I have something in me dangerous

(Goat Rope is almost done with Hamlet, but you can skip to the links if Shakespeare doesn't do it for you.)

Ordinarily, you don't want a lot of drama at a funeral. Dealing with death is enough of a task. But, this being Shakespeare and all, there is quite a bit at Ophelia's funeral.

Hamlet's banter with the gravedigger is interrupted by a funeral procession which turns out to be hers. Her brother Laertes is already outraged by the abbreviated funeral rights, which are due to the questionable nature of her death. In the past, suicides were typically denied Christian burial and hers could have been interpreted as such.

Laertes curses Hamlet, who he blames for her madness:

LAERTES: O, treble woe
Fall ten times treble on that cursed head,
Whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense
Deprived thee of! Hold off the earth awhile,
Till I have caught her once more in mine arms:

(Leaps into the grave)
Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead,
Till of this flat a mountain you have made,
To o'ertop old Pelion, or the skyish head
Of blue Olympus.

Hamlet then announces himself and leaps into the grave himself. Laertes goes wild and tries to choke him. Hamlet has a great response, one that I hope to use next time somebody chokes me:

I prithee, take thy fingers from my throat;
For, though I am not splenitive and rash,
Yet have I something in me dangerous,
Which let thy wiseness fear: hold off thy hand.

He claims a far greater grief for her that Laertes (not that either of them did her a lot of good):

'Swounds, show me what thou'lt do:
Woo't weep? woo't fight? woo't fast? woo't tear thyself?
Woo't drink up eisel? eat a crocodile?
I'll do't. Dost thou come here to whine?
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I:
And, if thou prate of mountains, let them throw
Millions of acres on us, till our ground,
Singeing his pate against the burning zone,
Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, an thou'lt mouth,
I'll rant as well as thou.

Methinks he doth protest too much. Eventually, the two are separated and it's pretty clear that the trouble between them isn't over.

THE WAITING is the hardest part, as philosopher Tom Petty noted some time ago. Lately, unemployed workers have been waiting longer than at any other time on record before they find another job.

SPEAKING OF WHICH, the Senate yesterday passed a bill extending unemployment benefits and other provisions aimed at spurring recovery.

CONTRARY TO WHAT YOU MAY HAVE HEARD, most Americans want changes to health care.

WHO'D A THUNK IT? It might be possible to generate electricity from "bottled air" stored underground.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

There is a willow grows aslant a brook

Ophelia by John Everett Millais (1852), by way of wikipedia.

Goat Rope's long jag on Hamlet continues, although you can skip the Shakespeare if that isn't your thing and scroll on down to the links and comments section.

I have referred to the character of Polonius as a twit several times. I must now add that twitness of one kind or another seems to run in the male line of that family. After Polonius is killed by Hamlet, his son Laertes returns from France eager for revenge. Once there, he finds that his sister Ophelia has gone mad.

One would have hoped that he would have taken a little time to take care of her and covered some basic bases--like maybe keeping her from drowning herself, for example. But he couldn't be bothered over this small detail.

Here's how Gertrude, the queen of Denmark and mother of Hamlet describes her end:

There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

All the men in her life were useless at best, and deadly cruel at worst.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE? That is the question for health care reform and it may be answered fairly soon.

SHARE THE WORK. One of the links in yesterday's post was about the policy of work sharing, which could be a very effective way of helping people get through the Great Recession. Economist Dean Baker has written an op-ed on the subject that is worth a look. Here it is

A RISING TIDE, it is said, lifts all boats. But to benefit from that, first you need a boat. Here's an item from the Washington Post about how the recession and the Recovery Act are affecting minority communities.

YOU'VE HEARD OF THE TEA PARTY. Here's the Coffee Party. I've always preferred that beverage.

THE WAR ON SCIENCE continues.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

We know what we are, but know not what we may be

Ophelia, but John William Waterhouse, 1894, by way of wikipedia.

(Goat Rope is still winding through Hamlet, but you can scroll down for links and comments about current events.)

I don't know about you, Gentle Reader, but for me the most disturbing part of Hamlet is the madness of Ophelia, especially when I watch a performance. It's always upsetting when someone loses it, but by this point in the play, the viewer or reader should have some sympathy for her character.

