POLONIUS: "What do you read, my lord?" HAMLET: "Words, words, words."

Last December, on a Friday (the 5th), a year ago, I wrote a review of The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke, one the Applause Folio Texts, the Folios being one the original sources of all subsequent additions of Shakespeare, for amazon.com. Not a review, really -- just about what the play is about.

At that time, I had been staging managing Shakespeare productions for an off-Off-Broadway theatre company (The Frog & Peach Theatre Company) in NYC since 2000. I had absorbed a lot about how Shakespeare is acted and staged, and in early 2002 I started to carefully read Shakespeare, starting with Hamlet, taking it apart as a play, from an actor's/director's perspective.

About a week ago, I received a very complimentary e-mail from an Anna:

Christopher,
I enjoyed reading your review of Hamlet at amazon.com. That lead me to your profile and from there I found myself at www.christophalus.com. You are obviously very talented. I was wondering if you wrote articles? I will be publishing an e-Zine dedicated to classic literature in 2005. I have been collecting a diverse group of contributors.

I think our readers would be interested in the theatrical side of Shakespeare's plays.  I think your experiences as a Stage Manager and Assistant Producer would make an interesting article or article series.  Your passion for "Hamlet" was obvious in your review and I think you would be able to write an excellent article on that topic.

Not only did I feel very complemented, but Shakespeare is a waking dream, and I can't believe I've been asked to write about Hamlet -- and the e-zine will pay me a small amount, though it is a chance I would jump at for free.

The target article size is between 500 and 1500 words. They are currently doing a re-design of their site, and they will be advertising in print journals such as the Kenyan Review and the Brick. They will also have several online campaigns at sites such as Bookninja, Bridge Online, Bookslut, Complusive Reader, LitQuotes, etc.  They will be bringing attention to the e-zine with bumper stickers, T-shirts, etc. as well as working on affiliations with a few independent bookstores.

I e-mail back to Anna:

Dear Anna,

Everything sounds great!. Thank you again for contacting me and asking me to do this.

What I'll do this is rework and expand (or reduce?) my amazon.com review to no more than 1500 words.

What I'd like to do after is write a series of articles on the play Hamlet, but each article will focus on one main character and how they interact/intersect with the other characters and show how this moves the plot along and helps tell the story of Hamlet. If that's successful, it would be fun to do it for other Shakespeare plays.

Much has been written about the "psychology" of the characters as an explanation for who they are. In my opinion, this is not really worth much in terms of understanding Shakespeare or what he really did -- he wrote plays. He didn't create real people, so it's a mistake to try to analyze or understand them from some psychological or post-modern analytical perspective. What Shakespeare did was create 'stories' that reveal us, show us (who ARE real) who we really are.

The characters don't exist for us to understand them -- they exist to help us understand ourselves.

I'd like to write about these characters as dramatic devices that are used to help tell the story of Hamlet: that was my perspective in the amazon.com review you read. It's a great way -- the best way actually, short of actually acting in and producing the plays -- to really understand these beautiful plays, and by way of that, understand ourselves. There is speculation that in 1611 Shakespeare helped revise the bible into what is now known as the King James version. In the front of KJV, there's an inscription to the effect of "these words are not meant to be read, in private, but to be spoken aloud" as if the human breath is needed to carry the spirit of God.

I can't really speak to this claim or this type of spirituality, but I know that Shakespeare is Life as living poetry playing out in a structured universe. My articles will attempt to address this dramatic 'structured universe' created by who the characters are. Who they are is really no more than 1) what they want, and 2) the choices they make in attempting the get what they want. That's all you really need to know -- cognitively. If you want to know them personally, you must give them voice, lend them your breath. The moment-by-moment experience structured by who they are is the living Poetry of Shakespeare.

Of course Shakespeare resonates with us -- it IS us.

- Cheers,
         Christopher

Anna thought this sounded like a great idea, so, I'll start with a series of articles about Hamlet, starting Hamlet himself, and then follow up with other characters. With luck, other plays will follow.

To act in a Shakespeare production would be a real milestone, a really watershed event for me, but until that time, writing about Shakespeare's characters from an actor's or dramaturge's perspectives -- character's that Harold Bloom called "The Invention of the Human" -- is one of the most special things that's happened to me since I first read Macbeth in my little room at night in Park Slope in the cool fall of '99 while watching thought my little window, as if by magic, all of New York City shinning and glittering in the distance floating over the rooftops of Brooklyn . . .