Oh now he’s calling her good?
What the?
He makes his exit lines – his rhyming couplet cap on his blistering speech, the subtext of which is, “You’re a whore, mother.” And then he’s all “one word more, good lady.”
And then changes his tactic entirely.
First, he’s all like – “Abstain!”
And then essentially he’s like, “Actually, that’s bad idea.”
But it’s not entirely clear whether he wants her to not do what he told her to do before or not do what he’s about to tell her to do.
Ain’t nobody “Good” at this point in the play.

Tell it to your girlfriend, sweetie.
If having your father murdered is bad –
This is actually just as bad as what you went through for her. If not actually worse, since the father was killed by an ex-boyfriend.

I mean, sure, your dad was king and his murder was pre-meditated – but at its essence – they are equal amounts of bad. The only difference is that this father’s death is a little bit accidental – but you DID mean to kill someone. So…it’s a nice justification to say that the worse remains behind but I’m not sure it’s entirely true.

People behaving cruelly often think this. And 9.9 times out of 10, it’s bullshit. It’s just cruelty. This especially happens with people “just being honest” as if honesty is a great justification for cruelty. 9.9 times out of ten, it isn’t honesty of any objective sort – it’s just an opinion. And honest or not, it’s cruel to share some opinions. There is a reason we don’t say every thing that comes into our heads.

By this point in the play, even the audience might be clued in to the fact that when Hamlet says “Good Night” he’s probably about to keep talking. It might be the signal for a halfway point in a scene. It’s like Hamlet says, “I’m HALFWAY done talking with you” when he says “goodnight.” I mean, he might as well say, “I’m taking a breath before I keep talking for at least another page.”

Oh, Hamlet. You shouldn’t have! Of all the deaths you could have given me, this one may be the most ignoble. I mean – you really shouldn’t have. I mean, if you had to give me a death – I’d really have preferred one in my sleep or from sex or a glorious one on a battlefield. Instead – this one you gave me is all cagey and stuck behind the drapes with a sword in my guts. I mean. At least it was quick. That’s something.

Hmm. Interesting justification. Yes, yes, heaven made me do it. Heaven is punishing me by having me kill this guy. This dead guy is my punishment. Never mind the punishment this poor dead guy just experienced. Nor the punishment the dead guy will receive in this religion’s worldview given that he had no time to say his last rites.
But yeah, heaven is punishing you, guy who just killed someone, by making you kill someone. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
This is how many a sociopath justifies his ill deeds. All those cult leaders raping under-aged girls are convinced they’re doing God’s will. They are heaven’s minister, cleansing the earth of evil. It is classic, though.

On an episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast  they talked about the amazing properties of the human brain to justify things after the fact. Like the psychologist who learned a bunch of cold reading techniques to try and debunk psychics and started to become convinced he was really psychic after a while, as he got better and better at reading people.
It took a magician to help him prove to himself that he wasn’t, in fact, psychic – but just very good at cold reading.
I think that’s what Hamlet’s doing here. He’s justifying his ass off. Convincing himself, probably even more than his mother.

I should hope so. I mean. You DID murder him.
I sort of want to see a little more penitence than “I do repent.” You just killed your (ex?) girlfriend’s father and your family advisor and a high ranking official. You may have only killed a guy by accident (well – not REALLY by accident – you just killed the wrong one) but you have killed a rather important person to your culture. And without any honor, either, when it comes to that. Killing people through curtains is generally not socially acceptable. I sort of want you to feel a little bit bad about it.

I understand why he kills Polonius. He’s worked himself up into such a state…he’s a firecracker ready to explode – anyone could have startled him into murder given his state of mind. But I want him to feel sorry and I’m not sure this line is quite enough to give me what I want.

Where does this shift come from? What makes him shift tactics? He’s all fire and brimstone – and then suddenly he’s like – “I’m gonna ask you for a blessing.” And then afterward he finally acknowledges the shittiness of having murdered Polonius. Does this shift happen in the middle of the line? Is it something Gertrude does? How does he get suddenly a little bit contrite?
Where is the turn?
And what is the trigger?

Hilarious. Hamlet pulls the same shit with his mom that he did with his girlfriend – the “Goodbye! I’m leaving!” move…and then not leaving and then saying goodbye again. Is this what Hamlet does with women? Leave over and over again? It would seem that it is so. But – given that there are only two women in this play. The sample size is pretty small.

I am captivated by the Habit’s powers. It is extraordinary how easily we form habits and what it takes to change them. I loved The Power of Habit and Switch and Made to Stick and all the books that explore our patterning and how to shift our ways. It connects right up to my work in the Feldenkrais Method as well – how we form habits of the body and how we learn to shift them.

There are incredibly potent tools we can use to make a shift – one of them is to USE the impulse to create a habit to replace the pattern we want to change. We want some habits. If we didn’t have habits, we’d spend every minute of our lives trying to decide how to walk or talk or make a sandwich. Putting that decision making in the background is one of the wonderful things our nervous system does for us. It frees us up to tackle new problems by chunking our current patterns into generalized, forgettable, automatic responses. If we can use that tendency, we’re more liable to make a change. We can tie a new thing to an old thing, for example. To remember to perform one new regular task, tack it on to one you already do. So – if you regularly put your shoes on when you leave the house, you can add something to that ritual that you want to make sure you do every day.

Emotion is another incredibly important tool. One that the Heath brothers discussed as harnessing an elephant for your own purposes. If you let the elephant run loose, you will have to follow it wherever it goes. But if you let the elephant lead you or gently guide the elephant, you have a very powerful motivation beneath you.

All things so potent. So rich.
Habits aren’t the devil (in most cases) but it does feel good to master them or throw them out when they cease to serve you.