i am not sure of many things, but there's one thing i know with the utmost certainty and it's that hamlet and horatio explored each other's bodies. multiple times.

" ذَلِكَ مِنْ أَنبَاء الْغَيْبِ نُوحِيهِ إِلَيْكَ وَمَا كُنتَ لَدَيْهِمْ إِذْ أَجْمَعُواْ أَمْرَهُم وَهُمْ يَمْكُرُونَ "

هاملت العزيز ، الذكي، الشجاع ، الجسور ، الحنون ، الغيور
حسناً ، أنا أحسد هاملت ، نعم ، أحسده من أعماق قلبي لانه لم يتورع ، لم يتأخر ولم يتنازل عن الأخذ بالثأر ، عن الانتقام لمن سرق منه احبائه ، لمن سلبه حقه في الاحساس بالحب والأمان .
صدّق شبحه ، ذاك الزائر العجيب ، ومشى ورائه ولكن بكل رزانة وخبث

" مجنون ، جنون البحر والريح حين يصطرعان ،
ليثبتا أيهما أشد بأساً "
مجنون ، وصف نعت به ولم ينكره بل حاول جاهداً التشبث به لينفذ خطته بدقة وحرص ويتمكن من فك أسر الحقيقة وإطلاق سراحها للعلن دون الخوف من عواقبها الأكيدة الحدوث.

أحسده ، على سيفه المسلول الذي أغمده في عمق المكر والخيانة في حين اني لم أمتلك ولو حتى سكيناً واحداً اتمكن فيه من تسديد ولو بضعة طعنات إلى ذلك الزاحف الأسود فيرتد على عقبيه . ويتركني وشأني ولو قليلاً ، بل بالعكس، أظهر نفسه امامي بكل وقاحة و أضحى يمشي ، متبختراً بنفسه ، بالإنجاز الذي كان يسحقني فيه كل دقيقة ، شامتاً مني ، بعجزي عن إدراكه وإيقافه .

مهما امتلكنا ، فليست كل الحروب نستطيع الفوز بها ، ولا كل الأعداء مرئيين ، ولا كل الأصدقاء .. أوفياء
هو انتصر ، اما انا ، فخسرت ، غابت شمسي ، وتكسرت اجنحتي ، واظلم عمري ، واصبحت ُ فتاةً من ورق هشة تخشى اي شيء ، كل شيء

https://ibb.co/0m46MMp

" إن رغباتنا كثيراً ما تتعارض وحظوظنا ،
فيفسد كل تدبير دبرناه وكل عزم اعتزمناه ،
واذا كانت أفكارنا من صنعنا فإن مصيرها ليس بأيدينا"
كنت قد بدأت لوم نفسي على تأخري في قراءة هاملت حتى الآن .
ولكن بعد انتهائي منها اكتشفت بأنني قرأتها في الوقت الصحيح تماماً من حياتي ، ولو اني قرائتها قبلاً لما وصلتني مشاعرها بهذا الصدق و الواقعية
لكن ، صحيح تماماً ، الكتب الكلاسيكية له توقيت محدد تدخل فيه حياتك ، وهي من تقرره وليس نحن

What’s the question?

“To be, or not to be: that is the question”

Shakespeare’s most famous play? Maybe. And that quote may be his most recognizable, certainly one of the most memorable. The tragedy of the Danish prince, his revenge, the introspection and self doubt that shaped his actions, and the tragic events described in some of Shakespeare’s most provocative language is mesmerizing.

“This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Borrowing from ancient legends, Shakespeare’s tragedy draws on complicated human emotions. Themes of death, loss, justice and destiny abound in a play that may be characterized by its somber, dark subject.

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Perhaps his most psychologically compelling drama, analysis of Hamlet has fueled debates, challenged students and inspired countless writings since. “The character of Hamlet played a critical role in Freud's explanation of the Oedipus complex and thus influenced modern psychology” – Wikipedia.

“When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.”

Interestingly, for such a depressingly emotional action, Ophelia’s character and her role in the narrative do much to anchor the mood and sets a tone from which the play never rises.

“Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. ”

"Para definir la locura, ¿no tendría uno que estar loco?"

Una maravilla! No puedo explicar lo mucho que me gusto este libro. Quedé enamorada de la escritura. Era una delicia leerlo.
A Shakespeare le encantaba el drama eso queda reflejado en cada libro suyo. Pero tenía un don para la escritura que pocos tienen.

