It is unfortunate that so many of us can only see through the images of our own causes. It’s like we’re all wearing lenses that filter out anything that is not our experience. The self-oriented glasses reframe everything to ourselves.

It is a tremendous obstacle when trying to teach empathy. Why care about someone who is different from you, who has different life experience?

Hamlet shouldn’t have to have an epiphany that Laertes’ experience is like his. It would be great if he could recognize Laertes’ grief for Ophelia separate from his own. But in the moment, he can’t. So he has to backtrack to understand how Laertes’ situation is so like his.

You sure did, Hamlet.
You sure did.
You jumped in his sister’s grave and challenged him to a grief-off.
That was some serious self forgetting.

This is a good line to give to students, actually – one of those that can be introduced as “there is almost no agreement on what the heck Hamlet is talking about here. It may be very simple. Or it may be very complex. What do you think Hamlet means here?”

And then just let them bat it around for a while. There are no words that are particularly challenging – it feels simple. Though it isn’t. I feel I’d enjoy watching students wrestle with its possibilities. I know there would be students who would be as certain as they could be that they knew the answers. There are always such students.

But none of us can be certain.
We don’t know what this “one” is referring to is.
The number? A self? A life? A moment? An interim?

There’s a potency in this sentiment. Hamlet feeling his power, his moment. He has taken possession of time itself for this interim period. I wonder what he imagines he will do with this potent moment. In the end, he acquiesces to the king’s request and whatever plan he has is lost in the events that follow. But in this moment, he must have something in mind, something that makes him feel emboldened and ready to take on the world.

When I was on tour – the year-long one – it started to feel like a tour of duty at a certain point. As the end of our contract drew nearer, one of the actors began saying, “I’m getting short.” It’s apparently a military term for nearing the end of an engagement. I don’t know how he knew that. He’d never been in the military and I think his dad was in the CIA – which is not the same. But maybe they use the same terminology? I should ask my friend who used to say that. I think we all began to say it at a certain point, as the end drew closer and we drove one another more and more crazy.
But then, of course, I mourned the loss when it was all over.

Slippery slope, this.
I mean. Morally, yes.
One fully understands why killing Hitler before he can kill anyone is a perfectly acceptable thing to do. It does feel moral to kill a killer like him before he can kill.
But to be damned for it?
Let’s say you had a chance to kill Hitler and you didn’t do it. You wanted to. You felt it was the right thing to do but your stomach turned so at the thought of murder, that you failed to turn the knife. Would this God punish you for such a failure?
I mean – it seems to me that the law of the religion is pretty clear. It’s “Thou shalt not kill.” Period.

Not – ‘Thou shalt not kill unless the person you’re killing is a villainous killer, in which case you are obligated to kill. So don’t kill unless you really have to and if you really have to and you don’t, then you’re looking at an eternity in the damnation machine. Clear?”

It is rather a long list of grievances.
Claudius has really done some A+ work as a villain.
The phrase I’m most interested in here is the one about popping in between the election and Hamlet’s hopes.
First, because this is one of the most explicit references to the question of succession that hangs over the play but is rarely addressed directly.
Second, the “election” sounds like a democratic process but it is certainly not in this case. In fact, it illustrates how we got such a word as election and how its roots are in powerful men choosing a single powerful man to be their figurehead – and it is that way still in so many ways.
Third, popping is such a light word for what the results are. It is an interesting choice for the action. Claudius just pops in where Hamlet should have been and the whole succession committee was like, oh, it’s you? Oh, okay – fine. Next order of business!

This is a rather halting beginning to a speech that gets quite forceful and direct after it. His charges against Claudius are clearer than at any point previous in the play – but this introduction to it stops and starts. It has a jumpy quality. I mean, sure, it’s pentameter – but it’s not exactly iambic and it feels a bit like he’s interrupting himself. I wonder why.

It rarely works like this.
The toadying suck-ups to authority rarely see consequences beyond their own loss of self respect.

If there were a physical expression of Hamlet’s line here, it would be a big rain cloud of destruction. Every time Rosencrantz or Guildenstern insinuated himself into the corrupt orbit of the king, the cloud would get a little bigger. The destructive storm cloud would hang there over them, sucking up each suck up like an anteater sucking up ants. Soon it would become so full it could do nothing else but rain destruction over them.

If our conscience were in an actual physical location, it might be easier to recognize when someone was without one. We could run them through the MRI machine, check for the conscience – and if they are without , we don’t let them become politicians or doctors or any job with people’s fates on the line. I mean – there are very few jobs that a conscience-free person SHOULD have. A conscience tends to come in handy in every profession. But – some more than others.