I’m breaking this sentence up. I imagine that some editors do the same. It’s just such a giant bit of text. And not just a lot of words but a lot of complex ideas and a lot of words. So we’ll begin with the fardels and move on to the undiscovered country tomorrow. 
Today, life really does feel a bit like plowing forward under the yoke of something. There’s a way that it feels a little relentlessly difficult. When I was in my 20s, it seemed as if a better way was always around the corner. Everyone seems to be poor in their 20s – even the rich people. Then I noticed that all around me people were doing lots better than they used to be. They got jobs with salaries. They had families. And my life is still very much like it was when I was 25. I’m just as poor, if not poorer – but I have less hope for that being different and fewer people in my same boat. When there is no real hope for change, it can feel like a long hard slog across a muddy field, with a bundle of hardship on my back.   

Thousands of hearings of this speech and I don’t think I ever noticed this brief rhyme in the very middle of it. It’s like a little breath, perhaps at the end of a long sentence and in the middle of a long speech.

Also I have questions about these spurns. Is it that Patient Merit is hanging around and The Unworthy One comes along and spurns him? It’s about taking the spurns right?

“Zounds! I should take it!”

Someone making his quietus with a bare bodkin makes total sense, especially after putting up with that long list of whips and scorns.

Something really can happen to people when they take on a Position. Holding a fancy job title can sometimes create a kind of insolence. I’ve seen normal ordinary people behave like assholes suddenly because they’ve taken on a position of authority. These are usually people who have some discomfort at being in a position of some power so they tend to over-exercise it. Middle managers around the world become tyrants for fear for being seen as weak. Jung’s Shadow Sides emerge quite clearly in the offices of the world.

I don’t have much personal experience with lawsuits (gratefully) but reading Bleak House made me feel like I went through one vicariously. Dickens does such an extraordinary job of taking the reader through the hills and the valleys of a lawsuit. It is the ultimate delay of the law. The case would seem to have lingered on for ages, for generations, for lifetimes and the conclusion of all the stories are wrapped up within the conclusions of the lawsuit. I’ve never read a more vivid account of law. Or its delay.

Despised love was never really my problem. Unrequited love, sure. Apathetic love, yep. Tepid love, yes. Not really anything like love love and let’s not call it love love were the dominate romances. Unrequited love was my hobby. For years, my natural state seemed to be LONGING for someone, pining, wishing.

Sometimes someone I was silently following would surprise me by turning around but we never got in deep enough to get to despising. I can’t think of anyone I’ve loved who I later despised or who I despised that I later loved.

There are those who disappointed me, those who disappointed themselves, those that broke my heart or whose heart I broke. Those that burned bright and those that fizzled out. But if any if them despised me, I don’t know about it. Hopefully, even in all the drama of loving we all tried to be kind to each other.

This is hardly the worst of it.

Contumely, okay, is a bit of scornful speech – which, granted, can cut a person to the quick. But somehow coming from a proud man, it feels a little less painful. I mean, because you can go, “Well, that guy’s proud, maybe too proud, so his putting me down is some weird ego trip.”

Unless, of course, it’s a scornful speech to a proud man, a bit like the proud man getting his come-uppance. . .in which case. . . ouch. You’ve got a long way to fall if you are riding high on pride.

And once again this bit of the speech is so ABSTRACT. Not like. . .ooh, burn on Claudius or whatever. It’s an almost academic remove, this whole section. Baffling almost in its formality.

Most oppressors do not think they are oppressors. And many of the oppressed don’t think of themselves as being oppressed. That’s why that Monty Python bit is so funny.  Oppression is system-wide and people are specific.

Most oppressors think they’re doing good in some way with whatever their oppressive tactics are. Hitler thought he was improving things for everyone.
This is all stupidly obvious.

But it’s making me think of Theatre of the Oppressed. I learned about it in college, when we read Boal’s book in my anthropology class. I loved it. Then years later, I was a part of a Theatre of the Oppressed project and found I had much more complex feelings about it. The first was that identifying as the oppressed didn’t seem to really empower anyone.

