Talking Tuesday: Hamlet's Just Deserts

 

 

Recently, I rewatched Kenneth Brannagh's masterful production of Hamlet.  It is possibly his best work on screen.  The film came out when I was in college, and I remember eagerly awaiting its arrival in the video stores (remember those?)  I went to a small college in the middle of nowhere, and had to wait on the small local video store to get it before renting, but I promptly declared I had a hot date with Shakespeare and settled in on a Friday night to watch it.  All four hours.  

 

Most productions of Hamlet cut some of the subplots to bring it to a more standard 2 hours, but Brannagh chose to make an uncut version, weaving together all the complex story lines.  (I took several days to watch it, since these days I rarely have four hours to sit in front of a screen uninterrupted).

First was what an excellent cast Brannagh assembled--the top Shakespearean actors of the time (it is a kind of a Who's Who of that set) plus a high quality listing of American actors like Charlton Heston, Billy Crystal, and Robin Williams.  Simon Russell Beale has a small role as one of the grave diggers (I almost didn't recognize him!) and John Gielgud has a role as Priam--I believe it was one of Gielgud's last screen roles, although his portrayal of the Pope in Elizabeth may have been the very last.  The two films were released close together, so I couldn't say exactly.  Brian Blessed, a long time collaborator of Brannagh's, plays the dead king to perfection, and Derick Jacobi's Claudius is oily and inspired.  

Hamlet is, at its heart, a play about grief.  It is about a son grieving his father, about a wife grieving a husband and making poor choices about her future life from the depths of that grief by marrying her brother-in-law. 

 

 

(The movie Ophelia makes the bold claim that Gertrude's choice to marry Claudius came from a desperate desire to maintain her youth and sexual desirability.  I'm not sure what I think of this, but it certainly could be true.  A perimenopausal woman watching her vigorous son and Ophelia together may well have felt the forgotten woman.  On the other hand, you have to feel for Ophelia, who was madly in love with Hamlet, had given herself to him in anticipation of a marriage to come, but instead is driven to madness by Hamlet's poor treatment of her.  One wonders if he had just let her in on what was going on, perhaps she would have gone along with the deception.  I found myself increasingly frustrated on her behalf, and wanted to yell at Hamlet to just tell her already). 

 

 

I heard someone say once that it was too bad that Gertrude and Hamlet couldn't have just sat down for a heart-to-heart and shared their grief over the king's death, as the whole tragedy of what follows could possibly have been avoided.  But then we wouldn't have a play to discuss and use as a mirror for ourselves.  Hamlet's famous "To be or not to be" speech is about a man in deep pain; a pain so deep he contemplates the end of his existence.  By the end of the speech, Hamlet recovers himself, and decides that yes, he does want to live, but his life will be one of revenge for his dead father.

There was a line that struck me between the eyes, so to speak, in Act 2, Scene II.  In it, Hamlet meets his university friends, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern, whom Claudius has sent for in the hopes that they will rouse Hamlet from his melancholy madness.  Hamlet's madness is written in such a way that it can be played a deliberate deception or as genuine insanity; Brannagh chooses the former, clearly using the guise of madness as a cover for his real plans to uncover the poisoning of the old king by Claudius.  

Toward the end of the scene, a group of players arrive at the palace to put on a play for the court.  Hamlet is delighted to see them, and sees that he can use them for his own ends.  That is, he will direct them to put on a play that exposes Claudius' perfidy to the entire court in the guise of a story about Troy.  Hamlet is giving his instructions to the lead player, and Lord Polonius (Ophelia's father) is increasingly concerned about Hamlet's state of mind, particularly given Hamlet's previous attachment to his daughter. 

Hamlet and the lead player have been exchanging words about the play, and the lead actor (played by Charlton Heston), assures Hamlet that he is well aware of the classical references Hamlet seeks.  Polonius is unsure of the subtext of the verbal parrying between the two men and keeps interjecting his own commentary.  Hamlet rudely tells Polonius where to put it, but then this exchange caught my ear:

LORD POLONIUS
My lord, I will use them according to their desert.

HAMLET
God's bodykins, man, much better: use every man
after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?
Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less
they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.
Take them in.

Given Hamlet's underlying desire for vengeance over the old king's untimely death, it is an interesting thing to say: that everyone under the sun is deserving of death and destruction, but that we should not use people thusly.  We should rather treat people as we would be treated, with honor and dignity.  It is, I think, the moment that Hamlet reveals his hand: that his madness is an affect, that he desires justice for his father, and a redress of the wrongs done.  