Leyendo en mi tablet quedó con un monton de citas marcadas. La verdad una obra de arte!
Incluso me gustó mucho mas que Romeo & Julieta.


"Hamlet refleja la incapacidad de actuar ante el dilema moral entre venganza y perdón"

"La lección de la locura: ajusta el pensamiento y el recuerdo"

"La culpa no sabe fingir su recelo y al fin se traiciona queriendo esconderlo".

Oh, how much ink has spilled on this excellent Shakespeare work and how many tears will have shedding for it, I dare not imagine.
Also, I will not pretend to do a review that you would not have read probably dozens of times or even bring new elements you would not already know but only know this piece. Admittedly, this is a tragedy (therefore, as the name suggests, nothing very encouraging), but what poetry in these verses, what beauty in this bittersweet madness the Prince of Denmark believes he has reached, the young Hamlet.
Is he mad? I don't think so. He saw a specter, that of his father murdered by his uncle but who never felt the presence by his side of a loved one who had recently disappeared, and what is more, in more than questionable conditions. I cannot say that I have never experienced this feeling or at least wanted to believe it. The specter, therefore, reveals to his son how his brother did it to assassinate him and demand revenge!
So Hamlet's mind is tortured, it is true, but who wouldn't be after such a revelation? So what does he have to do? Take the sword and spill the blood again? For his part, the King, Claudius, sensing the danger, does everything to remove Hamlet from the kingdom of Denmark to preserve his place on the throne.
Hamlet, therefore, finds himself alone in the face of his fate because, although the presence of this specter at the castle has been revealed to him by three guards and by his friend Horatio, on whom else can he count? Who will believe it? He will take for granted, which will well arrange the affairs of his uncle or others who would be just as greedy for power as he and who have dedicated their cause to Claudius. Because, as everyone knows, the Prime Minister (to name nothing but him) must be faithful to the one he serves and devote his most remarkable devotion to him.
I will not say more about the plot because I think once again that I will only repeat what has already been said many and many times, but I insist on the point that this work, although 'this is a drama in which a lot of blood will flow, is a thing of beauty. To read and reread without fail!

this is just one big episode of the office

According to reports, Gillian Flynn is set to release a retelling of Hamlet as part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project in 2021, so this felt like the right time to reread this delightful Shakespeare play. Enjoyed all over again!

shakespeare when pitching this play, probably: this is my OC hamlet. hes a prince. hes bisexual. hes moody, brooding, and is anywhere between the ages of 16 to 30 years old. and no, i am not taking constructive criticism.

well, let me tell you what. im sold! i love hamlet. i love his angsty monologues. i love his sassy remarks. i love that he cant seem to shut up. i love his relationship with horatio. i love everything about him avoiding osric and his hat. i love that hes OTT and i seriously cant get enough.

also, for those of you who have read this, watch this. its great.

↠ 4.5 stars

یه اعتراف می خوام بکنم:
من قبلاً از بین کارهای شکسپیر، هملت رو اصلاً دوست نداشتم. عاشق اتللو و مکبث بودم، ولی از هملت خوشم نمی اومد اصلاً و نمی دونستم چرا معروف ترین اثر شکسپیره.

همه ى اين ها، تا وقتى شنيدم "بنديكت كمبربچ" نقش هملت رو بازى كرده. قبلاً اجراى سينمايى "مل گيبسون" رو ديده بودم، و راستش چندان كمكى نكرد كه هملت رو بيشتر دوست داشته باشم. اما بنديكت كمبربچ ماجراى ديگه ايه. با سختى اين اجرا رو پيدا كردم، و: موسيقى بى نظير، طراحى لباس بى نظير، طراحى صحنه ى بى نظير، نور پردازى بى نظير... اما همه ى اين ها فقط زيورهايى عارضى بودن گرد جوهر اصلى: بازى بى نظير.

عادت شكسپير اينه كه تقريباً هيچ كدوم از حالات شخصيت ها و لحن ديالوگ ها رو نمى نويسه و همه رو واگذار كرده به كارگردان و بازيگر. كلماتش همه خشك و بى جان هستن، و يك كارگردان و بازيگر خوب نيازه تا روح درستى به اين كلمات بدمه. يكى مثل بنديكت كمبربچ كه با دم مسيحايى ش به تك تك كلمات، شخصيت متمايزى بده، روح مستقلى بده، و حالات چهره اى به نمايشنامه اضافه كنه كه مثل شارح يك كتاب قديمى، جمله به جمله شرح بده كه چطور بايد هر جمله رو فهميد.

