Shameful Reading Secrets Revealed!
Once upon a time on the much-beloved (well, most of the time much-beloved) Fametracker Forums, there was a thread called "Shameful Reading Secrets Revealed!" -- and it was filled with folks who broke my heart talking smack about Middlemarch and Thomas Hardy.
Damn, those were some good times.
I thought about the thread last night while talking to my friend Steve. I was telling Steve how I'm currently in a fight with the Shakespeare Theatre Company because they want me to renew my subscription, and yet they also want to put on yet another production of both Hamlet and Richard III -- two plays that they've already done in the last five years. Done, and done really really poorly, if'n you ask me, mostly because they cast this David Hyde Pierce-looking guy, Wallace Acton, as both Hamlet and Richard III. Wallace Acton has two styles of acting: (1) Over; and (2) with his hair.
In the last five years, here are some plays the Shakespeare Theatre Company hasn't put on:
And a subscription to the theatre's expensive, y'all. And I don't know that I want to plop down that kinda cash for plays I won't see. "I can't imagine you seeing another Richard," Steve said. "But you'll probably see the Hamlet if it gets good reviews, right?"
Wrong.
I. Hate. Hamlet. And that's my shameful reading secret. Only not so much with the shame, really. I'm bewildered, maybe, by all the other mofos out there who think this play is the reason the English language was invented. And for a long time, I just thought it was me and my poor reading skills that kept me from reaching the sort of intellectual climaxes everyone out there with an English degree and a healthy dose of pretension seem to reach -- complete with toe-curling and surreptitious licks of fingers afterwards.
Look, guys: it's a long, boring play about some Danish fop who's still going to college and he's what? Thirty? At some point, Ham, you're going to have to tinkle or get off the potty with this education thing. You're going to have to get the degree or drop out and pay off those student loans with some crappy job as a barrista so you and all the other over-educated potheads can make me feel beneath you while you pour my coffee. Or, better yet, maybe you could get one of those coveted positions at Kramerbooks & Afterwards, and you and the other asshats who look down their noses at me for buying Dickens rather than some post-modern novel that doesn't use the letter "i" because it's proving a point can have yourself a gay old time. Stupid Kramerbooks & Afterwards. You know, you can be above-it-all-hip and helpful at the same time. Really. Try it.
Anyway. That's it. That's your main character in this play. "To be, or not to be"? Look: that comes 7 hours into the play, and I just don't have time for that kind of whiny vacillating. If he ever gets it figured out, let me know. Until then, I'll be over here, reading other Shakespeare plays that get the job done better.
It's not that I don't get that life's an existential crapshoot, and there's lots out there to get all prozac-ed up about. But hi, Hamlet? You're young. You're very young. You're still-in-college young. And if you'd not gone all mad at the end and murdered everyone and yourself, you might have reached, like, 35 or something and you would have looked back at your angsty Wonder Years with a little bit of a rueful headshake. "Killing my stepdad/uncle? What was I thinking? I could barely pass gym."
For my reading time, I think, there are any number of Shakespeare plays that are more psychologically and spiritually interesting than Hamlet. For instance, King Lear packs a more satisfying punch. There's a moment in the play when Lear, impotent, old, confused, and almost alone shakes his fist and rages, "I would do such things!" Only he, the other characters, and the audience know that there are no other things he can do. He's limited by his own life and his circumstances and his two evil daughters. And yet that rage-filled fist-shake at the sky: we've all been there.
I'm also pretty partial to Macbeth, and what happens when love turns toxic, and ambition o'er reaches itself. The trick to the play is that it's not the witches at all who have anything to do with Macbeth's downfall: it's Macbeth himself. And that's what makes the play so terrifying. If it were witches, then it's just a story of extenuating evil. But when it's just Macbeth, alone, watching a forest of death creep towards the castle: that's where the wallop is; that we each carry the ability to ruin our own lives deep inside of us.
Hamlet, though? What do we learn? That late 20-something super-seniors can't be trusted with revenge? That dresses don't serve as floatation devices? That Freud should not be allowed within a quarter mile of literature? Folks: these are things we already knew. And we don't need some long-assed boring play about some bipolarized dude in a page-boy to refresh our memories. One can try plumbing the depths of the play all one wants, but at the end of the play all you've got is a dead kid from a fucked up family who's hard on a girlfriend and should have been one of those bisexual theater majors. You know the type, always going on about how it's not the sex of the person that they're attracted to; it's the energy? Nevermind the fact that they keep going back to the same well of the drunkenly confused phys ed majors. What do I know from energy?
I don't doubt that there are people out there who get something out of the play. I'm just not one of them.
Damn, those were some good times.
I thought about the thread last night while talking to my friend Steve. I was telling Steve how I'm currently in a fight with the Shakespeare Theatre Company because they want me to renew my subscription, and yet they also want to put on yet another production of both Hamlet and Richard III -- two plays that they've already done in the last five years. Done, and done really really poorly, if'n you ask me, mostly because they cast this David Hyde Pierce-looking guy, Wallace Acton, as both Hamlet and Richard III. Wallace Acton has two styles of acting: (1) Over; and (2) with his hair.
