Traveller’s Comments (group member since Jan 14, 2015)

Traveller’s comments from the On Paths Unknown group.

Indeed, agreed on all that, and I do think that in spite of the fact that we are looking at the poem line by line here, one should still keep in mind how the poem works synergystically as a whole.
Are we ready to move on to the next part?

Derek wrote: "Notice in scene II, we have the same succession in Norway as in Denmark. "Norway" is "uncle of young Fortinbras". It makes far more sense in Claudius case. Claudius is a man still in his prime. Man..."

I know, right? I noticed it as well, and was thinking to comment on it once I'd had the time to look up the systems of succession in the countries mentioned.

...but then, what does idolatry actually mean? ;) Isn't one religion simply another religion's idolatry? In fact, praying to broken stone, might, depending on your personal point of view, indicate religion itself, were you agnostic or atheist. It might also represent things like materialism, where "false gods" such as Mammon is being idolised.

Well, I meant the comment about the ambiguity to relate to the entire poem, actually. In the entire poem, I find that often, the way he constructs his sentences makes them open to more than one interpretation, and not sure if it's meant to be that way, but it might be.

Derek wrote: "There are only three at a time, Francisco (who seems completely superfluous) exits just before Horatio and Marcellus enter. I might not be overwhelmed, but I'm definitely whelmed!"

Okay, I admit, since I'd not been following the names, I just saw them as generic guards. But you have a point, 2 would have been enough, with a third one perhaps just thrown in passing would have worked too, I suppose. Maybe they wanted to give more actors work, even if just a bit-piece? XD

Derek wrote: "I've always found this first scene too confusing to open the play. Why did we need four watchmen? Two would have done. Couldn't we have Kings and Princes with different names? Why not just call Claudius "Hamlet", too, and totally ruin it for me. Things start to make a little sense later, but then we get into madness and it all runs back into confusion.
."

Hmm, but isn't it just 3, with the one relieving the other? The fourth person being Horatio, Hamlet's friend. I love the intro scene. (As long as you don't bother trying to remember the guard's names, which are unimportant, as I see it.)

It sets the scene on what is to come beautifully, with a cool, spooky atmosphere to boot. It prepares us without overwhelming us, and it's mercifully quite short. :D

Yes, all of the previous, er, about 10 posts refer, directly or indirectly to part III

III
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

We have commented on the "cactus land", and the stone images and the fact that supplications ( and prayers) are made to stone images/broken stone. I'm really tickled by the stone images/broken stone - shall we see how much meaning/symbolism we can tease out of those?

Note that these people mentioned in the second stanza are certainly striving and praying; they seem quite desperate - at a time when people usually feel tenderness, they turn their passion elsewhere - they direct prayers to these stone images.

The way that Eliot constructs his sentences do make them rather ambiguous, I find, and this adds to the difficulty of decipherment.

I think I've become a bit blunted to the charms of the first scene, because I have often started a Hamlet film, never to finish. Or started reading Hamlet (only to start skipping stuff later on).

But indeed, it is a wonderfully atmospheric scene, I personally see it as being foggy and misty as well- perfect weather for ghosts to appear!

Not wanting to give away spoilers, but yes, Fortinbras certainly needs to be taken notice of, and those who have never read Hamlet will see at the end how beautifully circular (or elliptical - is Michele out there?) this play is.

Ruth, when the text becomes hard to digest, silliness and hi-jinx will follow! Anything to divert us from the pain of breaking our brains on Eliot's poetry, which I yet love. They say that which you love most can hurt you the most; and Eliot is the only poet I know who can hurt my brain. Therefore it follows that I must love his poetry...and I do! :)

Feel free to comment on Act 1 scene1 - I apologize if I'm kind of rushing through it, but it is in scene 2 that the REAL drama starts for me: with a pompous flourish, we are introduced to the new king: no, King Hamlet's oldest son Hamlet was not made king, but Hamlet senior's brother, Claudius is now king. (Is it just me, or are the names of Cladius, Polonius and Laertes (even Cornelius) not pretty Greek/Roman for Danes? Ha. )
I wonder if Shakespeare presupposed any knowledge of the Danish system of succession from his audience. Of course he had to set the play in a foreign land - setting a succession drama in Britain would have been far too close to home.

