An Infinity of Mona Lisas

Last night, after forcing my wife to watch a portion of Hamlet, I told her “You know I’ll watch the whole three hours again.  With remote in hand, stopping and rewinding.”

I tried to explain why that is.  It’s more than just “I liked that movie, I would watch it again.”  With Shakespeare’s masterpieces you get this dual-nature thing going where on the one hand you’ve got what Shakespeare wrote us 400 years ago.  That’s not changing.  You could see Hamlets now till the end of time and the source text isn’t going anywhere. But on the other hand you’ve got this particular interpretation.  It is one of a million.  So, sure, Hamlet always says “To be or not to be”, but how did this particular actor say it?  And why? How does it differ from how that other actor said it?

I was at a loss to explain the analogy. I started down the path of saying “Imagine you have a chance, regularly, to go see the Mona Lisa.  But that’s not quite it, because that’s a masterpiece that doesn’t change, it’s the same every time you see it.  What if every time you saw it, it was different?  Still the same, still the Mona Lisa, still a masterpiece.  But … different.” 

Does anybody know what I’m trying to say?  Many a science fiction story has been written about all powerful core sources of “stuff”, be it energy or life or power or what have you, and the notion of seeds or splinters of that wellspring being used as the essence of new “stuff”.  It’s a bit like that.  Here you’ve got this body of work that’s essentially infinite in that we can continue to draw on it forever.  So each time we perform it we’re taking a little sliver of it and creating something new. 

Make sense? Am I babbling?

Love it when she does that.

So, Wednesday night before Hamlet came on, I was lying in bed with my wife watching some other program that she likes.  Typically she falls asleep a lot sooner than I do, so it’s easier to just DVR my programs and watch them a little later.  She knew full well that I’d be watching 3 hours of Hamlet later, and since it was also my birthday I threatened to require that she watch it with me :), but I did not follow through on that threat.

Anyway, it’s getting late, she’s falling asleep and mumbles, “I know you want to go watch Hamlet, go ahead and go back downstairs.  Hark who goes there.”

Me:  “….”  <open mouth> ” …. ” <close mouth> “…..”  <shakes head> ” … what?”

Her: <mumbling> “Go downstairs, watch your show.  Who goes there.”

Me: ” ??? You know that’s the opening line to Hamlet?”   (* Yes I know it’s more like “Who’s there?”, work with me here.)

Her: “Yup.”

Me: “I had no idea you knew that.”

Her: <snore>

Boggles my mind when she does that.  Not “To be or not to be” or “what a piece of work is man”, quotes she hears the children say all day long.  No, she quotes (accurately or not) the opening line, which many people wouldn’t even recognize. I have no idea if she looked it up in one of my books just so she could do that (doubtful, otherwise she wouldn’t have waited so long to deliver it), remembered me talking about it (possible, though I certainly haven’t done so deliberately in months), or remembered it from an actual Hamlet production we’ve seen (less possible, as it’s been years since we watched Hamlet).

I think I’ll keep her.

The Shrug Heard Round The World

If you haven’t seen the Tennant/Stewart Hamlet yet, read no more!  Spoilers follow about “the thing”.

Here, while you’re waiting, have a look at this completely unrelated clip of the “best death scene ever”…

Ok, let’s talk about this.  Claudius, holding a cup of poison and with Hamlet’s sword to his throat, *shrugs* before voluntarily drinking the poisoned wine.   I called it the biggest WTF moment in a movie full of them. I fast forwarded to that part just so I could show it to my wife, just so I could complain about it to a live person.

Can anybody come up with a logical interpretation for why he’d do that?  For that matter, the final scene is a real character switch for the man.  When Laertes is about to spill his guts (possibly literally), Claudius leaps up and begins frantically waving to have him taken away before he talks.  When Hamlet draws on him. Claudius *grabs the point of the sword*, which is rather unusual, but then at the ensuing booboo on his hand he shows the crowd and says “Help me, I am hurt!” 

