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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.