He probably really knows how to do this. Probably there’s a whole course in royal training school where they teach you how to write commissions. You don’t need to learn to write essays or read novels but you will need to learn to write commissions and other such royal decrees. Proclamations are their own workshop.
Royal Syllabus:
In this course, we will learn to write commissions, decrees and missives. Pre-requisites include: Proclamations, Handwriting, Seals and Posture.
Author: erainbowd
Ere I could make a prologue to my brains, They had begun the play –
The they is the villanies, I presume and it is they who have set the play in motion. The villanies wrote the scenario, the villanies started the plot.
Hamlet was hoping to make his own work, from his own brain – but all these villanies kicked into action and his play was tanked before it could even begin. Before he could even work out how he wanted to begin, he was forced to react to the villanies before him.
Being thus be-netted round with villanies –
This is probably how a fish feels, caught in a net. All around him, the lines of betrayal, lumped in with old boots and tin cans, plastic bottles, syringes and crill.
I imagine a sunfish Hamlet calling to the Gods, “How came I to be thus be-netted?”
I beseech you.
When did words like beseech, plead and beg fall out of casual use? Pleading and begging, we still use, but they are mostly only used in the most extreme circumstances. Pleading and begging turn up in violent situations and in court but we don’t go around pleading and begging when chatting with our friends. And we certainly don’t beseech them.
Rarely, we might hear an “I beg your pardon” but even that has fallen out of favor. My grandmother said it quite often – but I only ever use it with mock horrified gentility.
But wilt thou hear me how I did proceed?
Is Horatio reading the commission?
Did Hamlet lose him by giving him his death warrant reading material? I mean – if someone handed me the death warrant he’d discovered for himself, I might find it hard to resist perusing – even if I had been instructed to read it at my leisure later. I mean – it’s a death warrant! You don’t see a lot of those. Not unless you’re an executioner.
Read it at more leisure.
See, he can’t read it quickly because it has been so overlarded with reasons and ills and so on. What’s wild is that one can almost imagine the style of the text of that commission because Claudius’s way of talking is also often larded with excess phrases.
Here’s the commission.
I’m curious how a word that once meant something like instructions for authority or delegation of power came to mean a work paid for by an authority. When the Medicis commissioned artwork, were they delegating authority? Or does it, perhaps, stem from the idea of empowering someone – that is, with money, you can empower an artist to create. The fact is, though, you are likely essentially giving them a very specific task to accomplish – so it’s not REALLY empowerment. It’s the kind of empowerment, I’d totally accept but still –
Is’t possible?
Do you doubt that? Do you think it’s out of the realm of possibility that a man who personally poisoned his brother would hesitate to have his enemy killed at a remove?
It may have even been more surprising if Claudius had NOT attempted this sort of villainy. It’s not like Hamlet has some kind of magical 6th sense. He knows what his uncle is capable of. He knows his methods. Of course that letter to the king is a death sentence for him. Horatio should maybe not be surprised.
Such bugs and goblins in my life, That, on the supervise, no leisure bated, Not, not to stay the grinding of the axe My head should be struck off.
I’m very curious about what these bugs and goblins are that Claudius has described in Hamlet’s execution warrant. Like, are they literal goblins? Is Claudius claiming that Hamlet has become possessed by demons of some sort? That is, if the King of England were to let him speak or even allow time to sharpen the axe, moths or roaches or flies or beetles would pour out of Hamlet’s mouth and then England would be sorry they hadn’t taken off his head as quickly as instructed?
It’s hard to imagine anything besides supernatural explanations that would demand such a speedy execution.
An exact command, Larded with many several sorts of reasons Imparting Denmark’s health and England’s too, With ho!
It’s kind of unusual for Hamlet to interrupt himself so much like this. I mean – not unprecedented – certainly some Foh! About my Brains! Turns up earlier. But he’s interrupted himself twice in this same passage.
Well, he’s got a lot on his mind, certainly and a great deal of unease. So it does make some sense that he has some emotional outbursts.
Also – side note: I would love to find occasion to use “larded” as it’s used here. It’s so beautifully specific. Like – the letter is overloaded with reasons and the reasons are laid on thickly, like a layer of fat.
The Hamlet Project 