definite article

Elsewhere I've reviewed a seventeen year old Hamlet instruction video.

I can appreciate that this blog has been neglected this past few days. I've been on holiday this week and with the flat to myself as well, I've taken my annual "hermitage" week where I simply spend some time alone generally doing just one thing. In previous years I've watched lots of Shakespeare, or Hitchcock and this week, it's been Hamlet, seven productions in fact, five audio, one blu-ray and the aforementioned instructional video.

I'll be posting reviews of it all to The Hamlet Weblog over the coming days. I will admit to a certain level of fatigue. With this kind of repetition, hearing the same three or four hours worth of text read over and over in roughly the same manner its impossible not to and it's certainly underscored for me what it must be like to work in a theatre listening to an extended season. At one point I was shouting with delight when a random musical instrument was deployed.

Yet, by reading some criticism in conjunction, I do feel like I've gained a better understanding of the play. As you'll read over there in the coming days, I can now see that for all the arcane language, Shakespeare was writing in a style that often seems four hundred years ahead of its time; the play within a play and how it fits into the structure of the story and Hamlet's character is positively post-modern and that the prince's so-called indecision really does have method in it.

Anyway, to offer a rare interjection of process, I'll still be posting reviews over there into next week with the usual links here. I know that it would be just as easy for me to cross post the whole thing here, but I quite like the idea of having a personal blogging network, or at the very least, these pockets of myself strewn across the web with this blog as the hub. Plus I'd hate for The Hamlet Weblog to lose its definite article after all these years.