Uh-oh. What in the heck is a rouse?
It falls between ‘gaming’ and ‘tennis.’
He has been overtaken in this – so
I’m going to guess that it is some kind of game.
Maybe like cat and mouse but rat and rouse
Or Bat and Moose. I would play a game called Bat and Moose.
It would just HAVE to be fun.
Before I started to think about it, I assumed ‘rouse’ rhymed with ‘cows’ and was just a fancy way to say rows, which is in itself a guarded way to say ‘fights.’
I imagined that Laertes was beaten in fancy French boxing when he was overtaken in his rouse. A Louis XIV fop is the ref. His long feather in his cap bows over and over again as the ref, dressed in his best silken breeches and coat makes the calls – counting how long the contestants stay down on the gilded mat.

We are most inclined to admire Shakespeare’s skill when gazing over a poetic bit of speech. We will exclaim over a choice metaphor or an insightful bit of reasoning. But a touch like this makes me exclaim a little, too. It is such a graceful bit of character and rhythm and it is seemingly effortless in its construction. It steps over itself. It’s repetitious, musical in its silliness and lands, like the ending of a song, with a satisfying cadence.

There are few gentlemen left in the world. We’ve socialized them out of business, it seems. But then, I’m not even sure what would qualify someone as a gentleman in this day and age.
On one hand, he would need a gentility of manner.
He would wear a suit, not a t-shirt and what modern man would not wear a t-shirt? He would have a code of behavior, a graciousness, like he was hosting a party everywhere in the world, making everyone welcome.
Or else – if not a gentleman of manners – he might be a Gentle Man. That is, he would take the injustices of the world, his grievances, the battering he might receive at the hands of life and rather than pounding his fists on those more gentle than himself. The gentle man would become more kind, more generous, would attempt to make the way easier for those around him, becoming like water, flowing around a stone.

With his hands folded over his protruding belly, resting over his tailored vest, the picture of self-satisfaction, his case made.

With a slam, with a creak, with a quiet swoosh.

With a whoop for joy as the multitude of papers are finally signed, after endless negotiations with the lady in the suit dress, with the highly manicured nails and the hair that doesn’t move in the wind.

With a joke about his mother, one that almost always generates applause as well as the laugh.

With their big hit song, which he now performs solo, stripped down and acoustic, with his hat tipped over his left eye in a blue spotlight.

By locking the door, putting the chairs on the tables, sweeping the floors, picking up the kitchen mats and shaking them out back.

Out of context, it’s hard not to hear this line with a Spanish accent and interpret it vastly differently. I picture a woman in her 40s, with her dark hair piled high on her head, tendrils spilling out in all directions, glasses perched on her nose. She’s sitting on a bar stool in one of those cantinas – you know the kind they have in movies – but are maybe based on something real, not that I’d know since I’ve never actually seen an actual cantina.
I’m picturing the kind with a tin roof, open to the elements, the bar, a weathered wood, the customers almost as weathered and our black haired beauty sits on her stool presiding over them all in her black dress that drapes over her like it was made for her and it probably was. She speaks when a distinguished man, well dressed, somehow buttoned up even in his summer linens asks her why she’s never married. She throws up her hands, laughs, loudly and exclaims.

Out of context, of course, this phrase makes no sense – but its repetition serves as the trigger for Polonius’ memory. This is the third ‘Closes In the Consequence’ and the more it gets repeated, the more the words get abstracted and seem to shift from meaning to sound and rhythm. Closes in the consequence is fun to say and gets more and more pleasurable the more times I say it.
Closes in the consequence.
Closes in the consequence.
Closes in the consequence.
__________________/     u    u  ________  /      /    u
Looking at it, repeated, consequence becomes con-sequence
And there’s a sequence in its consequential quality
Until it closes, of course.

In the search for where it all went awry, for the moment the train derailed, the instant of the destruction of the dream, I discover it is a search for self. I was me, here, there, growing up, changing, shifting and then suddenly, I seemed to be gone. Look back, there I am – in a flash. . . but I’ll have to look along the timeline to find the moment that I left.

Doing some character analysis according to what or who a character swears by would be a completely fascinating study. It seems that mostly comic figures swear by the mass. Rosalind in As You Like It swears by Jupiter. She’s the only one in the play who does, though not the only one in the canon.

I don’t know. I haven’t done the study yet – but I’d like to see a list of all of Shakespeare’s characters and who/what they swear by. The mass is a curious one. Is he swearing by a Catholic mass? A church service of some other kind? Or is he swearing by the physical substance of something? The mass of forgetting? Or the mass of remembering?

In life, we forget what we were about to say very regularly. A few minutes ago, I saw a young woman utterly flummoxed by her forgetting why she’d begun a story about her brother and a moving van. Some people, once the point had been forgotten, might have proceeded anyway, hoping the reason for the story would return. This girl (yes, she had a job but she appeared to be no older than a minute) stopped, asked why she was saying what she was saying, then turned her head to the side and stared that way for some time. Her companion was no use to her at first. She simply complimented the girl on her ring and seemed ready to chat on about something else. The girl reluctantly joined in the chat – but finally asked what they’d been talking about before and once reminded, quickly found her way back to the point of her story.
I love that Shakespeare includes a character that slips into the same conversational traps we all still do today. It’s one of those touches that makes an archetypical old Pantalone or Dottore figure into a human being who does just what we do in our daily lives. It also helps him be likeable so that we might care about him later, when he’s killed.

Are you supposed to address someone differently if they’re from another country?
Is that how they rolled in Denmark?
Hello Stan of Portugual, this is Phil of Estonia. Good Sir of Persia. Friend of France.
Great Gentleman of Germany.
This is a phrase that I feel like I get the sense of but become increasingly confused by the longer look at it. “According to the phrase” Yes, sure, okay “OR the addition of man” I’m lost a bit there – is that the addition of a man’s name? His own particular personality maybe? “And country” Okay. It could be that we use Great Gentleman of Germany or that, depending on what country you’re in, you’d use a different address. Monsieur in France, Signore in Italian and so on. But none of this is quite clear to me and maybe not even to Polonius because it is right about here that he starts to get off track.