Wanted to say that I got King Lear from the library for the sole purpose of understanding your AU/staging thing and while it's still a little confusing (because, y'know, 400-year language gap and I don't trust Sparknotes ever since they translated "sirrah" as "sir") BUT. It's been pretty great.
I’m honestly so honored that there’s someone in the world who’s *that* dedicated to understanding one of my posts
There are a bunch of changes I want to make to the staging thing now, and I’m not sure if I should just edit the original post, or post a new post with all the things I would delete or change
ANWAY yeah I glad you’re reading King Lear!! It’s really great, but if you don’t read Shakespeare often it might take a bit for you to get used to the language (it took me a while as well)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern did nothing wrong and I will die on this hill.
This is something that I never knew I had opinions on until I got this ask
- you’re right but also there’s so much more to it than that
- yes in my opinion they did nothing wrong, but it completely depends on how their actors play them in the given production. They can easily be played as if they knowingly and intentionally were spying on Hamlet and knew they were sending him to his death. I do, however, *strongly* prefer them being entirely innocent
- the way I see it is 1) they didn’t have a choice in coming to spy on Hamlet bc the king himself literally told them to, 2) they didn’t even know the king’s true purpose in spying on him, 3) they wouldn’t have spied if they knew, 4) they agreed to spy bc they genuinely care about Hamlet’s wellbeing and think this is the best way to help, 5) everything they saw in Denmark seemed to prove Claudius right- Hamlet did seem to be mad to them, and so they continued spying, 6) they absolutely never would have agreed to go to England with Hamlet had they know what was in the letter they were carrying
-BUT given that R and G are innocent, it’s very easy for Hamlet to be played as unnecessarily cruel in how he treats them. Which, NO. Why. Hamlet isn’t innocent, but he *is* just a guy who got wrapped up in something that was much too big for him to handle on his own, and did his best in the situation, and everything just went really wrong really quickly, even though he tried to think everything through, and make what was to him the most logical decisions in the moment.
-so from Hamlet’s POV, R and G still have to come across as very sus
-to the extent that he would reasonably believe that they would intentionally participate in a murder plot against him
-so in conclusion, the best way for R and G to be played is innocent but acting sus
(Kinda like Cassio from Othello? Technically innocent, but just. *Constantly* doing things that make him look sus)
Lear’s really like “ah yes I was planning on staying with my youngest daughter, but now that I suddenly don’t like her I’m gonna stay with my two oldest daughters” and expects them to be instantly ready to accommodate for not only him but 100 of his knights
