Is this why people have an unconscious prejudice for tall people?
Evidence points to an overwhelming advantage to being tall. Perhaps people thought of the distance from heaven as a real thing, that someone whose head reaches further into space must be closer to God, closer to the angels, closer to knowledge, Growing up meaning literally growing up. Getting closer to closer to perfection.

When I was in middle school, I remember watching one of my fellow students do something stupid and thinking, “It’s possible that she’ll never grow out of that. It’s possible that we won’t age into perfection.” Until then, I had believed that growing up meant learning it all, getting closer and closer to perfection with age. But in a flash, I could see how that 11 year old girl was not all that different from the 7 year old girl I’d known and how she might still be the same at 31.

Growing up means literally growing up for a while and then it means something else entirely.

What must it have been like to be one of the boys in the company? To grow up the butt of jokes, to be called young lady by Princes, to have extraordinary text written for you but know that everything you learn now must be cast aside when your voice changes? Did the boys in the company become men in the company when they grew up? Did they “Graduate” from Juliet to Hotspur? Or were they cast off to join other professions? What was the career trajectory? Were little boys brought in to be the boys in Macbeth or Winter’s Tale or trained to be girls right from the start?

Maybe from boy to fairy to teenage girl? And once the transformation began did it continue off stage?
Did boy players behave and dress as girls offstage, too? Hamlet would appear be greeting a boy as a girl here (that, is, assuming that Shakespeare is meaning for us to see the gender of the player who is actually playing the character and not expecting us to imagine that Danish players are co-ed when English players were not.) So curious.

R is a part of the Bear community. Before I met him, I would have thought the Bear Community would have involved either grizzlies, teddies or koalas but R introduced all of us to his fellow Bears through stories and photographs. What became clear in his presentation was how significant his beard was to him. We came to understand that his beard was his identity and marked him as a Bear. He did such an extraordinary job imparting the significance of his beard and his community that when it became clear that he was about to shave his beard off in front of us, we all gasped.
If you’d asked us half an hour before how we’d feel if R shaved his beard, most of us would likely have shrugged, beard, no beard, what’s the big deal?

But now we understood what the big deal was and R handed out false beards to all of us which we solemnly wore (despite how ridiculous we all looked) as we watched him take a razor to his entire identity.

It is remarkable how a man can change so completely the face he presents to the world simply by how he grooms (or doesn’t groom) his facial hair. What must it be like to grow more and more unfamiliar to yourself, day by day, as your face is covered with hair? And then to find a new version of yourself below it when you share it again?

Maybe this is why women get plastic surgery, not on cultural over-valuation of feminine beauty and youth, of course but for beard envy, because we cannot hide half our faces from ourselves with ourselves, and then reveal them again.

I wonder how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern feel about the Players’ reception. Hamlet does warn them a bit about not feeling slighted by the warmth with which he knows he’ll greet the Players. And it is warm.
While Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are also greeted as friends, one might suspect that they are not quite so warmly received but then Hamlet has no reason to suspect the Players of betrayal. It is probably a relief to have a simple transaction. The players show up, Hamlet has them put on a show, they probably all drink together and have a quaffing good time and then the players shove off. Not so complicated and a welcome development.

There seems to be such genuine affection for the Players in these lines. This is not the formal welcome – it is full of knowledge of the company. This one, for example, who Hamlet is glad to see well. Another whose facial hair has changed. He knows these people and seems so genuinely glad to see them. There’s an atmosphere of familiarity that is absent in many of Hamlet’s interactions with others.

And truly, actors can be very familiar. They’re often too familiar. There’s something about the intimacy of a theatrical company that leads to blurring of boundaries, the relaxing of niceties and formalities and just generally creating an atmosphere of permissiveness. It is one of the great joys, as well as one of the great frustrations of being a part of a company of actors.
And one need not join the company to get a whiff of that heady familiar intimacy. Come to the opening night party, go drinking after the show, sit in on a rehearsal you will likely find yourself swept up in the whirlpool of familiarity.

It may be the fact that I’m a theatre artist but the entrance of the Players into this play at this moment is always a great relief. It feels like it releases some sort of tension, that the Players have come, everyone can relax now.

And it does have that effect for a while, everyone has hope that the play will provide a welcome distraction, that it could provide Hamlet a focus in his madness or just shake things up a bit.

The players do put a pin in the balloon of the play here. They collapse the play into something entirely new before they blow the whole thing up again.

The players’ arrival feels like the arrival of a long-awaited friend. And many of my friends are players so it does make some sense.

Is this where we get The Bridge in popular music? Does it come from an abridgement to what came before?
It seems as if Hamlet is making music allusions in this sections so it could well be that he means abridgement musically. That is, he’s singing a song and the players have arrived to sing the next bit. Which is a shift in the tone and sound of the song. Makes sense as The Bridge to me. He and Polonius have been singing the verse and the chorus and the Players take them to the bridge.
If he doesn’t mean it musically, I’m not sure how he means it. The Players are his abridgement, that much is clear.
What the abridgement is outside of a musical context, well, that’s a bit of a mystery to me.

Is he being purposefully obtuse here? Seems likely. I mean, a) using the French for song, a form that is usually secular then b) making that song Pious – It’s just – well, we expect a pious hymn or a pious chorale but a pious chanson? It’s like a pious pop song – not unheard of but still pretty weird.

Then – the first row? Is he saying the first line? The first verse? Or is this an accepted way of talking about music in Renaissance England (or Pre-Denmark pre-Renaissance)? The first bars on a sheet of music might well be called a row; there is a row-like appearance.
This is where music scholarship and literature scholarship might get together and have a conversation. Hell, I know a music scholar, maybe I’ll ask him.

Sometimes I see the structures of moments as jokes. In training actors and directors we often talk about Beats (or “bits” as someone alleged that Stansilavsky was actually saying with his Russian accent.) This whole Jephthah section is a curious beat and if it were a joke, it would seem to fall flat here. The punchline feels like it’s all at the top. Perhaps these quoted lines are a song and perhaps the melody provides a punchline that the strange vagueness of them doesn’t, but with the information I have in front of me, it sort of fizzles out.

Hamlet brings up a man who killed his daughter, calls Polonius that man and when Polonius accepts the offer, Hamlet blocks it and sings a nonsensical song. Maybe it’s a Monty Python sort of joke in which a man at a desk interrupts with something odd instead of ending the sketch.