These most famous lines are the hardest. They make me feel like I should add something meaningful to the discourse around them. Or do something so far out, so irreverent, maybe, that I side-step the discourse entirely. I want to go to cooking or a rug burn in progress. But there’s really nothing there to see once you go there. It’s like a one hit bad joke.

There is, I suppose, a rub in everything if you look closely enough. And sometimes it’s better not to look too closely. The rub may reveal itself anyway. There is many a thing I wouldn’t have done if I’d seen the rub at first.

But even if I’d known it would look like this, if I’d seen the rub of choosing an artist’s life, I’d probably have chosen it anyway.

I dreamed I was directing Hamlet last night. I’d read a bunch of stuff about women directors before bed so I think it snuck into my subconscious and I began directing in my dreams. Going to Directing School took most of the joy out of directing for me so usually these dreams are not pleasant ones. They can be stress dreams, ones I can wake up from in a sweat.

But strangely, despite the fact that directing can be one of the most demanding, stressful things I do, most my anxiety dreams are not theatre dreams.

No, when I truly wake up panicked, it is 9 times out of 10 a Packing dream. I have to be somewhere and I’m already late and I have this entire apartment to pack up in as little time as possible. It could be a plane I’m late for or a show but whatever it is, I have to get a whole lot of things into boxes before I go. As nightmares go, it’s pretty banal. Maybe that’s why dreams don’t really scare me too much. I can handle most of what my brain cooks up.

This morning I had a fairly awful imaginative journey in which all copies of Hamlet were somehow lost and all that remained of it was my Twitter feed where these lines of the play get pasted when I post a blog. I thought how it would be such a difficult task to figure out what the play was if you only had the lines from Twitter. You’d have to figure out which character said what. You’d have to imagine what the rest of the line was after the 140 character limit in the longer sentences. It would be a terrible way to try and figure out the play. But if it were the ONLY remains of it, there would still be great nuggets in even little parcels of text. You’d get this whole line of thought, for example. You’d get: To die, to sleep – to sleep – perchance to dream. Ay there’s the rub.
Which would be quite a bit of awesome even if we lost so much else.

This repetition is one of the reasons this speech can be tricky to memorize. My brain remembers phrases that come after “To die, to sleep – “ and I’m never quite sure I’m on the right one. I’ve never tried to memorize this speech, I’ve just heard it often enough that it’s almost in me, like a song.

I like this line in the Spanish translations I’ve heard and seen. It has its own gorgeous rhythm. Morir. Dormir. I feel like I could just hear those two verbs together again and again for a while.

Consummation is a word I have never heard in relation to anything else but sex and marriage or if not marriage, a relationship approximation of marriage. It’s probably a word like “commencement” – something that has come to really only mean one thing – when it has a broader meaning at its heart.

But let’s assume for a minute that Hamlet’s wished for consummation is of the sexual union variety. It would be a logical assumption – death and sex being already linked to each other poetically through the ages. To die – meaning to orgasm for many many cultures. Songs like “S’io ch’io vorrei morire” (*Yes, I would like to die) are embedded in these sorts of consummations.

So if we assume this consummation so devoutly wished is like a wedding night, who is the bride and who the bridegroom?

I guess I’m just trying to work out where this consummation stuff comes from – it seems like it might be a bit out of the blue. Although the word “Flesh” does come in the sentence before. Maybe that’s the trigger for thoughts of the consummation.

It’s just curious in this speech because while the language is very muscular and poetic, it isn’t particularly erotic. Or is it? I’m seeing this speech in a whole new way now. We’ve got bare bodkins, grunting and sweating, great pitch and moment, Ophelia’s orisons. We’ve all been reading this speech all wrong. It’s all about sex.

I wonder if anyone has ever numbered the natural shocks. I thought about making a list of them myself but then realized how many a thousand really is. I’m not sure I care to think of a THOUSAND natural shocks.

