Shakespeare Reading Group Week One: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

>not using Arden Shakespeare
>being this new

I would maybe do this but only if we started with/only read the histories.

Every English speaker on here is going to have read the majority of his tragaties The histories are relativly more obscure but have the same kind of weight as the tragedies.

Or we should just read them in chronological order. I can't imagine many people on here feel like reading Macbeth or Othello.

>Lit is rejuvenated

Shut up retard.

Ok sure, I'm down for this.

>ywn go to an Elizabethan production of Shakespeare's greatest work at The Globe
>ywn sit in the balcony and watch Macbeth slay his liege
>ywn watch Ophelia cast herself into the river
>ywn hear Henry V give his rousing speech to his men on St. Crispin's day
>ywn see how the Theater Company creates the titular Tempest on the stage

>ywn watch Ophelia cast herself into the river
Played by a boy you know.

Shakespeare himself actually played some roles too.

Might as well join in, also in /comc/

glad this board is getting better

Ophelia's death takes place offstage and is only described by Gertrude. Ditto Duncan vis-a-vis Macbeth.

And The Tempest was originally performed in the Blackfriars Theatre by The King's Men--which would have been dope. They still do Elizabthen/Jacobean-style productions in that space, and The Tempest is a popular pick for obvious reasons. Highly recommend going if you're ever in London.

I will join, provided we get an actual schedule showing the dates over which each of the tragedies will be read/discussed.

>reading shakespeare, old white male
>instead of rupi kaur, proud woman of color
fucking bigots

Bump for the bard

Wait I'm retarded why did Ophelia drown?

She tried to save Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the sea but was overcome by pirates and succumbed to their patriarchical order.

She threw herself in the river about hamlet I believe

Check out this lecture by C S Lewis: fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20160701

Can we start with Othello? I watched a performance of Hamlet by a guy with a gameshow voice and I need time to get it out of my head.

Hamlet is one of the most plebbiest of his plays.

Let's read Coriolanus instead. If you disagree you are a plebe.

Reminder that if you're not subvocalizing Shakespeare with an Irish accent you're missing out on a lot of the rhythmn, cadences, accents and rhymes, basically all of Shakespeare's language.

You mean a west-country fARRRmer's accent.

Hamlet is a failure.

You really want to read a 5 hour play where some uppity teen werewolf stretches out the play with whiny monologues?

this besu

sounds like irish to me m8

didn't Joyce remark that the plot of Hamlet has Irish origins? Plus Shakespeare was Catholic (thus not British).

What else could have been but Irish?

Let's make the emerald isle red again.

You might find an answer to that if you looked up what people who know what they're talking about have to say, instead of your own meandering uninformed pontification.

I'm studying at a Drama school and we had this great ol' American stage actor come in and talk about the play. He said that Olivier's interpretation that Hamlet is a play about 'a man who couldn't make up his mind' is completely wrong and does the piece a great disservice. I happen to agree. I think the cause for Hamlet's inaction is that he simply doesn't care about or love his father enough to take revenge on Claudius, but he is consciously trying to will himself to care enough to go through with it. Also any idea of Hamlet as having an Oedipus complex is absolute bollocks and Freudian interpretation can go fuck it's Mum.

a recusant english catholic

they existed you know

No the point is that English accents at the time, especially Southern accents, were closer to a West country/black country sound than anything else, perhaps with an Irish lilt in there too. You can watch some stuff on David Crystal talking about it and reciting in that accent which is quite interesting. Also here's the best stage actor alive doing an accurate period Globe performance of Chorus from Henry V:

youtu.be/ue2bUpz_uRw

Let's do this.

Is this the first week or are we starting next week or what?

Does anyone have that big Shakespeare flowchart?

youtube.com/watch?v=smMa38CZCSU

Have this video

>tfw exams on the 10th & 12th

Sadly I don't think I can take part in this one, boys.

Some critics think that Ophelia was pregnant with Hamlet's child, as some of the flowers she mentions in the scenes before her suicide were commonly used in connections meant to abort pregnancies

Oh...yeah...

pathetic

there were Shakespeares in Ireland a few generations before him

look it up

Since it's settled that he was Irish.

What's the actual schedule for this?

