Author: erainbowd

When these are gone, The woman will be out.

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And here we have a line that I always understood completely differently because I had not looked at it closely. I thought he was saying his tears were just gonna come. That is, “the woman” is just gonna “woman.” Tears will be tears. Boys will be boys. The woman will be out. In other words, the tears must flow.

But I see now that he’s talking about the tears he’s crying in the moment. He’s already crying and when these tears are gone, all that is womanly in him will be gone. He’s expunging all femininity as soon as he stops crying. It’s almost as though he feels as if he’s been possessed by a woman and she is leaking out of him, out of his eyes and when he’s cried it all out, she will be gone.

Nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will:

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Every time a male character cries in Shakespeare, he gets all full of shame and self-flagellation and every time, I want to play him Rosey Grier singing “It’s alright to cry.” I grew up listening to this song but it wasn’t until I was an adult that I realized Rosey Grier was actually a pretty bad ass tough guy football player. So it’s even more alright to cry, little boy, when a man such as this tells you it’s alright. It’s alright to cry little boy. I know some big boys who cry too.

But yet It is our trick;

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These phrases don’t hold together so much. Clearly Laertes is distraught (with good reason.) But even though the words are disjointed and the sense shifts and clicks and stops and starts, it is all metrically pretty even (aside from the feminine ending of the first line.)
It’s as if Laertes, even in his grief, cannot let go of convention. He speaks in ten beat lines, though the iambs are up and down and he keeps interrupting himself. He’s crying but won’t give himself time or space to cry. There is no obvious pause in this flow of words – there is no spot for him to stop and get emotional. But instead, the stopped up nature of his feeling comes out in his broken up speech.

Drown’d, drown’d.

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We really do need to be told a few times when something like this happens. We’re most of us, not really equipped for this kind of terrible surprise.
We have to say, “What? – I’m sorry. What happened?”
I’ve gotten several calls over the years – the kind letting me know that someone I’d cared about was gone, usually a suicide – and the brain just does not compute. It can’t grasp the reality of the information. Even a stranger – I was glued to social media on August 12th when the car killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. I’d been watching and sharing and trying to be of help from a distance all day and when the news broke that a guy in a grey car had just driven into a crowd, it was incredibly hard to process. I saw the videos of people immediately after. I saw the chaos. I soon heard that someone was dead. For a while, the word was that it was a 12 year old kid. It is a terrible feeling to feel a little relieved that it was an adult woman instead. But then awful again. Because we watched it in progress, really. And even if you were following – you needed to be told twice. She’s dead. She was hit by a car. She was murdered by an angry white supremacist trying to inflict as much damage as possible and now she’s dead. Murdered. Dead. Murdered.

Alas, then, she is drown’d?

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There are quite a lot of drownings in classical literature. I don’t know whether this is because people just drowned more often – like maybe they didn’t learn to swim at summer camp like a lot of modern folk do – or if it’s more that there’s a certain metaphorical pleasure in the concept of drowning. It leaves so many opportunities for correlations to the water of tears and the water that took the loved one’s life.

I don’t know if I’m just lucky – but I’ve never lost anyone to drowning. In literature, though, I have lost a lot of the beloved characters – either the characters themselves, like Ophelia or the authors like Virginia Woolf.

It’s elemental, I suppose that’s part of its appeal.

but long it could not be Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay To muddy death.

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Killed by clothing.

It’s not that she killed herself, it’s that her clothes drank themselves silly and pulled her from the water into the mud.
Murderous dress? Not exactly.
Just careless cloth that soaked up too much and let itself get so sopping it pulled a poor innocent singing woman into the muck.
This is a good reason to watch what you wear. You don’t want your outfit turning on you at the inopportune moment and killing you by accident.

As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element:

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The Ophelia-fish is a curious native to the local ponds. It floats on the surface for a while as if it were sunbathing and then appears to become heavy and sinks below the surface like a stone.
Just when you think the Ophelia fish has gone forever, it floats back up to the surface face down in a classic dead man’s float. It is likely then to swim away and repeat this cycle somewhere else.

Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;

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This is actually not a terrible way to go – at least, as described here. I hope however I go, I can go down singing.

Once, on a boat, in a terrible storm, one that might comfortably be called a tempest, I clung to the side and I sang. No one could hear me – because the storm was loud – but I sang for myself. I thought I might die out there. So I sang.

My friend, clinging to another rail on the boat, recited poems to herself. She is a poet, of course.

Music and poetry are there for us when we need them most, up to and including our deaths. May my death come when I have a few moments to sing as it arrives.

Her clothes spread wide; And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up.

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In my fantasy version of Hamlet, Ophelia’s mermaid–like clothes swirl into a tail and she is, as she sings, transformed into a mermaid. She grows gills and her lungs expand and as she lies there, she finds her tail moving her first one way then other. She finds herself moved by her own tail and in a sudden burst of inspiration and knowledge, she dives deeper into the water and then emerges again, laughing. She takes one last look at the land and swims away toward the sea.