And then there would be the question of which sort of shocks are the natural ones that flesh is heir to. Would they be the physical ones? The heart attacks, the sharp pains in the belly, the sudden loss of breath, the ruptured appendix? Or would they be the metaphoric? We’ve already got heartache on the list. Would we add disappointment?
Betrayal? Despair? Fury?
We are vulnerable to so much and how we bear it, that’s our survival.

There does seem to be a limit of things being difficult before a person will just snap. It’s the accumulation really, layer upon layer of bad news or hopeless conditions. It is actually almost more remarkable how resilient people can be. How they can bounce back from tremendous cruelty or loss or destruction.

There are time in which I feel I will sink under despair built on nothing so horrific, just little moments of hopelessness, just the daily wear of relentless challenges, not the giant kind – just the small. The drip of a small stream of water against a stone, slowly but surely boring a hole through the middle.

We were working on Hamlet in their English class.
The students chose scenes to work on but there was some fall-out, as the groups had varying levels of commitment and interest. One girl found herself surrounded by entirely disinterested scene partners.

So we suggested a soliloquy for her and she chose this one. She dove right into it and we saw a transformation almost immediately. That’s when her teacher told me that this student had struggled with depression that year.

And it’s funny, if I’d KNOWN that, I wouldn’t have suggested this speech. I’d be afraid it would be too close to home. But, in a peculiar way, by engaging with these ideas, she seemed to emerge from a fog.

Is it the comfort of knowing you’re not alone?
Is it the ability to say something to everyone that you couldn’t say yourself, that would worry everyone if you said it out loud? To say something that can feel draped in shame? To say it and say it loud and then get applause for it instead of concerned looks?

I cannot begin to know what was going on in that student but whatever it was, it felt like a testament to the power of theatre, to the power of these words.

At the final presentation, I wept all the way through her performance, even though it wasn’t the least bit sentimental. It was direct. It was matter of fact. Like someone who’s been to the wars and is here to report it back to us.

That outrageous fortune! She can’t be content just spinning her wheel, no, no, she has to get out the slings and arrows, too?

I picture Fortune sitting up on a rock somewhere, bored, with a stack of rocks and a pile of arrows and when she sees someone go by, she just picks up her bow and starts firing arrows at them. When she gets tired of the arrows, she reaches for her slingshot and chucks a bunch of stones at them.

And while she’s having fun, she won’t switch targets. She won’t care if they’ve had more than they can take, she’ll just keep firing. Like Tig Notaro’s last few years with the illness, followed by the sudden death of her mother, followed by another illness, followed by a break-up, followed by breast cancer in both breasts.

Arrow arrow arrow stone stone stone
And there would appear to be no way to stop it. The option here is to take up arms and oppose the onslaught by ending yourself, since there’s not a chance in hell you’d ever get close enough to Fortune herself to make her stop. There’s a sea of trouble between you and while her arrows can fly over it and strike you in the heart, your arrows would fall in and disappear before you cleared the shore. Hopefully there are more options on the table than suffering and ending. Hopefully you could find a way to interest Fortune enough to distract her from firing at you.

To be, or not to be – that is the question;
Well blow me down. Here we are at the most famous line in Shakespeare (possible exception “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?) and I’m utterly fascinated by this punctuation.

Now I want to see every edition of this play, like, ever and see how other editors have punctuated this bad boy. I mean, there is a LOT of punctuation in this sentence and I wouldn’t have thought it necessary. One of the reasons I chose this edition that I’m working with is that they’re not so punctuation crazy. There are editions that seem to be nothing but semi-colons and this one tends to not go the semi-colon route so often. But we have one here. On the most famous line in Shakespeare. Pourquoi?

I like this edition because it generally feels as though the punctuation has been put there for performers to speak it. It is punctuation that tends to serve the speaker. It can sometimes be a directive. In this case, it feels like a very specific directive, like a director, almost, telling the actor how s/he should say it. So it might be the editors saying to the actors say: To be (small pause) or not to be (bigger pause) that is the question (not so big a pause as you might think. Not a period, a semi-colon; don’t full stop here. )
This is a perfectly sensible interpretation, of course, but somehow it feels so specific, it almost feels bossy.