Debate Shakespeare? Borrring....
Maybe it might seem so because you’ve never been shown an angle that hits a sweet spot--a spot that stimulates thought, makes life more interesting. After all, you have no time for ivory tower hub-bub (not to mention the reading to be done in order to say something intelligent and worth consideration); you’re here to keep an eye on the political sphere--specifically--what the heck Democrats are doing to disable institutionalized corruption and return the nation to the Rule of Law (etc.).
But, should you make the jump, what’s great is, you don’t have to be a genius intellectual type, or have degrees from expensive universities for it to be interesting, just a general understanding of human nature and a little curiosity.
To quote Kossack cfk: "I always just accepted that the ghost was there and seen. I found it an interesting way to get the play-goers involved as in, 'Whoa! There is a big problem here!'"
OK, here’s what’s happened so far: I was on a list-serve with a bunch of playwrights/artistic directors/intellectuals--folks who know a lot about theater and the world of ideas--and the subject of the ghost in Hamlet came up.
Hamlet’s Ghost: part 1: http://www.dailykos.com/...
In this diary the idea was put forth that every society is made up of:
- Ideas that are residual.
- Ideas that are dominant.
- Ideas that are transgressive.
- Ideas that are emergent.
RESIDUAL, with respect to Elizabethan England, in part meant the Catholic religious establishment, which, though declared illegal in 1532, nevertheless hung on in memories, values, published texts, subversive practices, ruined or remodeled monastic buildings, as well as in a Europe where Catholicism was still primarily dominant. For Elizabethans residual also meant those early subversive reactions to the Catholic order mobilized by Wyclif, Hus, Melanchthon, Zwingli, and Luther, among others, linked in the public mind with Wittenberg and the 1521 Diet of Worms, and associated with the Hamlet in the play. Residual also designated a wide spectrum of conservative and social feelings based in agrarian resistance to economic and social change. In part residual also marked that long traditional, blood-based hereditary aristocratic order which successive Tudor monarchical bureaucracies labored to disempower.
DOMINANT signifies the Protestant, monarchical, bureaucratic cultural formation that emerged with Henry VIII (1491-1547), and came into full power during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603). Dominant also meant that the authority formally vested in the Pope, Catholic tradition, and/or an oligarchic English aristocratic nobility, came to reside instead in a sovereign monarch, English common law, and parliament.
TRANSGRESSIVE means everything defined as illegal and/or sinful according to the laws of the dominant culture and/or the more general codes of the culture. In religious terms, transgression of activities included atheism, witchcraft, sodomy, prostitution, incest, and adultery; in political terms, treason, rebellion, sedition, and the like; in social terms, violations of, for example, sumptuary laws (laws that made it illegal for people to wear clothes that would elevate their social status or alter their gender). Though the transgression is distinguished from the Dominant and Residual, it is a phenomenon that also occurs within each of these domains.
EMERGENT, to quote Raymond Williams, means the "new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and new kinds of relationship [that] are continually being created." These include the sorts of new knowledge a dominant order readily appropriates (i.e. takes over) as a way of strengthening itself, and the sorts of new knowledge that such an order regards as sufficiently threatening to contain or suppress.
From Understanding Hamlet R. Corum, Greenwood Press, 1998
cfk reads that and applies it to us today:
Residual: What is left over from the past.
Our pride in the idea that Americans were light bearers of freedom...the torch of our lady in the harbor stood for something important that led other nations toward the light of emancipation from dictatorships...that our forefathers and mothers had created something special in this land and held out that promise to all. Sure we had made mistakes, but we were working on fixing them.
Dominant: What is presently in control.
~~~shudder~~~
Transgressive: What lies beyond the boundaries of the acceptable.
Greed and the privatization of everything that moves so the rich will benefit more and more.
Emergent: What arises as new.
I have hope that the netroots will continue to flourish and our ability to communicate the truth will stop the propaganda and keep the pressure on our officials to do what is right.
Hamlet’s Ghost: part 2: http://www.dailykos.com/...
In this diary it was explained how in Ur-Hamlet (the play Shakespeare used as template for his) simply featured a "ghost which cried... miserably at the theater, like an oyster-wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge....’"