اوايل فيلم خیلی از دیالوگ ها رو متوجه نمی شدم به خاطر نثر قديمى شكسپير، و زيرنويس هم موجود نبود. به خاطر همین رفتم ترجمه ی "م.ا به آذين" (كه اتفاقاً از مترجم هاييه كه دوست دارم نثرشون رو) از نمایشنامه رو دانلود کردم. نمايشنامه رو باز گذاشتم کنار فیلم و همزمان فیلم رو می ديدم و ترجمه رو می خوندم، و به اين ترتيب بنديكت كمبربچ دست به دست م.ا به آذين، باعث شدن هملت با دوازده پله از قعر جدولِ نمايشنامه هاى محبوب من، به جايگاه صدرنشينى صعود كنه.

آنك من: شيفته و دوستدار هملت!

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark and, like Oscar the Grouch, I love it. And I love Hamlet. He can’t shut up, he’s a moody as hell bisexual and gets all philosophical while wanting everyone to think he’s losing his mind triggering a self-fulfilling prophecy of his mental health actually spiraling… okay so maybe I relate a bit too much. But this play rules and it has survived as a classic for a reason even if its characters don’t survive the play. Plus who doesn’t love a good revenge story? Especially one that has become a staple plot that has also led to great retellings like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead or even The Lion King and has so many elements that would later be revitalized as gothic tropes in literature and film.

This whole play is steeped in the interrogative mood that situates us in constant contemplation of ‘what a piece of work is man’ through a cavalcade of philosophical inquiries that move from sophism to existentialism. Of course ‘to be or not to be,’—one of the most quoted and recognizable lines of the play—is often considered to probe existentialist ideas long before Kierkegaard and Sartre would take up their pens and opens the play up as an investigation of identity and purpose that is, arguably, very existentially thematic. Much of the play asks ‘what is a man’ but is also Hamlet asking “who am I?” of himself as he schemes and stumbles through the ‘rotten’ state of the world. He also seems to express ideas of relativism central to the Sophists in lines such as ‘there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,’ and this moral relativism coupled with a thirst for revenge adds a rather edgy and engaging texture to the narrative as it plunges forward into destruction and death.

It is also a coveted role on the stage and there is such an incredible list of people who have played Hamlet. Peter O'Toole, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Fiennes, Richard Burton, David Tennant, Kenneth Branagh, Christopher Plummer, Daniel Day-Lewis, Alan Cumming and many more. Even Ian McKellen played him in a recent age-blind cast production. Who wouldn't want to play Hamlet? But Ophelia as well, one of the more interesting characters who has certainly had a life of her own across literature.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet lives on, like many of his plays, for having a rather universal quality to them that appeals to the times no matter when in history it is revisited or performed. Themes of being trapped by circumstance, themes of betrayal, themes of the in-fighting of the ruling class dooming a nation under them, and themes of struggling with identity continue to trouble people in every era and Hamlet always offers an avenue for confronting these ideas. A fantastic play that stands out even in Shakespeare’s impressive canon of works.

n  The singular and peculiar life is bound
With all the strength and armour of the mind
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw
What's near it with it. It is a massy wheel
Fixed on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things
Are mortised and adjoined, which when it falls
Each small annexment, petty consequence,
Attends the boist'rous ruin.n

There is a mounting vileness once the Queen is dead. The Basilikon Doron is released, the son whose mother's head was cut off to ensure the peace of the realm is on the throne, and what has been gained through inveterate evil of colonialism has kept on gaining, but instead of that much pronounced Elizabethan, we have Jacobean. Instead of the gold of novelty, surprise after surprise of peace through scything after scything of populace, we may have the scythe, but not the wielder. Hated, unnatural, the bane of existence to many a man and a biting prick in the spine to the entire gender, but there was no betrayal that cut off the head too soon, no insipid frivolity that forced the island to swallow its own tail, no language of the conqueror to wriggle out from beneath and painfully make its way to light. There was just Elizabeth. And now she's dead.

