How may we try it further?

Claudius knows Polonius has a plan.
He’s seen the machinations of Polonius’ scheming mind and sees the next steps and sees the role he is to play in it. He does not ask, “What should we do about it?” Or “Maybe we should ask Ophelia to requite a little if she wants to if, indeed, the problem is unrequited love.”
He asks how to test the theory. And, of course, Polonius has an experiment in mind. He has already organized the elements, gotten the lab equipment out, set the thing in motion. He’s got the players all lined up and their places reserved behind the curtain. They’re a team, these two – Polonius fed Claudius the set-up, Claudius delivers the reply, then the show proceeds.

Not that I know.

There was a radio show about accountability. One in which they pointed out how wrong most pundits were when they made predictions. The people who shout on our televisions? They are almost never right. They are on our TVs for their shouting, not the accuracy of their predictions – but there is a movement for a new kind of accountability. Maybe a score card for predictions:
PUNDIT JONES
23 Predictions made on FOX TV
22 inaccurate 1 still pending

It is such a relief to have this authoritative leader actually ask his wife what she thinks. I know it’s been a particularly sensitive time for me, gender politics wise. . . so I happen to be wearing a particularly jaded pair of lenses. It seems like everything I’m seeing leaves women with no brains – just bodies for consumption or mother for fantasy reassurance – so just to see a line that asks a woman what she thinks feels like a rarity. Shakespeare’s not so guilty of this diminishment of women, even if the majority of the plays wouldn’t pass the Bechdel test. He writes us women who DO think and in this particular moment, I love that the king asks her. Even though it is in her role as Hamlet’s mother and not, per se, about the ambassadors of Norway, so no award here. It’s just a nice relief for a moment to have a queen get to voice her opinion.

As of a man faithful and honorable.

I undervalued these qualities in my youth. While abstractly I would have said a faithful, honorable man was a good idea, I was drawn to charming, unreliable rogues. I repeatedly chose cavalierly romantic over unshakably steadfast. I’d end up under the bright moon with dark impassioned poets with girlfriends at home, or in another state, or across the ocean. Surely some faithful, honorable men stood by and watched me spiral out into heartbreak but I never noticed them and if they reached out, I must have batted them away and forgotten them quickly. I cherish honor now and adore the faithful.

But how hath she
Received his love?

How do you THINK she received it?
He’s the freakin’ Prince of freakin’ Denmark.
She’s the daughter of a public servant, really.
You think the intelligent, complicated, broody Prince shows up at the door of a quiet, passive, sheltered girl and she turns him away?! Does she shout, “We’re all set for Romantic Princes around here, thanks! Try next door! I hear they’re in the market for Melancholy Danes.”?
I mean, come on, I know that he’s a prince out of her star and all but he’s a PRINCE, OUT OF HER STAR! There’s no way she’s not interested.

We say that snails carry their homes with them but is this true? Do snails, or turtles, or all things with shells not have homes?
Is there no nest that the snail family returns to? No place where turtles gather to sleep or tell their stories?
Just because they can retreat into solitude, the kind no one can intrude upon doesn’t mean they don’t leave their shells, their selves, in the care of other turtles or snails or whatnot.
Somewhere someone greets them with “Most welcome home!”

There was a time, last summer, in which I was at my friend’s gathering in the South of France. There were many of us there, spending the days in the sea, swimming, reading, chatting, having lunch on the patio, retiring to our rooms for naps before returning to the sea. . .then, at night, dining together.
It was only a few days but they were redemptive days, days that brought back hope and pleasure and joy. The feasts (which were not so called but they take on that quality in my memory) so filled with an air of conviviality. Never has dining with a dozen strangers felt so easy or so pleasurable.
When I read my journal from those days, I was almost there again, struck by the generosity of a man I barely knew offering me his apartment in Spain or the genuine interest of human beings in other human beings, floored by the surprise of never once being asked what I did or asked to demonstrate my worth or jockey for position.
Dining together, nay, feasting together, was extraordinary in its togetherness. Together there were people adept at conversation, in two languages, creating art out of mealtime.

There’s a finality to this wish – as if sending these guys off to their death. And if I’m not mistaken, this is the last we see of Voltemand and Cornelius, so they might as well be going off to their final retirement.
Or, if they were robot ambassadors, they exit and climb into their re-charging stations where their batteries are removed until future use. Or a cryogenic freezing chamber where they suspend the lives of ambassadors until they are needed again.
Voltemand and Cornelius go off to their rest and are not seen again. What if they went off to sleep and slept so hard and sound that they didn’t wake for days and when they woke up, they were Norwegian?
Is this what happens? All the Danish royalty dies before Fortinbras shows up. Who’s left to rule Denmark but the Norwegian guy? Voltemand and Cornelius stumble out of their days of sleep and rub their eyes, wondering where their diplomatic work went wrong.

The king’s a better boss than most of mine. He handles the business expediently and thanks his employees for their work. I make a lot of organizations look good with the labor I do for them and the times that I have been honestly thanked for doing that are few and far between. There have been quite a few perfunctory thanks over the years but the authentic personal ones are in short supply. The king does not have to thank his employees here. He could just as easily give orders and dismiss them – but he thanks them anyway. I’d like that, too.

I want a world with more considered time. Everything happens so fast. Before the event is over, there are millions of tweets and tumblrs and Facebook pages and comments comments comments. Some of it is wonderful. But. . . there must be value for the slow thought, too. The one that baked in the mind all night and all day. The one that weighed one thing against another and came to a conclusion. The one that rattled around the empty house for a while before resting on the sofa.
I want to write something called “Our Considered Time” and in it, I will advocate for the response that took a while, for the person who took a while to reach a conclusion, for the slow-baked meal.