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There should be an upper limit on headaches. Seriously.
I have read almost all the books I got out about Hamlet. The one I bought I haven't started, but since it's bought I don't got to take it back anywhere so that works out. The one I was reading today I only read the first 5 chapters and the one on Hamlet but I think the reading list says 'first four chapters' or something so that probably works out. And now my head hurts. So reading will pause.
I've been thinking about quotes that mean something quite different in context. A lot of Hamlet gets taken and used as particular lines, and a lot more gets used to add a sort of Hamlet tint to something. But context is so key. Take 'To be or not to be', a speech so famous I didn't used to know what play it was in but I knew the speech from all the piss takes. (To pee or not to pee... :eyeroll:) That speech within the play is so complicated. The words on their own could be about suicide, tyrannicide, or some other thing entirely. But put it back in the play and it just gets all complicated. It is probably a soliloquy, with only Hamlet on stage and the convention that the character truthfully speaks his innermost thoughts. But then again it could be that Ophelia is on stage and visible to Hamlet, and we know that Claudius and Polonius are hiding somewhere around there. Those two might be visible to the audience but not Hamlet, or they just might have been noticed by him. And it's a whole different speech, depending on these things you can't figure out from the written word - who is watching and who knows who is watching and is it in fact a soliloquy or just a speech the others don't interrupt? And when you just stand there and quote it you don't get any of those layers.
Using quotes to add some Hamlet to things... well does just using the quote add Hamlet? Picard quotes 'what a piece of work is man' to Q. Is Picard being mopey, suicidal, and Danish? Not so much. In fact in that case he explicitly changes the meaning of the piece - "What Hamlet said with irony I say with conviction". Which is interesting... but come to think I haven't watched that episode quite possibly since it first aired so how is it I remember that bit anyway? Because Patrick Stewart rocks I think. ANYway... I looked on Wiki and it has a whole section on quotes just to that little speech... wherein I find it's in the Coraline film. Cool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/References_to_Hamlet has its own page, and it is a rather large one, despite being as hit and miss as Wiki tends to. Includes a generic revenge tragedy ghost or three, because Hamlet is the bit of the genre that survives in the popular imagination. Leaves out the Buffy film.
Buffy didn't recognise "The rest is silence" in the movie. Were we meant to? Given that it turned out to have practical relevance, somehow being how to break out of vampire thrall. If so, her not getting it is a haha look at the clueless, followed by a clueless wins anyway triumph. Same line gets quoted with rather more humor in The Dark Age, one of those episodes I at least used to have memorised. Giles says it when Buffy turns off her non-music. Is he being Hamlet-y or especially snooty British? Well he's not actually dying and he doesn't have to rely on others to tell his story... but the guy outside does. Is interesting.
Is also the episode that introduced Ethan. And in the Buffy comics his Hamlet quote is "I'm more an antique Roman than a Dane." Also, in context, the line that immediately follows it "Just remember what you see here." sounds rather like both old Hamlet's ghost's orders to his son and young Hamlet speaking to Horatio. But Buffy remains clueless, doesn't know the context, tries to figure out the words. She gets from 'roman' to XXX as roman numerals to Ethan's room. So far so simple, right? Like in the movie, the quote turns out to be simple useful information.
But...
If it keeps the original context, it makes Ethan that little bit more interesting. Because Horatio says that as a prelude to suicide. After all the buisness with the poisoned sword and poisoned wine:
Hamlet: Horatio, I am dead, thou livst, report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied.
Horatio: Never believe it. I am more an antique Roman than a Dane: Here's some liquor left.
Seeing Hamlet poisoned and dying Horatio resolves to follow him, in the Roman style. Notes in the back of the copy I've got say 'like Cato or Brutus'. Notes from class say like stoics - the idea was you could bear everything unruffled, and if it ever got too bad you could always kill yourself. Classical Roman philosophy approved where Christianity was quite clear on it being unacceptable.
Hamlet goes on to talk Horatio out of it, "if thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw they breath in pain, to tell my story."
Ethan is talking to Buffy. Who doesn't even know what he means.
And does he mean it like Horatio did? Is he more a Roman? We know he worships Janus, a Roman god. So maybe that's as far as the reference goes... But then he ends up dead. So. The question remains: Did he know helping Buffy was suicidal? Did he know it would end that way? Did he choose the out?
The resonances the quote brings to it makes it ever more annoying that as far as we know Buffy hasn't even told Giles, Giles might not even know (does he? I haven't been reading with as much attention after that first volume.) Brings a lot of richness to it, stuff I can apply from recent learning, the clash between classical roman ethics and assorted christianities.
But it also pretty much inverts what it is Ethan's doing. If he's just telling Buffy his cell number he's making a sort of deal, taking a last chance to get out. If he meant it the other way, well, he's still out... but it's self sacrificing in a conscious way usually not associated with him.
I still say there's worlds of story to be had from Ethan&Giles. I don't appear to be writing them lately. *sigh*
I guess I'm more sensitive to context because I once figured out my autistic brother talked pretty much entirely in context. The words meant very little, the story they'd been said in on TV had all the meaning. Darmok.
But it's very difficult to know if intertextual references are meant, and with something like Hamlet where people have been referring to it over and over again for so long it's really very difficult to know *which* associations it is meant to bring.
