If I repeat this line –
I’m suddenly singing
A line
From a song
From the first show I ever did
As a professional actor.
The play that ran parallel to this one –
But rehearsed first.
Twelfth Night will always be linked to Hamlet for me.
Feste linked to Gertrude –
Though they have very little to do with one another
Aside from the death of, or by, maidens-
Be it in song
Or in mysteriously descriptive speeches.
“Come away.” Claudius says to Gertrude – or Hamlet –
or the court – or the lot of them and they are
all gone, all but Hamlet.
“Come away. Come away death.” Sings Feste
already slain but longing for the end.
The brain makes these connections
Neurons building bridges to other neurons
“Come away” connected to “Come away.”
Hamlet to Twelfth Night
A clown to a queen
Forever twinned
Entwined by fate.
Author: erainbowd
This gentle and unforced accord of Hamlet sits smiling to my heart; in grace whereof no jocund health that Denmark drinks today but the great common to the clouds shall tell and the kings raise the heaven shall bruit again re-speaking earthly thunder.
Small graceful acknowledgement leads to daily gesture
Which leads to the shaking of the earth
Through heaven and divine right.
Small small huge!
It’s a sentence that begins with the key in the ignition –
Before we know it
We’re roaring down the highway.
This car’s pick up is extraordinary.
It doesn’t necessarily seem to know where it’s going
But it gets there with speed and boisterous shaking.
Madam come.
Under their royal bedcoverings
(in a bed we’ll hear much more about in subsequent scenes)
I bet this is a familiar command
From King to Queen.
What her response might be to this instruction is dependent on
What brought these two together.
If the crackle between them
Was audible, if you could almost see his touch on her arm
Rocket through her like an earthquake,
If royal dinners had previously been torture for them
Back before they were partnered
With their knees accidentally brushing under tables and
Curious fingers seeking
Under the safety of surfaces – –
Then the sounds that followed this instruction
Would be heard nowhere in this play,
Only in the rooms safe from their subjects.
If this king persuaded this queen
With politics and rational words,
If he posited it all as good for the nation
Or threatened her with consequences
The sound might be similar but
it would be hollow and manufactured.
Or maybe he just wants her to follow him.
Be as ourself in Denmark.
This must be in the textbook on irony.
A man takes another man’s job
Then tells him to be as he would be
If he’d had the job that is rightfully his.
To the world: “Treat him
As if he were me – the king –
Which is who he should rightfully be in the first place.”
It twists the knife, doesn’t it?
I take your home, move in, claim all your stuff
Then invite you over and say
“Make yourself at home!”
But be sure
If you did
If you put your feet up on the coffee table or
Fixed yourself a cup of tea with your old kettle,
You’d be back on the street in a minute.
Have no doubt, this is my home now. . .
This is how I can welcome you to it.
Why tis a loving and fair reply.
Isn’t that just what we all need?
Someone to label and critique our answers,
Someone to translate and codify
What we say to our loved ones.
“Thanks very much for picking me up at the station, Mother.”
“What a nice thing for a boy to say to his mother! Nice work!”
As if familial relations were moderated by
Siskel and Ebert (or whomever the new guy is) or
Beavis and Butthead.
Now
He’s all thumbs up
All smiles
All praise
But one can feel how mercurial this smiling may be
How temporary this compliment.
Who is this man to judge
A son’s love of his mother?
Who is he to pat the boy on the head and pinch
His cheeks and say
How sweet he is
How loving
How fair.
I shall in all my best obey you Madam.
You are the queen
Your will is law
Whether or not I wanted to go back
Is moot.
You have made it so.
Demands framed as requests aren’t any less demanding.
This answer is as vague as I can be
To both agree and not agree at once.
I can insist that I will always do as you say
Without explicitly saying that I will remain
As you asked.
I have answered without answering in the same way
You have demanded without demanding.
Go not to Wittenberg.
What studies is our Hamlet giving up to stay in Denmark?
Is he abandoning his dissertation
On the symbolism of flowers in English literature?
Brushing aside anthropological research on village life?
Are his analyses of Latin Rhetorical studies lost forever?
Back at Wittenberg, is his tutor wondering what happened
To that Danish prince?
Are his rooms growing musty?
The library chasing after a student who isn’t there
For the books he hasn’t returned? The ones stacked
Up on his floor
Lining his bookcase
While spiders crawl over them like King Kongs on a tower,
Coating them with webs
Dusting them white
Turning leather powdery and thick with the crumbling of the room.
Does his wooden door have dents in it now
From all the friends wondering where he’s gone?
Is his threshold layered with envelopes scented with the perfume
of the young woman he met outside his philosophy class?
What is Wittenberg like without a Hamlet in it?
I pray thee stay with us.
Hands clasped together
Eyes skyward
Then back to you
I am a supplicant to you
For you
For only your company
For your remaining
Here
Hand in hand
Together
With us.
Let not thy mother lose her prayers Hamlet.
How do you lose your prayers?
By speaking in the third person?
By tossing them into the wind?
By forgetting to say them?
To say them and say them and start to believe
There really is no one listening and no one cares.
To whisper them til you are hoarse
Wondering why they never seem to make a difference?
To resign yourself to a cold indifferent universe
In which your dreams will never come to fruition and you’ll
End, as you started, penniless and alone?
I don’t think she means that really.
Nor do I think she’s been praying for her son to stay.
It seems silly to pray for something you could simply
Make a case for yourself.
Especially when you have the power to command.
Perhaps Gertrude lost her prayers a LONG time ago.
For your intent in going back to school in Wittenburg it is most retrograde to our desire; and we beseech you, bend you to remain here in the cheer and comfort of our eye, our chiefest courtier, cousin and our son.
Keep your friends close but keep your enemies closer?
Is that what’s happening here?
A fatal mistake, really –
Back at school, the student might forget the wrongs done him.
He might allow the sting of the loss of his position to diminish.
He might wrap himself up in philosophy
In language
In science
In words
In books
And trouble himself a lot less about the world back home
Where his country putrefies from the top down.
But place him next to you
Beside the throne that ought to have been his
Smelling the wine you drink and the scent
Of his mother on you –
Place him where the world can easily compare you
And hope to elevate him back to his rightful place.
Place him where he can ferret out your actions; You create your own end there, Claudius.
You calculate yourself into your grave.
The Hamlet Project 