This is a line that sounds really good but doesn’t really follow the previous thought – at least in my understanding of “conscience.” Maybe conscience here is more like consciousness? That the awareness that one mess might so easily lead to another, even bigger, mess might just be a factor of being a conscious thinking being. That makes some sense to me. 
However, if conscience is conscience as I normally think of it, that is, a sense of morality, of doing right by someone or something, of goodness, somehow. And yes, awareness of our actions, too, how they might not be good choices – well, in that case: Yes, conscience does keep many of us from doing many things, some of which might be called cowardly in certain societies, particularly ones with HONOR at the center. I think of that study of honor and revenge in Southern men. (Listen to a show on it on You are not so Smart) They found that in cultures with a high honor code, participants were much more likely to exhibit vengeful behavior.  It points to an interesting cultural conundrum that puts conscience and cowardice in the same boat, that makes conscience the enemy of bravery, that makes conscientious objectors chickens rather than brave people standing up for their beliefs, for another morality. Curious. 
And then many months later after I first wrote in response to this line, I discover this: Zachary Lesser’s take on this line in his discussion of the Q1. In it, I learn that my sense of conscience – as in consciousness – has been an explanation many scholar’s before me have used. But Shakespeare uses conscience in its moral sense in other places in the play – so there’s a whole world of religious sense of conscience and morals and this line becomes a lever to pry open a world of worlds behind the various editions of the play. Listen to the Free Library’s Podcast to hear more details. 

Me, I’m always trying to fly to new ills. Not these ones he’s specifically referring to, i.e. not to DEATH but the other devils I don’t know.

The devil I know is familiar and intractable. The devil I don’t is seductive and offers the possibility of change. The devil I don’t know is sexy and suave. Even the problems he brings me are interesting. The devil I don’t know whispers seductively to my wanderlust suggesting that it will all be better over there, that that place will change everything. He convinces me that the devil I know is a real devil and he, the devil I don’t know, will be different. He will treat me better than the other devil.

But, after years of listening to each new devil, I came to see how each new devil quickly revealed how much like the old devil he was. It’s really like there’s really only one devil who happens to be a master of disguise.

I can’t help but think about Backwards and Forwards with this bit. Because this is the line that really makes his case that Hamlet is not saying this speech for his own benefit. Because, the fact is, Hamlet has direct experience of a traveller returning from death. His father, who he saw interred a month prior, has shown up quite vividly before him. He’s had all kinds of descriptions of the “undiscovered country.” He’s heard about the rending flames, the horrors, the sin-burning, etc. So it is hard to see this bit as a real inquiring thought on Hamlet’s part. It starts to seem like poetic embroidery on a theme he is exploring for the benefit of his audience. It’s a beautiful poetic embroidery or maybe even the sort of embroidery anyone creating a fiction will do. When lying, for example, we usually keep talking to help make our case. 

I’m breaking this sentence up. I imagine that some editors do the same. It’s just such a giant bit of text. And not just a lot of words but a lot of complex ideas and a lot of words. So we’ll begin with the fardels and move on to the undiscovered country tomorrow. 
Today, life really does feel a bit like plowing forward under the yoke of something. There’s a way that it feels a little relentlessly difficult. When I was in my 20s, it seemed as if a better way was always around the corner. Everyone seems to be poor in their 20s – even the rich people. Then I noticed that all around me people were doing lots better than they used to be. They got jobs with salaries. They had families. And my life is still very much like it was when I was 25. I’m just as poor, if not poorer – but I have less hope for that being different and fewer people in my same boat. When there is no real hope for change, it can feel like a long hard slog across a muddy field, with a bundle of hardship on my back.   

Thousands of hearings of this speech and I don’t think I ever noticed this brief rhyme in the very middle of it. It’s like a little breath, perhaps at the end of a long sentence and in the middle of a long speech.

Also I have questions about these spurns. Is it that Patient Merit is hanging around and The Unworthy One comes along and spurns him? It’s about taking the spurns right?

“Zounds! I should take it!”

Someone making his quietus with a bare bodkin makes total sense, especially after putting up with that long list of whips and scorns.

Something really can happen to people when they take on a Position. Holding a fancy job title can sometimes create a kind of insolence. I’ve seen normal ordinary people behave like assholes suddenly because they’ve taken on a position of authority. These are usually people who have some discomfort at being in a position of some power so they tend to over-exercise it. Middle managers around the world become tyrants for fear for being seen as weak. Jung’s Shadow Sides emerge quite clearly in the offices of the world.

I don’t have much personal experience with lawsuits (gratefully) but reading Bleak House made me feel like I went through one vicariously. Dickens does such an extraordinary job of taking the reader through the hills and the valleys of a lawsuit. It is the ultimate delay of the law. The case would seem to have lingered on for ages, for generations, for lifetimes and the conclusion of all the stories are wrapped up within the conclusions of the lawsuit. I’ve never read a more vivid account of law. Or its delay.

Despised love was never really my problem. Unrequited love, sure. Apathetic love, yep. Tepid love, yes. Not really anything like love love and let’s not call it love love were the dominate romances. Unrequited love was my hobby. For years, my natural state seemed to be LONGING for someone, pining, wishing.

Sometimes someone I was silently following would surprise me by turning around but we never got in deep enough to get to despising. I can’t think of anyone I’ve loved who I later despised or who I despised that I later loved.

There are those who disappointed me, those who disappointed themselves, those that broke my heart or whose heart I broke. Those that burned bright and those that fizzled out. But if any if them despised me, I don’t know about it. Hopefully, even in all the drama of loving we all tried to be kind to each other.

This is hardly the worst of it.

Contumely, okay, is a bit of scornful speech – which, granted, can cut a person to the quick. But somehow coming from a proud man, it feels a little less painful. I mean, because you can go, “Well, that guy’s proud, maybe too proud, so his putting me down is some weird ego trip.”

Unless, of course, it’s a scornful speech to a proud man, a bit like the proud man getting his come-uppance. . .in which case. . . ouch. You’ve got a long way to fall if you are riding high on pride.

And once again this bit of the speech is so ABSTRACT. Not like. . .ooh, burn on Claudius or whatever. It’s an almost academic remove, this whole section. Baffling almost in its formality.

Most oppressors do not think they are oppressors. And many of the oppressed don’t think of themselves as being oppressed. That’s why that Monty Python bit is so funny.  Oppression is system-wide and people are specific.

Most oppressors think they’re doing good in some way with whatever their oppressive tactics are. Hitler thought he was improving things for everyone.
This is all stupidly obvious.

But it’s making me think of Theatre of the Oppressed. I learned about it in college, when we read Boal’s book in my anthropology class. I loved it. Then years later, I was a part of a Theatre of the Oppressed project and found I had much more complex feelings about it. The first was that identifying as the oppressed didn’t seem to really empower anyone.

Who decides who is oppressed and not? It felt patronizing to say, “Well, you’re oppressed because you live in this neighborhood and you’re that race and you don’t have much money.” The story selection felt like a game of identity politics, a “Who is the most shat upon?”
And while the program brought people together in some ways, the solutions it came to seemed to conveniently leave out the systematic problems people had and instead focused on the micro problems. Rather than thinking about how to battle racism as a collective, it used the collective to think about how to talk to a racist. And there’s nothing wrong with any of it. The participants seemed to enjoy it all immensely and audiences came to see it.

But it all left a very complicated bad taste in my mouth. There are many groups that I identity with that are less privileged than others. Being a woman, for one. Being part of the working poor. Being an artist.
But I have no interest in identifying as oppressed. It feels diminishing somehow Because it comes from outside of me.