We value originality, don't we. We admire talent and those who bring us something new.
But, on the other hand, there's nothing new under the sun and all books owe a debt to previous books, all poems are somehow related to previous poems even if it is only because they are nothing like them.
There is no point putting a link here to the programme on Radio 2 last night about the history of Glam Rock because it will run out in six days time. But it included much treasure, the best of which was probably the making of Ride a White Swan, and how a song that could have been ordinary in other hands became a sensational piece of work with considerable thought and effort.
But it was also explained how Bowie's seminal Starman came out of Judy Garland's Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Just sing to yourself, 'There's a Star-man' and then, from Judy, 'Some-where', and you will see what is meant. Who would have thought it. I can't remember anybody pointing it out at the time.
We know Marc Bolan took the riff for Get It On from elsewhere and then Oasis recycled it to some kind of use of it 20 years later in Cigarettes and Alcohol but the 'Star-man/Some-where' borrowing is more deeply hidden.
I only hope that when my song, Break, causes me to be an inadvertent millionaire one day that nobody notices it is made out of Ronan Keating's Life is a Roller Coaster and Jennifer Paige's Crush. Because it is.
But, here's a quiz question for you. Who wrote quite a lot of T.S. Eliot's poems? It couldn't have been him, could it, or else he wouldn't have gone to such lengths to provide so many footnotes to show that he didn't.
But in the same way that every breath we take includes some air that, say, Julius Caesar might have breathed, we also have to use the same words, ideas or chord sequences that others have used before us. Although we seem to admire originality, we might not have much chance of either achieving it or seeing it in others.
So, keep up the good work.
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
Friday, 25 June 2010
Best Chart Ever
http://www.everyhit.com/retros/index.php?page=rchart&y1=1971&m1=08&y2=1971&m2=08&sent=1&day1=1&day2=1
Prompted by discussion and memories of Buffy Sainte-Marie's tremendous Soldier Blue http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=97xgT9nH-yw , I looked up some charts from that time and wondered if August 1971 wasn't the best hit parade ever, with several of my favourite pop records of all time in it. Get It On, Just My Imagination and I'm Still Waiting are almost enough on their own but there's not much not to like on this list.
Or is it just that our first encounters with pop music leave the deepest impression and we are inevitably marked and defined by the experience. I don't know but this is a great, great list.
I looked further into Buffy Sainte-Marie, her campaigning and relationships and all and remained impressed until I found the names of her son include Starblanket and Wolfchild. Well, I don't know about that. I thought it was only Coldplay singers married to actresses that gave kids such names. Never mind. The message is presumably to enjoy the music and don't look too far into biographical details.
PNR
PN Review 193, May/June 2010
To celebrate its 40th birthday, PNR has offered lapsed subscribers a year's subscription at half price and I, liking the idea of a bargain, took them up on it. It is in many ways foremost among poetry magazines with its internationalist, modernist and pluralist agenda and other such desirable things.
Previously, I always appreciated the reviews and essays more than the poems they publish and that continues to be the case as I resume on number 193.
Neil Powell is a longstanding contributor to the free-wheeling and open-ended Reports section, here with memories of schoolboy publishing in the 1950's and as enjoyable as ever; Frank Kuppner muses for a while before improvising on possibilities of words that Shakespeare might have written where 'stuff' is printed in Macbeth and one can almost see a Kuppner poem in the making.
While Les Murray is always of interest in the Poems, there is also Will Eaves here although not with anything that I expect to be returning to with any priority.
Having recently taken it upon myself to berate BBC Radio 5 for careless and mis-leading sports reports and having generally accepted that the BBC is no longer a paragon example of English grammar, I re-read a sentence in the editorial here several times wondering if I was missing some subtle inference, 'Ricks himself, brilliantly, adopts the roll now of a guileless Sancho Panza..' Surely it should be 'role' rather than conjuring images of sausage rolls but who am I to say, apart from thinking that if PNR can't be word perfect any more then what's left to us. But I'm only a part-time, casual sort of pedant.
Among the reviews, Heather Yeung gives us an account of Zachary Leader's (ed) The Movement Reconsidered, reviewed on this website- I have to point out- last September but it is workmanlike at best as a review and I can reassure potential readers of the book that it is not as dull as this report makes it sound. But there are pieces of value and considerable use here, too. Jody Allen Randolph provides a stimulating account of Paula Meehan who outgrows her early influences, like Gary Snyder, to become a finer writer than them and one I will be able to look at again in more detail with some confidence. And the best piece here, by some way, is Iain Bamforth's summary of Robert Crawford's biography of Robert Burns, a useful and well-judged abstract that can do no more than encourage one to look at the whole book.
Bamforth is also good in the notes collected in 'Catchwords', with a particularly percipient insight on insights by the C19th philosopher, R.L. Nettlefield. So, there's fun and worthy work to be had among the grind of scholarship and high church intellectualism. One can only admire the dogged devotion of some academics to their vocation but not all poetry readers are going to find the spectacle entertaining. As an amateur, there comes a time for me when I eventually stop caring and PNR is clearly aimed at a slightly more sophisticated audience than me. The tireless capacity for discussion on internet forums is impressive at first but ultimately exhausting and, as with my trips to conferences over the years, one eventually wants to get back to the simple entertainments of, say, football except all the football pundits are talking that enterprise to a standstill as well.
So, yes, PNR, thank you for another cut price year. I'll look forward to the regular bi-monthly deliveries but I won't always be able to swallow it in one go.
