One of my favorite songs came on in the café I’m writing in. For the most part, café music isn’t so much music as an aural landscape – just more noise, creating atmosphere. But then – a song like “Tightrope” pops out of the blur and it’s no longer just atmosphere, it is killer music, music that makes me move, even while trying to appear like this music isn’t moving me, literally, from the soles of my feet on up.
Sometimes it feels as if we should have less music around so that we can really hear what there is – especially the good stuff that shakes your bones.
Aha!
Because of this blog, the folks at the Global Hamlet found me and hired me shortly thereafter to help them make inroads in the American scene. They were claiming to be the first crowdsourced literary work.- the first crowdsourced Hamlet. When I explained it to my partner, he said, “Oh, like Rap Genius but for Shakespeare?”
And I was like: “What’s Rap Genius?”
Which is where Google came in and lo and behold Rap Genius had now become just Genius and what do you know, it also had Hamlet on there – with commentary already in action. I thought the two websites ought to have done a team up – but The Global Hamlet folk weren’t so into it. So I let it go. Then they let me go. So now Genius is my literary website of choice – and one of the things that I particularly love about it are the comments that are Gifs.
All that to say that if I ever got myself into doing Genius commentary, I’d definitely want to find a Gif of the Norwegian band from the 80s for this line. Maybe the moment where he sees himself in the mirror.
We’re not that high tech here at the Hamlet Project. I’d have to learn how to make a gif first. And then how to embed it in the blog. . .well. . .maybe an A-ha gif would be worth the trouble.
I did very well note him.
I tried to save myself some time with technology. I got this super fancy pen that recorded what I wrote into typed text. I was really excited about it. I imagined a future in which no time would pass between writing and publishing of things.
And it worked. More or less. But I found that I had to go a lot slower. I had to write more slowly, carefully – so that the software could understand me and convert my text more accurately.
And in slowing down and becoming more deliberate about what I was setting down, I had too much time to think. That is, in the little time it took to make me more careful, my inner critic suddenly had a window to observe what I was doing and to offer all kinds of unhelpful thoughts about it.
Normally I write without stopping much. I just GO and don’t quit until I’m done. But with the pen recording everything and making all things equal, I found myself stopping all the time. I got particularly hung up when I suddenly wanted to make an edit. If I hated the previous word, I couldn’t cross it out, it had already happened. I couldn’t draw an arrow to the previous thought and sneak it in the previous sentence. I had to think only ahead, straight ahead. The pen meant I was linear, no matter what. It was a stern (though quiet) admiral, watching my every word emerge – and insisting, too, that I keep marching ahead, even if it was check each word (will that be legible later? Is that REALLY the right word there? Did you really just write “write” instead of “right”? Well, that mistake is now part of your narrative.) Every single mis-step is noted as well as your good ones. If you had any good ones.
So – while the pen noted all that I did very well, in the end, it also inhibited my thought and the flow. So I’ve retired it for my writing writing and will find some other (less creative) use for it.
Upon the talk of the poisoning?
Again, it is interesting that it is the TALK of the poisoning rather than the poisoning itself
that triggers Claudius’ response.
This line makes that very explicit as does the order of events. The poisoning in the (non) dumb show triggers no response. The poisoning in the dumb show may be a slow burn trigger- like it could light the match but it’s the TALK of the poisoning that sets off the bomb.
Very well, my lord.
The way this project goes for me is that I write these things by hand, in my notebook. It takes a long time to get all that I’ve written typed, so I usually don’t make contact with these things until at least 6 months have passed.
Then, it tends to be another year before what has been typed makes its way to the
blog.
There are two encounters with these words at two very different points in the
future.
All that is to say that I encountered this very same line last night in one of
those two fixed points. Whether l posted it or typed it, I can’t be entirely sure-but
i feel sure l only recently read essentially this same line from Horatio at an earner point in the play.
In that process, I re-meet the play, circling back around on itself and also myself, circle
back around on myself-where I thought something before or encountered this
line with my particular lens on that day-and then I circle back again, re-encountering me and Horatio and the play all at once.
Didst perceive?
