Hamlet

That was, that was pretty fantastic.

Um, I know I am a bigger fan of Elsinore than, than m- uh, many here, or at least some here, and I wanna speak on that just for a moment, and that is Andrew Scott who is playing actor Ian Charleson, the Scottish actor who was in Gandhi and Chariots of Fire, and throughout his life sort of did not hit the, the high highs, uh, of a UK actor, but was well-known, and finds himself at a convergence in his life where he has HIV AIDS, is literally dying as he gets the role of a lifetime to play Hamlet for the National Theatre, and it is a very short time period of that, the rehearsal performance.

And for Andrew Scott, he, he is very familiar with Hamlet, having played him hundreds of times himself.

And I'm already a fan of, of Scott's diversity of work.

I think what he's doing in this is so complicated because he has to deconstruct his own version of Hamlet to create a very different one and a very new one.

And I totally understand and accept the very '90s-ish Oscar bait of it all.

It's, it's very that.

It's, it does feel like a, like a Miramax film.

Uh, and notice that for Paul, Adam has historical consequences outside the story, and that means that he does not regard Adam as purely a literary figure.

For example, the literary figure Hamlet in Shakespeare's play was a prince of Denmark, but he had no effects outside the literary world of the play because he's a fictitious character.

So similarly, if Adam is a purely fictitious literary figure, he can have no real-world effects, um, as a result of his sin, and yet that's exactly what Paul teaches.

So if we deny- The historicity of Adam and Eve, I think we're going to have to revise our view of biblical inspiration and authority such that Paul and other New Testament authors could teach theological error, and that would be a very radical revision indeed.

Malik Nabors is standing at the gate pretending he hasn't decided whether to board the big jet blue plane over there.

And so this is not exactly Hamlet.

We're not talking about Hamlet here.

You don't need to have the to play or not to play routine.

You don't need that.

That's kind of the star maker.

It's like the new version of Hamlet.

Yeah, I know.

You want to do the Joker if you're like an actor.

Shakespeare's insight into the structure and working of society, profound as it was, is not to be compared with his understanding of personality, nor his interest in the diseases of the state with his interest in the maladies of the soul.

The rottenness of Denmark is only there to give occasion to the thought-sickness of Hamlet, and it is in these supreme studies of personality desperately entangled in the web of its own faculties and failings, far more than in his studies of societies or states, even of societies successfully asserting themselves, of states triumphing, of England herself rising up from the disasters wrought in her by weakling or desperate kings, that the supreme worth of Shakespeare, even for the English citizen, lies.

The series of the English histories, great and splendid as they are, are not to be set in the balance here.

Henry, vaulting upon his horse before Shrewsbury, as full of spirit as the month of May and gorgeous as the sun at midsummer, or scattering a universal largesse of heart and hope among his troops before Agincourt, means less for the culture of Englishmen than do Hamlet or Lear, apparently detached from all local or national significance, but more potent by their wider range and deeper reach to build us up in the humanity which is not a negation of citizenship but its crown and flower, that without which citizenship itself becomes merely an expanded parochialism.

3.

Yet with all this, literature has never again been in such close touch with the national life of its own day as it was among the great Elizabethans.

It is only among poetic portrayers of the second rank, such as Johnson and the allegorists, that theoretic categories of character have had any determining weight.

The supreme characters of literature are true creations, creations that are at the same time discoveries, pieces of humanity which exceed nature's reach, perhaps, but not her grasp.

I realized one of my special interests is Shakespeare.

My favorite Shakespeare play is Hamlet.

And there's this Tom Stoppard play about Hamlet.

It's called Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

It's a little bit of a fanfic.

And I always loved this play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

And then once I realized I was autistic, and by the way, probably so is Tom Stoppard and Shakespeare.

And Hamlet.

You consider yourself a well-read man.

Let me paraphrase Hamlet here and say, methinks the man doth protest too much.

I'm starting to think that Conor Benn is saying all this because he wants Ryan Garcia to believe that he's going to be weight-trained because he is laying it on pretty thick.

Like, what other fighter can you remember tolerating Talk about the weight cut this way.

Who the hell did you quote right now? It sounded like you quoted Popeye.

It was Shakespeare.

It's Hamlet.

Me thinks.

Maybe not.

I feel a little like Hamlet.

Oh, this I got a feeling I'm going to regret.

What do you mean you feel like Hamlet? He couldn't decide either.

Of course you remember his famous soliloquy.

I think the children should all be sent to bed right now.

What's the message of The Lion King? Well, it's see what you were born to be.

Macbeth, isn't it? Hamlet.

But Hamlet is complicated.

He doesn't actually achieve the goal of revenge.

It's just literally be what you were born to be.