most high and palmy state of Rome"). Palmy = glorious, prosperous, flourishing
sharked up = indiscriminately gathered together
(gotta shark up the rent)
distilled almost to jelly = scared the hell out of (though turning-to-jelly is a cliché now, loved reading it in perhaps its first, or at least a very early use?)
reechy = filthy, gross, as in "reechy kisses."
knave (hear that a lot in Hamlet, also knavery) = as my class decided, jackass or douchebag

Hamlet on a rooftop

From Will Eisner's breakdown of Hamlet's "to be or not to be" speech.

Dews of Blood

From Act 1/Scene 1, early on:

The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead
Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets:
As stars with trains of fire and dews of blood,
Disasters in the sun; and the moist star
Upon whose influence Neptune's empire stands
Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse.

Love this. Love "dews of blood." Love "the sheeted dead." Love "the moist star." Horatio, Hamlet's good friend, has just seen the ghost of the King & thinks it's a bad omen. In the above, he's talking about how Rome purportedly looked right before Caeser was killed--how ghosts had appeared and run amok. Reminded me of "The Night on Bald Mountain" part of Fantasia. Completely and totally absorbed by that as a kid, LOVED it.

If I were filming Hamlet, I think I'd like this as a voiceover with a cold, hallucinatory depiction of what the speech describes. Like at the end of Nosferatu with Klaus Kinski, people feasting in the rat-and-Black-Plague infested streets.

Poster/Art

I love this. Click to see it large. By Eric Jonsson.

Bill Viola & Hamlet 2000

I google-booked A Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen and found that someone named Bill Viola, a video/multi-media artist, was thanked in the closing credits of Hamlet 2000. Bill Viola, according to the book, was a big influence on the aesthetic of the film, which has lots of pixelated home video footage, security camera shots (we first see the ghost through a security camera), reflections in glass, etc.

Apparently part of the "To be or not to be" speech was going to be filmed at a Viola retrospective at the Whitney, but it didn't wind up working out. At any rate, turns out Viola is heavily influenced by Buddhism, and the projections, etc., in his art are often cited (including by Viola himself) as having to do with the ephemerality of the self & its interconnectedness to the world, etc.

Innnnteresting, since one might expect the aesthetic in Hamlet 2000 would have to do with dislocation/fragmentation in late-capitalist consumer culture blah blah etc, considering the film's setting: global-corporate, a sterile world of limos, high rises, glass, logos, all buoyed by technology that feels intentionally cold (why is that always the case? I mean zzzzzzzzz seen it), faxes, answering machines, video, video surveillance, etc. Amazing how dated the tech looks in the film--no cell phones, no digital cameras, answering machines instead of voicemail, etc.

To be or to inter-be

More on Hamlet 2000: Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist teacher, showed up in the film.

I recognized Hanh, as I've been taking a beginner "Hardcore Dharma" class at a place called The Interdependence Project. I became interested in Buddhist philosophy last year after a cancer diagnosis. A cancer diagnosis is fucking terrifying, especially at first, when you don't know how aggressive it is, if it's spread, etc. So my interest: call it foxhole spirituality. Like getting "saved" on death row or something. Though
I'm not saved and not a Buddhist (but, interested) and not on death row; I'm cancer free and consider myself very fucking lucky.

Hearing "you have cancer" brings to mind what you'd likely expect. The meaning of life, one's own mortality. Forces your face right in there. No amount of Law & Order reruns and Ativan is gonna keep you from thinking oh shit, cancer, surgery, chemo, people die from cancer, I don't want to die, etc.

Anyway.

At one point in the film, we see that Hamlet has various video devices around his room, and on one a video is playing in which Hanh is talking about "being" — "We have the word to 'be,' but what I propose is the word to 'interbe.' Because it's not possible to be alone, to be by yourself. You need other people in order to be." (Am thinking about Hamlet paper topics--maybe something interbeing-ish? How Hamlet changes according the the constellation of people around him?)

I found another Hanh clip on youtube in which he talks about the Holy Trinity as representative of interbeing--the father is in the the son, the son is in the father, the father in the holy ghost etc. I thought of Hamlet, mourning his father, also named Hamlet, and interacting with his father's ghost.

Shortly after Hanh appears, Hamlet delivers his "to be or not to be" speech in which he contemplates death.

To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause:

...

But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

So the rub is the fact we don't know "what dreams may come."
The dread of the unknown, death; they thought about it 400 years ago,
and the "undiscover'd country" is still this great terrifying puzzle.

Though Hanh says it's impossible to "be" alone, and I understand in theory, a cancer diagnosis certainly felt isolating. I did feel I was "interbeing" with people at the cancer center, though, quietly united with other people who were also facing this disease, thinking (or trying hard not to think) about shuffling off this mortal coil.

Gertrude = Kardashian

Today we finished the rest of Hamlet 2000, then discussed.

In order to view the film, we had to walk from the classroom to the basement of the library, which is a five second walk. The class is at 8 AM. The second we step outside, this one student, I'll call him Daniel, has a cigarette in his mouth. During class he keeps a cigarette on his desk. He's 19. He's awesome. As we're walking, "You know what I can't believe? I can't believe people fucking dress up to come to school. Like last spring semester I saw this guy wearing a fucking chinchilla coat."

The class hated the movie. General consensus: Julia-Stiles-as-Ophelia was boring as hell. Nobody could figure out why, if she's a photographer in NYC, she was so blah, such an utter pushover, and why she went crazy--since in the scenes with her father, she either stares out into space, or is quietly crying. And what were her feelings towards her brother, exactly? Who the fuck knows.

Daniel thought Laertes-by-Liev Shrieber was "a perv," and believable. Students agreed.

He said that Gertrude, played by Diane Venora, "reminds me of the Kardashian mother." I could see that perfectly. He also thought the film was ridiculous because there were murders, and no cops. "You can't spit on the floor in New York without getting arrested."

After class, as he's walking out, he comes up to me: "GOD I fucking hate that old English. Can you imagine someone talking like that on the fucking subway? I mean, right?"

Casting Hamlet

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So I'm teaching Hamlet

I'm teaching Hamlet in Queens, NY.

This blog = all things Hamlet, all the time.