Reading Great Expectations

My reading of Great Expectations moves along at breakneck speed. Things are getting much more serious now. Pip has discovered who his benefactor has been all of these years, and is having an extended panic-attack about it.

One of my favorite chapters so far is when Pip and Herbert go to see Mr. Wopsle in an amateur production of Hamlet (an awful amateur production of Hamlet – is there any other kind?). Pip’s description of why the play is bad, the absurdity of the badness of the show, and also – how embarrassed they were to see Mr. Wopsle backstage afterwards, because how could they say “nice job” convincingly – hits very close to home. I laughed out loud from beginning to end of the chapter. We’ve got the ghost of Hamlet’s father, walking around with his script in hand. We’ve got the heckling of the audience. We’ve got the general incompetence of the actor playing Hamlet. It’s all there. I feel like I was in the audience for this awful show myself.

Here’s an excerpt:

Several curious little circumstances transpired as the action proceeded. The late king of the country not only appeared to have been troubled with a cough at the time of his decease but to have taken it with him to the tomb, and to have brought it back. The royal phantom also carried a ghostly manuscript round its truncheon, to which it had the appearance of occasionally referring, and that, too, with an air of anxiety and a tendency to lose the place of reference which were suggestive of a state of mortality. It was this, I conceive, which led to the Shade’s being advised by the gallery to “turn over!” — a recommendation which it took extremely ill. It was likewise to be noted of this majestic spirit that whereas it always appeared with an air of having been out a long time and walked an immense distance, it perceptibly came from a closely-contiguous wall.

The Queen of Denmark, a very buxom lady, though no doubt historically brazen, was considered by the public to have too much brass about her; her chin being attached to her diadem by a broad band of that metal (as if she had a gorgeous toothache), her waist being encircled by another, and each of her arms by another, so that she was openly mentioned as “the kettledrum”.

The noble boy in the ancestral boots was inconsistent, representing himself, as it were in one breath, as an able seaman, a strolling actor, a grave digger, a clergyman, and a person of the utmost importance at a Court fencing match, on the authority of whose practised eye and nice discrimination the finest strokes were judged. This gradually led to a want of toleration for him, and even — on his being detected in holy orders, and declining to perform the funeral service — to the general indignation taking the form of nuts.

Lastly, Ophelia was a prey to such slow musical madness, that when, in course of time, she had taken off her white muslin scarf, folded it up, and bured it, a sulky man who had been long cooling his impatient nose agaginst an iron bar in the front row of the gallery growled, “Now the baby’s put to bed, let’s have supper!” Which, to say the least of it, was out of keeping.

This reminds me of the man shouting at the stage as I was performing in some god-awful play: “WHO THE HELL WROTE THIS SHIT???”

Good old-fashioned heckling is no longer in style in the theatre, although it used to be. I feel lucky that I got to participate, albeit unwillingly, in such an age-old tradition.

Mr. Wopsle, Pip’s acquaintance, plays Hamlet, to awful results. Pip describes:

Whenever that unfortunate Prince had to ask a question or state a doubt, the public helped him out with it. As for example; on the question whether ’twas nobler in the mind to suffer, some roared yes, and some no, and some inclining to both opinions said “toss up for it”; and quite a Debating Society arose. When he asked what should such fellows as he do crawling between earth and heaven, he was encouraged with loud cries of “Hear, hear!” When he appeared with his stocking disordered (its disorder expressed, according to usage, by one very neat fold in the top, which I suppose to be always got up with a flat iron), a conversation took place in the gallery respecting the paleness of his leg, and whether it was occasioned by the turn the ghost had given him. On his taking the recorders — very like a little black flute that had just been played in the orchestra and handed out at the door — he was called upon unanimously for Rule Britannia. When he recommended the player not to saw the air thus, the sulky man said, “And don’t you do it, neither; you’re a deal worse than him!” And I grieve to add that peals of laughter greeted Mr. Wopsle on every one of these occasions.

Ah yes. Hamlet’s advice to the actors: “Don’t saw the air” “Don’t tear a passion to rags” … It’s a mini treatise on acting. Forget about all the different schools and methods. Just do what Hamlet tells you to do, and you should be all right.

Here is Pip’s description of the agony of embarrassment he felt, watching Mr. Wopsle fail so badly:

We had made some pale efforts in the beginning to applaud Mr. Wopsle, but they were too hopeless to be persisted in. Therefore we had sat, feeling keenly for him, but laughing, nevertheless, from ear to ear. I laughed in spite of myself all the time, the whole thing was so droll; and yet I had a latent impression that there was something decidedly fine in Mr. Wopsle’s elocution — not for old associations’ sake, I am afraid, but because it was very slow, very dreary, very up-hill and down-hill, and very unlike any way in which any man in any natural circumstances of life or death ever expressed himself about anything.