Now I am alone

Well, I tested myself yesterday with all my speeches and I'm happy to report I knew every one with minimal to no prompting; a definite improvement from the last time I quizzed myself. I promise to keep reciting them everyday, but before that, I shall embark upon a new speech this week. It's been a long while since I've memorized something from scratch.

The decision was a no-brainer. I want to complete my set of the four major Hamlet soliloquies. There are other, less prominent ones, but if you want a cross section of Hamlet's psyche throughout the play, the big four will provide you with it. Weighing in at ~55 lines (depending on your edition of the play), the Act II, Scene II speech is the longest of his soliloquies, but no where near as long as the one with which Richard Gloucester has blessed me.

It has been nearly a year since I turned my well-honed fangirling instrument toward Sir Kenneth Branagh. I started with realizing that Thor was directed by him, then moved on to seeing the screen graced with his countenance and voice through King Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing and finally, the movie that changed my life, his complete and epic 4-hour masterpiece of Hamlet. On July 10th, not halfway through my first viewing of that glorious film, I clearly recall my heart o'erflowing with love and inspiration. So of course, to cap off my unlocked achievements, I shall embark upon this emotional thrill ride of a speech. It still makes me melt and my ovaries quiver to hear it.

A week from now, I hope to have some more insight into what it's like to occupy and live through these enthralling words.


Hamlet, Act II, Sc. II
Hamlet: Now I am alone.
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann'd,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect,
A broken voice, an' his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do,
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appal the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak,
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing; no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat,
As deep as to the lungs? who does me this?
Ha! 'Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal: bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance!
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing, like a very drab,
A scullion!
Fie upon't! foh! About, my brain! I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I'll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle: I'll observe his looks;
I'll tent him to the quick: if he but blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds
More relative than this: the play 's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

Within the book and volume of my brain

List, list, O, LIST

While I was working through the last 41 weeks of memorization exercises, I've had this paper taped to my closet door. It's just a chronological list of all Shakespeare's plays. Every time I read a play, I highlighted it in pink. Every time I learned a speech, I added a blue dot next to it. When I reached my goal, I snipped the paper into candy-colored strips, each with a play on it, and threw them into a bag. Now, every evening, I randomly select a strip from the bag and practice it a bit before bed, then proceed to spend my morning and afternoon commute to work reciting to myself, usually with the accompaniment of some old-school, wordless M83 songs.

Some are as easy to recall as that first "To be" speech; others require more polishing, as very often the one I grab from the bag is one I haven't revisited in so many weeks. But so far, this rehash activity has proven fruitful. Just yesterday, after a few weeks of this practice, I dumped the pile of re-visited speeches onto my bed and proceeded to pick one up, recite, then pick another and another until they were all gone. It took a half hour, and I did it with only one cheat: it was to make sure Hamlet said "my uncle" and not "mine uncle" in his first soliloquy.

My fear near the end was that I'd forget some of the less favorited speeches, so doing this both confirmed and destroyed that fear, since practice really is the silver bullet when it comes to achieving any level of proficiency at anything. (Plus, I've surprised myself that I even have enough room in my mental hard drive lately, since a large percentage of RAM has been dedicated solely to squeeing over Benedict Cumberbatch again.)

Obviously, this thing is not over.

I still have a mental list of speeches I'd like to still learn:
1) Hamlet's third soliloquy
2) John of Gaunt's speech about England in Richard II
3) Berowne's epic 77-line rave about love from LLL
4) Prince Hal's plea to his father about redemption in Henry IV Part 1
5) Ophelia's "What a noble mind is here o'erthrown" speech

I wonder if any of my readers could suggest any others for my tackling pleasure?

The longer the achievement, the more apt I am to unlock them. I'm not entirely sure why. Perhaps it's just the meditative quality of a good, lengthy thought process that keeps my brain at attention for so long and serves to defrag it or something. Maybe it impresses me more deeply because it seems so intimidating when you see it on paper, but turns out to be quite natural once it's uploaded to my brain. Whatever the reason, it's always fun.

Has anyone else given this a go?

What a piece of work is a man!

Hamlet dangles his antic disposition in front of his boys.

This being one of the most famous of Hamlet's speeches--and one often taken out of the very sarcastic context in which it is meant to be absorbed--I decided to go with the entirety of the monologue to keep it in perspective: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive at Elsinore unexpectedly, and Hamlet immediately figures them out, so he decides to play the ultra emo role he's set up for himself to throw them off the scent of what's really going down.

These two famously indistinguishable flunkies have been summoned to the court by Claudius and Gertrude. They are asked to kindly spy on young Hamlet and report back on the troubled prince's disposition. Starstruck as they are, they agree to this charge and "make love to this employment" as Hamlet puts it. They do this because they are the type of school friend who sends a friend request on Facebook just because they want to increase their friend count and include every single person they ever remembered from middle school and love to point out that "Look, me and the Prince go way back." Imagine if one of those people showed up at your house in the midst of family turmoil. You know your Facebook-troglodytic parents only friended them because they're the only friends they remember you had before college and have no clue that you've actually blocked their updates from your home timeline because their statuses are so soporific and banal you'd rather write whole soliloquies about grass growing than read them and be reminded that you were once inseparable.

Hamlet is insulted by this blatant conspiracy and complete lack of insight into his current social circle. He perhaps wonders if they had asked Horatio at first, and trusts that Horatio turned them down. He knows he has a role to continue playing, so that Claudius does not suspect that Hamlet suspects him of murder. Naturally, he interrogates his old buddies and goes on a non-specific rant about how horrible the world is and laments about the gross, arrogant fallibility of humankind. This way, the boys are no more wise about Hamlet's feigned motivation or his real one. But, methinks there's quite a bit of truth in the cynicism presented for them. Hamlet's disgusted by the state of humanity, or at least the representatives surrounding him, and with very good reason.


Hamlet, Act II, Sc. II
Hamlet: I will tell you why; so shall my anticipation prevent your discovery, 
and your secrecy to the king and queen moult no feather. 
I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth, 
forgone all custom of exercises; 
and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, 
the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy, 
the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, 
why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. 
What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! 
in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! 
in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! 
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? man delights not me: 
no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.