I'm here to tell you, Gentle Blog Readers, that I have fallen in love.
That's right. Mad passionate love.
With these two commas, right here.
"But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue." (Hamlet Act I, Sc i v.161)
Commas are important in grammar, natch, for they help clarify meaning--but when written in a text meant for performance, they are especially important, almost hyper-realized, for they are signposts that help the actor determine and deliver the sense of the text, and give them a tool (pause and breath) for expressing emotion.
Say the line like this:
But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue.
Now say it like this:
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.
Do you see? The profound difference the placement of those commas makes?
I have mentioned here before the rather surreal position I find myself in rhetorically in my dissertation, because I must do some heavy theoretical lifting to prove that the Elizabethans actually had a self and engaged in inward reflection. Yes, it sounds ridiculous, no? But there is a significant body of theoretical literature which demands that we take heed of the way external power structures control--indeed, dictate--our choices and over-ride any autonomy we may or may not have had in the first place. This is largely from a philosopher named Foucault--and truth be told, there is some merit in looking at the world through this lens--but only if we realize it is a lens and not a 1:1 map of certain reality.
For when we do that, we come up with a body of literature that determines that the "self" as a stable category of being, a self that reflects upon itself, and has its own Will and Reason independent of external power structures was a modern construction, ergo, ipso facto, the Elizabethans had no stable sense of self.
This is utter nonsense for multiple reasons--all of which I go into in the dissertation. However, I was in raptures yesterday, discovering those commas, for Shakespeare himself telegraphed that these theories are dead wrong.
Break my heart, for I must hold my tongue.
Break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.
The first: a man in conflict with external forces.
The second: a man observing conflict within himself.
The first: a line of dialogue.
The second: poetry.
The first is a line of simple dramatic dialogue, one that could be found going all the way back to the Greeks, and would not seem at all anachronistic.
But the second, as they are here, are distinctly Shakespearean. They signify the inwardness that made his characters so dramaturgically innovative, that we still, today, model our cinematic and dramatic characters on them.
Indeed, we model our selves on them, whether we are aware of it or not.
This is the number one argument for reading Shakespeare--his influence is so broad-reaching and profound that it acts in you, through you, and in and through all the elements of culture you consume. So if its there, in you, anyway, wouldn't you like to know about it to become more aware of it?
Anyway. They are beautiful, these commas. Passionate. Aching. Personal and intimate. And oddly corporeal. We can feel an aching pain in Hamlet's chest as he says them, or as we pretend that we are Hamlet saying them aloud. A pain, I'm sure Shakespeare--who had recently lost his own father, and was watching as the faith of his father was disemboweled in England--felt in his own chest as he committed it to paper.
And yes, perhaps, I do need to get out a little more, if commas are sending me into such thrills. Thanks for mentioning it.
