How does Laertes already know she’s mad? She hasn’t SAID anything yet. She must have a look about her or she must be doing something that shouts “I’m mad!” I don’t think anyone would have had time to tell him before – the madness is relatively new and he’s only just arrived. Whatever she’s doing, however she’s looking, she must look obviously crazy otherwise this would be an odd assumption to make.
It’s a heavy madness, too, it would seem – one that it will take a lot of weight to even out on the scale of his inauguration/revenge.

I wonder – scientifically – how many times salt it would really take to do this? At what multiplication of salt would one be blinded? And could the body misfire in this way? Like, when you cry, it causes agony – like pouring table salt in your eye? Like that amazing Kids in the Hall sketch wherein the guy puts salt in his eye over and over.

Laertes gets real colorful when he’s freaked out. I mean – brains…heat…it’s evocative!
I understand the impulse – like – the pain is extreme and your head is aching. I had a migraine recently and I was ready for someone to put a bullet my head, it was so agonizing. Some heat drying up a brain might do the trick just as well – especially in a time before bullets.

This is a very good question. What noise IS Laertes responding to? What is happening outside? Is Ophelia making crazy noises? Is someone fighting her? Is there someone who is preventing her from coming in loudly?
The Danes are clearly advocating for her entrance but she’s not in yet. Is she singing already? Are others trying to shush her? These are the questions that a lot of productions fail to ask and then end up bloodless and dry.
This is a good question. A good production will have a good answer.

I’m imagining a performance piece in which we see each character who says “How now” and the circumstances that inspire the How now. It’s only dialogue would be “how now.” The other lines would have to be observed somehow, with gibberish maybe or a speech reverser.

Actually this might work better as a film project. To edit together all the different characters in multiple settings with extremely different costumes and contexts and it’s just one How Now after another.

Today feeding people blood inevitably calls to mind vampires. But when Shakespeare was writing, vampires weren’t really invented yet. They weren’t yet a THING. A bird that feeds with its blood is just a noble bird, not a weird creature sacrificing itself to vampires.

I’m not sure one could talk about blood feeding in this day and age without conjuring a vampire image, so vivid is the vampire in the cultural imagination. Pelicans, not so much.

As far as I know, my father doesn’t have any enemies – except maybe injustice and war. And even they don’t have any particular argument with my father – he’s just a lover of peace, he might not call them his enemies. I don’t know what it’s like to have a father with enemies. I can’t imagine who would wish mine ill. The only possible exception would be his ex-wife – who, due to their sharing of some children, has to keep her ill will in check. If she has any – I don’t know.

I’m not a big maker of enemies myself. I doubt I have any mortal ones – though I have pissed a lot of people off. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t want to kill me, though. And given how a lot of people have to live in the world, that’s probably a privilege.

Husband as a verb came after husband as a noun, apparently – so one has to imagine that has was somehow related. The act of being a husband somehow being equivalent to limiting resources.
The patriarchy is baked right in!

Oh sweet young man, with so much confidence. I once felt that myself as a young woman. I believed I could bend the world to my will. In high school, I remember thinking “If I don’t like my college, I’ll change it!” And I fully believed I could. And I didn’t like my college as much as I thought I would and I tried to change it and it didn’t budge. I feel it must have been somewhere in that year when my understanding of the limits of my will began.
There are some young men who never run into their limits. The bubble of privilege means that they never encounter a stop – and then, as time goes by, they think everyone else’s wills are weak, since those people did not achieve all that they aimed at.
It makes me think of that cartoon of a race where a straight white dude has a clear course and the woman of color has a dozen treacherous obstacles. The caption says something like, “But the race is the same!”
Anyway – I suspect that until this moment, Laertes has never known an obstacle he couldn’t get past with his will.

And a million academic dudes cream their pants for this straight up counterpoint between Laertes and Hamlet. It feels like 99% of Hamlet analysis lives in this territory. Hamlet is a coward; Laertes isn’t. Hamlet hesitates. Laertes doesn’t. Hamlet fails to get revenge; Laertes tries more. And then you see how faulty this is. Laertes, yes, kills Hamlet, who killed his father. Which, I guess, in the revenge scales is right on point.

But Hamlet kills Claudius in the same scene. Effectively doing the same thing.
Laertes is no paragon. And yet so much of the academic literature of this play LOVES to compare how much more effective Laertes is at this revenge thing.

But he’s not any more effective than Hamlet.
He’s more emotional certainly. More impulsive, for sure. He starts shouting and creating a coup immediately.
But he ends up just as dead as Hamlet.
So there’s not, like, a better strategy for revenge.
MAYBE the whole notion of revenge is faulty.
MAYBE anyone who pursues revenge ends up getting his own sword turned on him.