Is there another instance of a king being called Gracious? It’s a little odd. Your Grace, okay. I get that. But gracious? I guess it falls in the same category as Majesty? Like it’s a hipper way to say, “Your Grace”?

I’m tempted to re-punctuate this bit. To have “gracious” be a compliment that Polonius gives his daughter, a reflection of how he perceives her walking there. And even “so please you” could be to Ophelia. It would soften the relationship between Polonius and his daughter a little bit, maybe give it a shade of affection, as if he were asking her permission to hide with the king or at least just letting her know where they’re hiding. That would give a fun bit of business for Hamlet and Ophelia later when he asks where her father is.
It could be. “Gracious! So please you, we will bestow ourselves.”

Polonius gives Ophelia her blocking. What sort of director is he? Does he just point to the location he wants her to walk in? Does he demonstrate for her the manner in which she should walk? Is he specific about this location or general? That is, does he point, with a finger or hand or just give a bit of a wave in some direction or other?
Polonius does have some experience in the theatre. He did play Julius Caesar that time. Is he orchestrating another great play here?

If you’d told me when I started this project that, through it, I’d become very interested in royal protocol, I’d have been very surprised. I thought, as I unpacked each line, that I’d fall into poetic raptures and sink deep into the pleasures of alliteration. Instead I find that so many lines lead me to wonder about the chains of command, rituals and methodologies.

This one, for example, leads me to wonder why Polonius is the intermediary between Hamlet and the King and Queen. That is, would Polonius normally occupy this position – of being beseeched by Hamlet to beseech the King and Queen? Can Hamlet not invite them himself? Or can he invite them but he chooses to use Polonius as a go-between? (This is all even more interesting when I think about how most of Hamlet’s madman performances seem to be FOR Polonius.) There’s a way that having Polonius be the one to invite the King and Queen contributes to the level of political calculation that Hamlet is doing. If it is the usual protocol to have Polonius as the conduit between these people in most things then this is not so unusual. Polonius may be the filter or the dam between Hamlet and Claudius, and perhaps even Gertrude. Having Polonius always in the middle complicates everything in a very interesting way.

This fall I saw two single gendered companies. The all male cast was the one I saw most recently. There is something so familiar about it, a sense that the entire company is bang on task and I imagine their company manager leading them out together this way, with
“Come Sirs.”

While the male company was the more highly publicized of the two, the more celebrated, the more expensive, the more lauded, it was also (despite all the hype) very much business as usual. I felt as though I’d seen much the same piece on other stages with a slightly smaller budget.

The female company’s show, by contrast, was not something I’d seen before, even though I’ve seen many all female Shakespeare productions. There was something new about it. Something unfamiliar and even though the show wasn’t all I’d hoped it would be, there was something so satisfying about not really knowing what was going on all the time, that expectations for roles, for characters, were just by virtue of being out of context for a change was very very compelling.

Also, I had the sense that when this group’s company manager led them with, “Come, ladies.” They may not have all come running at once.

Is this where we get dessert? Is there something inherent in our word for the sweets after a meal that implies a worthiness for it? Certainly in my family, dessert has always been colored this way. Either in that one deserves dessert for some reason or that one doesn’t deserve it but you’ll be “bad” and get it anyway.

I guess technically dessert must come from the French and the English use pudding for dessert so we don’t get it from them but there is something so apt about the way these meaning intersect. The moralism of dessert mixing with desert, but not desert like the landscape without water, but desert, pronounced the same as the American dessert, is appropriate for our American roots, our Puritanical heritage that calculates everything to deserving.

No more struggling. No more disrespect. No more condescension. No more sexism. No more racism. No more self doubt. No more poverty. No more self-flagellation. No more shitty theatre. No more injustice. Oh dear, once you start thinking of all the things you really want no more, of the list just goes on and on.
Maybe the ideal is to have no more of no more.

It’s funny how whether or not an actor can cry becomes the marker of his quality. Actual tears are impressive to an audience and the Holy Grail for some actors.

But it seems to me that actual genuine laughter is harder to do and almost no one remarks about that when discussing an actor’s performance. It’s like, it’s so delicate, no one even wants to remark on it. Especially not the laughers.

I am in total agreement with Polonius on this point. That is all.

I’ve been sitting here for 10 minutes trying to think of something that’s good. There are, of course, in the great stretches of the planet MANY things that are good but because I’m in a dark moment of my life, I’m finding it hard to think of one. Because, of course, this good thing must relate to me. It can’t just be an objectively good thing. It can’t be rainbows over waterfalls in Hawaii. It can’t be the Bolshoi Ballet or the Pyramids. It can’t be baby hedgehogs on the internet. That would be a brilliant exercise, though, listing all that is good in the world. In fact, I’m sure I’ve done that very thing MANY times before. Let’s check my journals from the last 20 years and see what we find.

HOWEVER. I finally came up with something that is good in my current life in this current moment and then I feel like an ass for not thinking of it right away, for not celebrating, for not floating around the city with joy. My student loans are about to be paid off. There is a check on its way to my loan company and when it arrives, I will no longer have student debt. It’s magic. One member of my family made a very generous move and magically, I am free. That’s good.

When I swore that oath to myself that I would be an artist and did not mind if I had to labor in obscurity for a while or live in poverty, I did not have a sense of time. When I was a teenager and making these choices, things that took a long time took months or a year. I figured that finding some success would be like those couple of years in which I was waiting for my driver’s license. It seemed long, sure and it took patience but there was an end point. I did finally turn 16 and even after I failed the test the first time, I did eventually get a license. Having to suffer for a while for my art seemed perfectly reasonable.

When a few years is the longest you’ve ever had to be patient, it is impossible to imagine the effect of 20.