I have seen my fair share of madness.
Madness has moved through my life
With the regularity of a planet in its orbit, sometimes
it’s quite close and its influence is strong –
At others, the madness passes at a distance – just the bright glimmer of Venus –
Which could almost be mistaken for a star.
Of the madness that I have seen,
None would have been provoked by a letter returned
Or a door closed.
The causes have always been deeper,
More dramatic, more outrageous
Or decidedly less so,
Sometimes there appears to be no cause at all –
Just a sudden shift in the brain
That turns the world upside down –
First for the “mad” one,
Then for the people around him.
A change in the wind,
A date on the calendar,
The loss of a child or the hope of one
The sound of a whistle
Are all as likely to trigger madness
And perhaps as likely to end it.

Has Ophelia ever given anyone any hard words?
She is all down and flowers, all compliance and pliability. She seems to have no rough edges (though surely they’ve just been sanded down to turn a square into a circle.)
She is custard and cream, a thick rice pudding with cinnamon and raisins on top.
She is a throw pillow, a ripe peach, a small nosegay of violets wrapped in ribbon.
Her words are feathers, dandelion seeds floating on a breeze, flour billowing into the air above the sifting, butterflies alighting on leaves, silk on silk sliding.

Now he says it. Now he notices his daughters feelings!
Well, this isn’t realistic at all. I’ve never seen a man dive right into action and then realize he needs to acknowledge the feelings of the woman in front of him. Never happens. Nope.
At least, though, he does apologize. Or sympathize. Whatever he’s doing here. And I suddenly want to do a search through the canon to see who else in the plays says sorry. How many apologies are there in Shakespeare? How many sorrys?
There are 90 in the canon. And there are 4 in the play.
It redeems Polonius a bit. He’ll say it twice in this scene.

Reaching back into my memory. I tried to find a moment where the ecstasy of love had violent property in my own loving.
There was one desperate night full of desperate undertakings – one I am trying not to turn to, to remember.

I thought I could avoid it, then I remembered hearing this very line in a powerfully potent way just days after the event. The actor playing Ophelia had been sent home and we all heard the play differently with her replacement. The story is bound to rise up in these lines in little bits, if not in its totality – but the headline was:

Ophelia, heartbroken from an affair with Claudius and body wracked from an abortion, goes mad when Gertrude hooks up with Claudius.
Violent Properties: fire, glass, pills, locks, hotlines, police
Desperate Undertakings: The same.

I’m sorry, but what sort of father, after his daughter comes to him traumatized (so affrighted!) decides to go talk to his boss? His first thought is to take his trembling daughter to the King? This would benefit Ophelia how? Seems to me that this would benefit Polonius himself in giving him an in with Claudius. He’ll give him the paternal impulse to do something first. Many a father might want to spring into action in response to a crying daughter. But to the king? I don’t know about that. The fathers I know would be more inclined to go have some words with the man who made their daughters cry. They’d go talk to Hamlet himself if they were concerned with their girls. The king? Ophelia never seems more of a pawn in his game than here. Does he deserve her devotion? Her subsequent madness?

Don’t tell the Cool Police, but I listened to a lot of Peter, Paul and Mary as a teenager. They had a song that went “Come and go with me to that land, come and go with me to that land, come and go with me to that land where I’m bound.” There wasn’t much else to it. Just, come, go, land, with, me. I liked it a lot. It had a forward momentum that made me want to come, go with them to that land, wherever it was they were bound. And maybe clap my hands while I went there.
I like how coming and going mean opposite things and yet when you put them together like this, they’re perfectly matched in meaning. That’s a neat linguistic trick.

In those giddy years, the ones when love rushes in like water and just as indiscriminately, there were probably more conversations about boys than anything else. What they said and then what I said and then what they said and what I did then, etc. Reporting on romance (or almost romance, or wished for romance, or imagined romance, or suspected romance, or uninvited romance) was nearly as exciting as the romance itself. In many cases, definitely MORE exciting than the romance itself.
I remember impassioned storytelling in Chemistry class, when we ought to have been practicing our equations but instead could not keep ourselves from the reporting of the daily love news with tremendous urgency. Every attempt from Mr. Jones to shut our giggling journalism down only managed to press it down for a moment before it would rise up again at the nearest opportunity. It was like pressing on a water bed, wherever you applied pressure created a swell somewhere else. Knowing what was said, what happened was urgent. It would not wait until after school.

No, no, not I. Grateful for it, yes. Mad, no.
There were moments I missed the madness – wanted to be crazy in love, to lose my senses, to become stupid for it but I have found a whole other hosts of pleasures in thy love – that I didn’t know were possible. I am comforted by thy love, warmed by it. Thy love doesn’t make me stupid; it seems to make me smarter. Thy love doesn’t make me weak in the knees; thy love makes me stronger. Thy love doesn’t turn me into an idiot; it helps me stand taller. Thy love buoys me up, like water under a boat. Baffled by thy love? No, thy love makes things clearer, like a good pair of glasses. I am not lost in thy love, I do not disappear. I am found. I am more vivid.

Shoot for the moon, young man!
Shoot for the moon!
The only thing holding you back from the moon is the absence of you shooting for it!
No excuses, kid!
You have to shoot for the moon, at least. After all, even if you miss, at least you end up among the stars.
But you won’t miss! If you say enough inspiring things to yourself, gird your loins, get yourself going, you will achieve it all!
Aim high!

What? What do you mean, “How”? You just. . .aim!
I don’t know, a rocket?!?A bow and arrow?
Doesn’t matter, kid.
Well, a space shuttle, I guess.
In space?
A few minutes I guess.
But you’d be among the stars!
Several million light years away, maybe?
Do you think Neil Armstrong asked how they’d get to the moon?
Okay, I grant you that, they probably did have a plan and a whole lot of money and training and governmental support. That’s a good point.
But someone had to dream it! Before they went, right?
No. I don’t know his name. No, you’re right, that guy didn’t get to go to the moon in the end. But he shot for it, didn’t he? And eventually someone went. Where would we be if he hadn’t shot for it?
Not on the moon, that’s for sure.
Why do you have to be so LITERAL?

Yeah, Ophelia, what’s the matter? You’re frightened by your boyfriend in disarray, sighing heavily? You’re disturbed by his looking at you for a while before backing out of a room? Why does all this frighten you and send you running to Daddy? Why don’t you just look right back at your obviously unhappy boyfriend and ask him what’s going on? Why don’t you say – “Something seems to be troubling you. You feel like saying what it is? No? You’re just going to stare at me like a looney? Get yourself together, Hamlet. Pull up your socks, man. Put your hat on. Brace up that doublet. Can’t you see I’m trying to sew in here? You wanna tell me what’s up?”
But no, our poor little Ophelia doesn’t say a thing. She just stares back at Hamlet, then runs to Daddy, where he asks what she ought to have asked Hamlet. When he started knocking his knees, she could have said, “How now, Hamlet, what’s the matter?”