What did Hamlet say when he talked about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?
And when did he do this talking?
Were Rosencrantz and Guildenstern good friends until middle school when they started running with the smoking crowd and geeking out on cop shows? Does Gertrude think Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are her son’s close friends because she’s out of touch or ARE they, in fact, closer than they seem. We never get to see them before they start behaving perfidiously. We don’t see late nights over beers with the prince, spilling their guts or talking about philosophy. We only see them spying on their friend for his parents. Or for money. Whichever it is, their loyalties don’t seem to lie with Hamlet. So, what did he say about them to the Queen? Or did he?
Gertrude
Go not to Wittenberg.
What studies is our Hamlet giving up to stay in Denmark?
Is he abandoning his dissertation
On the symbolism of flowers in English literature?
Brushing aside anthropological research on village life?
Are his analyses of Latin Rhetorical studies lost forever?
Back at Wittenberg, is his tutor wondering what happened
To that Danish prince?
Are his rooms growing musty?
The library chasing after a student who isn’t there
For the books he hasn’t returned? The ones stacked
Up on his floor
Lining his bookcase
While spiders crawl over them like King Kongs on a tower,
Coating them with webs
Dusting them white
Turning leather powdery and thick with the crumbling of the room.
Does his wooden door have dents in it now
From all the friends wondering where he’s gone?
Is his threshold layered with envelopes scented with the perfume
of the young woman he met outside his philosophy class?
What is Wittenberg like without a Hamlet in it?
I pray thee stay with us.
Hands clasped together
Eyes skyward
Then back to you
I am a supplicant to you
For you
For only your company
For your remaining
Here
Hand in hand
Together
With us.
Let not thy mother lose her prayers Hamlet.
How do you lose your prayers?
By speaking in the third person?
By tossing them into the wind?
By forgetting to say them?
To say them and say them and start to believe
There really is no one listening and no one cares.
To whisper them til you are hoarse
Wondering why they never seem to make a difference?
To resign yourself to a cold indifferent universe
In which your dreams will never come to fruition and you’ll
End, as you started, penniless and alone?
I don’t think she means that really.
Nor do I think she’s been praying for her son to stay.
It seems silly to pray for something you could simply
Make a case for yourself.
Especially when you have the power to command.
Perhaps Gertrude lost her prayers a LONG time ago.
If it be why seems it so particular with thee?
Everybody’s so specific,
So particular,
So entirely their own selves.
What a pain!
It would all be so much easier to manage if we responded uniformly,
Said what we were meant to say,
Did as we’re told.
So much more would get done!
But then – what would it be that got done?
One person’s will? A world of one straight line in a million curves.
All that lives must die passing through nature to eternity.
Nature as an intersection
Nature as the Holland tunnel
Nature as obstacle, nay, obstacle course
Nature as labyrinth- but not even
Merely the walking to get to the center
No, not labyrinth
Just – a tollbooth
This thing one must pass through
To get where you’re really going.
Who would mourn someone’s passage through a tollbooth?
Thou knowest tis common.
Grief
Despair
Anxiety
Consternation
Just because we’ve all felt them
Doesn’t make them any less acute.
Every grief is the first grief.
Every anxious moment feels like it takes over the world
Like a black cloud spreading out over the sun
Shading the earth
Filling the sky.
No matter how much we tell ourselves the sky is blue
Under this layer of vapor
Or that the sun is fiercely bright
Behind this veil of dark –
The shadows stretch farther and wider
Edging past our feeble reassurances
Pushing the boundaries
Til all we know is that dark world.
If you tell me
You see the darkness too
Or that you have once watched it spread
Like oil over water
You may poke a hole for light to stream through
Yes
But if you tell me
That it’s no big deal
That this ink
Is just like breath
A digestion
A fact of life
Like any other
I will shape my darkness into a rope and I will be
Tempted to wrap it around your neck
Until you see my shadows clearly.
Do not forever with thy veiled lids Seek for thy noble father in the dust.
Aren’t lids a kind of veil already?
Is this doubling here?
Covering his eyes again and again
First with his eyelids
Then with his grief
Then with his hands to hide it all
Then with his body, folded into itself
To veil and veil again the effects of terrible loss.
Good Hamlet, cast thy knighted color off And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark
The first sentence I spoke in my first job as an actor –
The first words I was paid to say –
I still hear it as I said it when I was 22 years old
Playing the mother of a man.
I may always hear it that way. It’s like a song in my head.
I will hear it that way and
See my friend Dwayne, as Hamlet
As I say them.
Forever, I have this bit of Gertrude in me
But Gertrude as a 22nd year old Emily
High on theatre
High on her first job with the very company
I always dreamed of working with.
Despite the knighted color of the text, there is
a halo of optimism around these lines.
They were the first ones of my new life
The one I thought I would have
The one I knew I’d revel in
The one that was off to a rollicking start.
The Hamlet Project 