And guess who Claudius has on his arm already? None but the dead king's wife; not as Claudius's sister in law, but as his brand new newly-wed wife! Ahem! Is it just me, but I couldn't help thinking ; no wonder old Hamlet is haunting the place with his wife hopping so quickly into her brother in law's bed. (Barely 2 months apparently.)

Phew, that right there at the start of scene 2 is enough to keep a dozen soapies going for a few years! :0

I'd like to research the customs at the time that the play was written; I know several cultures required a certain period of "mourning time" which close relatives and spouses had to adhere to, some by wearing black and some by refraining from marriage etc.

I wonder how the audiences of the time received this; Claudius makes a bunch of excuses for his actions, but to me he comes across as an oily snake. I'm sure audiences would have, at this point, agreed that Hamlet has ample reason to be dour and grumpy, and I feel that at the start, we are supposed to feel sympathy for him.

I had myself been planning to watch all the movies, but as you mentioned, this is an arduous task, and I fizzled out quite soon. I had, among others, acquired a black and white one - made by somebody pretty well known but I just can't place it right now....

Anyway, I've started it off, so take it away, Amy and company! The first thread is here : https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

How are we going to do this; shall I post a short sketch of the "setting" for the start of each act, and then open the floor for comments etc?

In any case, in Act 1 scene 1, we have the following:
Hamlet is a prince of Denmark. He has just returned to his home from university after learning of the death of his father, the king of Denmark.

The scene starts out with a conversation on the battlements of the castle, between three guards and Hamlet's friend Horatio, about a ghost that seems to have been haunting the castle.

The ghost then appears to them, and they remark that the ghost resembles the dead king, and... well, a lot of conversation follows. I might want to stop and ask if anybody wants to comment on any of their conversation there before we move on in broad terms.

Well, in that conversation, they do discuss quite a bit of background politics; the most important being that dead king Hamlet snr had defeated Norway in a recent battle and taken some of its lands, and that Fortinbras, the young Prince of Norway, has declared war, planning to take this land back and to avenge his father who had been killed while defending against Hamlet senior's attack.
We are not quite sure how Hamlet's father had died.
The discussion turns to wondering if the ghost might be Hamlet's father and whether it would speak to Hamlet, as it seems so far to have scorned everybody else.

Good, good, Amy. I am busy trying to compile the first post as we speak. I am kind of just trying to put -something- down to anchor us a bit into getting started somewhere - from that point on, we can run with how things pan out and play it by ear.

Amy (Other Amy) wrote: "Heh :-)

The authorship thing always strikes me as strange. I don't care if Billy-Bob Smith wrote Hamlet. It's still Hamlet!

It's a five act play; should we do one thread per act?"

Sylwia wrote: "The authorship thing always strikes me as strange. I don't care if Billy-Bob Smith wrote Hamlet. It's still Hamlet!

I agree. I think it matters mostly to historians writing papers."

Well... normally, I would totally agree. ..but the next question is, when you say we are going to do a discussion of "Hamlet", I need to ask you, "which Hamlet"? ..and by that, I mean : "which text of the play called Hamlet" , because there are several.

I'll quote from the Oxford companion to Shakespeare: (view spoiler)[
The discrepancies between the three substantially
different texts of the play have vexed its editors ever since the
publishers of the 'good' quarto of 1604-5, indignantly dis-
tinguishing their version from the apparently illicit 'bad'
quarto printed the previous year, declared it to be 'newly
imprinted and enlarged to almost as much again as it was,
according to the true and perfect copy'. It seems likeliest that
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet in about 1600 (producing the
version printed as the 'good' quarto), but had revised it by
1602 to produce the acted version which was printed in the
Folio and which also lies behind the first, 'bad' quarto of 1603
(a *reported text, very probably assembled by the hired actor
who played Marcellus, Valtemand, and Lucianus, whose
scenes are more fully and accurately rendered than the rest of
the play). There is no complete assent on the relations be-
tween the three texts, however: some editors have favoured
the 'good' quarto, insisting that the Folio text, though in
places puzzlingly superior, mainly reflects unauthorized cuts
by actors, while others, including those of the Oxford edition,
see the Folio as Shakespeare's own mature revision of his earlier draft. The 'bad' quarto, further disputed over by edi-
tors, is also valuable despite its obvious errors and inconsist-
encies (and eminently actable, as sporadic modern revivals
have demonstrated): its vivid stage directions may supply
genuine details of the play's early performances omitted by
the other printed versions, and its variations in character
names—Polonius, for example, is here called Corambis, and
Reynaldo is Montano—may result from an accidental con-
flation with the lost ur-Hamlet, in which the reporter had
perhaps also acted. " (hide spoiler)] I put that into spoiler tags, not because its a spoiler, but because it long and I want to save space. :)
In any case, it should be enough to give you an idea of what I mean.

