Come on, Hamlet. Come on.
Laertes should be asking YOU this question, you maniac.
Listen, I loved you ever. Always have. Always will.
But this question may be, in fact, the first genuinely crazy thing you’ve said in this whole play.

First – Laertes did jack shit to you just now. So he’s not doing anything to you – you’re the one who leaped out into his sister’s grave. That was you. As far as Laertes knew, you were in freakin’ England. So. Yeah – if he fought with you, it was self defense.

Second, he actually has some super genuinely legit reasons to be mad at you. You killed his father. Or did you forget that? Just because you loved Laertes himself doesn’t mean he can’t be mad at you for killing his dad. If anyone killed my father (even by “accident”) it would not matter how long they’d loved me, I’d still be furious. Also, you treated his sister like garbage and here she is dead. So…all of this “Why are you mistreating me?” nonsense just doesn’t make sense.

And it’s the kind of crazy talk that doesn’t feel like the madness he was feigning before. It feels genuinely unhinged.

It’s possible I don’t really trust most men to hear me anymore. I used to think – oh, they just need to hear what’s going on – to listen to an explanation, to wake up to reality.
But. Yesterday – the news about the horrific parental separations reached peak horror (thus far).
The sexual assault of children in custody.
The creation of Tender Age facilities and I saw the comments from people joking about the kids as if they were not humans.
I heard the callous response to a kid with Down Syndrome being separated from his parent and I just – lost some faith in hearing.

If people can hear these horrors and not be wrung out by them, no hearing will ever be enough.

Who wrote their PhD on mouthing?
I would like to read it.
Because etymology on-line declares it as speaking. That’s it. Speaking.
We use it now to mean speaking without sound or even faking it, in a sense. If you’re singing along and mouthing the words, you don’t know them or the melody, or your voice is terrible. And that meaning is often overlaid onto Hamlet’s references to mouthing – both here and in his speech to the players.
Is that meaning there or are we adding it?
It seems possible that it’s there. This line suggests it a bit. It can absolutely be read this way. It can be read as fakery or just over-exaggeration, just in the way the line to the players could be.

And in performance, the overly exaggerated choice is a useful one as you can do it as you say it. But I am curious as to what other layers might be present.

Idea for a play: Hamlet and Laertes are buried alive with Ophelia’s corpse. Once Hamlet and Laertes have killed each other (as they inevitably would, as they do later) their three ghosts are stuck in a grave together and have to work out how to either get along or escape eternity in a tiny space.
Is it called Buried Quick? There’s probably a better title but that’ll do for the moment.

Where do we get this sense of outface? I picture the models in Zoolander trying to compete with their facial expressions – a literal outfacing. 

But it is very curious that out doing someone, shaming them, diminishing them, is known as out facing. Is it from a sense of covering them with your own outward image? I don’t know.

Most people do not go to funerals to whine, it must be said. Laertes has come to Ophelia’s grave to mourn her loss, the way everyone does at a funeral. He has taken it to an extreme, of course, by leaping into her grave but whining is not his motivation and surely Hamlet knows that.

Has Hamlet been so blinded by his own grief that he has lost his own intelligence? The news of Ophelia’s death does seem to have come as a bit of a shock and I suppose Hamlet has had a rough patch but his temper seems outsized here. I feel like I’ve never seen a Hamlet who has a dangerous temper. Because you want someone who can sensitively handle all the intellectual stuff, the thoughtful soliloquies, etc, most people tend not to cast actors who have explosive rage. (Not to mention that actors with actual explosive rage are not fun to work with.)

But I suddenly would love to see a Hamlet with a real well of dangerous fury in him. I bet Gary Sinise could have been a really interesting Hamlet back in the day. Did they ever do that over at Steppenwolf? Or with John Malkovich? That would also have been fascinating. I’d be very interested in a performer who could be thoughtful and sensitive and warm and then quickly ignite.

I’m thinking now of Mark Maron and how he talks about his rage issues. Most of the time, on his podcast, we hear him in thoughtful, considered mode – but it’s clear that if a flip switches, he can rage. It’s too bad he’s not so keen on Shakespeare and maybe a bit too old for the part, because he’d be a really interesting Hamlet.

I may have to acquire some better drawing skills because I would love to have an image of Hamlet eating a crocodile. It would be such a delightful cartoon. Or gif! He’d have to be dressed in, like, Olivier type Hamlet costume or just a broad signaling Shakespeare shirt and he could be wrestling with the crocodile while he’s eating it. Prince and crocodile, an image for the ages.

Almost every time a crocodile shows up in Shakespeare, it is in its metaphorical sense of one who cries false tears. The mentions in Othello and Henry IV both expand on this idea and deal with it explicitly. The references to crocodiles in Antony and Cleopatra may also hint at the tears aspect of crocodiles and then there’s this one.

It always seemed to be a line about doing something impossible and ridiculous – like a crocodile is big and tough and would be incredibly awkward to sink one’s teeth into.

But seeing as how Shakespeare mostly referenced crocodiles when accusing people of false shows of grief, I read it more as a challenge to Laertes’ grief. Maybe by consuming a crocodile, one might take on his false tears of grief as well?

That is, Hamlet offers to match Laertes’ tears of grief ? Hamlet offers to match Laertes’ tears with the consumed crocodile.

It’s not very fair to the crocodile though.

I love when I google a word and its only example of usage is Shakespeare and usually the very line I’m exploring. So. It means vinegar. Okay. I need more.
The only other definition is from the Urban Dictionary where it reportedly means someone who comes from an intellectual or academic background. This is so incredibly specific and again, I want more. Who says this? When? Why?

Anyway – all of that aside.
What’s this drinking vinegar business all about?
People are doing it now all the time for health and hipness.
And my cursory research on the history of vinegar suggests that drinking vinegar wasn’t completely out of the question in Shakespeare’s time either. There were flavored vinegars then, for example.

It’s sour, sure. And wouldn’t taste good to drink, say, a whole bottle of it.

But does that really fall in the same category as tearing one’s self or eating a crocodile? I see why some scholars have theorized that eisel is a lake somewhere. Lake Eisel. So drinking it up WOULD be as challenging as tearing one’s self or eating a crocodile.
But…there’s no evidence of that really so here we are, imagining Hamlet or Laertes downing a bottle of vinegar.

This would be pretty hard to do, actually. It’s not so hard to tear out hair and probably scratching might be possible (and probably that’s what Hamlet actually means here) but to tear one’s self, like one would tear a piece of paper or even a piece of clothing would be.
Trying to tear one’s self might be a lot like that silly alt-right fella trying to tear up a protest sign and just trying over and over as hard as he could and never managing it. A study in futility and a delightful episode of schadenfreude.