Category: Hamlet

Hamlet endures due to its complex characters, psychological depth, and exploration of universal themes such as death, revenge, and the human condition. Its enduring popularity is also attributed to its poetic language, memorable quotes, and its influence on literature, film, and popular culture. Hamlet’s themes and characters continue to be studied and adapted in various forms, making it one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frequently performed plays. Its timeless appeal lies in its ability to speak to audiences across generations, cultures, and languages, and its place as a cornerstone of Western literature.

Browse the text of Hamlet entire play here.

Why Does Hamlet Hesitate to Kill Claudius?

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

Why does Hamlet hesitate to kill Claudius?

There are a few different ways to answer this question. I assume that most of the time people ask it, they’re referring to III.3 when he catches Claudius at prayer:

Now might I do it pat, now he is praying;
And now I’ll do’t. And so he goes to heaven,
And so am I reveng’d. That would be scann’d.
A villain kills my father; and for that,
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge! [citation]

So the short and easy answer is Hamlet tells us – by killing Claudius at prayer, his soul is clean, and therefore he’d go to heaven. However, this is not a luxury granted to Hamlet’s father, which is why he now roams the earth as a ghost.  Hamlet doesn’t feel that this is an even exchange.

You should, however, be saying, “Seriously?” right now.  “You set the trap to prove Claudius’ guilt, it worked, now you’re behind him, there’s no witnesses, you could absolutely finish him off. And instead you’re thinking ahead to where he soul ends up?”

That is precisely the whole point of the play. Hamlet’s indecisiveness is all. He can talk himself out of anything. Go back to I.5:

But know, thou noble youth,
The serpent that did sting thy father’s life
Now wears his crown. [citation]

So your father’s ghost appears and says, “I was murdered by the king.”  Your first thought is, “I know, I’ll start acting crazy around everybody so they won’t know what I’m up to.”

David Tennant not looking very hesitant.

At least the point has a specific rationale, however. In Amleth, the source material for Hamlet, the hero believes that his life is in danger and decides to pretend that he is an imbecile not to be perceived as a threat to the new king.

In Shakespeare’s version, however, that connection is lost — there’s no reason early in the play to think that Claudius is planning to kill Hamlet (though clearly, he plans to have England do it). So it looks like Hamlet’s just coming up with excuses to delay action.

I’ve always held that his mother’s death, not his father’s, ultimately spurs him into action. The entire play passes without him avenging his father, but it takes just 20 lines of dialogue between his mother’s death (“The drink! I am poison’d.”) and Hamlet’s action (“Follow my mother!”). Some argue that he finally sees his own mortality and knows, from Laertes, that he, too, has been poisoned, and if he does not act now, he will never have the chance. But I’ve always felt that the “Follow my mother” line is a big deal – it’s not as if he mentions his father. Remember his concern over the fate of his father’s soul? How he was not absolved of his sins? Well, now his mother’s met the same fate.

Has Anybody Seen Hamlet’s Ghost?

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

By that I mean Hamlet’s Ghost, a new film by Walker Haynes.  I just saw it scroll past on my FIOS On Demand. I’d never heard of it!  It appears new – their Facebook page says that it just became available this past week, which would explain why I never heard of it – but the IMDB page dates it 2015, so I guess it took a spin on the festival circuit first.

A modern Shakespearean actor must travel back in time to confront enigmatic forces from the past and future.

You had me at Hamlet.  But I’m still trying to figure out how much Shakespeare is actually in this.  Here, check out the trailer (which is dated two years ago and looks like the director put it together on his Commodore 64, but maybe he didn’t have much budget left at the time…):

So there’s a swordfight on stage.  Is that it? Do we even see Hamlet’s ghost? I’m happy to check this out, but I can tell you right now that I’m in it for the Shakespeare so if there’s not much, I’m going to be disappointed.

Also, does anybody else get a strong “young George Clooney” vibe from the director / star, Walker Haynes? I don’t believe I’ve seen him in anything else, George Clooney is the name that keeps leaping to mind as I watch.

Be the players ready?

The credits list Gertrude, Horatio, Laertes and Polonius, so that gives me hope. Where was everybody else? I clicked “See full cast” and discovered Claudius, Osric and Fortinbras.  Can’t find Ophelia anywhere, though.

Hey here’s a fun bit of trivia!  Hamlet’s ghost (or, at least, “The Ghost”) does show up!  The actor is someone whose credits include apparently long-running full time work as a transcriber for Shark Tank, and production assistant for The Real Housewives of Orange County. Guess the actual amount of acting experience needed for the ghost wasn’t too high.