Unfortunately, Hamlet's machinations take on a life of their own, and in the scandal and intrigue that follow, the Danish court is too distracted by the unfolding drama to notice that their old enemy Fortinbras, at the head of the Norwegian army, has breached their borders and overrun the palace, finding the king, queen, Hamlet, and Laertes dead, Polonius and Ophelia having met their untimely ends earlier in the play.  

It is a tragedy of the highest order, and so very human.

Talking Tuesday: Unorthodox

I had an endoscopy yesterday (routine, nothing new) and so spent the whole of yesterday afternoon parked on my bed with a DVD player and Netflix as my companions (and my knitting, natch).  I watched an older version of Persuasion with Sally Hawkins in the Anne Elliot role, and then turned to the Netflix limited series Unorthodox, based on the memoir of a woman who left a Satmar Hasidic community.  

 

I'm still thinking about the show today, and am now interested to read the book as well.  (A friend read it recently and enjoyed it).

The series follows a married 19-year-old Esther Shapiro (Esty for short) as she flees the confines of the extremely tight-knit and closed Satmar community in Williamsburg, NY for a new life in Berlin.  

The Satmars are unique in that they speak Yiddish as their first language, and emigrated from Hungary around the time of the second World War, fleeing the Nazi persecution.  Many of them lost family members to the Shoah.  The memory of that loss is very present in the community, and they see repopulating the Jewish people as one of their duties to God, hence the big families and intense focus on child-bearing and rearing.  They also view their separateness as their duty to God, since, in their view, assimilation to European society was what led to the Holocaust, which they see as God's punishment for abandoning their traditional ways of life.  The show is subtitled, as much of the dialogue is in Yiddish.

Shira Haas is unbelievably good as Esty.  She's tiny but has a powerful screen presence that keeps you riveted to your seat.  I love how the series wove together the story of her life before and after her marriage to Yacov, her young husband, with the new life she begins to build in Berlin.

The clever storytelling contrasts the two sides while managing to portray the Satmar community in a nuanced and largely sympathetic light.  (So often, these sorts of stories are grossly unbalanced).  I thought one of the great features of Esty's character is that she isn't a square peg in a round hole; she wants to live the life of an ultra-Orthodox wife and mother, but she has some dreams and marital troubles that get in the way of fully settling into it.  The costumes and sets are wonderful--so much detail and care went into it.  (There is a short "making of" show that follows the series that is an interesting look behind the scenes). 

I remember reading a memoir (or perhaps a novel) many years ago about a similar story, of a woman married in her late teens in an ultra-Orthodox community, who later left it for a secular milieu.  It was fascinating to me on a number of levels.  A late '90s arthouse film with Renee Zellweger called A Price Above Rubies explored similar themes to Unorthodox, and while I liked the Zellweger film very much, I liked Unorthodox even better.  

Shira Haas also appears in Shtisel, another Netflix show from Israel about an ultra-Orthodox family in Jerusalem.  I will probably give that a whirl at some point.  

Anyway, a bit of a blather for a Tuesday morning, but I recommend the show!

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait...

Or something like that.  I'm not sure I believe that statement, at least not entirely, but I do think it applies in this case.  To wit: a corduroy skirt.  But not just any corduroy skirt, a perfect gold corduroy skirt.  It is no secret that I love my marigold linen skirt to distraction, but it isn't a great weight for winter, and I've long hoped to find a heavy-weight corduroy to make a shoulder-season version.  Kaufman's gold for a long time was what they termed "cider" and was really an odd color somewhere between chartreuse and beige.  Not gold at all. 

 

Recently, Kate Davies came out with a sweater called Yolk that I immediately downloaded and plotted to make.  The whole outfit sang to me--the colors of the sweater, the gold cord skirt (you see where I'm going with this...), the dark tights and heavy boots.  Being the good little lemming I am sometimes, I started looking at my thrift shops for a gold cord skirt and nada.  Then I tried etsy for cord fabric and nothing.  I went back to my old standby fabric.com, which it must be said, has had a really poor selection of fabric for the past year or more.  I get it, everyone was making masks.  But I'm glad to see more things back in stock there again. 

