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)."

Poster

Poster by Polish designer Leonard Konopelski, 1974

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.

Hamlet on a rooftop

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

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.