#libation bearers

The stories they can tell each other.

Hamlet: My uncle poisoned by father.

Orestes: Same, but it was my mother who did it.

Hamlet: What?

Orestes: With an axe after throwing a net at him as he bathed.

Hamlet:...

Orestes:...

✨main characters in my working thesis on Greek tragedy: there’s a murder in the oikos✨

THEY ARE ONE AND THE SAME

if only hamlet had brought libations perhaps he would have recieved the guidance he so desperately needed….

he cannot not grieve, he refuses to remove his mourning vestments, he holds the rage and the grief that none else do for a murder unjustly committed and for the sake of a man who stole the throne

a man who shares his mothers bed a stained bed a bed made red by betrayal

So I was thinking about how this is very Antony's funeral speech: the body is substituted by a piece of clothing, a (theatrical) device.

And then there are also the dogs of war.