Hamlet

Which is of course one of the most preposterous stories ever staged. You know all those thrillers - books and movies - that start off as compelling and end up in a frenzied vortex of entirely unlikely, mindless slaughter? Here's your template. The ending, with the dead bodies of all the main characters strewn over the stage, gets more farcical every time I watch.

Still, Shakey managed to invent the teenager a few years before Elvis and James Dean - there's never been such a shoe-staring, box-room rebel as dear old Hammy. The play is a part of me having studied it for A-Level, but watching it these days it spools over me as a set of my own favourite quotations...every year I become more and more like TS Eliot's notion of a collection of other people's fragments.

"The morn in russet mantle clad
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill."

"How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world."
(Yes, Kevin, now clean up your room...)

"Frailty, thy name is woman"

"The funeral bak'd-meats
Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables."
(which I used on here just the other day)

"Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads."

"Give every man thine ear, but few thine voice."
(I think Polonius's advice to Laertes is the key to the staging of the play to be honest. Polonius is usually dismissed as an old fool throughout, but I think that's wrong. He's just old. And seen as a fool by Hamlet - and Laertes and Ophelia - ie by the "teenagers". Today, this speech remains great advice - to everyone but the young.)

"Neither a brorrower nor a lender be."

"To thine own self be true..."

"And to the manner born"

"It is a custom more honour'd in the breach than the observance"

"I do not set my life at a pin's fee"

"There is something rotten in the state of Denmark"

"Brevity is the soul of wit"
(unlike the play itself, and indeded this "in praise of"!)

"What a piece of work is man"
(though I usually say this cynically)

"There are more things in heaven and earth, blah, blah, blah"

"What's Hecuba to him , or he to Hecuba
That he should weep for her?"

"Ay, there's the rub"

"Shuffle off this mortal coil"

"Conscience doth make cowards of us all"

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks"
(Methinks, surely that's a modern word?)

"I must be cruel only to be kind"

"Good night ladies, good night sweet ladies; good night; good night"
(TS Eliot did a great cover version of this one)

"When sorrows come they come not single spies
But in battalions"
(The Flood years)

"Hoist with his own petard"

"The rest is silence"
(Thank fuck)

And, by the by, Tennant should have stuck to Doctor Who.


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