Shakespeare was a protestant you petards REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

>not going with Oxford edition

In all seriousness wondering what editions people read. I really enjoy the oxfords but I just read the Sognet Classic edition of The Winter's Tale and it had a really good smattering of critical essays like one from Coleridge and another on the original source material and a sample of it. Never seen that in an Oxford edition.

signet master race

all else is meme

The ecstasy of the Dionysiac state, abolishing the habitual barriers and boundaries of existence, actually contains, for its duration, a lethargic element into which all past personal experience is plunged. Thus, through this gulf of oblivion, the worlds of everyday and Dionysiac reality become separated. But when one once more becomes aware of this everyday reality, it becomes repellent; this leads to a mood of asceticism, of denial of the will. This is something that Dionysiac man shares with Hamlet: both have truly seen to the essence of things, they have understood, and action repels them; for their action can change nothing in the eternal essence of things, they consider it ludicrous or shameful that they should be expected to restore order to the chaotic world. Understanding kills action, action depends on a veil of illusion -this is what Hamlet teaches us, not the stock interpretation of Hamlet as a John-a-dreams who, from too much reflection, from an excess of possibilities, so to speak, fails to act. Not reflection, not that! – True understanding, insight into the terrible truth, outweighs every motive for action, for Hamlet and Dionysiac man alike. No consolidation will be of any use from now on, longing passes over the world towards death, beyond the gods themselves; existence, radiantly reflected in the gods or in an immortal ‘Beyond’, is denied. Aware of truth from a single glimpse of it, all man can now see is the horror and absurdity of existence; now he understands the symbolism of Ophelia’s fate, now he understands the wisdom of Silenus, the god of the woods: it repels him.

From The Birth of Tragedy

Awesome, I'll finish Blood Meridian then get to work on Hamlet

I'd like to join, but I'm really bad at interpreting Shakespeare's writing style. Is there a way to get better at interpretation, for instance, an easier piece of his to read to ease my way into his work? Or do I just read his work and practice from each piece?

nfs.sparknotes.com/hamlet/page_2.html

Do you ever read Hamlet and just contemplate how stunning and other wordly it is that a man from the 16th Century wrote something like this? At a time when the idea of the self and of internal personal conflict was barely recognised or understood? It's unbelievable. I know I'm saying something pretty obvious here but it is proof to my mind that Hamlet is the best work of writing in the English language.

Who's making the schedule?

hamlet is good but overrated

That helps a lot! Thanks!

Glad to help! Keep at it and after a few plays you'll find you need the translation less and less.

Most people use footnotes when reading Shakespeare. Different editions give different amounts of footnotes and on different aspects of the text. After a few plays with NFS, try out some different editions and see which fit your style.

read it with an irish accent

Your mom's pussy is good but overrated

Never read Shakespeare. I will participate. I am liking this reading group trend.

Maybe my 2017 will be dominated by this and the short story group. Wouldn't be unhappy about that.

there's nothing worse than someone who praises Hamlet as the greatest thing ever but has nothing interesting to say about it

You and Harold Bloom should have lunch together.

>internal personal conflict was barely recognised in the 16th century

do Shakespearecucks really think this?

I'll get the schedule up and running here soon, had a weird night last night and couldn't get it going but I'm working on it now.

'Shakespearecucks'
Shakespearescucks.
Jesus wept.

Don't interpret anything - just read it.

I took Shakespeare Lit class during fall 2015 and it was really fun discussing possible reasons for why certain scenes happened or what it happening in the background and different takes on characters. Here's some I remember that I thought were interesting: Hamlet knows Ophelia was sent to spy on him and knows her father and his uncle are hiding so he pretends to act crazy, trying to throw hints that she should get away from their influence.

After reading Hamlet for the second time, I felt bad for the guy because he loves Ophelia and she breaks it off with him by giving back items he gave to her and she does this all too easily only because she doesn't appear to think for herself.

Usually this gets brought up as a joke in class how since Hamlet's 30 isn't he too old to be going to college and to be acting how he does? But it does kinda bother me how he's still in college even though I thought high-class people would finish college between 15-18 unless he decided to go late for some reason?

will write something and add it later. Can anyone just delete shit? I'll be mad.

It's truth. Only in the upper classes who could read and write and understand philosophy was it really a thing. Most people had no real sense of identity. Read a lot on this subject mate

Should we create like a whatsapp group just in case these threads go away soon? So that people's discussions can continue more easily? Or are app grpups just a pain?

