There’s a little man in charge of the course of my life and he stands by a mile-marker with his clipboard and pen that he clicks back and forth.
I run at top speed up the road, heart pounding, breath heaving, all cells pointed ahead to go go get there, farther than ever before – ready to push past the sound barrier, the limits, the stops – but as soon as I get to that little man with his watch and his pen and his clipboard and mustached. I am stopped in my tracks – like the Time Bandits running into that invisible boundary to the Fortress of Ultimate Darkness. Nose slammed into glass, body stopped short. He puts his hand along the barrier, looks down his nose at me and says, “You may go so far” and I trudge back to the start, slowly now and limping, preparing to make another run at that track.

All the things a father can worry about when his son goes to Paris:
Those college kids get up to so much mischief! – What with the keg parties and the profanity and the getting into fights and what not.
And the drabbing, of course, these kids and their drabbing.
Wait, what?!
First, of all, a drab is a whore – which I do not understand because whores tend NOT to be the most drab women in the room –
Painted, bright, gaudy, visible, yes. Drab – no.
Where did this meaning diverge?
Second: Is drabbing an acceptable behavior for a young man of this era?
Reynaldo has some question about this, but Polonius isn’t too worried. I guess he sees drabbing as a way for a young man to sow his wild oats?
Maybe, in a society that places such strict limits on a woman’s sexuality, drabbing might be the only way to get some action before a wedding.

I guess then my question is: What are the sexual mores of the Denmark that Shakespeare’s created?
Are they Renaissance England’s?

Maybe not – because a study of marriage at the time would indicate that ladies and gents got busy before marriage quite a lot. Shakespeare’s wife was quite pregnant when they married. Are Hamlet and Ophelia lovers or sweethearts?
Hamlet’s awfully keen on sending her to a nunnery. And Laertes is pretty interested in Ophelia’s chastity. Ophelia’s songs later in the play might indicate a loss of that chastity, if you wanted to read them that way.
I feel like the acceptability of drabbing in a culture would directly relate to the status and acceptability of women’s sexuality in the culture.
If this Denmark puts the hard thumb on sex before marriage – whoredom thrives.
If Denmark figures people will, of course, get into some hanky panky sometimes, whoredom would be a lot less acceptable.
In this current American culture, whoredom is fascinating to a lot of people and certainly is not in any danger of disappearing. But it is not thought of as the honorable thing to do, not part of a young man’s wild oats, not standard frat boy behavior, not generally talked about in open conversation and certainly not something a father might wish his son to be labeled with.
Fencing, though – that’s funny. Because fencing has become sort of refined sport. There would be no shame in getting caught fencing in public.
Just hilarity.

This must be why there is such a vast amount of material created about American teenagers. The heady mix of freedom and age creates stories full of wildness and mistakes. Young peoples’ stories are powerful for everyone, in part because everyone was, once, young and can recall the extremities of feeling and events of those days. The stakes are always high for teens and these mistakes can be fascinatingly enormous. I’ve been watching a TV show that revolves around a high school and it reminds me of the fragility of that time, with painful accuracy.
I was not so wild or wanton. I stayed within the lines for the most part but my friends fell down constantly. Many were wanton. Many were wild. There were those that slipped with drugs, those that slipped with drink, those that slipped with displaced sexuality, those that slipped into self harm. My companions were those that slipped so perhaps I can say that I slipped in trying to rescue those that were slipping. I fell down once or twice, with my hand extended to a friend.

Are you more concerned with how the students look than what they’ve learned?
Are you worried about how the students’ performance will reflect on you?
Do you care more about the image of learning or the learning itself?
Real learning is messy. It does not always line up in good straight lines and say its lines correctly.
It does not demonstrate itself in well-coiffed hair and unified choreography.
I think about those prison videos
The ones where they get hundreds of prisoners
To dance in precisely choreographed numbers.
To fulfill someone’s vision, they have all fallen in line –
And it is remarkable, truly. It is moving to watch huge numbers of people in sync.
But it is totalitarian. It looks good. It looks magic –
But no one but the one in charge got to have a thought for himself.
No one (but the one in charge) exercised his creativity
No one (but the one in charge) used his imagination
No one (but the one in charge) had any agency over his own body, or thoughts, or art or song or dance.

When we learned how to walk, we fell down a lot.
We landed on our asses. We didn’t look good.
And no one else cared either.
The important thing was the walking.
So it is with anything we learn.
We have to fall on our asses a bit
We have to look ridiculous.

Who’s got a dis-honor-o-meter?
It’s little arrow moves according to the rankness of the bad behavior.
Apparently, for Polonius, gaming, drinking, fencing, quarrelling
Are low on the dis-honor-o-meter.
Drabbing, AKA whoring, is a little higher up the scale but still well within honorable range.
For Reynaldo, drabbing is clearly hitting the red of his dis-honor-o-meter.
Where does lying fall on the dis-honor-o-meter?
Spying? Gossiping?

Asking someone with questionable moral character
To improvise a character assassination
Is a bit like asking someone who just loves murdering
To just take a chunk out of someone.
I’m making an assumption, of course, about Reynaldo’s character.
I’m assuming that, because Polonius is giving him spy work that he’s not the MOST moral of men.
Anyway, which forgeries would please Reynaldo to put upon Laertes? Has he been looking for an opportunity to impugn him? Is this a moment for a vivid imagination to cut loose and paint a picture of a man debauched and wild ? Polonius figures he’ll let him improvise.
He doesn’t want to put limitations on the lying artist.

Addicted seems a very modern word here in this context. Addiction seems like a modern construct even though surely, people have had addictions through the ages. Alcohol, drugs, etc are all very ancient and surely control over them hasn’t likely changed much for those early eras. But I can’t think of another instance of the word “addiction” in classical literature, which makes me wonder if a) addiction meant something different then than it does now or b) this is one of those words that Shakespeare coined.