Dead King and Prince keep switching the places. When the Ghost speeks Hamlet's lines (with Ophelia?), the sound as if is on life-support. He comes before the 40 days are over?
The moonlight. VO (voice over), the actor moves in silence.
The ghost appears/disappears first on the monitor, screens.
Set -- video-cemetory. Morg. The Ghost is naked? He is old, he repeats himself. Hard to understand. He is MAD.
[ pix : Shakespeare ]
Hamlet had no children, broke the bloodline and spare his father from becoming a child.
Did Ophelia's mother die, giving her birth? She will never see what happened to Polonius
The rest in Hamlet2002...
2007 ...
A century later.
What do you from the future?
Purgatory
GHOST
I am thy father's spirit,
Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, (1.5.16)
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end, (1.5.19)
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list!
If thou didst ever thy dear father love--
Gibson (Ghost scene)
...
PS
From the ASTR List:
In his 2001 book _Hamlet in Purgatory_, Stephen Greenblatt deals with
Shakespeare and Catholicism. Beginning on p. 248, Greenblatt asks why the
ghost of Old Hamlet is clearly purgatorial: it might simply have called
for revenge without describing itself as "confin'd to fast in fires, / Till
the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purg'd away"
(I.v.10ff). Among other explanations, Greenblatt notes that evidence,
albeit quite speculative, suggests that Shaekspeare's father--but not
Shakespeare himself--had lived as a secret Catholic in Protestant England
(see also 312n60).
Greenblatt's other explanations for a purgatorial ghost (at this point in
his complex argument) are that (1) Shakespeare and his contemporaries were
of a younger generation than the leaders of the Protestant reformation and
this younger generation may have harbored some nostalgia for the old
Catholic rituals and (2) that Shakespeare himself was contemplating his
father's and his son's lives and deaths when writing _Hamlet_. He
concludes, however, that, regardless of these biographical and historical
particularities, Shakespeare certainly would have been aware of
Catholic/Protestant debate carried on in tracts published in England and on
the continent, and that "These works are sources for Shakespeare's plays in
a differant sense [than that of literal source material]: they stage an
ontological argument about spectrality and remembrance, a momentous public
debate, that unsettled the institutional moorings of a crucial body of
imaginative materials and therefore made them available for theatrical
appropriation" (249).
In getting to this and other conclusions regarding Old Hamlet's ghost,
Greenblatt raises (or perhaps resurects) some interesting questions
regarding _Hamlet_.
1) Why does Hamlet feign maddness? In the source story by Saxo
Gramatticus, the equivalent to Claudius kills the equivalent of Hamlet's
father out in the open, justifies the killing, takes the throne, but knows
that the equivalent to Hamlet is duty-bound to seek revenge. In this
context feigning maddness buys the character time. In _Hamlet_, however,
the murder of Old Hamlet is secret, so Hamlet actually draws attention to
himself by pretending to go nuts.
2) Why in the "To be or not to be" speech does Hamlet describe death as a
land from which no traveler returns, when he's just met a traveler who has
returned?
Greentblatt acknowledges that Shakespeare may have simply contradicted
himself, or chosen dramatic effect over consistency, but Greenblatt uses
these cruxes to advance his concerns (described above) about ghosts,
memory, and "unmooring" institutional dogma for dramatic use. Perhaps,
however, list readers have their own opinions, or know of other takes on
these issues.
David Schlossman
Not so cut and dried, I think. First, Queen Elizabeth's 1558 law
forbade religious references in plays--so the standard cycle play
replaced the religious figure with a secular one, creating the
Elizabethan form (eg Tamberlain, etc). It is also safe to say that it
was for political reasons that plays were set elsewhere and at earlier
times, not necessarily religious ones. Furthermore, there's a very
decent argument that Shakespeare was harkening back to Druidism in all
those plays set in "healing" or sprite-filled woods, which is pagan
according the Catholicism. This is not to say that there might not be
some Catholic overtones, but they are only some among a range of issues
and possibilities. Above all the plays needed to stand on their own for
such a commercial playwright as WS was in his day. Stuart J. Hecht, Boston College
If we accept the copy of the (now lost) Catholic testament of John
Shakespeare, discovered in the roof of Shakespeare's birthplace in
Stratford-upon-Avon in April 1757, then "the playwright was probably
brought up in a Roman Catholic household in a time of official suspicion
and persecution of recusancy" (Greenblatt, HAMLET IN PURGATORY, p.
249). Of William's personal beliefs we will never be sure, and it is
dangerous to draw conclusions from attitudes expressed by characters in
his plays. Evidence suggests that William conformed to the Church of
England, but my sense is that outward conformity could cover or mask a
broad spectrum of personal beliefs and practices at home. As Elizabeth
herself intimated, her delicate 1559 religious settlement emphasized
public conformity; she didn't wish to police private belief. That said,
it became much more dangerous to be openly Catholic in England after
1570, when Elizabeth was excommunicated by Pope Pius V (thus making all
Catholics seem potential traitors).
For more on this topic, see the recent special issue of RELIGION AND
THE ARTS (Vol. 5-3 2001) on "Shakespeare and Catholicism," guest edited
by David Beauregard. A full listing of scholarship on 'the Catholic
Shakespeare' has been recorded by my colleague Dennis Taylor on his
Boston College web site, "Shakespeare and Religion Chronology,"
http://www2.bc.edu/~taylor/shakes.html.
Respectfully,
Andrew Sofer Boston College
Screen = mirror. Security cameras.
NB
The crown and the thrown (the same coffin). Hamlet as king -- when? In the grave with the dead Ophelia as his queen. What kind of crown? Like the swords -- children toys.
