1
I wouldn't call this so much a review as an afterthought, because I have neither the capacity nor a hobby for judging anything I have shallow knowledge of. But I had a great flurry of thoughts come to me after watching it and just wanted to get them down before they were pushed down to my pre-consciousness, as Poe would have said.
My personal opinion of Hamlet Q1 was that it was brilliant in both the translation, which was easily comprehensible (and therefore allowed me to understand literally every single sentence--a pleasure I have never enjoyed before either in English or Korean), and the execution, which includes the wonderful acting and the clever use of the stage. I especially liked the effect of red paper shreds which seemed to symbolize blood, rage, madness, lust, death.
2
Since I could now understand every sentence, I realized how wonderfully clever Hamlet's words in his faked madness were.. perhaps it was the passionate rage towards his father's murderer, perhaps it was his cynicism towards the world that allowed such sin to occur, but his madness broke the dam and allowed truth from his innermost heart to flow out in great torrents. Sometimes with blade-like coldness, sometimes with a dark smirk, they allowed him an outlet to say what was in his heart, which left me wondering if madness is the only way society can accept utter and absolute truth. Hamlet may have been only pretending to be mad, but Ophelia's hopeless madness was very real, and only then could she deal with her new found knowledge: that one brother had murdered another, and now lay with his wife.
At this point, I could see a connection between Poe and Shakespeare. For Ophelia, knowledge is like the Original Sin; her innocence is lost and she becomes pessimistic, nihilistic, cynical. She no longer puts her girlish side forward but acknowledges her sexuality. For Poe, whose greatest fear was antemortem burial, knowledge was horror--the horror of knowing something bad will inevitably happen. For them, it would be better to remain ignorant of what is to come. On the other hand, Emerson's knowledge is the key to joy, as the more you get to know nature, the more you feel closer to God / Over Soul. For me, the lit major, I think knowledge is neutral: knowledge is a window to a vast world that I experience across time and space. It neither aims to destroy my innocence nor make me wise, it exists and I am the seeker.
3
The last scene in Hamlet was a stage full of the colour red and dead people. This scene distinctly recalled the image from Poe's The Conqueror Worm:
I wouldn't call this so much a review as an afterthought, because I have neither the capacity nor a hobby for judging anything I have shallow knowledge of. But I had a great flurry of thoughts come to me after watching it and just wanted to get them down before they were pushed down to my pre-consciousness, as Poe would have said.
My personal opinion of Hamlet Q1 was that it was brilliant in both the translation, which was easily comprehensible (and therefore allowed me to understand literally every single sentence--a pleasure I have never enjoyed before either in English or Korean), and the execution, which includes the wonderful acting and the clever use of the stage. I especially liked the effect of red paper shreds which seemed to symbolize blood, rage, madness, lust, death.
2
Since I could now understand every sentence, I realized how wonderfully clever Hamlet's words in his faked madness were.. perhaps it was the passionate rage towards his father's murderer, perhaps it was his cynicism towards the world that allowed such sin to occur, but his madness broke the dam and allowed truth from his innermost heart to flow out in great torrents. Sometimes with blade-like coldness, sometimes with a dark smirk, they allowed him an outlet to say what was in his heart, which left me wondering if madness is the only way society can accept utter and absolute truth. Hamlet may have been only pretending to be mad, but Ophelia's hopeless madness was very real, and only then could she deal with her new found knowledge: that one brother had murdered another, and now lay with his wife.
At this point, I could see a connection between Poe and Shakespeare. For Ophelia, knowledge is like the Original Sin; her innocence is lost and she becomes pessimistic, nihilistic, cynical. She no longer puts her girlish side forward but acknowledges her sexuality. For Poe, whose greatest fear was antemortem burial, knowledge was horror--the horror of knowing something bad will inevitably happen. For them, it would be better to remain ignorant of what is to come. On the other hand, Emerson's knowledge is the key to joy, as the more you get to know nature, the more you feel closer to God / Over Soul. For me, the lit major, I think knowledge is neutral: knowledge is a window to a vast world that I experience across time and space. It neither aims to destroy my innocence nor make me wise, it exists and I am the seeker.
3
The last scene in Hamlet was a stage full of the colour red and dead people. This scene distinctly recalled the image from Poe's The Conqueror Worm:
THE CONQUEROR WORM
Edgar Allen Poe
Edgar Allen Poe
Lo! 'tis a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly-
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!
That motley drama- oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!- it writhes!- with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
Out- out are the lights- out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly-
Mere puppets they, who come and go
At bidding of vast formless things
That shift the scenery to and fro,
Flapping from out their Condor wings
Invisible Woe!
That motley drama- oh, be sure
It shall not be forgot!
With its Phantom chased for evermore,
By a crowd that seize it not,
Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes!- it writhes!- with mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.
Out- out are the lights- out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero the Conqueror Worm.
To recap an explanation of the poem from Professor Earl Jackson, the first two stanzas show a frantic, chaotic play on stage where the actors are all over the place. The third stanza shows that the audience do not understand the play despite its repetition. The last two stanzas introduce a worm that appears on stage and eats the mimes (the actors), and down come the curtains: it is the end of the play called "Man".
This poem was apparently a Shakespearean image of life as a stage and everyone a player. The actors on stage are people who live their lives, and since everyone is the star of their own plays, and since life does not reveal its plot, it is chaotic and incomprehensible. Which is why the audience, despite repeated plays on the stage, do not learn anything from them. And when the play is over, when we are dead, we are buried and eaten by worms. Hence the Conqueror Worm.
However, what I found most interesting was that in Hamlet, Horatio, Hamlet's faithful servant and friend, is left alive. In his dying breath, Hamlet pleads against Horatio's desire to drink the remaining poison in the cup and kill himself too, reasoning that their tragic story must be heard. This seems to go further than Poe's end of the poem, because physical death is not the end: the Storyteller lives on and passes on the story, and they are all brought back to life on stage. And since Poe's poem itself is a good representation of immortal literature that outlives its creator, perhaps The Conqueror Worm was not such a pessimisitic poem after all.
This poem was apparently a Shakespearean image of life as a stage and everyone a player. The actors on stage are people who live their lives, and since everyone is the star of their own plays, and since life does not reveal its plot, it is chaotic and incomprehensible. Which is why the audience, despite repeated plays on the stage, do not learn anything from them. And when the play is over, when we are dead, we are buried and eaten by worms. Hence the Conqueror Worm.
However, what I found most interesting was that in Hamlet, Horatio, Hamlet's faithful servant and friend, is left alive. In his dying breath, Hamlet pleads against Horatio's desire to drink the remaining poison in the cup and kill himself too, reasoning that their tragic story must be heard. This seems to go further than Poe's end of the poem, because physical death is not the end: the Storyteller lives on and passes on the story, and they are all brought back to life on stage. And since Poe's poem itself is a good representation of immortal literature that outlives its creator, perhaps The Conqueror Worm was not such a pessimisitic poem after all.
