EXTRA CREDIT Blog Post #17A: Hamlet Blog Assignment 5

BASTILLE LYRICS

"Bad Blood"

We were young and drinking in the park
There was nowhere else to go
And you said you always had my back
Oh but how were we to know

That these are the days that bind you together, forever
And these little things define you forever, forever

All this bad blood here, won't you let it dry?
It's been cold for years, won't you let it lie?

If we're only ever looking back
We will drive ourselves insane
As the friendship goes resentment grows
We will walk our different ways

But those are the days that bind us together, forever
And those little things define us forever, forever

All this bad blood here, won't you let it dry?
It's been cold for years, won't you let it lie?

And I don't wanna hear about the bad blood anymore
I don't wanna hear you talk about it anymore
I don't wanna hear about the bad blood anymore
I don't wanna hear you talk about it anymore

All this bad blood here, won't you let it dry?
It's been cold for years, won't you let it lie?

“Bad Blood” by Bastille is a song Hamlet would relate to. It center around death, hence the title, and about how the moral choices we make, even “[the] little things” (Bad Blood, 2010) because they “define us forever”. The plays purpose is to show Hamlet’s struggle with revenge and coping with betrayal. When Hamlet’s father is slain, the new king, and technically his new father, says “You must know, your father lost a father . . . ‘tis unmanly grief” (1.1.94), emasculating him in a venerable time, beginning Hamlet’s mistrust of those closest to him. This is what the song is saying with the line “These are the days that bind you together” meaning that the most difficult times will make or break a relationship. Ill feelings towards Claudius only escalated when Hamlet speaks with his father as a ghost, who gives him an ultimatum: “If thou didst ever thy dear father love –Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder!” (1.4.23-25) and this begins Hamlet’s search for the true definition of a man. He must find the balance between doing right by father—loyalty—and true nobility, which means acting fair and just in the law of man and god. This burden of betrayal and indecision on whether or not to act cause Hamlet to go a bit mad on the outside. This makes the king and queen send spies “To draw him on to pleasures, and to gather so much as from occasion you may glean” (2.2.14) and Ophelia to question his sanity when he acts unusually saying “Lord Hamlet…Pale as his shirt; his knees knocking each other” (2.2.80) which makes Hamlet even more perturbed. This connects to the song through the verse “If we're only ever looking back, we will drive ourselves insane” showing that Hamlet is basing his present decisions only on past events, making him appear a bit insane. These lines precede “As the friendship goes resentment grows, We will walk our different ways” which directly supports the events in the play, because as Hamlet acted more eccentric, those closest to him drew farther and farther away, even his most trusted companion, Horatio, seems to think that “He waxes desperate with imagination” (1.4.155) and “deprive your sovereignty of reason and draw you into madness?” (1.4.120). The setting of winter in the play also connects to the song through the lyrics “It's been cold for years, won't you let it lie?” and this season is also very specific to Hamlet, because it is his last. The major theme of the song is that even though it is the little things that define us, the artist repeatedly exclaims “I don't wanna hear about the bad blood anymore, I don't wanna hear you talk about it anymore” highlighting the indecision that Hamlet also shares. At one point he feels so strongly for revenge he states “My fate cries out, and makes each petty artery in this body, as hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve” (1.4.65) but later he envies a player for his ability to fully commit, “…his whole function suiting with forms of his conceit [which forms to his thought]” (2.2.481-482) and the fact that he had “...the motive and the cue for passion” (2.2.486). Hamlet would also relate to this song through not just their shared sense of direction morally but only physically, because the opening line to the song is “There was nowhere else to go” and Hamlet also feels that Denmark has become a prison for him, with its taxing courtly rituals and gossip and his inability to leave. Hamlet feels so trapped he contemplates suicide, “…’tis nobler in the mind to suffer…Or to take arms against a sea of troubles…To die: to sleep” (3.1.61, 63-64). As to whether Hamlet will ask for this song to be played at his funeral, he probably did not have a will written up since his death was so sudden, and everyone he loved was dead anyway, but Hamlet certainly shared many of the same trials Bastille communicates through “Bad Blood”.