Despised love was never really my problem. Unrequited love, sure. Apathetic love, yep. Tepid love, yes. Not really anything like love love and let’s not call it love love were the dominate romances. Unrequited love was my hobby. For years, my natural state seemed to be LONGING for someone, pining, wishing.

Sometimes someone I was silently following would surprise me by turning around but we never got in deep enough to get to despising. I can’t think of anyone I’ve loved who I later despised or who I despised that I later loved.

There are those who disappointed me, those who disappointed themselves, those that broke my heart or whose heart I broke. Those that burned bright and those that fizzled out. But if any if them despised me, I don’t know about it. Hopefully, even in all the drama of loving we all tried to be kind to each other.

This is hardly the worst of it.

Contumely, okay, is a bit of scornful speech – which, granted, can cut a person to the quick. But somehow coming from a proud man, it feels a little less painful. I mean, because you can go, “Well, that guy’s proud, maybe too proud, so his putting me down is some weird ego trip.”

Unless, of course, it’s a scornful speech to a proud man, a bit like the proud man getting his come-uppance. . .in which case. . . ouch. You’ve got a long way to fall if you are riding high on pride.

And once again this bit of the speech is so ABSTRACT. Not like. . .ooh, burn on Claudius or whatever. It’s an almost academic remove, this whole section. Baffling almost in its formality.

Most oppressors do not think they are oppressors. And many of the oppressed don’t think of themselves as being oppressed. That’s why that Monty Python bit is so funny.  Oppression is system-wide and people are specific.

Most oppressors think they’re doing good in some way with whatever their oppressive tactics are. Hitler thought he was improving things for everyone.
This is all stupidly obvious.

But it’s making me think of Theatre of the Oppressed. I learned about it in college, when we read Boal’s book in my anthropology class. I loved it. Then years later, I was a part of a Theatre of the Oppressed project and found I had much more complex feelings about it. The first was that identifying as the oppressed didn’t seem to really empower anyone.

Who decides who is oppressed and not? It felt patronizing to say, “Well, you’re oppressed because you live in this neighborhood and you’re that race and you don’t have much money.” The story selection felt like a game of identity politics, a “Who is the most shat upon?”
And while the program brought people together in some ways, the solutions it came to seemed to conveniently leave out the systematic problems people had and instead focused on the micro problems. Rather than thinking about how to battle racism as a collective, it used the collective to think about how to talk to a racist. And there’s nothing wrong with any of it. The participants seemed to enjoy it all immensely and audiences came to see it.

But it all left a very complicated bad taste in my mouth. There are many groups that I identity with that are less privileged than others. Being a woman, for one. Being part of the working poor. Being an artist.
But I have no interest in identifying as oppressed. It feels diminishing somehow Because it comes from outside of me.

We all would, wouldn’t we? Or at least most of us do, most of the time. We bear the whips and scorn until we cannot bear them any more.
Time will have his way with all of us whether we like it or not.

And it suddenly strikes me why this speech is so famous. I mean, it’s good, there’s that. But it’s also very general. The whips and scorns of time hit everyone and all the subsequent phrases of this sentence manage to cover lots of unhappy bases. Hamlet has lots of reasons to be unhappy and he mentions NONE of those here. You could stretch “The law’s delay” to relate to Hamlet’s succession perhaps. . .but it’s a very vague reference if it is one.

Hamlet’s specific whips and scorns are DEATH, and death of a parent no less, his mother’s hasty marriage and his girlfriend’s returning of his letters and not getting to be king when really he should be. And yet he’s talking about proud man’s contumely?

I don’t know. It all adds weight to the idea that Hamlet is giving this speech for the benefit of Polonius and Claudius. I mean, if he were really about to off himself, I feel like he’d be ranting a little more specifically.

In any case, the whips and scorns of time get us all. It is interesting how some of them we feel more keenly as we age and some of them less. Some things cut deeper now than they did when I was an awkward adolescent but I felt every sting of the whip more acutely then.

Watching some middle school students in action today, I was struck by what open wounds they can be, how keenly they feel every tiny thing. Somehow being a pre-teen turns children into princesses, feeling many peas under their mattresses. It’s not so much the whips and scorns of time, with them, but those of their fellow young people.

I’ve never felt that life was too long. If anything, I’ve overdone it on the other side. I can remember saying to the boss of a theatre I worked for (and was agitating for change in): “I don’t have time to waste. I’m going to die. Don’t you realize that? I can’t waste my time in the box office when you contracted me to perform big juicy roles.”

