It’s probably the momentousness of my current moment and the climate of religiosity that hovers over death, but I suddenly wondered what would happen if we added a comma after Lord. It’s clearly not the meaning of the line. Context tells us that he’s speaking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and telling them what they’re up to. However – if one wanted to get a little irreverent with text – one could have Polonius respond to Hamlet’s jab at him with “You go to seek the Lord, Hamlet.” It could be an answer, a way to turn the other cheek or a bit of religious instruction. It probably isn’t But it might be interesting.
Author: erainbowd
These tedious old fools!
I’m writing this on a brief pause from sitting by my grandfather’s deathbed. I read this line and felt my lips rise up in distaste. Today of all days, I don’t want to think of the old as tedious fools. Today is a day I want to honor the life of one is who is very old and who is ready to go, to honor all of those who somehow managed to hang on, tooth and nail, to their lives. It’s remarkable, really, and a privilege to sit by the bedside of one who is going. But I can’t lie. It is filled with tedium, as well. Not from him. The man is not tedious but the sitting in a room, waiting and not waiting and not wanting to be waiting but waiting none the less – that bit is tedious. But not like any other kind of tedium. It is different than a tedious Sunday afternoon before dinner when there is nothing but quiet in the house. It is a tedium full of potentiality, the way a film set can be tedious or the hours before the election results are revealed.
It is a tedium I better get quickly back to and a tedium to contribute to. I play the fool in this moment. It does help. And I’m the youngest.
Fare you well, my lord.
Suddenly so formal! I mean, they’ve already been you-ing it, up with the formal You instead of thee and thou but this farewell (where are we in the count?) has a YOU in the middle! This would seem to make a farewell more specific and perhaps also more personal. I could say Farewell to the crowd and the people in it when I say Farewell but a Fare You Well would suggest only you that I’m saying goodbye to.
You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will not more willingly part withal – except my life, except my life, except my life.
We don’t do nearly enough leave taking these days. I can’t think of a single instance in which I have ever said or had occasion to say, “I take my leave.”
And unfortunately, this lack of discussion of leave taking means this joke can fall a little flat on contemporary ears. If I can call it a joke – it’s more a witticism and a boldly rude thing to say, I guess. Anyway – it all leads to this little lemon drop at the end of this sentence and points to just the kind of mad Hamlet is hoping Polonius will think he is.
Why particularly does Hamlet want Polonius to think that he’s suicidal? What advantage does he gain? Or does he genuinely feel this way? Before he meets the ghost, he’s definitely got suicide on the brain, he wishes the everlasting had not fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter and does not set the price of his life above a pin’s fee – but after the ghost, he’s a little giddy, more energetic, not so morose. One would think he becomes more intent on murder and less intent on self-slaughter and maybe this whole “except my life,” “grave,” and “to be or not be” stuff is a smoke-screen, to help throw the politicians off his trail, to seem as if nothing has changed when everything has changed.
My honorable lord, I will most humbly take my leave of you.
It is a curious human trait that solicitousness can sometimes infuriate. When I was younger, I thought that being nice to everyone would inoculate me against their anger. I felt that if I were blameless and sweet to everyone, no one would ever blame me. The sourest people got my sweetest treatment. The prickliest got my smoothest soothing-est greetings. I thought no one would ever be mad me because I would nice them right out of it so that even if I, by accident, managed to infuriate, I could dissuade them from indulging in the fury toward me.
I’m not sure why I continued to think this for so long despite so much evidence to the contrary. I knew people who, no matter how nice I was, could find any reason at all to become enraged. And I didn’t just know these people, some of them lived in my house. But somehow I thought I could still smother the fire of fury with niceties. The fact that it always failed didn’t shake my idea.
It wasn’t until I found myself enraged by niceties myself that I began to understand the flaws in my previous thinking. There’s something about someone treating me like a dangerous animal, like someone who must be tiptoed around, that makes me want to become a dangerous animal, or at least snap at hesitating fingers outside my cage.
I will leave him and suddenly continue the means of meeting between him and my daughter.
It’s possible that there is a deeply sentimental streak in Polonius. To him, it perhaps seems that Hamlet really does love Ophelia and has gone mad because Polonius has thwarted his attempts to reach her. There’s a Polonius that looks at Hamlet and feels very sorry for his own actions, that perhaps sees himself in a young man grown crazy for love. Perhaps this reunion with Ophelia is an attempt to right his own perceived mistake.
And what if this whole scene is an attempt at reconciliation, what if it were filled with tenderness? What if all Polonius really wants to do is sit down with Hamlet and say, “There, there, young lover. I understand. It’s my fault. I didn’t realize how much you loved my Ophelia. Be patient. We’ll work it out.”
I’ve never seen it played this way but I’d like to.
A happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not be so prosperously delivered of.
Ah yes, the prophecy of the madman! Throwing his crazy darts, willy nilly, hither and yon, he sometimes hits a bulls-eye and gives everyone goose-bumps. Sometimes it’s a happy (or unhappy) chance circumstance – other times, you wonder if the madman, released from social bounds and propriety, knows exactly what he’s saying and knows exactly how hard to throw the dart so that it will break the skin. Or sometimes it seems to be both – a precise list with one part of the brain and a wild toss with the other so that you could ask his rational brain why he threw that particular dart and he would have no idea.
How pregnant sometimes his replies are!
Hamlet in a nutshell: a man whose words tend to be pretty full of meaning.
Even when he’s trying to be nonsensical, he tends to sneak in some sense. Pregnancy may be the perfect analogy because Hamlet could be the kind of pregnant that remains a secret, small and hidden in the self or the meaning could grow, pushing itself forward until no one could mistake its shape.
Indeed, that’s out of the air.
Even out of the air, though, there is still air down there.
There isn’t much, I’d imagine, not enough to breath, but enough to speed along the process of decomposition.
Air and water, too – such key ingredients to maintaining a life – seep into a grave and magnify a death, taking a body further and farther away from its form.
But even then, water and air are encouraging life – worms and maggots and beetles and bugs thriving on the water and air in the body, in the ground, eating, drinking, breathing their way through a death – with their life.
Into my grave?
I introduced most of the characters of the play to my class today. They didn’t have many questions. Many of the logical things are logical and the outrageous things are meant to be. But one student asked me, “Why is there a gravedigger in the play?”
I let him answer his own question but it is a good one and the presence of a gravedigger before you understand the story is provocative. What is a gravedigger for but to dig graves? And his presence, at the ready to do his job brings a certain ominousness to the proceedings.
Do we need him now?
Is it time for the gravedigger to appear?
It might be interesting to start a production with a gravedigger, make it clear what his position is, and have him idle at the side of the stage, or rather, at the ready, like a vulture waiting for someone to die so he has a grave to dig.
This seeming non-sequitur of Hamlet’s might be fun provocation of the gravedigger, who might get his shovel ready to dig and then realize it’s a joke. The mention of a grave is like that a bit, it stimulates the gravedigger in the audience’s mind. The words create the grave that Hamlet walk out of the air with and suddenly, in the audience’s imagination, there exists such a thing as Hamlet’s grave and a part of us is waiting for him to end up in it.
The Hamlet Project 