Aren’t lids a kind of veil already?
Is this doubling here?
Covering his eyes again and again
First with his eyelids
Then with his grief
Then with his hands to hide it all
Then with his body, folded into itself
To veil and veil again the effects of terrible loss.
Author: erainbowd
Good Hamlet, cast thy knighted color off And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark
The first sentence I spoke in my first job as an actor –
The first words I was paid to say –
I still hear it as I said it when I was 22 years old
Playing the mother of a man.
I may always hear it that way. It’s like a song in my head.
I will hear it that way and
See my friend Dwayne, as Hamlet
As I say them.
Forever, I have this bit of Gertrude in me
But Gertrude as a 22nd year old Emily
High on theatre
High on her first job with the very company
I always dreamed of working with.
Despite the knighted color of the text, there is
a halo of optimism around these lines.
They were the first ones of my new life
The one I thought I would have
The one I knew I’d revel in
The one that was off to a rollicking start.
I am too much in the sun.
Examined
Like a bug under a microscope or
A magnifying glass
Taken apart
Analyzed
Piece by piece
Everyone watching
Waiting for me to make a mistake.
I am frozen in chemical solution
Singed by the focused beam of light
Exhibit A for the benefit of the public.
Not so, my lord.
Not so, nutso
Wouldn’t it be funny
If Hamlet called his stepdad a nutso?
“Official speak, official speak, Official recognition of my heir”
Nutso!
Maybe if Hamlet could call Claudius a nutso at the top of the show
Everyone wouldn’t end up dead by the end of it.
In teaching yesterday, a 7th grader
Started to tell me the story of Hamlet
When asked about Macbeth.
Her teacher corrected her and she waved her hand dismissively and said
“Same thing.”
Indeed. Indeed not.
It would take a lot to turn Hamlet into Macbeth –
In fact, I think it’s impossible –
Despite the similar body count at the end –
The intentions are so stupendously different
As well as their methodologies.
Hamlet breaks his heart by holding his tongue
Macbeth falls to cursing
Undone, the both of them.
But I’d rather hang out with Hamlet.
How is that the clouds still hang on you?
The sky like a coat rack
Clouds like a hanger
The sun like Velcro
Clouds passing like cotton cannot help but cling to it.
I am trying to be bright
To shine, to take my light and beam it wide
But these clouds are like moths to my flame.
They follow me
Shadowing my intentions
Standing between me and what I want
Surrounding me like pig pen’s cloud of dust.
These clouds, these dark heavy clouds
Seem to get fuller every day.
I wish it would rain and clear.
They would spend themselves in thunder and lightning –
Pour down torrents
Til every drop of cumulonimbus vapor has dissipated.
When the ground is drenched
I will be unburdened.
A little more than kin, and less than kind.
Hamlet’s first words in the play.
His verse is regular.
Each beat in time.
But he’s interrupted the king
And the editors of this Penguin edition of the play
Have put an exclamation point at the end.
He is metrically in line but well out of line.
Is he himself more than kin to Claudius
Or is Claudius more than kin to him?
Who is less than kind?
Neither could be considered terribly kind to the other
Less than kind
More than kin
It is the kind of kin that many of us struggle with.
Time be thine, And thy best graces Spend it at thy will But now my cousin Hamlet and my son –
He doesn’t even get his own sentence by the time his royal uncle gets around to addressing him.
He’s been denied his position
Lost his father
(and his mother in her sudden remarriage)
He’s all at sea –
His uncle talks to almost everyone in the room but him
Before he finally faces him.
And he dares to call him “son”?
I still prickle when my stepmother
Calls me daughter and she married my father decades ago –
To risk that after a few days or weeks
Or whatever it is – no wonder Claudius gets interrupted.
If it were me, I’d be shouting,
“You are not my father!”
No matter how childish or out of propriety it might be.
My cousin and my son?!
Damn, Claudius, that was clumsy.
Take thy fair hour, Laertes.
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Laertes.
Pick up blue bonnets and daisies
While the sun is shining and there’s space in your basket.
In short time, those flowers will whither
Along with the bright light of your sister
Along with your joy
Along with your carefree student days
Along with your studies
Along with your innocence
Along with you duty.
Now – it is all spread before you
A meadow full of possibility.
In front of you a blooming stalk of hope
Smell it
Stroke it
Take it with you.
Eat the petals if they’re flavorful;
Later, they will be dry and dusty. Take it. Take it.
I do beseech you give him leave to go.
Sometimes growing up is only this
Learning how to give space to he who needs it.
In earlier days, I might have held tight or
Walked along the same path, the very same path
Or rather, the brush and rocks and thorns beside it
Letting you go but not giving you leave
When the time machine dumps me out in front of my younger self,
I’ll quote this line.
He hath, my lord, wrung from me my slow leave By laborsome petition and at last upon his will I sealed my hard consent.
A garment
Drenched
Below it
Pools of water
Of effort
A slow drip
wrung from above.
The Hamlet Project 