[ID: A page of a play. It reads as follows, “Theseus: Stop. Give me your hand. I am your friend. / Herakles: I fear to stain your clothes with blood. / Theseus: Stain them, I don’t care.” End text.]
Mahmoud Darwish, From Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (tr. Ibrahim Muhawi) / Elizabeth Wurtzel, From Prozac Nation (Houghton Mifflin, 1994) / Artwork By Holly Warburto / Anne Carson, Wonderwater / Pedro Salinas, tr. By Ruth Katz Crispin, from Memory in My Hands: The Love Poetry of Pedro Salinas; “The voice I owe to you” / Susan Sontag, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980 / Robert Hass, Praise
listen i KNOW Hamlet is not a teenager but. i love the idea of teenage Hamlet for no other reason than how it plays with the idealism that belongs to the very young. teenage Horatio trying to support his friend, who’s just lost his dad, who’s not allowed to go back to the school he loves, and wants to end his own life. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who are helping Hamlet’s parents because that’s the right thing to do, right? parents must want the best for their kids. they think they’re on the right side and can’t understand why Hamlet turns on them. and Hamlet himself, idolising his father at a crucial age where he’s finding his identity and looking for a role model, absolutely goes insane and destroys them.
and don’t even get me started on Ophelia. looking at her first relationship through rose-tinted glasses, internalising that kind of misogyny in her formative years? being so much more vulnerable to what she is subjected to by her father (depending on how you play them) and by Hamlet?
i completely stand by adult Hamlet in the sense that identity formation is an ongoing thing. but also… maybe when you’re just kids who think people are inherently good, contending with the power of the adults around you, all this growing up is very hard to do.
