This scene is often cut. In Backwards and Forwards, David Ball explains why this is a mistake. While it’s true that no real action happens here, in it we see Polonius at his most devious, setting up a spy to get information about his son.
It’s important because its gives us insight into a character we might otherwise see as a sweet old man killed by our hero. I think that’s smart.
This is the first line in the first scene in the Act 2 and here we meet Reynaldo, who we will never see again and whose name shows up nowhere else in Shakespeare. It’s not a generic name. It seems important somehow.
Polonius will say it more than once.
He does not send Servant or Messenger to go seek out gossip about his son. He sends a character with a name and a unique one at that.
I have questions about Reynaldo. First, what sort of name is that? It’s not Italian. There is no Y in Italian but it sounds Italian. Perhaps it’s Spanish?
But again, I wonder: What are all these Latin folks doing in Elsinore?
Why is almost everyone in service Italian or Spanish or Portuguese? Time to go searching dissertations again. There must be one called The Latin Influence in Hamlet: An Historical Context of The Latin Presence in Shakespeare’s England and Denmark, too.
Author: erainbowd
Nay, come, let’s go together.
I was trying to teach my students about Shakespeare’s implied stage directions about how beseeching someone on my knees would likely indicate some knee-age. It was tricky because they don’t fully understand what it means to imply something. This line is like an implied stage direction. It seems to suggest that something is happening but it’s not entirely clear what it is. Horatio and Marcellus may be attempting to sneak off or scatter or to leave Hamlet alone to muse. Given that he’s just spoken an exit rhyming couplet perhaps they left before and this last line, he calls after them.
All that’s clear is that Horatio and Marcellus have done something to make Hamlet say “Nay” and bring them together.
O curséd spite, That ever I was born to set it right!
Of the myriad things that seem wrong with the world
When we are born into it, it is very tricky to see
Which of those wrongs we are meant to right.
There are those who would attempt to fix
Everything around them, to pick up every fallen twig
To cure the illness of the world, its diseases, its tragedies
But that fixing is never ending. . .
Not to mention a little grating
When you’re the one being fixed.
But things do fall down and maybe
Everyone has one thing
That they’re born to set right and our lives
Are simply a search for what that thing is.
The time is out of joint.
Pushed out of the socket by a fall
Pulled out from hanging on so tightly to that pole
Slipped out in a moment of careless unconsciousness,
Time, like a shoulder, may need a firm loving adjustment,
For someone to take a deep breath
Slip their hands around the limply dangling bit and the empty shoulder and firmly
Pop it all back together.
Let us go in together, And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
Gestural language sticks around
In much the same way as words, it seems.
Fingers on lips suggest silence
As easily and as clearly now
As they did hundreds of years ago.
Gestures might have a sense of universality.
I would have thought so at one point –
Before I learned that our gesture for “Halt” –
Palm open, up at a right angle
To the arm, held before the body –
This gesture that screams, “Stop”
That has shades of police authority
And the Supremes playing with police authority in the name of love. . .
Is the gesture or “mudra” for peace in Manipur.
Monks can stream down temple steps, with the arms up in this way.
To my American eyes, they almost look like military arms saying “Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop” when in fact they say, “Peace, fear not” one after the other.
When I moved to Italy, I thought Italians just spoke with their hands
That they simply waved their arms more but soon discovered a finger to the nose,
A digging motion with both arms by the hips –
I had to learn the meanings of all these gestures
Just as I had to learn the words.
Language is not just what we say and write and read and hear.
So, gentlemen, With all my love I do commend me to you, And what so poor a man as Hamlet is May do t’express his love and friending to you, Good willing, shall not lack.
I am curious about these moments when Hamlet starts to speak of himself in the third person. I can think of at least one other one and suspect there may be more. I wonder if Third person speech is a signal for a Royal self. Certainly the First Person Plural functions that way but there is a similar distance in Third Person Singular. There’s the distancing effect for one – that the Prince can speak of the Prince as a separate entity from himself. He might be more able to make pronouncements, to deliver commendations and formal obligations. This sentence shifts from First to Third and in a way creates a Second self in the Second part. Psychologists analyzing Hamlet must use this line in their theses. I don’t speak Psych – I don’t have a sense of what’s in the DSM – but I think this might be an example of disassociation which might be necessary for all that has happened and is about to.
Rest, rest, perturbéd spirit!
I think we know what a ghost’s perturbéd spirit feels like because our living spirits are so easily perturbéd or at least mine is.
I recall a time when I was pretty unflappable, when rejection rolled off my back like water off an umbrella – that is, it still rained but I didn’t get so wet. I could walk into the wind, face down storms, moving ever forward, toward something I could not give up, would not give up. Sure, I would cry easily, could feel the slightest slight like the princess felt the pea through 20 soft mattresses but I cried as I walked, watching the road under my feet.
At some point, though, the road got so muddy I couldn’t see it anymore and there were times when I had to sit down on a rock, soaked through to the skin.
Swear.
Repetition. Re-encountering a word I’ve worked with before – but I’m different today than I was the last time I thought about the Ghost’s instructions.
I’m not a LOT different, I would think. . .
But I’m a wee bit older. I’ve had a different day.
Even if, by chance, it were the same time as the last one
Or even the same place –
This swear is quieter today
Than previous swears.
I hear the swoop of the SW, the swuh,
Followed by AIR and the word drifts out
Into the mist and disappears.
This do swear, So grace and mercy at your most need help you.
This is either a threat or a prayer,
I’m not sure which.
Swear not and mercy and grace might well abandon you when you need them most – which would give a whole lot of power to this particular swearing. Or perhaps, once it is all sworn, an extra blessing of mercy and grace might fall on you in your hour of need. Either way, blessing or curse, it is contingent on swearing.
That you, at such times seeing me, never shall, With arms encumbered thus, or this head-shake, Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase, As “Well, well, we know,” or “We could, and if would”, Or “If we list to speak”, or “There be, an if they might”, Or such ambiguous giving out, to note That you know aught of me –
Ambiguous giving out is the worst –
The opening of a door, meant to be closed but you stand at it, latched and opened a crack, space enough for a whisper
A letter, a gesture, a thought,
Space enough to just touch
Space enough to persuade
Space enough to break through a weak chain.
You can say, “I didn’t let them in. I didn’t invite them. I didn’t open the door,
no, no, I just cracked it
because I had to
because they would have banged on it all night if I hadn’t. “
But your face looking through was all the answer they needed.
The Hamlet Project 