Thoughts and Production Notes on
I'm an occasional blogger. Howsomever, Hamlet has been the subject of many recent and lengthy blogs. For best bet, check the dates between May-August 2006 (see the left sidebar) over on O! Beauty Unattempted!. For more specific rambles, check out the following:
Other thoughts I'll post here, in no particular order. However, it would behoove the obsessive reader to mosey to the blog as occasion demands.
Needless to say, I bombed. Or rather, the scene did. The difficulty - besides biting off more than I could chew, having only three weeks of rehearsal, and learning two days before performance that my Hamlet was cooling his heels in jail for some misdemeanor or another - was that I overthought and litcrittered my way through the scene. I.e., I gave into the thoughts that since Hamlet "does nothing," since he keeps hesitating, since he berates himself for "los[ing] the name of action," I should therefore have Hamlet do as little action as possible. I was also firmly of the mind that Ophelia did go mad, and that she and Hamlet had a virginal relationship. Let me 'splain the whole Ophelia-as-Virgin argument. My reasoning, anyway, was that no woman who is regularly sneaking behind her father's back to sleep with a prince is going to simply give in to her father's demands to break up with said prince for whom one is sneaking away from Dad. Also, I was of the opinion then as now that Hamlet's difficulty with life stems mostly from his desire for all the world to be perfect and his terror and disgust when he learns that the world is not perfect (cf. "What a piece of work is man"). How, I wondered, could Hamlet ever sleep with Ophelia when he would be the first to hold her so far up on a pedestel, even he would not dare to climb so high - much less pull her down so low! No, I thought at the time - theirs was a pure love, held up in counterpoint to the "incestuous, adulterate" affair of Gertrude and Claudius. (Nevermind that Ophelia later, in her mad scene, refers repeatedly to lovers jilting girls because of premarital sex. I convinced myself that Ophelia was merely either a) insensible about the lyrics of the songs she picked or b) felt as though she's been spiritually deprived of her virginal state of mind if not her actual virginity. Weak, weak, weak I know. More about this later.) This view of the Hamlet/Ophelia relationship, coupled with my insistence that Hamlet was hardly a man of any action, led to one rotten nunnery scene. Hamlet rarely moved, and when he did, the connection between Hamlet and Ophelia was practically non-existent - certainly not physical! (Which inaction on-stage is the kiss of death. Or in this case, the do-nothing of death.)
However, I wouldn't trade that debacle for anything in the world. One of the best ways to learn how to do something, is to learn rather firmly how not to do something. And what I learned from that directing session is that unless a piece of litcrit works practically as well as neatly upon a dissertation, it ought to go out the window. Hamlet Man of Inaction? Out. Hamlet Anti-Hero? Out. Hamlet Ice-King? Out. These and other ideas of Hamlet are those "pale cast[s] of thought" that "sickly o'er" the imagination. And since the stage is fully the realm of the imagination made incarnate, only those thoughts which work on stage, which "suit the word to the action, the action to the word" should be admitted. Oh, one other thing I'd forgotten: Shakespeare should be fun.
(c) 2006
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