Ah shit so many good reading groups are popping up, thanks for making Veeky Forums great again

>mega.nz/#!thsg0Q4S!3jxmsVHZqcaPMX_gwak4OSn7SVPOqWNWUuO2StcQAH0
Awesome link, thanks a bunch user

Here's some good videos on the pronunciation

youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
youtube.com/watch?v=9FF5K8VlcRI
youtube.com/watch?v=qYiYd9RcK5M

Sorry it took me so long to do this, I've been very busy with life and actually trying to read Hamlet again. Anyway, here's the schedule for the coming months for the Tragedies
>All of the plays are up for one week, Sunday to Sunday, in multiple threads if need be. This last Sunday, the 1st, was the first one.
>Week 1: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
>Week 2: Macbeth
>Week 3: Othello, the Moor of Venice
>Week 4: King Lear
>Week 5: Titus Andronicus
>Week 6: Romeo and Juliet
>Week 7: Julius Caesar
>Week 8: Antony and Cleopatra
>Week 9: Coriolanus
>Week 10: The Life of Timon of Athens
After we finish tragedies we'll move onto Comedies, then Romances, then finish with his Histories.
If someone would like to compile this to an image that would be great, I would but unfortunately am horrible with graphic design.

He's right. Hamlet is trying to collect enough evidence to be certain because murder is high stakes. He knows exactly what he is doing.

30 year old Hamlet is a convention based on one edition not included in others. There is also reason to believe that he more like 20-23.

princehamlet.com/furness.html

Link is the whole kerfuffle. I'm not into beating dead internet horses, but Hamlet The Younger is more fun. And more likely.

If Hamlet and Othello switched places both the tragedies would have been avoided. Othello would have killed Claudius right after seeing the ghost of his father and Hamlet would have watched desdemona and realized she was faithful.

Stoppard, is that you again?

Thanks OP. I've read 7/10, but will try to participate in the discussions and read the ones I lack.

There is reason to believe Shakey was being coy about Hamlet's age. I know, if you take the gravediggers two statements and blah, but those two lines of dialog have ambiguity in them, considering the way the guild rules for advancement worked. 30 is best thought of as the upper limit. There was also the very real world problem of casting actors available, so a range would have lent itself to production necessities. There are also problems with Gert's relative age if Hamlet is really 30, re "passion" of Claudius, unless he was really into GILFs, which, ew, plus, really? There is also the text problem, in other editions the math is more like "anything older than twelve" which leaves young Hamlet on the table. He's called "young" so many times that he'd have to be retarded if he's thirty. Let's say probably 23, but up to 30 if we can't cast a credible young actor this season.

This reminds me of a statement Bloom made that it would be impossible to have Lear and Hamlet on the same stage, or something along those lines.
Just how would that play out?

Seriously though, Shakespeare is the most overrated writer in modern history.

Bad opinion

It's hardly an opinion. Shakespeare owns his world wide popularity to the success of British colonizers.

I'm not saying he's bad, just highly overrated.

dude,
> After we finish tragedies we'll move onto Comedies, then Romances, then finish with his Histories.
That's simply not happening.

A better list (in no order)

- Hamlet
- Antony and Cleo
- Coriolanus
- Measure for Measure
- King Lear
- Macbeth
- Othello
- As You Like It
- Merchant of Venice
- Henry 4
- The Tempest

he's one of the best, but I agree saying he's THE best is useless and overlooks the fact that he churned out crap and we probably attribute more meaning to his writing than he did and he sometimes wrote in collaboration

Stop being such a narcissist.

>discourage memes
>a good thing

Agreed, the idea that the group will persist through every play is foolish. We should instead line up ten reasonably accessible ones and see how it goes. I don't know enough about Shakespeare to offer an opinion on which ten they should be, however.

What's his best history play? I've looked around and there doesn't seem to be a consensus, but Henry IV came up a couple of times. How are the parts related? They're not considered one play, right?

Hence the fact that I've only planned out the order for Tragedies. His Tragedies are his best and most famous, so I don't think it's much to say that we can get through them all in these next 10 weeks
If people are still on board then we'll move on.

The Life of Timon of Athens and Titus Andronicus are not more famous than eg The Merchant of Venice or The Tempest or A Midsummer Night's Dream or Twelfth Night or etc etc. Plus I think the variety might be nicer than just wading through tragedies.

So, I just went and saw the play. Does that count?

Henry IV. Though it's not very strictly historical.

