Performing Reality, from Hamlet to Trump

I think everyone knows, or at least everyone of a certain age who went to public school somewhere in the US (and probably the UK as well) knows that Shakespeare’s plays are full of plays within the plays. Maybe the most famous one is “The Mousetrap,” as the play staged in Hamlet is called. What perhaps is less well known is the idea that a great many of Shakespeare’s plays are centrally about performance itself.

Consider a little further the scenario that we encounter in Hamlet, for instance. Claudius is performing the role of the good, competent monarch—and in fact does a damned good job of it except for the minor point of his having murdered his own brother. Ultimately that catches up to him, so to speak, in his response to the performances that Hamlet himself puts on. Before he puts on his “antic disposition” Hamlet tries out a costume or two—his inky cloak, let’s say—and afterwards another costume, with “doublet all unbraced” and all the accoutrements of the madness he’s performing. At any rate, the antic disposition engages almost every one of Hamlet’s actions—acts?—from his treatment of Polonius to his treatment of Ophelia, poor young woman.

 

And then there are the comparatively minor performances. There’s Polonius’s advice to Reynaldo on how to catch the truth of Laertes’s behavior in Paris, to use “indirection,” which is to say to perform, so as to “find direction out.” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fall into the same thematic frame, although their acting abilities are so poor that Hamlet susses them out within five minutes of their arrival. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead riffs on their performative incapacity. Only Ophelia, poor young woman, and perhaps Laertes, seem not to perform. Certainly Ophelia’s actual madness is meant to contrast Hamlet’s performative madness. And although Laertes at the outset may be performing the dutiful son and brother, when he returns from Paris there is no performance in his anguish at his father’s and then his sister's death. Even that peacock, Osric, performs, although his act is so stereotypical a role that Hamlet mocks him from the moment he enters to the moment he exits the scene.

 

But Hamlet is not unique in the thematic focus on performance. Henry V is one performance after another, a concern beautifully captured in Kenneth Branagh’s film of the play, in which it becomes difficult to determine where actual behavior begins and performance stops. Performance is the heart and soul of As You Like It, of Twelfth Night, of Measure for Measure, of Timon of Athens, of The Winter’s Tale—and so on.

 

The serious, crucial corollary of the plays’ concern with performance is deciphering those moments and those characters that are authentic. My favorite conundrum in that regard involves Horatio. Is he really what he seems to be? Or is he just a better actor than Hamlet’s old buddies, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? If Horatio is indeed Hamlet’s buddy, then how does he end up being a flunky in Claudius’s court?

 

I’ve worked through these points regarding Shakespeare’s plays because our current world is so full of performance that I find it more than difficult to distinguish what is real from what is not, so that, a bit like Macbeth, my “function / Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is / But what is not.” Take a trivial example that is currently in every Swiftie fan’s mind. Isn’t it wonderful that finally Taylor and Travis have agreed to tie the knot! And those pictures of Travis kneeling at Taylor’s feet are just so . . . so . . . so . . . practiced? I’m not doubting that the two people are really in love and are really getting married. But I am definitely doubting that the scene with the kneeling groom is an authentic moment. To my mind, it’s clearly a made-for-the-web opportunity.

 

More serious in many ways are all those fake pictures, videos, texts, written and peopled by artificial “intelligence” rather than by actual human beings. The danger those phenomena represent can’t be overestimated. I can envision a moment when a deep fake is so provocative that it provokes indeed, even to the point of causing a war to break out.

 

Even more crucial, I think, is the everyday performance that everyday people enact in every minute of their lives. Is the clip on TikTok of little Susie and little Johny disporting themselves on the beach or sharing a lovely breakfast in a fancy restaurant or passionately embracing in the shadow of the Tour Eifel a moment of real joy? Or is it joy performed for the ever-focused eye of the iPhone camera and the every-watching eyes of Susie and Johny’s online followers? And can Susie and Johny tell the difference?

 

Is there a difference? Aristotle says that one is what one does. Althusser agrees. Taking that idea to its logical conclusion, then, Susie and Johny’s performance is not merely a performance. If not an actuality, it is a reality in the making. The performative joy becomes the grounds for the eventual actual wedding. So too Hamlet, putting on his antic disposition, becomes an antic in fact. Hearing a noise behind the arras, in a moment of antic madness he kills Polonius.

