I am curious about these moments when Hamlet starts to speak of himself in the third person. I can think of at least one other one and suspect there may be more. I wonder if Third person speech is a signal for a Royal self. Certainly the First Person Plural functions that way but there is a similar distance in Third Person Singular. There’s the distancing effect for one – that the Prince can speak of the Prince as a separate entity from himself. He might be more able to make pronouncements, to deliver commendations and formal obligations. This sentence shifts from First to Third and in a way creates a Second self in the Second part. Psychologists analyzing Hamlet must use this line in their theses. I don’t speak Psych – I don’t have a sense of what’s in the DSM – but I think this might be an example of disassociation which might be necessary for all that has happened and is about to.

I think we know what a ghost’s perturbéd spirit feels like because our living spirits are so easily perturbéd or at least mine is.
I recall a time when I was pretty unflappable, when rejection rolled off my back like water off an umbrella – that is, it still rained but I didn’t get so wet. I could walk into the wind, face down storms, moving ever forward, toward something I could not give up, would not give up. Sure, I would cry easily, could feel the slightest slight like the princess felt the pea through 20 soft mattresses but I cried as I walked, watching the road under my feet.
At some point, though, the road got so muddy I couldn’t see it anymore and there were times when I had to sit down on a rock, soaked through to the skin.

This is either a threat or a prayer,
I’m not sure which.
Swear not and mercy and grace might well abandon you when you need them most – which would give a whole lot of power to this particular swearing. Or perhaps, once it is all sworn, an extra blessing of mercy and grace might fall on you in your hour of need. Either way, blessing or curse, it is contingent on swearing.

Ambiguous giving out is the worst –
The opening of a door, meant to be closed but you stand at it, latched and opened a crack, space enough for a whisper
A letter, a gesture, a thought,
Space enough to just touch
Space enough to persuade
Space enough to break through a weak chain.
You can say, “I didn’t let them in. I didn’t invite them. I didn’t open the door,
no, no, I just cracked it
because I had to
because they would have banged on it all night if I hadn’t. “
But your face looking through was all the answer they needed.

It’s possible, that in the future, it will make a great deal of sense, to act like a mad fool. In fact, it’s possible, that putting on an antic disposition might successfully get one out of a great many scrapes.

Your job making you crazy? Just act crazy!

Your romance a little on edge? Tip it over with madness!

Your family plucking your nerves? Pluck up and Mad up!

People will give a crazy person a very wide berth – so it creates a great deal of freedom, in a way. The only trouble is, when people think you’re crazy, they start to give you a wide berth and they get a wary look in their eyes around you and then you might find yourself entirely alone, when you hadn’t quite meant to do that.
There were many times when J. was actually crazy, when there was nothing for it but to put him on a bus and send him back to his doctors and familial net – and I watched the strangers on his bus give him lots of room, watched them look at him from the corners of their eyes, saw them hope that the crazy kid wouldn’t talk to them. In one way, he was safe as houses on that bus because no one, but no one, would bother him – but with his mind estranged from itself, he was not safe from himself, even if he was immune to the reactions of the people around him. I, however, was not immune. My heart broke as I saw the world respond to someone I love with fear and trepidation. It’s breaking still.

When does Hamlet conceive of this plan?
This is the first mention of it and he’s had no time to mull, no time to turn it over.
It all happens very quickly –
1) See Father’s Ghost
2) Find out father was murdered by uncle (and also that his dad has to spend time in hell)
3) Discover friends nearby, who also know Father is a ghost
4) Swear friends to secrecy with Father’s help
5) Suddenly, seemingly from nowhere decide to act a little crazy back in their normal lives
It seems like the sort of plan that should be calculated. But maybe, given that he’s already acting a little crazy in this scene, the idea occurs to him as he watches his friends try to solve his mystery. Maybe, in tasting the cake of crazy, he realizes it could be very very useful. Crazy is a cover and a release. He had not made a fuss before now. He’s been polite with his family, taken the loss of father and crown with restraint and political posturing – but now, as the ghost leads them willy nilly around the space, now, perhaps, he sees another way.

Followed by eight beats of walking perhaps?
At least, this version of the text suggests it might be so.
It’s not the MOST compelling pause in a metric universe.
One might be inclined to tack these two syllables on to the previous line
Or the subsequent,
To cheat, as it were,
With the verse.
Or even – and this is my preferred one:
But come. Here as before,
Never, so help you mercy. . .
Which leaves us four beats of silence
Then three, rather than eight all at once.
In eight beats, I want the world to shift, for emotions to erupt
For silence to be the only choice – that or wailing –
With four and three
We can just take a breath.
Run a few steps.

There must be many dissertations categorizing exactly
What Horatio’s philosophy must be.
I remember from some class or text that he’s a stoic.
I’m not sure what such a theory is based on. Horatio doesn’t, as a rule, have a lot to say. Hamlet does the bulk of the talking in this relationship, so there’s not a LOT to go on.
We are given to understand that Horatio’s philosophy does not generally include ghosts but what else has Hamlet learned in the conversation with his dead father that has no place in the philosophy? Murder? Fratricide? Hell?
I would wager that there are both fewer things and more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in any philosophy. Philosophy being an attempt to organize the world into sense and the world being the sort of place that tends to defy stringent organization.

Those sorts of visiting rules of etiquette get used so rarely here in this urban landscape. When your apartment is too small even for the people who live in it, it’s tricky to make space for strangers or even friends.
You meet in the bar
Or the café
Or not at all, eventually.
There are times, though, when I miss the opportunity to play hostess, to welcome the strangers (those known and unknown, those strange and stranger) but I am out of the habit. I will have to welcome you to my art instead – that’s the only place there’s my room.

Someone used this line as a title for something.
It might be a famous something (like a Willa Cather novel?)
But I can’t recall what that something is.
That’s the thing with Hamlet; People like to use these lines to signal the smartness of their work.
A surefire way to up the smug intellectual content of one’s work is to link it somehow to a line from Hamlet. What this says about me and this little project, I fear to investigate.
However, the world is full of references to Hamlet that the educated are meant to catch. In effect, this is why Hamlet is part of the canon. We teach it so that those references will not be made in vain. The culture must circle back on itself somehow – like the ouroboros eating its own tail.