The Hamlet Project

A notebook.
A blank piece of paper.
A canvas.
A silence.
An empty theatre.
A deserted stretch of beach, ocean climbing up the shore.
A mountain.
A train journey.
A moment alone.
A rock, to sit on.

When I was a child, pansies were my favorite flower. I’m looking at an image of them now, trying to swim backward in my thought to figure out why. I like them, still, but I don’t know if that’s because I used to like them so I associate them with my childhood affection. They are colorful, certainly.
And intrepid. They will grow when nothing else will. That’s why I like them now – their resilience and robustness.
But why when I was little? Was it the name? The colors? The shape? The way they looked like faces? Their height? When I was small, they were much closer to me than they are now.
But I love them still. Whether it’s because I loved them before or not, I will never know. But if someone handed me a bouquet of pansies, I would find it endlessly charming.

It’s interesting, the effect of this comma before love.
Usually, I hear or see this line as Pray Love, Remember. As if she’s calling someone “Love” – usually Laertes…or, as some editions will suggest that she’s confusing Hamlet and Laertes and calling her brother “Love” when she shouldn’t which is some big misstep like calling your father “baby.”
But with this comma here between Pray and Love…it becomes a list. It’s three things to do 1) Pray 2) Love 3) Remember.
I wonder, though, if there’s some discrepancy in text…I’ve also usually heard this line as “Pray you, love, remember.” Which leads one to the calling someone “Love” idea more than without the you. But still…even then…it could be three things to do. And we know Shakespeare loved his lists!

Most productions I’ve seen, including the one I did, use something other than rosemary, pansies, fennel, columbines, daisies and rue to be these plants. It’s easier to, say, collect a bouquet of sticks, which is what we did in the show I was in, than to collect a bunch of prop plants. But it changes Ophelia’s madness a bit to have her completely mis-identify things. She’s mixing up people, sure. She’s singing at inappropriate times – but her madness doesn’t seem like the kind where you misidentify objects. That’s a pretty specialized madness.
She could be pretending, like a child, proposing a symbolic game. She could see asking the group to play with her in thinking of air or a stick as Rosemary but…it’s almost too advanced in her thinking at this point.
It feels more transgressive actually for her to have made her way to some kitchen garden and picked all these flowers. I imagine her trodding through the palace kitchen garden, collecting flowers and herbs while the royal cook’s assistant tries desperately to stop her. Maybe the whole kitchen staff chases after her through the herb beds and flowers.
It also makes sense that these are actual flowers and herbs because of her death. She doesn’t die strewn with sticks – No. She drowns covered in flowers, ones we presume she’s picked on her journey to the brook. And, in a moment of dark desperation, it does make sense that she would be drawn to the beauty of flowers, to collect them to make herself feel better.

I see “Steward” and I think of Malvolio.
And Malvolio could be seen as attempting to steal his master’s daughter – one assumes he was steward to Olivia’s father before he became steward to her.
It would be funny if Ophelia was making a reference to Malvolio and Olivia here.
It would be like a crossover in a TV series – like when Richard Belzer as Detective Munch shows up in multiple TV shows. I don’t think that’s what’s happening here – but it is funny that she uses the word “steward” – this is not a word that shows up all over the canon.
There are not stewards in every play. Only a handful and none of them are as fully fleshed out as Malvolio. Goneril’s steward, Oswald, only manages to come in a distant second.

I love a good linguistic mystery. I mean…this is one of those lines that is described as “much debated” which means that nobody is really sure what the heck it means.
I can see how you can make it mean something about the song. The song is the most likely candidate for the “it” in this sentence…which means we have to make wheel mean something to do with a song. Which…is massageable of course. A wheel, being something that rolls, could be a chorus, a refrain…in that it repeats and comes back around again and again.
And becoming in that context is enhancing , beautifying, etc. But further afield – becoming could be an active becoming – a transformative becoming – a wheel becomes something else. A wheel becomes…IT…whatever it might be. Maybe the song?
There is the wheel of fortune, which certainly is down, a-down, for her, at this point in the play.
I mean…there’s no knowing, for sure. Which is delightful. It also means that this line is usually cut. But hey…it is a delightful mystery just sitting there in the middle of a madwoman’s song.

It’s time for fun with punctuation again!
I would put a period after “sing.” I would have her try and get someone to sing with her. Laertes. Gertrude. Claudius. Someone. And then begin the song with “a-down a-down An you call him a-down-a.”
Which is a pretty odd song by the way. Especially since the last part of it, depending on the accent, can sound like she’s calling someone a downer….which was probably not a thing in the 1600s but is hard not to hear in the 2000s.

Who, now, is Ophelia’s dove? I mean – it makes sense that she might speak this directly to Laertes – I’ve seen it done that way often.
But – a dove is something that files away – so either Hamlet or Polonius might be better candidates. The rhyme of dove and love would suggest Hamlet to me – but then again – she has just been singing a funeral song – so that makes Polonius a more likely dove.
I think it would be weird to call your father your dove, though. But maybe that’s just me.