Seriously, though, has anybody seen this yet? Is it worth seeking out?

Hamlet's Ghost

Horatio’s Big Moment

~ duane ~ Leave a comment

I may have mentioned that I did not, at all, like Horatio in Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet. It wasn’t just the over the top hipster characterization. He just didn’t … do, anything.  He’s a nonentity in almost all of the play.  When we see him in the unusual scene one he’s little more than a messenger with something very important to say, who is dismissed by Hamlet before he gets to say it.  Later it almost seems like he’s heading out of town, having given up Hamlet for dead.

Except for one scene.  Hamlet’s back, he’s relayed the ridiculous story of how he escaped the pirates, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are No More.  This takes Horatio a second to piece together, or maybe it just takes him a second to work up the guts to say it, but:

HORATIO
So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to’t.

HAMLET
Why, man, they did make love to this employment;
They are not near my conscience; their defeat
Does by their own insinuation grow:
‘Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.

HORATIO
Why, what a king is this!

He yells that last line at Hamlet.  I think it’s the only time he raises his voice.  Took me by surprise, actually. But I liked the interpretation.  Hamlet is in the middle of justifying how he’s left two “friends” to their death and that he doesn’t think twice about it, and Horatio has to say, “LISTEN TO YOURSELF! Were you supposed to be king? Is this the kind of king you would have been?”

Bardfilm tells me that this line can be interpreted as meaning Claudius — agreement with Hamlet, getting back to the original “It was them or me, Claudius is the one that sent me to my potential death” argument.  If that’s the case, then at least in this production Horatio would still be just a sniveling toady.  Hamlet’s told him that he killed two guys and doesn’t care, and Horatio’s all, “Yeah, screw them!  Claudius is the real bad guy here, not you! Let’s go get a scone and an espresso, I want you to read my Nanowrimo entry…”

(P.S. I feel obliged to point out here, for those that do not have the text handy, that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do NOT typically know that they are taking Hamlet to his murder.  I wonder if Hamlet knew that, if it would have given him pause?)

A New (?) Theory About Hamlet’s Ghost

~ duane ~ 2 Comments

One of the reasons I love Shakespeare is that every time I see a play, I see something that I’ve never considered before.  Beneficial Cinnabun’s version is no different.

Consider the ghost’s appearance in the bedchamber scene.  A standard question on high school exams is, “Is the ghost even real at this point, or is Hamlet insane?  How come we could see the ghost in the first two occurrences, but not this one?”

Coming away from Benvolio Concubine’s version I’m left with a new idea.  What if the ghost is there because Hamlet is screwing up the plan, and he’s here to save him?

It depends heavily on how you play it, but this version of Hamlet (I’m getting tired of thinking up variations for the man’s name) is pretty heavy handed with all of the “Look, seriously, I’m not crazy I’m only pretending” clues.  It goes so far as having Hamlet himself dress up to take part in the play-within-a-play and pour the poison in his player father’s ear, which is about as big an F-U to Claudius as you could imagine.  If that doesn’t say “I know what you did” I don’t know what would.

And now here he is lecturing his mother on “almost as bad dear queen as kill a king and marry with his brother” and everything that comes after.  I imagine the ghost hovering underneath the stones (a joke the “old mole” played for laughs earlier) thinking, “What is this kid doing???”

So he makes an appearance, where he basically yells at his son that he’s doing everything wrong.  He’s invisible to Gertrude, so it’s going to look like Hamlet is suddenly talking to no one.  He comes as an angry ghost, so from Gertrude’s perspective her son goes from yelling at her to apologizing to the wall.  Presto, now she’s back in the “My son is crazy” camp.

One of the big questions is whether Gertrude knows what Claudius did, and/or was in on it.  But either way, she’s still a mother dealing with her son, and as far as I know is very rarely shown to be more on Claudius’ side than Hamlet’s.  So, she’s already sympathetic to his cause.  Maybe she doesn’t know what Claudius did.  Maybe Hamlet is actually convincing her that maybe there’s something to it.   Maybe, if the ghost doesn’t appear, maybe she goes to Claudius and says, “Hamlet was in here muttering all kinds of weirdness about me murdering his father.”  But that doesn’t happen.  The ghosts appearance makes her firmly believe that her son is nuts and needs to be protected from a very irate Claudius.  She says nothing, other than the obvious murder thing.