>More than half the page is annotations

I want to read the damn play

A couple of interesting comments from Goddard:

The story of Hamlet is the story of Hal over again, subtilized, amplified, with a different ending. The men themselves seem so unlike that the similarities of their situations and acts are obscured. Like Hal, Hamlet is a prince of charming quality who cares nothing at the outset for his royal prospects but is absorbed in playing and savoring life. Only with him it is playing in a higher sense: dramatic art, acting, and playwriting rather than roistering in taverns and perpetrating practical jokes. And, like all men genuinely devoted to art, he is deeply interested in philosophy and religion, drawing no sharp lines indeed between or among the three. Because he is himself an imaginative genius, he needs no Falstaff to spur him on. Hamlet is his own Falstaff.

----

Another example of his projection: Of all the glasses that catch his image in the play none, oddly, is more revealing than that held up by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. [...] It is their function to be nothing except what they give back from the world around them. They are conformists. They follow the prevailing mode. They contaminate their friendship for Hamlet by obeying the King when he invites them to be spies. But what is Hamlet himself doing but obeying another king and following another mode in accepting the code of blood revenge? [...] This unperceived analogy is unquestionably the ground of Hamlet's devastating contempt: for these harmless fashion plates. He scorns Guildenstern for attempting to play on him as on a pipe at the very moment when unseen forces are playing upon him.

----

Up to the play scene, the opposing natures in Hamlet are in something like equipoise. With the play, blood gains the upper hand and confirms its victory in the murder of Polonius.

"There are many crises in Hamlet, but this is the crisis of crises—this, and not the sparing of the praying King or the killing of Polonius, which are but the inevitable outcome of what happens here. Now, for the last time, Hamlet is free. A second more and he will be bound by the fatality of his act. Fortune will have sounded on him what stop she pleased. The second passes, and Hamlet's blood finally overwhelms his judgment. Seeing Lucianus pour poison, he must pour poison too—all that is left in his vial. He breaks in to give a huddled summary of the rest of the plot:

He poisons him i' the garden for's estate. His name's Gonzago; the story is extant, and writ in very choice Italian. You shall see user how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago's wife.
The dagger has descended. Hamlet himself has o'erstepped the modesty of nature and betrayed the right of dramatic art to speak obliquely. He has produced an abortion. Forgetting that "the play's the thing," he has ruined his imaginative experiment by "telling all"—just what he damned the players for doing, far less blatantly and offensively, in their dumb-show. He is hoist with his own petar. He has sprung the mousetrap instead of letting it spring itself, and has caught two royal mice, himself as well as the King."

""Lights, lights, lights!" everyone echoes. To miss the symbolism here is to miss all. Light, not fire, is what Claudius craves. And light is what The Murder of Gonzago might have been to his soul. But Hamlet has debased it to fire, to false fire at that."

"As the cry "Lights, lights, lights!" fades away, Hamlet, left alone with Horatio, dances about in a delirium of joy. The Ghost is justified! He sings snatches of song and calls for music. "Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings at grave-making?" That later remark of his to Horatio in the churchyard is the tersest comment on his own conduct here, for it is many graves, including Ophelia's and his own, that he has just been digging."

The dead Hamlet is borne out "like a soldier" and the last rites over his body are to be the rites of war. The final word of the text is "shoot." The last sounds we hear are a dead march and the reverberations of ordnance being shot off. The end crowns the whole. The sarcasm of fate could go no further. Hamlet, who aspired to nobler things, is treated at death as if he were the mere image of his father: a warrior.

[...]

Art or war: it is the only choice humanity ever had or ever will have. Unless the first is resorted to while we are free, the other has to be resorted to under the pressure of events. Hamlet made the right choice, but then, at the moment of triumph, converted an instrument of regeneration into an instrument of revenge. Made for heaven, he was tempted by hell-and fell.

[...]

In War and Peace, Tolstoy gives us the same situation with the other outcome. Pierre, like Brutus, conceives it to be his duty to kill a tyrant: Napoleon. Like Hamlet, he wanders about in a daze. "He was suffering the anguish men suffer," says Tolstoy, "when they persist in undertaking a task impossible for them—not from its inherent difficulties, but from its incompatibility with their own nature." [...] In saving the actual child from the literal fire, he saves his own innocence, the child within himself, from the criminal fire that threatens to consume him. Imagination triumphs over force.

What's a good book version to buy? I'm scared of getting one and it endsbup being an annotated version for 9th graderd

Arden standalones or collection. Standalones come with introductory essay and lots of notation.

Older people do have sex, friend. New STD infections are a common problem in retirement communities.