In the 1990s, if memory serves, Ophelia became an emblem for the problems many young women were said to experience in adolescence and early adulthood and her name was featured on the title of at least a couple of books.

In the play, however, she isn't just suffering from general malaise. Apparently motherless, she was the daughter of the twit Polonius, who could be cruel with her. Her brother Laertes seems pretty self absorbed. An obedient daughter, she breaks off her relationship with Hamlet at her father's command and is further wounded by Hamlet's later actions and attitudes. That was bad enough, but then her father is killed and her only known relative is off studying or partying in France.

She has taken to wandering the palace and its surrounds, singing and speaking in ways that seem both meaningful and nonsensical. A gentleman at court describes her symptoms thus:

She speaks much of her father; says she hears
There's tricks i' the world; and hems, and beats her heart;
Spurns enviously at straws; speaks things in doubt,
That carry but half sense: her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection; they aim at it,
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts;
Which, as her winks, and nods, and gestures
yield them,
Indeed would make one think there might be thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.

When not speaking of her father, she often sings sexually suggestive songs, like this one:

To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day,
All in the morning betime,
And I a maid at your window,
To be your Valentine.
Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes,
And dupp'd the chamber-door;
Let in the maid, that out a maid
Never departed more.

(I have an idiosyncratic theory about Ophelia's madness bugs me so much. It's a guy thing and goes like this: most guys at some level may be aware that they often push the women in their life close to the edge of insanity. Ophelia is troubling as an example of one who actually goes over the edge.)

UNEMPLOYMENT. WV's unemployment insurance fund is in trouble and so far efforts to modernize and improve it have been blocked.

AN ALTERNATIVE TO LAYOFFS. Here's an article about an interesting policy option some companies and state governments are using to avoid layoffs.

A SAD SIGN OF THE TIMES. Here's an article from USA Today about how a plant closing has hit Ravenswood, WV hard. Back in the proverbial day, El Cabrero and friends tried to support union workers during a lockout. It was a great fight, and the workers won their jobs back after nearly two years of struggle back in 1992. Then came the Great Recession...

WORKING WV. Here's an op-ed by my friend the Rev. Matthew Watts on West Virginia's workforce woes.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

The primrose path of dalliance

If you know anything about Shakespeare's tragedies, you know that a lot of bodies are going to pile up by the end. Hamlet's whole family will wind up shuffling off this mortal coil, but they won't be alone. Another whole family will join them before it's over.

That would be the family of Polonius, counselor to Claudius and a major twit as well. Apparently a widower, he has a son, Laertes, and a daughter Ophelia. Laertes has been studying (or, more likely, partying) in Paris and returned to Denmark for the funeral/wedding. Those ceremonies concluded, he seeks and is granted permission to go back to France.

In the meantime, Hamlet has begun or revived his courtship of Ophelia since he returned from his studies in Wittenberg. She, alas, will be double-teamed by son and father in Act 1, scene 3 and told not to trust Hamlet's pledges of affection and even to break off the relationship.

Laertes takes aim first, warning her not to take Hamlet's professions seriously:

For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour,
Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood,
A violet in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute; No more...

He (no doubt hypocritically) urges her to chastity:

Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain,
If with too credent ear you list his songs,
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmaster'd importunity.
Fear it, Ophelia, fear it, my dear sister,
And keep you in the rear of your affection,
Out of the shot and danger of desire.
The chariest maid is prodigal enough,
If she unmask her beauty to the moon:
Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes:
The canker galls the infants of the spring,
Too oft before their buttons be disclosed,
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent.
Be wary then; best safety lies in fear:
Youth to itself rebels, though none else near.

Ophelia appears to yield, but she knows a double standard when she hears it and urges him to take his own advice:

I shall the effect of this good lesson keep,
As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven;
Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads,
And recks not his own rede.

SPEAKING OF DALLIANCE, here's an article on edible aphrodisiacs.

SCARRING. Here's a sobering look at the possible long term impacts of the Great Recession.

MYSTERIOUS PRESENCES and near death experiences are discussed here.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED