Late last night on a bit of a whim, I started reading Hamlet. I'm not sure how far I'll get, but so far I'm keen.It helped a LOT for me that one of the characters is a ghost.
Huldra Forsvant (Theodor Kittelsen)
Huldra Forsvant (Theodor Kittelsen)
6 comments:
Our class did Hamlet in senior; the other classes did Macbeth. That meant we had to work twice as fast as Hamlet is about twice as long as Macbeth. Good play.
Are you reading it in the 'original' or modern English?
I did Macbeth in year 11 I think. I was a silly unappreciative teen then and didn't take the time to get into it.
Just the fact that it starts out with three witches standing around a cauldron shouldv'e allerted me to it's goodness.
I'm reading Hamlet in it's original language. E has a four book complete Shakespeare collection that she picked up at a market. They are very old, so I assume it's just the original language.
Not just my favourite Shakespeare, but my favourite play. I saw it at Belvoir St in 1994. We had our feet on the stage; Geoffrey Rush spat on me and Jacqui Mckenzie showed more of herself than a 14-year-old boy might expect.
I reckon it's hard to get a feel for it on paper. I'd recommend the Franco Zeffirelli version (with Mel Gibson) for the 'thwarted man of action' reading, or Laurence Olivier's for the 'man who couldn't make up his mind' reading. I loved the look of the Kenneth Branagh versions, but I didn't feel like they really told a coherent story.
Stuart, did you see Branagh's full 4hr true-to-Shakespeare's-play version? A cut down 2.5 hr version of it came out - I only saw the full one.
Yes, I watched both versions :)
I quite like cut versions. It makes the company decide on an interpretation and run with it. (I seem to remember reading somewhere that this probably happened in Elizabethan times, too. But it sounds like the kind of self-justification my memory would manufacture.)
With both of Branagh's versions, I felt like that was missing: I didn't really know what Hamlet's motivation was, or why he wasn't getting on with it. The man who couldn't make up his mind was Branagh himself.
Cool, I'll have to check me out some movie versions when I'm done.
You know, if I was a braver man, more willing to put myself out there, I'd suggest a book group on this one. But I should learn my lesson on that one!
Post a Comment