Maude,

Best ever proof of the socratic method and symbiosis?

So, I taught Hamlet like for 20 plus years…and no matter what I always learned something new.

So there’s these lines in a play within a play.

Hamlet has added some lines in a travelling player’s play called the Murder of Gonzago, wherein a brother (Cain =Claudius), kills his brother (Abel= Old Hamlet) for the crown (East of Eden=Elsinore Castle, Denmark) and steals Old Hamlet’s wife, Hamlet’s mother: Gertrude. (Which is a take on Osiris and Set and Isis, with Horus=Hamlet, the avenging son.)

You might think wait, this is the same plot line as The Lion King, and you’d be right.

The lines go something like this:

Ophelia: You are merry my lord.

Hamlet: …What should a man do

but be merry? For look you how cheerfully my mother

looks, and my father died within’s two hours.”

Ophelia: Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord.

Hamlet then goes on how quickly his mother has gone to bed with Claudius, etc.

One of my students asked me, ‘Sir, why does Hamlet say two hours? Is it just to prove to the audience and to his girlfriend that he’s become unhinged?”

I closed the play with my finger to mark the place and was about to launch into the importance of this play within a play and Hamlet’s continual references to the fact that he knows he’s a actor in Fate’s play.

I stopped and looked at my book. My finger had divided the play in half.

Stopped me cold would more appropriate.

So Shakespeare (despite the continual debate over authorship, etc) was clever enough to make a reference to the fact that according to the four hour long play, Hamlet delivers these lines at approximately the two hour point.

“My father died within’s two hours.”

There’s tons more to this play but that one made me dance up to the student’s desk, wish I could remember his name, and give a couple of moves better seen in ‘Grease, the musical’…always give one’s students the more eccentric side of one’s nature, even though my merry jig an antic which brought books to faces poste haste.

I’ll share more later.

Thanks for the prompt.

Daryl