I love a good linguistic mystery. I mean…this is one of those lines that is described as “much debated” which means that nobody is really sure what the heck it means.
I can see how you can make it mean something about the song. The song is the most likely candidate for the “it” in this sentence…which means we have to make wheel mean something to do with a song. Which…is massageable of course. A wheel, being something that rolls, could be a chorus, a refrain…in that it repeats and comes back around again and again.
And becoming in that context is enhancing , beautifying, etc. But further afield – becoming could be an active becoming – a transformative becoming – a wheel becomes something else. A wheel becomes…IT…whatever it might be. Maybe the song?
There is the wheel of fortune, which certainly is down, a-down, for her, at this point in the play.
I mean…there’s no knowing, for sure. Which is delightful. It also means that this line is usually cut. But hey…it is a delightful mystery just sitting there in the middle of a madwoman’s song.
Author: erainbowd
You must sing a-down a-down, An you call him a-down-a.
It’s time for fun with punctuation again!
I would put a period after “sing.” I would have her try and get someone to sing with her. Laertes. Gertrude. Claudius. Someone. And then begin the song with “a-down a-down An you call him a-down-a.”
Which is a pretty odd song by the way. Especially since the last part of it, depending on the accent, can sound like she’s calling someone a downer….which was probably not a thing in the 1600s but is hard not to hear in the 2000s.
Hadst thou thy wits, and didst persuade revenge, It could not move thus.
There are so many times wherein a woman’s wits and persuasion are not nearly as moving as she would like. Here’s Ophelia. If she tried to explain her position rationally, if she asked for support, if she attempted to persuade – anyone to anything – I suspect she would not be successful. Ophelia can only persuade with her body – once her will has been trampled. And then, of course, she’s not persuading anyone of anything she wants. She’s just become a symbol…a trigger on the gun.
I can’t help feeling that if a character like Ophelia had learned to use her wits – to become a little more like Beatrice or Imogen or even Lady Macbeth, she wouldn’t end up dead. It’s almost as though, because she had no persuasive power as a conscious creature, she becomes more of a projection machine. It becomes more possible for Laertes to read what he wants to read in her. I think it would be incredibly unlikely that Ophelia would use her wits to plead for revenge. I don’t think that is what she’d use them for.
Fare you well, my dove!
Who, now, is Ophelia’s dove? I mean – it makes sense that she might speak this directly to Laertes – I’ve seen it done that way often.
But – a dove is something that files away – so either Hamlet or Polonius might be better candidates. The rhyme of dove and love would suggest Hamlet to me – but then again – she has just been singing a funeral song – so that makes Polonius a more likely dove.
I think it would be weird to call your father your dove, though. But maybe that’s just me.
And in his grave rain’d many a tear:
The news came through a widget on my mother’s iPad, just as we were about to watch a silly frothy movie. This year has claimed many extraordinary people. It’s been brutal in its elimination of people that were meaningful to my childhood and/or adolescence. This one is somehow closer. I adored so many of the others – but this one was one of my first celebrity crushes. I was obsessed with Wham! Obsessed. I got the Bad Boys album that came out previous to the one that was a hit here in the US. I had posters all over my room of George and Andrew.
I had a crush on both of them – though I thought I’d have a better relationship with Andrew and crushed on him harder (I always did like the boy next to the obvious one) and George seemed like a sun – he shined so bright.
When I was 12, he was 22. And now I’m 43 and he’s dead at 53. And the world seems darker and scarier without him in it. His music played an enormous role in my growing up. I sang along with him and dreamed of being a singer. My friends and I would tape record pretend radio shows and play his music and sing along to it.
Sometimes he pushed my boundaries. I was growing up and was not so sure I wanted to listen to music about sex nor was I so sure I wanted to have it. But he made it fun to dance to and made it seem fun, actually. In so much of the culture, sex was dark and sure to be bad news for the ladies – but George Michael made it fun for everyone. He made it seem like becoming an adult might be a good idea, after all. It might be sunny and bright. I hope it may be still.
Hey non nonny, nonny, hey nonny;
This is such festive lyrical filler.
So much more so than la, la, la, yeah, yeah, yeah or even sussudio.
It’s somehow made darker here because of its festivity.
Time for a hey non nonny pop revolution.
They bore him barefaced on the bier;
Does this mean that they shaved the beards off of corpses? That would be a very odd funeral ritual – but I could make up some reasons for it. For example, maybe in returning someone to the earth, it makes sense to have him looking more like the younger man – the boy. The beard being a signifier of age and power, to shave it at death would be a relinquishing of both those things. Or maybe the family could knit a sweater out of the beard and treasure it once the man is gone. Or in some families, they make a nest with it – which they place near the grave so birds will roost there and watch over their loved one.
Or – it’s also probably pretty likely that this song doesn’t mean that he’s without a beard…it probably means without a shroud over his face. But still….
Nature is fine in love, and where ‘t is fine, It sends some precious instance of itself After the thing it loves.
She gets a box down off the shelf in the closet. There are old things in it that no one cares about anymore so she dumps them on the floor.
She sits in front of the box and lovingly places a memory into it. She takes another and places it side by side with the other. Seeing them there makes her smile so she keeps going – memory after memory, thought after thought.
She feels she will not be satisfied until the box is full. The more she places in the box, the emptier she feels and she finds she likes the emptiness.
With just an inch left of space left, she tosses in her wits, as well, as she feels she no longer needs them. She closes up the box, seals it shut and delivers it to the body of her father in the chapel. She slips it in to the coffin and then slips away.
Is’t possible, a young maid’s wits should be as mortal as an old man’s life?
I suppose it IS possible – but it always seems like there’s got to be more to it than a simple death. Not that the death of a parent is ever simple – but there really must be other factors to push a grown woman over the edge. A break-up plus death will start to add it up- but for me, the real reason Ophelia loses her wits is that her whole world had been so tightly controlled, so wrapped up in being obedient to the men in her life – and when they abandon her, she’s without a rudder, without a compass. That’s what I think pushes her off the edge – not the old man’s death – but the control he wielded while he lived.
O heavens!
Oh ho. Interesting, interesting.
You know who else says this very same line earlier in the play?
Hamlet. Hamlet says it. And now here is Laertes, saying exactly the same line.
It’s almost as if Shakespeare wants us to see these characters in a similar light. He places them near one another again and again.
The Hamlet Project 