Tag: Shakespeare

Daniel Day Lewis as Hamlet, Acting as a Two Track Activity – David Burke on

The idea of a hoax had first come to me during a performance of the play. If anyone is shocked by this, all I can say is that I know of no actor who is so pure onstage that he thinks only what his character thinks. If he did, he would presumably become the character: a form of madness. This may of course be what happens to Hamlet—he puts on an antic disposition, and gets stuck in it. Something rather like this seems to have happened once to an actor who was playing the Prince. Daniel Day-Lewis, as was widely reported in the press at the time, suffered a breakdown in the middle of the performance, and the explanation most commonly offered was that he came to believe that the actor playing opposite him as the Ghost of his father was his own father, who had been dead many years; whereupon he abruptly left the stage, never to return, and never to play the role again.

This was not a warning that I am ever likely to forget; I was the Ghost.

Acting is mostly a twin-track mental activity. In one track runs the role, requiring thoughts ranging from, say, gentle amusement to towering rage. Then there is the second track, which monitors the performance: executing the right moves, body language, and voice level; taking note of audience reaction and keeping an eye on fellow actors; coping with emergencies such as a missing prop or a faulty lighting cue. These two tracks run parallel, night by night. If one should go wrong, then it is likely that the other will misbehave too.

I had a painful illustration of this just before we finished our run in the West End. After nearly three hundred performances I was tired, and I suppose that the sight of the finishing tape made me relax. At some point I failed to make one of my moves. Sara told me later that a mobile phone had just gone off in the audience. A second or two later I was standing on the stage not knowing where I was or what I had to say. A black hole had opened up around me. Niels Bohr had vanished from Track One, and an alarmed David Burke on Track Two had to take a prompt from the equally alarmed prompter. The move I had failed to make was tied to the thought and the words; when one went, they all three went.

The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue
Michael Frayn, David Burke

A Tip About Shakespearen Soliloquies – Roger Michell to Simon Russell Beale

While I was rehearsing for Richard III, another director, Roger Michell, gave me a tip about soliloquies. ‘When you have to speak directly to the audience,’ he said, ‘always give them a role.’ It’s a simple and brilliant idea. As an example: I said earlier that Iago lies to his audience. If that is true, then he would, presumably, think of them as a pack of gullible idiots. For Hamlet, the only people he can really trust are his friends in the audience; he believes that, whatever happens and whatever he chooses to do, they will understand him. In Richard’s case, he behaves like the leader of the gang. Any challenge that the audience might throw down – seducing a woman over the corpse of a man that he’s just killed, let’s say, or seizing the crown – he will accept. And he will triumph – to his and the gang’s delight.

A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare and Other Stories
Simon Russell Beale

God’s Spies – King Lear quote, ChatGPT on

In King Lear there is a speech containing the phrase God’s Spies. Can you elaborate on what this means?
ChatGPT
The phrase “God’s spies” appears in King Lear, Act 5, Scene 3. This is part of Lear’s speech to Cordelia after they are captured and imprisoned. Lear, despite their grim fate, imagines a life of spiritual reflection and connection between himself and Cordelia, insulated from the corruption of the outside world.

Here is the excerpt:
“We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we’ll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who’s in, who’s out;
And take upon’s the mystery of things,
As if we were God’s spies: and we’ll wear out,
In a walled prison, packs and sects of great ones
That ebb and flow by the moon.”

Interpretation of “God’s spies”:
The phrase has a profound and multi-layered meaning.

Spiritual Insight and Detachment: Lear imagines that he and Cordelia, by being isolated in their prison, will achieve a higher perspective on life, akin to “spies” for God, observing human folly and the mysteries of existence from a distance. This reflects a sense of spiritual transcendence—being able to see the world’s troubles and vanities from an almost divine vantage point, while remaining apart from them.

Reflection and Observation: Spies gather secret knowledge, and by calling themselves “God’s spies,” Lear implies that their suffering and isolation will allow them to perceive deeper truths about life, society, and human nature. They’ll observe the rise and fall of power and the transient nature of worldly concerns as if they were privy to a divine understanding.

