Hendiadys is a turn of phrase. "Reelin and a rockin", is an example of hendiadys. So is "Rogue and peasant slave." It means, from two comes one, or something like that. Shakespeare used the form differently than, say, you know, the bible: he would pair two seemingly disparate adjectives together that formed a deeper meaning by their difference. When Hamlet refers to himself as a "rogue and peasant slave", close your eyes and draw the imagery, whatever kind of slave is most provocative to your mind, (it is often the case, when appreciating this writer, to take his metaphors beyond his own lifetime): a rogue slave might be Harriet Tubman; a peasant slave might in my reading be an Uncle Tom, a house slave. When Hamlet refers to himself as both in the same phrase, while superbly setting forth his struggle, it shows he is self-aware of his own inaction; he bitches and snipes, but at the end he has consented to the King's request that he hang around the plantation that is Elsinore.
Shakespeare uses hendiadys quite often, but never so much as in Hamlet. Everyone is talking out of both sides of their mouth in Hamlet, as does the Prince himself, although different: whereas the other characters' dual speech is often politicking, Hamlet's is, at the least, an honest struggle. And thus the author has stricken him with what has been described as, "thinking too much", but might be better described as a bipolar condition.
Hamlet is still a prick, but here, I think, is something of his popularity: His struggle, his drama, the story, are greatly appealing, but that's not why a sociopath is so beloved. No, Hamlet is a rock star. And I don't mean the musty term that once meant something, but today means douche bag. I mean he speaks with a kind of charisma that is mesmerizing in the way one thinks of rock music mesmerizing young people.
To explain a theory of this Author is dangerous, as trying to explain this particular Author is often a Rorschach test of the one attempting the explanation rather than anything useful about a lost biography from 400 years ago.
Shakespeare was the Nature Boy, the Natural, a phenom. He was written of by his betters in the theater for being a ripoff and a hick; a bumpkin without education, stepping on their backs to get to the top of his industry. Robert Greene is attributed posthumously with this warning to his fellow scriptwriters: Yes trust them not: for there is an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tyger’s hart wrapped in a Player’s hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and beeing an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.
He's saying there is an actor, a jack of all trades, who now thinks he can write like us; not just that, but thinks he's the only shake-scene around that matters; and not just that, but the "Tyger's hart" bit is from Shakespeare's Henry VI, so as to leave no mystery who he means. Sounds like something James Spader would say in an 80's movie.
And often I have thought Robert Greene is right: this Author was an actor who caught on fast to how these writers wrote, and decided on trying it out himself. Who famously coined thousands of new words, which is often celebrated, but might be because, well, he didn't know enough words.
This Author often gets so gnarled up in his writing that it can't be deciphered. He's excessive and sloppy at his worst, which certainly disgusted his friend Ben Johnson. But at his best, well.. you have critics and bardolators who credit him with inventing humanity -- talk about a cult.
And all this silliness, this worship, is not because this Author invented words, or because Hamlet talks about being and not being, and slings and arrows, and outrageous fortunes. It's because this Author writes like Chuck Berry. It's not the lyrics really, it's the rhythm. The reelin and the rockin. The dada and the dada. His style is propulsive in the way rock music is in that it simulates fucking. There it is. Simple as that.
When one critic of his time refers to the author as "honey-tongued Shakespeare", one understands he's not describing the sweetness of his love poetry, but the high/low, in/out, rise/fall orgasming nature of his pace. His poems were passed around as pornography for the young people. His lines are a bearcat, scratching at the door.
And his great invention, the Prince of Denmark, is, (when one gets beyond the psychological evaluations by every cultural big-wig since), the lead stud of the world's kookiest rock opera by the all-time king of hillbilly fuck music. That's how a prick like Hamlet is so obsessed over, and how Shakespeare is timeless. Those two opposing adjectives in hendiadys, are the rogue and the peasant, the sling and the arrow, the shake and the spear, the rock and the roll, the cock and cooch. The high and low of the best who ever did it. |
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