 

Is authenticity itself a performance? Laertes and Hamlet, coming to the point of fisticuffs at Ophelia’s grave—an authentic moment that grows from performance? The Beatles’ solution to the question is a bit nihilistic—“nothing is real; there’s nothing to get hung about.” My worry, though, is that every performance is or becomes real. So Donald Trump performing the tough guy on TV becomes Donald Trump performing the tough guy in the Oval Office becomes Donald Trump being the tough guy who sends the Marines to pacify American cities.

 

That seems to me something definitely to be hung about.

Orientation Back Then

Seeing the incoming college newbies, both here and at PSU via online pics, I try to remember my arrival on campus back in 1970. These are the things I recall, although I will not swear to them because memory, many splendored though it is, often fails me.

 

First thing I remember is meeting my roomie, Sandy C, who seemed a nice guy, although in the long run that turned out to be not as accurate as it could have been.  And then, second thing, I couldn’t wait for the parental unit to disappear. As soon as they did I found my way to another kid, Dave C, whom I asked where I could find some pot or hash. It was kind of a dumb thing to do because I had no idea who or what Dave C was. But Dave C said his roomie, Bruce L, could satisfy my needs. So I went to Bruce L, who was equally dumb because, not knowing me from Adam, he immediately told me I could score some wonderful red Lebanese hash from him. So I did.

 

Third thing I remember is hearing that there was some sort of welcoming speech by the president, also a newbie on campus as it happened. Together with a couple of other kids we agreed that on the whole we’d rather skip that BS. So we did.

 

Fourth thing I remember is the “house” meeting in the dorm, when the RA, Tom E, gave us all sorts of interesting things to think about, especially two things. First, he told us about something called “jammies,” which were outdoor music/dance parties sponsored by the various dormitory areas on campus, and that there’d be one that very evening, down at Pollock Halls. That evening, then, a group of us went down to Pollock Halls for a nifty evening. And Tom E told us of the party that he himself was going to host, in the study lounge in the “house,” that weekend, when he would be supplying us with two or three tubs of alcoholic entertainment. I’d never had any alcohol at all, pot being my drug of choice. But that weekend I got drunk for the first and last time. Why? Well, I woke up the next morning in a bathroom stall, with puke all over me. Did I need that to happen ever again? Nah.

 

As I recall, there was absolutely nothing of the cheerfully welcoming hand-holding that seems to be the default mode nowadays. No team building. No introduction to the campus and the mysteries of how to register for classes or how to do anything at all. The only “welcome” was my fifth memory, an announcement that we would all have to endure a swimming test to demonstrate that we wouldn’t drown as we walked across campus in the rain. And that we would also have to endure a “fitness” test, which entailed running a mile around the track in Rec Hall in seven minutes or less.

 

The swimming test was not a problem for me. I’d been swimming for longer than I’d been walking, so swimming across the pool was a doddle. What they didn’t tell us was that we were required to bring our own swimsuits. I walked over to the Natatorium in my trunks, so that was no big deal either. But a lot of kids didn’t do so, and didn’t have swimsuits with them. So they had to do the test naked. The tests were sex-segregated, so there was that. But I suspect that approach to things would not fly nowadays.

 

The “fitness” test, on the other hand, I failed miserably. I’d been smoking cigarettes from age thirteen, and was up to about two or three packs a day by the time I came to campus. There was no way I would run a mile, not in seven minutes, and maybe not even in seven hours. That meant that I was condemned to take remedial phys ed. Along with the other losers, though, I had a great time since the “remediation” entailed hanging around the indoor track in Rec Hall, making believe we were really trying to improve our stamina. I’ll admit that that “class,” which was actually graded, as were all the phys ed classes we were required to take in order to graduate, and single credit though it was, brought down my GPA. Instead of a 4.0 at the end of my first year, I ended up with a 3.98. That meant that I missed out on getting the President’s Freshman Award that year—although I did get it the next year, for some reason.

 

Somewhere in there, maybe at that first jammie in Pollock Halls, I met the young woman who would be my first love. To begin with she dated my roommate, but he blew it with her, and I was fortunate to have her accept me—how that happened I cannot remember. She must have been extra kind to me since I was, and still am, a dead loss in the dating game. We lasted together for about five months, and then I also blew it.

 

But that was long after my introduction to the university and the “orientation” that, for better or worse, none of us had.