"The reft is shouting" (and acting like a dick)

(originally posted on myspace here)

I woke at four. That was fine. I'd needed some sleep. The last two days I'd been trying to tackle the London Dungeons' new summer hours on the lowest reserves of rest, attention, patience, hope and vim that I'd seen since records began (ie this blog). Were there advantages to this physical state? Well, it wasn't all

no. The fact I'd been up at nights reading David Cairns' vividly illustrated missives from a week-long Hammer-Frankethon did lend my Ripper and Autopsy shows a new-found, straight-backed edge for example, as my faltering ability to discern Reality from Some Blog's Precis of Fantasy finally dissolved completely in the dry ice drifting off of Boghurst's bubbling jars. With an insomniac shudder of my shoulder blades, however, I also spent much of these days disproportionately haunted by Cairns' account of Peter Cushing's near-legendary grief, following his wife's less legendary death-bed confession that she had always thought he'd spent his life acting like a dick, in fact, and that he'd broken her heart and had made her life hell...

Look at that poor man. And look on this:

It's a design for Hamlet's conscience, Mr. Tommy Knockers. I scribbled it in the kitchen yesterday evening, while Bishop phoned round for puppets. It should be easy enough to fashion a conscience out of milk I would think, although it now looks more like we'll be going for something in a sock and some shades. The show's a week away (remember, we didn't do the publicity). But, good news: Stumbling back from work to my kitchen with a family Lasagne from Iceland and a heart of black ice I found that, once the boys had arrived and we actually stood up and started trying to perform what we'd written, I was having fun. I was having fun and I wasn't tired. And by half past eleven that evening we finally had something like a finished script to e-mail to our producer. Bishop was a little worried that he'd miss the last train back (to his fiancee, as of Friday! Tirree!) but of course, THE GREAT THING ABOUT WRITING HAMLET, as I learnt for myself and I'm sure you'll all learn for yourselves when you get round to writing Hamlet, is that if you do suddenly find you're five minutes away from the deadline with all your protagonists still standing, you can solve it with a simple stage direction - Hang on, I'll go and get the First Folio...

Omigod! Or, however you spell it. I've just made an immensely important literary find.

Right... The stage directions in the last scene of the Folio's Hamlet are certainly pretty brilliant (though not as good as in the Penguin version:
"In scuffling they change rapiers, and both are wounded with the poisoned weapon...
"The Queen falls...
"She dies...
"He wounds the King...
"He forces the King to drink...
"The King dies...
"He dies...
"He dies..."
And so Shakespeare finds out that, blimey, fighting is certainly a lot easier to write than speaking and in fact he was much nearer to the end than he had thought - There is a theory he spent over a decade working on "Hamlet", which given that he wrote thirty other plays in the space of twenty years is probably worth a mention, but anyway) no, the real find I've just made is Hamlet's ORIGINAL last words. Because, according to the First Folio, these are not, as has been handed down to us: "The rest is silence." They are in fact, as printed in the very first collection of Shakespeare's complete works back in 1623, (and thereafter one supposes consigned to the Naughty Step of Theatrical History):

"The rest is silence. O, o, o, o."

Well, at least it wasn't "The rest is silence. Oooo."

But actually, isn't that brilliant? Isn't it brilliant that Hamlet can't even get his own dying words right? He's a dick to the end... But a dick with dignity. He's OUR dick, and a plague and a pox and a dump upon those who'd try and paint him otherwise. Anyone can write a sympathetic villain, but try to write a sympathetic dick, that takes real heart - Ooh, bangs and barking outside. I wonder what that was. Let's see if there's sirens.

Well I didn't write what I'd intended to but I dare say that's fine. I'd found this teddibly interesting article on procrastination in the Observer in the Hop on Forest Hill. All the findings therein make perfect sense to me - See below: I am clearly a man of my time, this blog a vital social document - Speaking of which, here I am as Tony Blair in an earlier, serious version of Hamlet.

... Nope, no sirens. Clearly it was horseplay. Night then.