Two guards talk to each other. Or rather they ask each other to identify themselves. That's all that has happened thus far in Hamlet.
Yet from that I have drawn, or perhaps overdrawn, ideas about how this meeting also meets us with implications about division and solidity, presence and identity., the nature and meaning of matter, and the problem with the words that make places for all such implications.
In doing this we make these figures "solid," give Bernardo and Francisco life.
In doing this we make these figures "solid," give Bernardo and Francisco life.
To perhaps over-extend this point and make it "matter" too much (as teachers are want to do), let's try a thought experiment using Bernardo.
Imagine the person pretending to be Bernardo is exactly like Bernardo in each and every way such that in their personality, physical make-up, spiritual characteristics and all other traits too. Say that every X and each Y of the player and the guard this player plays makes such a seamless graph of "identical" that under any inspection and every view, even God's, the person pretending to be Bernardo and Bernardo can not be divided one from the other, as if the role and actor were utterly 'solid.'
And yet Bernardo must not and cannot know we, the audience, are "there," must be divided from the person pretending to be Bernardo in this if in nothing else.
Actor and role are, in this experiment, one and the same, can be absolutely the same except in knowing/not knowing someone like Sefa or Jimcale is there too, watching them, seeing them "be."
For Bernardo may well believe in God or ghosts or angels or the Hulk or singing lions, may well be open to any of art's possibilities as answer to the question: Who's there? Indeed, if Bernardo's thoughts move to the pretend as mine do and as I bet yours do too, a sound late at night when alone could easily prompt our imagination to move to the unreal:
The question asked by Bernardo, I am arguing, calls attention to the authority of pretend and the context of the contextual. Since the first few words of the play remind us that we are in the audience and reflects on how Bernardo/the person pretending to be Bernardo's is on stage you might hear in the opening question a statement that sounds like, "Look at me, I am on stage" or as the players on stage and we the ghosts in the audience begin to pretend together, questions like:
What does it mean to be a who when a who can be anyone? (Or almost anyone?)
And,
How can you be a who here if "here" might change from moment to moment?
Or,
How will we play out our lives?
But more likely right now you will simply say: Enough
Give it a rest, Mr. Ted. "Who's there?" and "who are you?" are the same in everyday, normal life and a person standing on a stage asking a simple question does not suggest most of what you have argued. Can't we just get to the next line of the play already?
Yes, in a moment. First, though, let me say that you are indeed correct. In most situations, the distinctions I am drawing do not matter at all. Unfortunately, though, I see each of the next four thousand lines of this play as trying to answer Bernardo's initial question. So while it is time to get to the next line of the play, making too much of the difference between things like "who we are" and "who's there" has just begun.
And I would defend this too-much making of mine, in part, by saying that neither the play nor all I might make of it can ever measure up to all it means to be you, as you are, in whichever "there" you find yourself.
Because the world asks you "who's there?" every second of your life, every moment you appear on its stage. And about that we can never say enough. About each of you too--in certain contexts--much could and should be made.
Making too much of Bernardo's question, in other words, only hints at the expansive territory and endless difficulty of being alive. To overwork things is my way of asking you to consider the play as a guide to that territory, a balm to the difficulty of being something other than a ghost. To make less of it is to make less of you, to make less of all of us.
And not just that, I wonder aloud too if we--old and young, white and black, teacher and student--can get to a point where matters of pretend can unite us rather than divide us, where we might sketch out that map back from tragedy I mentioned in my introductory note.
Towards all this, and how the play helps us consider the challenge of being one's self, let us begin to discuss the drama of recognition when we turn to----finally--the second line of the play next time.
See you then, and there,
--Mr. Ted