Musings on Shakespeare's Hamlet - Humble recital from Act 1, Scene 2
Channel: Russ McClay
Date: 29/04/2015

"How all occasions do inform against me..."  Just some words about the play Hamlet and then reciting a bit from memory.  I've discovered a tremendous joy through Shakespeare in the brilliant years of my life and I'm a very thankful having done so.  A new joy is memorizing bits. To keep them one must practice them as long as one wants to keep them. 

I'm a new student (59 years old) of Shakespeare, but I'm already discovering that as I read and recite more I'm starting to catch the meter and rhythm of his writing.. which makes memorization easier.  Also the way sentences were constructed in Elizabethan times.  I've fallen in love with my native tongue.  How sweet!

HAMLET O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month--
Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!--
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow'd my poor father's body,
Like Niobe, all tears:--why she, even she--
O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn'd longer--married with my uncle,
My father's brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good:
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.