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!

I dare say you're a better read Shakespearean scholar than I am

Actually I'm a pretty crap Shakespearean scholar! Sorry, I didn't mean to suggest that you personally had made any claims for Hamlet/Horatio, and I'm not really familiar enough with Much Ado to comment on Claudio/Benedick.

My post above was perhaps unnecessarily grumpy, and I apologise; I've just been musing about something someone (they know who they are!) said on another forum about having a problem with slash because it sexualises everything, which I don't completely agree with, but...well, I guess I do agree to a certain extent, at least when slash threatens to stop being a specific and very cool strategy for writing stories and to become a kind of overarching, blunt, one-size-fits-all way of approaching all narrative of any genre or period whatsoever. I'm interested in the history of sexuality, it's what I do, but one of the fascinating things about that history for me is the extent to which our ways of talking about non-sexual things have changed as well, how friendship in particular used to be the object of such passionate discourse, and we lose a bit of that historical texture if we seize on every instance of an early modern bloke telling another early modern bloke he "dearly loves" him or whatever and go "Ha! See! Slash!" Does that make any sense?