There are places where a little madness can fit right in – where it might not be as obvious. The theatre tends to be one of those places. Behavior that would get you thrown out of an office is perfectly placed on a stage. The strictures of a theatre life are less confining.

But…in a lot of cases, some folks suffering from some madnesses do better in an office. They will cope better with clearly defined rules of behavior, with narrow lanes. Those lanes are easier to stay in. It’s sometimes easier to drive down a road with no choice about how you do it.

Actually, it’s probably better to send your mad friends and relatives to another country than the usual alternative in history. At least a change of scenery gives a person something positive and a degree of freedom. The “cures” for such things could be brutal and violent and most likely did more harm than good.
Later, institutions for the mad were such places of horror, it must have been like giving your loved one a death sentence to send them there.
Lord knows that foreign travel does wonders for my mental health.

We romanticize so many things about the past. We imagine how much more simple things once were, how poetic, how full of vitality. And the dresses were so pretty.
But there are things that remind us that it was a terrible time for a lot of people. Those women who had no choice but to wear those dresses, for one. But also, anyone with a mental illness. There was no therapy, no helpful medicine, no understanding.
They’d just send you away. Just away. Or lock you up in a horrible place. That’s it for you and your glitchy brain.

Oh, THAT Hamlet! There are just so many of them – it’s hard to keep them all straight. There’s the one who sledded the dreaded pole-ax on the ice, of course – the old king. But then of course, there’s Hamlet the Plumber. Hamlet, the Florist. He that is athletic and sent to the Olympics. There’s he that is religious and sent to the monastery. There’s Hamlet, the game-show host – Hamlet, the organic farmer. Hamlet the adjunct professor. So it’s good you clarified that you mean the one who is mad and sent to England.

I wish we could figure out exactly what day this might have been. I’d love to be able to celebrate Hamlet’s birthday. I mean, it must be in the winter because Hamlet Senior defeats Fortinbras Senior on the ice. So we know Hamlet was born in a month that would have been icy. But in Denmark, that’s likely a fairly wide range. Is there a Shakespeare scholar/astrologer out there who has theorized about Hamlet’s astrological sign? Given the ice conditions – he’s probably not a Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo or Libra.
This would be a rather unusual overlapping of areas of knowledge – I don’t know a lot of Shakespeare scholars who are into astrology and while I do know some astrologers who LIKE Shakespeare, I wouldn’t go so far as to call them scholars. BUT. It may be time for a meeting of the minds on this. Mostly just because I want to know.

Fools are really making a comeback these days. We have a notorious fool in charge of the country and he has surrounded himself with fools of every stripe – and even when there are things that every fool can tell that they cannot, nothing ever changes. The whole climate seems to breed more fools. Stupidity has become fetishized and now, for sure, apparently desirable.

This is such a great way to say “You don’t know that? How can you not know that?” Because it’s not about the KNOWING – it’s the TELLING. Many a person will shame another person with the “Don’t you know that?” which always has an undercurrent of “What’s wrong with you? Why are you so stupid?”
Whereas “Cannot you tell that?” even though it essentially means the same thing could have a layer of remove. That is, you may know something but cannot say it. You know the answer but cannot tell it.