I heard an extraordinary lecture by Dr. Gail Paster last week. She calls herself something like a somatic anthropologist and her work explores the body and how it relates to the worldview of the time. We learned about the Four Humors, which most of us might have said, before this lecture, “Yeah, Yeah, the Four humors, that’s a thing in Shakespeare. I know that, check!”

But this time we learned how the beliefs of the make-up of the body connected to the world outside. The blackness of bile connecting to the blackness of night and blackness of purpose and the intermingling of all of those things. We also learned about the humors’ connection to the Four Qualities and their combos: warm, dry, wet and cold and how the references to those qualities had emotional states as well as climate-like ones.

There was a discussion of winds in the body and winds out of doors, the way a storm could come over you on both the inside and the outside. And there was a hint of emotive geography – how those in the south were hotter and more moist or drier and colder depending on the source. And what all of this might mean in reference to their emotional qualities.

I’m fascinated with all this and it makes me wonder about the Four Directions. Does the North-North-West represent something in particular to an Elizabethan audience? Does a North-North-West wind suggest a particular state conducive to Hamlet’s particular brand of madness? Is he sending a coded message to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern without saying what he means explicitly?
And what of Westerly-ness? Why North-Northwest and not just North?
He slips off the scale of the Four Directions to suggest Eight Directions.
North, North-west, like warm and dry or cold- wet.
I’m just wondering.

And we think it’s only contemporary families that are confusing! Having your mother marry your uncle is very very tricky familial relations–wise. It’s trickier even than the daughters and sons of marriages before and after and all mixed up. What to call all of these pairings can be terribly complicated.

My mother was partnered with someone for many years. He lived in my house (or, more accurately, I lived in his) and he sometimes turned up for important life events. But because he had not married my mother, I had the strange problem of knowing what to call him. Well, I knew what to call him – it was his name that I called him by. What I didn’t know was what title to give him. He wasn’t my stepfather, because of that whole marriage thing, but it was little bit off to simply call him my mother’s boyfriend. We settled on pseudo-stepfather. It gave him the authority of a step-father but undercut it too and it seemed to suit everyone involved.

Those that I said this to were often baffled by it. As I imagine Rosencrantz and Guildenstern might be by uncle-fathers and aunt-mother.

The difference between someone saying you are welcome and the feeling of being welcome can be profound. You can feel a welcome the way that some people say “I’m open.” It usually means the opposite.

I find that open people do not claim to be open. And non-open people rarely make you feel like you could talk to them about your concerns when they say “I’m open to your concerns.”

Real openness is felt and needs no words. Likewise a real and genuine welcome.

It’s too bad Hamlet never gets to be king because I think he’d be a great leader.
This line, for example, strikes me as a very diplomatic and forward thinking thing to say. He’s aware of all of the ceremony and perceptions around ceremony and heading off a potential diplomatic problem before it even begins. I imagine a court is full of people jockeying for positions of favor and I imagine that someone else might not concern himself with the conflicts that could explode around the favors he, the prince, might give. I know very few leaders who are true leaders like this – who can address difficulties before they get nasty – who take responsibility for their own roles in those difficulties. I try to do it when I can and while it is not easy it does make everything cleaner and clearer to tackle the problems before they get too big.

Huh. Is what you’re wearing really the demonstration of welcome to someone?

I suppose, when you’re royalty, it totally is.

You put on your ermine for other royalty, your military garb for commanders, your religious toned robes for the pope.

There may well be an outfit for every brand of welcome.

When greeting the peasants, do you dress up or down?

Oh boy. That fella’s never gonna give up his seat by the air conditioner. No siree. He’s finished his sandwich, he’s drunk his water and now he’s well into his book.
He does shake his leg rather continuously. (I wonder what that’s about? And he never trades legs. The tonus on those two legs must be quite wildly different!)
And certainly, you pays your fee for the sandwich-ee and you should get to stay for as long as you like! But –

Wheee! He’s looked at his watch and now he’s departed
and now it is me who gets to hog the A/C.

I sit myself right in front, too, no pretending I’m not interested in this cooling force next to me. No – this is what I’m here for. This cool air. And nothing else.

I guess a lot of ladies go crazy for a guy’s physique. I had a friend in middle school who was obsessed with boy’s backs. “Look at his back!” she’d swoon, as some high school boy got out of the pool. I did not understand sexuality hardly at all. I guessed, since she swooned over backs, that backs were what was meant to be attractive in boys.

At the time, I thought boys were cute if they had nice faces. But I understood that that was not something meant to make me swoon.

There were girls who went crazy for butts, for chests. There was a sort of part-for-part objectification competition.

Me? It was always hands that would make me go swoony when I thought about them. But not until I’d seen those hands in action and I could swoon at the thought of your hands on my skin, or moving across strings or over keys, circled around sticks, trailing along my arm, wrapped around a paintbrush. For me, it was always what you did with them.

I used to write songs about that. 

This seems to be an official, ceremonial, Princely welcome to the castle for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He is, after all, welcoming these guys to a place they’ve already been welcomed by the King and Queen. He’s giving them the run of his palazzo, which they already have been given access to.

What he’s not doing is welcoming them to his chambers, or his private smoking room, or the corner of the castle that’s like his pub, you know where he can kick back and have a few drinks with buddies. He’s not welcomed them to play pool or go shooting or ride his horses. It’s like the welcome he’d give a visiting ambassador, not the welcome he gives his friend, like Horatio, for example.

Hast any philosophy in thee?

Philosophy used to be the place you’d go for answers, it seems. Psychology and anthropology and sociology hadn’t really kicked in yet, so philosophy was what you had to explain the oddities of the world.

I never studied philosophy. The one class I was interested in met at 8:00 in the morning and I found I wasn’t QUITE interested enough to think through the early morning fog that clouds my brain at that hour. I’m not sure I even fully understand what philosophy means in this day and age or even, in previous ages. It seems to me to be a methodology for thinking about the world. If I had any philosophy in me, it is a fluid one that shifted from seeing the world as a stage to seeing the world as a game to a Feldenkrais lesson to a Rasaboxes exercise to a viewpoints exploration to a Choose Your Own Adventure and so on.

I am curious about the economics of king’s portraits. Clearly, they can be expensive. And are likely not mass produced. It seems unlikely that etchings would be the prime portraiture so these are likely paintings, painted by painters.

Do they churn out multiple copies of the same painting? Or paint one and have their apprentices copy them? Or just paint portrait after portrait in various styles? And in miniatures?!

And why would you shell out a hundred ducats for a painting of a guy you used to make mows at? Is it expected? Is it so that if someone comes over and they see it, they can report back to the king that “Lord SO and SO has a lovely portrait of you in his dining room? You really must go and see it!”?

I understand that politics and economics had a great deal to do with currying favor. It’s just hard to see how getting a painting of a king would do that.