(We’re mashing up current events with Hamlet, the whole play, and you can start here in the middle or with this post.) Polonius, having stage-managed the breakup of the two lovers, Hamlet and Ophelia, has now also stage-managed a post-breakup meeting between them: Ophelia: “Good my lord, How does your honor for this many a day?” Hamlet: “I humbly thank you, well, well, well.” Ophelia: My lord, I have remembrances of yours, That I have longed long to redeliver. I pray you, now receive them.” (She offers tokens). Hamlet: “No, …

‘And I, of ladies most deject and wretched/That sucked the honey of his music vows’: Blogging Hamlet – 18 Read More »

(We’re mashing up current events with Hamlet, the whole play, and you can start here in the middle or with this post.) We’ve come upon the most famous of Hamlet’s seven, count them seven, soliloquys, and without further ado: Hamlet: “To be, or not to be, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep – No more – and by a …

‘And thus the native hue of resolution/Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought’: Blogging Hamlet – 17 Read More »

(We’re mashing up current events with Hamlet, the whole play, and you can start here in the middle or with this post.) Act III opens with Claudius interrogating Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, just as Hamlet knew would happen.(o’eraught means overtake or catch up with): Claudius: “And can you by no drift of conference Get from him why he puts on this confusion…” Rosencrantz: “He does confess he feels himself distracted, But from what cause ‘a will by no means speak.”… Queen: “Did you assay him to any pastime?” Rosencrantz: “Madam, it …

‘The harlot’s cheek, beautied with plastering art/Is not more ugly…’: Blogging Hamlet – 16 Read More »

(We’re mashing up current events with Hamlet, the whole play, and you can start here in the middle or with this post.) Hamlet has just uncovered that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s business model involves selling his online data to advertisers; that is, that King Claudius ordered them to spy on him. Even though he now knows the cameras and microphones are live, and in Claudius/Biden’s America always will be, Hamlet in his large-heartedness finds himself confiding in them.  (Your secrecy to the King and Queen molt no feather means their promise …

‘Prithee, say on. He’s for a jug or a tale of bawdry, or he sleeps’: Blogging Hamlet – 15 Read More »

(We’re mashing up current events with Hamlet, the whole play, and you can start here in the middle or with this post.) Following Hamlet’s post-election moment of despair, his spirits are revived by the welcome arrival of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his two former schoolmates. He doesn’t see the hidden microphones that King Claudius himself placed on them in an earlier scene. After all, they promised us that those personal assistants could be turned off. Hamlet: “Good lads, how do you both?” Rosencrantz: “As the indifferent children of the earth.” Guildenstern: …

‘Then you must live about her waist, or in the middle of her favors?’: Blogging Hamlet – 14 Read More »