#more hamlet

[bloodybellycomb]

I really do think that it’s good for the soul to be unironically pretentious about something. Not in a gatekeeping kind of way but in a “yes, it really is that deep and I would love to enthusiastically and passionately explain why” kind of way.

[aq2003]

i guess ten being considered the universe's hottest dude with women falling over themselves to kiss him is kinda crazy to me bc in my mind he is fundamentally a little wretched twig of a guy. like a drowned kitten or perhaps rat to me . i'm realizing that the spirit of donna noble is possessing me as i write this post

[lansolot]

tag that classic lit character

[tall-glass-of-nope]

@moonlarked I love these additions because I haven’t spent nearly enough time pondering the various ways Gertrude’s actions could be interpreted, and “behaving tacitly under the watchful eye of her new husband” is one that had passed by me until now.

Suddenly the world of “Gertrude is a brilliant chess player (a powerful, beautiful woman) who sees what Hamlet sees but has spent her life learning to patiently play the game of nobility” opens up and starkly contrasts her son’s privilege to emotionally react whenever he senses injustice. And it makes sense, given her class and the time period (generally 14th century, I believe?). It also makes her death even MORE tragic because she played well for so long and for what? Her son has seen through his uncle’s poor veneer enough to understand he’s using convention to get away with literal murder, but Gertrude was too good at measuring her responses (possibly for her whole life) such that her own son didn’t know her well enough to understand her response at the play was a necessary bluff? Delicious. T r a g i c.

They are then two opposing forces on the same side of a conflict: the forces of subtlety and reactivity. And those are not forces that inherently communicate well. With this in mind, I want to go back and reread their confrontation scene in her bedroom. (Which btw has NEVER had incest undertones when I’ve read it before wtf is wrong with people)

Also: in discussing Hamlet’s sanity — at what point is it human to incorrectly jump to conclusions based on personal experience and at what point is it insane to believe your conclusion can be the only correct one?

Let’s talk about “the lady doth protest too much,” because it’s a phrase I heard and used before I knew the actual context. And now, after I’ve finally gotten the context, I find myself continually thinking about its intent.

When I first heard it, (and pretty much exclusively how I still hear it) it’s been used to mean “it is suspicious that this person is denying something waaaay too hard.”

Ex. “The PR people keep insisting this chemical won’t harm the environment. They doth protest too much, methinks.”

And I never questioned that usage, because it makes sense.

Then I read Hamlet, and found that the line comes from a scene wherein Hamlet is trying to trick the people around him into revealing their guilt by having actors perform a thinly veiled parody play of his current predicament as he sees it.

In his actors’ play, the character that parallels his mother is solicited by her husband’s killer — who is also her brother-in-law. And the actress in the show denies her solicitor several times before succumbing to him.

When Hamlet turns to his mother and asks what she thinks of the show so far, he’s looking for her to see herself in the part. To react, or provide some kind of recognition of what she’s done. To condemn the clearly uncomfortable situation her character is in. But all she says is

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

And I LOVE analyzing that, because my personal takeaway is like.

You know how you can write a whole poem or story about someone who’s wronged you, and they’ll read it and not see themselves in it? Yeah. (If you don’t know: this happens. A lot.)

So, whether or not she saw herself in the character onstage, My interpretation is that Gertrude (Hamlet’s mom) is revealing that her decision to marry Claudius (Hamlet’s uncle) was not a tearful and tormented decision made under coercion and duress. (Which is how Hamlet has experienced seemingly every major decision in his own life, and explains why he’d find this lack of passionate waffling to be offensive.) For better or for worse she’s revealing she just… didn’t say no to her brother-in-law.

And from there you can get into the why behind all that and her motivations and whatnot but that’s beyond the scope of what I’m trying to get into here.

“The lady doth protest too much” doesn’t read to me like condemnation of insincere delivery. Not exactly. The difference is kinda subtle, I guess.

A more parallel usage of the phrase is difficult to imagine, then, because there is some amount of self condemnation that it should invoke.

Me: “I baked you these cookies”

Them: “I shouldn’t; I’m watching my figure”

Me, knowing full well I ate five of the cookies before boxing the rest up to give: “The lady doth protest too much. Take the cookies.”

