What does Rosencrantz have against ambition exactly? First, it’s the thing that turns Denmark into a prison for Hamlet and now he thinks it’s as insubstantial as a shadow’s shadow? Which is it? A really powerful transformation of experience or a light airy nothingness? Either way, it’s not a positive thing. I guess Rosencrantz doesn’t have any ambition himself? Or is he trying to hide it? He is after all, the friend of a prince. He’s also signed up to be a spy on that friend for the king. One could see that as a kind of ambition. Maybe Rosencrantz is VERY ambitious and railing against it to divert attention from it.
Author: erainbowd
A dream itself is but a shadow.
Scientifically, this metaphor makes a good deal of sense. On the radio, there was a scientist who, after climbing rocks all day, dreamed, vividly of climbing rocks. He set out to investigate dreaming, something that is scientifically quite tricky to explore. He searched for an activity that would reliably produce dreams and thought none would ever emerge. Then his students told him about Tetris and how playing a lot of Tetris would cause you to see falling bricks in the first flushes of sleep. And it was so.
And he concluded that many dreams are like Tetris, that we dream of what we did, we dream of a shadow of our days, we dream of a suggestion of what we did.
We don’t see the computer and the mouse. We don’t feel the chair. We don’t include the light outside or the music playing. We just dream of the bricks. We dream the essence of the thing or the silhouette. Or the shadow.
For the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
Ambition is almost never a good thing in Shakespeare. It’s a vice, like gluttony or envy, it seems. The ambitious characters are almost always the ones who fall. Macbeth, Richard the 3rd, Hotspur. And they generally take a lot of people with them on the way down.
The idea of ambition as something to be feared, or to dismiss, or as a shadow with no substance seems like an antidote to an ambition-soaked world. It is 2013 in the United States of America and a person without ambition is generally someone with a problem. As if a person without ambition were just a sad slug, a lay-about who wants nothing more than to lie on the couch and consume. But a culture full of grasping , striving, highly ambitious people doesn’t seem like a pleasant culture to live in. Hang out in a room full of Macbeths and everyone’s bound to get a little anxious.
My own ambition is a fickle creature – one who can energize me and get me moving or who can cut the heart of me, bit by bit, sending me under the covers to hide.
And of course it is a shadow. It does not exist in and of itself. It can only follow you around and changes with the light.
Which dreams indeed are ambition.
I was struggling with how Hamlet’s bad dreams were ambition. What would nightmares have to do with aspirations? I suppose a monster could run in and eat you just as you were accepting your Academy Award and that would be a bad dream that would thwart your ambitions pretty good.
But even so – this seemed like a leap. Then I realized that we call our ambitions our dreams and I guess so did Shakespeare– so, yes, of course. It seems like a particularly modern notion, the wanting, the aspiring, the longing, the dreams but it seems as though everyone has always had dreams.
O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
Despite this glass of coffee and the loud music pumping through the café, I almost fell asleep just now, while thinking about this line. It’s not that it’s a dull line – it isn’t. It’s one of the most interesting lines in this scene. Maybe that’s the trouble. It’s hard to have just the one perspective on it. I picture Hamlet all squished up tiny in a nutshell, like the meat of a walnut. Then I see him floating in space, stars and planets glowing around him, his head encircled with a shiny crown. Then I see the stars and the planets inside the nutshell with a little tiny Hamlet, only visible with a microscope. Then I see a something large with teeth eating up the night sky, chomping down on infinity, Hamlet covering his eyes in his nutshell.
But there is so much more to it than that. The small, the large, the tiny space, the infinite space and also bad dreams, why the vastness of it all makes my eyes droop and the letters blur on the page.
‘Tis too narrow for your mind.
Denmark is too narrow for Hamlet’s mind? Is that what Rosencrantz is saying here? Is this meant to flatter Hamlet’s broadness of mind? Is he perhaps, trying to suggest that Hamlet’s got a big imagination and Denmark’s a little small for it? Or is the allusion to ambition in the line before touching on the succession problem? Is the reality of Denmark’s screwy royal bloodline the narrowness to which Rosencrantz is referring? Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about who should really have been King here?
Why, then your ambition makes it one.
O ambition! You fickle lover, you, you’re the kind I’d sacrifice everything for and then find myself destitute. When I come to you, penniless and hopeless, you pretend you don’t know me.
But when it’s good, when I’m chasing you, I’m trailing your wind to fly higher than ever. The problems come when you take a sharp turn and I fall from your current, so far, so far, sometimes crashing into hillsides and cliffs, face broken, skin torn, broken bones.
Then I wish I’d never met you then I wish I were the sort of person who’d never heard of ambition, the kind who might be content with what she has, with the comforts and structures of home.
To me it is a prison.
One of my favorite shows ever featured two prisoners who realized that they could escape from their prison at any time. They hopped in and out of their cage, delighting in being both inside and outside it. They realized that they’d been inside their own prison.
Most of our prisons are like this. We build them ourselves and haven’t realized we’ve done it. In many cases, the confinement is only in the mind. We build the walls with ideas of what has been before or what we believe to be true. Sometimes the walls of the prison are built out of solid evidence and concrete experience but even when this is so, there is almost always a door and we almost never realize that we have the key.
I have the sense that my current prison has several doors but I have no idea where they are. I bump into a lot of walls looking for them.
For there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
Zen and the Art of Shakespeare.
This is like that story where the guy gets good news and he says something like, “We’ll see.” And also sigh bad news, like his kid breaks his leg and everyone asks him why he’s not upset and he’s like – well, he’s like, philosophical, like Hamlet here. I don’t recall all the details but basically the kid with the broken leg doesn’t have to go to war when they go around rounding up soldiers because of his leg. And we’re meant to see the kid’s father as wise because he neither wept for his son’s broken leg nor celebrated his reprieve. We’re meant to see it as nothing either good or bad.
I am not a fan of this story, I will confess. It sounds, to me, like a one-noted life in which successes are never celebrated and losses never mourned. It may be true that our thinking creates the world but I think we HAVE to feel it, too.
Why, then ‘tis none to you.
If only we could accept each other’s realities as we accept each other’s names. Oh, your name is Hamlet? Oh, you think Denmark is a prison? We generally can’t try and change what someone calls themselves but we do periodically try to shift how they see.
If I tell a Londoner how much I love her city, she might point out all the reasons to hate it. When I tell a fellow New Yorker how ridiculous I find the theatre scene here, I often get a litany of all the ways he thinks it’s great.
But it can be as simple as saying, it’s like that for you, and your name is your name.
The Hamlet Project 