I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth. This goodly frame the earth, appears to me a sterile promontory. This most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'er-hanging firmanent, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
Nah that'll be the steam getting in your eyes, come over here a bit the view is much clearer
"What's gone and what's past help should be past grief."
And since everything is, so should you be....
" pestilent congregation of vapours " =steam
Since when is steam pestilent?
Personally, I think Guildenstern was crapulous.
Hmmm - they believed more in the air - "miasmas" - as a source of infection then - I don't think they meant steam - as in boiled water vapour, but as in mists and marshy exhalations.
Thank you, Hiama.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, so speak no ill of the, or I'll put a stoppard to you! Of course, so is Hamlet...
Deb,
I'm awa to me bed please accept this as a token of my.....
For a while
Let it be enough:
The responsive smile,
Though effort goes into it.
Across the warm room
Shared in candlelight,
This look beyond shame,
Possible now, at night,
Goes out to yours.
Hidden by day
And shaped by fires
Grown dead, gone gray,
That burned in other rooms I knew
Too long ago to mark,
It forms again. I look at you
Across those fires and the dark.
awwwwwwwww....that is lovely!!!!!
man, hiama was busting them out tonight/this afternoon/this morning, wasn't he?
yes, i think the ghost -- which of course appeared in the fog that rose from the marsh shortly before daybreak -- still weighs heavy on hammy's mind, the ponce.
what most people seem to miss is that fortinbras is quite well-adjusted and isn't responsible for anyone's death, leastways his own. and that the whole thing may have been directed at thomas kyd's earlier hamlet (the so-called ur-hamlet -- might have been someone other than kyd -- i'm very rusty), which featured a notoriously bad actor in the title role; hence, an over-actor is a 'ham.' unfortunately, the earlier play has not survived and is known only by reputation, so it's impossible to know just how much of the pontification and heavy-handed silliness in shakespeare's play is really just a joke on kyd.
and so, thanks in no small-part to the heavy-handed interpretations of the drug-addled likes of coleridge and freud, we in the 20th century have inherited hamlet as one of the great shakespearean tragedies instead of as, perhaps, the "Scream" of its time.
oh well. whatcha gonna do?
Kill everyone and wait for the new administration to take over?
Like Hamlet etc did?
Now I wanna remember if it WAS Kyd!
ABOUT THE PLAY
The play in its present form belongs somewhere between 1598 and 1602. Evidence suggests that the most likely date of composition seems to be late 1599 or early 1600, just at the threshold of the Jacobean age.
The task of determining the date of the play is further complicated by a tantalizing literary mystery, that of the Ur-Hamlet. (Ur is a German prefix meaning primitive or original.) There seems to have been an earlier Hamlet play on the Elizabethan stage.
Some scholars attribute the lost Ur-Hamlet to Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy, a drama of revenge that resembles Shakespeare?s play in several important respects. It is conceivable that Shakespeare himself wrote the Ur-Hamlet very early in his career and drastically revised it around 1600.
Although Shakespeare?s main source seems to have been that elusive Ur-Hamlet, the story can be traced back several centuries. Long a part of Scandinavian folk tradition, the tale of "Amleth" first assumes literary form in the Historia Danica (c. 1200) of the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus. Most of the elements of Shakespeare?s Hamlet are contained in Saxo:
? The death of Amleth?s father at the hands of his brother Feng.
? The murderer?s marriage to Amleth?s mother, Geruth, the widowed Queen.
? Amleth?s pretense of madness to protect himself from his uncle.
? A confrontation between mother and son in his mother?s bedroom, at which Amleth kills one of his uncle?s spies.
? Amleth?s departure for England with two companions who bear secret instructions from Feng ordering the King of England to have him killed.
? The hero?s discovery of the plot and his forging of substitute instructions sending the two envoys to their doom.
? Amleth?s return from England and his subsequent revenge upon Feng and his henchmen.
Saxo?s story reappears in the fifth volume of François de Belleforest?s Histoires Tragiques, published in French in 1576 and translated into English in 1608.
There are three extant texts of Hamlet: The first bad Quarto (Q1) of 1603, the good second Quarto (Q2) of 1604 and the version included in the 1623 Folio (F1) See Susan Willis?s essay. What is significant is that Hamlet itself stands at a turning point in Shakespeare?s playwriting career. After Hamlet, Shakespeare wrote a series of unresolved "problem plays" (Troilus and Cressida, All?s Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure) before moving into his great tragedies and luminous romance plays which followed. In contrast to his early plays, happy endings are harder to find and achieved with more difficulty in these later works. Heroes are less obviously heroic and moral certainties are displaced by moral ambiguities.
"The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.
The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose's quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.
The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand the holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.
The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow."
Dylan Thomas
Patio dog-may I call you patio or dog I feel I know you well enough
Debs
That is an interesting poem, Hiama!
(I call him Patio Puppy.....heheheheehheee)
Waking this morning, attended by my own foul and pestilent congregation of vapours, I find I take offence easily, not least of all to porchpuppy's derogation of the drug addled.
it was a little harsh, wasn't it?
perhaps if he were to be allowed into the HOUSE occasionally...?
The house, built to R12 tolerances with TyeeLation (c) VapourBarrier (c) - "If you hate penetration, use TyeeLation" - is not the proper place for a second pestilent vapour source.
some dogs don't do that...
