no wonder Pynchon is seen at his plays.

[Monte Davis]

HAMLET [Drawing]: How now! a rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!


[Makes a pass through the arras]


LORD POLONIUS [Behind]: O, I am slain!


[Falls and dies]


***


Stoppard's summary of a mummery:


PLAYER: Lucretius, nephew to the king... usurped by his uncle and shattered
by his mother's incestuous marriage loses . . his reason... throwing the
court into turmoil and disarray as he alternates between bitter melancholy
and unrestricted lunacy... staggering from the suicidal (a pose) to the
homicidal (here he kills "POLONIUS")... he at last confronts his mother and
in a scene of provocative ambiguity---(a somewhat oedipal embrace) begs her
to repent and recant. (He springs up, still talking.) The King---(he pushes
forward the POISONER-KING) tormented by guilt---haunted by fear ---decides
to despatch his nephew to England---and entrusts this undertaking to two
smiling

accomplices---friends--- two spies..


Mason on Wolfe's 1756 suppression of the weavers (313):


“The Clothiers had made of children my Age Red Indians, spying upon them
from the Woodlands they thought were theirs. We call’d them ‘the White
People,’ and the House they liv’d in, ‘the Big House.’ Splendid boyhood,
you might say, but you’d be wrong,— what I had imagin’d a Paradise proving
instead but the brightly illustrated front of the Arras, behind which all
manner of fools lay bleeding, and real rats swarm’d, their tails
undulating, waiting their moment."


***


No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous –

Almost, at times, the Fool.

On Thu, Jan 29, 2015 at 6:13 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> The Guardian (@guardian)
> 1/29/15, 4:07 AM
> The Hard Problem review - Tom Stoppard tackles momentous ideas in his
> rich new play trib.al/u5U4otQ
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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