Oh yeah. Compulsive order, giving the charge. Mmm-hmmm.
I mean, what’s funny about this is that it’s such a masculine way to think about lust. I mean- I think, in a man, lust can feel like a compulsion which charges forth. It’s sort of the nature of an erection.
But for women, who are Hamlet’s concern here, I can’t imagine any woman describing her desire this way. It’s more a heat that distracts than a compulsion that charges. It’s more like stepping into a warm pool. You want to swim, of course. Of course you want to swim. The water is warm and all you can think about is how warm the water is and how nice it would be to just sink into it. But it’s not a charge – unless we’re thinking of a charge in the electrical sense – in which case – okay – I can go with that. But even in the electrical sense – it’s not putting your finger in a light socket charge, it’s a bulb on a dimmer – which you can turn up quickly, sure – but you can also turn up slowly.

Here’s hell. Rebellious hell. No less.
It can create a mutiny, an upheaval, a revolution in an older woman’s bones, And if this is possible, if this is so – then youth, in flames already, might as well dissolve all virtue in its hot desire. Go ahead young people, screw your brains out – no holds barred – since an old lady is getting hot with lust, you might as well let it all out – Go nuts. No controls on anyone anymore, kids. Go to it.

Shame’s been trying out some new responses. She’s been at it for years and the same old routine has gotten a little old. You know, head hanging, face and ears red, sometimes even the chest, the foot kicking at the floor.
“I’m tired of doing the same old thing!” shouts Shame. “How about ebullient shame? Effervescent shame? Can’t we celebrate me for a change? People are always trying to banish me, get rid of me. It seems like the only time someone wants to see me is in some one else’s face. They search the other person – “Oh, don’t you feel shame? Come on – blush, hang your head, something!” – but no one has Shame Pride. Shame Appreciation. I declare today Shame Appreciation Day and no one will blush or shuffle their feet today!”

Genius suggests that “mope” here means to be stupefied. The online etymology dictionary implies that it means to be apathetic and listless. I find myself not so sure how to interpret it – it feels to me that it’s more related to impairment. That her senses are more impaired by seeing without feeling or its opposite, hearing without tactile sense or just smelling. That’s the only sense you have. To smell. Which – you know – is PRETTY impaired. I’m not sure how long you’d survive with only a smelling sense.
And really, Hamlet, you DO exaggerate.
Which is interesting.

These lines are usually cut.
Most productions will go straight from apoplexed to “O, Shame, where is thy blush?”
Because this is a whole lot of exaggerated yammy yammy that Hamlet is saying here.
And it does, I imagine, help get him worked up – so caught up in his own exaggeration that he stops experiencing what’s happening in front of him and just gets caught up in a rant so extreme his father has to come back from the dead to check him.
There is a grand build in the rhythm of this line – in all these bits that are usually cut. The meaning might be tricky to get behind but the rhythm, oh, the rhythm!

Rules for Hoodman Blind
As imagined by a 21st Century Geek

1) Find a hood. You can use a sack if you like – but make sure it’s empty of its contents. You’re going to put it over your head and you don’t want to accidentally breathe in onion skins or something..
2) Place it over your head. You may feel sort of creepy about it in this day and age – as the appalling torture in Abu Ghraib has more or less ruined hoods on the head for everyone else. But as long as you don’t tie off the bottom, you should be relatively torture free.
3) In a nice open area, like a field or a meadow, or even a parking lot or playground, set loose a group of people. The hood –man (that’s you, with the hood on) must try and tag someone else. If you are successful at tagging someone. You pull the hood off and shout: “The Hood Man sees!” and the place the hood on the tagged. And then the whole game begins again. The style of player will determine whether it is a quiet sneaky game or high speed run with lots of stumbling. Most players will attempt to fool or taunt the hood man … but don’t worry, the taunts are usually such that they get reckless and risky and you will be more likely to catch a taunter. Patience often wins the game.
4) The game is over when the last hood man tires of it and announces: “The Hood Man Is No More!”

Come on. I mean, come on.
Listen Guy who has been Pretending to be Mad.
You’re saying people in the middle of a mania, who cannot tell reality from illusion, who believe themselves to be Jesus or King George or believe themselves to be the subject on a (link to This American Life) Truman Show–like reality show experiment or who believe aliens are after them and dwelling inside you…you’ve saying these folks would never be so crazy as to choose the alive brother over the dead one? Because that’s the choice. Brother A (Hamlet, Sr.) is dead. You can’t have him except as a corpse and a memory or you can have Brother B (Claudius) who, sure, isn’t a war hero – and maybe (according to Hamlet) isn’t as handsome as his brother but he has several advantages over his brother.
# 1 He is alive.
# 2 He’s King
I think maybe Hamlet is thinking of his own (made up) madness wherein he’s perfectly capable of distinguishing all kinds of differences.

If your sense were separate from yourself and it had its own little seizure…it would be it’s own particular brand of crazy.

But there is no self without sensing. That’s what I’ve learned from Feldenkrais and neuroscience books about the brain and the self…we are what we sense.
We sense therefore we are.
We are because we sense.
Sense a change and the change has happened. Sense your body and your body becomes more available to your will.
So an apoplexy of sense would very likely be an apoplexy of the self.

The reverse is also true –
That you have sense because you have motion. Everything that lives, moves. Even if it is only the breath that animates.
Feldenkrais said: Movement is life.

In order to move with intention, though, you need some sense. You need your mind to say, “Walk now” “Kiss now” “Dance now” before you can do it. And you need your body to listen well to heed those instructions.
Sense and motion.
Mind and movement.
Life.

Probably a very sound one.
Probably one that would prefer to keep her head on, and her clothes on her back and her position in the court and her lifestyle in tact.
The more I learn about royal marriages the less sense it makes to think of them as having any connection at all to love or lust. Trouble would tend to ensue when such things intruded on the marriages of monarchs – as Henry the VIII’s reign might testify to.
Given the limited options open to women – they had to make some very calculating decisions about this one thing – as this one thing might become the ONLY thing they had a choice about. You choose this and all other choices immediately follow on from it.

You gotta be savvy if you’re going to survive the royal monarchy.
Not that Gertrude survives in the end.
But since pretty much no one does, I’m not sure this particular judgment before the play is the cause.

I don’t know if the heyday in the blood gets humble exactly. I don’t sense that it’s sitting in the background, waiting, looking at judgment, going, “No, no, I’m good. You go first.”
I think it’s more like, as time goes by, judgment gets smarter and stronger and cagier at keeping the heyday in check. The heyday still leaps up everytime it sees something it likes: “Oh – that person is hot! That person gave me a look that went straight to the center of my heyday! Those nice words feel good. Let’s go!”
But judgment learns to step in and say, “You know what? I acknowledge your interest in that person. I can see that you would very much like to get out and run free on this. But – let’s recall our circumstances… let’s recall the last person who charmed us like that…Let’s recall previous experiences.”
It’s not as though one necessarily stops lusting after unsuitable people … it’s that we learn how to recognize their unsuitability, along with the attraction.