The Hamlet Project

It’s funny that hire and salary are words with such a long history. They seem so contemporary somehow or maybe a few decades ago, at the most.

In our freelance society, getting hired or getting a salary are increasingly Rare things. But I don’t know how these words meanings have shifted and changed over the years. I know that a while back people would hire coaches and horses and so on. Has a salary always been a regular payment system? Usually a yearly sum? Maybe it was once a little different.

Hire AND salary would suggest that Hamlet’s been FIRST, SELECTED to do the job of killing Claudius at prayer and also PAID for it.
This seems a tiny bit redundant but there is a slight raising of the idea with “AND salary”

It would seem that Hire and Salary wasn’t an everyday phrase. This is Shakespeare inventing.

It also would be a great name for a pub or a rock band.

Is Hamlet an only child?
If he has or had any sibling, they are nowhere to be seen in the play. We know he’s the only boy but does he have a sister stashed somewhere? Maybe married off to the King of Sweden or something?
Or did he have brothers who didn’t survive?
It is rare for a Royal family to have just one child. Part of the deal with having a Royal Family at all is to insure lots of heirs. So I’m curious about Hamlet’s only-ness.
I’m part only child (on one side) but no one’s concerned about middle class lineage.
And I am the sole daughter both of my mother – to whom I am also the sole child and to my father, who has two sons.
It never occurred to me to wonder about Hamlet’s siblings before – why he doesn’t seem to have any and what happened there.
Was Gertrude unable to have more? Did she become a little like Lady Macbeth and lose a child or two?
Are there sisters somewhere?
I’d like to imagine that there are three sisters and one is Queen of Sweden, another is in a nunnery (the one where Hamlet would send Ophelia) and the third has been discovered, since she ran off, joined up some pirates off the coast.
It’s a natural extension of Virginia Woolf’s imagining of Shakespeare’s sister – this extra fictional step of imagining Hamlet’s sisters. If I started a band again, I might call it Hamlet’s sister, since someone already took Shakespeare’s sister.
It’s the next best thing.

We start with scanning text, with verse
Analyzing words and then
Somewhere sometime
A thing that was text based
Becomes image based
And before long we have
A piece of technology
(Created in my lifetime)
that places scanning firmly
in the image camp)

And yet
Despite its transition from word to image
There is some essential thing in the word
that remains.

There was that interesting moment in theatre history when revenge plays were all the rage, of which this is one. It makes me curious about why. Why, in this particular moment in history, was revenge so important? What social anthropologist has worked out the significance of revenge to the English people in the Renaissance? Because, yes, it is fantastic fodder for drama. This drive – this vengeance is delicious in the Revenger’s Tragedy, The Spanish Tragedy and of course, here in Hamlet. But we don’t really write Revenge stories much anymore – Is it that we’ve somehow evolved past them? That we are driven less by honor and revenge and use more of our common sense in this area? It would be nice to believe so. But I’m not entirely sure – it could just be that once Shakespeare wrote this one, no one ever felt they could top it – so the trend just dried up.

I’ll set something down.
Put one word on the paper to start with even if I don’t have another to follow it. I’ll make at least one mark and then the next might just follow on.
Sometimes I can sit and stare at the page, waiting for something to come to me – especially with this Hamlet Project. I’ll look at the line and think about it and little bubbles of thought will rise and sometimes I’ll seize one.
And then sometimes there’s nothing and I feel like I could stare out the window for an hour before anything occurs to me. I could feel that about to happen today – perhaps due to the sheer amount of possibilities in a line like, “And now I’ll do it.”
So I just did it – instead of standing at the threshold waiting.

This bit is where a lot of character analysis goes a little bit bananas. Those who believe Hamlet to be too hesitant, too wishy-washy or INDECISIVE as they usually say – use this speech as evidence.
“He ought,” they usually say,” to have killed Claudius outright in this moment when he gets the opportunity.”
They say, “He knows he’s guilty now. Why does he pause?”
They see Hamlet’s explanation for NOT killing him now as a convenient excuse. And then the final evidence is the fact that Claudius’ prayers have been ineffective.
“See,” they say, “He should have killed him here.”
But while it is a convenient moment to kill Claudius, I think we have to take Hamlet at his word. As far as Hamlet knows, Claudius is in the midst of getting absolved. As far as Hamlet knows, killing Claudius now is actually a terrible idea – given his worldview. If he is well and truly after revenge in a world where hell is real – he truly would believe that he’d be sending his murderous uncle to heaven.

For many contemporary viewers of this play, hell is an abstract concept that doesn’t pack a real emotional punch. So Hamlet’s concern about sending his uncle to heaven instead of hell doesn’t seem legitimate.

But – a little cultural anthropology is useful to apply to this moment. To try and see this from the actor’s point of view and also the views of a lot of the audience. Sure, it is ironic that, with this worldview, he could have killed him and still sent him to hell despite the appearance otherwise – but that irony packs no punch at all unless you can believe that killing him while praying would send the murderer to heaven.

You can’t really have both things- a Hamlet who’s just using the praying as an excuse and an ironic end to the scene. But that’s how a lot of people see it. They see the end at the beginning and discount the character’s very real concerns of heaven and hell.