We all would, wouldn’t we? Or at least most of us do, most of the time. We bear the whips and scorn until we cannot bear them any more.
Time will have his way with all of us whether we like it or not.

And it suddenly strikes me why this speech is so famous. I mean, it’s good, there’s that. But it’s also very general. The whips and scorns of time hit everyone and all the subsequent phrases of this sentence manage to cover lots of unhappy bases. Hamlet has lots of reasons to be unhappy and he mentions NONE of those here. You could stretch “The law’s delay” to relate to Hamlet’s succession perhaps. . .but it’s a very vague reference if it is one.

Hamlet’s specific whips and scorns are DEATH, and death of a parent no less, his mother’s hasty marriage and his girlfriend’s returning of his letters and not getting to be king when really he should be. And yet he’s talking about proud man’s contumely?

I don’t know. It all adds weight to the idea that Hamlet is giving this speech for the benefit of Polonius and Claudius. I mean, if he were really about to off himself, I feel like he’d be ranting a little more specifically.

In any case, the whips and scorns of time get us all. It is interesting how some of them we feel more keenly as we age and some of them less. Some things cut deeper now than they did when I was an awkward adolescent but I felt every sting of the whip more acutely then.

Watching some middle school students in action today, I was struck by what open wounds they can be, how keenly they feel every tiny thing. Somehow being a pre-teen turns children into princesses, feeling many peas under their mattresses. It’s not so much the whips and scorns of time, with them, but those of their fellow young people.

I’ve never felt that life was too long. If anything, I’ve overdone it on the other side. I can remember saying to the boss of a theatre I worked for (and was agitating for change in): “I don’t have time to waste. I’m going to die. Don’t you realize that? I can’t waste my time in the box office when you contracted me to perform big juicy roles.”

He laughed at me and told me I should take up meditating. I don’t feel that same sense of urgency anymore, or rather, I don’t think, “I can’t do that. I’m going to die someday. I can’t waste that time.” But I do retain a sense of that ticking clock.

Back when I quit that job in which I was being taken advantage of, I was only a few years out of college. I had a sense that I only had a few years to do what I wanted. I think I knew, somewhere deep down, that as a woman who wanted to act, I didn’t have any time to waste. I needed to get all the jobs while I was young. I’d internalized a sense of acting being a bit like gymnastics, that once the bloom was off the rose, there would be no more work. And I wasn’t wrong.

Now, nearly two decades later, I can feel how long my life is and how long it yet still will be. But not so long. Not calamitously long. Just as long as it will be.

First? Punctuation. There isn’t any in this sentence in this edition. Which is interesting after the abundance of instructive punctuation in that first line of this speech in the same text. If you read this line without any commas, it sort of bounds right through and maybe it should. Maybe the regularity of the verse suggests no pausing until “give us pause.” It’s an interesting choice. I feel like some commas might help for meaning but maybe they don’t help for performance in the end. Maybe it’s tried and tested like this.

I’m hamstrung with meaning on this one, too. The line is so rich, so compact and so woven into our culture, I find I can’t sink my head into it directly. Shuffling off this mortal coil? It is a fucking punch you in the face extraordinary metaphor for death. That’s why people use it all the time, why this bit has stuck in the common parlance.

And you have to wonder – where did it start?
How did the good old W.S. come up with this particular metaphor. Is there a concept that it springs from? (See what I did there, coil, spring. . .yeah.) So there’s that. Shuffled off this mortal coil sounding a bit like shuffling off to Buffalo, which might, for some, serve as just as apt a metaphor.

“What dreams may come”? They liked that one so much they made a move with that title. (Was it any good? Did anyone see it? I just remember the poster.)
It all must give us pause really.

These most famous lines are the hardest. They make me feel like I should add something meaningful to the discourse around them. Or do something so far out, so irreverent, maybe, that I side-step the discourse entirely. I want to go to cooking or a rug burn in progress. But there’s really nothing there to see once you go there. It’s like a one hit bad joke.

There is, I suppose, a rub in everything if you look closely enough. And sometimes it’s better not to look too closely. The rub may reveal itself anyway. There is many a thing I wouldn’t have done if I’d seen the rub at first.

