dispassion

[truepenny]

The 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.

Comments

[lcohen]

i don't know why you love hamlet but i think that for me, a lot of it's there in the cracks and crevices and it's simlilar to the thing that led tom stoppard to write rosencrantz and guildenstern are dead. there really is so much to chew on, to think about, to argue about.

i'm glad that you still love it. good luck with this next push!

[libskrat]

Yes, damn it. I know. Little romances (pronounce that in Spanish, please) like baroque pearls, the silly seven-sibilant system of Old Spanish and the mess it collapsed into, Puerto Rican liquid confusion, and I still love La vida es sueño and I still want to translate La vida de Santa Maria Egipciaca and I still think someone ought to do an alliterative translation of the Cantar de mio Cid only it can't be me because I haven't read any Middle English alliterative verse in years...

It'll never wash out of your system. Maybe you find that comforting, maybe not. But that's how it goes.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Some things just do it for us like that - they reach this realm in our internal economy.

Chesterton is a thinker I am very iffy about - all that bluff hearty RC convert thing etc - but he did say an interesting thing somewhere which was that with a play like Hamlet you could write the story from anyone's point of view and it would still be a story and make sense. Whereas with Maeterlinck's drama (which as I recall was the point of comparison), you had to stand at a particular angle and be looking from a particular perspective for it to have the slightest meaning at all.

What I liked about Jonathan Miller's production (in which the actual Hamlet was a bit weak and neurasthenic) which I saw, yeah, long time passing ago, was that it had this sense of everybody having their own world and their own story to an extent I've seldom encountered in the numerous productions I've seen.

[skalja.livejournal.com]

*sits quietly and loves Hamlet with you*

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I bet its the prose and the people.

I love it too -- I went to see two productions in one week in the Fringe, and I'd have been up for a third if there had been one.

[porcinea.livejournal.com]

yes! <handwave> that.

I fell in love with Hamlet when I was about 8, reading the opening ghost scene in my McGuffey reader. Opened up the whole world of Shakespeare to me (I was such an arrogant child; I was sure I'd read everything on our shelves---such a shock when Mamma insisted we had the rest of this play there). Hamlet's always stayed my favorite.

[pameladean]

I love Hamlet too (gee, bet you'd never have guessed THAT), even though it was the centerpiece of my M.A. thesis.

I think this is because it's funny. Not JUST funny, it's a whole mass of other things, some impossibly terrible. But as to why I love it better than any other Shakespearean tragedy or better than any other tragedy anywhere -- it's also funny. Hamlet is his own clown. That just does me in every time.

Pamela

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Yes! And, as someone else has pointed out, that everyone has a point of view from which one could derive a Roshomon-style tale.

And several playwrights have done so - Stoppard, as noted, and the wonderfully giddy Fortinbras by Lee Blessing, there are probably others as well.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

There's at least one novel, Horatio's Version by Alethea Hayter. And dare I mention The Lion King? partner and I hooted like anything when we read a review of this, complete with plot summary, which claimed that it was not based on an existing work.

[fitzcamel.livejournal.com]

plus Updike's _Gertrude and Claudius_

[fitzcamel.livejournal.com]

plus Updike's _Gertrude and Claudius_.

[reannon.livejournal.com]

Okay, I'll ask it...

If not Hamlet, who IS your favorite Shakespearean character?

[vass]

For me it's the words. It makes me catch my breath more than any other Shakespeare play.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

As a character and a vehicle for poetry, Richard III.

As a person with whom I'd actually like to spend time, Beatrice.