[mizgnomer]

David Tennant gently stroking things

[swords-and-starlight]

i feel the need to remind everyone that Damen’s literally one of the smartest and most well-educated characters in the series. He’s extremely well-read and knowledgeable about military tactics and strategy, which if you didn’t know also includes a huge depth of history knowledge, and his talent comes from both education and years of experience. He’s smart enough to know geography and terrain information of an area he hasn’t needed to have information on in seven years, and even then, the lands they are talking about were in mainland Vere, not Delpha, so his studies were his own initiative. he has favorite poems! HE ENJOYED DEBATING OBSCURE PHILOSOPHY WITH HESTON!!! like y’all Damen is just as intelligent as Laurent, it’s just that Laurent’s intelligence is about manipulation and chess and Damen’s just a nerd.

(also people are gonna be coming for me for this one but i think Damen likes books and libraries a lot more than Laurent ever did)

[theofficialpresidentofmars]

I’d like to propose a performance of Hamlet in which the audience is addressed, looked at, and treated as if they were there but ONLY by characters who have gone mad.

in Act 2, when Hamlet’s pretending to go mad, while in the presence of Polonius and others, he sort of pretends to look at the audience, but always glancing over, looking sort of in the wrong direction, putting on a show for the only eyes he thinks are watching. When he’s alone and doing his soliloquies, it’s clear that he’s talking to himself, even though we’re listening in.

And it continues this way until Act 3 Scene 4, when Hamlet runs Polonius through with the sword. For a moment after the deed is done, there’s a shocked silence on the stage. As Hamlet goes to examine the body, he falters, slightly, as he becomes aware of just how many eyes are on him. And slowly; he looks at us, and through the rest of the scene his attention is torn between the audience and his mother, until the ghost appears (perhaps in the audience as well) and he’s… sort of put back on track. But from then on, all his soliloquies, asides, he begins to talk to us, in the audience.

And we notice the change, sure, but we don’t really get what it means, not until Ophelia goes mad, and while onstage she begins to give audience members flowers, to talk to them as the others call her crazy. And at that point most of us can make the connection.

From then until the play is over, Hamlet can’t fully ignore us. Every other character will, and does (besides maybe the gravediggers if you wanted to include anyone else), but we’re ever present in his sight. As he dies, we’re the ones he refers to when he says ‘you that look pale and tremble at this chance, that are but mutes or audience to this act’

[pricklenettle]

I’m so excited to finally show the illustrations I did for this year’s invisobang!

These are from the first chapter of @wingedflight’s story, Something Rotten

It’s based around Hamlet, and it is so cool and tragic to read the characters in their roles, please go check it out!

[vinceaddams]

(watching Hamlet for the first time) Oh, so that's where that quote is from. Oh, so that's where that quote is from. Oh, so that's where that quote is from. Oh, so tha

[movietonight]

Method and Madness

Catch-22 // M*A*S*H // Hamlet // The Physicists

[vampiremotif]

shakespeare themed blinkies made with blinkies.cafe (insp.)

[binary-bird]

heyyy scrolling through your hamlet stuff and i saw a post bout laertes and fortinbras and hamlet and horatio with the like face shapes (ex. hamlet being pizzafaced, horatio having a squarish face, laertes rocking a rhombus, etc.) so i was wondering what Ophelia's shape would be

i get that you're more focused on oc's right now but i would still love to see it :)

circle! but she starts to incorporate sharper elements into her design later in the play.

this way she starts to mirror hamlet, who's also perceived as volatile and dangerous as a result of mismanaged grief.

[aq2003]

obviously the interpretation of the ghost as visibly suffering and in pain and scaring hamlet bc he never saw his father this way in life + later fueling his fear of life after death, has a Lot of basis in the text. HOWEVER the version that will always hit me more emotionally is the ghost being commanding and frightening just as he was in life and still, even beyond the grave, instilling hamlet with intense guilt for simply existing

[butchhamlet]

i said i was going to arrange a list of my favorite articles/criticism about shakespeare, so here’s my first little roundup! obligatory disclaimer that i don’t necessarily agree with or endorse every single point of view in each word of these articles, but they scratch my brain. will add to this list as i continue reading, and feel free to add your own favorites in the reblogs! :]

essays

Is Shakespeare For Everyone? by Austin Tichenor (a basic examination of that question)

Interrogating the Shakespeare System by Madeline Sayet (counterpoint/parallel to the above; on Shakespeare’s place in, and status as, imperialism)

Shakespeare in the Bush by Laura Bohannan (also a good parallel to the above; on whether Shakespeare is really culturally “universal”)

The Unified Theory of Ophelia: On Women, Writing, and Mental Illness ("I was trying to make sense of the different ways men and women related to Ophelia. Women seemed to invoke her like a patron saint; men seemed mostly interested in fetishizing her flowery, waterlogged corpse.”)