The podcast I was listening to did a story on Bodily Resonance and it referenced some scientific studies in which they could manipulate people’s biases. They could, in effect, make people less prejudiced by giving them an expanded sense of empathy. They could reduce their bias by making them feel as if they were more like whatever group they had a bias against. They could make a white person, with an implicit bias against a black person, feel as if his hand were black through the rubber hand experiment. And once they’d made him feel as if the black rubber hand were his own hand, they gave him another implicit racial bias test and found him to be less racist.
My question was/is: “Were the participants aware of this shift? Did they perceive it?”
0 good Horatio, I’ll take the ghosts’ word for a thousand pound.
Best Jeopardy category ever.
And the thousand pound one is the most challenging.
The Ghost’s Word for 200 is a snap.
Adieu, Adieu!. Hamlet, Remember me
The thousand pound question is:
“But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine”
You might have rhymed
This line seems to end the beat of the post show high that Hamlet’s riding. He’ll change the subject right after this.
As the end of a beat, really the end of a joke, this line falls a little flat.
It’s not clear what Horatio is trying to do with it. Just simply saying “You could have just said Ass?”
Is that all? Complaining about Hamlet’s verse making skills? Teasing him somehow?
None of it is actually very funny. In fact, this line may just be stating what was probably obvious to a contemporary audience..
It makes me think of the guy who played Horatio in the first production of Hamlet I did right out of school. He was a sweetheart – a generous, kind, well-intentioned guy. He was also Very Literal and would often not really get the joke. He was a little behind the joke curve.
We found out towards the end of the run that he suffered from some brain damage after a fall and that suddenly explained a lot.
He’ll always be the first Horatio I think of, though.
And in his mouth, this sort of flat response would be exactly right
-a joke that isn’t a joke-
a bit of repartee
that isn’t really repartee
For thou dost know, O Damon dear This realm dismantled was Of Jove himself; and now reigns here A very, very -peacock.
This a great example of a line that might make more sense through the lens of
original pronunciation. It may even be a line that helped those who have been
working out what original pronunciation was. I mean “was” just has to have been pronounced in such that it might rhyme with “ass.”
Horatio indicates that Hamlet has avoided the rhyme here. There is some expectation – some sense that “peacock” is the substitute for something else and it just has to be “ass” doesn’t it? In order for the joke to work.
Because it really doesn’t work as it stands.
I’m not hugely interested in OP (original pronunciation) as a performance technique.
As an American, I am skeptical of any codification of how l should speak the text.
I’m interested in the wide variety of accents that one could use. The wider the better.
But THIS is the area where I find it very useful to consider – when it can explain a mysterious text problem – then it becomes VERY interesting to me.
My English friends are much enamored of OP, which I didn’t understand at first.
Not until one of them explained how it liberated the text from RP (received pronunciation,) how it took Shakespeare down off of an upper class pedestal he’d gotten put up on, did the attraction start to make sense to me.
The class distinctions are less of an issue here in the states where speech isn’t so codified. Many people are still fighting for the idea that one doesn’t need to use an English accent when reading Shakespeare – to shift to now needing to use one, is a little bit repugnant.
However – if this new OP allows us to understand things, well, that’s a very useful tool and one I won’t be turning my nose up at –
not without thoroughly investigation it first.
A whole one, I.
Even in a metaphor, this guy is a great negotiator.
They’re just joking around here about the role Hamlet could play in an imaginary company. Horatio offers him half a share, presumably as an upgrade from the fellowship Hamlet proposed, and Hamlet ups it again to a full share.
I’ve been thinking about negotiation and how hard it is to learn. I posted a blog about a negotiation that actually worked out for me last summer – but what I didn’t post was how much coaching l needed to get there. There’s a whole world of literature on women and negotiation – how women don’t negotiate – how we should learn to do it but also how we have good reasons for not doing it. (Like the article called “women don’t negotiate become they’re not idiots.”)
But there’s another non-negotiating impulse that comes with being an artist. Artists don’t negotiate either – also because we’re not idiots. We’re in precarious positions most of the places we work and despite the uniqueness of each of us, we are extraordinarily replaceable. An artist who negotiates might not be asked back. Same as being a woman, really.
So we learned, artists, women and others who are in unstable position, not to ask for more – while people like the Prince of Denmark are just automatic negotiators, primed to ask for more from the beginning – probably even as a child, always advocating for a little bit more.
The Hamlet Project 