Hamlet’s response to his father’s ghost’s return is complicated. His first reaction is fear. He asks the angels for protection from his fate. He does exactly the same when he first sees the ghost. Pure, primal fear, it would seem.
And then – he switches, if not reactions then tactics. He would seem to become distant and courtly with his father’s ghost. The first time he speaks to the ghost, he uses informal language. He thees and thous him. But here, he swings into you – and not just you – but “your gracious figure.” It has distancing effect – Like, the ghost isn’t his father anymore but a representation of him.
Which – maybe so – given that he’s a ghost. But it’s more like a painting of the ghost or his father. The figure of his father and not his father himself.
And as this scene continues, he continues to speak formally to the ghost (and also to his mother.) He has made a switch at some point in the middle of this play. Is it because he thought of the ghost as more of a thing at first and now that he’s convinced of his veracity, he switches to a more respectful you? He speaks to his mother with “You” – is that his parental language? Or is there something about being with his mother that means he uses different language with his father?
There’s a lot to explore in just comparing Hamlet with the ghost in Act 1 versus Hamlet with the ghost in Act 3.
Save me, and hover o’er me with your wings, you heavenly guards!
There was a period wherein I really believed in Angels. I had an angel book that kicked it off, I think. I purchased it for next to nothing at a used book shop. I had angel cards, too.
I’ve never been religious – didn’t believe in God, even while believing, with tears and laughter, in angels.
Angels were appealing in a way that God was not. They had personalities, specialties. I welcomed them with meditations and automatic writing. One of them got me through a break-up and an up-ending of my life.
I feel pretty clear now that that angel was my own mind, my own imagination, giving me the good advice I needed. The fact that I found a roundabout way to hear it is of no consequence now. It was an angel then. It helped me. When it enfolded me in its imaginary wings, it provided comfort.
There is something assuring about a flock of angels watching over you, ready to defend against difficulties of all kinds. The fantasy of someone flying in from above to save you is one of the best there is. In a future dark moment, I might imagine more angels, even if I don’t believe in them.
A king of shreds and patches –
My boyfriend was laughing with abandon in the other room. I had to go in and see what had caused him to laugh so much. (He’s not quick to laugh.)
I found him watching Shredding videos. I had never seen nor heard of these before but they are a thing. Shreds are the video of great musical acts with hilariously bad audio that matches the video. Instead of Robert Plant singing or keening, you get him sounding like an alien muppet. Instead of John Oates’ dulcet tones accompanying a soul Daryl Hall – you get a Simpson-esque Harry Shearer-ish Hodor accompanying a breathing high school voice – and the predominant sound of Daryl Hall hitting his mic stand. In a shred, Keith Jarrett plays plinky plunky piano sounds instead of complex jazz. Shreds are very silly. And particularly funny to musicians.
So I picture Claudius as a King of Shreds. Either a guy who sits in a basement creating those videos – or singing something in a band himself, getting dozens of shreds on his video because he is so fun to re-record and make fun of.
No more.
It feels like so many of the worlds ills could be resolved if we simply learned how to respect a woman’s request for no more. It is astonishingly rare for this sort of request to be heard.
We are trained from an early age to ignore women and encourage men.
We allow men to speak and consistently interrupt women. I say we – because as much as I could hope that I don’t personally have this bias, it is so ingrained in culture, I cannot see how it could have avoided being embedded in me too.
In its extreme, this tendency is what leads to rape. A woman’s request is ignored, just as in conversation, it extends out to where, of course, it is ignored in a context where sexual consent isn’t something men are encouraged to think about. They’re encouraged to push past boundaries – even just simple verbal ones like “No more.”
A murderer and a villain, A slave that is not twentieth part the tithe Of your precedent lord, a vice of kings, A cutpurse of the empire and the rule, That from a shelf the precious diadem stole And put it in his pocket –
This first part is obviously true. Claudius is a murderer and a villain.
Which is interesting because this is the first time Hamlet’s let on to his mother about the murdery part – which really is enough of a problem. Probably if he just calmly said, “I am now certain beyond a reasonable doubt that Claudius murdered my Dad. The ghost came and told me so and Claudius’ reaction confirmed it. Did you know? Are you guilty, too? The ghost says not. But…”
However – he just skims right over this murdery business and goes on to a really interesting diatribe about how shitty a king Claudius is. This is interesting to me – because there are some ways that Claudius is actually not so bad. He’s a good politician. He speaks the lingo anyway – and he does avert a war with Norway at the top of the play.
