I am sitting in a wooden bench and table café
In front of a plate glass window.
I’m sitting on a school style stool – like from
Chemistry lab or something. I’m leaning
Into the brick wall next to me, trying to hide from the sun.
It’s September and in the 80s
And the glass acts like a magnifying glass
Baking my arms and face.
I have to wear sunglasses to look at the whiteness of the page.
I am trying to remember what it is like to be cold.
There’s something about a brittleness of the skin,
Lips cracked with dryness.
I can remember teeth chattering,
A mist emerging from me every time I speak,
A vague bouncing up and down,
Hands rubbing together
Every bit of skin exposed feels raw and beaten.
I think.
Right now – I don’t want to touch one arm to the other
For fear of combustion.
Author: erainbowd
The air bites shrewdly.
Those guys look cold and very serious
Maybe even a little frightened.
Is that a little gap above his jacket?
That little bit of wrist there
Showing between a glove and a sleeve
That’s bound to freeze them all the way through.
Doesn’t the wrist have a sort of temperature influence?
I have seen people put an ice cube there in summer to cool themselves down.
I will sink my airy teeth in right there and let the body do the rest of the work.
I shall obey, my lord.
O Ophelia
I wish for you
To discover duplicity.
Your father has it in spades.
He will send a spy to get the truth about his son
He will hide behind an arras
He will say whatever it takes to get himself placed
He is a political creature.
His son, likewise, will later allow himself to bend his sense of honor
To poison a sword in secret
To shift his alliance from one side to the next.
But you, Ophelia, just keep right on doing as you say you will.
I know you have to tell your father “yes” but I want you
To go right out of those doors and do the opposite.
I want you to deny someone else
Instead of yourself.
Come your ways.
It’s the simplest of sentences that baffle me sometimes.
I could dismiss this little tag line with a blanket translation/assumption –
A sort of pat on the bottom and a bold,
“On your way then, champ!”
But come is different than go
Except when it isn’t
And why does she have WAYS, plural
And why are they hers? Especially after he’s been so prescriptive.
She’s only got one way
As he’s put it to her
And it’s not really hers.
Look to’t, I charge you.
I haven’t done the full research
But it seems to me the CHARGING in this play
Always centers around speaking and not speaking.
The ghost is charged to speak
Polonius charges Ophelia to cease speaking with Hamlet.
How many other things can human beings charge each other to do
Certainly we are full of actions we can be charged
To do
Or not do
But we get into so much more trouble with our words
To charge or uncharge them
May be the only thing we really feel we can control.
I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth Have you so slander any moment leisure As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet.
Polonius, laying down the law with his daughter with a pronouncement.
It sounds like a royal decree and one that could not possibly be ignored.
“From this time forth”
Takes us from weddings and religious decrees
As well as serious legislation.
I can see why Ophelia doesn’t bother to argue –
It would be like arguing with an earthquake
Or the wind
Or the will of a god.
He shifts the world here
From this time forth.
This is for all.
People always say they don’t want to be all things to all people
Or is it that you can’t be all things to all people?
Anyway – you can’t.
I thought I could when I was young. See, I was nice.
I had the signs from the Student of the Week exercise to prove it.
Emily is nice. Emily is nice. Emily is nice.
Repeated ad infinitum by almost every student who had been compelled to write
Something positive about me.
And it was true.
I was nice.
And I thought being nice
Would keep me safe.
I thought I would be nice
And always and forever
That would mean
I would be for all.
That the world around me could disagree about religion
And politics and fashion
But they would all agree
That I was nice.
I was for everybody.
When that illusion burst,
It was devastating at first.
All that adjusting to please everyone
To accommodate the world
To fit myself newly into each new frame
Was for naught. Really I could have been for only a few all along,
Not for all,
But for those more precisely more deeply more exactly more truly more my own self –
Not just nice.
For they are brokers, Not of that dye which their investments show, But mere implorators of unholy suits, Breathing like sanctified and pious bawds, The better to beguile.
Polonius, mixing his metaphors
Like a mad chef
With a metaphor cupboard
Slinging the ingredients together.
The money metaphor, the clothing metaphor, the religious, so artfully following
And blending one into the other, it’s hard to imagine them as separate ingredients –
Like he’s baked some bread
Such that you can’t tell what was milk
What was flour
What was yeast –
It’s just bread now.
But it’s a pretty hastily stirred batch of dough
And not quite up to Polonius’ normal rhetorical skill.
It feels like he’s casting about, searching
For the right way to sum up his instructions.
Money – yes. Brokers – no, dyes, no clothes, religious clothes, no, not religious,
Like religious – – – ah hell –
It’s like he’s too distraught to even pick a metaphor.
He gives up on them here and turns to plain terms.
In few Ophelia, Do not believe his vows.
This is the whole speech in one sentence.
For Lord Hamlet, Believe so much in him that he is young And with larger tether may he walk Than may be given you.
Is Hamlet like Prince Hal? Free to mess around
Until ascending the throne, at which point, he is meant
To throw over his boyish pursuits.
Is Ophelia Hamlet’s Falstaff?
Rather than his father calling him in to read him the riot act
(At least not that we see or know of)
Or being called into action by rebels (unless Claudius can be counted the ultimate rebel)
Hamlet casts aside his previous life
After a visit from the after life.
What if Henry IV was the prequel to Hamlet rather than Henry V?
What if Prince Hal grew up to be Hamlet instead of Henry?
I suddenly want to see a mash up of these two plays.
The Hamlet Project 