The Hamlet Project

When I read Shakespeare as a teenager, I remembered being particularly taken with the lines about drinking. I didn’t do much drinking myself and watched a lot of people do a lot of stupid things and get themselves into a lot of hot water from the booze. There are a few real good lines for this in Othello – mostly due to Cassio’s relationship to the stuff. I wrote them down in my quote notebook. (I kept a quote notebook. A book in which I wrote down quotations I thought were meaningful and important.) I may have had a whole page of Cassio inspired alcohol quotes.
At the time, I think I thought the Shakespeare was trying to tell us something – that he had an opinion about drinking and he was expressing it through the plays. I see now how specifically character driven each reference to drinking is, Cassio talks about the evils of alcohol because it has gotten him into terrible trouble. Hamlet talks about drinking, mostly in reference to Claudius. That gives us some sense of a) how he sees Claudius or b) how he wants others he’s talking to to see Claudius. He returns to a theme here of a drunken king and again, it’s with a friend. (If we can still call Guildenstern a friend at this point in the play.)

Kings are hard to dismiss like this.
Railing against them
Praising them
Sucking up to them
Challenging them
Those sorts of things, when,
Talking of kings, are all within
The norm.
But indifference?
You can never
Take or leave a king.
“How do you feel about the king?”
“O, I could take or leave him. Doesn’t matter to me.”
Kings just generally must be
Responded to.
Any indifference is likely to be feigned.

I’ve been reading Charles Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend in which one of the characters asks another to read The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to him. The character is illiterate but moneyed and his first attempt at enriching himself is this particular history. it takes a long time to read someone a whole history so quite a lot happens in the book before they finish and move on to another one.
But interestingly, the character, even when he moves on from this history, stays with histories. He clearly feels that they are the most edifying books of all.

I’m in Gotham Café – which is as New York an establishment as any I can think of. I cannot tell you why but it has a flavor of old New York while adapting to the new one. They have photos on the walls of jazz greats and landmarks.
And playing, quite loudly, too, is “Free Bird” which seems so out of context, I can hardly make sense of it. In some cafes in NYC, this jamming of “Free Bird” might be ironic. If I heard it at Café Grumpy, for example, or Birch, I’d understand that this was a guilty pleasure play or ironic enjoyment jam.
Here at Gotham, it feels like an earnest playing of “Free Bird” as if someone said, “Come, some music!” and when the opportunity for requests came, someone shouted for “Free Bird” and not as a joke.

I’d heard joke references to “Free Bird” for many years before I heard the song itself. It is the accepted joke to make at the request portion of an evening of music. I’d thought no one really wanted to hear “Free Bird” that they were just joining in the general shouting.
But people do want to hear “Free Bird” and not just in the South and not just ironically. Even at an old school café in NYC.

Is Hamlet just making this up? Is he riffing on an existing rhyme or song?
Or does he just start spouting lyrics, rhymes or raps when he gets excited?
I’ve known some rappers who do this – just turn the key and rhymes come out.
This rhyme’s not great. He wouldn’t win a rap battle with this one.
The rhythm is funny. And perdy?
Hmmm.
If this is some song or lyric or poem that Hamlet pulls out at this moment, it may be slightly more comprehensible, in that the comedy has another point of reference. That is, if this is referencing something else – it can be a joke about both THIS situation and the something else. Mostly it feels like this is here to get at a sense of giddiness in our Prince of Denmark, a little pause in the demand for music he’s making.

I’d love if we still had roving bands of recorder musicians ready to play at the drop of a hat. Now – recorders have pretty much been reduced to children’s music classes and the occasional Ren Faire.
But what if there were several recorder players just hanging around in every establishment – in coffee shops and bars, theatre and clubs – and you could just summon them forth and have a little tune. I’d be calling for them all the time.