#thehufflepuffprefect

[elucubrare]

thehufflepuffprefect replied to your post: I have been called the fuck out, there’s a Sabriel...

You love Sabriel? I love Sabriel! Is there a fandom somewhere?

there's a semi-active one on tumblr! I track #abhorsen and I think #the old kingdom works too. 

[flappyfluellen]

Tell me about the closet scene in Hamlet and why it's so interesting!

OKAY LET’S GO

(i’m so glad i already had most of the ideas here written down in the annotations of my hamlet edition)

the first reason why this scene is so fascinating is that hamlet and gertrude continually switch what pronouns they use to refer to each other. first, gertrude uses the familiar “thou” for hamlet, while hamlet uses the formal/polite “you” for her.

GERTRUDE: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.HAMLET: Mother, you have my father much offended.GERTRUDE: Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.

gertrude, confused, switches to the formal “you,” probably out of caution. they continue like this, the tension in the conversation rising, until gertrude cries, “What wilt thou do? thou wilt not murder me?” (i also love all the emotion in this scene—it’s very clear through the text, and very disturbing.)

hamlet kills polonius. gertrude stays with “thou”—either to chastise hamlet or attempt to regain the familiarity she’s lost, if that makes sense. it seems to be the former, what with gertrude’s later line “What have I done, that thou dar’st wag thy tongue / In noise so rude against me?”

it’s also interesting to note that hamlet’s attack on gertrude is, from the beginning, based in gender roles. for example, he cites modesty, virtue, and innocence—all of which are stereotypically feminine—as things which gertrude is lacking or that she lost when she married claudius.

anyway, hamlet has a lot of really nasty things to say to gertrude, but what interests me the most is his distinction between gertrude’s emotions and her reason. i’m not going to close read the entire thing, but i find these passages particularly interesting—think about reason vs. emotion, choice vs. compulsion, madness vs. sanity, etc:

You cannot call it love; for at your ageThe hey-day in the blood is tame, it's humble,And waits upon the judgment: and what judgmentWould step from this to this? Sense, sure, you have,Else could you not have motion; but sure, that senseIs apoplex'd; for madness would not err,Nor sense to ecstasy was ne'er so thrall'dBut it reserved some quantity of choice,To serve in such a difference....Proclaim no shameWhen the compulsive ardor gives the charge,Since frost itself as actively doth burnAnd reason panders will.

in this monologue, hamlet also switches to “thou” for the first time in the scene, obviously to attack and belittle gertrude.

then gertrude says this,

O Hamlet, speak no more:Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul;And there I see such black and grained spotsAs will not leave their tinct.

which almost seems like some sort of confession. it also looks like she believes hamlet’s words—believing that she’s done something wrong, whether that be marrying claudius or even, as mentioned earlier in the scene, helping to kill hamlet sr. (which is less likely textually, but an interesting direction to take a production...)

and then of course we have this passage,

Nay, but to liveIn the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making loveOver the nasty sty—

which is just downright GROSS, with some very nasty imagery going on.

another quote i find interesting is gertrude’s “These words, like daggers, enter in mine ears,” which reminds me of Hamlet’s earlier line, “I will speak daggers to [Gertrude], but use none.”

but then everything changes when the ghost enters:

GHOST: Speak to her, Hamlet.HAMLET: How is it with you, lady?GERTRUDE: Alas, how is't with you...

here, both of them turn back to the formal/distant “you.” hamlet no longer has the upper hand—he’s afraid, and so is gertrude. there’s some interesting pronoun stuff here:

O gentle son,Upon the heat and flame of thy distemperSprinkle cool patience. Whereon do you look?

AND THEN. hamlet has this absolutely fascinating line to the ghost:

Do not look upon me;Lest with this piteous action you convertMy stern effects: then what I have to doWill want true color; tears perchance for blood.

