It’s possible, that in the future, it will make a great deal of sense, to act like a mad fool. In fact, it’s possible, that putting on an antic disposition might successfully get one out of a great many scrapes.

Your job making you crazy? Just act crazy!

Your romance a little on edge? Tip it over with madness!

Your family plucking your nerves? Pluck up and Mad up!

People will give a crazy person a very wide berth – so it creates a great deal of freedom, in a way. The only trouble is, when people think you’re crazy, they start to give you a wide berth and they get a wary look in their eyes around you and then you might find yourself entirely alone, when you hadn’t quite meant to do that.
There were many times when J. was actually crazy, when there was nothing for it but to put him on a bus and send him back to his doctors and familial net – and I watched the strangers on his bus give him lots of room, watched them look at him from the corners of their eyes, saw them hope that the crazy kid wouldn’t talk to them. In one way, he was safe as houses on that bus because no one, but no one, would bother him – but with his mind estranged from itself, he was not safe from himself, even if he was immune to the reactions of the people around him. I, however, was not immune. My heart broke as I saw the world respond to someone I love with fear and trepidation. It’s breaking still.

When does Hamlet conceive of this plan?
This is the first mention of it and he’s had no time to mull, no time to turn it over.
It all happens very quickly –
1) See Father’s Ghost
2) Find out father was murdered by uncle (and also that his dad has to spend time in hell)
3) Discover friends nearby, who also know Father is a ghost
4) Swear friends to secrecy with Father’s help
5) Suddenly, seemingly from nowhere decide to act a little crazy back in their normal lives
It seems like the sort of plan that should be calculated. But maybe, given that he’s already acting a little crazy in this scene, the idea occurs to him as he watches his friends try to solve his mystery. Maybe, in tasting the cake of crazy, he realizes it could be very very useful. Crazy is a cover and a release. He had not made a fuss before now. He’s been polite with his family, taken the loss of father and crown with restraint and political posturing – but now, as the ghost leads them willy nilly around the space, now, perhaps, he sees another way.

Followed by eight beats of walking perhaps?
At least, this version of the text suggests it might be so.
It’s not the MOST compelling pause in a metric universe.
One might be inclined to tack these two syllables on to the previous line
Or the subsequent,
To cheat, as it were,
With the verse.
Or even – and this is my preferred one:
But come. Here as before,
Never, so help you mercy. . .
Which leaves us four beats of silence
Then three, rather than eight all at once.
In eight beats, I want the world to shift, for emotions to erupt
For silence to be the only choice – that or wailing –
With four and three
We can just take a breath.
Run a few steps.

There must be many dissertations categorizing exactly
What Horatio’s philosophy must be.
I remember from some class or text that he’s a stoic.
I’m not sure what such a theory is based on. Horatio doesn’t, as a rule, have a lot to say. Hamlet does the bulk of the talking in this relationship, so there’s not a LOT to go on.
We are given to understand that Horatio’s philosophy does not generally include ghosts but what else has Hamlet learned in the conversation with his dead father that has no place in the philosophy? Murder? Fratricide? Hell?
I would wager that there are both fewer things and more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy. Philosophy being an attempt to organize the world into sense and the world being the sort of place that tends to defy stringent organization.

Those sorts of visiting rules of etiquette get used so rarely here in this urban landscape. When your apartment is too small even for the people who live in it, it’s tricky to make space for strangers or even friends.
You meet in the bar
Or the café
Or not at all, eventually.
There are times, though, when I miss the opportunity to play hostess, to welcome the strangers (those known and unknown, those strange and stranger) but I am out of the habit. I will have to welcome you to my art instead – that’s the only place there’s my room.

Someone used this line as a title for something.
It might be a famous something (like a Willa Cather novel?)
But I can’t recall what that something is.
That’s the thing with Hamlet; People like to use these lines to signal the smartness of their work.
A surefire way to up the smug intellectual content of one’s work is to link it somehow to a line from Hamlet. What this says about me and this little project, I fear to investigate.
However, the world is full of references to Hamlet that the educated are meant to catch. In effect, this is why Hamlet is part of the canon. We teach it so that those references will not be made in vain. The culture must circle back on itself somehow – like the ouroboros eating its own tail.

Practically, now, how does the ghost travel so quickly underground? And why?
Are there tunnels for the dead? Like, sewers for corpses to move through
During the morning. Morning is clearly a threat to them so that perhaps they must
Hide themselves from the sun’s rays, like vampires.
Or has the morning made the ghost lose corporeality, turning him into a mist that flows from place to place, yet that can still speak (albeit in a lot less articulate way than the corporeal ghost).
Perhaps the dawn turns the ghost into a mole
Or a worm or a beetle
Or some tunneling creature and he ceases his martial stalk to become a scuttling earth-dweller making its way through soil and sod and stone.
But he’s one with a megaphone or some kind of strange amplification system that transforms his voice from the squeak of a mole to the imposing haunting voice of “Swear.”
The mist is my favorite solution because there’s a sort of uncontrolled dissipation in a mist. It can’t stay in one place; It has to move hither and yon with no authority or ground of its own. Water underground might have the same sort of movement quality, in that it cannot stop moving with gravity and geology and open pathways until contained or absorbed or collected somewhere. I like the idea of the king slipping away into something more elemental.

How does Hamlet’s relationship with his father’s ghost change so fast? Before he calls his dad an “old mole” he’s been silent and awed, trembling perhaps before the heightened rhetoric of his ghostly father – then once the ghost’s voice comes eerily up through the ground, he becomes irreverent and affectionate somehow. A mole conjures no really fearful quality (even for a Small Mammal-phobe like me). A mole is blind and cute and I picture one cradled in the palm of a hand, even a very old one, with grey whiskers, perhaps a long beard, still, harmless. Perhaps even more than harmless.

And isn’t it sort of condescending to say something is well said when you’ve just said that very thing yourself?
It’s like when a child learns to talk and we praise him for the very thing he’s repeating, when really we just said it ourselves.
Dramatically, this scene makes sense in performance. It’s satisfying to see Hamlet treat the scary ghost like a cute old spirit, like Casper, not a poltergeist –
but I can’t figure out how to explain this shift.