Is Hamlet just making this up? Is he riffing on an existing rhyme or song?
Or does he just start spouting lyrics, rhymes or raps when he gets excited?
I’ve known some rappers who do this – just turn the key and rhymes come out.
This rhyme’s not great. He wouldn’t win a rap battle with this one.
The rhythm is funny. And perdy?
Hmmm.
If this is some song or lyric or poem that Hamlet pulls out at this moment, it may be slightly more comprehensible, in that the comedy has another point of reference. That is, if this is referencing something else – it can be a joke about both THIS situation and the something else. Mostly it feels like this is here to get at a sense of giddiness in our Prince of Denmark, a little pause in the demand for music he’s making.

I’d love if we still had roving bands of recorder musicians ready to play at the drop of a hat. Now – recorders have pretty much been reduced to children’s music classes and the occasional Ren Faire.
But what if there were several recorder players just hanging around in every establishment – in coffee shops and bars, theatre and clubs – and you could just summon them forth and have a little tune. I’d be calling for them all the time.

One of my favorite songs came on in the café I’m writing in. For the most part, café music isn’t so much music as an aural landscape – just more noise, creating atmosphere. But then – a song like “Tightrope” pops out of the blur and it’s no longer just atmosphere, it is killer music, music that makes me move, even while trying to appear like this music isn’t moving me, literally, from the soles of my feet on up.
Sometimes it feels as if we should have less music around so that we can really hear what there is – especially the good stuff that shakes your bones.

Because of this blog, the folks at the Global Hamlet found me and hired me shortly thereafter to help them make inroads in the American scene. They were claiming to be the first crowdsourced literary work.- the first crowdsourced Hamlet. When I explained it to my partner, he said, “Oh, like Rap Genius but for Shakespeare?”
And I was like: “What’s Rap Genius?”
Which is where Google came in and lo and behold Rap Genius had now become just Genius and what do you know, it also had Hamlet on there – with commentary already in action. I thought the two websites ought to have done a team up – but The Global Hamlet folk weren’t so into it. So I let it go. Then they let me go. So now Genius is my literary website of choice – and one of the things that I particularly love about it are the comments that are Gifs.
All that to say that if I ever got myself into doing Genius commentary, I’d definitely want to find a Gif of the Norwegian band from the 80s for this line. Maybe the moment where he sees himself in the mirror.
We’re not that high tech here at the Hamlet Project. I’d have to learn how to make a gif first. And then how to embed it in the blog. . .well. . .maybe an A-ha gif would be worth the trouble.

Again, it is interesting that it is the TALK of the poisoning rather than the poisoning itself
that triggers Claudius’ response.
This line makes that very explicit as does the order of events. The poisoning in the (non) dumb show triggers no response. The poisoning in the dumb show may be a slow burn trigger- like it could light the match but it’s the TALK of the poisoning that sets off the bomb.

The podcast I was listening to did a story on Bodily Resonance and it referenced some scientific studies in which they could manipulate people’s biases. They could, in effect, make people less prejudiced by giving them an expanded sense of empathy. They could reduce their bias by making them feel as if they were more like whatever group they had a bias against. They could make a white person, with an implicit bias against a black person, feel as if his hand were black through the rubber hand experiment. And once they’d made him feel as if the black rubber hand were his own hand, they gave him another implicit racial bias test and found him to be less racist.
My question was/is: “Were the participants aware of this shift? Did they perceive it?”

Best Jeopardy category ever.

And the thousand pound one is the most challenging.
The Ghost’s Word for 200 is a snap.
Adieu, Adieu!. Hamlet, Remember me
The thousand pound question is:
“But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine”

This a great example of a line that might make more sense through the lens of
original pronunciation. It may even be a line that helped those who have been
working out what original pronunciation was. I mean “was” just has to have been pronounced in such that it might rhyme with “ass.”

Horatio indicates that Hamlet has avoided the rhyme here. There is some expectation – some sense that “peacock” is the substitute for something else and it just has to be “ass” doesn’t it? In order for the joke to work.
Because it really doesn’t work as it stands.

I’m not hugely interested in OP (original pronunciation) as a performance technique.
As an American, I am skeptical of any codification of how l should speak the text.
I’m interested in the wide variety of accents that one could use. The wider the better.
But THIS is the area where I find it very useful to consider – when it can explain a mysterious text problem – then it becomes VERY interesting to me.

My English friends are much enamored of OP, which I didn’t understand at first.
Not until one of them explained how it liberated the text from RP (received pronunciation,) how it took Shakespeare down off of an upper class pedestal he’d gotten put up on, did the attraction start to make sense to me.
The class distinctions are less of an issue here in the states where speech isn’t so codified. Many people are still fighting for the idea that one doesn’t need to use an English accent when reading Shakespeare – to shift to now needing to use one, is a little bit repugnant.

However – if this new OP allows us to understand things, well, that’s a very useful tool and one I won’t be turning my nose up at –
not without thoroughly investigation it first.

Even in a metaphor, this guy is a great negotiator.
They’re just joking around here about the role Hamlet could play in an imaginary company. Horatio offers him half a share, presumably as an upgrade from the fellowship Hamlet proposed, and Hamlet ups it again to a full share.

I’ve been thinking about negotiation and how hard it is to learn. I posted a blog about a negotiation that actually worked out for me last summer – but what I didn’t post was how much coaching l needed to get there. There’s a whole world of literature on women and negotiation – how women don’t negotiate – how we should learn to do it but also how we have good reasons for not doing it. (Like the article called “women don’t negotiate become they’re not idiots.”)

But there’s another non-negotiating impulse that comes with being an artist. Artists don’t negotiate either – also because we’re not idiots. We’re in precarious positions most of the places we work and despite the uniqueness of each of us, we are extraordinarily replaceable. An artist who negotiates might not be asked back. Same as being a woman, really.

So we learned, artists, women and others who are in unstable position, not to ask for more – while people like the Prince of Denmark are just automatic negotiators, primed to ask for more from the beginning – probably even as a child, always advocating for a little bit more.

It would be great if all it took to join a theatre company was a crazy outfit featuring feathers and shoes. I’d have tried that technique straight out of the gate. No auditioning required – just get a lot of feathers and some funny shoes.
And then I could join a “CRY” of players. Is that really the collective of players? Like a murder of crows? A cry of players?

It makes a great deal of sense. First, a great deal of crying happens on stage and Second, a player’s life probably had a great deal of crying off stage as well.
I suppose, though, that it’s not just his outfit but also the play he just put on that might get him his membership in the players. So – write a play, put on the shoes and some feathers – get a membership in a theatre company.
I have written a great many plays – and since I started a theatre company –in order to produce them, I guess it worked! Now all we need are the feathers and the shoes.