Hamlet: To Soliloquy. Definitely To Soliloquy

Never was a story of more woe than this.
Romeo & Juliet Act 5. Scene.3.

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form.
(King John Act 3. Scene 4.)

Act 1. Scene 2. Hamlet is the guy in the room who could use some therapy. Freud would have had a field day with him. Everybody else in the room is singing, “Happy days are here again.” They’re all thinking Hamlet is messed up. All that sitting in the corner and brooding. None of the courtiers had seen its like. Ever. You’d think there was a ghost running around the castle, moaning and groaning.

“Cheer up,” the king says.

“Cheer up,” his mom, the queen, says.

“Cheer up,” all the courtiers say.

Even Hamlet’s inner voice (you one that keeps going, “To be or not to be”) says, “Cheer up.”

Still Hamlet broods and broods, and he broods some more.

Hamlet is depressed. You’d be depressed too. With good reason. Your daddy dies, then  Momsy goes off and marries his brother. Now Hamlet can’t be king. Momsy really fixed that.

On top of everything else, the only girl in Castle Elsinore is Ophelia, and he is not allowed to date her. And definitely no making out in the back of his BMW. I mean, c’mon. Ham is a young frisky guy, with all his testosterone hanging out.

Why did Hamlet have to go and promise Mom and the king he would stay in town? He’d rather be off to Paris and the ooh-la-las with Laertes. How did he get himself into this mess? Oh, yeah. He could never resist his mother’s pretty-please look.

Laertes gets to skip town. What makes him so special? Why not Ham? He mimics Claudius. “Your mother has missed you a lots. Besides I want to teach you the king business.”

One thing is for sure. Ham is not the one in the white hat business. He’s not the one shaking hands and kissing babies. That guy is Claudius. He’s the guy what wants to be liked. All that paparazzi snapping his mug every which-a-way. Let Claudius have his throne. Hamlet doesn’t care. There’s no way he could stand all that attention.

Hamlet steps up to the mic. This is his big chance to get in good with the audience. He had better not blow it.

“I hate Denmark,” Hamlet speaks into the mic. “Why? For one thing it gets friggin’ cold here. I don’t mean the normal winter chill. I mean to-your-bones cold. I can never get warm.”

Bad Hamlet appears on his right shoulder. “Why don’t you go ahead and off yourself.”

“Who the devil are you?” Hamlet wants to know.

“I’m the guy who wants you to have a happily ever after,” Baddie says.

Hamlet pulls out his dagger. In mid-air, Good Hamlet shows up on his left shoulder. “Hold it,” he says.

The dagger stops.

“Wh-wh-what?” Hamlet stutters.

Goodie repeats himself, “Hold it, I said.”

“What do you mean showing up here?” Baddie challenges. “Haven’t you got business elsewhere? Like helping Henry VIII pick a new wife?”

“Nope,” Goodie says. “Got no place I’d rather be than here. Now, Hamlet, put that thing away. You’re going to poke your eye out.”

Baddie puts his hand above Hamlet’s hand on the dagger. “Hold on, fellow. You’re stuck here in limbo already. Why not go whole hog?”

Goodie grabs the dagger. “Hamlet, you know that is a mortal sin.”

Hamlet grabs the blade and cuts his hand. He releases the blade.

“Now see what you’ve gone and done,” Baddie says. “That’s not nice.”

“What’s this got to do with nice?” Goodie retorts. “What we are talking about is his immortal soul.”

Horatio, Marcellus and Barnardo appear onstage. Poof! Goodie and Baddie are out of there.

Horatio calls out, “Yo.”

Marcellus and Barnardo do a “Yo” as well.

Hamlet says, “Yo yourself.” He embraces his friend, Horatio, then says, “It’s been a month of Sundays.”

“Longer,” Horatio says.

“Whazup?” Hamlet wants to know.

“We have news,” Marcellus says.

“We saw your daddy,” Horatio says.

“Or a reasonable facsimile,” Barnardo says.

“I’ve seen him too,” Hamlet says. “In my mind’s eye.”

“You still on that happy juice?” Marcellus asks.

“No,” Hamlet says. “I haven’t been able to find a dealer here. My daddy drove them out of the kingdom when he was king. He wasn’t happy that so many Danes were happy. Thanks to the happy juice.”

