Is she saying “Ay, my lord” like, “I know what you meant, I get it”?
Or is she saying it like, “Okay, fine, go ahead and lie in my lap”?
Poor Ophelia surely has no idea what she’s supposed to say in this situation.
Here, they are, all broken up, and now he’s all calling her attractive metal and wanting to lie in her lap.
Surely, even the most obedient girl (which she is) won’t have any idea which way the wind is blowing in this situation.
I mean, my head upon your lap?
There’s a couch, in my memory, and on it, I am sitting with a man’s head in my lap. I stroke his brown curly hair because it’s just right there and seems to be the thing to do. He’s a man. With is own apartment now.
We watch an episode of Kids in the Hall, wherein I’ve heard of but never been able to see, due to it’s being on cable. I know this man to be a player. I have heard stories about beach weeks and bedrooms and I have seen him in action with a girl on a bus, many years ago. But there’s a tenderness on this couch. Something I didn’t really see in those two months when we went together, when I tried to express my affection and he teased me for it. And despite all those reasons I have to push this man away. I have ended up here on this couch in my memory (Is it yellow? I think it’s yellow. Or chartreuse.) because I longed for him ever since – even with all the reasons I knew him to be bad news.
How I ended up here on this couch, I don’t recall. How I left and never returned, I also can’t recall. I suspect he tried to push my boundaries again and I made my permanent exit but all I really recall is the couch, the lap, the hair and the TV show.
If I could find my journal from that time, I’m sure the rest of the story would rush back but here, now, at least twenty years later, it is simple. It is a man with his head upon my lap.
No, my lord.
It must be so hard to negotiate dating a prince – or at least dating a prince when the prince might have the authority to imprison you for displeasing him. It takes tact to refuse any man but to refuse a prince takes mega-tact.I’m thinking now of that book I read about the American woman who, more or less, joined the harem of a prince. It was compelling reading. She went of her own free will, went with her own desire, found herself coveting the prince’s affection just as much as all the other girls, her American irony and cool, notwithstanding.
And the extracting of herself from that position? Tricky. Very tricky. Saying no once you’ve said yes being an even more difficult task than simply saying no all along.
In a way, this moment is Ophelia at her bravest.
Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
The last time Hamlet saw Ophelia he was breaking up with her, quite cruelly. He left her in tears, convinced he’d lost his mind. He’d said some really shitty things, told her to get her to a nunnery a bunch of times and then fucked right off without even saying farewell. And now he’s asking her if he should lie in her lap? Bad news, Ophelia, this guys is Bad News.The minute you dry your eyes, he comes swanning back again, all charm and dirty jokes and chitty chat.
I’d like Ophelia to be able to say something like, “Have you forgotten what a dick you were to me not long ago? Wasn’t that you who told me to get me to a nunnery? And now you want to cuddle up to me and lie in my goddamn lap? Who do you think you are, Prince of Denmark?
It’s like Hamlet forgets what he did before and I think the audience forgets, too. We like this merry Hamlet and want Ophelia to welcome him, enjoy him and we forget how he’s just left her.
Do you mark that?
There is a kite hung up on a powerline here outside the balcony of our apartment at the beach. It has been there for several days now, its shape shifting and changing. When it first got stuck there, its wings were taut and splayed. It looked like a flying bird, arrested and stilled in midflight. Or a butterfly, perhaps, wings spread wide. It would seem to soar when it caught the wind.Several days later and it hangs limply like a handkerchief held up in the middle. It takes up half the space, with its kite wings folded in on itself. The wind still lifts it but it lifts a limp bat or a dead butterfly and it no longer soars.
Yet it still clings to this powerline – still hangs there tenaciously. It may never fall – just like the plastic bag on a tree back in Queens that has grown with the tree through so many years of so many violent seasons, so much so that that tree and plastic bag would seem to never be parted. So it may be with that kite and that powerline.
O ho!
This is something my grandfather would say when he saw something that caught his interest. He might say it when someone told a good joke, or even a bad joke – he was fond of jokes. He might say it as punctuation to your story. He might say it if he came upon you in a room, or around the bend or on the patio.I imagine he might have said it silently while reading the murder mysteries he loved, when the killer was revealed.
My grandfather was also a great fan of “a-ha!” and could be heard to say it interchangeably with “O ho.”
I was reported, as a small child, to have picked up this vocal tic and said it, too, on similar occasions, for a while – probably until I realized that everyone was laughing at a small girl saying a grandfather’s words.
Here’s metal more attractive.
Women as Metal. Well. Well.
We can be hard. We can be strong. We hold up a great deal of things. We are shaped by the forces around us.
There is so much iron in our blood and every month we watch it leave us only to return again.
We can bend in the wind, the way tall buildings and bridges are built to.
Solid. Shiny.
Tough.
No, good mother.
Here is “good” again. First, it was the good king and queen and now it is good mother.Doth Hamlet protest too much with this “good” stuff?
Come hither, my dear Hamlet, sit by me.
Sometimes I think of the queen as Arkadina in The Seagull, a woman who may love her son but is also struggling with her sexuality. She is pulled toward men who can engage it, who make her feel like a woman, not just someone’s mother.
I imagine that the Queen might just wish for her son to give it a rest already and let her enjoy her newfound vitality with her new husband.
But of course, her son couldn’t possibly and so she must continue to woo him back to her, to sit by her side sometimes.
They stay upon your patience.
I picture the players behind a police barricade, clambering to get out, fiercely warming up – stretching their legs ballerina style, doing vocal exercises. The barrier, instead of NYPD reads “Patience.”
The players are chomping at the bit, ready to be released, hungry for the work before them, the way a runner will be hungry for the race.
They wear sweatbands and capes, which they could throw off at any moment. They drink bottles of Gatorade and trade preparatory barbs.
As soon as Rosencrantz lifts the barrier, they will come hurtling onto the stage like dogs released from a pen.
The Hamlet Project 