Who decides who is oppressed and not? It felt patronizing to say, “Well, you’re oppressed because you live in this neighborhood and you’re that race and you don’t have much money.” The story selection felt like a game of identity politics, a “Who is the most shat upon?”
And while the program brought people together in some ways, the solutions it came to seemed to conveniently leave out the systematic problems people had and instead focused on the micro problems. Rather than thinking about how to battle racism as a collective, it used the collective to think about how to talk to a racist. And there’s nothing wrong with any of it. The participants seemed to enjoy it all immensely and audiences came to see it.

But it all left a very complicated bad taste in my mouth. There are many groups that I identity with that are less privileged than others. Being a woman, for one. Being part of the working poor. Being an artist.
But I have no interest in identifying as oppressed. It feels diminishing somehow Because it comes from outside of me.

We all would, wouldn’t we? Or at least most of us do, most of the time. We bear the whips and scorn until we cannot bear them any more.
Time will have his way with all of us whether we like it or not.

And it suddenly strikes me why this speech is so famous. I mean, it’s good, there’s that. But it’s also very general. The whips and scorns of time hit everyone and all the subsequent phrases of this sentence manage to cover lots of unhappy bases. Hamlet has lots of reasons to be unhappy and he mentions NONE of those here. You could stretch “The law’s delay” to relate to Hamlet’s succession perhaps. . .but it’s a very vague reference if it is one.

Hamlet’s specific whips and scorns are DEATH, and death of a parent no less, his mother’s hasty marriage and his girlfriend’s returning of his letters and not getting to be king when really he should be. And yet he’s talking about proud man’s contumely?

I don’t know. It all adds weight to the idea that Hamlet is giving this speech for the benefit of Polonius and Claudius. I mean, if he were really about to off himself, I feel like he’d be ranting a little more specifically.

In any case, the whips and scorns of time get us all. It is interesting how some of them we feel more keenly as we age and some of them less. Some things cut deeper now than they did when I was an awkward adolescent but I felt every sting of the whip more acutely then.

Watching some middle school students in action today, I was struck by what open wounds they can be, how keenly they feel every tiny thing. Somehow being a pre-teen turns children into princesses, feeling many peas under their mattresses. It’s not so much the whips and scorns of time, with them, but those of their fellow young people.

I’ve never felt that life was too long. If anything, I’ve overdone it on the other side. I can remember saying to the boss of a theatre I worked for (and was agitating for change in): “I don’t have time to waste. I’m going to die. Don’t you realize that? I can’t waste my time in the box office when you contracted me to perform big juicy roles.”

He laughed at me and told me I should take up meditating. I don’t feel that same sense of urgency anymore, or rather, I don’t think, “I can’t do that. I’m going to die someday. I can’t waste that time.” But I do retain a sense of that ticking clock.

Back when I quit that job in which I was being taken advantage of, I was only a few years out of college. I had a sense that I only had a few years to do what I wanted. I think I knew, somewhere deep down, that as a woman who wanted to act, I didn’t have any time to waste. I needed to get all the jobs while I was young. I’d internalized a sense of acting being a bit like gymnastics, that once the bloom was off the rose, there would be no more work. And I wasn’t wrong.

Now, nearly two decades later, I can feel how long my life is and how long it yet still will be. But not so long. Not calamitously long. Just as long as it will be.

First? Punctuation. There isn’t any in this sentence in this edition. Which is interesting after the abundance of instructive punctuation in that first line of this speech in the same text. If you read this line without any commas, it sort of bounds right through and maybe it should. Maybe the regularity of the verse suggests no pausing until “give us pause.” It’s an interesting choice. I feel like some commas might help for meaning but maybe they don’t help for performance in the end. Maybe it’s tried and tested like this.

I’m hamstrung with meaning on this one, too. The line is so rich, so compact and so woven into our culture, I find I can’t sink my head into it directly. Shuffling off this mortal coil? It is a fucking punch you in the face extraordinary metaphor for death. That’s why people use it all the time, why this bit has stuck in the common parlance.

And you have to wonder – where did it start?
How did the good old W.S. come up with this particular metaphor. Is there a concept that it springs from? (See what I did there, coil, spring. . .yeah.) So there’s that. Shuffled off this mortal coil sounding a bit like shuffling off to Buffalo, which might, for some, serve as just as apt a metaphor.

“What dreams may come”? They liked that one so much they made a move with that title. (Was it any good? Did anyone see it? I just remember the poster.)
It all must give us pause really.