THE most famous speech in Shakespeare, I imagine, is Hamlet’s. (Act III, scene one.) This is how it starts:
But Hamlet – the character – saves Shakespeare’s play from what would be a depiction of total social disaster. We pay attention to him. He does have saving grace. What is it? I think it’s his language. He plays with it, and it’s a deadly serious game.Take the moment when he confronts his mother, Queen Gertrude, in Act III, scene four, and the ghost of his dead father appears to him – but the Queen can’t see him.
Hamlet seems trapped but he has his responses. He might pretend to be mad, or he might be really mad – unhinged, irrational, incapable of conforming to the rules and conventions the world of Elsinore, that is, his society, insists upon.Back to Hamlet: here he is, running rings around the King. First, here’s Shakespeare:HAMLET: Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet.
So Scotland thinks about its own identity, a nation trapped and held in thrall to its powerful, dominant neighbour. But so much more than that. A nation held down and self-suppressed by its own people, so long convinced that they cannot pick up the work for themselves, and do a better job.
In a good actor’s good Scots voice, what might be done with this? The Scots transforms the English. The castle might still be called Elsinore but let’s imagine it on the east coast, maybe in the shape of Dunnottar: a kind of translation, from Denmark, via England, backA’m here, or else, A’m no: Thon’s the speirin’ o’t:Or gaither a’ the weaponry tae set agin an ocean’s darg an’ trauchles,Nae mair – an’ by sic sleep to say we closeSairly tae be wantit.
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