Redemptive Suffering: The idea that suffering and imprisonment might bring them closer to God or divine purpose is also present. Shakespeare often explores how suffering can lead to enlightenment or redemption, and Lear’s vision here reflects his longing for peace, forgiveness, and reconciliation after the chaos and betrayal earlier in the play.

Contrast and Irony:
This hopeful vision of Lear’s is deeply poignant because it is tragically short-lived. The audience knows that this imagined life of peace and reflection will not come to pass; Cordelia will soon be killed, and Lear will die in anguish. Thus, the phrase “God’s spies” also carries an ironic undertone, highlighting the contrast between Lear’s idealistic hope and the brutal reality of the play’s conclusion.

In summary, “God’s spies” encapsulates Lear’s yearning for redemption and meaning, his newfound humility, and his desire to rise above worldly concerns through a deeper, almost divine perspective on life. However, this vision is tragically unattainable in the context of the play’s devastating ending.

Shakespeare Everyday – November 13

November 13 | The Tempest | Act 3 Scene 2

Shakespeare stimulates every sense, giving images a smell, a sound, and a colour even when he doesn’t mention those aspects explicitly. When read or heard, the language can be completely immersive, particularly in the later plays. However complex Caliban of The Tempest may be, what is certain is that he speaks one of the most beautiful speeches in the play. The words themselves, like the isle he talks of, hum with gentle sounds and sweet airs.

CALIBAN
Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That if I then had waked after long sleep
Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked I cried to dream again.

Shakespeare for Every Day of the Year

Interpreting a Line of Dialogue – Ian McKellen

Give us the opening line of The Merchant of Venice.
Ian McKellen: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.”

Now that simple line can be said in an infinite number of ways. On the one hand you could go for the mood and the quality of it. Try it, for instance, sadly.
Ian McKellen: Do you mean by the mood or the quality, just painting over it with a color called sadness?

Yes, the feeling only.
Ian McKellen: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.”

Now try it humorously.
Ian McKellen: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.”

But now try and ask what is Antonio’s intention. Perhaps it’s to try to explain himself.
Ian McKellen: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.”

Yes, search your thoughts.
Ian McKellen: Make a connection between the mouth and the brain and then with the heart: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.”

Now try changing the intention to avoid explaining yourself
Ian McKellen: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.”

Or to make light of your sadness.
Ian McKellen: “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.”

And one more: try to put an end to the conversation.
Ian McKellen (finally): “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.”

Hamlet Meets Father – Jonathan Pryce, Sandra Huller Interpretations

Enter Ghost
Rebecca Mead, in her piece on the German actor Sandra Hüller, describes Hüller’s performance in a 2019 production of “Hamlet” (“Interiors,” December 4th). During Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost of his father, Hüller spoke both characters’ lines, with the ghost’s exhortation to revenge seemingly torn from Hamlet’s innards. I was reminded of another production, at the Royal Court, in London, in 1980, directed by Richard Eyre and starring a young Jonathan Pryce: the encounter with the ghost was performed the same way, with Pryce fairly vomiting his father’s words, a bodily possession both painful and purging. It still resonates with me as one of the most exciting and terrifying stage moments I’ve witnessed.

Chris Rohmann
Florence, Mass.

New Yorker
(From The Mail, December 18, 2023 issue)

Hamlet – Old Language vs Modern

OLD LANGUAGE ====================================
HAMLET
Let me see. (takes the skull) Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.—Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your songs? Your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chapfallen? Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that.—Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.

HORATIO What’s that, my lord?

HAMLET Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’ th’ earth?

HORATIO E’en so.

HAMLET And smelt so? Pah! (puts down the skull)

HORATIO E’en so, my lord.

HAMLET To what base uses we may return, Horatio. Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?

HORATIO ’Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.

