Consummation is a word I have never heard in relation to anything else but sex and marriage or if not marriage, a relationship approximation of marriage. It’s probably a word like “commencement” – something that has come to really only mean one thing – when it has a broader meaning at its heart.

But let’s assume for a minute that Hamlet’s wished for consummation is of the sexual union variety. It would be a logical assumption – death and sex being already linked to each other poetically through the ages. To die – meaning to orgasm for many many cultures. Songs like “S’io ch’io vorrei morire” (*Yes, I would like to die) are embedded in these sorts of consummations.

So if we assume this consummation so devoutly wished is like a wedding night, who is the bride and who the bridegroom?

I guess I’m just trying to work out where this consummation stuff comes from – it seems like it might be a bit out of the blue. Although the word “Flesh” does come in the sentence before. Maybe that’s the trigger for thoughts of the consummation.

It’s just curious in this speech because while the language is very muscular and poetic, it isn’t particularly erotic. Or is it? I’m seeing this speech in a whole new way now. We’ve got bare bodkins, grunting and sweating, great pitch and moment, Ophelia’s orisons. We’ve all been reading this speech all wrong. It’s all about sex.

I wonder if anyone has ever numbered the natural shocks. I thought about making a list of them myself but then realized how many a thousand really is. I’m not sure I care to think of a THOUSAND natural shocks.

And then there would be the question of which sort of shocks are the natural ones that flesh is heir to. Would they be the physical ones? The heart attacks, the sharp pains in the belly, the sudden loss of breath, the ruptured appendix? Or would they be the metaphoric? We’ve already got heartache on the list. Would we add disappointment?
Betrayal? Despair? Fury?
We are vulnerable to so much and how we bear it, that’s our survival.

There does seem to be a limit of things being difficult before a person will just snap. It’s the accumulation really, layer upon layer of bad news or hopeless conditions. It is actually almost more remarkable how resilient people can be. How they can bounce back from tremendous cruelty or loss or destruction.

There are time in which I feel I will sink under despair built on nothing so horrific, just little moments of hopelessness, just the daily wear of relentless challenges, not the giant kind – just the small. The drip of a small stream of water against a stone, slowly but surely boring a hole through the middle.

We were working on Hamlet in their English class.
The students chose scenes to work on but there was some fall-out, as the groups had varying levels of commitment and interest. One girl found herself surrounded by entirely disinterested scene partners.

So we suggested a soliloquy for her and she chose this one. She dove right into it and we saw a transformation almost immediately. That’s when her teacher told me that this student had struggled with depression that year.

And it’s funny, if I’d KNOWN that, I wouldn’t have suggested this speech. I’d be afraid it would be too close to home. But, in a peculiar way, by engaging with these ideas, she seemed to emerge from a fog.

Is it the comfort of knowing you’re not alone?
Is it the ability to say something to everyone that you couldn’t say yourself, that would worry everyone if you said it out loud? To say something that can feel draped in shame? To say it and say it loud and then get applause for it instead of concerned looks?

I cannot begin to know what was going on in that student but whatever it was, it felt like a testament to the power of theatre, to the power of these words.

At the final presentation, I wept all the way through her performance, even though it wasn’t the least bit sentimental. It was direct. It was matter of fact. Like someone who’s been to the wars and is here to report it back to us.

That outrageous fortune! She can’t be content just spinning her wheel, no, no, she has to get out the slings and arrows, too?

I picture Fortune sitting up on a rock somewhere, bored, with a stack of rocks and a pile of arrows and when she sees someone go by, she just picks up her bow and starts firing arrows at them. When she gets tired of the arrows, she reaches for her slingshot and chucks a bunch of stones at them.

And while she’s having fun, she won’t switch targets. She won’t care if they’ve had more than they can take, she’ll just keep firing. Like Tig Notaro’s last few years with the illness, followed by the sudden death of her mother, followed by another illness, followed by a break-up, followed by breast cancer in both breasts.

Arrow arrow arrow stone stone stone
And there would appear to be no way to stop it. The option here is to take up arms and oppose the onslaught by ending yourself, since there’s not a chance in hell you’d ever get close enough to Fortune herself to make her stop. There’s a sea of trouble between you and while her arrows can fly over it and strike you in the heart, your arrows would fall in and disappear before you cleared the shore. Hopefully there are more options on the table than suffering and ending. Hopefully you could find a way to interest Fortune enough to distract her from firing at you.

To be, or not to be – that is the question;
Well blow me down. Here we are at the most famous line in Shakespeare (possible exception “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?) and I’m utterly fascinated by this punctuation.

