There’s a warm-up I do – both for myself and for actors or students I work with that involves traveling up and down – from the lowest note to the highest, though usually we go the other way round – that is, from the highest to the lowest.
I would sound many a person from top to bottom – anyone who wanted to expand their speaking range or their singing. It’s so easy to just speak the same handful of notes in the same small band – but if you’re going to be onstage, the audience will appreciate some outliers.

I’ve developed a little practice for myself that I do when I can. I just sing for ten minutes – no set songs, generally no words. I just make sound for a set time. Sometimes it sounds like a Slavic folk song, other times, a faux French pop tune. Most days, I don’t sound at the top of my compass or dip down to the lowest note. Most days, I hang out in the middle.

Today, though, I went to the top of the compass and suddenly understood why my voice teacher in college wanted me to go up there. On good days, the top of the voice can be fun. Maybe I’ll go up there tomorrow, too. And also hit the lowest note.

Like a deft surgeon of secrets, you could extract mine from me, painlessly. So fast, so precise – you knew right where to make the incision and how to sew me back up. Never before had I felt so understood. You had every mystery in hand.

It’s different now. Maybe you have extracted all the mysteries there were. Maybe you stopped wondering what my secrets were or what I was thinking. So in the intervening years, I’ve grown quite a few new secrets and mysteries. There’s a world in me now that you don’t understand and don’t seem to want to. I could pluck them out myself – but what would be the point? I let the mystery grow, like moss on a stone, expanding on the inside – unseen, unknown and well hidden.

The operative word here would seem to be SEEM. Because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern don’t actually have a clue. They keep trying to manipulate Hamlet. They keep trying to get him to reveal himself – but he catches them at it every time. They don’t have the slightest idea about where Hamlet’s stops are.
Horatio might know where the stops are – but he wouldn’t use them. Claudius might also know Hamlet’s stops – because he does keep on pushing Hamlet’s buttons. But Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are much too obvious. They blunder right through almost every interaction with Hamlet.

In the early days, I felt like your instrument. I felt like you were playing me, like a piano. Some notes up at the top of the keyboard, some at the bottom and the notes in between. I thought you were composing on my body, like you’d compose on the piano.

There’s the feeling of being an object, and sure, that’s not so fulfilling. But being an instrument is something else. It is a creative expression in several ways at once. I miss being your piano.

I have found it so difficult to call people on this sort of thing. Before I quit being a teaching artist, people were constantly revealing what an unworthy thing they made of me. It’s what drove me out of the profession. It was almost never personal – but my skills and thoughts and experience were never valued or recognized. It was clear how replaceable we all were. The system was becoming more systemized so that skill became less essential. It became about people who could execute a program, who could replace the widgets in the factory. It’s cookie cutter arts education and you know – even factory cookies are delicious and not entirely without value but sending a recipe innovator in to do the job of cutting out the cookies is a little cruel. It’s clear how unworthy a thing those innovators are in a cookie factory.

The stops.
Of course the stops.
The breath goes through the people
Flowing out through all the holes –
Making the notes it was made to make –
But then with a finger
You stop the breath there,
Forcing it to exit elsewhere.
The action always is the breath
Covering the holes or ventages or stops
Is like massaging the breath
Moving it around, sending it to new places,
Shifting sound with breath
Through the stops and releases

There’s nothing specifically erotic about this passage in the play but this sentence, out of context, has several erotic elements. Mouths, breath and music generally call to mind sensual pleasures. Eloquent music strokes the ear like a lover strokes the skin. In the right mouth, breath can be enough to stoke the amorous fires. Mouth, breath, music. Say this line right and it could be a seduction.

It is funny when we distinguish the thumb from the fingers – I mean, it is one of the five. There isn’t always a good reason for it – but in this case – Hamlet’s right, when you play the recorder, your thumb does something quite different from the other fingers. Look at this – Hamlet and Shakespeare giving ACTUAL instruction on recorder playing.
Of course – if this were the only instruction you had for how to play the recorder, you probably wouldn’t get very far.

Ventages is a fun word for holes, though.

The This American Life story about a guy who’d been raised to be 100% honest ended up demonstrating what a lot of value there is in lying. This guy basically had to learn how to lie or perhaps even more importantly, to not tell the truth all the time.

I was struck by the way he learned that total honesty was essentially selfish – that it meant he was not considering how others might feel when he expressed himself. And that’s what it can be – expressing one’s self – without much attention on how one’s self might impact another. Every “honest” person I’ve ever met proves this theory. The people who regularly defend their cruelty with “I’m just being honest” are habitually unconcerned with other people’s feelings. It presumes a kind of moral high ground, a superiority over the poor thin skinned other who just can’t handle the truth.
And certainly at some point honesty is more important than feelings – but the reverse is also true – and this guy’s journey makes that clear.

For some lying is easy. For some honest is easier. Depends on your bias toward your own truth or other people’s feelings.

Origins of “beseech”?
This is one of those phrases that has, after so many years with Shakespeare, become to familiar to me, I barely notice it when it turns up in a play. I forget, sometimes, that its meaning might not be immediately obvious to a new Shakespeare reader. It’s one of those that most people can work out from context, with a little time and attention, but it can slow down some readers.

Sometimes in reading something with fresh readers, I’m called upon to explain things like this that have become so familiar to me, I ‘ve forgotten details I once knew about them.

This happened with the word “Marry” the other day – as in, “Marry, sir” as in. . .a word that doesn’t mean what we THINK it means in that context. I found myself struggling to find an appropriate paraphrase. I went with “By gum” and “By George” but after sleeping on it, I realized, “You see” would be a better equivalency.

In this case – beseech has a nice direct corollary in Beg or Implore – but it does make me curious about where it comes from.