dispassion
Nov. 8th, 2003 07:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyThe thing is, I still love Hamlet.
I'm sick to death of this dissertation, my topic, most of my texts ... but if someone called me up and said, Hey! Wanna go see Hamlet tonight? my response would be, When's the show? and How do you feel about Mexican?
Why do I love this play so much?
I've been wondering about that as I stare at my Hamlet chapter, hunching up like a mortified hedgehog at the various and sundry sophomoric stupidities it contrives to commit. Why do I still want to talk about this play?
It's not its Cultural Icon status. Trust me. If I'd had to spend this long with Romeo and Juliet, there would have been extratextual as well as intratextual bloodshed and mayhem. And it's not Hamlet himself; he's not my favorite literary character, nor even my favorite Shakespearean character. It's something about the play qua play, something about Elsinore with its battlements and cemeteries. I could pretend to articulate it, and drop in big chunks of my dissertation argument, but I'm not convinced that that would go any farther towards explaining my abiding passion for the play.
So this is me loving Hamlet. That's all.
I'm sick to death of this dissertation, my topic, most of my texts ... but if someone called me up and said, Hey! Wanna go see Hamlet tonight? my response would be, When's the show? and How do you feel about Mexican?
Why do I love this play so much?
I've been wondering about that as I stare at my Hamlet chapter, hunching up like a mortified hedgehog at the various and sundry sophomoric stupidities it contrives to commit. Why do I still want to talk about this play?
It's not its Cultural Icon status. Trust me. If I'd had to spend this long with Romeo and Juliet, there would have been extratextual as well as intratextual bloodshed and mayhem. And it's not Hamlet himself; he's not my favorite literary character, nor even my favorite Shakespearean character. It's something about the play qua play, something about Elsinore with its battlements and cemeteries. I could pretend to articulate it, and drop in big chunks of my dissertation argument, but I'm not convinced that that would go any farther towards explaining my abiding passion for the play.
So this is me loving Hamlet. That's all.
