This year I actually FORGOT to write a birthday post, but then I noticed that I had just written one called “Shakespeare 2.0” without thinking about the holiday at all. I think I would have missed it entirely, but Claudia thought of it, and it turned out to be a weekend and I had nothing planned. So we met and eat out and then sat in my flat because it was too cold to sit on a bench in the park and talked for half a day continuously about “Cymbeline” – the play we had agreed to read – and other things like family history and its influence on our lives … and I didn’t even realize the connection until much later.
This was Saturday the 23rd of April, and on the 25th we went to the Cinema to see “The Northman”, a film about the story of Hamlet, in the film “Amleth”, a “real” Dane who ends up in Iceland with his family - I suppose just because Iceland looks so much better on screen than Denmark - and is taking revenge for the murder of his father. Contrary to my expectations, it wasn’t a pointless action film but something very visceral and literally down to earth and “primeval” human nature before Christianity took it over and taught us how to lie about ourselves and be politically correct. A film that left me totally happy and centred and at peace with myself. The kind of film I wanted to see again right away, but I’ll have to wait for the DVD. It might be a pointless, blood-soaked action film on top of all that, and I just didn’t notice - and the “Game of Thrones” crowd got what they wanted notwithstanding - because Claudia and I mostly disagreed about the quality of the film, except, I think, about some great aesthetic features and Nicole Kidman’s acting – whom we both don’t like and nonetheless have to concede to be a great actress every time we see her. Apart from an interesting variation of the bedchamber scene, it hadn’t much to do with Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” either – who wasn’t interested in real Danes anyway – apart from the fact that, if Shakespeare hadn’t written this play that “everybody” knows, nobody would have unearthed the original story two thousand years later to make a major feature film. And these text relationships are something that never ceases to fascinate me.
(Totally beside the point but the right place to fit in: the – supposedly? – last part of the “Vikings” series came finally out on DVD. I purchased it immediately, of course, but now I am goint to wait for my own birthday to watch as a treat. I don't think "they" tortured me on purpose to extract another Netflix subscription. I rather think it will actually be the last season, and they wanted to issue it together with the collected DVDs ... Whatever: All's well that ends well!)
Just a few days before the birthday bash, I had started to read “The Dead Father’s Club” by Matt Haig because my bookseller sister told me it was great, not because of the connection. But it is “Hamlet Retold” – in fact the first one I came by since Updike (“Gertrude and Claudius”). It’s a novel about an eleven year-old boy who begins to see the ghost of his recently deceased father who died in a car crash and is now telling his son that his uncle Alan, a mechanic, “fixed” the brakes. And this uncle is now getting into bed with the boy’s mother … Despite the heartbreaking story, there are lots of funny and insightful allusions to “Hamlet”, for example to what I think the play mostly is about, on a human level: Growing up – and being in a difficult position because if it.
Children don’t change into different animals when they grow up. It is not like they are caterpillars going into butterflies. They just get taller and wider and less funny and do jobs and tell more lies like Uncle Alan.
Or “To be and not to be” – triggered by a teacher’s talk about branding:
You are never free because you are in your body and your body is a prison because you end up old and in pain like Nan and then you die. And your brain is a prison as well because you cannot switch off your thoughts and when you sleep you have bad dreams. And if you die it might still be like a prison because Dad is a ghost and he wants to escape being a ghost and just to be Nothing like before he was born. But he doesn’t know if you can be Nothing again or if he will still be Something. No one knows for definite. Not even the Scientists (…)
My favourite bit so far is the one where the boy wants to make certain that his uncle is guilty before topping him and is looking for a film he can watch together with him and his mum. He hits on “The Murder of Gonzago” (with Joaquim Phoenix and Mel Gibson). I don’t think it actually exists because Google can’t find it, but it’s an amazing idea nonetheless.
I don’t know why, but there is nothing that entertains me like reading or watching the great stories of the past told in a new way.
So, quite without my own doing, there was suddenly almost more Shakespeare than I could take – like there is suddenly too much green and colours outside after everything has been grey and cold and dead for an incredibly long time – because I was already in the middle of “Cymbeline” when all the “Hamlet” stuff came along. Claudia and I were in agreement that the play isn’t much fun – or not a great play, though I reserved my judgment on this as usual – but I had Holinshed, and I got totally into his rather extensive and chaotic account about the Romans in Britain because I realized that I knew NOTHING about it. Having read Cornwell and seen “Vikings”, I came to know quite a lot about the Saxons and the Danes in Britain, and this had made me wonder about what it had been like before for quite some time. I knew Julius Caesar was there, and Hadrian built his wall – whom Holinshed totally ignores!? - but that was about it. And I became really involved with the question what being constantly INVADED does to one’s political identity. I never thought about that before because it is not part of MY political identity. “We” have never been invaded, we just sat there and mingled constantly and inconspicuously with the many ethnicities that came our way, but we were never conquered or had to put up a fight to remain who we were(, safe partly when Napoleon came, I guess, but we didn’t put up a fight apparently, and he didn’t stay long enough to leave anything else behind than a few French words.) So we had never known who we were anyway, and our “national awakening” occured rather late and kind of artificially induced, so that our national identity was probably messed up from the start – a long time before the Nazis messed it up for good. I had been aware that national identity in other countries is something much more substantial that usually relates to something “positive” like the French Revolution – which ended in terror - or Great Britain being an Empire – which they became by conquering and suppressing millions of other people - but in Shakespeare’s time this had only just started. (By the way: Great Britain is not “great” because the British think they are so much greater than everybody else – though they do, justifiable so! I only learned this recently from Holinshed(!): Some pre-Roman British count or something who’s name I have forgotten was driven out of (Great) Britain and used his time in exile to conquer Bretagne which he called “Little Britain”!!!)
In any case, as I had already realized reading the Roman plays, the Elizabethans were still way closer to the Romans than we are – even though, as Claudia and I agreed, we just don’t realize anymore that almost our entire civilisation comes from the Romans! – and the clash of Roman and British/Celtic culture was still an UNRESOLVED identity issue at the time. Reading Holinshed made me aware that Cymbeline was not just a mythical king whom nobody cared about anymore, but that he was the first British king after Caesar invaded - who grew up in Rome and was probably rather deep into Roman culture and values, but at some point ceased to pay tribute nonetheless. And there we are: right in the middle of a national identity crisis! This was where the play stealthily started to get interesting …
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