It’s funny that we use the same word for leather treatment as we do for darkening the pigment of skin. Is that accidental or on purpose? Do we say someone is tan because the color is tan (as I previously assumed) or because a piece of leather darkens when it is a tanned? It would appear so. And it connects, too, to the old saying of someone threatening to “tan your hide.” It is probably quite useful to remember that we are not so far from the animals whose skins we tan. It is probably useful, too, to think of tanning from the sun as close to that process of curing leathers. We need all the encouragement we can get to avoid skin cancer.
Author: erainbowd
Why he more than another?
I wonder if there were any female tanners? And I wonder at what point jobs like that became gendered. Like, I think at one point – it was just that working people did whatever there was to do to make a living. Women farmed and sold things and probably tanned hides but it would seem by Shakespeare’s time, craftspeople were seen as male. There are no lady mechanicals, for example.
But when and how did that switch get made?
A tanner will last you nine year.
Do tanners still call themselves tanners? I’ve never met one – though I do feel I’ve seen some at, like, craft fairs or artisanal events. Mostly they just sell leather goods, they don’t seem to be tanning them necessarily – at least not right there. I get the sense that it is a pretty smelly process. But. I have met people with the last name of Tanner and it is remarkable to realize that generations ago, those folks were tanners. And according to the gravedigger, they decompose a little slower than the rest of us.
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I’ faith, if he be not rotten before he die – as we have many pocky corses now-a-days, that will scarce hold the laying in – he will last you some eight year or nine year.
I can find no actual evidence of this but I have always interpreted pocky corses as corpses with the pox – that is, bodies that died with the plague or some other wasting disease that rots you before you get into the ground and probably even before you die. Or, like, leprosy, which might lose you whole portions of your body before you gave up the ghost. And all of that makes me wonder if the gravedigger is referencing a plague outbreak, and particularly, the one that closed London’s theatres for a bit. I imagine Shakespeare’s audience had recently seen more pocky corpses than they would have liked. So, too, they might particularly identify with a gravedigger who is irreverent with bodies. Probably the whole population had to get immune to dead bodies at a certain point – and a pocky corse might get you a laugh of recognition.
How long will a man lie I’ the earth ere he rot?
This is a very macabre way to ask this question.
It would be less so, perhaps, to say, “How long until a man is naught but bones?”
Or nowadays we’d say, “How long is the decomposition process?”
But Hamlet has rotting on the brain (“There is something rotten in the state of Denmark.”) and, perhaps, given how recently he’s seen his father’s ghost, he might also be wondering what his dad will look like the next time he sees him.
I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years.
I feel like I can imagine being a gravedigger but I find it harder to imagine having a thirty year gravedigging career. I mean – almost every day – for thirty years, you are surrounded by earth and death and of course a skull is just a normal part of the job after thirty years of running into them.
Thirty years is a long time to do anything. They only thing I have been doing that long is theatre – and that’s my calling…but is gravedigging a calling? If so – what kind of person is called to it?
Why, here in Denmark.
In case you forgot where we’re supposed to be, it’s Denmark.
This play takes place in Denmark.
Where are we again? Denmark. Yep.
Upon what ground?
Ground is such a great flexible word. First, it is one of those words that just SOUNDS right for what it is. It is earthy and round and gritty. Second, it is so rich in possible meanings. Earth and cause, reason and probabilities are all connected to Earth, probably – that is metaphorical things on which something stands are also grounds. And as a verb, it turns something to earth.
Also it is very pleasurable to say.
Faith, e’en with losing his wits.
It would be a funny world if losing your wits was like losing your keys or your wallet. Like, you just temporarily misplace them – you look around and search in all the usual places and the places they absolutely shouldn’t be but you search there anyway, just in case. “Oh, man, they were just here! I feel like I just had my wits and then …where could they be? I had them in my hand and – what did I get distracted and put them down in a silly place?”
Then when you find them, you forget the panic you felt for the short time you were without them.
The Hamlet Project 