This is a rather halting beginning to a speech that gets quite forceful and direct after it. His charges against Claudius are clearer than at any point previous in the play – but this introduction to it stops and starts. It has a jumpy quality. I mean, sure, it’s pentameter – but it’s not exactly iambic and it feels a bit like he’s interrupting himself. I wonder why.
Author: erainbowd
Why, what a king is this!
This is a very odd moment for Horatio to exclaim like this. He’s not really directly responding to what Hamlet just said; Hamlet was just talking about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and only obliquely referred to Claudius, if at all, as one of the mighty opposites. (Maybe.)
So…this exclamation from a man who mostly just nods along and supports Hamlet – is very out of character and out of sync with the conversation.
Some have theorized that maybe Horatio means Hamlet but Hamlet is not King. He’s a Prince. And if it were about Hamlet, wouldn’t it be “What a King you’d be!”?
I could buy it as an exclamation of praise – the way a friend might call me a queen when I do something with authority.
Their defeat Does by their own insinuation grow:
It rarely works like this.
The toadying suck-ups to authority rarely see consequences beyond their own loss of self respect.
If there were a physical expression of Hamlet’s line here, it would be a big rain cloud of destruction. Every time Rosencrantz or Guildenstern insinuated himself into the corrupt orbit of the king, the cloud would get a little bigger. The destructive storm cloud would hang there over them, sucking up each suck up like an anteater sucking up ants. Soon it would become so full it could do nothing else but rain destruction over them.
They are not near my conscience.
If our conscience were in an actual physical location, it might be easier to recognize when someone was without one. We could run them through the MRI machine, check for the conscience – and if they are without , we don’t let them become politicians or doctors or any job with people’s fates on the line. I mean – there are very few jobs that a conscience-free person SHOULD have. A conscience tends to come in handy in every profession. But – some more than others.
Why, man, they did make love to this employment.
Sometimes, in performances of Shakespeare, there is an excessive amount of thrusting of pelvises. It is many an actor’s way to show an audience that he is telling a dirty joke. I wouldn’t want Hamlet to thrust his pelvis on this line. Let me just state that upfront.
But I picture Rosencrantz and Guildenstern thrusting into their job – like, humping this letter or Claudius.
So Rosencrantz and Guildenstern go to’t.
So do we all, eventually. Though hopefully not to an execution the way they are.
I have always been spooked by execution. I used to have nightmares as a teen in which either one or the other of my parents had been condemned to execution for reasons that were not clear. The state, the authorities, the government seemed more powerful than any other means of death I could imagine. More intractable. More – immovable. My protests more desperate – a hope for justice still bumping around in the dark like a moth.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern don’t endear themselves to many in this play – but the notion of anyone getting executed freaks me out a bit.
Maybe they escaped?
Maybe they were killed by sea pirates instead?
And what to this was sequent Thou know’st already.
The best possible way to say “And you know what happened next.”
Now, the next day Was our sea-fight.
It would be funny if the sea-fight were not a surprise attack by pirates but an event planned and scheduled into the voyage like shuffleboard games on a cruise ship. Like – Monday is the cabaret.
Tuesday is water sports in the ship’s pool and Wednesday is our sea-fight.
Thursday is Taco Night and Friday is the dance.
I’m picturing it all written on one of those school calendars with cheesy clip art scattered here and there and it makes me laugh. I picture Hamlet drawing pirate hats and swords surrounding Sea Fight Wednesday.
I also want him to really have planned it.
Folded the writ up in form of the other, Subscribed it, gave’t the impression, placed it safely, The changeling never known.
I like the fact that there is a special folding technique for this writ.
It’s like Hamlet has to do a kind of bureaucratic origami in order to really disguise it. The king’s seal – sure.
The right address – okay.
But the folding!
The folding.
I had my father’s signet in my purse Which was the model of that Danish Seal.
Now – I know that when Hamlet says purse, he probably means a tiny little drawstring bag to keep money in. It’s the sort of bag one could tie to one’s self, I expect. But I would love to see a Hamlet with a purse in the way that we think of it now – like a handbag or a pocketbook (as my grandmother would have called it). A Hamlet with a (modern) purse would be a very interesting Hamlet.
But just writing this now, writing all the words for a bag that women carry, I’m struck by how each of them has come to have a layer of condescension over it. The bags women carry inevitably seem to absorb quite a bit of misogyny in the journey. I think this is why, even when I carried a purse, I was wary of calling it one. But here’s Hamlet talking merrily of keeping his father’s ring in his without the slightest suggestion of embarrassment.
Also, let’s think about pocketbook for a second. I mean – why does pocketbook sound like a joke? Because older ladies say it? It’s two great things in one. Pockets! And books! And pockets are extremely political. The choice to leave pockets out of women’s clothes? Sexist as hell.
Anyway – that’s maybe why I want to see a Hamlet with a modern purse – because I’d like to reclaim purse for all of us.
The Hamlet Project 