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A review by casparb
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
5.0
ey up january 1st '23 reread it's still real good
22
I've read this so many times but also not for a while so I thought it would be good to revisit today. Not to be too mainstream but it was reading this and Ulysses a long time ago that slapped me about and told me to actually pay attention to things. Hamlet is unique, I adore it, and it is one of perhaps two or three texts that surpasses Ulysses.
As a play, we know it's problematic. It takes a little over four hours to perform (Ken Branagh actually missed a couple lines in his supposedly complete version, I noticed) and is unwieldy. Uncharacteristically for Shakespeare, the women characters are noticeably underwritten (suggesting to me that the play could have been initially even longer, with more developed Ophelia & Gertrude). The end is fairly predictable from early on and the sequence of events is frankly disorganised and bizarre. I love it
Hamlet is not a man, Hamlet is not a character. He's almost an actor but not quite. Hamlet is a continent though we must remember that Europe never was one. He performs lines of flight, as has been clearer to me on this reread. Extraterrestrial. He is a flux of intensities spilling from scene to scene with the meta-metatextual energy of an aesthetic terminus. One of my favourite lines is from the famously unnamed Claudius: "Do it, England; /For like the hectic in my blood he rages" - what better description than THE hectic? an interruption to the logocentric flow, a cardial arrhythmia to the cardiophallocentristic prison of form; Protestant, sane, playing-seeming Denmark. We must consider his character beyond fiction. He is not to be relatable, sympathetic or unsympathetic. Hamlet is The hectic, Nausical, viral, and oscillating difference to difference endlessly.
The play itself is a unique event in language. This is what makes it The work of art to me. Finnegans Wake is all I can compare it with and then FW I struggle to think of as art (more on this another time). To briefly explain my returns to Joyce with this play - something of the Scylla and Charybdis episode of Ulysses stays with me and troubles more than any obvious cry de profundis. This is genius in a cold intimacy with genius. Joyce is unsettled only in his encountering Shakespeare it feels, or rather Shakespeare/Hamlet the Real art outside itself. At the point of Ulysses Joyce knows he has genius but doesn't know what to do with it, perhaps because there is nothing to do with it. Finnegan can come about only through assimilating the rupture, the line of flight, the fissure-man that is Hamlet in a way that Shakespeare never could, and in so doing he no longer creates art. He creates Finnegans Wake.
Where else than in this play do we get
"Why should the poor be flatter'd?
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may follow fawning."
so earlier I had a little tear of joy from that. Language here is in absurd ecstasy with itself in such a way that I have found nowhere, in years and so on. (FW again is not ecstasy, is something Other than art).
"Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:
Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed;
Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;
And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,
Or paddling in your neck with his damn'd fingers"
I don't know how this could have been achieved. The language is something other than perfect. It exquisitely disgusts with the force of a pioneer at all angles. It is as if Shakespeare, in these moments, was the only person in the language that was ever allowed to be free - where are these images from! They appear and disappear so instantaneously. Blood-jets miraculously sutured with the very act of wounding. Such is the spectre, the Spirit anticating energising hectifying the Prince (what is a prince if not one that looks to the future? That anticipates? Haunted by the spectre of his unarrived potential). Derrida has clarified for us the fold twice-looking and polysemic in the spectral temporality that animates this play and every projective sense. I won't recap Specters of Marx here but I loved that too at least in part because Ham allowed me to.
I missed this very much and was delighted to come back. It has lost nothing. I may call it the definitive piece of art in the west for the past half millennium or so. What event is not unique? Uniquity defines the event but Hamlet in its way must be navigated by each future event, not in the tepid Eliotan 'Tradition' sense, but as a kernel unrooted in the language. It is the condition and qualification to the unique. Maybe critique starts there.
22
I've read this so many times but also not for a while so I thought it would be good to revisit today. Not to be too mainstream but it was reading this and Ulysses a long time ago that slapped me about and told me to actually pay attention to things. Hamlet is unique, I adore it, and it is one of perhaps two or three texts that surpasses Ulysses.
As a play, we know it's problematic. It takes a little over four hours to perform (Ken Branagh actually missed a couple lines in his supposedly complete version, I noticed) and is unwieldy. Uncharacteristically for Shakespeare, the women characters are noticeably underwritten (suggesting to me that the play could have been initially even longer, with more developed Ophelia & Gertrude). The end is fairly predictable from early on and the sequence of events is frankly disorganised and bizarre. I love it
Hamlet is not a man, Hamlet is not a character. He's almost an actor but not quite. Hamlet is a continent though we must remember that Europe never was one. He performs lines of flight, as has been clearer to me on this reread. Extraterrestrial. He is a flux of intensities spilling from scene to scene with the meta-metatextual energy of an aesthetic terminus. One of my favourite lines is from the famously unnamed Claudius: "Do it, England; /For like the hectic in my blood he rages" - what better description than THE hectic? an interruption to the logocentric flow, a cardial arrhythmia to the cardiophallocentristic prison of form; Protestant, sane, playing-seeming Denmark. We must consider his character beyond fiction. He is not to be relatable, sympathetic or unsympathetic. Hamlet is The hectic, Nausical, viral, and oscillating difference to difference endlessly.
The play itself is a unique event in language. This is what makes it The work of art to me. Finnegans Wake is all I can compare it with and then FW I struggle to think of as art (more on this another time). To briefly explain my returns to Joyce with this play - something of the Scylla and Charybdis episode of Ulysses stays with me and troubles more than any obvious cry de profundis. This is genius in a cold intimacy with genius. Joyce is unsettled only in his encountering Shakespeare it feels, or rather Shakespeare/Hamlet the Real art outside itself. At the point of Ulysses Joyce knows he has genius but doesn't know what to do with it, perhaps because there is nothing to do with it. Finnegan can come about only through assimilating the rupture, the line of flight, the fissure-man that is Hamlet in a way that Shakespeare never could, and in so doing he no longer creates art. He creates Finnegans Wake.
Where else than in this play do we get
"Why should the poor be flatter'd?
No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,
And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee
Where thrift may follow fawning."
so earlier I had a little tear of joy from that. Language here is in absurd ecstasy with itself in such a way that I have found nowhere, in years and so on. (FW again is not ecstasy, is something Other than art).
"Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:
Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed;
Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;
And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,
Or paddling in your neck with his damn'd fingers"
I don't know how this could have been achieved. The language is something other than perfect. It exquisitely disgusts with the force of a pioneer at all angles. It is as if Shakespeare, in these moments, was the only person in the language that was ever allowed to be free - where are these images from! They appear and disappear so instantaneously. Blood-jets miraculously sutured with the very act of wounding. Such is the spectre, the Spirit anticating energising hectifying the Prince (what is a prince if not one that looks to the future? That anticipates? Haunted by the spectre of his unarrived potential). Derrida has clarified for us the fold twice-looking and polysemic in the spectral temporality that animates this play and every projective sense. I won't recap Specters of Marx here but I loved that too at least in part because Ham allowed me to.
I missed this very much and was delighted to come back. It has lost nothing. I may call it the definitive piece of art in the west for the past half millennium or so. What event is not unique? Uniquity defines the event but Hamlet in its way must be navigated by each future event, not in the tepid Eliotan 'Tradition' sense, but as a kernel unrooted in the language. It is the condition and qualification to the unique. Maybe critique starts there.