Leigh, I know of what you speak, having seen Bell Shakespeare do Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, The Tempest, Lear, and Othello, if my memory serves me correctly. Bell does a very good job usually, but I do have to concede that the best ever live Shakespeare performance that I have attended has to have been The Royal Shakespeare Company's Richard the Third, featuring the amazing Antony Sher. My friend and I were openly sobbing after the Coronation scene (along with the majority of Concert Hall patrons). Absolutely amazing performance.

Edited because parentheses usually come in pairs.

Hamlet/Horatio

Leigh, I know of what you speak, having seen Bell Shakespeare do Hamlet

Did Leon Ford play Hamlet in the production you saw? Because he was absolutely fantastic tonight--he had this hectic physicality which worked both the pathos and the comedy into a really intricate, fascinating performance. t /post-show rave

Without wanting to rain on the Hamlet/Horatio parade, can I just point out that it's only through a modern lens that this kind of thing looks slashy? Between the renaissance and the romantic era (broadly speaking) it was extremely common, in fact conventional, for men to express friendship for each other in very florid, passionate terms. There was nothing sexual about it; in fact being about friendship made it less sexual because there wasn't yet a concept of friendship and sex as things that went together. It wasn't until homosexuality became more culturally visible (during the 19th century) that men felt the need to restrain themselves in expressing their (non-sexual) feelings for each other.

t /killjoy

(The Sonnets are a different story of course...)

Granted, Angus. But I'm assuming that homosexuality was no more nor less common in the past than it is today. So whilst I'm quite happy to agree that tenderness does not have to be interpreted sexually, I don't see that there's anything to preclude it being interpreted sexually.

Would you argue that the sonnets are a case of agape rather than eros, then?

Ha, Fay, I just edited my post...no, The Sonnets are a different thing altogether and are totally Eros. But the sonnet is an erotic form of discourse through and through.

What precludes Hamlet's language about Horatio from being interpreted sexually is that in the context of the time it isn't sexual language. Of course you're still free to believe that they were at it, but it's a misreading to claim that the text actually supports this.

Can I ask a non-slashy Hamlet Horatio question?

I have just watched Hamlet about 10 times.

Did Horatio get to Denmark in time for Hamlet's Father's funeral and Hamlet didn't? When Hamlet and Horatio first meet in Denmark, it sounds like Horatio had been there a lot longer than Hamlet, but if the were both in school in Wittenberg when the news of Old Hamlet's death srrived, wouldn't they have traveled together? Or something?

Sophia, I think that timing issue has been generally acknowledged as an unresolved puzzle. (IIRC, A. C. Bradley once wrote an essay called "Where was Hamlet when his father died?"--the kind of thing that used to give Shakespeare scholars sleepless nights in the olden days.)

Of course you're still free to believe that they were at it, but it's a misreading to claim that the text actually supports this.

fwiw, I didn't make any such claim. However, you could perhaps say the same thing for Claudio/Benedick, which I did describe as canonical. I'll not deny that my interpretation is largely through a 21st century lens, and I'll agree that one can read it as a platonic friendship - but would you say that a romantic reading would be going against the text? Because it doesn't seem to be so to me with Claudio/Benedick - but I dare say you're a better read Shakespearean scholar than I am, and I'm basing this more on what seems (subjectively) reasonable to me personally than on a list of specific citations.

Thanks Angus. At least I am not crazy or missing something!