It is, though. Definitely. For everyone, more or less – either metaphorically or actually. We do, all end up dead. We don’t believe it. We think the things that happen to us will go on forever but…wait long enough and everything will change. The people we thought would always be here, they will all go, either before or after we do. We thought we’d always have Bowie and Prince and Alan Rickman. And because she had always been, it felt as though my grandmother would always be.
It is, even when you know better, hard to believe there will be an end.
Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service – two dishes, but to one table.
Oh, Bienvenue Monsieur et Madame – we have some deliciously new specials on the menu today. We bring to you a royal dish – a plate of roasted king. This skin crisp, fresh, ready to fall off the bone. This one was nice and fat and juicy and will roast up beautifully.
We also have an especially lean cut of a beggar. It is well seasoned and, you’ll see, carries the flavor of many roads, many lands with him.
These are our top sellers and excellent companions to one another, due to the contrast. Look over the menu, see what you fancy. We’ll bring to your table any combination you like.
We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.
It would be something if maggots, realizing they were at the top of a food chain, began to take over.
What if they’ve already taken over?
We think we want to eat that ice cream sandwich because it tastes good but really our maggot overlords are sending secret mind control messages to our brains. “Eat the ice cream sandwich,” the message says. “Eat two!”
They try and adjust our diets to get a different flavor of human. There’s, like, a breed of maggots that really hates wheat, so they kicked off the whole “No Carbs” idea.
Your worm is your only emperor for diet.
His crown is one of leaves. The smallest his followers can find. The worm Emperor sometimes wears a toga, like a Roman emperor – and sometimes a tight business suit, like a movie mogul.
His business is dieting. He makes an incredible amount of money in telling people what to eat and what not to. He himself will eat anything but he knows that’s no way to make a living. If he can sell people his “only compost” program or is “Eat Nothing but Protein” or “Only Orange Food for a Week.” He can get an unparalleled amount of people at his meetings for which he charges a hefty sum.
He presides – worm that he is – perched on a chair – crown on his head.
A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him.
I don’t get a lot of the contemporary political jokes that Shakespeare included in the plays. I don’t know what I don’t know in this department.
In this case, though, it seems I’ve always know that this line is a reference to the Diet of Worms, named for the town that the convocation was held in.
What I didn’t know was what the convocation was for. I didn’t know that this line was a reference to the reformation. I didn’t know that the convocation was a collection of priests. I’d have to think a lot more deeply about it to work out that layer. Though, certainly, I can’t help but picture some worms dressed up in priest outfits eating a dead body.
For me, this line has always felt like a pop culture pun in a contemporary comedy – a little shout out to the issues of the day – a way to make an audience nod and say, “I see what you did there.”
Not where he eats, but where ‘a is eaten.
I can’t help but picture Polonius laid out on a dining room table – naked and covered in sushi, like one of those weird specialized models that people eat sushi off of.
I can’t believe that that is a thing.
But I know that it is
And this line evokes that for me.
It starts with the sushi sitting on top of him and once the gleeful mob has eaten all the rolls it can manage, they break out the knives and forks and start carving into the dish – i.e. carving into the dead naked Polonius. Yum. (Yuck.)
Where?
Whenever I think, “This place is ridiculous. I really need to get out of here.” Then the next thought is the inevitable, “Where?”
Not Detroit. Though I’ve considered it…it is a good place for artists. But the problem with the performing arts is that they require a critical mass of people with performing arts talent. Unless you’re willing to do a lot of teaching and waiting for those newly taught to get ripe enough to get good. I do not have the patience for this sort of thing at this stage in my life.
If I could go anywhere, it would be London. But immigration laws do not allow it. I’d also happily enjoy Toronto or Montreal or Vancouver. But again…immigration laws…so in my native land, I feel pretty stuck with NYC, no matter how crazy it makes me.
Sure, I’d like to see some more trees on a regular basis and to not have to spend every waking hour worrying about money. But in this country, the critical mass of talent and skill and people in that zone is such that I cannot leave. Because leave? And go where?
At supper?
I’ve seen this played with a period as well. As in, “At supper.” As in, “At supper, you asshole. Please don’t fuck with me.”
At supper.
Shakespeare uses both “supper” and “dinner” (I think of Caliban saying, “I must eat my dinner.”) For me, the words are interchangeable. But I know that there are distinctions depending on where you come from. One example I can think of is Dinner being like a big lunch and Supper, the lighter evening meal. But I imagine there are more distinctions. What I’d like to know is A) were there any distinctions between supper and dinner that Shakespeare might be making? Were they interchangeable for him? Or his contemporaries? and B) Was there any perception of these concepts in Denmark at the time?
Is it Suppertime?
Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius?
O now the King’s calling the dead body “Polonius”?
It’s been dead body this and body that all this time but now… it’s Polonius. When it suits his purposes, he will give the dead body its identity.
It is hard, I grant him, to reconcile a person with their dead body. Or to un-reconcile them.
In the last few days, I’ve thought much more deeply into the circumstances of my grandmother’s body’s journey to ashes than I would like to have considered. An error in cremation has sent my imagination on an uncomfortable journey with her dead body. From the hospice to bags to slabs to fire… and never, even though I know she is no longer in there, never was I able to think of her as a thing and not as a her. Claudius here has gone straight to thing and returns Polonius to a him when talking to Hamlet.
The Hamlet Project 