Hamlet

Due to the lack of line numbers I cannot take this copy to the exam

Back in the late 60's, I saw a movie version of Hamlet at the Odeon theatre in my hometown. I looked up Hamlet productions on the IMDB and find that it was likely the 1989 movie with Nicol Williamson as Hamlet. I had taken five Shakespeare plays in high school but not Hamlet. I was unfamiliar with the play beyond the usual quotations from it. I didn't understand a word of it. Looking at the commentary on the Internet, I find that I was not alone in this. William spoke in a thick brogue and very quickly. At the time, I put up my lack of understanding as a lack of capability on my part. Hamlet was for other people who had a more subtle intelligence than mine. Imagine my surprise then when I saw Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour movie version of the uncut play. This was fast moving, exciting, insightful and powerful drama interspersed with some very funny comedy. Hamlet was completely accessible even to someone like me. Perhaps, it wasn’t me who was lacking subtlety but the previous versions of the play that I had seen with their cuts and impenetrable dialog were the things that were lacking subtlety. These were productions of a meta-Hamlet. People could be familiar with the play and recognize parts of it in the production and appreciate the play and the production in that way. Given my experience with Branagh’s version, I looked forward to reading the play as part of my project to read all the literature that I was assigned to read in school but didn’t. I’ve read my five high school plays and have moved on to attempt to read as many of the plays as possible. I found the Folger editions of the plays and with their side-by-side notes. I’ve found that I can read these plays with what I think is some degree of understanding. Each Folger edition has a brief essay on the play from a modern perspective. The Hamlet essay pointed out that the interpretation of the play has changed markedly over the centuries. Earlier critics looked at the personality of Hamlet and found him to be someone who was not capable of dealing with the issues that he faced. The author of the Folger essay points out that modern critics look more to the society in which the action takes place. They see an analog of the modern surveillance state in the actions of the characters to constantly spy on each other’s actions. The Danish court in Hamlet is one in which there is no common purpose. Characters vie with character for advantage. Each is out for his own benefit and are indifferent to the consequences of their ambition on others. Claudius murders the king and conspires to kill Hamlet multiple times. Hamlet is indifferent to the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the pain to which he put Ophelia. Hamlet is a revenge play, but it is a revenge play in which those seeking revenge are as lacking as their enemies. The Folger edition says that the play can carry many readings and that is the reading that it carries for me. I have seen this in some other Shakespeare Plays. The Henry IV plays argue against the ambitions that cause the death and famine of internecine wars. Hamlet carries a play within a play that mimics the Danish court. However, for me, the Danish court is also a play that carries on in its own action indifferent to the factors of the real world. The players conspire against each other while in the real world the army of Fortinbras approaches to destroy the artificial world that they create among themselves. In this, I see the essential weakness of the surveillance state. We are faced with this same issue today as Shakespeare pointed out in his own time. Self-interest and suspicion breed only pain, hinger and death. The society they enable is unstable. It has no centre and cannot hold.

A book you need if you study a certain topic...

Good

Great explanation on Shakespeare’s Hamlet writing and poem.

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