by Ella Leynard
I was in the Globe Theatre to see the performance of “Hamlet” (1600-1601), a couple of days ago. I do love the rich costumes they wear and the sound of the words. I suspect some are invented by Shakespeare himself. Seldom can anyone afford to do it, because language resists the sudden novelty.
Never before had I heard such beautiful English, and I’d been using it all my life.
Well, if Claudius hasn’t killed his brother, it’s only natural that he wants to be the king. My good friend, Francis Bacon is right to wonder: “Why should I be angry with a man for loving himself better than me?” Some will consider Act III, scene 3 proof enough for Claudius’s guilt.
The flaw in his character or some specific sin causes the Greek hero to fall. The Shakespearean heroes influenced by the Roman playwright, Seneca (4B.C.-64A.D.), have a stoical attitude. Free will suggests activity while the Greek heroes submit to fate. Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, considers purgation – “catharsis’ or the feelings through the arousing of pity and terror, the function of the tragedy.
Owing to his inability of movement, Hamlet seems to have been the victim of the circumstances he finds himself in. Prone to meditation, Hamlet becomes handicapped by his own thoughts. He enters a blind alley leading into a maze whose entangled paths make it impossible to find the way out.
In Act II, scene 2, Hamlet tells Polonius: “Use every man after his desert, and who should ‘scape whipping’?
Indeed, for he, himself is death’s best accomplice. His counterfeit madness to escape the suspicion that he is dangerous to the king, turns his love for Ophelia into rudeness that pushes her to commit suicide by drowning, as if to make her wait for him in death. Hamlet kills Polonius, the lord chamberlain, Ophelia’s father, thinking he is the king. In order to take vengeance for the death of his father in a fencing match organised by the king, Laertes uses a poisoned sword and kills himself, who has mortally wounded the former and stubbed the king. Gertrude has drunk a poisoned cup intended for Hamlet.
Trying to give life to a dead body, “wild justice”, as Francis Bacon calls revenge, Hamlet finds himself unable to reconcile two contradictory ideas. Only justice can be served, not “wild justice”. Bathing himself in “words, words, words”, Hamlet starts suffering from the wrong-word intoxication and is ultimately killed by the disease.
Samuel Johnson explains the perennial pleasure of reading Shakespeare or seeing his plays performed: “His characters are not modified by the costums of particular places, unpracticed by the rest of the world; by the peculiarities of studies or professions, which can operate but upon small numbers; or by the accidents of transient fashions or temporary opinions: they are always the genuine progeny of common humanity, such as the world will always supply, and observation will always find.”
Only four years older than Hamlet, the first part was published in 1605 and the second part in 1615, Don Quixote, the hero of the first true novel, by the same name, inherited from Hamlet the double pair of inner eyes, a faculty he will change into determination, following Seneca’s advice: “Vivere militare est.”
The world’s ugliness and dirt couln’t take away Don Quixote’s stoicism.
Where does reality start?
Is the story told by the ghost real or the story everybody else seems to know?
Who is Don Quixote? The knight called upon to roam the world with a bewitching imagination, in search of adventures on his old horse Rosinante, accompanied by the squire Sancho Panza, with a chivalric devotion almost amounting to worship for Dulcinea del Toboso?
Then who is Alonso Quijano, the poor gentleman of La Mancha, a man of amiable character, of whose deep feelings the girl of the neighbouring village is totally unaware? Don Quixote himself supplies the explanation: “Cuando el hombre hace algun hecho heroico, alguna, alguna extrana virtud y hazana, entonces nace de nuevo y cobra otros mejores padres y pierde al ser que antes tenia.” ( Cervantes, “Don Quixote de la Mancha, I, 1.)
“When man performs some heroic deed, when he proves some unusual virtue and achievement, then he is born again, and he gets better parents and he loses his former identity.” Love makes a new man out of him, but the so strong passion draws a heavy curtain on his reason and Don Quixote gets himself involved in the most bizarre adventures. Having been overthrown by one of his friends, the bachelor Samson Carrasco, disguised as a knight, Don Quixote is required to abstain for a year from chivalrous exploits. Having stepped out of the world of illusions, falls sick and after a few days he dies. But his lesson of fighting the windmills has survived death: We can only be “madly in love”, we can only be irrational when in love.
Queen Isabela would have said to Don Quixote the same words she told Christopher Columbus: “If the piece of land you’re looking for doesn’t exist, God will create it in order to reward your boldness.”
Don Quixote has the courage to stand before the world wrapped in his absolute loneliness, and he did not care, because he had to defend his love. Such suffering love only Jesus had felt when bleeding on the Cross. There is only one woman to have been loved so generously, Dulcinea and there were only two Knights of Love humanity has: Jesus Christ and Don Quixote.
Failures aren’t all the same, most are hilarious, very few become myths: the myth of the double world, the world of the spirit , of the mind, of thinking – Hamlet’s and the most important Spanish myth, the myth of unfulfilled love – Don Quixote for Dulcinea. Hadn’t they failed, both their ideals, they would never have become myths.
Hamlet noticed that “something was rotten”, Don Quixote tried to make the world settle down by offering his love to heal it.
The idea of revenge creeping into Hamlet’s sound brain and heart triggered his inability to act, while the knight’s generous idea of love brings forth his determination to fight the windmills with the sole purpose to get to his beloved heart. Yet, about “Don Quixote”, Jose Ortega y Gasset said: “there is no other book so open to symbolic allusions on the essence of human life and yet there is no other book in which we may find less anticipation, less clues leading to its own interpretation.”
The search for truth/justice and for love goes on.
I used to be Hamlet, but as time goes by, I feel closer and closer to don Quixote. I strongly believe that “time is not out of joint”, although many people think it has been so for too long a time.
I also believe that a good deed erases a bad deed, and if we all clean the mess in our back yard, the world will have more oxygen to bring into our lives.
I strongly believe that love is the miraculous medicine that can heal the way only God can.
I believe that this world is the most wonderful place I know and with only a bit of effort, we could make Heaven on earth.
I believe children are the wonders created by God to give us a glimpse of heavenly cleanliness and purity. I believe that my students are the noblest Princes and Princesse.
I believe that my profession is worth doing, no matter how hard it may seem at times, because I’m somebody who stubbornly believes that education alone brings “the bliss which only centres the mind’. (Samuel Johnson)
I believe there is magic all around me and if I ask my fairy for the magic wand to change the bad into good, she’ll leave it on my dressing table.
I believe that books are God’s whispers dictated to those who can write them properly, intended for those who can read and understand them: “Has de poner los ojos en quien eres, procurando conocer a ti mismo, que es el mas difficil conocimiento que puede imaginarse”. (Cervantes, “Don Quixote de la Mancha”, II, 13.)
How else can you “look after yourself and get to know yourself, because this is the most painstaking knowledge of all that we can imagine”, and we have also to consider Hamlet’s words in this respect: “We know what we are, but know not what we may be”. (Act IV, scene 5)
Indeed, “the rest is silence”.