Almost every company of actors I’ve ever been a part of would have made a great deal of fun of “finger’d their packet” – but maybe it was just the company of Hamlet I was in, especially. We were, after all, pretty young and dirty jokes were our bread and butter. Not really my bread and butter – but the bread and butter that held the group together.

In that company, both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were both played by women – so there was some extra frisson to the idea to the idea of Hamlet fingering their packet.

I like that fingering has meant so many things over the years – in this case, stealing and/or pickpocketing. I’m not sure when fingering as a way of snitching on someone came in to play – I suspect it was in the Al Capone era. And of course there’s the bread and butter actor’s dirty mind of fingering someone.

The image I have of this moment is Hamlet in pitch black, feeling his way through the ship, stumbling into chairs and tables, pulling back blankets on sailors and other passengers before finally feeling some distinctive feature of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Or maybe they’re the only two sharing a bunk or something – so he could know immediately upon seeing their two bodies huddled together with fear and complicity.

I have, in the past, felt kind of bad for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern but in the current political climate, I see complicity rather differently than I once did. I don’t feel so bad for these guys anymore.

There seems to be not much agreement about what this sea-gown is. Depending on the source, it is a sailor’s tunic, a nightshirt worn at sea or the fog.
I like that there might be special clothes for sea voyages and that they’re called gowns. I also like the specificity of how Hamlet is wearing this gown. Scarf-d about him suggests to me he’s either tied the gown on with a scarf – like belted it or just sort of tossed it around his neck. It gives him a sort of cavalier feeling. What does he care for actually fastening his clothes? He can just scarf them on, just drape them over himself as he gropes in the dark, like a guy with his jacket draped over his arm, ready to fly if he has to.

I used to really believe this. It was quite comforting to think that some divine hand was pulling the strings around me, guiding me to some magnificent fate. It allowed me to move with great confidence, convinced that the universe had my best interests at heart. But then I ran into a rough patch and I couldn’t understand why the divine hand let me down, had sent me to a place that did not push me forward, that seemed to throw me into the dark forest. When I emerged, I had lost my belief in the divine and felt entirely rough-hewn.

This is a weirdly complicated sentence for what seems to be a fairly simple thought – which is that sometimes it pays to be rash and/or indiscriminate.
But the thought bounces hither and yon.
Like, what is “let us know” doing in the middle of this sentence?
And what is rashly related to, grammatically speaking?
Is this fragmented phrasing suggestive of his fighting heart that would not let him sleep?

And I bet mutineers in shackles don’t sleep so good either. What I love about this sentence is that it has the flavor of nonsense. Like it sounds a little bit like the jabberwocky. Soley based on sound, the mutines in the bilboes could easily be in the Jabberwock’s forest.

I wonder if this was a common phrase of the time – an idiomatic but commonly recognized image – or one that Shakespeare invented. If he invented it, it is a funny moment for this series of sounds. I know the image makes sense – especially since Hamlet is talking about his experience on a boat – but the sounds have a silly quality. I don’t object to silliness one bit. In fact, I applaud it mightily.

But if it is silliness, what is it trying to accomplish? I suspect it’s Hamlet embroidering the story for Horatio – performing it, really.

The most succinct description of insomnia ever.

When it happens to me, it is a bit of a battle.
“This thing is worrisome!”
“It’s fine. We’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
“But I need to figure it out now!”
“There is nothing you can solve now. You have to let it go for a few hours and then when we wake up, we’ll tackle it.”
“But what about -?”
“Sleep is the only answer.”
“But I just have to think about this one thing.”
“That thing you already thought about 16 times? Yeah, I think we can safely say you thought about that already. It’s sleeping time.”
“But.”
“Sleep.”
“But.”
“Sleep.”
And so on and on.

I have a tendency to read multiple books, plays or stories at once. I watch several TV shows. It generally seems normal to me to bounce around from narrative to narrative. But it suddenly struck me that when I do that, my brain has to retain the circumstances of many stories at once. When I dive back into a novel, I usually take no time to acclimatize. I almost never really want to see the “What happened last week” teasers on TV. I just remember the circumstance usually.

These moments are rather uncharacteristically vague for Shakespeare – and for Hamlet. “So much for this” (What was the this?) and now for “The other”?
We can guess at what these two things are referring to but there isn’t any real evidence for what the this and the other are referring to.

Perhaps this is to suggest an intimacy between Hamlet and Horatio wherein they share private chat that even the audience is not privy to. They can speak in code. The way that the Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks characters do in Broadcast News.

 

Is there a resource for finding the origins of phrases? Many times, the origin – or the first known use of something – is, in fact, Shakespeare.
This one, though – seems like it might go way back – while simultaneously feeling incredibly contemporary.
“So much for him” often gets a laugh in Claudius’ speech at the top of this play.
So much for so much for so simple and so elegant.