To celebrate its 40th birthday, PNR has offered lapsed subscribers a year's subscription at half price and I, liking the idea of a bargain, took them up on it. It is in many ways foremost among poetry magazines with its internationalist, modernist and pluralist agenda and other such desirable things.
Previously, I always appreciated the reviews and essays more than the poems they publish and that continues to be the case as I resume on number 193.
Neil Powell is a longstanding contributor to the free-wheeling and open-ended Reports section, here with memories of schoolboy publishing in the 1950's and as enjoyable as ever; Frank Kuppner muses for a while before improvising on possibilities of words that Shakespeare might have written where 'stuff' is printed in Macbeth and one can almost see a Kuppner poem in the making.
While Les Murray is always of interest in the Poems, there is also Will Eaves here although not with anything that I expect to be returning to with any priority.
Having recently taken it upon myself to berate BBC Radio 5 for careless and mis-leading sports reports and having generally accepted that the BBC is no longer a paragon example of English grammar, I re-read a sentence in the editorial here several times wondering if I was missing some subtle inference, 'Ricks himself, brilliantly, adopts the roll now of a guileless Sancho Panza..' Surely it should be 'role' rather than conjuring images of sausage rolls but who am I to say, apart from thinking that if PNR can't be word perfect any more then what's left to us. But I'm only a part-time, casual sort of pedant.
Among the reviews, Heather Yeung gives us an account of Zachary Leader's (ed) The Movement Reconsidered, reviewed on this website- I have to point out- last September but it is workmanlike at best as a review and I can reassure potential readers of the book that it is not as dull as this report makes it sound. But there are pieces of value and considerable use here, too. Jody Allen Randolph provides a stimulating account of Paula Meehan who outgrows her early influences, like Gary Snyder, to become a finer writer than them and one I will be able to look at again in more detail with some confidence. And the best piece here, by some way, is Iain Bamforth's summary of Robert Crawford's biography of Robert Burns, a useful and well-judged abstract that can do no more than encourage one to look at the whole book.
Bamforth is also good in the notes collected in 'Catchwords', with a particularly percipient insight on insights by the C19th philosopher, R.L. Nettlefield. So, there's fun and worthy work to be had among the grind of scholarship and high church intellectualism. One can only admire the dogged devotion of some academics to their vocation but not all poetry readers are going to find the spectacle entertaining. As an amateur, there comes a time for me when I eventually stop caring and PNR is clearly aimed at a slightly more sophisticated audience than me. The tireless capacity for discussion on internet forums is impressive at first but ultimately exhausting and, as with my trips to conferences over the years, one eventually wants to get back to the simple entertainments of, say, football except all the football pundits are talking that enterprise to a standstill as well.
So, yes, PNR, thank you for another cut price year. I'll look forward to the regular bi-monthly deliveries but I won't always be able to swallow it in one go.
Thursday, 24 June 2010
Sebastian Horsley by Maggi Hambling
If this isn't Maggi's portrait of Sebastian Horsley, who died last week, then I hope someone will tell me but I think it is.
I've ordered Dandy in the Underworld, the Horsley memoir that takes its title from T. Rex and will review those remains of bohemian Soho just as soon as possible.
He tried his best.
Wednesday, 23 June 2010
Top 6 - Alfred Tennyson
Andrew Motion on Tennyson, Royal Marines Museum, Portsmouth, June 23.
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Andrew Motion presented his personal appreciation of one of his laureate predecessors in the fine surroundings of the Royal Marines Museum with views of the Solent across to Tennyson's Isle of Wight just out of the windows, over there.
He began by noting the surprising proximity of the dates of birth of Tennyson and Keats, given our perceptions of them now as representing very different ages. It was Hallam who switched Tennyson on to Keats, who only sold 200 books in his brief lifetime, and although they have a fascination with similar themes and exist in the same tradition, they are different in sensibility, Keats liking poems to press towards a conclusion while Tennyson's occur at a moment before something dramatic is about to happen.
He noted the ghost of Shakespeare in Ulysses and echoes of Homer throughout, but also a tendency in earlier Tennyson towards generalization, a consensus, that might sound glib to modern ears that has been overcome by the time of maturer poems like Audley Court.
Motion's best piece of literary critisim came in his finding in this, his favourite Tennyson poem, a pleasant feeling of being within a current moment yet of vulnerability to geological scales of time.
In In Memoriam he finds a tenderness in poems about his friend Hallam that is not apparent in poems about women although he was at pains not to suggest that this was homo-erotic in any way we might understand it now.
So, by choosing six Tennyson poems to read, joined together by these biographical and literary notes, Sir Andrew did me a great favour by unwittingly nominating a Top 6 of Lord Alfred, which were The Kraken, Ulysses, Audley Court, In Memoriam, The Princess and Crossing the Bar. But Andrew didn't choose these as a Top 6 and so I mustn't pass it off as such. In fact, perhaps the most moving poem of the evening was when Andrew was prevailed upon to give us one of his own and he chose his tribute to his friend and Tennyson scholar, Mick Imlah.
His manner is modest and careful and increasingly becoming like Prince Charles in a thoughtful mood. A genuine and humane man, he is English in that traditional, understated way that hopefully isn't completely out of fashion yet. He could have said more but he preferred to present more of a poetry reading rather than give a lecture and you don't get to see poets reading other poet's work so often these days. Or I don't, anyway.
