"Nice Play, Shakespeare!"

 (notice the earring)

Remember “Nice play,Shakespeare!” You’d say it to someone when they’d flubbed up. Makes you wonder if anyone ever said it to Shakespeare himself, say when he committed a faux pas. Also makes you wonder whether Shakespeare would have gotten the joke, Was he self-involved enough to think that he was simply being praised for one of his masterpieces? An example of this might have been a situation where Shakespeare broke a floorboard at the Globe on the night of a scheduled performance of Twelfth Night. One of his techs could easily have said “Nice play, Shakespeare,” to express their annoyance at the clumsiness of their boss. It might even has simply come off as a bit of good natured chiding of the kind that Shakespeare would have endured if there’d been a WHCA (White House Correspondents' Association) annual dinner back in Elizabethan times--which he’d been invited to attend. Horatio might have said “Nice, play Shakespeare,” when Hamlet stabbed Polonius who was hiding behind the arras, but the self-conscious reference to the author of the play might have fucked with Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” The case of Hamlet is even more complicated, for if you said “Nice play, Shakespeare” to Shakespeare and he was too narcissistic to get the sarcasm, he still wouldn’t know which play you were talking about Hamlet, or the play within the play, The Mousetrap. Your average Joe has an advantage in this regard. He doesn’t have to worry about being Shakespeare and he knows he’s screwed up when someone says, “Nice play, Shakespeare!”

Hamlet for President?

Hamlet’s predicament epitomizes the famous dichotomy Matthew Arnold made between the Hebraic and the Hellenic in Culture and Anarchy, with the Hebraic representing "strictness of conscience" and the Hellenic, "spontaneity of consciousness." From the Hebraic point of view Hamlet must avenge his father, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. From the Hellenic, he is, according to Coleridge, “a man living in meditation, called upon to act by every motive human and divine, but the great object of his life is defeated by continually resolving to do, yet doing nothing but resolve.” However, is this last not an action, if we take the existentialist view that existence precedes essence and man is defined by  his actions? Hazlitt supports this conclusion when he remarks, “It is not from any want of attachment to his father or of abhorrence of his murder that Hamlet is thus dilatory, but it is more to his taste to indulge his imagination in reflecting upon the enormity of the crime and refining on his schemes of vengeance, than to put them into immediate practice. His ruling passion is to think, not to act.” But who do we prefer, the man whose action is action or the man whose chief action is thought? Hamlet has a clear chance to do away with Claudius, but his reaction is almost juridical. He realizes that killing his uncle while he's praying will be more a sanctification than a punishment, with the result that his uncle may well end up in his heaven, while his father’s ghost continues to languish in purgatory. That’s just good thinking. The specialty of the man of action is seldom an appreciation of consequences and such impulsiveness often comes at a price. A chess grandmaster's actions, by definition, comprise an extraordinary level of premeditation, but he or she is generally a mnemonic prodigy. Many politicians, who are quick to act, are not blessed with great memories, especially when it comes to history and hence end up getting us into quagmires like Iraq. On the other hand would we wish to have a Hamlet as the leader of our country? What about the philosopher king? The answer is a likely “no" since such a surfeit of consciousness is, as we have seen in the case of Hamlet, a precursor to madness. Hamlet prefigures the kind of interiority that Dostoevsky described in his characters. Yet would you go to the Underground Man for advice? Even considering the kind of men and women of action who are currently running for president, would you defer to a reformed criminal with a highly developed moral universe--like say Raskolnikov? Would you vote for Hamlet?

You Might Have to Use the Jakes, John or Loo, but Don’t Name a Kid After It

Thomas Crapper

It is no coincidence the etymology of the name of the melancholy Jaques from As You Like It is Jakes, which is the slang for toilet. Many of the character’s most brilliant asides (which anticipate Hamlet’s dark view) amount to the fact that everything is shit. Describing his state in Act IV, Scene 1, he says “it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.” Jakes has something in common with John which is another word for toilet and derives from John Harrington one of the 102 god children of Elizabeth I, who is credited with inventing the first flushing toilet. John is obviously one of the most common names in the English language. It functions like Massimo which also happens to be one of the most common male names used by Italians. However don’t parents who name their male offspring Jake (which is a close relative of Jakes) realize that they are adding a heavy psychic burden to children? Aren’t such children already weighted down with the baggage of their progenitor’s unfulfilled dreams and wishes? Do they have to add to that the stigma of being named after a toilet. The same applies to seeming innocuous name of Lou. It is hard enough to be a male in our current society. What child named Lou isn’t going to be challenged by having a name that sounds like loo? Loo is not Lou, but the road to hell is paved with homonyms as well as good intentions. As a rule, can we agree that it is best not to name children after crappers, despite the venerable Thomas Crapper, who was so instrumental in promoting the use of the flush toilet?

