No offense
Innocence
In no sense of the word
Noah Fence. No, a Fence!
Horatio
These are but wild and whirling words, my lord.
Bramble, hurricane, vine, tornado, undergrowth, cyclone, lion’s roar, dervishes, naked man in a cave with his beard grown down to his waist, circle wind, cats the size of bears prowling through the trees, stainless steel beaters whipping one thing into another, sweet berries nestled among leaves that hide their treasure from view, pirouette, things with horns and teeth and claws, gears without their pins, even the most civilized under the moon with desire building in the body, a light bit of plastic caught by the wind.
There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave To tell us this.
Ghosts would start to become tiresome
If they were popping out of their graves regularly to state the obvious.
Fog, midnight, big production, SFX, to emerge from the mausoleum and say
“A little chilly out, isn’t it?” or “Love can really do a number on you, can’t it?”
It would get to the point where you’d do anything to keep the dead from rising –
Banalities just don’t suit the no longer living.
In a way, banalities are what make life, life like.
Ay, by heaven, my lord.
I’m sorry. But I’ve got nothing here. As we approach the end of Act I, over a year into this project, (or is it two?) I’ve finally run out of responses. Partly, it’s the repetition. I’ve thought about heaven some and “my lord.”
Ay, perhaps, I haven’t quite dived into Ay.
But Ay, yi.. . . what is there to be said?
Perhaps, though, I’m up against a feeling of futility in my art already and it’s all magnified today. A line like this fails to inspire on an uninspiring day in an uninspiring week.
Not I, my lord, by heaven.
I will be secret. I will keep what you want hidden,
Tucked away in a spot no one has ever found.
I will wrap it up, box it, bury it, fold it into a blanket –
Whatever you require.
Good my lord, tell it.
That one about the ghost and the murder?
That’s a good one. Last time, at the campfire,
Billy peed his pants he was so scared.
Tell it. Tell the one about the ghostly king
Come to haunt his people, wearing armor and his beaver up.
Tell about how he’s doomed to walk the earth
How he spends his days engulfed in purifying flames
Tell the one about revenge and avenging
Tell the one about betrayals and reprisals
Use those words you have
The ones that make us rapt, the ones we can taste
As you say them.
What news, my lord?
News are the things that are new
It’s a plural new.
When we have newspapers, they are recounting of that which is new.
Until this moment, I never thought of where
We get news. News is a product
Something on paper, or in a TV broadcast
Spoken by a serious man in a suit.
When we say it in conversation, to ask for someone’s news
Is to formalize the report a little. It’s like asking for
An update (which is a news report.)
But “what news?” is not far from “What’s new?”
They are, in essence, the same idea –
A check in about what has changed since the last time we connected.
I have discovered , though, that asking what’s new is
A peculiarly American greeting
That America is obsessed with newness –
We name our cities New.
We like products new
We like constantly changing
Ever new horizons
Leaving behind old ideas
Old traditions
Old ways, lines and structures.
Heavens secure him!
Celestial rope tied into celestial knots,
Nestle him into a celestial net
From which he cannot wriggle free
Tether him here with gossamer twine
Or holy handcuffs of heaven.
May flights of angels pin him to his place
Glue him to the ground with Godly glue
Fix him where he stands with All Mighty Adhesive.
My lord, my lord!
There is no contemporary thing we say like this.
We’d call someone my love or my sweet or my dear
Or if we’re being funny we might go so far as my good man
But none of these would serve as a good way to call someone
From a distance. I wonder if it was equally unlikely
At the time this was written. There’s my lord, my liege,
And perhaps this is only with royalty. Not being quite
Familiar with royal etiquette myself, perhaps one might still
Call to a king who might be in peril “My lord!”
It indicates a certain impossibility of speaking someone’s name.
It suggests to me, once again, that Horatio is not nearly so close to Hamlet
As everyone assumes. He seems, in fact, much more
Like an idealized loyal subject (albeit not of this country)
Marcellus calls him lord, too –
But he is Lord Hamlet, to him.
Marcellus calls him by his name.
Heaven will direct it.
A boffo blockbuster
Full of action sequences
Multiple explosions
A tragic love story
A heartwarming family subplot
Starring your big screen favorites,
Beloved by many, known by few.
It’s an old script
Reworked and remade
Multiple times -So many that no one recognizes the old form within it
And the original author is lost to history.
From the people who brought you all your favorite stories,
This new film will give you all the thrills and more.
Directed by Heaven, who’s gunning for an Oscar.