Shakespeare Meets Twain's HUCK FINN: The Hamlet Mashup

Thank you to Yvonne Hangsterfer and Jerome Mohsen for creating the following:

Hamlet’s Soliloquy

In Huck Finn, the King performs a creative version of Hamlet’s soliloquy, with allusions to three of Shakespeare’s play.  Below is the actual breakdown of the allusions, with a color code to understand the original text behind each allusion.

Key

Hamlet’s Soliloquy

Other Hamlet

Macbeth

Richard III

Soliloquy

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,

But that the fear of something after death

Murders the innocent sleep,

Great nature's second course,

And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune

Than fly to others that we know not of.

There's the respect must give us pause:

Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,

The law's delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take,

In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn

In customary suits of solemn black,

But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,

Breathes forth contagion on the world,

And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage,

Is sicklied o'er with care,

And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action.

'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.

But soft you, the fair Ophelia:

Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,

But get thee to a nunnery- go!

See the original texts.

Watch these scenes:

Hamlet’s Soliloquy:

Below: Act III scene i (Line 121)
Get thee to a nunn'ry, why woulds't thou be a breeder of sinners?





Below: Hamlet Act III scene ii

'tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world.




Macbeth Act IV Scene i

THIRD APPARITION

Be lion-mettled, proud, and take no care

Who chafes, who frets, or where conspirers are:

Macbeth shall never vanquish’d be until

Great Birnan wood to high Dunsinane hill

Shall come against him.

Descend.

MACBETH

That will never be.

Who can impress the forest, bid the tree

Unfix his earth-bound root? Sweet bodements! Good!

Rebellious dead, rise never till the wood

Of Birnan rise, and our high-plac’d Macbeth

Shall live the lease of nature, pay his breath

To time and mortal custom. Yet my heart

Throbs to know one thing: tell me, if your art

Can tell so much, shall Banquo’s issue ever

Reign in this kingdom?

ALL WITCHES AND APPARITIONS

Seek to know no more

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Richard III
Act I scene i
(Lines 1-4)
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that low'r'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

"Four American Characters" includes Huck Finn - TED Talk by Anna Deavere Smith

"But you see, the human touch, you see, it's disappearing. You know, you see, you've got to question the official truth. You know the thing that was so great about Mark Twain -- you know we honor Mark Twain, but we don't read him. We read 'Huck Finn,' of course, we read 'Huck Finn' of course. I mean, Huck, of course, was tremendous. Remember that great scene on the raft, remember what Huck did? You see, here's Huck; he's an illiterate kid; he's had no schooling, but there's something in him. And the official truth, the truth was, the law was, that a black man was a property, was a thing, you see. 

And Huck gets on the raft with a property named Jim, a slave, see. And he hears that Jim is going to go and take his wife and kids and steal them from the woman who owns them, and Huck says, 'Ooh, oh my God, ooh, ooh -- that woman, that woman never did anybody any harm. Ooh, he's going to steal; he's going to steal; he's going to do a terrible thing.' Just then, two slavers caught up, guys chasing slaves, looking for Jim. 'Anybody up on that raft with you?' Huck says, 'Yeah.' 'Is he black or white?' 'White.' And they go off. And Huck said, 'Oh my God, oh my God, I lied, I lied, ooh, I did a terrible thing, did a terrible thing -- why do I feel so good?' 

"But it's the goodness of Huck, that stuff that Huck's been made of, you see, all been buried; it's all been buried. So the human touch, you see, it's disappearing. So you ask about a defining moment -- ain't no defining moment in American history for me. It's an accretion of moments that add up to where we are now, where trivia becomes news. And more and more, less and less awareness of the pain of the other. Huh. You know, I don't know if you could use this or not, but I was quoting Wright Morris, a writer from Nebraska, who says, 'We're more and more into communications and less and less into communication.' Okay, kids, I got to scram, got to go see my cardiologist." And that's Studs Terkel. (Applause) 

Razing Houses in Cleveland

Featured in 2011

And again in 2017 Cleveland.com:

Cleveland City Council approves $8 million more for demolishing dilapidated housing

, 

City of Cleveland Nears Demolition of 10,000 Blighted and Abandoned Structures

Thursday, May 3, 2018

The City of Cleveland is nearing a significant milestone in its efforts to strategically remove blighted structures from its neighborhoods. The City has now demolished 9,700 blighted, abandoned and nuisance structures during Mayor Frank G. Jackson’s tenure. The Department of Building & Housing (B&H) has taken a systematic approach to identifying properties, often based on citizen complaints and routine inspections. 

Click here to watch a demolition and interview with Building and Housing Interim Director Ayonna Blue Donald. 

The City has dedicated $72 million since 2006 –from a variety of funding sources— to its ambitious demolition strategy. Funds include $13 million from the Mayor’s Safe Routes to School Initiative, General Fund monies and grants. The removal of these properties is part of a comprehensive strategy to eliminate blight while encouraging neighborhood investment and increasing property values –a goal of Mayor Jackson’s Healthy Neighborhoods initiative. 

From 2013 to 2017, B&H has razed 3,450 structures, conducted 16,647 board-up actions, and issued 6,540 condemnation violations. It has also closed 8,175 vacant property complaints during the same period. 

