That’s how you should do it, yes, faith.
All this shouting and flailing about
All this gesturing to one another’s genitals
All this thrusting of the pelvis to indicate a kind of joke,
To make us know it as sexual, to make us understand,
With a big neon sign, that this is lewd –
All of the beating of the breast, the grasping. . .
I don’t think it’s the way, There is no heart in it.
I can empathize, this outsize demonstration of big bold telegraphy choices
Is what we can fall into when we don’t know if we are okay.
When we think our words are not landing, when they’re not ours, really
And we have to broadcast the Shakespeare news, push past the truth of ourselves
And the things we could express heartily –
That is, from our hearts –
That’s the scary stuff.
And it takes a brave guide to pull an actor back from the shouting cliff
To speak gentle truths
To do less
Or more with less.
I have shouted, too. I have probably over-gestured. I have probably strained
Toward making that old joke understood. I know I have. And may again.
But I want to check myself, stop myself from doing it again if the occasion arises. Next time, I want the words to flow through me
Like water through a spout
Heartily – easily, with no force, no stop, no defense between me, my heart,
the words and the audience.

Is there another play that deals with offense as much as this one? Or at least uses the concept? I cannot think of one. People don’t seem to talk much of being offended in Shakespeare, except here. And then later, Claudius names his deed as an offense, a rank one, too.
When we talk about offending these days, it’s usually about language. It’s swearing when the climate abhors rude language. It’s jokes in poor taste or ones that cross the line on stereotypes. Offense has become smaller. A murder is still a criminal offense but the victim’s family wouldn’t call it so – – offense is the least of their worries. It’s the loss, the hole in their lives, the disruption of the ordered universe, the violation of trust that we have in one another that we’ll generally behave, that we will do unto others, that we will hold life sacred.

Every woman, too, hath business and desire –
Or at least, every woman I know. I can’t make sense of a person without some business even if it’s only to wash the dishes. Taking on one’s business and desire seems to be the task of adulthood. You start taking care of business – sometimes in the name of your desire. Sometimes you chase desire with all the ferocity of business and sometimes desire comes upon you like the scent of Jasmine on an afternoon walk, all business, when, poof! Desire wafts by without warning.
Even so, it requires tending to just like business.
Prayer, though, that’s like a step out of the striving of both business and desire. Hamlet sends his friends back into the business of the world while he sets himself up to have that moment out.

The woman they’ve brought in to be my boss has so little social grace
That I had to ask if I could shake her hand after she’d come in in a flurry, all
Mad about something that she seemed to think was my fault, but was entirely hers.
This is how she introduced herself to me, by spinning and spitting,
then sitting behind me. I had to turn around and say, “Can I shake your hand?”
To which she assented (so gracious!)
I wish I had the authority to say this line instead – to simply acknowledge that there need be no more circumstance, no more stilted negotiations, that we shake hands, this once, then part. No need for any more than that.
I think there are some organizations wherein the workers get a say as to who becomes their boss. When universities hire tenure track professors, they ask the students. But they never ask. And if they do you really have to lie.
If they’d asked me in this case, I would have happily acquiesced to whatever they needed me to say, told them they were in the right and then found a way to shake hands and part.

Horatio’s response to this line
Seems to suggest that this is something of a cliché’.
Perhaps it’s an old adage, adapted.
“Villain dwelling in all Denmark” has a heightened sense of musicality
That might indicate an old nursery rhyme form
Or if not an old adage, the analogy might be an obvious one, as in,
“There isn’t an asshole in all of New York
That isn’t a son of a bitch.”
My edition puts a dash between
The “if” and the “then” of the analogy
Which might indicate a disconnected thought,
That Hamlet starts to say one thing and ends with another.
As if he were correcting himself, first calling Claudius a jerkwad, then realizing Jerkwad was too good for the assface that Claudius is.

Locked up tight.

Key, squirrelled away to someplace dark and inaccessible.

I can keep a secret

But sometimes I don’t –

Usually when I have not realized I was meant to box up some revealings

When I didn’t know I shouldn’t say and said.

Secrets are best secreted when they are known to be secret.

This one baffles me. If I weren’t attempting to read closely, I’d probably sail on by a mystery like this. Sandwiched as it is between “How say you then?” and “But you’ll be secret?” you can sort of elide the thought to just continue the line of “Can you keep a secret?” but I don’t see how it connects when I pull it out. Is it a sort of call back to what he just experienced? Are the ghost’s words so unfathomable that the general heart of mankind should not even be able to consider it? Or that the secret could be revealed?
Is “How say you then?” to the ghost, then? Then, the next line perhaps actually questions the heart of man, given the ghost’s position in the earth. As we’ll shortly see, the ghost might have more direct access to the heart of man than the living standing upon it. Or Hamlet could be questioning his own decision, checking in his own man’s heart before confirming the secretness of his friends.
The general heart of man contains quite a lot. I find I can really only truly know the heart of one.

This sentence structure reminds me of the way non-native English speakers ask for a definition. Of course, the meaning is nothing like this, actually – but it calls to mind for me, the many time I’ve heard: “How call you the thing for the rain?”
“What you say to stop someone?”
“How say you the word for wonder?”
“Can you splain me this?”
“What this say?”
“Mean what this?”

Beneath this cloak is a small tender thing.
It is soft and uncertain, precious
Like someone’s first born baby. It grows in swaddled darkness.
It’s not a secret so much as a vulnerability,
A tenderness that might shrink in the light.
If you knew it was there, you might lift the cloak,
Unwrap the blankets, you might reveal it before its time.
I’m waiting for it to open its eyes so it can greet the world
When it’s ready. When it’s grown.

Celia says this, too, but she keeps going to make it
Most wonderful and yet again wonderful.
It must have, at one time, been a sincere exclamation.
Now, we see “O, wonderful” and assume it’s sarcastic
Particularly in the mouths of teenagers. “O, great”
Could go this way too, if we’re not careful.
But then, if I punctuate it: O! Wonderful!
I somehow get the wonder back.
Wondering being something so full, so basic, it feels
Like a gift to remember what it’s like to wonder.
There are few things that spark true wonder
After a certain age. One of the great gifts of children
Is the tremendous surprise that everything in the world is –
A field, a truck, a horse, a constellation, a bone,
A library, a train, a sticker, an eggbeater.