I suppose most of the scene continues after the ghost disappears, so Hamlet’s got plenty of time to talk sense to his mother.  Or, you could shuffle things around a bit so that all the logic comes first, then the ghost, and then she’s left completely confused as to whether he’s nuts or not.  Lots of potential room for interpretation I hadn’t really considered before.

 

Review : Benebatch Cumberdink’s Hamlet

~ duane ~ 3 Comments

Sorry, I should probably spell the man’s name correctly if for nothing else than the SEO I might get, but it just amuses me to no end to spell it differently every time.

Last night, after months of waiting, I got to see the encore performance of B.C.’s Hamlet, presented by NTLive.

While I have some major issues with many of the directorial choices and was often making my Picard “WTF have they done to my Shakespeare?” face, I think that old Ben himself might individually be the best Hamlet I’ve ever seen.

Should we cover the good first, or the bad?  I’ll start with the opening, and you tell me.  We open with Hamlet, sitting in what I presume to be his room (although it felt like it could have been an attic), listening to old records and looking through photo albums, presumably of his father.  I *loved* this.  When I try to relate the play to people I always start by saying, “Hamlet is about a man whose father died.” Here we actually get a glimpse of him in mourning, not just in his inky black cloak, but actually going through the motions that you could expect anyone to go through that lost someone dear.  Before the scene is over he will go into a trunk of his father’s clothes and don one of his father’s blazers – but not before smelling it, once again to remind him of his father.  It’s about 30 seconds into this 3+ hour play and you already know exactly what’s going on in Hamlet’s head.  Ever wonder what his relationship was like with his father? No questions here.

I figured ok, awesome start, lights out and we start the show, right?

Nope.  Knock knock knock.  “Who’s there?” says Hamlet.  Says HAMLET.  SAYS HAMLET.  “Answer me, stand and unfold yourself!”  And I’m in bizarro world because Horatio enters and we’re catapulted briefly to … scene 5, was it?  Horatio’s original meeting with Hamlet?  But but but but but but…. where’s the ghost?  So confused.

It’s a bold move to do stuff like that because you have to follow up with it and have it make sense and flow smoothly.  I don’t think that did.  First of all, there’s no reason to introduce Horatio there at all.  He doesn’t do anything.  Second, we’ll later be treated to Marcellus and Bernardo entering with, “My lord I saw him yesternight.”  It’s like they just cut the context and shuffled it around and didn’t even attempt to smooth it over.  Boo.

Couple words on casting?  I hate hate hated Horatio.  If I could think of a way to blend the two words together I would. Horhatio maybe.  Imagine five minutes before showtime, somebody runs up to the director and says, “Bad news, our Horatio’s been hit by a bus!”  “No problem,” says the director, “Run down to the local Starbucks and grab the barista, he told me this morning that he played Horatio once in college.”  Boom, done.  Checkered flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a backpack that he never takes off, which gives him this hunched over sort of snivelly, groveling sort of character like he’s afraid to look Hamlet in the eye. All of his lines are delivered with a constant shaking of his head.  He’s also got some sort of speech impediment or something going on, which becomes more pronounced at the end of the play, where he sounds like he’s got something in his teeth.  It became grating after awhile.

I also hate the ghost.  They deliberately cut all the dialog about describing the ghost’s warlike appearance – I was waiting for the line about “wore his beaver up” because I like to see how Hamlet plays the “Then saw you not his face?” line.  But that’s all gone.  When we eventually see the ghost he’s dressed in normal kingly attire, not any sort of armor.  Fine.  But then he starts talking and oh dear god out comes this heavy accent….Irish, I think?  It was so horribly distracting I didn’t know what to do with myself.  No attempt to make it booming or ghostly or anything.  Or regal for that matter.  He sounded like a cross between somebody’s crotchety old grandfather, and the school janitor yelling at kids for running in the hall. I found it just laughably out of place.  Bardfilm liked it and suggests that he was channeling Olivier.  I don’t remember Olivier’s ghost well enough, so if he was, I missed it entirely.  He sounded entirely like he was chastising his son. Didn’t get much of a loveable father/son relationship, as I think about it.  Remember this is a Hamlet who was smelling his father’s scent on his old clothes a minute ago.  Now he’s getting yelled at.

