Friday Five:
Mar. 6th, 2020 02:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
capri0mni1) A question that was on my mind, this morning:
Has the world really become more cruel in recent years, or am I just more aware of it?
2) I often think of Act Four, Scene One of the "Winter's Tale," and how it's a brilliant example of stagecraft, even though I have a hard time reading through it, and most often skim the middle, and just race ahead to the action bits of the scene. But then again, Shakespeare wasn't writing the scene for me; he was writing it for an audience that would only see the play once. And he basically turned that whole scene into a music/dance concert where the audience was invited to join in and sing along. So rather than simply watching the characters on stage have a party, the whole audience became guests at the party. So when the hosts' lives were threatened by the king at the end of the scene, the audience was emotionally invested, and cared about what happened next.
It doesn't work for modern audiences, because we come to a "Shakespeare Play[TM]" with a whole different set of expectations. But it's a brilliant bit of Audience Wrangling on Shakespeare's part, since he probably realized that half the people in the theater that day were only there to see the live bear run across stage. And he didn't want them to lose interest and leave right before the plot comes to a head.
3) I have a (relatively) new favorite flavor combination (as in: within the last few months): Chocolate, Coffee, & Ginger. The spice just brightens everything up.
4) Ever since I started thinking through my theory that Ophelia was murdered, rather than died by suicide, I've had a quite obsession with Hamlet running almost constantly in the back of my mind. I've come to the conclusions that a) the traditional typecasting for the title character has been all wrong, most of the time, and instead of being cast as the Romantic Lead, Prince Hamlet should be cast as the slightly out-of-shape, nerdy sidekick-to-the-Hero type, and b) it should be played for laughs as often as possible* )so that the truly tragic ending comes as much as a surprise to the audience as it does to the characters on stage.
5) If I had a working Time Ship, and the skill to fly her, the ethically dubious thing I would try to do is rescue the breeds of dog that were native to the Americas, that are now all extinct. Just saying.
Has the world really become more cruel in recent years, or am I just more aware of it?
2) I often think of Act Four, Scene One of the "Winter's Tale," and how it's a brilliant example of stagecraft, even though I have a hard time reading through it, and most often skim the middle, and just race ahead to the action bits of the scene. But then again, Shakespeare wasn't writing the scene for me; he was writing it for an audience that would only see the play once. And he basically turned that whole scene into a music/dance concert where the audience was invited to join in and sing along. So rather than simply watching the characters on stage have a party, the whole audience became guests at the party. So when the hosts' lives were threatened by the king at the end of the scene, the audience was emotionally invested, and cared about what happened next.
It doesn't work for modern audiences, because we come to a "Shakespeare Play[TM]" with a whole different set of expectations. But it's a brilliant bit of Audience Wrangling on Shakespeare's part, since he probably realized that half the people in the theater that day were only there to see the live bear run across stage. And he didn't want them to lose interest and leave right before the plot comes to a head.
3) I have a (relatively) new favorite flavor combination (as in: within the last few months): Chocolate, Coffee, & Ginger. The spice just brightens everything up.
4) Ever since I started thinking through my theory that Ophelia was murdered, rather than died by suicide, I've had a quite obsession with Hamlet running almost constantly in the back of my mind. I've come to the conclusions that a) the traditional typecasting for the title character has been all wrong, most of the time, and instead of being cast as the Romantic Lead, Prince Hamlet should be cast as the slightly out-of-shape, nerdy sidekick-to-the-Hero type, and b) it should be played for laughs as often as possible* )so that the truly tragic ending comes as much as a surprise to the audience as it does to the characters on stage.
5) If I had a working Time Ship, and the skill to fly her, the ethically dubious thing I would try to do is rescue the breeds of dog that were native to the Americas, that are now all extinct. Just saying.
no subject
Date: 2020-03-06 10:50 pm (UTC)I _think_ with that reading you can play the character either as feigning madness throughout, or that he is somewhat mad (monomania is in that direction, anyhow) but also sees that being considered mad may be useful.
(Are you putting Ophelia's murder to Hamlet's account, or someone else's?)
no subject
Date: 2020-03-06 11:50 pm (UTC)I've also read an interpretation that Hamlet can be read as a Spoof of the Jacobean Revenge Genre, in that Hamlet the character is as familiar with the requisite tropes as the audience, and all of his second-guessing himself is his way to try and outsmart said tropes.
...With the moral of the story being that you can no more outrun the tropes of the story you're in than you can outrun Death.
I am thoroughly convinced that it was Queen Gertrude who killed Ophelia -- Or she witnessed one of Claudius's servants do the deed, and was covering for her husband. Shakespeare has, first: Queen Gertrude admit her guilty feelings in a pair of rhyming couplets (the only rhymes in the whole scene), right before she speaks with Ophelia in Act 4, scene 5; second: King Claudius, recognizing that Ophelia may be a danger to herself, gives orders that she be followed and watched (so contrary to Gertrude's account of Ophelia's drowning, she was not [or should not have been] alone, and free to climb out on that fragile tree limb over the stream); third, we only have Queen Gertrude's word for it for how Ophelia died, and finally: The First Clown gravedigger tells us that the Coroner ordered that Ophelia be given a Christian Burial, which was strictly forbidden for people who committed suicide.
And then, I realized: Hamlet had to be told about his father's murder by his father's ghost, because he was away at university. But Ophelia was there in the castle, the whole time, and could have seen everything (or at least enough to make guilty parties nervous).
So even if Shakespeare didn't explicitly say Ophelia was murdered, he still put enough clues in the text itself to let us know that Queen Gertrude and King Claudius were not to be trusted, and not to take their words at face value.
(It couldn't have been Hamlet who killed Ophelia, because he'd already been banished to England and kidnapped by pirates for killing Polonius, and he was surprised to learn the grave was being dug for Ophelia).