In the last five years, here are some plays the Shakespeare Theatre Company hasn't put on:
And a subscription to the theatre's expensive, y'all. And I don't know that I want to plop down that kinda cash for plays I won't see. "I can't imagine you seeing another Richard," Steve said. "But you'll probably see the Hamlet if it gets good reviews, right?"
Wrong.
I. Hate. Hamlet. And that's my shameful reading secret. Only not so much with the shame, really. I'm bewildered, maybe, by all the other mofos out there who think this play is the reason the English language was invented. And for a long time, I just thought it was me and my poor reading skills that kept me from reaching the sort of intellectual climaxes everyone out there with an English degree and a healthy dose of pretension seem to reach -- complete with toe-curling and surreptitious licks of fingers afterwards.
Look, guys: it's a long, boring play about some Danish fop who's still going to college and he's what? Thirty? At some point, Ham, you're going to have to tinkle or get off the potty with this education thing. You're going to have to get the degree or drop out and pay off those student loans with some crappy job as a barrista so you and all the other over-educated potheads can make me feel beneath you while you pour my coffee. Or, better yet, maybe you could get one of those coveted positions at Kramerbooks & Afterwards, and you and the other asshats who look down their noses at me for buying Dickens rather than some post-modern novel that doesn't use the letter "i" because it's proving a point can have yourself a gay old time. Stupid Kramerbooks & Afterwards. You know, you can be above-it-all-hip and helpful at the same time. Really. Try it.
Anyway. That's it. That's your main character in this play. "To be, or not to be"? Look: that comes 7 hours into the play, and I just don't have time for that kind of whiny vacillating. If he ever gets it figured out, let me know. Until then, I'll be over here, reading other Shakespeare plays that get the job done better.
It's not that I don't get that life's an existential crapshoot, and there's lots out there to get all prozac-ed up about. But hi, Hamlet? You're young. You're very young. You're still-in-college young. And if you'd not gone all mad at the end and murdered everyone and yourself, you might have reached, like, 35 or something and you would have looked back at your angsty Wonder Years with a little bit of a rueful headshake. "Killing my stepdad/uncle? What was I thinking? I could barely pass gym."
For my reading time, I think, there are any number of Shakespeare plays that are more psychologically and spiritually interesting than Hamlet. For instance, King Lear packs a more satisfying punch. There's a moment in the play when Lear, impotent, old, confused, and almost alone shakes his fist and rages, "I would do such things!" Only he, the other characters, and the audience know that there are no other things he can do. He's limited by his own life and his circumstances and his two evil daughters. And yet that rage-filled fist-shake at the sky: we've all been there.
I'm also pretty partial to Macbeth, and what happens when love turns toxic, and ambition o'er reaches itself. The trick to the play is that it's not the witches at all who have anything to do with Macbeth's downfall: it's Macbeth himself. And that's what makes the play so terrifying. If it were witches, then it's just a story of extenuating evil. But when it's just Macbeth, alone, watching a forest of death creep towards the castle: that's where the wallop is; that we each carry the ability to ruin our own lives deep inside of us.
Hamlet, though? What do we learn? That late 20-something super-seniors can't be trusted with revenge? That dresses don't serve as floatation devices? That Freud should not be allowed within a quarter mile of literature? Folks: these are things we already knew. And we don't need some long-assed boring play about some bipolarized dude in a page-boy to refresh our memories. One can try plumbing the depths of the play all one wants, but at the end of the play all you've got is a dead kid from a fucked up family who's hard on a girlfriend and should have been one of those bisexual theater majors. You know the type, always going on about how it's not the sex of the person that they're attracted to; it's the energy? Nevermind the fact that they keep going back to the same well of the drunkenly confused phys ed majors. What do I know from energy?
I don't doubt that there are people out there who get something out of the play. I'm just not one of them.
posted by Mike at 10:01 AM
2 Comments:
Speaking of the Folger -- they just did, like, a couple months ago, a pretty kickass production of Measure for Measure. It was such a kickass production that I completely reversed my "MfM sucks" line.
I saw a production of MfM at St. John's College once when I came out to visit Cult Leader Josh (before he became Cult Leader Josh) and it was pretty dreadful. It was the final for one of Josh's friends, and the whole thing was poorly cast, poorly realized, poorly acted, and poorly heard. Seariously, I got maybe 5 lines of dialogue. Everything else sounded like the adults from a Peanuts cartoon decided to put on a play.
Anyway, I'm not firmly in your camp; it's an amazing play.
Also -- thanks so much for all of your kind words. This is why you've always been my favorite. Just don't tell the others.
The sentiments are fine, of course, but it's the way they're expressed that rings my bell: smooth as buttah. Perfectly lovely.
And get me--I'm an English major who never took a Shakespeare course. Ah, the '70's! An age of utter intellectual slovenliness!
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