The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 23.0252  Friday, 15 June 2012

 

From:        Patrick Dolan <This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.>

Date:         June 14, 2012 3:40:08 PM EDT

Subject:     Re: Yale Hamlet

 

>Ophelia describes Hamlet in the following terms:

>

>The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword;

>The expectancy and rose of the fair state,

>The glass of fashion and the mould of form,

>The observed of all observers. . . . 

 

Surely others will notice this and respond similarly. Ophelia loves Hamlet and is his social inferior. She sees all these things because she’s in a specific relation to him, not the other way around. If you want to talk about a writer who is keenly aware of how human emotions inflect human perceptions, look at the sonnets, look at the plays and then come back to Hamlet. If Giametti can pull Hamlet off, more power to him. If he can’t, there will more than his looks to blame.

 

Hamlet:

What have you, my good friends, deserv’d at the hands of

Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?

 

Guildenstern:

Prison, my lord?

 

Hamlet:

Denmark’s a prison.

 

Rosencrantz:

Then is the world one.

 

Hamlet:

A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and

dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th’ worst.

 

Rosencrantz:

We think not so, my lord.

 

Hamlet:

Why then 'tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or

bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.

 

Cheers,

Pat

 

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