I wonder how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern feel about the Players’ reception. Hamlet does warn them a bit about not feeling slighted by the warmth with which he knows he’ll greet the Players. And it is warm.
While Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are also greeted as friends, one might suspect that they are not quite so warmly received but then Hamlet has no reason to suspect the Players of betrayal. It is probably a relief to have a simple transaction. The players show up, Hamlet has them put on a show, they probably all drink together and have a quaffing good time and then the players shove off. Not so complicated and a welcome development.

There seems to be such genuine affection for the Players in these lines. This is not the formal welcome – it is full of knowledge of the company. This one, for example, who Hamlet is glad to see well. Another whose facial hair has changed. He knows these people and seems so genuinely glad to see them. There’s an atmosphere of familiarity that is absent in many of Hamlet’s interactions with others.

And truly, actors can be very familiar. They’re often too familiar. There’s something about the intimacy of a theatrical company that leads to blurring of boundaries, the relaxing of niceties and formalities and just generally creating an atmosphere of permissiveness. It is one of the great joys, as well as one of the great frustrations of being a part of a company of actors.
And one need not join the company to get a whiff of that heady familiar intimacy. Come to the opening night party, go drinking after the show, sit in on a rehearsal you will likely find yourself swept up in the whirlpool of familiarity.

It may be the fact that I’m a theatre artist but the entrance of the Players into this play at this moment is always a great relief. It feels like it releases some sort of tension, that the Players have come, everyone can relax now.

And it does have that effect for a while, everyone has hope that the play will provide a welcome distraction, that it could provide Hamlet a focus in his madness or just shake things up a bit.

The players do put a pin in the balloon of the play here. They collapse the play into something entirely new before they blow the whole thing up again.

The players’ arrival feels like the arrival of a long-awaited friend. And many of my friends are players so it does make some sense.

Is this where we get The Bridge in popular music? Does it come from an abridgement to what came before?
It seems as if Hamlet is making music allusions in this sections so it could well be that he means abridgement musically. That is, he’s singing a song and the players have arrived to sing the next bit. Which is a shift in the tone and sound of the song. Makes sense as The Bridge to me. He and Polonius have been singing the verse and the chorus and the Players take them to the bridge.
If he doesn’t mean it musically, I’m not sure how he means it. The Players are his abridgement, that much is clear.
What the abridgement is outside of a musical context, well, that’s a bit of a mystery to me.

Is he being purposefully obtuse here? Seems likely. I mean, a) using the French for song, a form that is usually secular then b) making that song Pious – It’s just – well, we expect a pious hymn or a pious chorale but a pious chanson? It’s like a pious pop song – not unheard of but still pretty weird.

Then – the first row? Is he saying the first line? The first verse? Or is this an accepted way of talking about music in Renaissance England (or Pre-Denmark pre-Renaissance)? The first bars on a sheet of music might well be called a row; there is a row-like appearance.
This is where music scholarship and literature scholarship might get together and have a conversation. Hell, I know a music scholar, maybe I’ll ask him.

Sometimes I see the structures of moments as jokes. In training actors and directors we often talk about Beats (or “bits” as someone alleged that Stansilavsky was actually saying with his Russian accent.) This whole Jephthah section is a curious beat and if it were a joke, it would seem to fall flat here. The punchline feels like it’s all at the top. Perhaps these quoted lines are a song and perhaps the melody provides a punchline that the strange vagueness of them doesn’t, but with the information I have in front of me, it sort of fizzles out.

Hamlet brings up a man who killed his daughter, calls Polonius that man and when Polonius accepts the offer, Hamlet blocks it and sings a nonsensical song. Maybe it’s a Monty Python sort of joke in which a man at a desk interrupts with something odd instead of ending the sketch.

This line ends up landing on my 40th Birthday. I find that, for perhaps the first time, I am filled with a sense of trepidation about my age. I have mostly embraced the shift from year to year before now (although truthfully the last two have had a twinge of a sneak preview of this age trepidation.)

There is nothing to be done about it. Age happens regardless of how we feel about it – but I am surprised at how much this feels like the passing of my youth. Within all of that though, is the anticipation of liberation. That in no longer being young, I might finally achieve some respect, might be able, for once and for all, release all hope of pleasing other people, of maintaining an illusion of trying to fit in. It’s as if I will go straight from maiden dresses to purple, as in When-I-am-an-Old-Lady-I-will-Wear-Whatever-the-Fuck-I-want-because-it-doesn’t-matter-any-more Purple.

I am entering middle age, see. That’s the trick. And in the archetypal structure, we go from maiden to mother to crone. But who are we, those who are not mothers? This space is a blank, almost. Maiden – SOMETHING – Crone. And I suspect this is why I imagine going straight to my I Shall Wear Purple Stage. Because there’s nothing in between. Which makes me feel as though I’m falling off the edge of the earth. Nay, that follows not.

It only occurs to me now what a non-sequiter this whole Jephthah sequence is. Polonius is talking about actors, about Roman writers and then suddenly Hamlet exclaims about Jephthah’s treasure?

It really is classic crazy-acting behavior. And if the first line is just an out of the blue exclamation to a biblical figure, then the second is clearly calling Polonius Jephthah. It’s a two-step crazy.

Take crazy to the gods for your initial exclamation! Like, “O, Diana, what a nice bow and arrow you had!”

Then go crazy direct as in, “Hey, Diana, I’m looking at you.”

Voila! Mission Accomplished in the Attempting to Appear Crazy Game.

There was an article about the effect of daughters on fathers.  It indicated that there was some evidence that having daughters turned fathers into better men. Or at least, more compassionate ones.
It’s funny, though, I read this article round about the same time that I heard this Freakonomics podcast which seemed to indicate that fathers who had daughters were many times more likely to divorce their wives than fathers with sons.
It would seem that these two bits of media might be in contradiction with one another. And looking at them side by side, I do feel my eyes cross a little. But in a way, they make sense together, the cultural preference for boys leads to both divorce and more enlightened fathers of daughters. If, of course, any of that is true.
Certainly the fathers in Shakespeare are mostly the fathers of daughters (Lord Montague, Gloucester, Henry IV, Macduff, Hamlet, Egeus of Syracuse, Belario excepted) and while some of them are improved by their daughters (Pericles, Cymbeline, Duke Senior, arguably Lear) a lot of them are right bastards about their girls (Egeus of Athens, Lord Capulet, Prospero, Leontes, Brabantio, Baptista) And the mothers that there are (Gertrude, Volumnia and the Abbess) are the mothers of boys. Ist possible that being single fathers magnifies the girl effect?

Actors arriving on a herd of donkeys is already an amusing image. I see a twelve person company just clump clumping up to the palace gates and they look gloriously ridiculous.

Even funnier is a group of actors arriving on their asses, like scooting across the ground on their butts, like a dog trying to scratch his behind. Or maybe on Toboggan type sleds, their hands on the reins, their legs bringing them scoot by scoot closer.