So, using Andrew's sound choices to start with, I'll have to insert my personal favourites from the classic Tennyson and select the Top 6 as Mariana, The Lady of Shallott, The Lotos Eaters, Audley Court, In Memoriam, and Tithonus. In fact, I find myself changing most of it with the proviso that Andrew Motion knows much more about Tennyson than I do and, furthermore, my favourite Victorian poet is probably Matthew Arnold and have also always suspected that the corresponding period in French poetry has more to offer.
But none of that takes anything away from a generous and intimate evening, well supported for such an event in Portsmouth and my thanks to Andrew for returning here once more to give us the benefit of his view of this massive figure in English poetry. It's difficult to imagine a poet now being as big a public figure as Tennyson was in his day, not only of genuinely laureate status at the Queen's court but with a wide general readership, not operating as a marginal cultural figure on a university campus known to few beyond the province of specialist magazines and increasingly inward-looking shoe-gazers. If that's a problem for anyone, it would be up to them to wonder why it is so.
Thursday, 17 June 2010
Top 6 - Andrew Motion
Andrew Motion is coming to Portsmouth next week to talk about local poet, Tennyson. So, to mark the occasion, here's a Top 6 of him and then next week, with our memories refreshed and our tastes reawakened, we can do Tennyson.
It might be fair to say that Andrew didn't quite capture the public's imagination in the same way that Tennyson did, or their affection like Betjeman did or even their prurient interest like Hughes did, but he put in an honest shift and made himself available. He might have been a rather more diffident personality than is useful in such a public position but he was never less than a humane and considerate poet.
The outstanding anthology piece and memorable early poem is Anne Frank Huis in which 'just listening is a kind of guilt' because one can't help but feel guilt even for the mundane opportunity,
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to leave as simply
as I do, and walk at ease
up dusty tree-lined avenues, or watch
a silent barge come clear of bridges
settling their reflections in the blue canal.
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Sometimes stylistically reminiscent of his early hero, Edward Thomas, he is especially good at this quiet elegy. Fresh Water is a longer poem in memoriam his friend Ruth Haddon who died on the Marchioness, the poem following the Thames from its obscure sources down to London, the party, the disaster and then Ruth 'swimming back upstream'. In an age when poems are so often made to fit so tidily onto one page, it is a masterpiece of an extended idea.
Another influence, Philip Larkin, is remembered in 'This is your subject speaking' in which Motion's sympathetic narrative recalls a last visit to see Larkin both vividly and sensitively.
And Motion's mother, tragically killed in a riding accident, although remembered often elsewhere, is memorialized also in a poem called Serenade, about the horse she fell off that lives on in a kind of unknowing culpability.
You do, I do is a fine love poem capturing one of those glorious moments of togetherness in the lines,
I feel a stranger to myself
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and all the lives I've led - like someone travelling,
whose boat has suddenly stood off a sunlit coast
with him on deck, who never saw these cliffs before,
or smelt this new mown grass smell drifting out to sea,
but knows at once that he belongs here, and he's home.
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I won't award a prize for spotting the borrowing from Thomas in those lines or even blame Motion for it- I'm sure we all do it- but it stands out a mile whenever I read those lines.
And I think I'll put another early poem in to complete the selection, The Whole Truth, another love poem, slightly more domestic but using that tremendous opposition of absence and imagined presence, thinking of each other, to understated great effect.
In a way it might have been Motion's most attractive feature, a lack of showmanship and an inwardly, watercolourist nature, that worked against his widespread acceptance by a public more used to celebrity attention seeking. He might have been better off without the job at all but I'm sure he benefitted from it in many ways and he is the poet I've seen most often which is perhaps as much to do with his availability as it is with me being a big fan of his work. But I am a big fan of his best work.
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Next week, then, Tennyson.
Wednesday, 16 June 2010
Top 6 - John Betjeman
Betjeman's was always a retro style and so his old-fashioned stanzas are a deliberate part of his design rather than an indication that his poetry belongs to a bygone age.
Hipsters and gurus of poetic fashion were always wary of the apparently cranky old duffer but I'm not sure whether there is much difference between the anachronism of writing in some parody of past forms and the similar claim of being at the cutting edge of poetic practice as if showing the way into some foreseen future.
Looking through the famous Collected, it nearly changed my mind about an obvious selection of six but in the end probably didn't.
Indoor Games Near Newbury was a favourite once and retains its inter-war, privileged charm although Myfanwy is staying as young and lovely as it ever was, too. I think I quoted these lines about 32 years ago in a review and so I'll not desert them now,
Golden the light on the locks of Myfanwy,
Golden the light on the book on her knee,
Finger-marked pages of Rackham's Hans Andersen,
Time for the children to come down to tea.
Betjeman's musical collaborations with Jim Parker were an unusual outlet, one of the highlights being the version of A Shropshire Lad and the Midlands accent essayed on it.
The encroaching world of sales reps and suburbia was lampooned to fine comic effect in Executive and the more discursive Beside the Sea has it moments of both bracing fresh air and fun and social satire.
And while I'd love to leave it out, you can't really can you, and so A Subaltern's Love Song completes the half dozen.
Of course one can see why self-conscious aesthetes with all their modish considerations of style and what is currently proper will always want to put plenty of distance between themselves and a taste for Betjeman but everyone can have a day off and enjoy themselves from time to time and it might just do you some good.
Sunday, 13 June 2010
Introduction to Hamlet
I wrote this a few years ago with the intention of helping an A level student with the play. I'm not sure how much good it did then but it's been used by others since. Although a bit unwieldy for this blogspot format here, this is the safest place to keep it because I keep losing it and having to ask friends who have it on their computers to send it back to me.
