The sin had been planted some years ago
A little seedlet of sin dropped into the earth
It lay there dormant in the dark earth
Until one day it shot out a little
Green shoot of a root.
The rain had rained a particularly pertinent rain
The sun had warmed the soil to a perfect temperature
The earth shifted a bit in its placement,
Minerals stirring up into a nutritious mud
A potent ground for a little root of sin to shoot out and take hold.
It grew down and up, at once –
Getting bigger and longer and stronger
Not really yet a plant
Just the idea of one
One that could be nipped or upended at the slightest disruption.
It shot out of the earth
Green emerging from brown
More green everyday
Budding, growing
Becoming a flower.
Becoming the fullest expression of itself
Blossoming, opening and exposing
The heart of the flower, of the sin.
Had it been allowed to progress,
The flower would have fallen on its own
And winter would have stepped in and buried it in snow.
Ghost
And a most instant tetter barked about, Most lazar-like, with vile and loathsome crust All my smooth body.
This corruption of the case of the body
Is the final indignity. To lose the texture of yourself suddenly –
(When all your life, you’ve discovered the world with it and through it.
The first thing we know of ourselves is how we feel – the smoothness of our skin being
a way to know ourselves even as we age and lose elasticity.)
Is to lose a way of knowing suddenly.
When your liver fails
It is no doubt a terrible betrayal and a deep loss
But it is a secret one, a stealthy hidden betrayal.
But this
A bark, a crust suddenly encasing every part of you
As you watch yourself disappear –
This is the last straw. And it is the last description of his death.
So did it mine.
We talk about blood curdling screams but this literalization of the phrase, the illustration of it, really lays out what that means. This scream of the blood curdling sort would turn the red liquid moving rapidly throughout the body to lumpy red cheese and I can see how a sudden change in the blood’s texture like that could very quickly kill you because no bloody cheese like substance could pass into the heart or out of the heart into the lungs or out of the lungs. Maybe you could watch, horrified as a little lump of cheese moves from the end of your finger through your palm, up your wrist, your arm, your shoulder, but as soon as it attempts the openings of the most crucial organs, you’re a goner, you’re a ghost and the horror of your blood’s transformation is one of the few things you have left.
Sleeping within my orchard, My custom always of the afternoon, Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole With juice of curséd hebona in a vial, And in the porches of my ears did pour The leperous distilment; whose effect Holds such an enmity with blood of man That swift quicksilver it courses The natural gates and alley of the body, And with a sudden vigor it doth posset And curd, like eager droppings into milk, The thin and wholesome blood.
One story in one sentence.
It travels quickly and directly, perhaps with the precise trajectory of the poison. It begins slow and sleepily but before a body has had time to take a breath, suddenly the hebona with its quicksilver flows through, shoots through the somatic transportation system, faster than a bullet train.
As far as long sentences go this one must be the fullest. Image after image, it is the summary of a betrayal as well as a death.
For someone without a physical body, this ghost has some of the most embodied language in the play.
Brief let me be.
I have heard and read this line many many times before but just now I read it in a way I’d never understood it before, which seems extraordinary given the obviousness of the idea. Always, I’d had the feeling that this was somehow spoken to tormenting demons or the morning itself – a request to be left alone to tell his story. But damned if it’s not a whole hell of a lot simpler. Polonius says something pretty similar in a subsequent scene. Just reorganized – let me be brief. In short – to sum up – to make a long story short:
I was poisoned in the ear.
But soft, methinks I scent the morning air.
Ghost, interrupted by a smell.
Having become more animal than human, his sense of smell has become more acute.
The smell of morning comes upon him as swiftly
as the sudden strong odor of an explosive sulphuric fart, sudden and strong.
It stops him in his tracks – makes him shift away from the rant he’s just fallen into. Extraordinarily, the smell of morning arrives before morning itself.
Before light, before dew, before sound.
Only for the diuranlly sensitive.
But virtue as it never will be moved, Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven, So lust, though to a radiant angel linked, Will sate itself in a celestial bed And prey on garbage.
I do not really understand this line.
I don’t think he’s speaking directly of Claudius and Gertude here –
I think he’s speaking generally of virtue and lewdness (which is, of course, how he sees Gertrude and Claudius respectively) but what I do not understand
Is what exactly lust is up to.
Is it that it hangs out with radiant angels?
Lust sleeps in the celestial bed with a radiant angel – is lust having sex with the angel?
It is sating itself by preying on garbage?
Is lust bringing trashy whores home to the angel’s celestial bed?
Is lust banging a hooker from the corner next to the angel, trying to sleep?
Lewdness is in a shape of heaven – does it fool virtue with its disguise?
Or does lust drag a bag filled with food scraps and packaging
And old wet newspapers and make a feast over the supine radiant angel?
It’s lust, not disgust, how does lust prey on garbage?
O, Hamlet, what a falling off was there. From me, whose love was of that dignity That it went hand in hand even with the vow I made to her in marriage; and to decline Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor To those of mine!
This ghost is not humble –
That much is certain.
The primary objection here is that he is so much better
Than his brother – that he’s more dignified and has richer natural gifts.
This may be true.
Certainly he’s got that not-having-committed-fratricide on his side –
But this whole falling off notion would seem to suggest a Lucifer falling
from heaven to hell, from an angel to a devil.
For a spirit/man currently doing time in the flames of hell
This is a gutsy assertion.
won to his shameful lust the will of my most seeming virtuous queen.
This tangent of the ghost
Would seem to suggest
That, from his ghostly purgatory,
He has some privileged views
Of the world he left behind.
Did he stand (ephemerally) by
Watching his widow get seduced by his brother?
Did he watch the woman
He thought of as So Virtous
Listen carefully to his brother’s proposition?
Did he see her resist for a bit
Then suddenly relent?
Did he watch his brother
Touch first his widow’s hand, then her arm?
Was he looking when Claudius moved a strand of Gertrude’s hair
Away from her face and went in to kiss her?
Did he watch her respond?
Did he see the desire between them grow just where he’d thought there would
Always be ice cold chastity?
It might be worse than the daily purifying flames to witness such things.
O wicked wit and gifts, that have the power So to seduce!
Does anyone who really has this power ever use it for good?
A man with great skill at seduction
Does not use it on a willing seductee.
In order to be a world class seducer, one stretched to the limit of his powers,
One has to convince someone of something
They really didn’t want in the first place.
And in the realm of romance,
No seducer worth his salt
Would ever stop at just one seduction.
It is a game that must be played over and over.
Wit and gifts – the killer combination.
We see Richard the Third use this. Iago. Claudius.
But never the good guys.
It’s not a good guy strategy.
There were times when I wish I’d known that.
The Hamlet Project 