Steve Reads

I’m really surprised that I hadn’t read Hamlet until this week. Now that I have, some observations:

1. Quite a lot of other artistic works just make sense to me now. E.g., when Prufrock says that he’s not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be, I’m now not quite clear on what he means by that. Prufrock is just as powerless as Hamlet, unable to act to go after the woman he loves. He may not be powerless for the same reasons (namely that Hamlet seems to overintellectualize everything), but he’s still got a lot of Hamlet in him. Also, Moses Herzog, the title character in Saul Bellow’s book, is a very Hamletty character, this time trying to save his own life through the use of philosophy.
2. Shakespeare has a certain set of stock routines that he goes through. In one, a character who is typically royalty (say, Hamlet) talks to someone who’s unaware that he’s talking with royalty (e.g., the gravedigger), and gets information about how the world views him. In another, someone gets sent a long distance away, and confusion arises because of the communication problems at that distance. Havoc ensues. You’d think he’d get bored with that setup, but it seems to work well. Did this structure appear often in pre-Shakespearean literature?
3. Speaking of pre-Shakespearean lit, I want to read the revenge plays that came before him. I think Bruce Sterling got me going in this direction, via Cosma Shalizi:

   Don’t become a well-rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish. If you want to woo the muse of the odd, don’t read Shakespeare. Read Webster’s revenge plays. Don’t read Homer and Aristotle. Read Herodotus where he’s off talking about Egyptian women having public sex with goats. If you want to read about myth don’t read Joseph Campbell, read about convulsive religion, read about voodoo and the Millerites and the Munster Anabaptists. There are hundreds of years of extremities, there are vast legacies of mutants. There have always been geeks. There will always be geeks. Become the apotheosis of geek. Learn who your spiritual ancestors were. You didn’t come here from nowhere. There are reasons why you’re here. Learn those reasons. Learn about the stuff that was buried because it was too experimental or embarrassing or inexplicable.