So, if it can be of use to A level students, please have a look.
So, if it can be of use to A level students, please have a look.
Pictured- Fran Lewis, one of my favourite Hamlets, taken from Southsea Shakespeare Actors http://www.southseashakespeareactors.com/page14.htm
Introduction to Hamlet
Shakespeare is one of the very few eternal, world-famous names of any artist – perhaps the most famous writer in world history. More famous than the most highly-regarded musicians like Bach or Mozart, the painters Rembrandt or Picasso or possibly even pop singers like Elvis Presley or The Beatles, and we are lucky, now, thinking about the play Hamlet that we don’t need to worry about whether this very famous theatre man from Stratford actually wrote the plays that bear his name or not (because there are a number of people, some of them quite respectable, who don’t think he did) because our job is to think about the play, the words we have on the page and how it might be interpreted and acted. Thank heavens for that. It makes me nostalgic for the long ago days when I was at University and the fashion was to concentrate on the text. The text, you see- ‘the play’s the thing’ as Hamlet himself says. This is ‘English Literature’, and not so much of the rumour or guessing games that have come in recent years to surround the works of literature themselves.
We don’t need to resort to very much opinion or imagination to believe that Hamlet was Shakespeare’s masterpiece, above all of his other major plays, and that he intended it as such. Written around about 1600, after he had practised thoroughly with plot, character and staging in the theatre and started to make a good living out of it- if we need to refer to the traditionally accepted life of Shakespeare- we can see that he might have felt free enough to do what he wanted to do, to write the play he wanted to write and make some kind of ‘personal statement’.
It has been worked out that Shakespeare used about 600 new words in Hamlet that he had never used before, compared to King Lear next best with 350, two-thirds of which he never used again, so he does seem to have made a special effort.
We don’t think it must be a ‘personal statement’ simply because the title of the play is very similar to the name of his son, Hamnet, (or traditionally believed to be his son) who died, aged 11, a few years before he wrote the play- that might just be a big coincidence. And neither do we think that the appearance of Hamlet’s father as a ghost in the play means that Shakespeare was thinking of the death of his own father, John, around about that time. The story of Amleth, a Danish prince, had existed for centuries and an earlier version of a play about Hamlet was produced in London in a different version in the very early days of Shakespeare’s time there so, although it’s unlikely that he wrote that version, it’s very likely that he knew about it. What is quite possible is that Shakespeare eventually saw enough potential in that early play to use the story as the basis for his own greatest work.
Among the reasons why we might think that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet because he wanted to, rather than because the theatre he had shares in needed a new play- which is probably why he wrote most of his plays, especially the comedies and plays like The Merry Wives of Windsor- are the fact that it is too long, performed in its entirety, to have fitted into the usual afternoon slot in his theatre, The Globe, because it would take four hours or more to perform it uncut and most of Shakespeare’s plays are usually made to fit into three hours.
It also looks as if Shakespeare spent much more time on this play than he did in writing most of his others. It is his most complex, interesting and inventive play and, as such, perhaps the most complex, interesting and inventive play in the English language.
But, like almost every work of art, it doesn’t come new and fully-formed into its author’s head. Hamlet is a play written very much to satisfy the fashion of its time and ‘revenge tragedies’ like Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy or Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy are examples of contemporary works based on similar themes. Whatever is great about Hamlet, it isn’t necessarily any originality in the story or the theme. All of Shakespeare’s tragedies conform to at least one of the conventions that had been inherited from Ancient Greek tragedy- like those of Sophocles- which in the cases of Macbeth, King Lear and Othello, as well as Hamlet, the downfall of the hero depends on one fatal flaw in their character while they are otherwise noble, worthy, admirable and the tragedy is that we see a good person destroyed. But Shakespeare doesn’t use the ‘classical unities’ required of classical drama in which all the action on stage has to occur in the same place, on the same day and, perhaps, all of it written in the same style of poetry. But, at least, because of this, you see more people murdered on stage in Shakespeare than in an episode of Midsomer Murders whereas in Sophocles or Aeschylus you only hear about them, reported in long speeches by static actors who might then choose to tear their hair out in grief.
At the beginning of the play, the atmosphere is a tense and nervous. Even in the first line, Bernardo, who is coming to relieve Francisco from his watch on guard duty, says ‘Who’s there’ when it is really Francisco’s job to challenge anyone who advances on him. From the very first line, things are ‘out of joint’. The officers on night watch have literally ‘seen a ghost’, the ghost of Old Hamlet, the recently deceased King and Hamlet’s father. As Marcellus says, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’. Hamlet is a student, just home from University at Wittenberg, and his friend Horatio tells him of the sightings of the ghost, which Hamlet must go, and witness for himself. When the ghost appears to Hamlet, he tells him he must take revenge on Claudius, Hamlet’s Uncle, who murdered Old Hamlet and then married Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, and became the new King. Each scene ends with a rhyme and when Hamlet realizes the horror of the situation and the enormity of the challenge, he despairs that,
The time is out of joint, O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.
Hamlet’s possible weakness is prevarication- thinking too much and not simply getting on with the job in hand. Such responsibilities weigh heavily upon him. We are shown how Laertes, a more passionate, sword-fighting young man less burdened by deep thought, would have acted later, in the sub-plot, when he wants to take revenge on Hamlet for the murder of his own father, Polonius.