The City is committed to addressing vacant and abandoned properties and ensuring all citizen complaints are addressed. Clevelanders are encouraged to support the Healthy Neighborhoods initiative and report blighted or vacant structures by dialing 3-1-1 or emailing bhcomplaints@city.cleveland.oh.us.

http://cuyahogalandbank.org/demolition.php

http://clevelandhousingcourt.org/en-US/Vacant-Property-Research-Toolkit.aspx

To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: Nina Simone, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry

Lyrics

To be young, gifted and black,
Oh what a lovely precious dream
To be young, gifted and black,
Open your heart to what I mean

In the whole world you know
There are billion boys and girls
Who are young, gifted and black,
And that's a fact!

Young, gifted and black
We must begin to tell our young
There's a world waiting for you
This is a quest that's just begun

When you feel really low
Yeah, there's a great truth you should know
When you're young, gifted and black
Your soul's intact

Young, gifted and black
How I long to know the truth
There are times when I look back
And I am haunted by my youth

Oh but my joy of today
Is that we can all be proud to say
To be young, gifted and black
Is where it's at

Songwriters: Nina Simone / Weldon Irvine

To Be Young, Gifted & Black lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

Archie Bunker: Lionel Moves Into the Neighborhood

Various Versions of A RAISIN in the SUN

American Playhouse Presents Danny Glover and Esther Rolle

in Lorraine Hansbury's A RAISIN IN THE SUN Directed by Bill Duke

Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin

From "The Radical Friendship Of Lorraine Hansberry And James Baldwin"

The friendship that grew between Lorraine and Jimmy is storied. It was both an intellectual and a soulful partnership. Jimmy first saw Lorraine in 1958 at the Actors Studio in Manhattan. She was there to see a theatrical workshop production of his novel Giovanni’s Room. She sat in the bleachers. But when the lights came up and luminaries of American theater expressed how much they disliked the play, little and unknown Lorraine argued with them intensely. Jimmy was grateful. “She seemed to speak for me, and afterward she talked to me with a gentleness and generosity never to be forgotten. A small, shy, determined person, with that strength dictated by absolutely impersonal ambition: She was not trying to ‘make it’ — she was trying to keep the faith.”

They both participated in a roundtable titled “Liberalism and the Negro,” hosted by Commentarymagazine, a publication that vaulted the literati of the 1950s and 1960s into the sphere of public intellectualism. This discussion consisted of a group of writers: Langston Hughes (Lorraine’s mentor and Jimmy’s sometime nemesis), Alfred Kazin, Nat Hentoff, Emile Capouya, and Lorraine and Jimmy. At one point, Jimmy responded to a question from Hentoff, who wondered whether black writers had sufficiently questioned the value of assimilation.

Baldwin: I feel that there’s been far too little.
Hentoff: In other words, equal for what?
Baldwin: Equal for what, yes. You know, there’s always been a very great question in my mind of why in the world — after all I’m living in this society and I’ve had a good look at it — what makes you think I want to be accepted?

Then Lorraine jumped in:

Hansberry: Into this.
Baldwin: Into this.
Hansberry: Maybe something else.
Baldwin: It’s not a matter of acceptance or tolerance. We’ve got to sit down and rebuild this house.
Hansberry: Yes, quickly.
Baldwin: Very quickly, and we have to do it together. ... You know, in order to be a writer you have to demand the impossible, and I know I’m demanding the impossible. It has to be— But I also know it has to be done. You see what I mean?

In the same discussion, they echoed each other another time, this time with Jimmy responding to Lorraine’s calls. In considering the failures of Southern white writers Carson McCullers and William Faulkner when it came to racial matters, Lorraine said:

William Faulkner has never in his life sat in on a discussion in a Negro home where there were all Negroes. It is physically impossible. He has never heard the nuances of hatred, of total contempt from his most devoted servant and his most beloved friend, although she means every word when she’s talking to him and will tell him profoundly intimate things. But he has never heard the truth of it. ... The employer doesn’t go to the maid’s house. You see, people get this confused. They think that the alienation is equal on both sides. It isn’t. We’ve been washing everybody’s underwear for 300 years. We know when you’re not clean.

And then Jimmy said Lorraine’s point was very important, and remarked that Carson McCullers’s treatment of black people “doesn’t reveal anything about the truth of Negro life, but a great deal about the state of mind of the white Southern woman who wrote it.”

That said, Lorraine’s and Jimmy’s politics were different. He wasn’t ever going to call himself a Marxist, communist, or nationalist. He was just committed to honesty, ideology be damned. Lorraine was insistently though creatively ideological. Lorraine leaned more toward social theorist, and Jimmy was to his core a critic, truth teller, and doer. And Jimmy didn’t refer to himself as gay, he just happened to “fall in love with a boy” a number of times, whereas Lorraine, though closeted, embraced the words lesbian and homosexual to define herself.

However, the spirit of their work was always mutually sympathetic. Jimmy called A Raisin in the Sun a play in which Lorraine served as a witness to black America. He did too. In perhaps his most famous book, the 1963 epistolary text The Fire Next Time, he answered Walter Lee’s climactic action. In Raisin, standing before his son, Walter Lee insists upon moving into the white neighborhood and rejects the offer of a lot of cash in exchange for maintaining segregation and abdicating his dignity. In The Fire Next Time, Baldwin testifies to his nephew about his late father. Jimmy wants his nephew to see how his father (like their father before him) had been crushed by the forces of white supremacy in his life. He issues an appeal to his nephew’s generation to make use of their righteous anger rather than be distorted by it. Jimmy, a former child preacher, preaches to the Walter Lees of the world and to the others. He makes plain the wages of white supremacy.

In this video: James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Lorraine Hansberry, Emile Capouya, Alfred Kazin talk together in 1961. Check out this playlist of other Baldwin videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list...