Mouthing a speech makes me think of a baby, chewing bread, gumming it, really, since he has not teeth yet. It’s like taking a text and turning it into mush. Except that mouthing also calls to mind an overarticulation, a wrapping one’s mouth around words wider than one needs to – like someone fake biting instead of actually sinking your teeth into it – the way we pretend to eat the hands and feet of children we find adorable.

And now, of course, mouthing has come to mean saying something without voice, without sound, moving one’s lips and teeth and tongue in the shape of words but never voicing them – which is surely not what Hamlet means here – but does have the rather charming quality of somehow connecting up all these ideas into one funny mouthing idea.

While a lot of this is very good advice – speaking the speech, trippingly on the tongue. . . it does seem that Hamlet has given this entire company a bunch of line readings. It is funny that this speech, this advice to the players, is used so often as actual advice when there is really nothing that will kill a performance more quickly than being read a speech and then told to do it the way I did. The “just do it as I did it” technique has never worked, as far as I know. I mean, Hamlet is not a director, he’s a prince, so he’s not really meant to be giving useful advice to the players, is he?

There is a world of Shakespeare studies that proclaims that this speech is Shakespeare’s advice to his own players – that somehow it’s in the play as implicit criticism of all the actors in the company. But surely reciting a speech as it was pronounced to you didn’t work in Shakespeare’s day any more than it does now. And while not sawing the air too much with your hand is generally good advice – and of course, suiting the action to the word, the word to the action is a good idea, I am suspicious of anything said by a character in a play that begins with generally bad theatrical practice. It feels important to remember that this is Hamlet’s speech to the players, not Shakespeare’s. We have here a Prince of Denmark telling a group of traveling players what to do. The Prince of Denmark has written, perhaps for the first time, a bit of theatrical text. He is an amateur playwright, seized suddenly with a page full of advice for the professional artists suddenly charged with delivering the work. I think it’s important to take any advice he gives with a grain of salt.

It’s funny, after so many farewells in this scene, that he doesn’t use one when he actually leaves. This is the exit line instead of the multiple ALMOST exits previously.

This line is, in its way, many repetitions. It’s the most efficient “Go to a nunnery” sentiment – it repeats that idea, and repeats an exit. And, in a way, it perhaps sets you up for another fake-out. Previously, when he went to leave, he came right back. Is there some vaudevillian trope to be played here? Some physical return and exit again after this line? Or playing with the expectation that he’s set up that he’ll tell Ophelia she should go to a nunnery, making as if to leave and then coming back to say more stuff.

That sense of being toyed with might be enough to send me into tears. Maybe that’s how Ophelia gets to this next speech – out of sheer frustration of “Is he staying or going?”

It does feel as though stasis will tend to win. Single people tend to stay single. Married people, even if they split, will tend to stay married. I’ve been in a relationship for coming up on five years and I still feel sort of single – I think like a single person. If I imagine losing my partnership, it feels as though I’d just return to my natural state of individual-ness. I’m 40 and spent most of those 30 years on my own, with a few brief interludes of relationship. I know how to do it. Probably better than I know how to be in relationship.

For many of my friends, though, they default to relationship. When they lose one, they slide quite easily to the next.
We tend to keep as we are. Even though the nature of things is to change.

What if Hamlet were in his rightful place as king and made this pronouncement? What if the law of the land suddenly outlawed marriage? There would be no more marriage. Those that were already married would be grandfathered in, but their marriages would be a relic of the old laws.

What would people do? Would marriage disappear or would it just go underground? How deep is the compulsion to hitch up? Would underground churches spring up? Underground city halls? I would be curious to see the society without marriage. What would it look like if being single were privileged over marriage? Like, if you got a tax break for being single and health insurance and the right to live in the country you wanted to live in.

As a king, you could make this kind of grand social experiment, really see what happens, what might be the results of an entirely radical pronouncement. It’s actually surprising that kings didn’t make these sorts of rules more often.