With the need of a royal divorce came the gateway to a new, minimized, individualized religion. Poetry is the mediation a human requires to reconcile life and death, and over time the rhythms and rhymes have coalesced into many a ritual of speaking, singing, screaming, the random chance of natural selection resulting in such an example as the words spoken during the course of a Catholic laying to rest. What happens, then, in a particular corner of the world where Purgatory is no longer an incentive and prayers no longer a necessity and your beloved long departed may or may not be suffering ten-thousand years longer, an oversight in a change of scheme that names their transmutation nonsense. All of us are doomed to die, a universality garnering interest with a vengeance beyond twenty-five when the cell decay begins to outpace the cell renewal, but truth has nothing to do with individual experience. All you love are doomed to die, but each and every may only die once.

What of Hamlet I know now will make the return to King Lear all the more dire, for freedom's a baleful deity only because responsibility is so much worse. Your wars are won, your peace is gripped, and all there is left to do is provoke the self into an action guided by loss, propelled by rage, confined by that mewling and puking concept that is honor, that will bring the whole host of dependent selves down. A head of state's a nasty piece of work when fratricide is on the résumé, but put on the stage tens of thousands of revenge plots and you'll never accurately frame through scene and line of dialogue that creature that is civil war. Lear comes close, which is why, hard as it is for me to believe, I may come out of this class with a rearranged hierarchy when it comes to Shakespeare. But perhaps not. Unlike Hamlet, I have not yet seen the storm in the flesh, and the divide between words on a page and souls on a stage when contemplation's broken free off the footnotes must be given pause. I'm a reader through and through, but if all the world's a stage, the bodies fell first.

n  If thou didst ever hold me in they heart,
Absent thee from felicity a while,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.n

Hamlet, Hamlet. I will never muse enough.

n  Good my lord, will you see the players well bestowed? Do ye hear?–let them be well used, for they are the abstracts and brief chronicles of the time. After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.n

---

1/2/2013

I first encountered Hamlet in comic book form, alongside many other Shakespeare plays portrayed with fantastical characters in all shades, poses, and degrees of perverseness. The strongest memory from that time consists of the titular character, blonde head posing with an innocent expression between a hawk and a handsaw. Some time later I was intrigued to learn that Shakespeare himself had performed in productions as the infamous ghost. Nothing else of his acting career stayed in my brain, which may have been a foretelling of the special place this play would come to hold in my heart.

The years rolled on, and with them came my favorite teacher of all time. Thanks to her, Hamlet, and a ten page essay discussing the symbolism of death, I began to see what all the fuss with Shakespeare was about.  As that year ended, so did my last English class, and it would be a long while until I rediscovered Hamlet, at my first live performance put on by the actors of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.

Now, it's true that I had loved the play in high school, but that had been through reading it at an extremely slow pace, constantly ferrying back and forth between text and explanation. Flash forward four years to the performance, years filled with equations, calculations, and engineering garble, leading up to a much quicker rendition of the work I had understood only through slow perusal and much hand-holding. What good would watching it do, if the scenes flew past my uncomprehending brain?

But I did know what was going on. I could follow every amusing quip and every stunning soliloquy. More importantly, I loved it as much as I had all those years ago, my first journey through lines of archaic prose to the shining and glorious wit that had composed it. And a week later the title Infinite Jest caught my eye, and the rest is history.

In short, Hamlet is special to me, for its beautiful prose and deceptively human themes as well as its constant presence throughout the years. It is a play whose value to me only increases as my life continues, with every new encounter inspiring increased understanding and appreciation of its existence. I could go on about the complexities seething in the mind of each and every character, the wickedly quick humor and scathing wordplay, the immense presence of death working its way throughout every aspect of Hamlet's world, the battle between ancient cultures raging through lines of debate. To be, or not to be. With so many beliefs, who can avoid the question? I could even drag out my aforementioned essay for public perusal. But I won't. A heartfelt recommendation, for now, is enough. The rest is for the future.

There is something rotten in the state of Denmark...

I like the way that pretty much everybody is dead by the end of the play. The political and personal entanglements are so tightly interwoven that nobody can survive.

As is probably not unusual I went along to the local theatre with the whole of the year group taking English Literature to see the play when the line was spoken that Hamlet would be sent to England and since everybody there was mad anyway he'd fit in unrecognised, the theatre audience much to my surprise erupted in laughter, which I felt demonstrated the truth of the play's proposition.