“what I have to do”—kill claudius? this almost seems like hamlet doesn’t want to kill him, but the ghost is making him do it. (i played off this theme in my screenplay, actually!)

after the ghost exits, gertrude, who couldn’t see the ghost, insists that hamlet’s mad. hamlet insists he isn’t. he then goes on to, again, urge gertrude not to sleep with claudius, and tell her to repent. lots of religious rhetoric here. but this time, hamlet isn’t attacking her, he’s pleading with her. gertrude also switches pronouns again to “thou,” while hamlet stays with the polite “you”:

GERTRUDE: O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.HAMLET: O, throw away the worser part of it,And live the purer with the other half.Good night: but go not to mine uncle's bed;Assume a virtue, if you have it not.

it almost seems like hamlet is trying to save her or help her, since he doesn’t want her to go to hell. (“I must be cruel, only to be kind.”) there are some other interesting individual lines in this speech, but i won’t go into them.

AND NOW COMES MY FAVORITE PART—

GERTRUDE: What shall I do?HAMLET: Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed;Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse;And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses,Or paddling in your neck with his damn'd fingers,Make you to ravel all this matter out,That I essentially am not in madness,But mad in craft.

the main point here is that hamlet is not mad, he’s just pretending and that under no circumstances should gertrude tell this to claudius. hamlet starts out by listing things that gertrude should Not Do—even if claudius kisses her and all that stuff, she should not tell him that hamlet’s faking his madness. hamlet then goes on a rant that’s sarcastic and kind of hard to understand, so i haven’t included it. basically it’s just adding to his above points.

gertrude responds:

Be thou assured, if words be made of breath,And breath of life, I have no life to breatheWhat thou hast said to me.

essentially an interesting way of saying “I swear I won’t tell him.”

her assurance here is REALLY IMPORTANT in the next scene, where this happens:

CLAUDIUS: What, Gertrude? How does Hamlet?GERTRUDE: Mad as the sea and wind, when both contendWhich is the mightier.

GET THIS: gertrude keeps her word. she insists that hamlet is mad, even though she knows he isn’t. and this is important because it seems now that she’s more on hamlet’s side than claudius’.

then the scene goes in a different direction. (i swear i’m almost done)

HAMLET: I must to England; you know that?GERTRUDE: Alack, I had forgot: 'tis so concluded on.HAMLETThere's letters seal'd: and my two schoolfellows,Whom I will trust as I will adders fang'd,They bear the mandate; they must sweep my way,And marshal me to knavery. Let it work;For 'tis the sport to have the engineerHoist with his own petard: and 't shall go hardBut I will delve one yard below their mines,And blow them at the moon: O, 'tis most sweet,When in one line two crafts directly meet.

this passage suggests that hamlet knows about claudius’ plot to have him killed in england. i especially like the “hoist with his own petard” line: the folger edition rephrases it as, “to have the maker of military devices blown up by his own explosives.” essentially, hamlet is already planning to turn the plot on claudius (the engineer) by having r&g killed. it’s also fascinating how excited he sounds about this: “tis the sport,” “tis most sweet.” and as for his “two crafts”—foiling claudius’ plot, and killing r&g? he sure sounds excited to kill r&g. it’s pretty awful.

it’s also interesting that this part comes right after the “don’t tell claudius i’m sane” part, since there seems to be no correlation. and why tell gertrude about his plot to kill r&g? my theory is that the two are in fact related—perhaps, if claudius thinks hamlet is insane, hamlet can go about his plotting business without suspicion.

WOW OKAY THAT WAS HELLA LONG but i hope it makes sense. i could probably unpack the scene even more, if i had the time and energy to do so. but i think this is just fine. if you read the whole thing, i’m impressed!!

[oldshrewsburyian]

I saw your post about Brideshead Revisited and I wanted to say that I love it too! What do you think of the ending - bittersweet, but is Charles as encouraged as he thinks he is? His life seems pretty bleak.

My Anglo-Catholic instinct, in replying to this, is to yell “THE FLAME IS LIT IN THE CHAPEL!” and then flail a lot. Because… that’s what it’s about, in the end, for Charles. Yes, he is still staring down the Age of Hooper. Yes, he is still, in his own words, “homeless, childless, middle-aged, and loveless.” (Cue me moaning aloud.) But the veil between heaven and earth has been torn in two! And though he has long resisted responding to this knowledge, this revelation, Charles cannot, in the end, escape the twitch upon the thread. 

