Poor Osric. He has no idea what the heck Hamlet is talking about. Hoisted with his own linguistic petard, as it were.

And by infallible, he means – you said what I would have said.
That is, that which I agree with is, in fact, infallible.
I wish that this weren’t true of most men.

I find it hard to believe that Osric doesn’t know that Hamlet already knows Laertes. I mean – first of all – Laertes may have newly returned to court but he’s been around. And Hamlet dated his sister. Which may have been meant to be a secret but really wasn’t.
But here’s Osric describing Laertes as if he’s a total stranger to the court. Is it possible that Osric is so rarely at court himself that Laertes is actually news to him? Or has he been instructed to praise Laertes by Claudius? Or can he just not help talking once he’s got started? I have met people like that – who would describe your own mother to you just because they got started on a descript-o-thon.

Really? Is Laertes here? The one I just wrestled in his sister’s grave? The one I just got REAL mad at for no reason? You’re saying he’s newly come to court? I hadn’t noticed.
And also – I’m amazed that you had not heard that I have already tangled with him, Osric. News does not travel quite as fast as I would have thought.

But of course Osric knows. He must know.

I’d love to plead for my ease. This world we live in is so concerned with that that is hard. We praise hard work, hard workers, those who have had a hard life. We’ll forgive a fault if we saw that the person tried hard.
But to plead for ease? That pleases me.
I learned to value ease from training in Feldenkrais, to move toward that which is easy instead of that which is hard. I have accomplished worlds more from going toward the easeful path rather than the hard one. Which doesn’t mean that I’ve chosen a life of sloth, indolence and ready comforts.

For me, ease is something much more valuable than comfort. Ease creates possibility. It offers movement and choice.
For my ease. I’d risk a great deal.
For my ease, I’d sacrifice, too.

The Osric, in the production I was in ages ago, was played by a woman. I’m thinking about that now because I’m thinking about how these power dynamics would be so complicated by gender. In that production, her Osric didn’t seem to be really gendered. He was just a fop – a Monty Python character with an American accent. And our Hamlet was about her same size. They looked like brother and sister. (Did they play Sebastian and Viola in our accompanying Twelfth Night? I’m actually pretty sure they did, yes.)

But – if the size differential had been bigger, if Osric wore a dress..I don’t know – all these fun orders would read a lot differently.

This is one of those moments where the slowness with which I manage to post these little moments comes around in such an uncanny circular way. I wrote this post during the Kavanagh hearings and I then went to post it on the day that Amy Coney Barrett, handmaid of the patriarchy, was confirmed and sworn in. I did not post on that day. I felt there was something I needed to add here, at the top, where I could point to the circles of time that make all these things revolve and revolve in such a terrible way.

It’s also a curious circle, in that, this Kavanaugh situation prompted me to write a blog post about becoming a dragon. It was a small hit. And a few months later, that blog post inspired a piece that has since become the audio drama podcast that I’ve been making throughout this pandemic and am just one episode away from completing. In seeing the beginning of this Kavanaugh cycle, I’m now wondering what horrors this new awful Supreme Court confirmation will yield and what blog posts it will inspire, which maybe, if I’m lucky inspire me to make another piece of work.

A lot has happened in two years.

I don’t know what madness might be in the air when you read this but I hope that it isn’t this particular pocket of enabling again.

*

My sympathy for Osric is slightly reduced today. I find that the goings on in the Supreme Court Confirmation news has made me less sympathetic to enablers of shitty powerful men. Today I am full of fury and am ready to destroy the patriarchy – starting from the shitty head of this country and just going full beserker outward. Osric would not escape my revolutionary fury today. Today I see him as all the enablers on Twitter trying to say that a little attempted rape at age 17 isn’t really a big deal, boys will boys, boys will just cover the mouths of women screaming to be let go, boys will just turn up the music to avoid being caught raping. Today I see him delivering these kinds of messages, the invitations to power’s center, the welcome to the bloodbaths.

I have become concerned with what the actual temperature is in this scene. I mean, I understand that Hamlet is messing with Osric and getting him to agree to whatever he says. But there is also an objective temperature – and one statement or the other is in conflict with that.

I suspect it is actually very hot. This sentence is supporting my sense of the earlier line wherein Osric seems to be disinclined to put his hat on, due to the heat.

In fact, it is Osric who brings up the temperature. He is the first to declare it is hot – which leads me to believe that it is, in fact, hot. This line has a sense of relief to it – yes, it is. Hot. Very hot. We’re back on to solid ground here and Osric can fan himself with his hat if he wants to if he cannot tell how hot it is.

What’s funny to me about this is that I have never paid the slightest attention to what the actual circumstances were in this scene, temperature-wise. It always was just Hamlet messing about with a sycophant.

This line would be much funnier if Osric were sweating profusely as he said it. If sweat were pouring off him, if he had pit stains and circles of sweat at his back and then declared that it was indifferent cold…

It’s remarkable how affected this speech is without actually having any vocabulary or intelligence. The most rarified word is “impart” but what he’s imparting is “a thing.” I mean..there are a million words for message (OK, maybe not a MILLION!) but this guy can only come up with “thing”.

Also his repletion of “lord” in the first bit is pretty sycophantic. Which is definitely a word that Osric wouldn’t know.

Here in 2018, Osric’s speech really reminds me of someone whose face and voice and words are never out of the public eye.