Which is fascinating.
I have read almost all the books I got out about Hamlet. The one I bought I haven't started, but since it's bought I don't got to take it back anywhere so that works out. The one I was reading today I only read the first 5 chapters and the one on Hamlet but I think the reading list says 'first four chapters' or something so that probably works out. And now my head hurts. So reading will pause.
I've been thinking about quotes that mean something quite different in context. A lot of Hamlet gets taken and used as particular lines, and a lot more gets used to add a sort of Hamlet tint to something. But context is so key. Take 'To be or not to be', a speech so famous I didn't used to know what play it was in but I knew the speech from all the piss takes. (To pee or not to pee... :eyeroll:) That speech within the play is so complicated. The words on their own could be about suicide, tyrannicide, or some other thing entirely. But put it back in the play and it just gets all complicated. It is probably a soliloquy, with only Hamlet on stage and the convention that the character truthfully speaks his innermost thoughts. But then again it could be that Ophelia is on stage and visible to Hamlet, and we know that Claudius and Polonius are hiding somewhere around there. Those two might be visible to the audience but not Hamlet, or they just might have been noticed by him. And it's a whole different speech, depending on these things you can't figure out from the written word - who is watching and who knows who is watching and is it in fact a soliloquy or just a speech the others don't interrupt? And when you just stand there and quote it you don't get any of those layers.
Using quotes to add some Hamlet to things... well does just using the quote add Hamlet? Picard quotes 'what a piece of work is man' to Q. Is Picard being mopey, suicidal, and Danish? Not so much. In fact in that case he explicitly changes the meaning of the piece - "What Hamlet said with irony I say with conviction". Which is interesting... but come to think I haven't watched that episode quite possibly since it first aired so how is it I remember that bit anyway? Because Patrick Stewart rocks I think. ANYway... I looked on Wiki and it has a whole section on quotes just to that little speech... wherein I find it's in the Coraline film. Cool. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/References_to_Hamlet has its own page, and it is a rather large one, despite being as hit and miss as Wiki tends to. Includes a generic revenge tragedy ghost or three, because Hamlet is the bit of the genre that survives in the popular imagination. Leaves out the Buffy film.
Buffy didn't recognise "The rest is silence" in the movie. Were we meant to? Given that it turned out to have practical relevance, somehow being how to break out of vampire thrall. If so, her not getting it is a haha look at the clueless, followed by a clueless wins anyway triumph. Same line gets quoted with rather more humor in The Dark Age, one of those episodes I at least used to have memorised. Giles says it when Buffy turns off her non-music. Is he being Hamlet-y or especially snooty British? Well he's not actually dying and he doesn't have to rely on others to tell his story... but the guy outside does. Is interesting.
Is also the episode that introduced Ethan. And in the Buffy comics his Hamlet quote is "I'm more an antique Roman than a Dane." Also, in context, the line that immediately follows it "Just remember what you see here." sounds rather like both old Hamlet's ghost's orders to his son and young Hamlet speaking to Horatio. But Buffy remains clueless, doesn't know the context, tries to figure out the words. She gets from 'roman' to XXX as roman numerals to Ethan's room. So far so simple, right? Like in the movie, the quote turns out to be simple useful information.
But...
If it keeps the original context, it makes Ethan that little bit more interesting. Because Horatio says that as a prelude to suicide. After all the buisness with the poisoned sword and poisoned wine:
Hamlet: Horatio, I am dead, thou livst, report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied.
Horatio: Never believe it. I am more an antique Roman than a Dane: Here's some liquor left.
Seeing Hamlet poisoned and dying Horatio resolves to follow him, in the Roman style. Notes in the back of the copy I've got say 'like Cato or Brutus'. Notes from class say like stoics - the idea was you could bear everything unruffled, and if it ever got too bad you could always kill yourself. Classical Roman philosophy approved where Christianity was quite clear on it being unacceptable.
Hamlet goes on to talk Horatio out of it, "if thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw they breath in pain, to tell my story."
Ethan is talking to Buffy. Who doesn't even know what he means.
And does he mean it like Horatio did? Is he more a Roman? We know he worships Janus, a Roman god. So maybe that's as far as the reference goes... But then he ends up dead. So. The question remains: Did he know helping Buffy was suicidal? Did he know it would end that way? Did he choose the out?
The resonances the quote brings to it makes it ever more annoying that as far as we know Buffy hasn't even told Giles, Giles might not even know (does he? I haven't been reading with as much attention after that first volume.) Brings a lot of richness to it, stuff I can apply from recent learning, the clash between classical roman ethics and assorted christianities.
But it also pretty much inverts what it is Ethan's doing. If he's just telling Buffy his cell number he's making a sort of deal, taking a last chance to get out. If he meant it the other way, well, he's still out... but it's self sacrificing in a conscious way usually not associated with him.
I still say there's worlds of story to be had from Ethan&Giles. I don't appear to be writing them lately. *sigh*
I guess I'm more sensitive to context because I once figured out my autistic brother talked pretty much entirely in context. The words meant very little, the story they'd been said in on TV had all the meaning. Darmok.
But it's very difficult to know if intertextual references are meant, and with something like Hamlet where people have been referring to it over and over again for so long it's really very difficult to know *which* associations it is meant to bring.
Which is fascinating.