I was planning on watching basketball games this afternoon as I had no idea that today was reserved for the so-called play-in games, the marquee one being Michigan State v. UCLA late tonight. It took me awhile to adjust to the existence of these play-in games. Now I think there's more of them, and the NCAA and the TV networks are evidently trying to elevate their status by scheduling them on what used to be the first day of the actual 64-team tournament. Ka-ching! Maybe just a matter of time till the field expands to 128. Any team that doesn't make it must fire the coach. He'll then be hired by one of the other universities that had to fire its coach. The unsuccessful coaches will just circulate among the unsuccessful programs. The salaries are all into 7 figures so it's not a bad gig, even if you have to move a lot.
Anyway, since the afternoon is open, more about Shakespeare, whose Hamlet I recently reread after reading this review of Hamnet, one of the New York Times's ten best books of 2020. Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, died at age 11. We know that the boy was buried at Stratford-on-Avon, where he lived with his mother, on August 11, 1596. By that time his father, 32, had been working in London's theater biz as an actor and playwright for five or more years. Stratford-on-Avon is about 100 miles northwest of London, and 100 miles in 1600 was a lot farther than it is today. The theatre guy, then, lived apart from his family. Hamnet, by Maggie O'Farrell, is a novel based at least loosely on what is known, or surmised, about Shakespeare's family, his likely problematic marriage, grief, and its possible impact on the playwright's work.
A source for Hamlet is a previously existing work with a boy hero named Hamlet, a circumstance that tends to refute the notion that Shakespeare, thinking of his son, chose a name that differed by a consonant. Nor is it the case that after his son's death Shakespeare, in his grief, immediately turned to the composition of Hamlet, for the play was almost certainly composed in the year 1600, about three years after the boy died. But, as there is little known about Shakespeare's emotional life, it is a kind of pastime to try to infer one from his work, and Hamlet seems the most personal work. There is, for example, the title character's obvious interest in the theatrical arts. He'd been moping around the castle, soliloquizing about suicide, but when the traveling theater troupe arrives he's suddenly animated and alive—full of questions, advice, and suggestions for the players, who it seems might have had reason to be put off by the presumption: they're the professionals, right? But Hamlet will not shut up. The scene goes on and on—too long, some may think, all the details not really necessary in order to advance the plot. It's said that Shakespeare's self-education had left him so well versed in the tricks of so many trades that carpenters think he must have been at least a carpenter's apprentice, sailors that he must have shipped out to sea, etc., etc., but the title character in Hamlet is like his creator sunk in the fine points of the theatre professions.
It's also intriguing that Hamlet appears to represent a break with Shakespeare's artistic past, which, some have felt, is suggestive of a rupture in his private life. Hamlet is about half again as long as any of the 20 or so plays that preceded it. Scholars have determined that Shakespeare deployed in Hamlet more than 600 words that don't occur in any of the plays or poems he'd already written. The technique is different, too. To praise Hamlet, you would not say that it's "tightly plotted" or "well paced." Elements of the plot don't make a ton of sense. The hero’s first despondent ruminations—
O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon against self-slaughter. O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't, ah, fie, 'tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
—occur before his interview with the Ghost causes him to suspect foul play. Once he knows his father was murdered, the audience wonders whether he'll take revenge, but he wonders whether he should commit suicide:
To be, or not to be, &c
The tight plot and paced action are gone and replaced by this brooding figure, dissatisfied with life and disgusted with the corruption around him. The length of the thing, and the new vocabulary, are like a piling on—an analog of the famous "double plot" in King Lear, about which someone observed it's apparently not enough that one old man should roam the earth in despair: there must be two. Between Hamlet (1600) and Lear (1605) Shakespeare created Iago, and Macbeth belongs to 1606. Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet is fiction, her surmises just surmises, but it's hard to dispute that Shakespeare discovered something new within himself in 1599 or 1600.
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