The clown lives in bafflement. She is best when she doesn’t understand what is happening.

This phrase for example is pretty baffling. I would like to watch a clown try to work out how to tickle someone’s lungs. Or figure out what o’th’sere might be. Or solve the grammar of “lungs are tickle.” Would she find her own lungs suddenly tickling her? That would be a funny clown turn. Clown with tickling lungs. I would watch that show.

What is the journey of the word “humor”? How did a word that once meant moody come to mean comedy? At first blush, I looked at this line and thought, “What would a funny guy want to end his part with peace for? What good would that be?” but then I realized – humorous is suggesting some battling his humors. The bile (Black and Green) the choler, the phlegm and so on, making him angry or irritable or depressive or petulant or snapish or aggressive. And someone running that gamut of moods could absolutely use some peace. And a lot of it.

But how did humorous come to mean funny? How how how? Possible trajectory: to be in good humor meant to be free of all the bad moods – good humors meaning feeling good was often provoked by jokes, so jokes came to be called humor for short, losing the good and becoming almost the opposite of itself in meaning.

And THAT is some scholarly making shit up.

It would be amazing to be compensated for sighs. Being in love is, of course, its own reward but given how hard it can be to prioritize anything else in that state, it would be great insurance to have some payment per sigh situation. So you missed work because you couldn’t bear to be parted from your lover, no worries, every genuine sigh is money in the bank. Rack ’em up. The sighing stage won’t last forever.

Couple this with Flute’s hope that Thisby is a wandering knight and it would seem that knights played a rather regular role in drama of the period. Now, whether that’s Shakespeare’s period or an idea of period’s prior, I am not certain. But at some point there was a certain expectation that knights would show up in a play. Maybe that is what is missing from contemporary theatre. There are simply not enough knights. There are certainly insufficient sword fights – a problem which an increase in knights might go a long way to mend.

We saw a very dull and badly acted As You Like It a few months ago. We left at intermission because dinner seemed much more appealing than more of the same nonsense and we knew how the story turned out. I don’t know how we came to it but at a certain point we thought of Mr. T and how much improved the production would have been by his presence. I mean, sure, it would have disrupted the entire show but a show that banal needs disruption. And at least Mr. T has some stage presence. We thought we might have found a new way to say something sucked. We could just say, “That show could have used Mr. T.”

Knights could be like that, but actually true. I mean, you couldn’t actually get Mr. T to play King Lear but you could throw a knight into a tepid production of ‘Night Mother or a floundering Glen Garry Glen Ross. No explanation, just send a guy in armor galloping across the stage at some point, with foil and target.

Is Hamlet already getting his idea to stage The Mousetrap right here? It seems unlikely – though it is often played that way. I wonder though if this line is more about welcoming another king since the king he’s got now is so problematic. It might be such a relief to greet a pretend king in a moment when the local king is trouble.

Hamlet wouldn’t be the first person to have greeted an actor as if he were the person he represents. This paying of tribute to the Player King is partly a joke, I imagine and partly a show itself. That is, Hamlet might happily pay tribute to a player when he might avoid any tributes to the actual king. The very act might be a relief to finally get to welcome a king without complication.

I am wrong about Guildenstern and laughing in this bit. I just glossed right over the “ye” in this sentence I have always heard it as you, read it as you – just assured it was you. But it is “ye.” So Guildenstern must have laughed too and Rosencrantz answers the charge.

It is amazing what one little word can do to change things. A Guildenstern who laughs is very different Guildenstern than one who doesn’t.

Is this a gay joke? Or the nipping in the bud of a gay joke in the works? It is very often played that way. Or maybe it’s just a generic averted sex joke. A sort of “Maybe men don’t delight you but I know a woman in Wittenberg who’d delight you no end.”

In any case, it’s another clumsy move by Rosencrantz. Hamlet’s pouring out this serious poetic exploration, full of truth and darkness and depth and Rosencrantz starts in with a lascivious smile? Or at least one that Hamlet can interpret as such.

We’re both a little bit more and a little bit less than dust. We’re made up of particles even smaller than dust. We’re a collection of tiny parts, just like everything else. But as tiny collections of particles go, it is hard to argue that we’re not a particularly remarkable collection.

I’m particularly struck by the wonder today. I had a Functional Integration lesson and it was one of the profound ones. One in which I learned a new way of walking, one which I was surprised to discover that all of my previous walking had come from my ankles. And no wonder my ankles started giving me trouble ten years go – it is amazing that they haven’t been much trouble recently. Our brains! Our bodies! How and why did I learn to walk this way? Or rather that way – as I will no longer be walking that way in the future. Something as simple as walking really is rather a miracle.

While doing some Feldenkrais with someone yesterday, I discovered an interesting quirk he had. I can’t recall what it is was now – something simple like his arms moving in radically different ways. And I was delighted, interested and curious about this quirk. It made him unique. Another practice might encourage my seeing this particularity as an error, something to be corrected or eliminated, smothered over. The culture, for example, would steer us all toward an ideal. But it is fantastic to be delighted by the differences between us. To enjoy them. How a stooped and aged body can be just as express and admirable as a model. This practice helps me find every person a piece of work, every person, the beauty of the world.

And it’s not just Feldenkrais that has taught me to see this way. About four years ago, I watched a great many episodes of Doctor Who, all in a row. I found myself moved by the Doctor’s love for humans, and not just when they’re being nice and doing sensible things. He loved humans when they were being exceptionally human. When someone made a foolish choice, he would shake his head, cluck his tongue affectionately and say, “Humans.” (This was the 10th Doctor, for those of you who know about these things.)

And the stupider people were, the more he loved them. It seemed to me that he loved humans not in spite of their imperfections but because of them. The Imperfect Beauty of the World.

Damn you, Hair! I cannot read this line without singing the melody. And because the song got into my brain first (I had the soundtrack and was in a production as a teen) it makes it seem like the Shakespeare is wrong.

I feel like it should be “why it appears no other thing to me” because that was the lyric. I guess it scanned for the melody better. I think it would take MANY performances, rehearsals, repetitions of speaking this correctly before the correct text would seem right. It is a startlingly beautiful line, both the most delicate description of the air and the most horrible.

Lines like this are one of the reasons this play stands out. In Hamlet, Shakespeare had the perfect conduit for painfully beautiful language. It’s perfectly pitched, not ornate or beautiful for beauty’s sake. It is a string of juicy words that also serve a clear purpose.