He called me his sweet lady yesterday. I liked it. It was a new endearment and it pleased me. Perhaps it’s because it sounds a little classical, like this dear lady here? Or because it was possessive and it gave me a sense of belonging?
Lady is a funny word. Many of my friends are using it as terms of intra-lady endearment and I don’t know whether we have matured into this title, formerly “hey girl” moves on to “hey lady” or whether lady has taken on a sort of ironic love in this day and age when most of us aren’t too concerned about whether our behavior is ladylike. We have not been taught the skills of the Great Ladies. We don’t carry ourselves like ladies. There’s a sort of evolution of ladylikeness.

Sometimes I don’t like all the lady stuff. Particularly when someone shouts “Hey Lady!” to get my attention. But I liked it when he called me his sweet lady. I don’t know if he’s mine evermore (or if that’s even what either of us would want) but I’m curious about his machine.
And Hamlet’s machine.
It seems only logical that Hamlet’s machine is his body but it’s a rather curious way to talk about a body, particularly in an age without so many machines. Was a machine just a thing that worked?
Someone give me the etymology of machine, please. I want to know about Hamlet’s machine, my machine, my man’s machine and all the machines that matter to me.

Hmmmm. More French. And why particularly this word? Doesn’t Adieu have a certain finality? Is this supposed to be a Dear John letter?
“I love you more than everything – Goodbye Forever?”
Like, is this supposed to be a suicide note? No other words in this letter would suggest that. It is, it seems, a very very out of place “adieu.”
It does make me question when this letter was written. And to what purpose. Does Hamlet have an inkling that Polonius is meddling? Has he written it for his benefit? Or perhaps he even suspects it might make its way to Claudius? If he wrote it after the sewing in the closet incident with the fouled stockings, he might just suspect things are afoot. If it’s written BEFORE, I really have no idea what this “adieu” is doing here.
His father’s ghostly adieus make some sense. This one? A mystery.

But that I love thee best, O most best, believe it.

Best of whom? That’s what I’d like to know. Are there other ladies in Hamlet’s life that he loves a little less?
A girl back in Wittenberg, perhaps? One who bends her head close to his as they look over the Latin translation together.
One, a sexy noblewoman in France, when he’s on vacation?
Maybe Hamlet’s got a pirate girlfriend and she’s on the crew when they rescue Hamlet from the ship headed to England.
He’s got a girl among the players. She lives in drag (since the players tend to be dudes) but can slip into femininity to play a queen, or don a mustache to play the villain.
There’s his old flame from grade school who he sometimes takes up with at the tavern when he slums it into town for a drink.
But he loves Ophelia best of them all. O most best. Because nothing screams sincerity like “O most best.” And also, “Believe it.”

Art is pretty much all I have with which to reckon my groans. I will even reckon my groans with one Art, with the other. When theatre seems to rip my heart out and taunt it, too – I will turn to words on a page. When the words on the page twist around into an unrecognizable mess, I will turn to sound, I will sing. When I lose my voice, I will play my guitar. When my strings pop off, I will play on a drum. When my drum is too loud and wakes up the neighbors, I will shake rice in a can. When rice in a can ceases to move me, I will turn to something I can make with my hands. I will sew one bit of cloth to another. I will stitch words in, and shapes. I will fold paper. I will draw my groans. I will write them. I will sing them. I will put them on a stage.

There is a rather convenient absence of an object in this sentence. We can assume that everyone loves. Even if it’s only the taste of cherries warmed by the sun.
I love. You love. Even the cruelest of dictators loves. The thing that a man’s lover wants to be assured of though, is that OBJECT part – that he loves HER.
The question is not that he loves but if she stands in the sights of that loving. He may love his mother. He may love his dagger. He may love Erasmus. He may love telescopes. He may love his dog. He loves. There is no doubt of that. But who? But what?

There’s that old riddle about the two brothers at a crossroads, the one in which one always lies and the other always tells the truth but you don’t know which; you can only ask one question to figure out which way you should go. If you don’t know this riddle and want to work it out on your own, read no further and do that. If you’ve heard this riddle as many times as I have, you may recall that the solution is (SPOILER ALERT) to ask what his brother would say. In lying, the lying brother will reveal the truth and the truth teller will illuminate his brother’s lie.
The trouble with this thought experiment is how absolute it is. There was never yet a human who was so reliable a liar that you could tell the truth by his lies – nor was there ever a truth-teller so rock solid that you couldn’t find some reason to doubt him. Even the most die-hard radical honesty advocate might slip off the rock of truth, if only by accident. But apart from that, a person you could set your Truth Watch by, ceases to be human somehow – you certainly wouldn’t want to chat with him at a party. Maybe this riddle would work better with robots.

Doubt that the sun doth move.

Don’t tell anyone but I’m a little bit of a glosser. I can easily gloss right over lines like this. I’m a big batch organizer, I guess. As in, I read a couple of lines in what is meant to be a love poem, put them in the box marked “love poetry” and dismiss them with, “Yeah, yeah, standard poem, Next!”
I have been known to do this when reading novels, as well, especially with descriptions, nature particularly. Give me a detailed description of the wheat bending in the wind across the plains and I batch it up with – Nature. Wheat. Wind. Next!
Which is partly why I’m doing this project because it is with this discipline that I catch my short-cuts. Thinking about the science of doubting the stars and the sun raises a whole host of questions about what in the heck Hamlet is up to in this poem, if in fact, he wrote in it the first place. It does not read: Doubt the existence of stars. Doubt the existence of the sun. Doubt the existence of truth. This is the sort of standard batching way I read it. Yeah, yeah. Stars. Sun. Truth. Love. It points at all of those things in a world where all of those things are newly questionable. Including Hamlet’s love.

This is actually good scientific advice; Doubt of accepted norms being one of the things that really moves science along. And if I’m not mistaken, we know now that stars are not, in fact, fire, so it’s a pretty good bet to doubt in this case. It is curiously fascinating to think about what was undoubtable for Shakespeare. Stars were fire. That’s it. There was no way to know that this was so, it simply was. Was fire the accepted fact of the moment? What did the Renaissance scientists think?
The evolution of the telescope taught us a great deal about the celestial bodies and their materials but I’m thinking, if I remember my science history correctly, that it was about 100 years after this that we got a really good look at the sky.
I will point out that the next line is, “Doubt that the sun doth move, “which is another thing that one really really should doubt – and makes me wonder at what point the news from Galileo made it over to England. (Fun fact: Galileo and Shakespeare were born the same year!)
It feels like there are few possibilities here:
1) Shakespeare knew of the developments in astronomy and was giving Hamlet some scientifically interesting things to say or
2) The scientific news had not yet hit and Hamlet is here asserting things he holds to be true – as in Doubt that the table is wooden. Doubt that we breathe air – which poetically is much more effective than telling someone to doubt things that are already in doubt
3) Shakespeare is giving Denmark a more medieval worldview than his Renaissance England where the sun still revolves around the earth and the stars burn with fire in the darkness.

Science scholars and Renaissance lit scholars unite! What is likely going on here?!