It's a five act play; should we do one thread per act?
"
Indeed, that sounds good! Shall we make this the background thread for all things Hamlety and Shakespearean, and start with the text itself in a new thread, because I can guarantee you that if some of the Hamlet/Shakespeare buffs I know start posting here, that there are books-ful to post "around" Hamlet the text.

For the record, the primary tree-book (as opposed to e-book) that I am using for this discussion, is this one: http://www.amazon.com/Hamlet-Case-Stu... (from the Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism series), and they use the full Riverside Shakespeare's version - with text by G. Blakemore Evans.

My book's text is a bit closer to the original than the popular renditions out there - I have found a few online examples:
http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/ful...
and
http://www.folgerdigitaltexts.org/htm...
and
http://www.shakespeare-online.com/pla...

I was wondering if you guys would want us to basically follow the same text, or shall we make do with what we each have?

The first striking difference I found in my text from the modern renditions, is line 7.

My rendition says: 'Tis now strook twelf. where the modern rendition goes: 'Tis now struck twelve . However, these are just minor cosmetic differences, and I would rather use a modern text, which I assume most of you will be doing.

Okay, so you guys want to deal directly with the text itself - good! Let's see how it goes. I'll link you to the first thread shortly!
I am ecstatic to see y'all showing up, btw! Very, very welcome!!

Ugh, Ruth, NOW look what you've gone and done! yes, and you too, Derek! Now I have the following kind of nonsense going through my brain at idle moments:

Knock knock
Who's there
Hollow
Hollow whoo?
Hollo-ha! (Aloha)
or:
Hollow who?
Hollow? hollow? (Hello? hello?)
or:

Holler louder, I can't hear ya!

Anyway, another way to look at the poem holistically, would be to see the wasteland described in The Hollow Men, as just one of the metaphorical places where one would not be able to "see" moral and spiritual truths for what (Eliot believes) they are.

In other words, these are various ways, as described in the various stanzas, of being an 'empty' being metaphorically speaking, and being in a place where you cannot look with "direct eyes". Maybe, also, in a psychological sense, these hollow men represent people who are cut off from their own spiritual selves?

At least the people in the cactus land realize they are in a bit of hole, and they are at least trying to move beyond it, they are supplicating, even if it is to broken stones, whereas the people in death's dream kingdom seem more placid, more complacent with their situation in their dreaming state.

Heh, my point was rather to agree that The Hollow Men does indeed not lend itself well to knock knock jokes. The only other hollow/holo I could think of, was holograms/holographs, or if you said something like; "That sounds hollow, man!" ...but, yeah. It doesn't really go anywhere...

Inner resources is a good one for cactus, I guess, if ... this cactus land is to mean "life on earth " (...but albeit in a moral wasteland)? I'm starting to wonder if I'm not trying to make a round peg fit into a square hole when trying to chisel out a "life on earth <-> purgatory <-> hell" comparison here. Maybe it's just the EYYYES that refer to the Divine Comedy? Maybe I'm just too dumb to figure Eliot's poetry out? :(

Knock knock
Who's there?
The Hollow.
The Hollow who?

Quit hollering so I can finish my Hollowmen discussion!

No but seriously: Sure, Ruth. It's just that the cactii stumped me for a bit. I suppose they indicate drought, barrenness and prickliness?

Hmm, I suspect Derek applied it a bit thick there.... it's bad, but not THAT bad, unless you never wash your hands! :D

Derek wrote: "Further to that, a couple of articles in the Daily Mail (slightly less than the most reliable of sources) about Russians dying when their charging iPhones were used in the tub or shower. There was ..."

For the record, I don't believe in dreams, but off the record? I shall refrain from tempting fate!

Derek wrote: "Traveller wrote: "The only solution is to let more hot water in and read some more."

And this is a problem, how? I remember doing that.

You know your Kindle can't actually electrocute you, right?..."

But... but.... dreams.... :S Who knows, by some freakiness- you never know. The person was really freaked out because I definitely died in the dream. :P