Rosencrantz, speaking first again. I mean, I assume Guildenstern is standing there, too and it is Rosencrantz who speaks.
I am building a whole case about Rosencrantz now. One in which he’s a little bit of a kiss-ass and in which Guildenstern is not sure what to do about it. Maybe he resents him? Maybe he’s impressed with Rosencrantz’s new found ambition with the higher-ups?
Maybe he’s used to it?
Oh, but that Rosencrantz, he’s such a suck-up.
There’s a world to be developed between them and certainly Tom Stoppard took them one way but there’s another narrative in here, too.
It’s not just a story of how alike they are, how they are mixed up, like twins. There is also a story of how they’re different.
Be the players ready?
The readiness is all. Not to be all circular with my Hamlet quotes – but really. . .the readiness is the most significant factor with players. Especially players who are about to do something live. Live-ness depends on readiness in a way that nothing else does. It requires being ready for the thing you’re doing but also for eventualities around that thing.
What happens if someone forgets to set that prop? Only readiness gives you the skills you need to deal with that.
I’ve been developing my company’s first improvised show and there is nothing to be done for the shows but to get everyone as ready as possible. What do we do if someone gives us this? How do we adapt if we get nothing from them? What if it starts to rain?
And we just have to hope that everyone’s ready.
It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there.
Rimshot! Punny punny rimshot!
We got the Brutus.
We got the double meaning of capital.
But what I’m curious about is the calling of Polonius/Caesar a calf.
Are we meant to see Caesar’s death as a sacrificial slaughter? An offering for the gods in some way?
And if we’re meant to see Caesar’s death that way, are we meant to see Polonius’ death that way, too?
If we see Caesar’s death as regrettable, then yes, it bears some similarity as Polonius’. But Caesar’s is very purposeful – Polonius’ death accidental.
I do wonder, though, if there is some way that we’re primed to see Polonius’ eventual death as noble, as sacrificial, as necessary in the long run somehow.
Brutus killed me.
SPOILERS:
Hamlet killed you, actually.
It’s an interesting foreshadowing.
Interesting that Polonius says Brutus killed him, when Caesar was killed by a whole group of conspirators.
Are there parallels between Hamlet and Brutus?
They’re both thinkers and deliberators. Both good speechifiers.
They both end up [Spoilers!] dead.
What else?
What else?
I was killed I’th’Capitol.
This happens in acting class or in shows. You start to identify with the character. Some will teach you to do it – to think of as I instead of him. Other times it just happens. You start to identify so fully with the character that the things that happen to the character seem to happen to you.
Characteristics of the character seem to be yours.
For months after playing a pregnant girl, I had post-partum depression. I missed my cotton front t-shirt bump baby.
It is a curious way to experience things.
Worlds start to interlock if you’re not careful. On our tour, Gertrude and Claudius did eventually start to collude. Ophelia went mad. Laertes raged. Polonius talked a blue streak. Hamlet spent a lot of time alone.
On the other hand, though, not quite a decade later, I played many characters without taking on their stuff. I think, perhaps, the lines of self are a lot more malleable when we are young, so we’re not as clear what we are acting and who we are.
Polonius was a young man when he played Caesar – so he took his playacted death as personally as a young man does. The death was clearly the biggest event for Caesar and so became so for young Polonius playing him.
I did enact Julius Caesar.
I worked with an actor who took a similar pride in having played Julius Caesar. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the title character isn’t anywhere close to the best part. It’s not even a star part, like the kind Orson Welles really enjoyed playing – i.e. the character that everyone talks about throughout the whole piece and so when he comes in at the end, everyone’s been anticipating him for two hours. Caesar shows up at the top, gets killed halfway through and doesn’t do a whole lot of interesting stuff on his journey there.
But my actor friend who played Caesar talked about this role with more pride than any of his larger, more flashy roles. Maybe he relishes the idea of himself as emperor of the empire.
I would cast that actor friend as Polonius, actually. He has a beautiful natural pomposity, combined with a good natured enthusiasm that would make for an endearing yet maddening Polonius.
Is that who Polonius is? I’m not sure. But that’s who his Polonius would be.
What did you enact?
Does Hamlet already know that Polonius played Caesar?
Is he just winding him up to watch him go?
Or perhaps giving him a great set up, playing the straight man, as it were, giving Polonius the opportunity to talk about his glory days as Julius Caesar once again.
Maybe winding him up for an audience. For the King . . .maybe it gives him particular pleasure to have Polonius evoke the name of a ruler who ended up assassinated by his friends? Maybe it’s a little pre-show show – a little preview of the more pointed drama.
That did I, my lord, and was accounted a good actor.
Hamlet my lords Polonius and Polonius my lords him right back.
I’d like to see Polonius’ acting. I’m developing a real jones to see collegiate Polonius in his toga saying, “E tu, Brute.”
I imagine it like the flashback scenes in Harry Potter where we see young Potter parents, young Professors, young Villains, before the current moment.
We see the whole college scene – all the people who account Polonius as a good actor – the collegiate audience, the reviews in the college newspaper. And I’m sure someone has noted this already but it just struck me now that both Polonius and Caesar meet their ends with a blade to the vitals. We don’t know which of the many wounds on Caesar is the fatal one but one assumes it to be the most emotional as well, the blade of Brutus.
It is interesting to me that Polonius dies in the same way his theatrical counterpoint did. Does he think of it as he dies? As Polonius says, “O I am slain” does he remember his death as Caesar? Does he indulge it a little?
I’d like to see a version where Polonius returns to his Caesar-ness at that moment. He could even say “E tu, Brute” after he realizes what’s happening. I’d enjoy those meta-theatrical echoes, I think.
My lord, you played once i’th’ university, you say?
POSTER:
Copenhagen University presents the Poli Sci Players’ production of Julius Caesar
(image: a 19 year old Polonius in a bedsheet clasped together with string.)
Saturday and Sunday in the College Cafeteria –
See Caesar meet his end where we meet our friends!
*
There’s something remarkable about the fact that kids have been doing plays in college from before Shakespeare started writing. There’s a long tradition of academic playacting, it would seem. Now, many of those people will do Shakespeare’s plays so it’s remarkable to think about that lineage going so far back and circling.
Before fraternity brothers put on Hamlet, they put on Julius Caesar – but not Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar – some earlier writer’s. Perhaps someone closer to the actual period of Caesar.
I meet a lot of people who did theatre in college. A lot of the people that I knew when I was IN college did theatre. It’s one of those things, like experimenting with your sexuality, that people do and think back on fondly before moving on to more lucrative things.
No, nor mine now.
That is the thing. When you send words out into the world, they leave you, you lose them. You give them away with speech, with writing, with publishing. The sharing of words is the loss of ownership, I suppose. There’s a way that writing with no audience is a kind of hoarding. I write and write and write – many many things that no one will ever read. Those words are still mine.
But as soon as others take them in, I share them. I retain some ownership but the eyes that read them or the ears that hear them own them a bit as well.
Once I’ve heard a story on the radio, for example, the story becomes a little bit mine. When I share it with someone else, either through playing it or explaining it, it becomes a little bit mine and a little bit theirs.
And so it goes on and on – the portion of ownership growing and shrinking as the words travel on.
The Hamlet Project 