Horatio says, “He was a ghost as large as the Eiffel Tower.”

“You saw my daddy? You saw his spirit?” Hamlet’s eyes light up with hope.

“The apparition we saw wore your father’s armor and his visor.”

Hamlet can’t believe his ears.

Marcellus continues, “We have seen it for the last three nights.”

“And,” Horatio says, “I saw it tonight.”

Right then and there, Hamlet decides his soliloquy has an answer to his “To go or not to go, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler to get the heck out of Dodge. Or lie up my ying-yang for forsoothing a bit too much of the hooch at Phi Beta House.” He definitely has to get out of town. Fast.

Before his father found out that he had been kicked out of Martin Luther U.

Shakespeare and Santa Claus

“He was not of an age but for all time.” Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s fellow playwright and rival.

Shakespeare is a literary person’s Santa Claus. And an actor’s too. For an actor, it’s not like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney saying, “Let’s put on a show.” Well, it kinda is, but it is still Shakespeare. You say, “You do Shakespeare really well,” and the actor’s in hog heaven. Of course, there’s one of Ol’ Will’s plays on every actor’s bucket list.

Like Santa Claus, you don’t even have to say The Bard’s first name. By the way, Santa’s first name is Will. Just like Will was Shakespeare’s. Guess that is how we ended up with where there is a Will, there is a way.

Once you get hooked on Shakespeare, you’ve got Christmas 365 days a year. There’s so many presents under that Christmas tree. It’s the gift that keeps on giving. Only the Bible competes. And Johann Sebastian Bach.

For instance, there’s the Sonnets. One hundred and fifty of them. Like the Psalms. Each of the Sonnets has something to say. It’s like sticking a shell against your ear. One day you hear a symphony. The next day it’s a sonata or a nocturne. You could read Sonnet 18 everyday for a year and you would get something different for each day. Now how many things in life can bring you that much pleasure?

As an actor, an actress or a scholar, you can build an entire career on one of The Bard’s plays. “King Lear” or “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, “The Tempest” or “Hamlet”, “Othello” or “As You Like It”. An actor can play Romeo early in his career, then move on to Macbeth and Richard III and Henry V. This is how Olivier became Olivier. At the end of days, there’s King Lear. For a an actress, you’ve got Juliet, Desdemona, Ophelia, Gertrude, Cleopatra, Rosalind and Prospera.

Then there’s the villains. Shakespeare had some villains that would make the Wicked Witch of the West or Lex Luthor look like a Barbie Doll. I am speaking of Iago, Lady Macbeth and Richard III, and Hamlet’s Uncle Claudius. Now those were some real villains who put the capital e into Evil.

And nobody does it better when it comes to a lovable character. Falstaff is as unique as Don Quixote and a lot more fun.

Do you have a favorite Shakespeare play?

The Very True Story of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

You think you’ve heard what happened in Castle Elsinore back in fifteen-four-ought. You know, how Hamlet had his Daddy’s revenge on Claudius. Well, that’s not the story the Ham’s best bud, Horatio, told me, and he ought to know. He was an eye witness to all things Hamlet.

The truth of the matter is the Ham was afraid of ghosts. Hard to believe since the Old Man showed up slinking around the castle like he owned the place. But if you’re living in a castle five hundred years old, what can you expect? Walls gonna talk and what they’re going to say is Boo.

And not just ghosts scare bejeesus out of the Ham. Shadows walking the halls. Even his own shadow. The graveyard. Ophelia tippytoe-ing down the hall in her flip flops. His Mommykins anoring so loud it could be heard down in the graveyard. Claudius giving a kingly command. You name it. He was afraid of it. If he heard a clinking of armor outside his room at midnight, he was kissing the ceiling.

When the Ham was knee-high to a grasshopper, his Dad had sent him to Anti-Boo Skool. But that hadn’t worked. Those monks walking around in black scared him all the more.

Since this was the middle ages, there was no internet, no tv, no smart phone, no movies. There was not even books. So folks had to find a way to entertain themselves. After a while, counting toes just don’t hack it.

That’s when Polonius came up with a boo-a-thon. He just loved running up behind the Ham and watching him turn white as a white picket fence. Pretty soon half the castle was in on the gig. The one that sent the Ham the highest with their boo won a prize. It might be a free ticket to the fair. It might be sitting on the king’s throne for a minute. It might be getting on the graveyard express with poor Yorick. It became so popular that Claudius and Gertrude joined in.