But even if I’d known it would look like this, if I’d seen the rub of choosing an artist’s life, I’d probably have chosen it anyway.

I dreamed I was directing Hamlet last night. I’d read a bunch of stuff about women directors before bed so I think it snuck into my subconscious and I began directing in my dreams. Going to Directing School took most of the joy out of directing for me so usually these dreams are not pleasant ones. They can be stress dreams, ones I can wake up from in a sweat.

But strangely, despite the fact that directing can be one of the most demanding, stressful things I do, most my anxiety dreams are not theatre dreams.

No, when I truly wake up panicked, it is 9 times out of 10 a Packing dream. I have to be somewhere and I’m already late and I have this entire apartment to pack up in as little time as possible. It could be a plane I’m late for or a show but whatever it is, I have to get a whole lot of things into boxes before I go. As nightmares go, it’s pretty banal. Maybe that’s why dreams don’t really scare me too much. I can handle most of what my brain cooks up.

This morning I had a fairly awful imaginative journey in which all copies of Hamlet were somehow lost and all that remained of it was my Twitter feed where these lines of the play get pasted when I post a blog. I thought how it would be such a difficult task to figure out what the play was if you only had the lines from Twitter. You’d have to figure out which character said what. You’d have to imagine what the rest of the line was after the 140 character limit in the longer sentences. It would be a terrible way to try and figure out the play. But if it were the ONLY remains of it, there would still be great nuggets in even little parcels of text. You’d get this whole line of thought, for example. You’d get: To die, to sleep – to sleep – perchance to dream. Ay there’s the rub.
Which would be quite a bit of awesome even if we lost so much else.

This repetition is one of the reasons this speech can be tricky to memorize. My brain remembers phrases that come after “To die, to sleep – “ and I’m never quite sure I’m on the right one. I’ve never tried to memorize this speech, I’ve just heard it often enough that it’s almost in me, like a song.

I like this line in the Spanish translations I’ve heard and seen. It has its own gorgeous rhythm. Morir. Dormir. I feel like I could just hear those two verbs together again and again for a while.

Consummation is a word I have never heard in relation to anything else but sex and marriage or if not marriage, a relationship approximation of marriage. It’s probably a word like “commencement” – something that has come to really only mean one thing – when it has a broader meaning at its heart.

But let’s assume for a minute that Hamlet’s wished for consummation is of the sexual union variety. It would be a logical assumption – death and sex being already linked to each other poetically through the ages. To die – meaning to orgasm for many many cultures. Songs like “S’io ch’io vorrei morire” (*Yes, I would like to die) are embedded in these sorts of consummations.

So if we assume this consummation so devoutly wished is like a wedding night, who is the bride and who the bridegroom?

I guess I’m just trying to work out where this consummation stuff comes from – it seems like it might be a bit out of the blue. Although the word “Flesh” does come in the sentence before. Maybe that’s the trigger for thoughts of the consummation.

It’s just curious in this speech because while the language is very muscular and poetic, it isn’t particularly erotic. Or is it? I’m seeing this speech in a whole new way now. We’ve got bare bodkins, grunting and sweating, great pitch and moment, Ophelia’s orisons. We’ve all been reading this speech all wrong. It’s all about sex.

I wonder if anyone has ever numbered the natural shocks. I thought about making a list of them myself but then realized how many a thousand really is. I’m not sure I care to think of a THOUSAND natural shocks.

And then there would be the question of which sort of shocks are the natural ones that flesh is heir to. Would they be the physical ones? The heart attacks, the sharp pains in the belly, the sudden loss of breath, the ruptured appendix? Or would they be the metaphoric? We’ve already got heartache on the list. Would we add disappointment?
Betrayal? Despair? Fury?
We are vulnerable to so much and how we bear it, that’s our survival.

There does seem to be a limit of things being difficult before a person will just snap. It’s the accumulation really, layer upon layer of bad news or hopeless conditions. It is actually almost more remarkable how resilient people can be. How they can bounce back from tremendous cruelty or loss or destruction.

There are time in which I feel I will sink under despair built on nothing so horrific, just little moments of hopelessness, just the daily wear of relentless challenges, not the giant kind – just the small. The drip of a small stream of water against a stone, slowly but surely boring a hole through the middle.