"The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables."
That's my single favorite phrase in all of Shakespeare, and has been since high school. Seems innocuous, doesn't it? Hamlet, Act I, Scene 2--
HORATIO
My lord, I came to see your father's funeral.
HAMLET
I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student;
I think it was to see my mother's wedding.
HORATIO
Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon.
HAMLET
Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
It's not one of the big, blazing, famous bits where the actor takes a deep breath and vents their spleen to heaven. Not one of those soliloquies so well known you could parody it on half a second's notice in front of any audience in the world. But god, god it's so elegant. So efficient. So much sentiment, character, and back-story compressed into one thin sentence.
Would it be much improved by turning it into this?
HORATIO
You look angry, Hamlet.
HAMLET
I'm angry that my mother married my uncle so soon after my father passed away!
*****
In Vonda N. McIntyre's mid-80s Star Trek tie-in novel Enterprise: The First Adventure, a 23rd century Shakespeare re-interpreter turns the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy into a plain-speech train wreck that begins: "Should I kill myself, or not?"
When McIntyre did this, it was meant as a joke.
*****
Orson Scott Card was once a writer of clarity, inventiveness, and passion, and while he was occasionally prudish he seemed like a man genuinely attempting to reconcile his personal faith to the evidence of the world around him. These days he seems to have lost all interest in that reconciliation. He's painted himself into an absolutist and authoritarian corner of his faith, and his frothing bigotry has eaten his artistic perspective.
Card's got every right to be a dreary homophobic bigot (though of course he dislikes it when people call him that; he wants to be free to advocate the imposition of hurtful, vicious, and primitive injunctions on the society in which he lives but he is awfully thin-skinned when objections are raised). He's got every right to create and sell dreary homophobic work. The rest of us, in turn, have every right to wish it wasn't so homophobic, or so dreary. And to mock... oh yes, to mock.
I'm pretty much an inclusive absolutist when it comes to re-interpreting Shakespeare. Add, sift, transmute, refine, pervert, and bowdlerize if you will... throw in steampunk robots, change settings, swap character genders, add harsh language, remove sex, add sex, whatever. Shakespeare's work isn't some solemn mausoleum at which we all must pay cold-blooded obedience, it's a playground which we can and must dig up, dirty, and refurbish on a continual basis.
So Card's got every right to tinker with Hamlet to his sad little heart's content. What draws my fierce mockery is that his Hamlet's Father willfully ignores the character and content of the original. The assertion that it reveals "what's really going on" in the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark is a reeking lie. It isn't an elegant interface with Shakespeare's creation, but a complete re-invention of it, steam-cleaned of its original texture and meaning. OSC's sternly moralizing, dull-as-a-brick Hamlet can only be conjured by completely disregarding everything the original character said, thought, and did. Now, if that's what you want to write, go ahead and write it. Just have the honesty to call it what it is... a bloody rewrite. Not an honest engagement with the original text.
As for the language itself... you've simply got to be kidding. From Card:
Horatio brought him his sword. "Laertes is looking for you," he said.
"I don't have time for Laertes. He must know I didn't mean to kill his father," Hamlet said.
"It's not his father," said Horatio. "It's his sister."
"Ophelia? I didn't touch her."
"She killed herself. Walked out into the sea, dressed in her heaviest gown. A funeral gown. Two soldiers went in after her, and a boat was launched, but when they brought her body back, she was dead."
"And for that he wants to kill me?"
Stale as month-old taco chips. Dry of emotion, rhythm, flair. Dead at conception, dead on arrival, dead. It's no crime to not be Shakespeare. . . but to hack up such a soulless paste in lieu of prose? There's less invention and less life in all of Hamlet's Father than there is in a single line from the original. A line about the catering arrangements.
Art doesn't die when artists make mistakes. It dies when they stop trying. In service to his viciousness and self-righteousness, Card has locked himself away from his art.
HORATIO
My lord, I came to see your father's funeral.
HAMLET
I pray thee, do not mock me, fellow-student;
I think it was to see my mother's wedding.
HORATIO
Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon.
HAMLET
Thrift, thrift, Horatio! The funeral baked meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
It's not one of the big, blazing, famous bits where the actor takes a deep breath and vents their spleen to heaven. Not one of those soliloquies so well known you could parody it on half a second's notice in front of any audience in the world. But god, god it's so elegant. So efficient. So much sentiment, character, and back-story compressed into one thin sentence.
Would it be much improved by turning it into this?
HORATIO
You look angry, Hamlet.
HAMLET
I'm angry that my mother married my uncle so soon after my father passed away!
*****
In Vonda N. McIntyre's mid-80s Star Trek tie-in novel Enterprise: The First Adventure, a 23rd century Shakespeare re-interpreter turns the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy into a plain-speech train wreck that begins: "Should I kill myself, or not?"
When McIntyre did this, it was meant as a joke.
*****
Orson Scott Card was once a writer of clarity, inventiveness, and passion, and while he was occasionally prudish he seemed like a man genuinely attempting to reconcile his personal faith to the evidence of the world around him. These days he seems to have lost all interest in that reconciliation. He's painted himself into an absolutist and authoritarian corner of his faith, and his frothing bigotry has eaten his artistic perspective.
Card's got every right to be a dreary homophobic bigot (though of course he dislikes it when people call him that; he wants to be free to advocate the imposition of hurtful, vicious, and primitive injunctions on the society in which he lives but he is awfully thin-skinned when objections are raised). He's got every right to create and sell dreary homophobic work. The rest of us, in turn, have every right to wish it wasn't so homophobic, or so dreary. And to mock... oh yes, to mock.
I'm pretty much an inclusive absolutist when it comes to re-interpreting Shakespeare. Add, sift, transmute, refine, pervert, and bowdlerize if you will... throw in steampunk robots, change settings, swap character genders, add harsh language, remove sex, add sex, whatever. Shakespeare's work isn't some solemn mausoleum at which we all must pay cold-blooded obedience, it's a playground which we can and must dig up, dirty, and refurbish on a continual basis.
So Card's got every right to tinker with Hamlet to his sad little heart's content. What draws my fierce mockery is that his Hamlet's Father willfully ignores the character and content of the original. The assertion that it reveals "what's really going on" in the tragedy of the Prince of Denmark is a reeking lie. It isn't an elegant interface with Shakespeare's creation, but a complete re-invention of it, steam-cleaned of its original texture and meaning. OSC's sternly moralizing, dull-as-a-brick Hamlet can only be conjured by completely disregarding everything the original character said, thought, and did. Now, if that's what you want to write, go ahead and write it. Just have the honesty to call it what it is... a bloody rewrite. Not an honest engagement with the original text.
As for the language itself... you've simply got to be kidding. From Card:
Horatio brought him his sword. "Laertes is looking for you," he said.
"I don't have time for Laertes. He must know I didn't mean to kill his father," Hamlet said.
"It's not his father," said Horatio. "It's his sister."
"Ophelia? I didn't touch her."
"She killed herself. Walked out into the sea, dressed in her heaviest gown. A funeral gown. Two soldiers went in after her, and a boat was launched, but when they brought her body back, she was dead."
"And for that he wants to kill me?"
Stale as month-old taco chips. Dry of emotion, rhythm, flair. Dead at conception, dead on arrival, dead. It's no crime to not be Shakespeare. . . but to hack up such a soulless paste in lieu of prose? There's less invention and less life in all of Hamlet's Father than there is in a single line from the original. A line about the catering arrangements.
Art doesn't die when artists make mistakes. It dies when they stop trying. In service to his viciousness and self-righteousness, Card has locked himself away from his art.
No comments have been added yet.
