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.

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.

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.