Shakespeare: C/D?

Although it's notable as the only speech where Macbeth achieves clarity. I'd say Lady Macduff even has a better role

macbeth is a busy mawn until then

Arguably there's clarity in the 'firstlings of my heart' speech but he's also (authentically) batshit at that point in the play. The McKellen exposition is so great.

These John Barton masterclass videos are the best (McKellen is in there, Patrick Stewart, Ben Kingsley, Judi Dench).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-MPmoQ_s18

ty will get on those

Barton has excellent cardigans and excellent vocal idiosyncrasies (metafuh and problim to name a couple).

episode two of that in particular, where they talk about working w the verse, is totally revelatory, not just for delivery but for understanding

another great unbartlettized juliet one is her pair of speeches to the friar ("tell me not, friar, that thou hear'st of this" and "o bid me leap rather than marry paris") after he's been like well, i guess this teen wedding i officiated didn't work out, that's a pity, and she's like excuse me do you think this is a game? aren't you supposed to be the grown-up here? don't you know you're in this with me? "god joined my heart and romeo's, thou our hands"-- then when he lets a second of uncertainty elapse without having a sententious speech ready she hits the textbook every-word-is-one-syllable maximum-emphasis line "be not so long to speak. i long to die"-- then her tumbling childish-tantrum list of things she'd rather do than marry paris ("chain me with roaring bears") spirals before your eyes into an adult premonition of her actual future, as she tries for the worst thing she can think of and hits on exactly what's going to happen ("or bid me go into a new-made grave / and hide me with a dead man in his shroud"). you get to act younger than romeo and older than the nurse and the friar just stands there terrified watching a human consciousness struggle to doomed life on the stage and thinking: i have made a huge mistake

Watched the 2021 Macbeth last night for the first time and enjoyed it. My partner also was flitting thru YouTube and caught some of the Ian Mckellan archives

Reading the tragedies over the past year has been a delight. I started with Hamlet and as you tune in Shakespeare's language the plays have gotten better and better. Antony getting the mob going in Julius Caesar was a marvel.

I will try to get into the comedies but there were few rewards in A Midsummer's Night Dream. Might re-read that over Xmas.

I reread The Tempest on Thanksgiving. Man, Prospero gets more and more unsympathetic with each reading. The play stops cold too when he exposes poor Miranda to three pages of exposition.

I've been reading Othello this weekend. Might watch one of the versions on Youtube later. Emilia rules, Roderigo is a chump.

I've also been reading some Bradley and G. Wilson Knight. GWK has some hilarious takes - he more or less depicts Hamlet as the villain of the play, while repeatedly talking about how wise and sensible Claudius is.

Idk if Claudius is sensible but Hamlet is absolutely the villain

"a" villain, not "the" imo. Claudius still murdered his dad!

Hamlet more of a dick than a villain i think

yeah hes not made the best of the opportunities that still remain for him, you cant gain am insta following in wollowing

Okay, yeah, point taken, I shouldn't have said 'hilarious' (didn't mean to imply that it's a worthless interpretation). He has a picture of Hamlet as a kind of inhuman superman who has seen death and therefore rises above the merely human failings of the rest of the characters, and crushes them all - whereas "a balanced judgment is forced to pronounce ultimately in favour of life as contrasted with death, for optimism and the healthily second-rate, rather than the nihilism of the superman." I think maybe he pushes the idea of Hamlet's cynicism and nihilism further than feels true to me, idk.

Hamlet fucks about trying to prove to himself that his father's ghost is telling the truth - either as an excuse not to do anything or to give himself the courage to revenge him. i don't think certainty or nihilism are his issues at all.

and it's the healthily second-rate characters who have the gung-ho spirit that finishes the play with bodies everywhere so i'm not sure that's a victory for Life either

The play stops cold too when he exposes poor Miranda to three pages of exposition.

i had this interrupted by a klaxon going off above ariel’s summoning chamber in the lab— prospero and miranda turn upstage to look— they both turn back— “now cease thy questions,” prospero says, immediately neuralizes her, and props her unconscious body against a flat. always got a startled, uncomfortable chuckle: man i dunno about this guy!

xyz u should read as u like it

Hamlet is not a villain. And certainty and nihilism *are* his issues.

There are many key moments but one of them has to be the soliloquy just before the play within a play. He wonders if he is a coward and sees in himself a deficiency of feeling. Instead of righteous rage, he felt neurosis and self hatred in response to his father’s death; his grief took a more complicated form than he expected. Only after does he shift gears and say no, the ghost might have been a spirit who took advantage of my weakened mental state — basically a delusion. He doubts his sanity. He affirms that the play within a play is the right thing to do. He needs to verify what happened.

Meanwhile, in his “delay” he has done more damage than he knows. Ophelia has ready been traumatized by him, and she knows the madness isn’t an act. She sees that his personality has deteriorated and talks about it right after the “nunnery” encounter. He is not rooted in anything solid; he is a mass of rage and fear.

Basically, he is experiencing a mental health crisis. It doesn’t look like what he believes “madness” is. It is not losing his “reason,” it’s the fact that his rationalizations are spinning out in multiple directions, trying to keep up with his volatile mood.

It is doubt that makes him “mad.” And he resolves it in act 5 by embracing fate and an identity as a divinely ordained king — “hamlet the dane” — but this too is a tragic and partial solution. He couldn’t take doubt — maybe he couldn’t take modernity — so he embraced the traditional code, for a moment, but this world is dying and he knows it. The future belongs to the osrics he disdains — the rising bourgeoisie — not princes like himself.

When he tells laertes that his madness was “not him” it is supposed to come off wrong. It was him, the whole time, all of it. he was digging into himself, and the process was ugly.