Whereas Laertes springs into action and challenges Hamlet immediately to a duel when he discovers his father dead and sister driven mad by Hamlet, Hamlet is paralysed by doubt and the implications of his actions. It is not until the end of Act 4 that he resolves,
O ! from this time forth
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.
First he frets about the challenge he has been set and makes sarcastic comments about his mother’s speedy re-marriage, then he gets a chance to kill Claudius at prayer but doesn’t because he finds an excuse not to, then he accidentally kills Polonius, guessing that the movement he sees behind the arras is Claudius spying on him and he also pretends to be mad perhaps in order to uncover Claudius’s guilt, which seems to send his girlfriend Ophelia mad in the process, all of which starts off the second revenge theme. The whole headlong dash into disaster in the court of Denmark seems to be generated by Hamlet’s delay and unwillingness to get on with the job.
However, we are told not to see Hamlet as a weak or ignoble character. The tributes to him after he has died, his friendship with Horatio and his obvious cleverness show him to be thought less ‘weak’ but more ‘melancholy’- aware of too many implications, a young man who thinks too much and dresses in black, brooding on circumstances when action would have saved so much more collateral death.
It can be debated either way whether Hamlet only pretends to be mad after he declares that he will put on an ‘antic disposition’ for strategic purposes, whether he had already been pushed over the limit or whether, once he starts pretending to be mad, he goes mad in the process.
Some critics suggest that from the earliest stages of the play, Hamlet wants to commit suicide to avoid the need to take revenge and that the most famous soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be’, is not so much a debate with himself about whether he should kill Claudius but a contemplation of his own death.
While this can be left usefully ambiguous, it is useful for students to consider the later soliloquy, ‘O, that this too, too solid flesh / Would thaw, melt and resolve itself into a dew’. There is some uncertainty whether Shakespeare wrote ‘solid’, ‘sullied’ or ‘soiled’ and, if we knew for sure, it might help us interpret ‘To be or not to be’ better. While ‘sullied’ and ‘soiled’ both refer to roughly the same thing- the corruption of human nature that he wishes to be clear of- and would indicate that he is more motivated by the murder and the indecency of his mother’s quick re-marriage, reading ‘solid’ into that line, which makes it more metaphysical and less related to recent goings on, would make us think he was contemplating suicide and did just want, above all, to disappear.
But, as we have already seen in passing, the play is made up of any number of ‘doublings’. Not only are there actually two revenge plots; two Hamlets; an older and younger Fortinbras (the Norwegian invaders who threaten Denmark throughout the play) but there are also a play within the play, a undifferentiated double act called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, another called Cornelius and Voltimand (both of which could have been represented by one character) and an elongating linguistic effect called hendiadys, before we even care to namedrop the echo effect of stichomythia..
We are invited to compare the invading Norwegians under the prince Fortinbras, seeking to reclaim land lost by his father, with the disarray of the Danish court where he, too, is seeking revenge for his father. At the beginning of the play they are out of sight, mentioned by Claudius but representing a further threat to the stability of Denmark but by the very end of the play, Fortinbras enters to represent a new age of power and control, not necessarily thoughtful or intellectual like Hamlet but orderly and likely to provide strong leadership.
The play within the play, The Mousetrap or The Murder of Gonzago, is part of Hamlet’s complicated web of scheming to undercover Claudius’ guilt but Shakespeare uses it to pass comment on the art of drama itself as well as providing an opportunity for a comic turn from the pedantic, old fool, Polonius. If we are not already aware of watching an artificial drama on stage, then this play is at a further remove in artificiality in its poetic language and exaggerated unreality.
Like Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can equally be played as comic turns although they are sinister, too. Used by Claudius to spy on Hamlet and then sent with Hamlet to England to make sure Claudius’ plan to have him put to death by the English king, Hamlet doesn’t trust them, sees through them and is clever enough to turn the tables on them and send them to their deaths instead.
Hendiadys means ‘one by means of two’ in such phrases as ‘law and order’ or ‘house and home’, in which each word has a slightly different meaning but refer to the same thing. In Hamlet there are numerous examples like ‘the trappings and the suits of woe’ or ‘a king of shreds and patches’. The effect, once noticed, is to deepen and extend the texture as well as the text of the play, making it richer, more various and giving it a shimmering effect where reality is not so precisely defined by one word but hovers between two that are close in meaning.
A further linguistic effect worth noting, if only for interest’s sake, is ‘stichomythia’ which has an echoing effect as one line follows the same pattern as the line before it such as in Hamlet’s exchange with his mother in her bedroom.
Gert. Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
Ham. Mother, you have my father much offended.
Gert. Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.
Ham. Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.
As well as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Polonius, there is further comic relief in the gravedigger as well as Hamlet’s sometimes bitter and morose wit. The gravedigger is a literally ‘down to earth’ character whose dark humour and matter of fact view of the world comes at one of the sombrest, most reflective moments of the play as Hamlet contemplates Ophelia’s grave before her funeral.
So, the play is structured around two, if not three, revenge themes that are interwoven in the story and a set of ‘doublings’. If we must usually say that revenge is thus the main theme of the play, we might also reflect that the ‘human condition’ -the question of what it is like to be a human being- becomes a theme, too, as Hamlet is made to consider his own character, his delay and inaction, and reflects in a melancholy way on ‘what a piece of work is a man’, that the earth is a ‘sterile promontory’, ‘an unweeded garden, /That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature/ Possess it merely.’