Hamlet Is a Suicide Text—It’s Time to Teach It Like One (on teaching shakespeare plays about suicide to high schoolers)

Commuting With Shylock by Dara Horn (on listening to MoV with a ten-year-old son, as modern jewish people, to look at that eternal question of Is This Play Antisemitic?)

All That Glisters is Not Gold (NPR episode, on whether it’s possible to perform othello, taming of the shrew, & merchant to do good instead of harm)

academic articles

the Norton Shakespeare’s intro to the Merchant of Venice (apologies about the highlights here; they are not mine; i scanned this from my rented copy)

the Norton Shakespeare’s intro to Henry the Fourth part 1 (and apologies for the angled page scans on this one; see above)

Richard II: A Modern Perspective by Harry Berger Jr (this is the article that made me understand richard ii)

Hamlet’s Older Brother (“Hamlet and Prince Hal are in the same situation, the distinction resting roughly on the difference between the problem of killing a king and the problem of becoming one. ... Hamlet is literature’s Mona Lisa, and Hal is the preliminary study for it.”)

Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony & Cleopatra Criticism (about more than just reviewers; my favorite deconstruction of shakespeare’s cleopatra in general)

Strange Flesh: Antony and Cleopatra and the Story of the Dissolving Warrior (“If Troilus and Cressida is [Shakespeare’s] vision of a world in which masculinity must be enacted in order to exist, Antony and Cleopatra is his vision of a world in which masculinity not only must be enacted, but simply cannot be enacted, his vision of a world in which this particular performance has broken down.”)

misc

Elegy of Fortinbras by Zbigniew Herbert (poem that makes me fucking insane)

Dirtbag Henry IV (what it sounds like.)

Cleopatra and Antony by Linda Bamber (what if a&c... was good.)

[mariathechosen1]

Digging too deep:

Philosophical obsession to the point of self destruction

[Image description: A collage consisting of 10 different photographs and quotes, all related to digging and holes. From top to bottom:

A wikipedia headline that says “Law of Holes”.

A close up of a shovel, digging into loose dirt.

An excerpt from a wikipedia article about the law of holes: The law of holes or the first law of holes, is an adage which states: "if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging." It is used as a metaphor, warning that when in an untenable position, it is best to stop making the situation worse.”

A lyrics excerpt from ‘The Song With Five Names’ by Will Wood: You can break a shovel when you break new ground / You dig dirt up when you dig deep down / You should know better than that by now / It's not profound to know that you could never know!

A blurry photograph of a dark rectangular hole in the ground, seemingly a grave. The hole is so dark the bottom of it isn’t visible. Besides the hole there is a pile of dirt.

A lyrics excerpt from ‘Hand Me My Shovel, I’m Going In!’ by Will Wood and The Tapeworms: Gotta get to the bottom of this/ Gotta get to the bottom of this / Gotta get to the bottom of this / Gotta gotta get, gotta gotta get, gotta get / Gotta get to the bottom of this / Gotta gotta get, gotta gotta get, gotta get / Gotta get to the bottom of this / Gotta gotta get, gotta gotta get, gotta get / Gotta get to the bottom of this / If it kills me

An excerpt from a wikipedia article about the law of holes: The second law of holes is commonly known as: "when you stop digging, you are still in a hole."

A photograph of a deep round hole. There’s a ladder going down into it and the bottom of the hole isn’t visible.

An excerpt from the transcript of episode 88 of The Magnus Archives: It was very strange. It was just the one word, solid capital letters in a small, neat typeface at the very centre of the page. It said ‘DIG’. I took that to be the title, and turned to the next page. ‘DIG’. Exactly the same. The third page. ‘DIG’. The fourth page. ‘DIG’. Dig, dig, dig, dig.

A lyrics excerpt from ‘Hand Me My Shovel, I’m Going In!’ by Will Wood and The Tapeworms: Looking down I could say heaven sent me / Hand me my shovel, I’m going in!

/end ID]

[‘Law of Holes’ - Wikipedia, ‘The Song with Five Names, a​.​k​.​a. Soapbox Tao, a​.​k​.​a. Checkmate Atheists! a​.​k​.​a. Neospace Government, a​.​k​.​a. You Can Never Know’ - Will Wood and the Tapeworms, ‘Hand Me My Shovel, I’m Going In!’ - Will Wood and the Tapeworms, MAG 88 ‘Dig’ - The Magnus Archives]

[mizgnomer]

Zooming in on David Tennant - Part Ten

Please see the [ Zooming on Tennant Series ] tag for more