But Hamlet thinks he’s a king of vice. His drinking, he’s previously let us know, is a problem.
At first I thought Hamlet was saying that Claudius was stealing money from the country’s coffers – that he was embezzling somehow – but now I see “a cutpurse of the empire and the rule” as more of a thief of the kingship. He stole the COUNTRY by usurping the throne. He doesn’t mention that Claudius has stolen the throne as much from him as his father. He’s weirdly mum about the succession. Other characters, in other plays, who were meant to be king and lost it, will have a lot to say on the subject – Hamlet does not. I wonder what that’s about.
This is a good fun rant, though.
No more, sweet Hamlet.
He is not being sweet right here, mama. No way. Not sweet at all. I know you’d like to remind him that he has the capacity to be sweet but right now…he’s not.
It’s funny how we do this, how we try to call forth someone’s better self like this in moments of distress. We try and remind a violent person that he’s not usually this way.
I think of Tony’s story about passing a man he knew who was in the process of threatening a crowd of people with, like, Molotov cocktails in hand (I can’t recall the weapon now) and Tony’s response, as he passed by, was not to try and stop the man or remind him that he was usually a very sweet man – but to try and be as ordinary as possible – to somehow shake him out of his state – which is a heightened, extraordinarily, at the edges place – and he just said, “Hey, (Whatever his name was) Good Morning!”
Like the mundane might be the way to bring someone back down to earth.
Sweetness almost never works but we almost always try it.
These words like daggers enter in mine ears.
When I don’t want to hear something,
I feel it in my belly.
It feels more like getting kicked in the stomach repeatedly than like getting knifed in the ears.
I like the metaphor a lot. It would be fun to play the Queen and really viscerally feel like Hamlet’s words are daggers. It would, I think, actually help to play this scene. It’s not so much what he says, just the repeated image of daggers every time he speaks.
And probably it’s not what he’s saying but how he’s saying it.
If I were to play the Queen now, I could explore how she is different from me. She would feel in her ears what I would feel in my guts and on that we could hang our difference.
We could build out from there.
O, speak to me no more –
If I’m mad or upset enough to say this, it’s really time to stop talking – because the emotional train has left the station and it will only get worse from here. If you keep talking after I’ve asked you to stop, you’re going to get either a major meltdown or a fight that it will take months, maybe years to recover from.
I don’t generally ask people to shut up. I will listen for hours without complaint. If I ask you to stop, the content has pulled the trigger on an emotional gun and I will because a storm of one kind or another. I am slow to anger – but I can feel it build in my guts – I can sense the rise of the tide, the bile or the wind, whichever one is coming.
I’m not saying you’re required to stop speaking if I ask you to – but I am warning you of the consequences.
Nay, but to live In the rank sweat of an enseaméd bed, Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty –
Hamlet. You’re saying this stuff to your mother. I mean – I realize her sex life grosses you out. I think parental sex lives are supposed to gross us out – but we don’t usually TALK about them.
And this is such a curiously lurid description of sex. It’s supposed to be nasty – we’ve got stuff like “rank sweat,” “enseaméd bed,” “stewed in corruption” over a “nasty sty” but we also have “honeying” and “making love” in the same sentence.
It’s not ENTIRELY disgusting. And there’s something about it that just could be just a little bit hot. I mean – sweaty sex ain’t all bad, man. Sure, if it’s rank, that’s gross. But their description involves both the making love and the sweat, which really might be ideal for a lot of people.
I don’t think Hamlet’s in love with his mom. Not by any stretch of the imagination. But I do think, he’s inappropriate with her in areas like this. Maybe he just doesn’t have good boundaries.
Thou turnest mine eyes into my very soul, And there I see such black and grainéd spots As will not leave their tinct.
I’m not gonna lie. This line may have been the hardest one for me to say when I played this role. I just – couldn’t get my head around feeling convinced by that speech. Feel guilty for lusting? Sure, I can understand feeling guilty for loving the wrong dude. But I just couldn’t work out what about any of this sexist, ageist speech was the trigger for her seeing into her soul. Is this true for her?
I think, if I were to play this part again, I’d have to spend a lot of time trying to work out what gets her here.
I’m pretty sure I just responded to my Hamlet’s tone and energy and didn’t think too deeply about what he was saying before finally just saying this line as best as I could – as if I believed it. Which is really the job, I guess. But I can’t help wishing I could have made some sense of it, some internal logic of it, some trigger in it that would have really allowed me to feel as though I were feeling soul stained.
The Hamlet Project 