I can even live with those, at least a little bit.  I can live with the idea that, once cornered, Claudius is basically a coward.  He has others do his dirty work for him, or he gets you in the ear while you’re sleeping.  But when he personally is called to the carpet?  He panics.  I can accept that.

It’s the shrug where I lose it.  Two seconds ago he was panicking that he’d been caught.  He makes a play to save himself (Help me, friends!), but no one comes to his aid.  So now he goes all stoic and with a “What the hell,” suicides?  No fight at all?  No *flight* at all? If you just declared him a coward, at least have him run for it and get it in the back or something.

Anybody got a justification for this one?

Double Casting?

So Patrick Stewart played both Claudius as well as Hamlet’s ghost in the David Tennant production that we’re all still talking about.  I’m told that this is common practice.  Fair enough.  Never really thought about it one way or the other.

My question for discussion, though, is … why?  I understand a live theatre troop having to double up on actors because they don’t have the bodies, or need to keep costs/resources/complexity down or whatever the real world reasons are.  I’m not talking about that.  When you’ve got plenty of budget and big name stars to work with, double casting to begin with is clearly a choice.  To double cast the major roles obviously has a point, such as the fairly obvious one when we see Theseus and Hippolyta double cast with Oberon and Titania in Midsummer.

So then, why Claudius and his brother?  What’s the point of that particular choice?  Is it to show that Hamlet’s issues with Claudius are really unresolved issues with his dad?  Is it to suggest that Hamlet’s dad and his brother were so close in physical resemblance that we can forgive Gertrude for essentially replacing the former with the latter?  Hamlet several times plays up the differences between his father and Claudius (the line “like Hyperion to a satyr” comes to mind), so is it to draw a stark contrast to that, to suggest clearly to the audience that they weren’t really so different after all, and Hamlet just wishes that they were?

Any other “well known” double cast decisions you want to talk about?

Calling Doctor Shakespeare! (Or maybe Dr. DeVere?)

Unfortunately the JAMA article linked in this Washington Post piece about Shakespeare’s medical knowledge is available only to AMA members, so I’m left linking a link of a link :(.

The article points to a piece from the “100 Years Ago” department that ponders how Shakespeare acquired his “extensive knowledge of medical matters.”  Deniers will, of course, tell you that this very sentence is prove that Stratford Will could not have written the plays because he was not a doctor, and we should be seeking out the medical professional who did write them.  (I heard that Oxford once successfully put a Band-Aid onto the pinky finger of his left hand, however.  So he’s still in the running.)

But Shakespeare did know his mental illnesses. The article notes that in his day, mentally ill people weren’t locked away in institutions. Shakespeare could train his powers of observation on people suffering all manner of mental disorders without going out of his way to encounter them.

It’s interesting to periodically step away and look at the words from this “100 years ago” perspective.  We’re so used to what Freud told us about Hamlet that we rarely stop to differentiate what Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have been trying to say (because the very concepts did not exist yet), from what he really was trying to say that we’re not seeing because we fail to look at what he gave us from his own terms.  Would Shakespeare have had a name for the behaviors that he gave to Ophelia? Was he describing what he’d personally seen in someone else?

Since Freud comes so much re: Hamlet, I’ve often wondered what other modern psycho/socio creations we have today that Shakespeare might have been showing us, in his own way.  Does Hamlet, for example, go through the “five stages or grief”? Do any of his characters suffer from textbook schizophrenia?  In my review of Tennant’s Hamlet earlier today I deliberately made reference to Asperger’s (and, on Twitter, ADHD) to see if anybody with more knowledge of those subjects would pick up on the thread.

You know what just occurred to me?  I don’t recall seeing a single peanut in any of Shakespeare’s works.  Perhaps Shakespeare was suggesting that Hamlet was allergic?  More importantly could he have found a rhyme for “epi pen” while still getting the meter to come out right?

[Credit to vtelizabeth on Twitter for the Tweet which pointed me in this direction.]