For the Christmas, 1541, Polonius planned a boo-a-pa-looza, For the winner, there was a week’s vacay with the Romeo and Juliet Sunny Italy Tour. Some years before, the R&J had been a venture capital startup with King Lear as a silent partner. That had been in the days before Goneril and Regan had conned daddykins out of his kingdom and he ended up in the mad house.

Well, the Ham’s Dad got wind of the plan on the other side. Seems Horatio had a seance with Macbeth’s three witches and they communicated with him.

“What to do? What to do?” Dad asked in his best W.C. Fields. He asked Faust. He asked Beelzebub. He even asked Beetlejuice. Three times, no less. They came up with nada. Nothing. They thunk and they thunk until they were boo in the face. Then it hit them. Their old friend Scrooge. Perhaps he had a solution.

Scrooge introduced Dad to Tiny Tim. Tiny Tim knew people. He was a regular medieval Facebook and he had thousands of Friends and millions of Likes. Tiny Tim introduced him to Doctor Frankenstein. Doctor F snapped his fingers and said, “Have I got a monster for you,”

He opened his closet and rolled out the ugliest thing you ever saw. It was on roller skates.

“This is Thing,” he said. “He’s slow on the up side but I think he’s the Thing for you.”

“Great.”

Needless to say the night for the boo-pa-looza was not a pretty sight. Dad slipped the Ham out of the castle and dressed up Thing like the Prince.

Around midnight Thing left the Ham’s room. It was Polonius who took the first boo. Thing turned and went, “Boo.” Polonius’ eyes became saucers. His whole body turned white. And he left the castle faster than a speeding bullet. Right behind him were Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes and Ophelia and the rest of the boo-pa-looza gang. They disappeared into the darkness and haven’t been seen since.

Hamlet decided Italy was the place for him. it was sunny and the food was good and everybody had wonderful Italian names.

As far as Elsinore was concerned, it became a ghost town. I mean, literally it was a ghost town.

Shakespeare Hits the Books

I must say that I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a book. Groucho Marx

Bet you’re wondering how Will got so smart. Smart enough to write all those plays. Shakespeare had a hobby. He read books. When he was just knee-high to a grasshopper, he got hooked on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He was smitten with words so much so that he read everything he could get his hands on. If Abe Lincoln had been around, Will would have given him a run for the money in the reading department.

When it came to books, his daddy, Ol’ John Shakespeare, told Will to “just say no”. The “Just Say No” campaign had worked well with Good Queen Bess. That’s what her daddy, Henry 8, had told her when it came to marriage. So Ol’ John figured it would work on Will. It wasn’t that Daddy Shakes was against reading. It was reading at night under the covers by candlelight. He was afraid Will would set the house on fire. In those days, there was no Smokey the Bear to put out the fire. On top of that, Will was going blind from all that reading. John was getting to the point where he couldn’t afford the cost of glasses.

Now you would think his dad’s lectures would work with Will. That and the other kids calling him Four-Eyes all the time. But Will was a stubborn cuss. He was going to read and nobody was about to stop him. Besides he kept telling anybody who would listen that he wanted to grow up and be a playwright. Thing was that nobody believed him . They didn’t even know what a playwright was. It was going to be up to Will to grow up and invent the word the way he invented a lot of other words.

When his dad said “Just say no”, Shakes would say, “Get with it, Dad.” You see, reading was the latest craze in the sixteenth century. Books were the iPads of that age. It was all started by Henry 8. Seems he had gotten an email from some guy named Gutenberg. The email said, “Have I got a deal for you.” Before you can say 3-D printer three times backwards, King Henry had gone all out and bought shares in Gutenberg Press stock. To make sure Gutenberg didn’t go bankrupt, Henry ordered enough printing presses from the company to stock every English town with at least one press.

It was a very wise investment. Sixteenth century England became the readingest country ever. To celebrate, Henry wrote his own version of “Greensleaves”. It was a hit. With that kind of encouragement, the English wrote and wrote, then they wrote some more. They wrote plays. They wrote essaies. They even wrote poetry.

To be a Somebody in Elizabethan England, you wrote poetry. Phil Sidney wrote poems. Ed Spenser wrote poems. John Donne wrote poems. Poems were the blogs of the sixteenth century.

