Hamlet

Reading notes

• The Baron §11 Hamlets

  The brooding, indecisive prince of Shakespeare's tragedy, used here (and throughout the story) as shorthand for a certain type of tormented, soul-searching stage hero.

• Untitled Play (Bezottsovshchina / "Platonov") §3541 we're thinking of putting on Hamlet

  Voynitsev's tipsy scheme for private theatricals -- casting himself as Hamlet, Sofya as Ophelia, Platonov as Claudius, and Triletsky as Horatio -- both mirrors and foreshadows the play's own love-triangle plot (Voynitsev as the wronged, ineffectual figure; Platonov cast, tellingly, as the usurping Claudius).

• Untitled Play (Bezottsovshchina / "Platonov") §3548 And that villain, / Having forgotten shame of woman, wife, and mother, / Could you give yourself to him!..

  Voynitsev misquotes/adapts lines from Hamlet's closet-scene rebuke of Gertrude (Act III, scene 4) in the standard 19th-century Russian stage translation, aiming them, without realizing the irony, at his own unfaithful wife and the friend (Platonov) who has, like Claudius, supplanted him.

• Untitled Play (Bezottsovshchina / "Platonov") §3555 O nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered!

  Glagolyev 2 quotes Hamlet's line to Ophelia (Act III, scene 1, "Nymph, in thy orisons / Be all my sins remember'd") in mock-romantic address, continuing the drunken Hamlet game begun by Voynitsev.

• Untitled Play (Bezottsovshchina / "Platonov") §4296 Oh, cursed spite!

  Platonov's cry as Osip's knife glints, echoing Hamlet's "The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!" (Act I, scene 5) -- a fleeting, half-conscious self-dramatization at a moment of real physical danger, continuing the play's running Hamlet motif.

• Untitled Play (Bezottsovshchina / "Platonov") §5344 Hamlet feared dreams

  Platonov's own gloss on Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy ("for in that sleep of death what dreams may come") as he contemplates suicide with the revolver -- the play's most explicit and self-conscious invocation of its own recurring Hamlet motif, made by Platonov himself rather than by another character casting him in the role.

• The Duel §117 Hamlet

  Shakespeare's famously irresolute prince; Laevsky likens his own paralysis to Hamlet's, one of several literary types he uses to excuse himself.

• Poetry and Prose §30 Hamlet

  The brooding prince of Shakespeare's tragedy, here played by an actor whose fake mustache keeps falling off mid-declamation -- the story's running joke about theater's gap between illusion and reality.

• My Witticisms and Sayings §5 Prince Hamlet said

  Quotes Polonius's line to Hamlet (Act II, Scene 2) -- "use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?" -- misattributed here (as a joke) to Hamlet himself rather than to Polonius.

• A First Debut §48 dragged Hamlet into his speech

  Quoting or invoking Shakespeare's Hamlet -- especially the "to be or not to be" soliloquy -- was a well-worn rhetorical flourish among young Russian courtroom orators of the period seeking to elevate a mundane case with literary grandeur; von Pach and Semechkin's gentle mockery of Pyatyorkin for doing so satirizes this overreach.

• L. N. Trefolev, 30 September 1887. Moscow. 30 Sept. §2 Hamlet

  Shakespeare's prince, invoked here for his advice on using people 'after your own honour and dignity' rather than their deserts (Act II, Scene 2) -- Chekhov's comic justification for accepting more than his book is worth.