The Hamlet Project

The verse seems to indicate these titles as all one thing –
A long list of identities to conjure a kingly father.
I want to punctuate it differently. Fuck up the verse.
I’ll call thee.
Hamlet!
King?
Father!
Royal Dane!
As David Ball points out in Backwards and Forwards, if these are each legitimate attempts to illicit speech from the ghost, the anticipation for what the ghost will say when it speaks grows with each word, with each silence.
As one sentence, it is a spell,
A conjuration, a strange artificial form of speech.
“Emily, Artist, Lover, American” would be a weird way to call me. And to be sure, I don’t have the titles a king of Denmark would
But even a king wouldn’t respond to this as an odd list.
And he doesn’t.