Diseased Garden State

The first time I read Hamlet, my instructor told me to take note of all the references to gardening that I could find. At that time, I was still new to Shakespeare so I focused on the overall use of language rather than weeding through the play to find gardening terms. This time around, I remembered my instructor's challenge and was surprised at what I found. The play is laced with words such as unweeded, rotten, rank, decay, seed, grow, nature, flowers, thorns, spring and many more. What Shakespeare created in Hamlet was a metaphor of a garden that tied into the theme of the nation as a diseased body.
Early on, it's declared that something is rotten in the state of Denmark. We're told that Claudius is the corrupted unjust ruler of Denmark and hellbent on keeping the throne at all costs. If Denmark is a considered a garden, Claudius, the gardener, is not tending it properly with his corrupt ways, thus, leading to the inevitable decay. You might even say Claudius is a weed.
Another way to look at the metaphor of the garden is that Denmark is to represent the Garden of Eden and the fall of man. When the Ghost tells Hamlet how he was murdered, he refers to Claudius as a serpent. What followed was Claudius's seduction of Gertrude and King Hamlet's death.

'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me, so the whole ear of Denmark (I.5.35)

When I really got engaged with the garden metaphor, I realized that the 1994 film The Lion King really painted it well on screen.

Before:

After:

Ultimately, Hamlet wants to reclaim his garden and restore good health to the nation of Denmark. 

Travis

Revenge is a Dish Best Served Tomorrow

I think it's safe to say that Hamlet is Shakespeare's most famous and most performed play. It was performed for the first time around 1603 and underwent several revisions before it became what it is now. Four-hundred years ago, the Ghost of Hamlet's father and his complicated demand that his son revenge his death struck audiences forcibly. An unusual sign of Hamlet's popularity is the record of it being performed aboard Captain William Keeling's ship Dragon off the coast of Sierra Leone in September 1607.  Why is Hamlet so popular? Just like the lead character himself, it's impossible to be certain. It's the only story of revenge that questions human purpose and incites human error. In today's world, most revenge stories are concerned with 'how' the act of revenge will be carried out instead of 'why'. In the 2003-04 films Kill Bill Vol I & II, the bride never questions her actions or her motives as to what she's doing. All she does is answer her urge for revenge by killing her ex-colligues who massacred her wedding. Unlike Hamlet, Kill Bill is very closed-minded in how it treats the use of revenge, often making it seem like a comical joke.
Elizabethan audiences would have been mixed about how to understand views of revenge. Not until 1623 did Francis Bacon's essay "On Revenge" call the act "a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out." An act of "wild justice"is an oxymoron because justice is a quality of civilization and "wild" being a form of savagery. Despite being condemned by church and state, personal revenge was very much frequent in all social groups and classes. So when a play concerning revenge involving a future heir to the throne of Denmark arrived, all social groups would most likely believe that Hamlet was in the right to defend his family's dignity. Shakespeare even justifies the use of revenge by adding a different point of view at the matter. Laertes' dilemma of a murdered father and a sister driven mad is directly reminiscent of Hamlet's dilemma.
I think what makes Hamlet so great is the build up of tension the play creates. More often than not, an audience screams at the protagonist to carry out revenge as quickly and brutally as possible to right the wrong. But not Hamlet. He instead runs from the responsibility and waits for the certainty that never comes. When he finally does decide to lash out, he makes a grave, reckless error by killing the wrong man. In the end, it's rather amazing that Hamlet actually accomplished his revenge.

There's so much to dissect in this play. Stay tuned.

Travis

Why you stuck-up, half-witted, scruffy-looking nerf-herder!

Insults! One of my favorite common pastime's is now a homework assignment and I couldn't be happier to bite my thumb at thee. Shakespeare, as you all have probably figured it out by now, was to insults what Michael Jordan was to basketball... unnaturally good and made it look like child's play. In today's modern world, the art of insulting someone eloquently and wittily has lost its charm. Insults these days are unoriginal, uninspired and overly vulgar. 

I've always wanted to insult someone in the language of Shakespeare. If pulled off correctly, most people wouldn't have a clue as to which language you're speaking. 

Try reading these with Samuel L. Jackson's voice in your head.  

-Cockered hell-hated pignut

-Yeasty fly bitten barnacle

-Errant rude-growing pigeon egg

While constructing this list, it reminded me of another figure who uses great insults in today's popular culture. I'm talking about Groundskeeper Willie from The Simpsons of course!

-You blouse-wearing poodle-walker!

-Ye croquet-playin' mint-muncher!

-You ruined the atmosphere, you daft pansy!

-(Referring to head-lice) See you in hell, you wingless bloodsuckers!  

After you read this post, I feel like most of you will be thinking something along these lines.

"What you just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even anything close to what may be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."

Travis

Shakespeare Unchained

I spent the first couple of weeks completely spellbound at the range of brilliance I saw my fellow 473 peers bringing to the discussion table. I'm a junior in the filmmaking program, and I've spent the last three years in the Visual Communications Building that I forgot there was a college outside of it. Needless to say, I jumped at the opportunity to get out and explore other classes in other buildings at MSU. This is the second course on Shakespeare's work that I've taken. I took my first course at a small community college in Helena several years ago. Up until then, I had never really openly explored the works written by the Bard of Avon. What surprised me most was how most of his works intertwine with one another with his use of characters, their archetypes and his recurring themes. For example, in just about every single one of Shakespeare's plays, the theme of the "rightful ruler" can be found. From Hamlet to Othello, and from the historical Henry pieces to even The Taming of the Shrew, someone is getting screwed out of a certain power that they believe they're entitled to.  

Fast forward to this class, where I'm tasked with reading the enigmatic works of Ted Hughes and Frederick Turner, and all of a sudden I'm lost at sea. These works are so immense that even the most seasoned readers could find something new every time it's read. While I understood that Hughes was making a point about the way Shakespeare constructed his plays with his vocabulary and the way he constructed sentences, Turner is still very foreign to me. I'm trying to find time go back through some of the earlier blogs and see what everyone else had to say.

One thing I've been wanting to discuss is the way Shakespeare writes his monologues and his overall use of dialogue in his plays. Shakespeare faced a problem in his theater because he had two main audiences to speak to, the aristocracy and the common populace. Since he depended so strongly on these two demographics to support his theater,  "he devised a means of expression that communicated instantly with every level of his audience, but particularly with the two extremes. In other words, he found the common language of the highest and the lowest" (Hughes 18).

Shakespeare's Elizabethan terminology seems out of place in our world today. I mean, after all, why bother saying "good morrow, my good lords and ladies! How fairest thine all today" when you could simply say "what's up dude?" Obviously he was heavily influenced by Elizabethan dialect and communicating to various audiences, but I think it was his way of being different from everyone else. Being an fervent lover of films, the only comparison I can make about the way Shakespeare wrote his plays is to the work of Quentin Tarantino. Both of these writers expressed their characters' personalities through extended scenes of dialog. It's just seems that Shakespeare had more eloquence in his style with phrasing things such as "away, you cut-purse rascal! you filthy bung, away! By this wine, I'll thrust my knife in your mouldy chaps, an you play the saucy cuttle with me. Away you bottle-ale rascal! you basket-hilt stale juggler, you!" (2 Henry IV 2.4. 120-22) As opposed to "English motherfucker! Do you speak it?" While both writers are trying to hit their target audiences in their own unique way, I still think they're just trying to be cool at the same time.

Travis