So, to preempt my own rhapsodizing about Charles and theology and Waugh’s prose, YES, I think he is… more than encouraged, profoundly heartened. I mean, he’s entered the church (as in, he’s had a conversion experience and been received, not just that he’s walked through the door.) He sees that ridiculously-designed lamp and sees the Real Presence, the immanence of the divine! He prays, in that “ancient, newly learned form of words.” He sees all of it, all of that passionate, tragic, flawed history, as being, in the end, a purification, a double (or triple? if we count Sebastian, Julia, and God) love story that brings him truly home, home to Brideshead and to the chapel where the lamp burns for soldiers “farther in heart than Acre or Jerusalem.”

…If you want me, I’ll just be sobbing over Charles Ryder in the corner. Given suitable time for emotional recovery, though, I am ALWAYS up for discussion of Brideshead Revisited.

[skeleton-richard]

Piano Man by Billy Joel is a Falstaff song...

It definitely is. It fits with how I imagine the Boar’s Head in general, with whatever the backstories of the patrons. Who’s the piano player?

[shredsandpatches]

I was wondering - are there any material details in the Henriad plays that are historically inaccurate? Did Shakespeare do his research? Or does he not mention concrete things like furniture/musical instruments etc?

Material history wasn’t really a thing in Shakespeare’s day -- just as characters in historical plays would have worn contemporary clothes, the references to material culture would also have been contemporary.* There are, therefore, plenty of them in the history plays, although for the most part they aren’t as jarring to the modern reader/viewer as (for instance) the clock in Julius Caesar. Richard II’s extended clock metaphor during the Pomfret soliloquy is just about current for Richard’s time, as it was during the historical Richard’s reign that mechanical clocks made their way to England! Eighteenth-century critics made a fuss over Shakespeare having Aumerle refer to his rapier in RII 4.1, as rapiers were a Renaissance invention, but modern readers don’t really notice that. The reference to “young dangling apricocks” in the garden scene is also anachronistic, as apricots weren’t grown in England in the fourteenth century, and York’s comment about Richard’s preference for Italian fashions, while not impossible in a fourteenth-century context, is more reflective of sixteenth-century social criticism (the historical Richard was more often criticized for his attachment to French culture).

This isn’t in any way comprehensive, and all of my examples are from Richard II because that’s the one I know like the back of my hand! It’s harder to be specific with the Henries because the small anachronisms are widespread; all of the scenes in Eastcheap are pretty much straight-up Elizabethan, as is true of basically any scene in Shakespeare with middle- or working-class characters, because that was Shakespeare’s own social circle. One that does come to mind, though, is coinage -- references to currency are in Shakespeare money and not Richard II/Henry IV money (some of the coins that are popular subjects of puns didn’t exist yet: the angel first appeared in 1465, and the royal apparently also in the 1460s?). Also, I know @lilliburlero probably has things to say about the depiction of military companies being Renaissance rather than medieval, but I’m not good at military history so I’ll bounce that one over to them. (That one, again, largely falls under the “stuff in Shakespeare’s social class is explicitly of Shakespeare’s time.”)

*I published a scholarly article a few years back that centers on how weird it is that actual medieval fashions are an important plot point in Thomas of Woodstock -- Renaissance writers/artists don’t usually emphasize that kind of thing at all.

[shakespearecircle]

3, 4, and 9?

Thanks friend!

3. A production you’d fantasize about directing

Romeo and Juliet, with lesbians

4. A character you’d fantasize about playing

I would love to play Edar from Lear Imagine teen hearthrob Lesbian Edgar stealin yo wives and lusting after her fathers land

9. The historical production you’d most want to see live

I think I’m gonna go with Twelfth Night 

[ardenrosegarden]

The Constable is a Bichon Frise...? Stubborn, loyal, fancy hair ;)

Awwww I love them, they’re so cute!  I could really see this happening personality-wise too!

The mighty constable:

[citrus-fruiits]

I love this sweater I can fit my whole body into it I am a Happy Clam