The English became so literate they no longer read stain glass windows for their Bible stories. They actually read the Bible. Until that time, there had only been Latin Bibles. No one was about to be caught dead with Martin Luther’s German Bible. He had left some stuff out. In fact, it was against the law to even possess one of “Marty’s ditties”. If caught, you’d be made dead. Believe me. A roast was no fun in those days. Especially if you were the roast.

Speaking of dead, Latin was a dead language. That is why nobody, but nobody read the Bible in Latin. People wondered why it had not been buried long before. In Sunday school, the teacher would ask, “Anybody know John 3:16?” His students answered, “It’s all Latin to me.” Before you know it, the English had their very own King James Bible. Now every inn room in the land got its own Gideon’s Bible.

And they got their own prayer book too. The Book of Common Prayer. Pretty soon just about everybody could pray. Gave God something to think about. He’d never heard so many prayers asking to win the lottery.

So, as you can see, the English were readaholics. And Will Shakespeare was the readingest of them all. He read everything he could get his hands. He read Holinshead’s Chronicles and wrote his two Henriads, “Richard III” and “Macbeth”. Geoffrey of Monmouth gave him “King Lear”. He read Ariosto and gave the world “Taming of the Shrew”. He read the Italian, Cinthio, and made “Othello”. He read Ovid and wrote “Titus Andronicus”. He read Plutarch, then scribbled down “Julius Caesar”, “Coriolanus” and “Antony and Cleopatra”. Arthur Brook provided the framework for “Romeo and Juliet”. “The Decameron” and “The Canterbury Tales” were the inspiration for several of his comedies. “Gilligan’s Island” gave him the idea for “The Tempest”.

As far as “Hamlet” is concerned, don’t blame it on the rain. It was Saxo Grammiticus and Tom Kyd’s play and wallah, “Hamlet”.

Makes me wonder what kind of play Shakespeare would have written after reading “Gone With the Wind” or  “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.

Scarlett: Why, Ashley Wilkes, you are the winter of my discontent.

Later Rhett: To Scarlett or not to Scarlett, that is the question. This is the long and the short of it.

Still later Rhett to Scarlett: God has given you one face, and you make yourself another, Scarlett.

Scarlett: “What’s in a name? That which we call a Yankee by any other name would smell like a Yankee.”

Rhett (to Scarlett): Something is rotten in the state of Tara.

Scarlett: Out, damn’d spot! out, I say!—One; two: why, then
’tis time to do’t.—Hell is murky.—Fie, my lord, fie, a soldier, and
afeard? What need we fear of you, Rhett Butler.

Rhett: All that glisters is not gold.

Scarlett: But it is, Rhett, it is.

Rhett: Frankly I don’t give a damn. (Rhett leaves.)

Scarlett (tears rolling down her face): I suppose tomorrow is another day. Yet to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more.

Mammy (Voice over); This was a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

If Shakes could do this with “Gone with the Wind”, just think what he could do with “Fifty Shades of Gray”.

Hamlet: Horatio One More Time

Last we heard of Horatio, he was saying “Good night, Sweet Prince.” Then he slipped into the night before Fortinbras was all over Elsinore. Some say that Horatio went east and made himself a kingdom someplace in the Urals. After all, he had learned soldiering from Old Hamlet.

Personally I go with those who say that he went south. Since he was a kid, he dreamed of Venice. One thing is for sure. He earned his way in the world with his sword. Along that way maybe he worked for Othello, the Moor. For a bit of time, he was a Capulet, then it was on to Florence and the Medici fam.

For a while he had a run in with the Borgias. If Elsinore had taught him any one thing, poison was not his gig. So he was out of Valencia in a hurry. Along the way, he spent some jail time with Cervantes. At least, this is what I believe.

Since he had been Hamlet’s Nick Carroway, Horatio was in demand everywhere. Last we heard from Horatio was that he was doing TED talks.

He begins this way: “Guess you thought Shakespeare was going to do this talk today. Sorry to disappoint. He had some business back at Straitford. Something about bailing out his son-in-law. He sent me instead.

“So how did Shakespeare come up with Hamlet? Guess you’ve heard the tale that it was a response to his son, Hamnet’s, death. Hamnet died back in ’96. It was in all the papers….”