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.