In the beginning
Of a relationship
It feels important to share everything
Good to reveal
Good to air the trouble
Good to voice insecurities and fears.
It is not yet clear to me
If it is good to continue this policy
As time wears on.

First – this is a CRAZY long sentence. Why?
Second – Hamlet sure has a lot of descriptive details of his mom’s sexual relationship with Claudius. I don’t put any real stock in the Freudian readings of this play. I do not think Hamlet actually wants to sleep with his mother.
However – I can see where that reading comes from. It’s lines like this. It has an erotic specificity. Hamlet is aware of or imagining some very intimate details about his mother’s sex life.
Third – why the bloat King? Is he calling Claudius fat? Actually? Or fat with power? Or is it, perhaps, a way to say he’s full of hot air? Just calling Claudius fat doesn’t seem quite cutting enough.

Gertrude calls Hamlet fat at the end of the play in a way that feels affectionate. To just call Claudius fat would feel a little small and petty. I feel like Bloat has to reference something a little bigger.

Is Hamlet being purposefully obscure here?
Purposefully contrary? It’s, like, double opposites.
What should you do? Not this.
Which this? The this you said before or the this you’re about to say?
And why would you tell me to do something that you don’t want me to do?
It is very unclear.
I wonder if Hamlet himself is a little unclear about his strategy here. I mean, yes, for his mother’s soul, as he sees it, she should quit sleeping with Claudius right away. But – but – actually – it might be good to NOT raise suspicions right now.
And sarcasm is a weird choice for this little moment.
If I were the Queen and Hamlet was like – “Don’t do what I tell you. Tell Claudius I’m just making up this mad thing.”
And meanwhile he’s really acting like a madman, killing someone, imagining he sees the ghost of his father, switching his tactics every 6 lines – if I were the Queen in that situation, I’d have no IDEA what Hamlet was asking me for. The queen seems to understand perfectly well, though, that he wants her to keep her trap shut as that is what she promises to do. But dang, it’s a baffler.

Oh now he’s calling her good?
What the?
He makes his exit lines – his rhyming couplet cap on his blistering speech, the subtext of which is, “You’re a whore, mother.” And then he’s all “one word more, good lady.”
And then changes his tactic entirely.
First, he’s all like – “Abstain!”
And then essentially he’s like, “Actually, that’s bad idea.”
But it’s not entirely clear whether he wants her to not do what he told her to do before or not do what he’s about to tell her to do.
Ain’t nobody “Good” at this point in the play.

Tell it to your girlfriend, sweetie.
If having your father murdered is bad –
This is actually just as bad as what you went through for her. If not actually worse, since the father was killed by an ex-boyfriend.

I mean, sure, your dad was king and his murder was pre-meditated – but at its essence – they are equal amounts of bad. The only difference is that this father’s death is a little bit accidental – but you DID mean to kill someone. So…it’s a nice justification to say that the worse remains behind but I’m not sure it’s entirely true.

People behaving cruelly often think this. And 9.9 times out of 10, it’s bullshit. It’s just cruelty. This especially happens with people “just being honest” as if honesty is a great justification for cruelty. 9.9 times out of ten, it isn’t honesty of any objective sort – it’s just an opinion. And honest or not, it’s cruel to share some opinions. There is a reason we don’t say every thing that comes into our heads.

By this point in the play, even the audience might be clued in to the fact that when Hamlet says “Good Night” he’s probably about to keep talking. It might be the signal for a halfway point in a scene. It’s like Hamlet says, “I’m HALFWAY done talking with you” when he says “goodnight.” I mean, he might as well say, “I’m taking a breath before I keep talking for at least another page.”

Oh, Hamlet. You shouldn’t have! Of all the deaths you could have given me, this one may be the most ignoble. I mean – you really shouldn’t have. I mean, if you had to give me a death – I’d really have preferred one in my sleep or from sex or a glorious one on a battlefield. Instead – this one you gave me is all cagey and stuck behind the drapes with a sword in my guts. I mean. At least it was quick. That’s something.

Hmm. Interesting justification. Yes, yes, heaven made me do it. Heaven is punishing me by having me kill this guy. This dead guy is my punishment. Never mind the punishment this poor dead guy just experienced. Nor the punishment the dead guy will receive in this religion’s worldview given that he had no time to say his last rites.
But yeah, heaven is punishing you, guy who just killed someone, by making you kill someone. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
This is how many a sociopath justifies his ill deeds. All those cult leaders raping under-aged girls are convinced they’re doing God’s will. They are heaven’s minister, cleansing the earth of evil. It is classic, though.

On an episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast  they talked about the amazing properties of the human brain to justify things after the fact. Like the psychologist who learned a bunch of cold reading techniques to try and debunk psychics and started to become convinced he was really psychic after a while, as he got better and better at reading people.
It took a magician to help him prove to himself that he wasn’t, in fact, psychic – but just very good at cold reading.
I think that’s what Hamlet’s doing here. He’s justifying his ass off. Convincing himself, probably even more than his mother.

I should hope so. I mean. You DID murder him.
I sort of want to see a little more penitence than “I do repent.” You just killed your (ex?) girlfriend’s father and your family advisor and a high ranking official. You may have only killed a guy by accident (well – not REALLY by accident – you just killed the wrong one) but you have killed a rather important person to your culture. And without any honor, either, when it comes to that. Killing people through curtains is generally not socially acceptable. I sort of want you to feel a little bit bad about it.

I understand why he kills Polonius. He’s worked himself up into such a state…he’s a firecracker ready to explode – anyone could have startled him into murder given his state of mind. But I want him to feel sorry and I’m not sure this line is quite enough to give me what I want.