Mar 25– From "Hamlet" by Shakespeare (~1600)

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Mar 25– From Hamlet by Shakespeare (~1600)

Summary: "To be or not to be..." and the Mousetrap play from Hamlet

Commentary: Normally, I try to watch the plays, but we're currently in the middle of moving, so I'm cutting corners this week! I'll get last week's recap someday (probably Thursday).

To be or not to be is pretty high on my soliloquy list. Up their with Crispin's Day (Henry V) and better than Tomorrow and tomorrow (Macbeth) or the balcony (Romeo and Juliet, though Mercutio's Alas poor Romeo is the underrated best from R&J). While no less overdramatic than the others, it's feels more authentic (Hamlet's semi-acted madness helps) and it deals with a more relatable question than many of the others. Where do we draw the line before we do something stupid/dangerous to take a stand against mistreatment? And what is the best way of taking that stand?

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are kind of terrible friends for spying on Hamlet, but he does want them to think he's crazy, so I guess that partially absolves them.

In all the whore calling of Shakespeare, "Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? " is certainly memorable.

I imagine Shakespeare has a lot of fun with Mousetrap, he gets to have Hamlet call out his acting pet peeves: 

HAMLET. 

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue. But if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant. It out-Herods Herod. Pray you avoid it.

FIRST PLAYER.

I warrant your honour.

HAMLET.

Be not too tame neither; but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature; for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure. Now, this overdone, or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others. O, there be players that I have seen play—and heard others praise, and that highly—not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, nor man, have so strutted and bellowed that I have thought some of Nature’s journeymen had made men, and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably.

FIRST PLAYER.

I hope we have reform’d that indifferently with us, sir.

HAMLET.

O reform it altogether. And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them. For there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of the play be then to be considered. That’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. Go make you ready.

I've never cared much for Mousetrap itself, Hamlet is not as good of a writer as Shakespeare. Lots of drama, but the lines aren't terribly clever, unlike this one from Hamlet mid play:

It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.

Say no more, say no more.