Those are my two biggest casting complaints.  Claudius I liked – and I could swear I recognize him from other works?  Have to check that out.  Kind of doing that big, puffed out chest thing, like he’s “on” all the time and deliberately trying to present himself like a king.  Even in his delivery, which is why I mentioned above how different the ghost’s was, because the ghost was supposed to be a king as well.  Having said that, he’s pretty one-note the more I think about it.  I did like the paranoia that was coming off of him, though.  Especially after Polonius is killed, all his thoughts turn to “How do I make sure this isn’t pinned on me?”  I don’t recall that from, say, Patrick Stewart’s Claudius.  He was all business and had everything in control up to the end.  This guy seems like he’s always walking a tightrope with it all just falling apart.

I agree with Bardfilm that the first half of this production was significantly better than the second. Perhaps that’s because we saw all the tricks once and then they didn’t work multiple times. They do this cool “everything goes in slow motion” thing during Hamlet’s soliloquies, and the first time you see it it’s very neat.  But it’s not as shocking the next couple of times.  One scene I loved was the “chase” to capture Hamlet after he’s killed Polonius.  I don’t know that it’s always done this way, but this was a full-on “mobilize everyone in the castle, find Hamlet” manhunt, and it was awesome.  The lighting changed, the sound changed, everything.  You really got the feeling that, whether they loved Claudius or not, the whole castle jumped when he said jump.  More importantly, you realize that Hamlet was truly alone and that literally everyone in the castle was against him.  This was brought home (though perhaps accidentally) when he’s captured and I noticed that Marcellus and Bernardo are the ones holding guns on him.  Bardfilm wondered if that might not just be a case of doubling “generic soldiers” but I like my interpretation better, like they are soldiers forced to do their job because the king said so, whether they’ve got personal feelings about it or not.

So, let’s talk about Hamlet as a character. I absolutely loved it.  I believe that the key to understanding the entire play is to get inside Hamlet’s head.  His father’s died, his mother’s remarried, he’s had the crown stolen from him, his girlfriend won’t talk to him and won’t tell him why.  I think that there’s this gap that modern audiences often fail to leap between “I understand the words and know what they’re supposed to mean so I get what Shakespeare wants me to get”, and, “I feel something for that dude, I know what he’s going through.”   You *bought* everything Cumberland Bendybits was putting out there. You really felt like he was going through the anguish.  All of my favorite “minor” scenes hit just the notes I’ve always wanted to see hit:

* “Mother, you have my father much offended!”  It’s not “I’m exchanging word games with you because I’m a smartass,” it’s the tiniest of escape valves to let off the fury he has for her and his complete inability to understand how she could have done what she did.  This is where it’s all going to come out, and that’s just the start.  He’s not superior at this moment, he’s not going to put her in her place, he’s a son desperate to understand how his mother could have done what she’s done.

* The flute scene.  It’s a simple enough scene where he makes R (or is it G?) look like an idiot.  But you feel how truly alone he is in that moment.  These are supposed to be his friends. Sometimes I see R&G interpreted as schoolmates who weren’t really that close because Gertrude doesn’t really have a feeling for who her son’s friends are.  But here they really do look like old friends.  So when he asks “Then what makes you think you can play me so easily?” it’s not “Aha, caught you in a trap!” It’s a real question.  You were supposed to be my friend, but you too are in the employ of the guy that killed my father.

There are some overacted bits to be sure.  His emoting often comes out as screaming, particularly during Ophelia’s funeral.  I still bought it, I just wasn’t as sympathetic to it.  Sure, he’s mourning Ophelia’s death – but he’s also the guy that crashed a funeral unexpectedly and is now trying to story top everybody that he’s got more right to mourn than everybody else.

The ending is so rushed, it made me so sad.  I could have used another 15 minutes, easily.  It goes so fast you can barely tell when somebody’s been wounded.  Horatio’s the one to say “The drink is poisoned!” which was a little weird, I broke out my WTF face again, how does he know?  At least Gertrude (who is supposed to deliver the line) is in a better position to realize it.  But here, she dies as soon as she drinks it.  It’s all chaos.

Overall I loved it and I want  a DVD so I can watch again with my kids. I want to pick apart all the individual delivery of every line.  Many times they tweaked words here and there, which I suspect will make people insane, but for the most part, I was ok with it.  What frustrates me most about that is not always being able to tell when they’ve changed a line, and when I’ve merely forgotten the original line.  I think this was a very approachable production. People laughed in the audience. Often, and not in high brow academic chuckle when you’re the only few people who got the joke.  Everybody got the joke. Most of the time it came from Bibbityboo’s delivery of key lines.

Go see it if you can.  No question.  It’s one to discuss.  Will it become the standard for classroom learning?  Unlikely.  Too much stuff changed.  But will it be a popular choice among larger audiences?  I definitely think so.