I love when this is played as a joke
Though I see why it mightn’t be.
When these two characters’ sense of where a dead person might be contradict each other – it’s this happy collision of the intellect with the supernatural.
Horatio quite literally just saw Hamlet’s dad.
In Hamlet’s experience, there’s no way to see his supernatural father anymore –
But somehow, I love a Horatio who reels around looking for a ghost.
Despite the fact that he is reported not to be passion’s slave
I love when he’s a little jumpy. After all, his entire world-view has just been up-ended.
Things that he held to be fantasy have walked right before him, chilled his very marrow.
If he looks to see what isn’t there,
He’s become who he wasn’t
He’s transformed by his experience in scene 1.
I like a play that is an ever widening gyre of transformation.

Yesterday, I was thinking of my father’s wedding
Remembering what it was to be 12 and watching domestic disaster strike
in stepwalk slow motion.
I thought, briefly, of the one session of therapy they sent me to
(“Why do I have to go to therapy? You’re the one with the problem!”)
Which made me realize that I didn’t know which came first
My father’s wedding or my mother’s moving in with her boyfriend, me in tow.
One followed the other so closely that my memory cannot distinguish
One from the other.
I know that my mother told me across a table
at a restaurant with the word “Dutch” in the title.
She told me with the same tone my father had told me about the divorce 8 years earlier, like she expected me to be upset
But because this move meant leaving our house with no plumbing
or phone or friends for the comfort of the city, I was delighted.
At first, anyway.
That was before I understood what living with a man who wasn’t my father, meant.
I had some suspicions about what living with a woman who wasn’t my mother might be.
My future stepmother had already revealed some fairly fairy tale like
stepmother behavior before she’d even taken the job.
But the effects of a formerly cheerful fellow suddenly taking up the reins
of a pseudo stepfather were slow to shake the foundations.
My father’s wedding: an earthquake
My mother’s submission: an aftershock
Or a premonition
One following another
Following the other.

It sounds like a show put this way. Like there’s an admission charge
And a box office to buy tickets for the ritual.
What if people did buy tickets for funerals?
What if they were spectacles for which you angled to get a comp
Or got a wealthy patron to make a donation so you could accompany him to the funeral?
Theatre is a ritual, too.
But it’s a very expensive one around here
And after I’ve paid my admission fee, it often feels like an empty one
Like the funeral of a man that no one liked but we still have to go.

Is this a joke?
Did Horatio just make a joke?
Did Hamlet not get it?
Or is it a sort of self-effacing comment
Meant to lower his status in the eyes of those around him?
We’ve all just met Horatio and we already know he’s the least truant-y man around.
Is it perhaps a very bad lie?
Is it an attempt at evasion?
Was Horatio sent for?
Hamlet never asks him and Horatio only volunteers
That he came to see the funeral.
A truant disposition – well, no one with an actual truant disposition would say so.
Those that wriggle out of their obligations and slip the hook
Of their responsibilities would never own up to their evasiveness.
A slippery fish, once caught, will slip free again
Very easily
Sliding from a hand to the floor, to the water
Again and never look you in the eye.

Who could I say this to?
To whom would I be willing to be a poor servant?
I love – and love heartily and willingly –
I will give as much as I have, as much as I can
But could I indenture myself to someone I love?

How about something?
I feel like a poor servant to Art.
I show up in my dirty maid’s dress and apron, coal dust under my nails
Hands raw from scrubbing and I say to Art,
“Is there anything else I can do for you?”
And when art sends me to the scullery
To peel sacks of potatoes for its banquet
(to which I will not be invited)
I bow and say, “Of course. Right away.”
I will sit in that scullery,
A thin shawl wrapped around my shoulders,
Sliding peels into a bucket,
Feeling grateful for the work.

Horatio will call Hamlet “Lord” in every line in this scene.
Hamlet calls him “my good friend” and “fellow student”
With seeming great warmth
But every time
Horatio calls Hamlet “my lord.”
Did he do this in Wittenberg?
When they were sitting in Philosophy ckass
Debating the nature of time,
Did Horatio say, “Pardon me, my lord, but your theories
Are full of shit and completely unfounded.”?
At the late night parties, when Hamlet struggled to keep his feet in order
after a bit too much ale,
did Horatio say, “My lord, you’ve puked up on your jacket, hug not me!”?
It’s a curious formality among friends
Even if one of them is a prince.

I wonder though, if this is a result of being on the Prince’s home turf.
Horatio, not a native Dane,
Isn’t sure how to behave suddenly –
Like someone in a fancy house
In which the rules of etiquette are quite different
From what he grew up with.
Is Horatio holding up the salad fork, wondering
What do with it?
Bowing at the wrong moment?
Afraid to make a dent in the cushy sofa
So he sits on the edge
Bolt upright
Nodding “yessir” and “Nossir”
And knocking over his drink.

Horatio speaks of our loves
Plural.
It’s clear that he loves our Hamlet
But I’m not so sure about Marcellus and Barnardo
We never really see them again.
If they love Hamlet, too,
Where are they as this play evolves?
Devolves?
Is this, in fact, some kind of royal “our”
Or do subjects, just as a rule,
Love their prince?
Our hour has come to
Meet this beloved Prince with
Duty and love. We’ll all be acquainted shortly.

Now I’m talkin’ like a fairy. Or a poet.
I’m anthropomorphizing the moon
Sending it walking over dewy hills
Dressed in red robes.
One night with a ghost and I turn poetic.
In an instant.
This makes sense, though, right?
After an enormous shock, you do
See things differently
The branches of a tree stand out
The smell of wild grasses strikes you
When it hasn’t before
You see the circular math of roses.
What is a poem but a close –up on a moment
A close up, like a camera
But with words.
A poem amplifies
Or miniaturizes
Those things that might otherwise disappear into the scene.
It is that one blade of grass
The one bending toward you like a courtier
Heaving under a dew drop.
It is that moon, dressed in reddish brown
Gliding over a hill.