We need to discuss more play topics.  I’ve been poking around my other site Shakespeare Answers, looking to see some of the most popular questions.  What follows isn’t one of the questions, but it got me thinking :).

Hamlet both poisons and stabs Claudius.  Why?

If you stab somebody and he doesn’t die – stab him again, no?

In some interpretations Claudius is merely wounded (“O, yet defend me, friends; I am but hurt.”) and then Hamlet forces him to drink the poison at swordpoint(?).  In an interpretation like that it seems as if Hamlet’s calm cool and collected (albeit a little insane) and is definitely thinking of providing a suitable ending for Claudius, now that he’s got him cornered.

But it also seems equally plausible that Claudius is already mortally wounded by Hamlet’s envenom’d blade, and a clearly insane Hamlet has to hold him up to pour the poison down his throat.  If he’d just waited a few seconds maybe Claudius would go on his own.  So, as noted – instead of stabbing him again, he opts to poison him some more.  Does that make sense?

I’ve always taken the position that it’s that “Follow my mother!” line that tells us all we need to know about Hamlet.  It’s revenge for her, not for his father, that finally spurs him to act.  The whole “Dude, you’re dead and you just haven’t fallen down yet, give it a second” revelation by Laertes certainly helps shift Hamlet into a “Now or never” mode, but if you take out Gertrude’s poisoning, would the scene have gone down the same?  Would being mortally wounded himself have caused Hamlet to finally act?  Or would he have gone to the undiscovered country still talking about it?

So, did you watch Shakespeare Uncovered?  I’ve got all 6 episodes (there were 6, right?) on DVR and have been trying to find the time to watch them, because I don’t want to miss anything.

I find my attention span with stuff like that does an interesting thing.  Here’s the way I put it in conversation earlier today:

They have this weird effect on me where a single line – or, hell, pretty much David Tennant on screen at all – is overwhelmingly spine tingly.  But then they switch to the narrator/host/expert who talks *about* Shakespeare and my mind tends to wander right out of the room. When it comes to the “about” Shakespeare part it’s in a different league.  “Oh, Shakespeare wrote The Tempest while he was dealing with his daughter’s controversial engagement to a man who’d impregnated another woman,  I never made that connection before….”  is interesting, but not in the same way that watching performance is.

Does that make sense?  I like learning about Shakespeare.  I do.  But Trevor Nunn talking about directorial choices in staging the shipwreck just doesn’t hold my interest the same way that the actual shipwreck does.

If you missed Shakespeare Uncovered, the entire series is available (or maybe coming soon?) to DVD.  Attached is the press release I received this morning:

So I’m home today for Presidents’ Day, catching up on Shakespeare Uncovered, and from the other room I hear this line (the subject line, that is) come out of my television…

…and I’m *there*.  A storm.  A ship going down.  A sailor shouting orders to his shipmates, urging them to put their backs into it to keep them all alive.

I’m reminded of this quote by Peter Brook: “Each line in Shakespeare is an atom. The energy that can be released is infinite—if we can split it open.”

My question is this, though.  Is it all in our heads?  How much of that energy is in our own minds and interpretation of what we’re hearing?

Think of it like this.  Imagine someone has never read The Tempest. The first thing we ask ourselves is, “Why am I hanging out with this person?” but we can get past that, because he stands his round at the bar.  It’s come up in conversation after talking about the Olympics closing ceremony and your friend has asked you to explain the story.  So you start here.  You quote this line, and you try to explain how those words in that order paint the picture that you felt above.

Can you do it?  This line isn’t particularly famous. Brook didn’t say “Certain lines in Shakespeare,” he said “Each line.”  I get it (I think).  I feel it.  I’m not kidding with the above description, it crashed over me like a tidal wave.  One line.  It was awesome.  And I found myself wondering if it was something in the line itself (and, of course, the delivery), or if it was really little more than conjuring up a memory of what I’ve seen in the past, something that I would be hard-pressed to ever explain to another person who hadn’t also seen it.

Thoughts?

(* PS – Since it’s come up, the subject line spelling comes from First Folio. Eagle-eyed readers will spot that the URL is different from the subject, because I did alter it when I found a typo.)