Why, I have had none yet!
And I may never.
Something I am not entirely sure how I feel about.
But I have been witness to many marriages and also many divorces. I grew up in one. And watching a dear friend be run through the rack of divorce definitively puts me closer to this declaration than at other times. And when I watched my friends get married on the heels of the law finally catching up with the world and making sense, I slipped easily to the other side – to a world of “Everyone should get married! Let’s marry everyone! This is so lovely!”

As a child of divorce, I am on one hand, terribly cynical about marriage and on the other, impossibly romantic. I am partnered with someone who has been through the wheel of both marriage and divorce and if he ever had that romantic idea about marrying – it was ground out of him through the turning of the divorce wheel. And so the balance tips away from romance.

Another friend is waiting for her partner to propose. They’ve already agreed on the marriage. They need it to stay in the same country with one another. But he wanted to propose and she wanted him to have that experience if he wanted it. So now she’s waiting anxiously. Mostly because she’s worried about the paperwork.

There were a few years there in which I was going to weddings all the time. It’s slowed down now. And the divorces are kicking in. And the deaths. I expect there will be at least a FEW more marriages, though.

Love does tend to make people mad. In both senses of the word. Crazy, yes. And also, angry. It’ll pull the mad right out of you, even if you think you have none.

But for me, at the moment, it is not romantic love that makes me mad. No, no, the love that mads me is my damn love for the damn theatre. It hath made me mad, over and over again. Today it hath made me mad that no one can really make a living doing it – no one but a small handful of artists and a world of administrators. It hath made me mad that the most creative and innovative work is made on the backs of people who can’t afford to have children or get health insurance (until recently that is.) It hath made me mad that everyone is so enamored of the glamour of Broadway that they cannot see the theatre in front of them without putting it in a Broadway frame. [“That was as good as Broadway! That show should be on Broadway! This is like Broadway, but different!”]
It hath made me mad with its persistent sexism and racism, with its ableism and ageism.
It hath made me mad with its sunny lies about how great its doing, how well it is, how it’s got some great projects coming up.
It hath made me mad with its promise of inclusion and diversity and the reality of just the most beautiful people making their way to the jobs.
It hath made me mad with its extreme extroversion, with its gladhanding and self-congratulation.

It hath made me mad by not being all that I’d hoped, all that I thought it was, all that I’d imagined.

I’ve mostly moved away from teaching young people. These last two days, I’ve been back in the teaching trenches.I wondered, when I stepped away from it, if I would miss it. I thought maybe I was just burned out – depleted from all the conditions surrounding the work – but given some time away, I would perhaps find my love of it again.

Turns out, I haven’t. Turns out, I’d be very happy to leave it behind me entirely. At least that’s what today’s classes seemed to show me. Two out of three classes were great, ideal examples of the form and its possibilities – but that third one kicked my ass and I suspect that even if it had been GREAT, I wouldn’t be sitting here wondering if I should get back into classrooms on a regular basis. 
No, I don’t miss it one bit. I’d like to find my work in studios now, in quiet places, with quiet people, making art and not discipline.
Teaching in school? Go to, go to. I’ll no more on’t.

This isn’t explicit in the text but for me, this alludes to a kind of cutesiness – a little girl persona that pretends that everything is so adorable and slips into the pose of a finger on her lower lip, a head tilt to the side and a disingenuous “I don’t know” in a small baby voice when asked a question.
I’m not keen on all the misogyny in this play and in this scene especially but I confess to hate this type as much as Hamlet seems to. Girls trying to seem cute and adorable make my skin crawl. They make me want to shake them and say, “Grow some ovaries, girl, and be a damn woman.”
Our culture is always telling boys to grow up and be a man. We should probably quit doing that or popularize the same for ladies.
First up to get some womanly arts: Ophelia.

Does she? We don’t see much jigging or ambling from her and no textual evidence of lisping. Maybe that’s why this line is almost always played as a general you – because it’s hard to picture Ophelia doing any of these things.
I would, though, like to see someone experiment with taking this as direction for Ophelia – finding opportunities to jig and amble, and if not to lisp, well, to try some cute-talk or baby voice. Maybe just that up-talking thing that is so popular these days could count as lisping. Though listening to Ophelia uptalk her way through the play might be impossible to bear.
Maybe if she just did it to Hamlet and talked like a normal person to everyone else.