girl, pen: #MyPlayToday ... Hamlet

#MyPlayToday ... Hamlet

By Anonymous 15:33

First impressions of the draw: 'Right then, it's time to have that talk with the blog'

Had I read the play before? Yes

Had I seen the play before? Yes

Could we have gone from a lesser known play to a more well known one? Whether we are talking Shakespeare, defining roles for actors and actresses, or even theatre itself, Hamlet is perhaps the play. It certainly was the play for me, the play that I consider my first encounter with Shakespeare. What an introduction that was.

This is neither the time nor the place to bring some academia-demolishing insight into the play's depths, so I'll save all that glimmering, innovative analysis for my MA (SWEATS NERVOUSLY). Rather, let's instead talk Hamlet and my day. Let's talk Hamlet and all my days, because I can say with slightly bashful sincerity that reading this play changed me.

'who still hath cried,
From the first cor[p]se till he that died to-day,
"This must be so."'Ham 1.2

When you're annotating Hamlet but you have a flair for the dramatic

For all it's generic shaping of a revenge tragedy, Hamlet wears the trappings and the suits of a intellectual's bildungsroman. Hamlet has returned home from university, a personal and geographical shift I too have been navigating recently, and is initially desperate to go back. The Royal Shakespeare Company's latest production wore this fact on its sleeve, emphasising Hamlet's youth and even featuring a prologue which gave us the young Prince's graduation. He's desperate to learn, but the effect of this knowledge begins to fester inside him when his rationality is challenged by the irrationality of life.

I'm in a classroom at seventeen years old, in my element studying for my A levels in a subject I adore. While discussion centres on the most familiar line of the play, 'To be or not to be...', I'm hit by an overwhelming feeling of unfamiliarity. I look around as if the voices reverberating around me can't really be there, this can't really be happening. I'm in a room with people who I talk to, people I laugh with, people I look in the eye every day and we are talking about the most terrifying, unspeakable inevitability - death. '"This must be so."'

When people ask me why I love Shakespeare, I find it hard not to regress and mentally sit myself down in that classroom. Of course I was, and I am, afraid reading those words. Isn't Hamlet's fear all of ours, too? But to read them and to speak them felt like an honesty I had never encountered. In my opinion, that honesty exists wherever Shakespeare is read and if that honesty speaks to you as a male or a female actor, as a teenager or when you're past your dancing days, in a different language or without words at all then you are entitled to it.

'many wearing rapiers are afraid of goose-quills'
Ham, 2.2

Does this make Hamlet my favourite play? Yes and no. I have been fortunate beyond my deserving to have seen some incredible actors in the role (I'm looking at you Cumberbatch and Tennant) and each time the connection between Hamlet and the audience that is woven so beautifully into the text sets my world on fire. When I read the play the lines chime with the devotion I felt for the text as a seventeen year old (and not just because my exam was closed-book). Every time I read it or see a new production is like polishing an old vase and feeling like the design has shifted when I turn my back. Because this most lauded of plays was my introduction to Shakespeare, I will always greet it like an old friend.

It's ancient but it's fluid and for this, I love the play. But perhaps because Hamlet is the play, my attention is always being caught by the quirks and tricks of other plays in Shakespeare's cannon. Moreover, I know I can never come back to this play and polish away that mark that shows the complete beauty of the design, because people far greater than me have been trying to do that for 400 years. There will be a time for my thoughts to piece together amongst all the others on this play and although my 'random thought' can't help but indulge my inner critic, that time is not right now (and if it be not now, yet it will come etc, etc.).

#yayhamlet

One entirely random thought/question the play inspired of me today: All Polonius's espionage behind-the-arras antics has got me thinking of the value of eavesdropping as a generically malleable trope - contrast, for example, the comedy afforded by the eavesdropping scenes with Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado against the tragedy-tinged-with-slapstick-comedy of Polonius' death in Hamlet.