Ghost Story
I’m reading Hamlet again. When I read it in high school, I dismissed Hamlet as an annoying procrastinator. I used my paper to prove my AP English teacher wasn’t reading my work, just giving me A’s, identifying Claudius with a term that contains the letters m and f. That was me, then: “an understanding simple and unschool’d.”
The next time I read Hamlet I was in graduate school, about ten years ago. My English friend Thalia lent me her copy, with her A-level notes. It was a discouraging contrast with my senior-year experience. I loved the play. It was a feast of words–so _this_ was the source of so many famous quotes, many of which I’d thought were from the Bible.
Two nights together had these gentlemen,
Marcelllus and Barnardo, on their watch
In the dead waste and middle of the might
Been thus encounter’d: a figure like your father
Armed at point exactly, cap-a-pie,
Appears before them, and with solemn march
Goes slow and stately by them; thrice he walk’d
By their oppress’d and fear-surprised eyes
Within his truncheon’s length, whilst they, distill’d
Almost to jelly with the act of fear,
Stand dumb and speak not to him. This to me
In dreadful secrecy impart they did,
And I with them the third night kept the watch,
Where, as they had deliver’d, both in time,
Form of the thing, each word made true and good,
The apparition comes. I knew your father;
These hands are not more like. –Horatio, from Hamlet I, ii, 196-206
Footnote from the 1997 Arden Shakespeare edition:
Horatio’s speech ‘a perfect model of dramatic narration and dramatic style, the purest poetry and yet the most natural language’ (Coleridge)
I decided on a slow reading: not just the text of the play, but the xxvii-page preface and 159-page introduction first, since I’ve read the play before. I read the spread of two pages, then their footnotes. At the end of each scene, I read the longer end notes for it. The preface and introduction took me the better part of two days to read. The academic jargon was so thick I only noticed my edition skipped from page 14 to 47 when I paged back for a definition of “foul papers.” I’d had to read that page transition several times to make sense it didn’t possess; it looks as if it were never bound in, not as if it fell out. The editor, Harold Jenkins, is entertainingly satisfied with himself, cutting down interpretations of other scholars with words as poisonous as Laertes’s rapier.
The Arden Shakespeare series has undergone several changes of publisher. They have a new edition of Hamlet, but I’m sticking with the one I read before, even if my copy is missing a segment. As the introduction makes clear, the lineage of the text is murky. Most copies of Hamlet rely on the second quarto, though some adhere to that of the first folio. Editors have a mighty task to decide which copy, if any, is the most authoritative for any given passage.
Asked later: What edition is your favorite/least favorite? Do you have a preference?
August 13th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
How funny, I’m rereading Hamlet too. In preparation for reading Lin Enger’s Undiscovered Country and the Edgar Sawtelle book.
August 14th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
I have read it 4 times: HS, college, and twice post college for pleasure. But the best Hamlet ever was at the Royal Shakespeare Theater, Stratford-Upon-Avon. GI Joe and I went in the summer of 2004 and saw Hamlet performed live. It was such an amazing experience. I think GI Joe dozed. I, however, was completely on the edge of my seat. It remains one of my very favorite plays.
August 15th, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Amy, isn’t it funny how the internet reading trends go? Undiscovered Country is on my shelf, and Edgar Sawtelle is in at the library. And Branagh’s Hamlet dvd is awaiting my attention.
Syd, I can’t believe you saw it at Stratford. I’m o’erwhelmed with jealousy. My current favorite wishful think is that I could go to London this fall and see David Tennant and Patrick Stewart in it.
August 16th, 2008 at 12:05 am
ooh, yeah!
I’m clearly nowhere near the bard fan that many who post here seem to be, but I’d give a LOT to see Patrick Stewart do Shakespeare!
August 18th, 2008 at 9:34 pm
I saw Patrick Stewart and Mercedes Ruehl in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, and it was great.