Claudius and Gertrude are deceived
In the satisfaction of ambition, the lure of power, of lust.
The way one thinks that achieving these things will bring you security or fulfillment or bliss.
The way one thinks that doing whatever it takes to achieve one’s dreams won’t come back to haunt you.
The way that hubris can make you believe you could get away with murder.

Hamlet’s deception about the state of his mind is nothing compared to the self-deception in the King and Queen.

I love that the Players are introduced with a flourish. I would relish a flourish at my arrival. Or when the actors arrive at a theatre, just to get ready you understand, not to start the show, if there were a flourish you know, to say, “They’re here! They’re in the building!”

I’d like to be the Players flourish player. I’d go in advance of them to parties and wait at the door til they arrived, at which point I’d bring my horn to my lips and play the flourishingest flourish. When they were on the road. I’d run along before them, ready to welcome them to the rest stop or the diner.

It is possible that I have never heard this line before.
It is a fantastic line full of possibility (Are these debates actually leading to head headbashing, brainspattering fights? Or does all that intellectual discussion just create an atmosphere of heady carnage? Are the brains being thrown about literal or figurative or both?) but its place in this conversation about the boys’ companies means that it is cut 9 times out of 10. If not 10 out of 10. If the little eyases stay in at all, usually, it’s their first mention and then on to Hamlet’s line about his uncle.

And with good reason. A discussion about a rivalry happening a long way away from the action of THIS play is completely inessential to the story. And given that this play runs about 4 hours at a steady clip uncut – most people find it beneficial to lose this sort of conversation first. But I do love the image of throwing about of brains.

I get the sense that Guildenstern has a somewhat dry sense of humor. It makes me like him more. Especially since he has this line that conjures up a zombie food fight.

Good move, Guildenstern. I don’t know what it costs him to say this. Is he risking his position with the king to confess it? We haven’t heard anything like that in the scene before but there must be some reason they wait for so long to tell the truth. Have they been specifically instructed not to reveal their purpose there?

Or is it that much more insidious censorship that was not explicitly stated but gets somehow internally implanted anyway. The kind where you control yourself in anticipation of something that you only imagine to be true.

Most Americans tend to fetishize British accents. There’s a peculiar cross-cultural enthusiasm for the voices of our friends across the pond. I can vouch for young people of all economic and cultural backgrounds being interested and excited by the idea of the Brits. The kid from the projects who doesn’t have a computer and has never seen a play is just as interested as the kid from the Upper West Side who discovered Monty Python when he was 7 while at Chess camp.

And it doesn’t really fade. My friend was over here performing with the RSC in a large company full of people with English accents of many varieties. He tells me that as they made their way through New York, he met many people who loved to hear them talk. They’d say, “Talk! Say something!”
And the actors would ask, “What should we say?”

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.

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.

Shakespeare in prison stories reliably move me. There’s been a radio show, a film, youtube videos, articles. Whatever the medium, it has a predictable ability to make me cry or touch my heartstrings in some way. At one time, I thought this pointed to some internal calling to work on Shakespeare in prisons. I thought, perhaps, I was meant to be one of those brave women who go into horrible circumstances and make space for beauty and insight. I have had my fill of horrible circumstances by now and if beauty or insight happens there, it’s only because beauty and insight can happen anywhere. So that no longer seems to be the reason for the impact Shakespeare prison stories have on me.

I taught a residency around a production set in a prison and the director explained his choice. He felt that the play’s worldview could only really still exist in the extremity of prison-life – that nowhere else in contemporary society had the rigid hierarchical structures or rivalries or factions. This makes me wonder if the Shakespeare work in prison isn’t so much about the power of Shakespeare to transform prisoners as the prisoners’ power to illuminate Shakespeare. Or maybe those two are one and the same.

I can’t help it. I suddenly pictured Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as Fortune’s labia. There’s something twinned about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and something sentinel-like about the use of the word “privates” which led me to see them as the gate of Fortune’s flower. There’s not much they can do in that position, they mostly just stand there, chatting. They can move away from each and closer but they have no authority to refuse anyone Fortune invites to pass their threshold or to invite anyone of their own. But if Fortune gets around as Hamlet suggests, they at least get to see a lot of action.