What makes the play Hamlet so great?
Macbeth and Hamlet are both somewhat special in that they are an opportunity to consider a world predating the onset of the Romanesque era.
Macbeth is like a medieval left-winger, and Hamlet is like a medieval right-winger in some respects. Hamlet could never approve of the French Revolution for example, but Macbeth would be right there at the front like a Voltaire or Robespierre.
Hamlet is an opportunity to consider a time when the world was made of 'softer stuff', and I think that's why I can forgive Branagh's interpretation, although Olivier's has firmer delivery. I haven't seen Gibson in the role, but I remember dispising Kevin Kline's performance in a videotaped form.
>>7690623
>Macbeth is like a medieval left-winger, and Hamlet is like a medieval right-winger in some respects.
Could you elaborate?
>Voltaire
Voltaire died 11 years before the French Revolution.
Burton's Yorick scene is quite interesting. I guess some people feel it deflated him for them, but I like how he invokes legend, book learning, and then song in order to punctuate it. It's such a tidy, Welsh performance.
Gibson's is made a bit obscene with some initially very bad insert shots, yet it also manages to reveal the actor nakedly. It's the most emotional rendering from what I can tell.
http://youtu.be/UbxMhvcxJJc
Olivier sets his heart afar off from Yorick.
https://youtu.be/Vk0Qytn6iQM
Hourly reminder that Hamlet's aside about Alexander is moot anyway because Alexander was embalmed
>>7690555
Psychological insight from centuries before the field of 'psychology' existed. Hamlet has one of the most emotive and tragic romance plots ever put to text, and it isn't even the theme of the play.
Numerous great lines and monologues too. I think nearly every phrase in the famous 'To be...' "soliloquy" has been turned into the title of a book or movie.
>>7690678
Well, to elaborate... There's no merit to the argument that Shakespeare staged Macbeth as an insult to King James, for his belief in, and oppression of, witches.
The Bard is just saying, 'Look, the superstitious pagan elements are political entities as well.' In the same way that James's ancestors were feared, many resented seeing him hold office, and so he's saying that 'they'll treat you the way Duncan is treated by Macbeth!'. The play is written from the Catholic position (as all Shakespearean plays fundamentally are).
>Voltaire died 11 years before the French Revolution
But that's immaterial because of the use of the word 'would'. Had Voltaire been alive, he would have remained in the vanguard of the Revolution.
>In summary I would say that the thing about Hamlet that has put Western man into a panic to explain it is not that the play is incoherent, but that it is coherent. There are plenty of incoherent plays; nobody ever looks at them twice. This one, because it obviously makes sense and because it just as obviously cannot be made sense of, threatens our inevitable working assumption that there are no "more things in earth" than can be understood in one philosophy. People see Hamlet and tolerate inconsistencies that it does not seem they could bear. Students of the play have explained that such people do not, in fact, find the play bearable at all. They therefore whittle the play down for us to the size of one of its terms, and deny the others. Truth is bigger than any one system for knowing it, and Hamlet is bigger than any of the frames of reference it inhabits. Hamlet allows us to comprehend -- hold on to -- all the contradictions it contains. Hamlet refuses to cradle its audience's mind in a closed generic framework, or otherwise limit the ideological context of its actions.
http://intranet.stpaulsschool.org.uk/resource.aspx?id=404344
>post interesting post
>make a mistake
>delete entire thing
Get back here motherfucker
>>7690793
This is a very interesting article, and thank you for posting it. It's what I've liked about Hamlet. It's got an impossible multiplicity of meaning, and it genuinely defies proper interpretation. Kafka's work is sort of like that also, and surprisingly, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. It's the mark of high art when you can't explain it. It's probably why TS Elliot was so buttfrustrated.
>>7690816
Yeah, there's a deeply Socratic strain in Polonius's moral platitudes. He's a Catholic era figure which manages to speak to the Calvinist in Shakespeare's own day.
By contrast, Hamlet indulges in Aristotelian syllogisms and enthymemes.
Hamlet's father is a monarch but one with more of a senatorial bent... He's like the ghost of Cicero condemning Antony!
>>7690889
I say Polonius is 'socratic' mainly due to his use of epigrammatical catechisms.
There's a tidiness to Polonius which Hamlet has infinitely outgrown.
I watched it live last year, it was the one with ayylmao man as Hamlet. I watched it with my oneitis and I remember getting the bus back at night with her and it was the first time she hugged me.
I KNEW HIM HORATIO
A FELLOW OF INFINITE JEST
early modernism
There's a wonder to Shakespeare's Art in that he is able to continually reconjure Socrates, Aristotle and Cicero among his kinsmen.
He knows exactly who each character would be if they lived in the 12th Century B.C. Greece, or in 11th Century Scotland, or even in his own time.
This is a purely Jesuit art, and it belies a Catholic education at the King Edward IV Grammar School. I suppose some credit is due to them, then.
>>7690967
I'll add that when Shakespeare re conjures those three core Rhetoricians, he is always able to alter their aspect and form in order to conceal their origins.
That's part of the method through which he's able to create such fresh, lively and contrasting characters that seem so familiar to us at the same time.
Can anyone recommend a good play version I can watch online?
>>7691004
Apparently this version is online:
http://youtu.be/YkAmMq3i3Hc
The image is a Visualisation of Shakespeare's rhetorical imagination. It may seem rough, but it's worth knowing, because he continually reiterates these figures.
>>7691310
Never seen it.
>>7691311
Watch it then, one of the best movies I have ever seen and it uses the original script with no cuts.
>>7691315
It cuts out all the humour
>>7691322
Yeah, and the scene where Hamlet rapes Yorick's skull.
>>7691294
Interesting.
>>7691361
My gorge rims at it.
>>7691369
Simplified.
The nature of Shakespeare's use of Fair & Dark, High & Low is very highly speculated on.
Another who contributed significantly to the spirituality of the Dominican Order is Albertus Magnus, the only person of the period to be given the appellation "Great".
His influence on the brotherhood permeated nearly every aspect of Dominican life. Albert was a scientist, philosopher, astrologer, theologian, spiritual writer, ecumenist, and diplomat. Under the auspices of Humbert of Romans, Albert molded the curriculum of studies for all Dominican students, introduced Aristotle to the classroom and probed the work of Neoplatonists, such as Plotinus.
Indeed, it was the thirty years of work done by Thomas Aquinas and himself (1245–1274) that allowed for the inclusion of Aristotelian study in the curriculum of Dominican schools.
