Monk

When Rosenberg discusses Hamlet’s ghost, about how people have tried to give it a haunting effect over the centuries, he drops an interesting personal note about Shakespeare.

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In Shakespeare’s time, surely all the resources of the Globe must have been used to present, with as much terror as possible, the advent of the ghost - perhaps especially because Shakespeare himself may have played it. (Rowe thought it was the “top” of his acting.)

-- Marvin Rosenberg, “The Masks of Hamlet”

Rosenberg, in his preface, also goes into how “Hamlet” stands continual rereading, how you can keep getting more out of it. Of course, this is true for all great works of literature, and “Hamlet” is certainly one of those works that can live with you for all your life, one of those works that enable you to feel glad that you lived, letting even the most desolate loner to get a richer taste of life and its passions.

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Every reading of the lines then becomes a kind of full rehearsal - and hence an adventure in discovery. Many actors confirm what scholars have long since learned in their study: each such rehearsal opens new depths, plumbs covert subtexts of the felt life - what Nuttall calls “stripping away more coverings.” The buried notes begin to resonate. And inevitably as we actor-readers rehearse the passions of the characters, we further discover and exercise our own subtextual impulses. We plumb this mystery like those astronomers who search in the skies for the hidden “dark matter” which presumably influences the behavior of solar bodies: what “dark matter” explains the unpredictable behavior of these characters?

-- Marvin Rosenberg, “The Masks of Hamlet”

I received Marvin Rosenberg’s “The Masks of Hamlet” several months ago. Quite a major purchase. Yet, I have not been able to fit it into my reading life. So, yeah, I am going to book-blog it, mine it for quotes. It is over 900 pages of Hamlet, but we will take it slow. Hamlet, after all, is often considered to be the greatest dramatic character ever conjured by the literary imagination, and I rather enjoy the work myself. Rosenberg, in his preface, cites a Montaigne quote and touches upon why Hamlet is celebrated so.
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He who examines himself closely will seldom find himself twice in the same state. I give to my soul now one face, now another.... All the contradictions are to be found in me, according as the wind turns, and changes. Bashful, insolent; chaste, lascivious; talkative, taciturn; clumsy, gentle; witty, dull; peevish, sweet-tempered; lying, truthful; knowing, ignorant; and liberal and avaricious and prodigal - all this I see in myself in some degree, according as I veer about; and whoever will study himself very attentively will find this discordance and unsteadiness.

-- Montaigne


On Shakespeare’s way to exploring this in “Hamlet”, he set himself a Herculean task: cram as much as possible of the clashing multiplicity of human personality - imaginative, sensual, spiritual, social - into a single dramatic character. One who can love and hate, mourn and rejoice, befriend and destroy, have faith and doubt and cheer and heart-ache, seek meaning in this life and the next, hope and be hopeless, laugh and weep, meditate and do, philosophize and politicize, seem mad and sane, tell truth and lies, speak soaring poetry and salty prose and sing jingles, play and fight, contrive and fall prey to contrivance, worship one parent and scorn another, cherish and kill - a troubled mortal, and an actor acting one.

-- Marvin Rosenberg, “The Masks of Hamlet”