Was Hamlet Suffering From False Memory Syndrome?

Ernest Jones wrote a book called Hamlet and Oedipus where he argued that Hamlet’s ambivalence about avenging his father results from his own incestuous wishes. Hamlet was in this case the perfect embodiment of the Oedipus Complex which is, as we know  is the mainstay of classical Freudian theory. Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher may have had his own oedipal problems with the founder of psychoanalysis when he wrote Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, but both the Oedipus and Electra complexes are still important in the kind of therapeutic thinking that believes in unconscious drives, with Shakespeare’s play providing a perfect petri dish for discussion. But what if Hamlet didn’t have the wish to murder his father so he could sleep with his mother. What if he was say suffering from False Memory syndrome induced by Horatio telling him about the sighting of the ghost. You don’t have to be Oedipal to mourn the loss of a parent and Hamlet is in a very vulnerable state when he's given the information about a ghost appearing on the premises. In addition his informants are themselves prone to suggestion which as we know can lead to a kind of lynch mob hysteria. King Hamlet has died so it’s assumed that if a ghost appears at Elsinore, it’s got to be him. Rumors do get around. The fact is, if you are going to go down that road, you can’t discountenance the possibility it might be not King Hamlet, but the ghost of someone else. There are likely to have been few if any any productions of Hamlet which have been based on False Memory Syndrome, but it could be a fecund path for an ambitious young director. Another even more controversial episode in the history of the Freudian canon was the repudiation of the seduction theory. While there are many people who may have suffered sexual abuse as children, the central tenet here is that oedipal fantasy is what is driving some of these memories which are in fact neurosis.  While false memory syndrome may come from external suggestion, the memories Freud is talking about are the crux of the neurosis. But let’s not confuse Hamlet’s insides with his outsides. Maybe he's just wrong. Maybe Claudius isn’t guilty of anything and maybe Gertrude is just the kind of person who jumps into a new relationship because of the huge void left in her life. Some people mourn forever and some are able to go on with their lives. Like a lot of people who are as tortured as they are deceived, Hamlet then turns to art, whereby he dramatizes his cause by producing the Murder of Gonzago, a thinly veiled attack on his uncle. If you look at it from Claudius' perspective, he’s getting a bad rap since he feels guilty enough about enjoying the pleasures of the flesh with his brother’s widow. The last thing he needs is to have some ideologically driven storm trooper, some zombie from the Night of the Living Dead, programmed with a bunch of erroneous conclusions that he’s hell bent on enacting.

The Death of the “N” Word

“Narcissus” by Caravaggio

Let’s entertain for a moment the theory of parallel universes, the doctrine of eternal occurrence articulated in varying forms by both Poincare and Nietzsche. The substance would be that within the infinity of time and space, everything will recur with all its infinite possible mutations. In other words you could climb into a wormhole or other exotic device and find a parallel universe in space/time where you existed along with infinite forms of yourself, the self that was a teetotaler as well as a drunk, the self that was a lothario as well as an anhedonist--who finds no pleasure in sex or anything else. In theory, it’s actually possible though not probable that you could find your exact present self in this world. Infinity like a Pandora’s Box unleashes all possible combinations and permutations. Another formulation of the same idea is the example of the monkey sitting in front of a typewriter and producing Hamlet. But let’s take poetic license and envision a parallel universe over the infinity of space and time where an even more unlikely possibility occurs, say a universe filled with exact genomic replicas of yourself, and not one but thousands of monkeys merrily pecking away at typewriters that all come up with not Hamlet this time, but the play within a play in Hamlet, The Murder of Gonzago. What if? At the very least there would be no such thing as identity theft in a place where identity was so easily shared and uniqueness was useless to cultivate. Of course there is no way to speculate about what life would be like in such a dystopia. One thing is certain, however. The much overused “N” word, narcissism,” would surely become extinct.