I was trying to teach my students about Shakespeare’s implied stage directions about how beseeching someone on my knees would likely indicate some knee-age. It was tricky because they don’t fully understand what it means to imply something. This line is like an implied stage direction. It seems to suggest that something is happening but it’s not entirely clear what it is. Horatio and Marcellus may be attempting to sneak off or scatter or to leave Hamlet alone to muse. Given that he’s just spoken an exit rhyming couplet perhaps they left before and this last line, he calls after them.
All that’s clear is that Horatio and Marcellus have done something to make Hamlet say “Nay” and bring them together.

Of the myriad things that seem wrong with the world
When we are born into it, it is very tricky to see
Which of those wrongs we are meant to right.
There are those who would attempt to fix
Everything around them, to pick up every fallen twig
To cure the illness of the world, its diseases, its tragedies
But that fixing is never ending. . .
Not to mention a little grating
When you’re the one being fixed.
But things do fall down and maybe
Everyone has one thing
That they’re born to set right and our lives
Are simply a search for what that thing is.

Pushed out of the socket by a fall
Pulled out from hanging on so tightly to that pole
Slipped out in a moment of careless unconsciousness,
Time, like a shoulder, may need a firm loving adjustment,
For someone to take a deep breath
Slip their hands around the limply dangling bit and the empty shoulder and firmly
Pop it all back together.

Gestural language sticks around
In much the same way as words, it seems.
Fingers on lips suggest silence
As easily and as clearly now
As they did hundreds of years ago.
Gestures might have a sense of universality.
I would have thought so at one point –
Before I learned that our gesture for “Halt” –
Palm open, up at a right angle
To the arm, held before the body –
This gesture that screams, “Stop”
That has shades of police authority
And the Supremes playing with police authority in the name of love. . .
Is the gesture or “mudra” for peace in Manipur.
Monks can stream down temple steps, with the arms up in this way.
To my American eyes, they almost look like military arms saying “Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop” when in fact they say, “Peace, fear not” one after the other.
When I moved to Italy, I thought Italians just spoke with their hands
That they simply waved their arms more but soon discovered a finger to the nose,
A digging motion with both arms by the hips –
I had to learn the meanings of all these gestures
Just as I had to learn the words.
Language is not just what we say and write and read and hear.

I am curious about these moments when Hamlet starts to speak of himself in the third person. I can think of at least one other one and suspect there may be more. I wonder if Third person speech is a signal for a Royal self. Certainly the First Person Plural functions that way but there is a similar distance in Third Person Singular. There’s the distancing effect for one – that the Prince can speak of the Prince as a separate entity from himself. He might be more able to make pronouncements, to deliver commendations and formal obligations. This sentence shifts from First to Third and in a way creates a Second self in the Second part. Psychologists analyzing Hamlet must use this line in their theses. I don’t speak Psych – I don’t have a sense of what’s in the DSM – but I think this might be an example of disassociation which might be necessary for all that has happened and is about to.

I think we know what a ghost’s perturbéd spirit feels like because our living spirits are so easily perturbéd or at least mine is.
I recall a time when I was pretty unflappable, when rejection rolled off my back like water off an umbrella – that is, it still rained but I didn’t get so wet. I could walk into the wind, face down storms, moving ever forward, toward something I could not give up, would not give up. Sure, I would cry easily, could feel the slightest slight like the princess felt the pea through 20 soft mattresses but I cried as I walked, watching the road under my feet.
At some point, though, the road got so muddy I couldn’t see it anymore and there were times when I had to sit down on a rock, soaked through to the skin.

This is either a threat or a prayer,
I’m not sure which.
Swear not and mercy and grace might well abandon you when you need them most – which would give a whole lot of power to this particular swearing. Or perhaps, once it is all sworn, an extra blessing of mercy and grace might fall on you in your hour of need. Either way, blessing or curse, it is contingent on swearing.

Ambiguous giving out is the worst –
The opening of a door, meant to be closed but you stand at it, latched and opened a crack, space enough for a whisper
A letter, a gesture, a thought,
Space enough to just touch
Space enough to persuade
Space enough to break through a weak chain.
You can say, “I didn’t let them in. I didn’t invite them. I didn’t open the door,
no, no, I just cracked it
because I had to
because they would have banged on it all night if I hadn’t. “
But your face looking through was all the answer they needed.

It’s possible, that in the future, it will make a great deal of sense, to act like a mad fool. In fact, it’s possible, that putting on an antic disposition might successfully get one out of a great many scrapes.

Your job making you crazy? Just act crazy!

Your romance a little on edge? Tip it over with madness!

Your family plucking your nerves? Pluck up and Mad up!

People will give a crazy person a very wide berth – so it creates a great deal of freedom, in a way. The only trouble is, when people think you’re crazy, they start to give you a wide berth and they get a wary look in their eyes around you and then you might find yourself entirely alone, when you hadn’t quite meant to do that.
There were many times when J. was actually crazy, when there was nothing for it but to put him on a bus and send him back to his doctors and familial net – and I watched the strangers on his bus give him lots of room, watched them look at him from the corners of their eyes, saw them hope that the crazy kid wouldn’t talk to them. In one way, he was safe as houses on that bus because no one, but no one, would bother him – but with his mind estranged from itself, he was not safe from himself, even if he was immune to the reactions of the people around him. I, however, was not immune. My heart broke as I saw the world respond to someone I love with fear and trepidation. It’s breaking still.

When does Hamlet conceive of this plan?
This is the first mention of it and he’s had no time to mull, no time to turn it over.
It all happens very quickly –
1) See Father’s Ghost
2) Find out father was murdered by uncle (and also that his dad has to spend time in hell)
3) Discover friends nearby, who also know Father is a ghost
4) Swear friends to secrecy with Father’s help
5) Suddenly, seemingly from nowhere decide to act a little crazy back in their normal lives
It seems like the sort of plan that should be calculated. But maybe, given that he’s already acting a little crazy in this scene, the idea occurs to him as he watches his friends try to solve his mystery. Maybe, in tasting the cake of crazy, he realizes it could be very very useful. Crazy is a cover and a release. He had not made a fuss before now. He’s been polite with his family, taken the loss of father and crown with restraint and political posturing – but now, as the ghost leads them willy nilly around the space, now, perhaps, he sees another way.