Tell me this hasn’t ever happened to you:
You’re on an outing with friends, and run into a situation where one of the group gets in a compromised position of some sort, but with a little fast talking you get out of the situation and carry on. Back in the car, or back on the boat, or back at the ranch, the friend declares something like: "And if you didn’t walk up right then and say [blaa, blaa, blaa]...."
It’s that quintessential aspect of the human condition, where if someone or some group is part of your group--your culture set--your clan--you don’t really need them to say exactly what’s going on, you can just tell how you need to agree with them in the moment (and of course you want to, because they’re you’re friend).
A good example of the dynamic is when Republicans attack the Democrats on something, it doesn’t matter if you support Edwards or Obama, you look for ways to counter in general--or, if you post here on Dkos, you’re really stoked when someone writes a killer diary that blows their position out of the water. But the best (that I know of at least) of the dynamic is when a group of guys goes out looking to get laid. A guy in that situation, where you’ve found some potential, you don’t need to see or say anything to each other, yet you’re suddenly conspiring when one of you asks the ladies what they’ll have to drink.
I recently had a conversation with some playwrights about the ghost in the play Hamlet. Who were these people? Just your average group of playwrights? Or well-known playwrights? Does it matter? Let’s talk about playwrights for a moment.
Of all the players upon the stage--Doctors, Professors, Lawyers, Politicians, Generals, Professionals, Tradesmen, Homemakers, etc., the playwright is the one performing the task of defining the zeitgeist--articulating the collective psyche/soul of a culture--so that the society can make sense of itself, or simply marvel at itself (I mean--c’mon--let’s admit it--human beings are endlessly fascinated with human beings [some poet (might’ve been Pope) once said the proper study of man is man]). In some ways they’re like a moral cop, and other ways a shaman--best case a little of both, i.e. an artist. Some plays are big hits and get made into movies because they define a moment in history. The story told may be original, an adaptation, or a new twist on an old take, but told in a way that defines how we the living, are...um...living.
If you take the job of playwright back to it’s origins, back to when it first appeared in Mesopotamia, the Cradle of Civilization, you can see that to be a playwright, you have to be able to think critically. It’s still true today, but not as much a requirement as it once was because of the corporatization of entertainment (btw, why don’t we have a national theater?). Corporations operating without adequate anti-trust will ruin anything, but I don’t want to talk about that--the state of American theater--I want to talk about how playwrights today talk about Hamlet.
There’s a list-serve, and it’s NYC playwrights and artistic directors, and reviewers. People who pride themselves on knowing just about anything on most everything. They are and have to be pretty sharp too, plus have a sense of the pulse of things. And equally important a sense of knowing what has come before. Off-Broadway, or Off-Off Broadway, somewhere in there--if it’s going down in society today--you’ll find some work which touches true zeitgeist.
Anyway, the intellectuals on this one list-serve got the full dose of the Article V Convention stuff, of course. That’s why I was there mostly, informing them of facts (the conversation stopped at: if Pepsi sponsors to pay for it--fine, otherwise it’s a waste of money). After the political stuff died down, a bit about Art and it’s function in society cropped up. I mentioned how Joseph Campbell once said, "Art teaches a person how to live." Someone didn’t know what that meant, and I replied that the best example is Hamlet, and how Shakespeare--the playwright--was informing his audience that if you hang on to the past, you end up with a stage full of dead bodies. The intellectuals balked, and wanted clarification. And when I said the ghost in Hamlet is not real, they all freaked out. I think I was actually called a fool out-right at one point. But it dawned on me how pathetic the situation was on the one hand, and how beautiful on the other. Pathetic because here we had a bunch of playwrights seeing something in obviously the wrong way, and beautiful because it meant the possibility of a renaissance in the way Hamlet is staged, how it’s popularly understood, and what it means for us today.
To get down to brass tacks, if you’re going to examine something, if there’s a blue-print or prototype, of course you look at that first.
There is no ghost in the legendary source for Hamlet. Apparently one was first added to this material by the author of the no longer extant Ur-Hamlet, a play produced in or before 1589 that featured a "ghost which cried... miserably at the theater, like an oyster-wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge....’"
Something to consider, the original Hamlet had a ghost which was not a dead king, just a voice which kept bothering him with the idea of revenge. That means Shakespeare was doing something specific when he wrote his adaptation. He has four people claiming eleven sightings in his play. Critics hold up the text of the first scene as if, just because two soldiers are looking into the dark and see a ghost, that it must be "real." In other words, they’re claiming Hamlet is a ghost story, not a story of a prince and his soldiers, however unwittingly, conspiring to make a world where they’re in control. The sightings of a ghost justify their actions (kind of like what NeoCons have done, and are still doing this moment, to our country). What was pathetic was that the combined knowledge of Shakespeare on that list-serve could not accept the second interpretation of Hamlet: that the play is about that behavior basic to human nature: to conspire (note: conspiring does not always have to be a bad thing, there’s such thing as conspiring for joy too).
I will admit to not knowing Hamlet forward and backwards (although I do know the soliloquy by heart [I should actually brush up, haven’t recited it in awhile]). But I suspect the play could be staged not as a ghost story, but one of Machiavellian intrigue and some tragic results (that’s why Gertrude couldn’t see the ghost, because it wasn’t there). Anyway, the intellectuals we’re saying how this interpretation was not valid, some sort of imaginative whimsy. When really the exact opposite is true, that to stage the play as a straight ghost story, is that of a secondary and not very interesting interpretation.
I’m thinking now, what might’ve happened, is that Shakespeare did Chekhov before Chekhov. Anton Chekhov is a Russian playwright who is thought to have transformed theater by not staging every scene, by leaving blank spaces. I’m thinking Shakespeare might have look at his adaptation, and thought it much more interesting overall, by leaving out a definitive answer as to whether the prince was mad or not.
I leave off with this box of text, just because I think it’s so cool. I’m not sure what my next diary will be: note: if you are smart and wealthy, could you please look at this site: http://www.articlev.org. I have everything lined up to make the first documentary, except funds. I really think it would be a significant documentary. If you’re so moved, visit the site, contact me.
- A small group of disillusioned soldiers suffering stress and anxieties after the death of their leader--needing what Hamlet needs (an image of their past heroic leader)--read Hamlet's mind and give him what he desires: the spirit of "the king [his] father" (1.2.191).
- Having tried other ways of getting Hamlet to act like his father, a splinter group in the Army conspires to say, "We saw ‘a figure like your father,/Armed at point exactly, cap a pe’" [from head to foot] (1.2.199-200).
- Having read Machiavelli, Hamlet tells Marcellus, his most loyal soldier: you saw a ghost the last two nights, didn't you, soldier? And you will see it again tonight, and you will convince anyone else on watch too (you’ll know the best man to employ), and the two of you will band Horatio to your view, and then the three of you will come and tell me about the ghost you saw, won't you, soldier?