MODERN LANGUAGE ====================================
HAMLET
Let me see. (he takes the skull) Oh, poor Yorick! I used to know him, Horatio—a very funny guy, and with an excellent imagination. He carried me on his back a thousand times, and now—how terrible—this is him. It makes my stomach turn. I don’t know how many times I kissed the lips that used to be right here. Where are your jokes now? Your pranks? Your songs? Your flashes of wit that used to set the whole table laughing? You don’t make anybody smile now. Are you sad about that? You need to go to my lady’s room and tell her that no matter how much makeup she slathers on, she’ll end up just like you some day. That’ll make her laugh. Horatio, tell me something.

HORATIO What’s that, my lord?

HAMLET Do you think Alexander the Great looked like this when he was buried?

HORATIO Exactly like that.

HAMLET And smelled like that, too? Whew! (he puts down the skull)

HORATIO Just as bad, my lord.

HAMLET How low we can fall, Horatio. Isn’t it possible to imagine that the noble ashes of Alexander the Great could end up plugging a hole in a barrel?

HORATIO If you thought that you’d be thinking too much.

Hamlet
SparkNotes
“No Fear Shakespeare pairs Shakespeare’s language with translations into modern English—the kind of English people actually speak today. When Shakespeare’s words make your head spin, our translations will help you sort out what’s happening, who’s saying what, and why.”

Hamlet as London Hipster Circa 1597

Shakespeare, as usual, knew what he was doing. It was not the first time he had used shoddy material as the springboard for a play, and in this case his actor’s eye saw the special uses of the situation. The bloody, barbaric old plot gave him a dark backdrop for the unhappy young modernist who was his hero, and his hero’s temperament in turn gave him a solution for the chief difficulty confronting any dramatist who worked in the field of revenge tragedy. Unless there was some reason why the revenge was delayed, the play would be over in the first act; and a revenge hero like Hamlet, caught in the general backwash of gloom and indecision that characterized the final years of Elizabeth’s reign, was exactly the sort of man who was incapable of working himself up to a single course of action until he had succeeded in ruining the lives of everyone in the cast.

Hamlet was born in part of the young men who had been glooming about the universities and the Inns of Court in the fin de siècle atmosphere of the late 90’s and passing remarks on the hollowness of life, the futility of heroic action and the degrading nature of sexual intercourse; but he was also the product of a more specialized group that was interesting the doctors of the period. A competent London physician like Timothy Bright would have diagnosed Hamlet as a melancholic and put much of his “internal darkness” down to physical causes. Melancholics, as Dr. Bright explained, “be not so apt for action.” They are “given to fearful and terrible dreams,” are “exact and curious in pondering,” are “sometimes furious and sometimes merry,” and are “out of measure passionate.” They have frequently studied too much, they mistrust their memories, and they dislike color in their clothes.

Shakespeare of London
Marchette Chute

Ikea Effect and Difficult Reading – Shakespeare and Game of Thrones

WILSON: Right. Exactly. There’s just a certain type of reader who loves these sprawling, sociological narratives that have massive casts of characters. That have these interweaving stories, and they’re just epic in scope. They go on and on and they expand outward. George R. R. Martin is clearly one of those people.

I often have to remind my students. I say, “You know, Shakespeare’s supposed to be hard.” Right? It’s supposed to be difficult to understand what’s going on in these texts, but I think we can forget how extremely difficult these texts are—Shakespeare’s first tetralogy, “A Song of Ice and Fire”—for first time readers to come to these texts and just try to understand what is going on here. But then I also think that there’s a connection between the labor that we have to do to understand what’s going on in these texts and the love that we have for these texts. In the book, I theorize this as an example of the Ikea effect.

Some researchers did this amazing experiment where they had people put together some Ikea furniture, and then they had a professional carpenter put together the same furniture, and then they asked people, which of these pieces of furniture do you want? The one that you built or the one that the carpenter built? And most people chose the one that they built. And so the Ikea effect means, for example, we don’t work so hard to raise our children because we love them so much. Instead, we love our children so much because we’ve had to work so hard to raise them.

