Self, Individual, Alone, One... That is the pix of the world beyond.
Mortal...
Death
Gate-coffin, the light behind it is different. Stop, freez -- the stages of living and dying.
After-life, after-death...
Love
Images?
From the Forum:
Date: Wed Oct 10, 2001 2:13 am
Subject: Heather plays what if...
So, what if Ophelia and Hamlet are "Everyman" and "Everywoman"? They
must, in each of them, be everything that their gender can be. Hence
Ophelia is a mixture of virgin and mother and whore and death. She
and Hamlet are inherently paradoxical and their tragedy may be that
they never find equilibrium. There is this constant battle that tears
each of them apart in their own way. I love Ophelia because I
empathize with her. She faces the same struggles that every woman
does, but to a more intense degree.
What if Ophelia died a virgin? She never got the chance to experience
all the aspects of woman that she is and this angers her. Maybe the
realization that Hamlet, the only man she could possibly have, he
being Everyman and she being Everywoman, was never going to establish
his equilibrium either, thereby depriving her of her chance at
fulfilling herself. What if being deprived in life has made her hate
Hamlet with a passion unmatched in death? What if she has come to the
realization too late that death really is an end of everything and now
she is in this limbo where she can never be anything ever again and so
she regrets taking her own life and now hates herself as well? What
if she has created this sort of alternate self to make up for what she
could never have in life?
What is Ophelia was not sweet and pure? What if she was the vilest
whore on the planet and repented by killing herself only after she saw
her only chance at redemption i.e. Hamlet slip away? Now she has a
chance at purity in death, but she can't break away from old habits.
Just a few questions. -Heather
Ham.
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! O God!
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! O fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead!--nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother,
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month,--
Let me not think on't,--Frailty, thy name is woman!--
A little month; or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father's body
Like Niobe, all tears;--why she, even she,--
O God! a beast that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn'd longer,--married with mine uncle,
My father's brother; but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month;
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married:-- O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not, nor it cannot come to good;
But break my heart,--for I must hold my tongue!
Ideas Page and this one should serve to bridge the play with the present.
From: "michael karoly"
Date: Tue Oct 9, 2001 8:15 pm
Subject: mike karoly
Hello this is emike, eghost. I am thinking that our Hamlet at some point finds himself to be just a character - especially in these post-modern times, ehamlet vs. realhamlet vs actor vs eactor. a crisis unfolding a stripping away of identities. not just of / for himself, but of & for the apparent (and then at other times apparently false) other characters - Hamlet discovers subtext in others, and himself. Considers the possibility of being empty (an instrument to be played upon) and then suppresses the horrifying notion in order to act. (like we do as actors - consider/try-to-make ourselves empty vessels for anothers plot (revenge?why that) but cannot simultaneously be empty and take action -(otherwise the ghost would act, hamlet too) emptiness is ghostliness, cleanliness is godliness, but we are dirt-dust-ashes as well. I believe in Hamlets instability - not actually being someone (questioning makes us/him (more) human, and prevents stability/ stasis), hamlets extreme instability (makes him so 'real') builds extreme attachments to others/identities/relationships attachment to a tangible something/one else (ie an actor, a mother who is a mother who is/isn't a girlfriend who is/isn't a whore who is/isn't pregnant (is Gertrude/Ophelia pregnant - again) who is a mother of who, a purpose for living [revenge], friends/enemies, drama. (like a dizzying drunk trying to sleep clutching the carpet for vertigo relief -= but if you're really drunk like? Hamlet? asking questions about everything, you make the carpet spin with you, the whole room spins away, and then you have less to hold on to then you did before-- (hamlet ala pirendello one character in search of an actor, - the ghost is a character in search of an actor (why they have the same name) us all characters in search of an answer. vtheatre, cameras, lighting, quantum physics, nuclear bombs - Our technology helps us ask more spiralling questions about ourselves, and our reality. techno-Surveillance of Ophelia and Hamlet having sex/making love ( is she/he complicit in this surveillance. Do we show the implicit voyeurism of the Claudius + audience (Claudience) asking 'are the actors doing it? do they enjoy it ? do the actors characters like each other hate each other want to kill us themselves? (polongertruhamlehoratiopheliaetc.- and our 'real' or 'actual' audience--- tantalizing them ourselves with pornopromises (watch us play!) -- slapped with real-fake pain/love/reality/insanity/loss...The instability of the audience what is real isn't real - the 'news' - propaganda vs. journalism. The theatre -- this A-effect could have same destabilizing effect on Audience as it does on actor/ Hamlet.
Madness = Lucky's monologue (postmodern take on knowledge).
NB
Death first -- and only then life; pomo conditions.
