You don’t hear much about Denmark in the news here in the States. I don’t think I’ve ever met a Dane. If I have friends who have visited Denmark, I don’t know about it. This might lead one to corroborate Hamlet’s statement that Denmark is as closed up as a prison. But I somehow doubt its prison-like quality. I imagine that it rather keeps itself to itself and doesn’t need to broadcast its identity all over the world (unlike some other countries I could name, like the one I’m sitting writing this in.) If it were truly a prison, word would get out, people would talk about it – because the harder a nation tries to suppress its people, the more their secrets spill out. It’s the sort of thing people talk about. Happy healthy people who don’t bother anyone, they’re just not that compelling a story for the rest of the world.

My high school felt like a prison to me. The architecture (designed by someone who designed prisons, I was told) reminded me of a prison (no windows, blocks of cells/classrooms, two yards surrounded by the building,) the air, the bells, the shouting in the hallways, all of it added up to Prisonville. But more than anything, I felt trapped in it. I was constantly straining at its bounds. I searched out loop holes and I found them. In retrospect, that sense of confinement may have served me well. If I hadn’t been searching for ways to escape, I wouldn’t have found a way to take a class at the University during the school day. I wouldn’t have found all those outside activities and communities and cultures. Being confined, I learned how to fly.

I wonder now if the tight restrictions of a prison-like high school experience had the effect of Temple Grandin’s hugging machine. I wonder if being tightly squeezed like that, made me feel freer to expand whenever I was released. Now – while I often feel trapped or stuck or limited in my life choices -I am never really confined. I wheel around like a pinball in a machine, hitting walls and falling into holes, but always on the move. I suppose even a free wheelin’ pinball is still confined in its game.

 

Sometimes, when dealing with particularly difficult people, I have to remember the power of a well-placed, well-phrased question. I get caught up trying to respond to what’s thrown at me, answering their concerns or taking the bait. But a question, a question, can accomplish so much more than the rant or the defense or the speech that rises up first. A question can challenge, can clarify, can pause a person in his tracks. A question is like a martial arts move that accepts the attack and diverts it.

Rosencrantz’s news is not only not true, I’m not sure that it is possible. Nor am I convinced that it would be desirable. As much as I admire the truth and long for it sometimes, I am grateful for the fiction of fiction. Theatre, while best when built on the foundation of some kind of truth, be it emotional or mythical or factual, requires a dose of the untrue to give it distance and shape.

Art gets made with the bending of truths into new forms, it takes the honest and makes it slightly less so. I am also grateful for the little dishonesties that grease the wheels of social interactions. The “You look greats and the “I really enjoyed your novel.” I would not want everyone to tell me how tired I look or how much work there still is to do on that book.

Twice I have been in schools on the day before a Doomsday prediction. The first one, a few years ago, was an elementary school. All of my friends were joking about the forthcoming end of the world that weekend. It was hard to imagine anyone taking it seriously. Then, in the hallway, between my 5th grade classes, a student asked a very serious question about what he felt sure was the end of the world. I did my best to both take his concerns seriously and to reassure him that that Friday would most likely not be the last we would see of each other. As it turned out, I was right (as I suspected) and I was furious at the Doomsdayers who created such tremendous anxiety in a little kid.

Then this past December, I met a middle school kid for the first time. I was there to get him (and his classmates) ready to go to the theatre to see a show the following day. He, very morosely, said he would not be there. I asked him why. He said none of us would be, as Doomsday was scheduled for that evening. I suggested he enjoy the workshop, just in case we all survived, which, as it turned out, we did. But the day of the show, the Doomsday kid wasn’t there. I worried about him. I wondered if, in the absence of a worldwide Doomsday, he might have created one of his own.

The new in news is really what it’s all about. The news is what is new. I read a book about the differences between the UK and the US. The author pointed to how obsessed the US is with new-ness, how we named our cities new this or that, how we ask each other what’s new, how our advertising skews toward the New and Improved, how we strive ever onward toward the NEW thing, the NEW idea, the NEW horizon.

Of all the shitty ways to say a woman gets around, this one may be the least shitty. Maybe I just want it to be true but a strumpet may include a hint of admiration in it. Like, a whore gets used but a strumpet gets to do some using.

If Fortune is a strumpet, then strumpeting must involve having a whole lot of power over a whole lot of people. Fortune wouldn’t sleep with anyone she didn’t explicitly want. Fortune makes all the calls. She doesn’t answer to anyone. She gets around because she likes to spread her gifts around. It’s fun for her to share. I want strumpet to mean something like Player or Casanova, or any of the vaguely flattering names for men who sleep with a lot of women. It probably doesn’t. But I want it to.

Some groups of students get antsy on the last day of school before break because they’re anticipating trips – vacations to nice places with their families. Others get antsy because they’re anticipating trouble – a week at home with their families means that they’re anticipating conflict and difficulty. Some groups are a combination of both things. But they pretty much all get antsy right before a break.

While Hamlet is pretty directly referencing Fortune’s lady parts, I think there are likely many other secret parts of Fortune. She is always veiled. You will never really know your future. You can guess at it, receive hints but Fortune is always obscured, always behind a curtain, under a table, inside a card deck, inscribed in a palm, you can’t ever really see her. Those that reveal bits of her truth tend to veil themselves also. They drape bits of fabric over everything and themselves, secret themselves away, in hushed, curtained rooms. Fortune won’t appear under fluorescents or under the eye of a microscope. She needs her secrets.

So many Hamlets steal the punch line from Guildenstern. They suggest that the middle of Fortune’s favors is between her legs. Now, I get that almost every Shakespeare actor that ever lived is constitutionally unable to resist a dirty joke (my non-Shakespearean boyfriend asked me, “Is there a law that says there must be exaggerated thrusting in every Shakespeare show?”) but if Hamlet makes the joke here – it is:

a) inaccurate geometrically

b) textually confused – he has just asked them if they live about her waist, which IS the middle, why would he then decide the ladyparts were in the middle? No sense.

C) stealing the thunder from Guildenstern. He makes this exchange a joke sandwich in which Hamlet gets the bread and Guildenstern gets the pimento paste in the middle. It’s also essentially the same joke three times in a row if Hamlet suggests Fortune’s middle is her mons pubis. If he is truly just following the metaphor they’ve set up, it makes the most sense that he’s truly trying to work out how they are.

They’ve said they’re not so great and not so bad and naturally Hamlet would have to conclude that they’re somewhere in between. He’s just continuing the metaphor. If Guildenstern’s “privates” line is a surprise to Hamlet, then his next line can be the surprise it seems to be, it can actually take on an exclamatory tone.

Hamlet is suggesting that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Fortune’s Belt, I think , and not her chastity belt. (Lord knows you wouldn’t catch Fortune in a chastity belt, not never, not nohow.) I’m not saying Fortune’s a strumpet but she probably gets around and there’s no one who could stop her.