Staging a production of Hamlet presents any number of potential problems or challenges- not only the problem of the play’s length which means it must often be edited down to more manageable proportions but the fact that Hamlet is a very long and emotionally challenging role but, being 23 years old, a mature actor with the experience and range needed to carry it off will usually look too old for the part. It does, however, offer itself to any number of interpretations which can be taken up by directors. For example, one production in Portsmouth had Hamlet playing with paper boats on water and setting fire to them as he recited ‘To be or not to be’, suggesting that he was ‘burning his boats’ and was deciding in this soliloquy to take action and never mind the consequences; in another, following the accidental murder of Polonius, Ophelia came on dressed in her father’s clothes, suggesting that the killing of her father by her boyfriend was the reason for her madness.
Hamlet, of course, always wears black; the representation of the ghost in live theatre is a challenge to imaginative staging and one needs to consider the contrasts in the scenes between the loud, passionate parts and the reflective, contemplative passages- there is a range of loud/quiet, fast/slow and even funny/serious polarities in tone that need to be handled sensitively.
In the end, we don’t want to make firm decisions on questions like whether Hamlet is good or bad, weak or strong, mad or sane. We need to balance the arguments on either side and usually come to a considered but not always decisive point of view. For example, it might be a mad idea for Hamlet to put on his ‘antic disposition’ in the first place which means he has no need of it if he’s mad already but it might be a brilliant strategy that could just have worked and he wasn’t mad at all, just unlucky in a sword fight in which his opponent cheated but, on the other hand, perhaps the stress and strain send Hamlet mad and, while pretending to be mad, he does actually go over the edge.
Neither do we have to believe any of it. George Bernard Shaw was one who felt the play was a bit too melodramatic and if such a film were made nowadays with so much murder, madness and incest in it then it would surely be an X certificate. It isn’t necessarily the realism or likelihood of the story that we are looking at but the thoughts, ideas and even the language that are built into it. A successful work of art will allow us to ‘suspend our disbelief’, to not even worry about its overall unlikeliness and, for the duration of the play, take it all on trust
And we don’t even have to prove whether it is a great play or not, but interpret it as best we can, although having spent any amount of time interpreting it, we are likely to decide it is a great play.
Quotes to know-
It is very useful, if not essential for students to be able to quote significant parts of the text to illustrate their points. It would be useful to be able to reproduce the lines below, as well as many others, and talk about their significance in the play-
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
The time is out of joint, O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.
O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I
To be or not to be: that is the question
O that this too, too solid flesh...
Useful books-
Two chapters on Hamlet in James Shapiro’s 1599, a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.
One chapter in Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language.
The Casebook on Hamlet.
Introduction to Hamlet
Shakespeare is one of the very few eternal, world-famous names of any artist – perhaps the most famous writer in world history. More famous than the most highly-regarded musicians like Bach or Mozart, the painters Rembrandt or Picasso or possibly even pop singers like Elvis Presley or The Beatles, and we are lucky, now, thinking about the play Hamlet that we don’t need to worry about whether this very famous theatre man from Stratford actually wrote the plays that bear his name or not (because there are a number of people, some of them quite respectable, who don’t think he did) because our job is to think about the play, the words we have on the page and how it might be interpreted and acted. Thank heavens for that. It makes me nostalgic for the long ago days when I was at University and the fashion was to concentrate on the text. The text, you see- ‘the play’s the thing’ as Hamlet himself says. This is ‘English Literature’, and not so much of the rumour or guessing games that have come in recent years to surround the works of literature themselves.
We don’t need to resort to very much opinion or imagination to believe that Hamlet was Shakespeare’s masterpiece, above all of his other major plays, and that he intended it as such. Written around about 1600, after he had practised thoroughly with plot, character and staging in the theatre and started to make a good living out of it- if we need to refer to the traditionally accepted life of Shakespeare- we can see that he might have felt free enough to do what he wanted to do, to write the play he wanted to write and make some kind of ‘personal statement’.
It has been worked out that Shakespeare used about 600 new words in Hamlet that he had never used before, compared to King Lear next best with 350, two-thirds of which he never used again, so he does seem to have made a special effort.
We don’t think it must be a ‘personal statement’ simply because the title of the play is very similar to the name of his son, Hamnet, (or traditionally believed to be his son) who died, aged 11, a few years before he wrote the play- that might just be a big coincidence. And neither do we think that the appearance of Hamlet’s father as a ghost in the play means that Shakespeare was thinking of the death of his own father, John, around about that time. The story of Amleth, a Danish prince, had existed for centuries and an earlier version of a play about Hamlet was produced in London in a different version in the very early days of Shakespeare’s time there so, although it’s unlikely that he wrote that version, it’s very likely that he knew about it. What is quite possible is that Shakespeare eventually saw enough potential in that early play to use the story as the basis for his own greatest work.
Among the reasons why we might think that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet because he wanted to, rather than because the theatre he had shares in needed a new play- which is probably why he wrote most of his plays, especially the comedies and plays like The Merry Wives of Windsor- are the fact that it is too long, performed in its entirety, to have fitted into the usual afternoon slot in his theatre, The Globe, because it would take four hours or more to perform it uncut and most of Shakespeare’s plays are usually made to fit into three hours.
It also looks as if Shakespeare spent much more time on this play than he did in writing most of his others. It is his most complex, interesting and inventive play and, as such, perhaps the most complex, interesting and inventive play in the English language.
