All over the place…

…all over the place and unfocused in between being focused and accomplishing the necessaries. Anarchy is big on my personal radar. Politically i’ve never defined myself, except as my behavior showed my politics. I am as fascist in my thinking as I am hippy. This was sometime a paradox, but if you ever witness’d two snarling scrapping hippies, my friend look to it! I have then a problem with authority. My own included.

Contrary to what you might think, my feelings may be part judge in this, that i am but mad north north west, when the wind blows southerly, i know a hawk from a hand shaw. Saw. Heron.

There is of course nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. An ironic dualism taunting its weaker partner into admitting its non-existence.

Remember I am but weak on sundays and in a rotting carcass maggots fill me to the brim. Haste make haste! Slow down, slow, slow down and speed up in a silly manner, flying your banner and waving it round and round.

Words, words, words. How pregnant sometimes his replies are? Though this be madness, yet there is method innit? Fortune plays a big part and a little part in Hamlet. I’d never noticed before how fortune gets used (yes she’s a slag. Used is right)! first by Hamlet with R+G in their greeting each other dialogue. If it live in your memory begin at this line. Let me see, let me see…

Good lads how do you both?
Ros: As the indifferent children of the earth.
Guil: Happy in that we are not over happy; on fortune’s cap we are not the very button.
Ham: Nor the soles of her shoe?
Ros: Neither, my lord.
Ham: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favors?
Guil: Faith her privates we.
Ham: in the secret parts of fortune? O most true she is a strumpet.

What news?
None my lord but that the world’s grown honest.

Then is doomsday near.
But your news is not true.

Let me question more in particular.
What have you my good friends deserved at the hands of Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?

And again not much further along, Fortune as a strumpet returns. Is this why Hamlet gets the player to do this speech? Does he feel like the painted tyrant, poised and unable to move? Unable to find his vengeance at mincing limbs?

Out out thou strumpet fortune!

he cries and would break all her spokes and fellies from her wheel.

(let’s get ready to play, the wheel of fortune. Dumb show as Game show. Here’s the wonderful prizes. Get it yet Claudius)?

And on to the mobled Queen. That’s good, mobled Queen is good. Is this Gertrude’s part of the show? The realization of what battening on moors does to a person?

Who this had seen, with tongue in venom steep’d,
Gainst Fortune’s state would treason have pronounced
But if the gods themselves did see her then,
When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport
In mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs,
The instant burst of clamor that she made,
Unless things mortal move them not at all,
Would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven,
And passion in the gods.

Gods or ghosts? Hamlet’s central problem? What a piece of work is a man. How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty and yet to me what is this?

Being nature’s livery, or fortune’s star.

Is this a social natural split or what? Clothed in nature’s livery? Or dressed by chance of birth? Hamlet the prince cannot fall into such disfavor being a prince that he should fall from his position in the firmament. Old Hamlet is trailing the Court like a ghostly comet. Remember me, old mole! More sightings than any episode of ghost hunters.

Young Hamlet examines his options and obligations and finds himself wanting in the doing power. Leading him to think on that which is to come but is most feared. Action. Anarchy. No other authority than himself. He had examples enough in common Renaissance mythology exhorting him to action. Yet like a Pyrrhus he takes a weak victory.

The player shows him how. Rosencrantz and Guildernstern awaken his slumbering wrath. Claudius and Gertrude hang around unsure as to who knows what. Unseen between the scenes, furtively copulating now legalised guilt sex behind the arrasses. Polonius runs and runs and plots his plots behind the plot. Ophelia rejected lies abed a sewing. Short sharp pricks.

And Hamlet?
Like a true liberal humanist, he puts on a play for the man that murdered his father. Hoping his terrors will implode or explode him as he watches forcing and publicly confessing his nefarious deeds. His mother stricken with self-loathing claims Hamlet rightful heir to the throne. Hamlet forgives them and they all live in a slightly less rotten Denmark.

Of course not. The consequences are tragically ineffectual and yet further the plot and minor characters mirror that plot. Polonius takes one for Claudius and the ghost. R+G get their come-uppance in England. (They don’t like it uppance, sir)! Ophelia defines true madness. Hamlet kills Claudius and Laertes, madrigals with Horatio thoughts on the demise of sparrows.
But this is yet to come. If it be now.

Claudius is miffed to put it mildly and Hamlet is convinced that this delusion that he has seen is not a delusion and madness is just a state of mind, so there. As by lot god’s wot, which is a lot. And so it came to pass. Look where my abridgment comes.