[Xmca-l] Re: The Ego and the Interpersonality

[HENRY SHONERD]

David,
Nice! I was totally struck by the hugs between father and son in the Brook version. A bit later Hamlet might have been thinking of those hugs when he said: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” And, the Brook version is so much warmer. Hamlet a person of color, in color. Agency and culture. Something worth dying for. Love. These two clips were great!
Henry

 
> On Apr 17, 2015, at 3:49 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> In "Psychology of Art" Vygotsky apprehends the so-called "Hamlet" enigma:
> why doesn't Hamlet just go and do it? Why all the dilly-dallying, the
> shilly-shallying, the hesitation and tergiversation? Vygotsky concludes
> that the "Hamlet enigma" is really a curtain painted over the whole
> painting. That is, the play is, itself, a study of how volition is and is
> not created.
> 
> It is, as Vygotsky later says, the key question in the whole of
> psychology--the question of how we make decisions and then these
> self-given decisions and not the God-given environment become the nature to
> which the human animal must adapt.
> 
> Consdier this 1964 Soviet version of Act 1 Scene 5--in Russian!--by Gregory
> Kozintsev:
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp5Rz0LqUSM
> 
> 
> 
> The film score was written by Shostakovich. But there is no music in this
> clip--just the music of speech.
> 
> 
> 
> Compare this version--by Peter Brook.
> 
> 
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT5rLk40fnM
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Kozintsev cuts precisely the line that Brook considers the most important
> line in all of Shakespeare. The Ghost says:
> 
> 
> "Taint not thy mind!" (10:52 on the Brook clip)
> 
> 
> Meaning, you must somehow carry out this murder, without destroying your
> own soul--you must avenge me, but not vengefully--you must kill out of love
> for your mother and for your motherland.
> 
> 
> I think that BOTH Kozintsev and Brook consider this line a complete
> contradiction. This line is why Hamlet hesitates and why he cannot seem to
> perform the murder for four long hours, and when he does kill the king it
> has almost nothing to do with vengeance (it is only when he has seen the
> king murder his own mother and when he knows that he too is dying anyway).
> 
> 
> Kozintsev cuts the line and makes the play into self-directed
> narrative, the source of Bruner's "ego". But Brook keeps the line, and as a
> result the play becomes more Shakespearean, more dialogic, and much closer
> to the source of the ego, the interpersonality.
> 
> David Kellogg