But, like almost every work of art, it doesn’t come new and fully-formed into its author’s head. Hamlet is a play written very much to satisfy the fashion of its time and ‘revenge tragedies’ like Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy or Thomas Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy are examples of contemporary works based on similar themes. Whatever is great about Hamlet, it isn’t necessarily any originality in the story or the theme. All of Shakespeare’s tragedies conform to at least one of the conventions that had been inherited from Ancient Greek tragedy- like those of Sophocles- which in the cases of Macbeth, King Lear and Othello, as well as Hamlet, the downfall of the hero depends on one fatal flaw in their character while they are otherwise noble, worthy, admirable and the tragedy is that we see a good person destroyed. But Shakespeare doesn’t use the ‘classical unities’ required of classical drama in which all the action on stage has to occur in the same place, on the same day and, perhaps, all of it written in the same style of poetry. But, at least, because of this, you see more people murdered on stage in Shakespeare than in an episode of Midsomer Murders whereas in Sophocles or Aeschylus you only hear about them, reported in long speeches by static actors who might then choose to tear their hair out in grief.
At the beginning of the play, the atmosphere is a tense and nervous. Even in the first line, Bernardo, who is coming to relieve Francisco from his watch on guard duty, says ‘Who’s there’ when it is really Francisco’s job to challenge anyone who advances on him. From the very first line, things are ‘out of joint’. The officers on night watch have literally ‘seen a ghost’, the ghost of Old Hamlet, the recently deceased King and Hamlet’s father. As Marcellus says, ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’. Hamlet is a student, just home from University at Wittenberg, and his friend Horatio tells him of the sightings of the ghost, which Hamlet must go, and witness for himself. When the ghost appears to Hamlet, he tells him he must take revenge on Claudius, Hamlet’s Uncle, who murdered Old Hamlet and then married Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, and became the new King. Each scene ends with a rhyme and when Hamlet realizes the horror of the situation and the enormity of the challenge, he despairs that,
The time is out of joint, O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.
Hamlet’s possible weakness is prevarication- thinking too much and not simply getting on with the job in hand. Such responsibilities weigh heavily upon him. We are shown how Laertes, a more passionate, sword-fighting young man less burdened by deep thought, would have acted later, in the sub-plot, when he wants to take revenge on Hamlet for the murder of his own father, Polonius.
Whereas Laertes springs into action and challenges Hamlet immediately to a duel when he discovers his father dead and sister driven mad by Hamlet, Hamlet is paralysed by doubt and the implications of his actions. It is not until the end of Act 4 that he resolves,
O ! from this time forth
My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.
First he frets about the challenge he has been set and makes sarcastic comments about his mother’s speedy re-marriage, then he gets a chance to kill Claudius at prayer but doesn’t because he finds an excuse not to, then he accidentally kills Polonius, guessing that the movement he sees behind the arras is Claudius spying on him and he also pretends to be mad perhaps in order to uncover Claudius’s guilt, which seems to send his girlfriend Ophelia mad in the process, all of which starts off the second revenge theme. The whole headlong dash into disaster in the court of Denmark seems to be generated by Hamlet’s delay and unwillingness to get on with the job.
However, we are told not to see Hamlet as a weak or ignoble character. The tributes to him after he has died, his friendship with Horatio and his obvious cleverness show him to be thought less ‘weak’ but more ‘melancholy’- aware of too many implications, a young man who thinks too much and dresses in black, brooding on circumstances when action would have saved so much more collateral death.
It can be debated either way whether Hamlet only pretends to be mad after he declares that he will put on an ‘antic disposition’ for strategic purposes, whether he had already been pushed over the limit or whether, once he starts pretending to be mad, he goes mad in the process.
Some critics suggest that from the earliest stages of the play, Hamlet wants to commit suicide to avoid the need to take revenge and that the most famous soliloquy, ‘To be or not to be’, is not so much a debate with himself about whether he should kill Claudius but a contemplation of his own death.
While this can be left usefully ambiguous, it is useful for students to consider the later soliloquy, ‘O, that this too, too solid flesh / Would thaw, melt and resolve itself into a dew’. There is some uncertainty whether Shakespeare wrote ‘solid’, ‘sullied’ or ‘soiled’ and, if we knew for sure, it might help us interpret ‘To be or not to be’ better. While ‘sullied’ and ‘soiled’ both refer to roughly the same thing- the corruption of human nature that he wishes to be clear of- and would indicate that he is more motivated by the murder and the indecency of his mother’s quick re-marriage, reading ‘solid’ into that line, which makes it more metaphysical and less related to recent goings on, would make us think he was contemplating suicide and did just want, above all, to disappear.
But, as we have already seen in passing, the play is made up of any number of ‘doublings’. Not only are there actually two revenge plots; two Hamlets; an older and younger Fortinbras (the Norwegian invaders who threaten Denmark throughout the play) but there are also a play within the play, a undifferentiated double act called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, another called Cornelius and Voltimand (both of which could have been represented by one character) and an elongating linguistic effect called hendiadys, before we even care to namedrop the echo effect of stichomythia..
We are invited to compare the invading Norwegians under the prince Fortinbras, seeking to reclaim land lost by his father, with the disarray of the Danish court where he, too, is seeking revenge for his father. At the beginning of the play they are out of sight, mentioned by Claudius but representing a further threat to the stability of Denmark but by the very end of the play, Fortinbras enters to represent a new age of power and control, not necessarily thoughtful or intellectual like Hamlet but orderly and likely to provide strong leadership.
