Hamlet Home Alone

One big house, thousands of books, two pesky cats, one bounding dog. Even with this literary and animal menagerie, I feel incredibly lonely in my own home with my wife and little girl in San Diego right now. The bed is empty, and sleep will not come. I am reading Plato’s Protagoras at the moment, and find it far superior to the last tragedy I read, the Philoctetes of Sophocles. I am also, I must admit, thumbing through a newer (though quite old) book I got for CC, the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare. Though it will be years before I can read these at bedtime, I am enjoying them immensely. Hamlet has long been my favorite Shakespearean play, and Charles Lamb has quite a take. He offers up a colorful wilderness of language and a stark tale.

I have come to realize that the reason I like Hamlet, other that the fact that it is brilliant, is because the dark prince is a man I can understand. We both have complicated and turbulent relationships with our mothers, complete fidelity and awed reverence for our fathers, and believe that the former has in a fundamental way betrayed the latter. (I thank God always that my mother has no part in our computer age). We both play at crazy (he in an angry manner, I in a silly one). As I have thought about all of these things, I come back to my favorite passage of the play. Gertrude has asked her son why he seems so sad (my guess is that it has something to do with the sudden death of his father and the betrothal of his mother to his paternal uncle, but that’s just me). Hamlet replies:

Seems, madam? nay, it is, I know not seems.
‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye, [80]
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passes show, [85]
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

Hamlet 1.2