Bloodstained Minds, Blackened Lives -Will Brady

I am loving this play so much. Hamlet's wit is producing the most savage roasts I have ever read. Especially, um... Those sexual wisecracks with Ophelia before the play in Act 3, scene 2. Didn't expect Shakespeare to do something like that, but okay.

I won't subject you all to a blog about that (although SOMEBODY in this class needs to, or I will get the Council to fail you all), because Claudius' soliloquy in the next scene is much more interesting (and safer). In praying about his guilt, Claudius says in lines 47-50, "What if this cursèd hand / Were thicker than itself with brother's blood? / Is there not rain enough in the heavens / To wash it white as snow?" This line in particular jumped out at me because it sounds exactly like one of Lady's Macbeth's lines in Macbeth after she has gone mad from enticing Macbeth to murder a few people: "Here's the smell of blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand." Shakespeare, I suspect your political assassination plays all follow the same theme--crazy, huh? 

The point made across multiple plays is a solid one; there are a LOT of things you can do to hurt people that can be forgiven later. Did you steal from someone? You can give it back and make up with them. Did you lie to someone? You can admit it and make up with them. Did you physically hurt someone? You can apologize, help nurse them back to health, and, again, make up with them. Did you murder someone? ...That's permanent. You can apologize to their loved ones all you want, but on this side of eternity you can't make reparations with your victim. They're dead. Gone. Finito. Nothing you try will undo that. Claudius knows this and laments it--but ironically, he won't make the reparations that he can, with man or with God. As he says later in the soliloquy, that would require him to renounce the crown, his new wife, and most likely everything else in his life. 

...And then he talks about how money and power can overturn the legal system and allow people to get away with crimes, which hits a little too close to home regarding recent current events and our political climate. Fortunately, Shakespeare gets very theologically correct when Claudius mentions that in Heaven, we will all confess everything we've done with no defense and no excuses. The only tragic part? Claudius still says he can't repent on earth for fear of losing everything and hopelessly calls to angels to comfort his distress. In another moment of irony, Hamlet enters and nearly kills him, but decides not to because he's worried Claudius is making himself right with God and would be dying while totally forgiven, even though Claudius literally just said he couldn't and wouldn't repent. Is that solely irony, or a jab at the Catholic system of dying with a certain amount of sin in your heart which translates to a certain amount of time in Purgatory or even the difference between Heaven and damnation? 

That felt like a lot of scattered, loose explicating, so I'll try to summarize with something relatively conclusive: don't murder people, please. Blood is harder to wash from your hands than from a white shirt. And don't believe that just confessing your sins to God is the same as repenting of them. You can't confess to God anything He doesn't already know--it's important for you to grow up and admit it, but that doesn't do you any good unless you DO something about it. Resolve not to do it again, repair the situation however you can, you get the idea. Or else, like Hamlet, we will roast you to death.

P.S. I commented on Moriah and Annakate's posts.