The play within the play, The Mousetrap or The Murder of Gonzago, is part of Hamlet’s complicated web of scheming to undercover Claudius’ guilt but Shakespeare uses it to pass comment on the art of drama itself as well as providing an opportunity for a comic turn from the pedantic, old fool, Polonius. If we are not already aware of watching an artificial drama on stage, then this play is at a further remove in artificiality in its poetic language and exaggerated unreality.
Like Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern can equally be played as comic turns although they are sinister, too. Used by Claudius to spy on Hamlet and then sent with Hamlet to England to make sure Claudius’ plan to have him put to death by the English king, Hamlet doesn’t trust them, sees through them and is clever enough to turn the tables on them and send them to their deaths instead.
Hendiadys means ‘one by means of two’ in such phrases as ‘law and order’ or ‘house and home’, in which each word has a slightly different meaning but refer to the same thing. In Hamlet there are numerous examples like ‘the trappings and the suits of woe’ or ‘a king of shreds and patches’. The effect, once noticed, is to deepen and extend the texture as well as the text of the play, making it richer, more various and giving it a shimmering effect where reality is not so precisely defined by one word but hovers between two that are close in meaning.
A further linguistic effect worth noting, if only for interest’s sake, is ‘stichomythia’ which has an echoing effect as one line follows the same pattern as the line before it such as in Hamlet’s exchange with his mother in her bedroom.
Gert. Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
Ham. Mother, you have my father much offended.
Gert. Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.
Ham. Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.
As well as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Polonius, there is further comic relief in the gravedigger as well as Hamlet’s sometimes bitter and morose wit. The gravedigger is a literally ‘down to earth’ character whose dark humour and matter of fact view of the world comes at one of the sombrest, most reflective moments of the play as Hamlet contemplates Ophelia’s grave before her funeral.
So, the play is structured around two, if not three, revenge themes that are interwoven in the story and a set of ‘doublings’. If we must usually say that revenge is thus the main theme of the play, we might also reflect that the ‘human condition’ -the question of what it is like to be a human being- becomes a theme, too, as Hamlet is made to consider his own character, his delay and inaction, and reflects in a melancholy way on ‘what a piece of work is a man’, that the earth is a ‘sterile promontory’, ‘an unweeded garden, /That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature/ Possess it merely.’
Staging a production of Hamlet presents any number of potential problems or challenges- not only the problem of the play’s length which means it must often be edited down to more manageable proportions but the fact that Hamlet is a very long and emotionally challenging role but, being 23 years old, a mature actor with the experience and range needed to carry it off will usually look too old for the part. It does, however, offer itself to any number of interpretations which can be taken up by directors. For example, one production in Portsmouth had Hamlet playing with paper boats on water and setting fire to them as he recited ‘To be or not to be’, suggesting that he was ‘burning his boats’ and was deciding in this soliloquy to take action and never mind the consequences; in another, following the accidental murder of Polonius, Ophelia came on dressed in her father’s clothes, suggesting that the killing of her father by her boyfriend was the reason for her madness.
Hamlet, of course, always wears black; the representation of the ghost in live theatre is a challenge to imaginative staging and one needs to consider the contrasts in the scenes between the loud, passionate parts and the reflective, contemplative passages- there is a range of loud/quiet, fast/slow and even funny/serious polarities in tone that need to be handled sensitively.
In the end, we don’t want to make firm decisions on questions like whether Hamlet is good or bad, weak or strong, mad or sane. We need to balance the arguments on either side and usually come to a considered but not always decisive point of view. For example, it might be a mad idea for Hamlet to put on his ‘antic disposition’ in the first place which means he has no need of it if he’s mad already but it might be a brilliant strategy that could just have worked and he wasn’t mad at all, just unlucky in a sword fight in which his opponent cheated but, on the other hand, perhaps the stress and strain send Hamlet mad and, while pretending to be mad, he does actually go over the edge.
Neither do we have to believe any of it. George Bernard Shaw was one who felt the play was a bit too melodramatic and if such a film were made nowadays with so much murder, madness and incest in it then it would surely be an X certificate. It isn’t necessarily the realism or likelihood of the story that we are looking at but the thoughts, ideas and even the language that are built into it. A successful work of art will allow us to ‘suspend our disbelief’, to not even worry about its overall unlikeliness and, for the duration of the play, take it all on trust
And we don’t even have to prove whether it is a great play or not, but interpret it as best we can, although having spent any amount of time interpreting it, we are likely to decide it is a great play.
Quotes to know-
It is very useful, if not essential for students to be able to quote significant parts of the text to illustrate their points. It would be useful to be able to reproduce the lines below, as well as many others, and talk about their significance in the play-
Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
The time is out of joint, O cursed spite
That ever I was born to set it right.
O! what a rogue and peasant slave am I
To be or not to be: that is the question
O that this too, too solid flesh...
Useful books-
Two chapters on Hamlet in James Shapiro’s 1599, a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare.
One chapter in Frank Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language.
The Casebook on Hamlet.
Monday, 7 June 2010
Passing
Passing
She comes at certain times
and then you know
she was expected,
her gown so loose about her
as she moves serenely,
extinguishing candles
in her pre-electric evening
with a breath-taking
peacefulness you've
never seen before.
And she bids you now go with her
to a night so dense and dark
that the silence far beyond it
is the emptiness inside you
that you recognize as home.
She comes at certain times
and then you know
she was expected,
her gown so loose about her
as she moves serenely,
extinguishing candles
in her pre-electric evening
with a breath-taking
peacefulness you've
never seen before.
And she bids you now go with her
to a night so dense and dark
that the silence far beyond it
is the emptiness inside you
that you recognize as home.