We also listed the kinds of ghosts that folks back in Shakespeare’s time constructed and used in everyday life:
For early modern Catholics, five kinds of apparitions operated in the everyday world on virtually a daily basis: (1) angels from heaven, (2) ghosts of the dead temporarily returned from purgatory, (3) demons from hell disguised as ghosts of dead persons, (4) ghost-hallucinations in the minds of the mad, and (5) ghost-frauds perpetuated by criminals. Protestants reduced this Catholic array to the last three, deciding in the first place that God no longer needed to use angels to send messages from heaven since he communicated with his true believers directly through the medium of the Holy Ghost, and, in the second, that since purgatory does not exist, neither do purgatorial ghosts. Skeptics further reduced this array to the last two on the ground that, as hell also does not exist, neither do demonic apparitions. For skeptics...ghosts became nothing but hallucinations or frauds. In other words, "preternatural phenomena were demonized" by Protestant doctrine, and then, and in the minds of the skeptics, "the demons were deleted, leaving only the natural causes" with the result that a ghost became "a new kind of fact" that signified nothing more than what it tells us about the contents of some person's head. The point of these reductions is clear: the more a culture desires to maintain the status quo, the more likely it is to construct ghosts as real, whereas the more it wants to embrace significant change the more it will derealize ghostly remnants of its past and the social formations these ghosts helped construct.... However, in addition to functioning for characters on stage as ghosts did [for people] in everyday life...one is particularly crucial for Hamlet, namely the use of a stage ghost...to epitomize a soulful formation, Hamlet's father's world, that insists on lifting its head in Denmark's present as a way of refusing to die.
Hamlet’s Ghost: part 3: http://www.dailykos.com/...
In this diary we wrapped things up and showed how critics/scholars hold up the text as if, just because four characters claim eleven sightings, the ghost is "real," i.e. a character--not metaphor for what facilitates/motivates actions and speech throughout the drama.
Kossack timmyk sums it all up:
timmyk: First of all, the Ghost is clearly denoted in the stage directions, speaking prompts, dramatis personae, etc.: that is, he's mentioned not just "within" the action of the play, but in the metatextual material added to it. So how could the Ghost be a figment? While we lack autographed MSS of Shakespeare's plays, it's assumed that these metatextual elements in the earliest printed versions would have at least been approved by him as useful and necessary to the play. So why assume a character doesn't exist when he's clearly denoted as existing in the play? Shakespeare himself played the ghost onstage. Why would the author of the play and a shareholder in the play company devote himself to dramatizing a figment that's not really "in" the play? The conspiracy story is a tantalizing figment of your imagination, nothing more. There's nothing to suggest this anywhere in the text! Actual conspirators were such a staple of the Renaissance stage, and such powerful characters, that no dramatist worth his salt would shunt them offstage, between the lines as it were.... To suggest that Shakespeare, contrary to his practice in all his other plays, would indulge in some supersubtle "hidden conspiracy" goes beyond ingeniousness into absurdity.
In other words, they’re claiming Hamlet is a ghost story, not a story of people conspiring to remake the world to their liking; where the ghost justifies actions in the play just like the War on Terror justifies actions of the NeoCons/MSM in real life.
Intellectuals and scholars of today lead society into a feeble-minded perception of Hamlet--the heart of the heart of western literature. Shakespeare's play uses the ghost to embody how the past undermines the present. But where Hamlet the character assigns positive value to it, Shakespeare's Hamlet shows what tragedy results when we do so in real life.
The text does indeed stand up to the following three interpretations (which can have shades of gray in-between, depending how it’s staged, and how the lead actor interprets the lead role):
- 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).
- Hamlet tells Marcellus, his most loyal soldier: you saw a ghost...didn't you, soldier? And you will see it again tonight, and you will convince anyone else on watch,... 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?
As far as Horatio's actions? Yes, he sees "the ghost," and is disturbed by it. He sees the machinations of an emerging conspiracy; he is traumatized and concerned with the safety and well-being of Hamlet. Is his friend in over his head? Will this conspiracy result in a tragedy? Would it not be better to accept how things have transformed with the death of the king, and move on? Horatio is that stereotypical character in life--one many of us have played--where "something’s up" amongst friends, and when we get wind of it, we’re not sure it’s the smartest thing to do.
American society has been Horatio for the past five years: 9/11 happened, and NeoCons claim a ghostly, world-wide network of terrorists to justify their actions. What will dispel it? An Article V Convention of course. The framers of the Constitution knew what Hamlet is about.