Shakespeare versus Friam! Oh, My! Seems like a hugely mismatched intellectual exercise! Well, Will wrote words for that, too! Perhaps: “A concatenation of cats”. Or: “What fools these mortals be!” It’s poetry, fellas! Didn’t anyone tell you? Before penning ab initio, ab ignorantio analyses, just study a leetle of the overwhelming volume of criticism on the Melancholy Prince. A good modern one, of the tens of 1,000’s of articles, is in Marjorie Garber’s, Shakespeare after All (2004). Read, and then write.
But, but, but, to the horror of literalists, in the “To be, or not...” soliloquy (III, i) our forgetful Prince describes death as “The undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns,” when two acts earlier (I, ii, iii), on the battlements, he’d actually been hearing some unpleasant revelations from his father’s ghost, “sy pappie se spook”, as the inelegant Afrikaans translation has it! Ah, consistency -- the hobgoblin of small minds -- but nevah the Bard’s! I view with delight all foreign versions of the play in “tongues unknown and accents yet unheard” that I can dig up. The Russian “Gamlet” (1964), with Smoktunovsky, and Shostakovich’s score, is pretty good. A darkly grand gothic revenge horse-opera. Much cold steel and poisoned chalices!! The Russian dialog is very impressive, sonorous and sinister, but a particular delight are the English captions. They are good, and grammatical, but weirdly, unaccountably, contain none of Shakespeare’s lines!! I have a vision of some good, grey Apparatchik Soviet State Translator, in the editing room earnestly listening to the spoken words and transcribing same into nice twentieth century English dialog with not the slightest inkling that there had actually been an English script (First Quarto, 1603), that a lotta Capitalists, over the centuries, found pretty inspiring! Peter Lissaman, Da Vinci Ventures Expertise is not knowing everything, but knowing what to look for. 1454 Miracerros Loop South, Santa Fe, New Mexico 87505,USA tel:(505)983-7728
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