There is still, hidden away somewhere, a deep romance in me for acting and for actors. I may roll my eyes when I meet yet another actor and have to take a deep breath as yet another long story begins to boom out of yet another actorly mouth, but I can, at times, remember the romantic sense of the art.

Lines like this send a little flutter of it past me, like a butterfly riding a breeze. While the realities of touring are grueling and frustrating, they can also be sweet. It is a rush to be introduced in this way. It brings to mind the feeling of walking into a new theatre in a place you’ve never been and looking around, filling the place with your imagination, seeking out the surprising bits of architecture you might take advantage of, weighing the advantages and disadvantages of various angles on the stage.

It is more than the sweetness of an empty stage. It is an empty stage that you will shortly take ownership of, discovering it and the people who sit before it all at once.
It could almost make me get back on the road again.

Sometimes news can feel like a warm puppy that you get to deliver to a child. You get pleasure from it as it squirms in your arms, licks your fingers and burrows into your elbow. It is not yours to keep, this soft creature – but for now, you enjoy both the anticipation of giving it away and the sweetness while you hold it.

Good old Shakespeare can get away with anything. Or maybe it’s Polonius who gets away with stuff. Either way – “Well” be with you?!? Well is suddenly a noun?

Or is “well” acting like an adverb, qualifying how to be? In any case no one could say this now. Or maybe it’s meant to be clunky? I mean, we know what he means. It’s a formality, a greeting, a wishing for wellness to gentlemen. It could be Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and maybe Hamlet, too or it could be some gentlemen he’s bidding goodbye. A busy prime minister version of Polonius wouldn’t have time to greet some gentlemen and then stand around while Hamlet and Rosencrantz talk about him. Unless Hamlet’s playing a power game here, stealing away the attention of his friends, leaving Polonius waiting while he talks about him. That scenario is kind of a dick move on Hamlet’s part. And sometimes Hamlet can be a real dick. And so can Polonius. It just depends on the production.

In the show, the actress (playing herself, it would seem) declared that she knew people by their touch, by their hands. Because she no longer had use of her hearing or seeing. She could only know someone this way.

I wondered though, if I lost both my sight and hearing, mightn’t I also know someone by their smell, by their vibration? Mightn’t I sense my mother’s approach even if I could not see or hear her?

But perhaps I overestimate the other senses. Perhaps the darkness and silence is so total, there would be no feeling someone behind you. Maybe those feelings are micro-hearing or seeing sensations. Maybe when I close my eyes in an acting exercise and sense the movement around me, joining it without seeing it, I’m really hearing it, quietly, without knowing that’s what I’m doing.

The kinesthetic sense, the proprioception that feels like it leads to some understanding of the other, to knowing someone else, may be the sum total of the other senses.

With my crazy punctuation idea, one could continue this thought. Polonius could be pointing out the location of the Lord to Hamlet instead of pointing out Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
I mean – Hamlet doesn’t need to be pointed out to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, presumably they know how to recognize him.

Often, in performance, this line has a dismissive quality – like Polonius is done with Hamlet and he’s tossing this line off to shake Hamlet off – to foist him off on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern perhaps. Maybe he would have given them a formal introduction but instead just points Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the right direction and stalks off. I can’t think of any other way I’ve ever seen it done.
Some Shakespeare education colleagues told me about a production in which Polonius, as the Prime Minister, is so busy, he’s constantly being presented documents to sign and things to do, calls to take, etc. In that case, this line could act as a hurried passing introduction.

Or it could be a last attempt to connect with Hamlet. Probably not, though, but it would be worth an experiment.

It’s probably the momentousness of my current moment and the climate of religiosity that hovers over death, but I suddenly wondered what would happen if we added a comma after Lord. It’s clearly not the meaning of the line. Context tells us that he’s speaking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and telling them what they’re up to. However – if one wanted to get a little irreverent with text – one could have Polonius respond to Hamlet’s jab at him with “You go to seek the Lord, Hamlet.” It could be an answer, a way to turn the other cheek or a bit of religious instruction. It probably isn’t But it might be interesting.

Suddenly so formal! I mean, they’ve already been you-ing it, up with the formal You instead of thee and thou but this farewell (where are we in the count?) has a YOU in the middle! This would seem to make a farewell more specific and perhaps also more personal. I could say Farewell to the crowd and the people in it when I say Farewell but a Fare You Well would suggest only you that I’m saying goodbye to.

It is a curious human trait that solicitousness can sometimes infuriate. When I was younger, I thought that being nice to everyone would inoculate me against their anger. I felt that if I were blameless and sweet to everyone, no one would ever blame me. The sourest people got my sweetest treatment. The prickliest got my smoothest soothing-est greetings. I thought no one would ever be mad me because I would nice them right out of it so that even if I, by accident, managed to infuriate, I could dissuade them from indulging in the fury toward me.

I’m not sure why I continued to think this for so long despite so much evidence to the contrary. I knew people who, no matter how nice I was, could find any reason at all to become enraged. And I didn’t just know these people, some of them lived in my house. But somehow I thought I could still smother the fire of fury with niceties. The fact that it always failed didn’t shake my idea.

It wasn’t until I found myself enraged by niceties myself that I began to understand the flaws in my previous thinking. There’s something about someone treating me like a dangerous animal, like someone who must be tiptoed around, that makes me want to become a dangerous animal, or at least snap at hesitating fingers outside my cage.

It’s possible that there is a deeply sentimental streak in Polonius. To him, it perhaps seems that Hamlet really does love Ophelia and has gone mad because Polonius has thwarted his attempts to reach her. There’s a Polonius that looks at Hamlet and feels very sorry for his own actions, that perhaps sees himself in a young man grown crazy for love. Perhaps this reunion with Ophelia is an attempt to right his own perceived mistake.

And what if this whole scene is an attempt at reconciliation, what if it were filled with tenderness? What if all Polonius really wants to do is sit down with Hamlet and say, “There, there, young lover. I understand. It’s my fault. I didn’t realize how much you loved my Ophelia. Be patient. We’ll work it out.”
I’ve never seen it played this way but I’d like to.

Ah yes, the prophecy of the madman! Throwing his crazy darts, willy nilly, hither and yon, he sometimes hits a bulls-eye and gives everyone goose-bumps. Sometimes it’s a happy (or unhappy) chance circumstance – other times, you wonder if the madman, released from social bounds and propriety, knows exactly what he’s saying and knows exactly how hard to throw the dart so that it will break the skin. Or sometimes it seems to be both – a precise list with one part of the brain and a wild toss with the other so that you could ask his rational brain why he threw that particular dart and he would have no idea.