And when we return to the literature, I think just the immense amount of labor that is required to understand what is going on here and to enjoy these texts spills over into just the intense passion that fans of Shakespeare, fans of Martin, show for these texts. You have these amazing fan cultures that grow up around Shakespeare’s history plays, so there’s @HollowCrownFans on Twitter…

Shakespeare and “Game of Thrones”
Shakespeare Unlimited: Episode 159
Based on his knowledge of Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, Harvard’s Dr. Jeffrey R. Wilson knew just how HBO’s Game of Thrones would play out. Jon Snow, the illegitimate son, was a Richard III type, who would win the crown (and our hearts, in a love-to-hate-him kind of way). But Daenerys Targaryen, as a kind of Henry VII, would defeat him in battle and win it back, restoring peace and order. Turns out he was wrong about all of that.

But as Wilson kept watching, he began to appreciate the other ways Game of Thrones is similar to Shakespeare—like the way that both Shakespeare and George R.R. Martin’s stories translate the history of the Wars of the Roses into other popular genres.

Wilson’s new book, Shakespeare and Game of Thrones, explores some of the ways that Shakespeare influenced Game of Thrones… as well as some of the ways that Game of Thrones has begun to influence Shakespeare. Wilson is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev.

Pascal’s Wager and Hamlet

Pascal and Hamlet both struggle with the question of how to act under circumstances of constant uncertainty. Hamlet deeply desires conviction before he acts, while Pascal argues that our actions will lead to belief. And, since we can never be absolutely certain, only the highest in a set of probabilities should dictate our actions. Though they try to weigh finite probabilities against the infinite, both Hamlet and Pascal recognize that the human condition limits our ability to know the infinite consequences of our actions and choices. To understand these probabilities, Pascal reasons through rigid, calculable steps. His process contrasts sharply with Shakespeare’s representation of temperamental human logic in Hamlet. Hamlet’s distorted reasoning highlights our mortal tendency to fixate on even the smallest risks in the shadow of vast gain. As Shakespeare writes, “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all”.

…
Regardless of the strength or weakness of one’s conviction, acting with confidence (even if insincere at first) creates a stronger, genuine belief. Uncertainty, according to Pascal, can be overcome through action and outward show.

Conversely, Hamlet is immobilized by uncertainty. Unlike Pascal, Hamlet needs to believe in his choice of action before he can perform it. He is thoughtful to the point of obsession, and constantly puts off action for the sake of having a more solid reason to do it. Hamlet recognizes his own hesitancy, and often berates himself for not being as passionate and resolved as the actor is in relation to the fictional Hecuba, or as Fortinbras’ soldier is over an inconsequential piece of land. All the while that he, Hamlet, has the strongest reason to act – his father’s wrongful death and his mother’s disgraceful marriage – all he does is complain:

Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murdered,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must like a whore unpack my heart with words
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
A stallion! Fie upon’t, foh! About, my brains.

Student Essay
Brumbaugh, Victoria. “Action and Uncertainty in Pascal’s Wager and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.”

The Art of the Probable: Literature and Probability
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/literature/21l-017-the-art-of-the-probable-literature-and-probability-spring-2008/assignments/

Course Description
“The Art of the Probable” addresses the history of scientific ideas, in particular the emergence and development of mathematical probability. But it is neither meant to be a history of the exact sciences per se nor an annex to, say, the Course 6 curriculum in probability and statistics. Rather, our objective is to focus on the formal, thematic, and rhetorical features that imaginative literature shares with texts in the history of probability. These shared issues include (but are not limited to): the attempt to quantify or otherwise explain the presence of chance, risk, and contingency in everyday life; the deduction of causes for phenomena that are knowable only in their effects; and, above all, the question of what it means to think and act rationally in an uncertain world.

How chance the King comes with so small a number?

Fool
And thou hadst been set i’ the stocks for that
question, thou hadst well deserved it.

KENT
Why, fool?

Fool
We’ll set thee to school to an ant, to teach thee
there’s no labouring i’ the winter. All that follow
their noses are led by their eyes but blind men; and
there’s not a nose among twenty but can smell him
that’s stinking. Let go thy hold when a great wheel
runs down a hill, lest it break thy neck with
following it: but the great one that goes up the
hill, let him draw thee after. When a wise man
gives thee better counsel, give me mine again: I
would have none but knaves follow it, since a fool gives it.

King Lear