He laughed at me and told me I should take up meditating. I don’t feel that same sense of urgency anymore, or rather, I don’t think, “I can’t do that. I’m going to die someday. I can’t waste that time.” But I do retain a sense of that ticking clock.

Back when I quit that job in which I was being taken advantage of, I was only a few years out of college. I had a sense that I only had a few years to do what I wanted. I think I knew, somewhere deep down, that as a woman who wanted to act, I didn’t have any time to waste. I needed to get all the jobs while I was young. I’d internalized a sense of acting being a bit like gymnastics, that once the bloom was off the rose, there would be no more work. And I wasn’t wrong.

Now, nearly two decades later, I can feel how long my life is and how long it yet still will be. But not so long. Not calamitously long. Just as long as it will be.

First? Punctuation. There isn’t any in this sentence in this edition. Which is interesting after the abundance of instructive punctuation in that first line of this speech in the same text. If you read this line without any commas, it sort of bounds right through and maybe it should. Maybe the regularity of the verse suggests no pausing until “give us pause.” It’s an interesting choice. I feel like some commas might help for meaning but maybe they don’t help for performance in the end. Maybe it’s tried and tested like this.

I’m hamstrung with meaning on this one, too. The line is so rich, so compact and so woven into our culture, I find I can’t sink my head into it directly. Shuffling off this mortal coil? It is a fucking punch you in the face extraordinary metaphor for death. That’s why people use it all the time, why this bit has stuck in the common parlance.

And you have to wonder – where did it start?
How did the good old W.S. come up with this particular metaphor. Is there a concept that it springs from? (See what I did there, coil, spring. . .yeah.) So there’s that. Shuffled off this mortal coil sounding a bit like shuffling off to Buffalo, which might, for some, serve as just as apt a metaphor.

“What dreams may come”? They liked that one so much they made a move with that title. (Was it any good? Did anyone see it? I just remember the poster.)
It all must give us pause really.

These most famous lines are the hardest. They make me feel like I should add something meaningful to the discourse around them. Or do something so far out, so irreverent, maybe, that I side-step the discourse entirely. I want to go to cooking or a rug burn in progress. But there’s really nothing there to see once you go there. It’s like a one hit bad joke.

There is, I suppose, a rub in everything if you look closely enough. And sometimes it’s better not to look too closely. The rub may reveal itself anyway. There is many a thing I wouldn’t have done if I’d seen the rub at first.

But even if I’d known it would look like this, if I’d seen the rub of choosing an artist’s life, I’d probably have chosen it anyway.

I dreamed I was directing Hamlet last night. I’d read a bunch of stuff about women directors before bed so I think it snuck into my subconscious and I began directing in my dreams. Going to Directing School took most of the joy out of directing for me so usually these dreams are not pleasant ones. They can be stress dreams, ones I can wake up from in a sweat.

But strangely, despite the fact that directing can be one of the most demanding, stressful things I do, most my anxiety dreams are not theatre dreams.

No, when I truly wake up panicked, it is 9 times out of 10 a Packing dream. I have to be somewhere and I’m already late and I have this entire apartment to pack up in as little time as possible. It could be a plane I’m late for or a show but whatever it is, I have to get a whole lot of things into boxes before I go. As nightmares go, it’s pretty banal. Maybe that’s why dreams don’t really scare me too much. I can handle most of what my brain cooks up.

This morning I had a fairly awful imaginative journey in which all copies of Hamlet were somehow lost and all that remained of it was my Twitter feed where these lines of the play get pasted when I post a blog. I thought how it would be such a difficult task to figure out what the play was if you only had the lines from Twitter. You’d have to figure out which character said what. You’d have to imagine what the rest of the line was after the 140 character limit in the longer sentences. It would be a terrible way to try and figure out the play. But if it were the ONLY remains of it, there would still be great nuggets in even little parcels of text. You’d get this whole line of thought, for example. You’d get: To die, to sleep – to sleep – perchance to dream. Ay there’s the rub.
Which would be quite a bit of awesome even if we lost so much else.

This repetition is one of the reasons this speech can be tricky to memorize. My brain remembers phrases that come after “To die, to sleep – “ and I’m never quite sure I’m on the right one. I’ve never tried to memorize this speech, I’ve just heard it often enough that it’s almost in me, like a song.

I like this line in the Spanish translations I’ve heard and seen. It has its own gorgeous rhythm. Morir. Dormir. I feel like I could just hear those two verbs together again and again for a while.