The amazing thing about this strategy is that it works. Or rather, it works in this play. In real life, I’ve almost never seen someone use art to communicate something and have it directly understood. I think of all the love-sick mix-tapes I made as a young person. I was trying to say something (usually, “I LOVE you!”) and also trying very hard to mask it. So I’d put on “You Do Something to Me” and immediately follow it with The Smothers Brothers doing “The Streets of Laredo” and somehow expect my listener to both know I loved him and also be able to claim innocence in case he wasn’t interested. (And he usually wasn’t. Mix-tapes not usually being the thing that’ll win a man’s heart.)

I’ve watched people watching shows or movies that would seem to be exactly what they were struggling with and they can somehow emerge unaffected by the similarities of their lives and the characters. There have been many times in which I have been stunned by how the personal connections sail right past them. But Claudius gets it right away. Hamlet sets The Mousetrap and Claudius goes for the cheese and gets caught. Hamlet sets it up as a test and it totally works.

Which does remind me of that time I wrote a song about a man I liked and years later, after I didn’t really like him anymore, I played that song at a gig he happened to attend. And he totally caught it. He came up to me and said, “This may be one of those – ‘You’re so vain you probably think this song is about you’ situations. But I sort of thing that song is about me.” So sometimes Art does say what you meant it to say. Just maybe not when you meant to say it.

Grounds is a very funny word. In this case it is most clearly linked to the legal sense of grounds, as in grounds for arrest, grounds for divorce, etc. But where does that come from? A sort of metaphorical sense? That you must be able to stand firmly on the thing – that you need ground enough to stand on?

The college in my hometown calls its campus The Grounds, which gives it a sort of stately mansion feel, as one does tend to wander the grounds of a nobleman’s estate.

And then, there are coffee grounds, as in something that has been ground up, I guess. That is probably not a place where you stand.

In a world with devils in it, this is a very logical and reasonable thing to consider. And why shouldn’t the Ghost be a devil? It’s already supernatural to have a Ghost appear; why not go an additional step and have a devil ghost?

In fact, what if, even if what the ghost says is true (and we have to assume it is, based on Claudius’ soliloquy) it were still a devil? After all, this play does end in a TOTAL tragedy. The entire Danish court is murdered. Every single one. As a diabolical plan, this one is pretty good.

Maybe it doesn’t end up with everyone going to hell – (it’s possible that Hamlet and Laertes escape the tormenting flames due to their exchange of forgiveness but otherwise,) the devils would seem to have racked up a nice list here.
1) The old king Hamlet (all his sins upon his head)
2) Polonius? (This one’s a toss-up. We have no real evidence of his sins.)
3) Ophelia (drowning yourself being a one-way ticket to hell)
4) Gertrude (assuming she had a hand in at least one of the things going on around here – adultery, maybe? Accessory to murder, possibly? Standing there watching Ophelia drown herself maybe?)
5) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Just for being toadies, I’d say. Though maybe they get a second to absolve themselves before they get beheaded.)
6) Claudius (big score there)
In terms of creating mischief, this is great devil’s work. In terms of upping the population of hell, it’s also pretty damn good.

It suddenly occurs to me that Hamlet might really be hoping that Claudius won’t blench at this point. (Not that I’m entirely clear what blenching is, now that I really think about it. I’ve always thought of it as a kind of blend between flinching and turning white.)

But his course really ISN’T a pleasant one. Of course he doesn’t want to follow it. Kill his uncle? I’d certainly be hoping that this little theatrical test might let me off the hook. Of course, that’s me. I’d be looking for any out I could find.

I have heard this speech hundreds of times. I have read it over and over again. I have even memorized it and performed it. But I don’t know if I ever really gave this line much thought. Looking at it on its own, it feels like I’ve never heard or seen it before.

Out of context, I would think if I were attempting to tent a man, I would be attempting to get his manhood to stand to. Or if not raising the tent pole, tenting him might be to provide him shelter. Tents are seemingly the same idea for Caesar and Antony as they are for us, though without the zipper and high-tech fabrics, of course.

But in context, it seems tenting has an entirely different meaning, one that is perhaps more related to attention than tee-pees. To tent someone to the quick might then be a way to attend to them so closely, you could almost see inside them.

Sometimes that’s what doing Feldenkrais feels like. Just attending to someone so closely you can almost read their minds *but of course, you are simply (or rather not so simply) reading their bodies and movement.

Eye-tracking technology is particularly fascinating. It is the most precise way to observe someone’s looks, that is, their eye movement. It’s the way to know what they are looking at, which can provide a window into how they think. Turns out that what we look at first gives some indication of our worldview.

For example, in an aquarium scene, the western eye will spot the big fish first. The Eastern eye will see the coral first. And this holds up metaphorically. Western culture is definitely more interested in the Big Fish than the bigger culture.
If I had my life to do over again. I think I might want to be a scientist so I could work out a study that helps us understand each other through our eyes, through our looks.

We saw a production of King Lear Saturday night. It’s one of my boyfriend’s favorite plays but even so, after it was over, he said, “What’s up with the word nuncle?” For some reason it gives him the willies. Then he found an on-line dictionary definition and clicked on the pronunciation audio file again and again – until it became, like a dance hit featuring “nuncle, nuncle, nuncle.”
Anyway – while I understood nuncle to essentially mean “uncle,” I hadn’t worked out that it was rooted in the elision of “mine uncle”, that “mine uncle” sounds very much like “my nuncle.” And I thought, “how many occasions are there to discuss “mine uncle,” really?” It wouldn’t seem to be an excessively used phrase.

But then of course, this is a perfect opportunity. Hamlet has many occasions to talk about his uncle and with good reason. It does seem good, though, that he’s not going to stage a play about his father’s murder for his nuncle. Nuncle nuncle nuncle.

Murder has this publicity problem. He does really great work. Every day someone takes another person’s life and Murder can’t say a thing about it, despite the fact that he’s a very successful anthropomorphization. But he’s a tricky guy, Murder. He knows how to get the word out about his work and the people who do it for him. Sometimes it’s with DNA. Sometimes it’s with spontaneous confessions at plays. Sometimes he has to wait a while – until the body rises to the surface of its shallow grave or until the paperwork suddenly reveals a surprising trend. But he has hopes that sooner or later, his work will be recognized. He hates to labor in obscurity.

Has this ever really happened? Was this a real thing?
The only time I’ve ever heard of it has been in plays. It strikes me as a thing we theatre people WISH would happen when we put on plays. We’d like to imagine that our work has so much power that guilty creatures would overcome all bounds of propriety, stand up and confess. We’d be better than church that way. And put on even better shows.

But we live in a culture of stories now. A guilty person might not be able to get through a day without encountering a story related to the thing he’d done. Now, a murderer must be immune to this sort of thing if he hopes to get away with his crime. Perhaps, 400 years ago, it might catch you by surprise and trigger an involuntary confession muscle.

The Hamlet that I think of as my Hamlet – the one in the first production I was in (not yet my own performance. That will be my Hamlet but before then, this was and is the guy) said this line without the comma. He gave us the sense that thoughts and fumes were circling around in his head making trouble.

I don’t know how I feel about this comma here.
It seems to make the line a command to his brains, like he were a military sergeant commanding his thoughts to About Face.