Thursday, January 10, 2013

He was probably a sensitive enough chap to feel that he had made a mess of his life, in certain moods and certain times.  His most famous ghost mutters this great line, to set up the drama of one of his crucial plays.   "I could a tale unfold.."

It's literature, art, a line, and it can be read in many ways, open to interpretation, and so it depends on the reader and what the reader may be feeling or going through, the kind of response to such a line.  Maybe certain interpretations are more fitting than others.

Would Shakespeare have been perfectly happy with his accomplishments, not without self-questions?  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  Is he here exercising, or exorcising, an item, an element of his own psychology?  I can tell a story, this story, because I feel something related to that feeling this ghost is now possessing and inhabiting, the angst below the surface and its niceties, an angst that possesses the sense of being wronged (or in this case poisoned) that follows, as well as one's own original mistakes in life.

So many great phrases emerge from the passage, 'burnt and urged away,' one of them.  The sense emerges of private pain and endurance.

And perhaps here too is the element of personally finding no point in putting all those crimes and errors into words.  One's own mistakes are too huge, too many, too mythical, too entrenched, that no one else could even begin to lift their burden.  They might require 'an external blazon' rightfully, but such a bellowing out would not be appropriate somehow, perhaps by social norm, perhaps as 'ears of flesh and blood' just aren't spiritually minded enough to really grasp the underlying human reality, as human reality is misperceived when the spiritual element of life is excluded (or maybe not), shout as you might, unable to bring a deep lasting forgiveness.

And here is Shakespeare, just at that moment when he is about to say, 'oh, but enough of that;  let's get on to the story here of the uncle killing his brother the king;  forget about all that in the meantime, the show must go on.'  Luckily, though, he had created the marvelous instrument of Hamlet, the son, the perfect vehicle of a person really being open, really able to tell you just how he feels and why.  Not be coincidence is this a prelude to that character so open and forthright about his feelings, replete with the knowledge of messing things up even as he is doing so.

One can hope that the audience of the day found it cathartic as found it worthy of holding the undivided attention.  They might have left into the night air with some sense of having opened up all that is kept closed and back in the various Stratfords of life and haunting us presently.



"I am thy father's spirit;
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand an end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. - List, list, O, list!"
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.5




And then this part:  "The play's the thing/  Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king."  We must now look upon any executive impulse of empire, such as torture, as is now a popular issue once again on Charlie Rose and current film and current issue, as being something alien, something outside the normal bounds of behavior.  Basically, we can attribute to people the basic impulse to be moral.  Sometimes they don't always act so.  The great counter-reaction to one action is to broadly assume the inability of the rest to act more or less normally.  A work of art asserts the moral normalcy of humanity, the golden rule, that rule descending to eye for an eye if respect gets lost somewhere along the way.  This too is a revolutionary thing that Hamlet is saying.


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