Anyway, Kaufman had added a gold cord to their 14-wale line that I like so much so I decided to see if it would work.  It is the perfect gold, and I'm super pleased with how this skirt came together.  I used my trusty Anne Adams 9481 (heavily modified/redrafted) and took another 1/2" or so out of the center back, which was just right.  Although, I had to take in an least an inch there on the previous corduroy iterations, so who knows what's what...I thought it better to start with 1/2" and make adjustments from there.  (I still wear all three of the heavy-weight ones quite a bit, and recently refitted the lightweight navy blue one for an elastic waist.  I also made a slight change to the lighter blue one to help the pockets lay flatter instead of bubbling up at the top). 

 

 

I did the waist band slightly differently because I only had 1.5" ban-rol, but it worked out, and I like the finish very much.  I got my machine to make two buttonholes on this fabric (finally!) and even sewed the buttons on with the machine, which made this a very fast project indeed.  I put one button on the inside flap of the waist band and the other on the outside and I like that very much.  I put gold bias tape on the hem and turned it in 2", which is a good length for this style.

  

Obviously, I've not had time to make the sweater yet, so stay tuned!  I've got the Lilias Day on needles and am waiting for the yarn to come for the Yolk.  

(I should add that this outfit has been my silhouette all winter: tank top under a slightly boxy sweater over straight skirt with wool tights.  In colder weather I've been wearing a wool skirt and Uggs and maybe adding a scarf).  It is comfortable and I feel good in it, so win-win.  I'm over tucking stuff in right now.

Talking Tuesday: Dear Comrades!

 

 

Last night my husband and I finished watching a stunning Russian film called Dear Comrades! It is the previously classified story of the 1962 protests in the Don River region over rising food prices and the State's efforts to quash the protests and then cover up the violence that followed. 

The story is told primarily through the eyes of a true-believer Party member, and her journey is quite extraordinary.  I'm still trying to wrap my mind around all the layers of meaning in the film, particularly since the ending is a bit ambiguous and left me with a lot of questions about what happened in the following years.  Shot in black and white, the cinematography is note-perfect and deserves all the festival accolades it has received.  

A number of questions are asked by the film: what do you do when all you hold sacred is shown to be a Potemkin village?  What does it mean to remember the past and honor it without idolizing or demeaning it?  How do we live in the truth of the terrible things that happen to us without breaking?  What does it mean to own your mistakes?

It is a film well worth seeing.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming: Stripes! Sweater

I finished my Stripes! sweater at last!  It was the Penelope sweater right to the bitter end, as I swapped out two stripes in the body and one of the sleeves while I was knitting the second sleeve, but I'm glad I did.  I'm quite happy with the end result, and have worn it twice already!  

I made a size 2 with no modifications except to swap the 3/4 sleeves on the cropped version to long sleeves and to knit the sleeves flat and then seam, as I always do.  I did make a few more increases than called for because I don't like my cuffs to flap around and my wrists are small, but I probably would make one or two less increases next time (my cuffs had 40 stitches on them, for reference).  

 

 

 

I also cropped the body slightly more than on the sample because my torso is even shorter than Andrea's!  But the visual effect is the same.

 

This is a pattern I would definitely knit again, possibly in a solid color, because I enjoyed the process of it, and stripe combo difficulties aside, it would have gone quickly.  (If you consider that I've basically knit this entire sweater three times since the end of November, it's a fast knit). 

 

I immediately cast on a Weekender with some Capra yarn that I had, and am enjoying that so far.  And in true Juliana fashion, when Lilias Day came out in the white colorway, I immediately swatched it from some yarn I had set aside for a different project.  Yay for stash-busting!  And yarn for days!

All This Without You Bonus Content

 

Good morning all!  I have a new website for my writing and artwork.  I plan to keep writing in this space about the things I usually write about, but if you would like to keep abreast of book news and other tidbits, maybe put the new site in your RSS reader?  

I'm planning to share some bonus content from All This Without You over the next weeks, and perhaps do a giveaway.  One advantage to sharing some of this content on a website is that I can link to some of the things mentioned in the book to provide a more sensory experience.

For today, please enjoy a deleted scene from early in the book, including a musical link.  

If you want to know why I used images from the Cave of Swimmers to make the page headers, you'll have to read the book!

All This Without You--pre-order available!

I'm chuffed to say that my book is available for pre-order!  The paperback version should be live for pre-order by Monday, and the kindle version is available to pre-order now.  

All This Without You will release on February 16, 2021!