Hamlet again; marvellous distempered

Don’t you get bored, teaching the same thing? It’s the question I usually get at parties when people realise I’m a teacher. That’s assuming they haven’t already spotted someone far more interesting on the other side of the room…Anyway, the answer is yes, sometimes; and no, most of the time. And when it’s Hamlet, which happily it often seems to be, never.

Anyway, this is not a History post, or a current affairs post. Nor is it a linguistics post.

And it will not be padded out by gratuitous personal anecdotes.

This is a Hamlet post!

So let’s get on with it!

So, where are we…

Yes, it’s Act 4, and our hero (is he?- debatable) has just proved to the entire Danish court that his step father Claudius is a murderer, by the brilliant method of having him witness a dramatized version of his crime- a performance from which the guilty party flees…

There’s some excited chat between an understandably buoyant Hamlet and his loyal friend Horatio of the did you see that, did you see that, told you so variety.

And then Shakespeare, always aware that drama depends on contrast, brings back Hamlet’s fake friends, the pair of suits that are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with a message from the boss, Guilty-Not-Guilty Claudius.

Guildenstern is nonplussed- what was that play all about?, and in a bit of a panic- I don’t like the boss being upset; someone’s going to pay for it…And if ever there was a convenient scapegoat, it’s Guil, or his equally uninspiring sidekick, Ros. Mediocrities engaged for one purpose, to serve power- and as Hamlet says, first mouthed to be last swallowed (what an image that is, the king as an ape, slowly and mindlessly chewing nuts much as one might today chew gum). I was reminded of it watching Mr Putin ritually humiliate and bully some anonymous Russian military officer during the early days of the fiasco in Ukraine. I expect by now he has fallen from an implausibly high window, and airbrushed out of official photographic records. But back to Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in case you’re worried, end up being despatched by the King of England, Shakespeare provocatively throwing in the idea of the anointed ruler of our sceptered isle as a kind of mercenary hitman probably not averse to a touch of defenestration.

But, unlike pretty much any character in the play, or anyone who’s ever read it or seen it, I’m actually fascinated by what Guildenstern says: The King is… [brief interruption from Hamlet the satirist here] …in his retirement marvellous distempered.

Let’s begin with what linguists would call the complement, distempered. Most people today would probably take a reasonable guess at the meaning. Claudius is upset- well who wouldn’t be- and this is pretty accurate. But it’s not the whole story- the Latin root of temper means to improve something by mixing it with something. And in the Renaissance, the belief was commonplace that the body was formed of the four humours more or less harmoniously stirred together within you- hence being tempered. We still describe someone who’s calm, and self-controlled as even tempered And Claudius is out of temper, by being full of choler. So watch out! You don’t want to enrage a monarch ruling by Divine Right, Dei Gratia!

Notice too that he’s marvellous distempered; and now that Michael Gove’s school curriculum, whilst efficiently discouraging a generation from studying English, has fetishised the adverb, there’s no excuse not to consider it. Today marvellous is simply approbatory, a rather vacuous measure of someone’s probably insipid and possibly insincere approbation. Great! Super! But strip away the heavy woodchip wallpaper and a more interesting word emerges- in the Renaissance to marvel at something was not simply to consider it beautiful or splendid, worthy of approval, but to see it as a thing of wonder, beyond our comprehension, and ambivalent, as likely to designate something frightening and malign as benevolent. Wonderful and amazing have followed similar etymological parabolas, dragged down from the peaks of the philosophical to the plateaus of the platidinous. It’s an example of what diachronic linguists call amelioration- the meaning of a word becomes more pleasant over time- and also narrowing; stripped of its shades of subtle ambiguity it is compelled to limp, broken, through modern life, nothing more than an underpowered cheerleader. One might speculate as to why this change has occurred, and perhaps conclude that as a culture we’re less often in that mystical sense of wonder, and more interested in things being…nice (though there’s another etymological can of worms).

Which brings me to retirement (so to speak).  There may be readers or audience members today who imagine for a brief moment that Guildenstern is telling us that Claudius has thrown in the towel and decided to spend more time on the golf course. But retire has another interesting etymology. Our contemporary idea, that the state should allow older members of society to be paid not to work, is a relatively modern one, initially introduced by the Iron Chancellor, Bismarck in the 1880s. But like so many words, retire comes into English via Latin, and in this case more immediately via French, where it is a reflexive verb, se retirer, literally to withdraw oneself. It gives us that staple of the grand house, the drawing room; not of course a room dedicated to sketching, but a room for the women to withdraw to, or retire to, perhaps to discuss Hamlet and philosophy, whilst the men smoked their cigars and discussed the stock market and hunting. The meaning also survives in Late Modern English when we refer to a jury retiring to consider its verdict, a phrase which is, fascinatingly, almost entirely in French. My grandfather, writing about his traumatic experience at the Battle of the Somme, refers to being given the order to retire, commenting “what a retirement it was, falling into shell holes”.

When I was a child, retirement seemed something so ridiculously remote, unimaginable, that its meaning was almost hypothetical. Retired people, or pensioners, appeared ancient, the last sighs of the 19th century as they clipped rose bushes or sat forlornly in bus shelters; in retiring they had certainly withdrawn from society. This mirrored Bismarck’s original idea which was more or less that the newly unified German state would pay a pension to anyone who made it to 70, allowing probably not many years to put one’s affairs in order before death, whilst freeing up some employment opportunities for younger workers. Now we like to imagine retirement quite differently- when I sort of retired this summer, I was bombarded with emails from Teachers’ Pensions, all illustrated with the same chiselled, artfully greyed George Clooney lookalike bobbing around in a swimming pool, surrounded by similarly photogenic people of indeterminate age, and a few (grand?) children. Retirement clearly needs a new name, and a rebrand- but if we do that the government might just decide it’s a social good and raise the qualifying age to 98…

Last year a class produced a meme in which the subject of the lesson is represented as drowning, whilst I digress endlessly about- well, about…

Anyway, as I said, this is a post about Hamlet.

But sadly we appear to be out of time, and, talking of swimming pools, my coffee’s going cold…