Now I want to see every edition of this play, like, ever and see how other editors have punctuated this bad boy. I mean, there is a LOT of punctuation in this sentence and I wouldn’t have thought it necessary. One of the reasons I chose this edition that I’m working with is that they’re not so punctuation crazy. There are editions that seem to be nothing but semi-colons and this one tends to not go the semi-colon route so often. But we have one here. On the most famous line in Shakespeare. Pourquoi?

I like this edition because it generally feels as though the punctuation has been put there for performers to speak it. It is punctuation that tends to serve the speaker. It can sometimes be a directive. In this case, it feels like a very specific directive, like a director, almost, telling the actor how s/he should say it. So it might be the editors saying to the actors say: To be (small pause) or not to be (bigger pause) that is the question (not so big a pause as you might think. Not a period, a semi-colon; don’t full stop here. )
This is a perfectly sensible interpretation, of course, but somehow it feels so specific, it almost feels bossy.

The amazing thing about this strategy is that it works. Or rather, it works in this play. In real life, I’ve almost never seen someone use art to communicate something and have it directly understood. I think of all the love-sick mix-tapes I made as a young person. I was trying to say something (usually, “I LOVE you!”) and also trying very hard to mask it. So I’d put on “You Do Something to Me” and immediately follow it with The Smothers Brothers doing “The Streets of Laredo” and somehow expect my listener to both know I loved him and also be able to claim innocence in case he wasn’t interested. (And he usually wasn’t. Mix-tapes not usually being the thing that’ll win a man’s heart.)

I’ve watched people watching shows or movies that would seem to be exactly what they were struggling with and they can somehow emerge unaffected by the similarities of their lives and the characters. There have been many times in which I have been stunned by how the personal connections sail right past them. But Claudius gets it right away. Hamlet sets The Mousetrap and Claudius goes for the cheese and gets caught. Hamlet sets it up as a test and it totally works.

Which does remind me of that time I wrote a song about a man I liked and years later, after I didn’t really like him anymore, I played that song at a gig he happened to attend. And he totally caught it. He came up to me and said, “This may be one of those – ‘You’re so vain you probably think this song is about you’ situations. But I sort of thing that song is about me.” So sometimes Art does say what you meant it to say. Just maybe not when you meant to say it.

Grounds is a very funny word. In this case it is most clearly linked to the legal sense of grounds, as in grounds for arrest, grounds for divorce, etc. But where does that come from? A sort of metaphorical sense? That you must be able to stand firmly on the thing – that you need ground enough to stand on?

The college in my hometown calls its campus The Grounds, which gives it a sort of stately mansion feel, as one does tend to wander the grounds of a nobleman’s estate.

And then, there are coffee grounds, as in something that has been ground up, I guess. That is probably not a place where you stand.

In a world with devils in it, this is a very logical and reasonable thing to consider. And why shouldn’t the Ghost be a devil? It’s already supernatural to have a Ghost appear; why not go an additional step and have a devil ghost?

In fact, what if, even if what the ghost says is true (and we have to assume it is, based on Claudius’ soliloquy) it were still a devil? After all, this play does end in a TOTAL tragedy. The entire Danish court is murdered. Every single one. As a diabolical plan, this one is pretty good.

Maybe it doesn’t end up with everyone going to hell – (it’s possible that Hamlet and Laertes escape the tormenting flames due to their exchange of forgiveness but otherwise,) the devils would seem to have racked up a nice list here.
1) The old king Hamlet (all his sins upon his head)
2) Polonius? (This one’s a toss-up. We have no real evidence of his sins.)
3) Ophelia (drowning yourself being a one-way ticket to hell)
4) Gertrude (assuming she had a hand in at least one of the things going on around here – adultery, maybe? Accessory to murder, possibly? Standing there watching Ophelia drown herself maybe?)
5) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Just for being toadies, I’d say. Though maybe they get a second to absolve themselves before they get beheaded.)
6) Claudius (big score there)
In terms of creating mischief, this is great devil’s work. In terms of upping the population of hell, it’s also pretty damn good.

It suddenly occurs to me that Hamlet might really be hoping that Claudius won’t blench at this point. (Not that I’m entirely clear what blenching is, now that I really think about it. I’ve always thought of it as a kind of blend between flinching and turning white.)

But his course really ISN’T a pleasant one. Of course he doesn’t want to follow it. Kill his uncle? I’d certainly be hoping that this little theatrical test might let me off the hook. Of course, that’s me. I’d be looking for any out I could find.