More doomed ship meme repostage.
hamlet | hamlet/horatio | the living are dead and the dead are all living
It is no wonder the dead king walks. This castle is no place for living flesh. It is cold, old, heavy air, the kind that drapes on you like mourning garb. There is nothing quite so egregious, here, as color. The dawns are sharp with frost. Under feet the grass blades snap like bones. The queen and her brother-husband are drunk on each other, laughing, kissing, to hell with age and old marriages. Small wonder the prince has grown thin, and seems half in love with his own silence.
+
Other times, there are words, endless streams of words that possess like a fever, leaving him trembling and luminous. Horatio listens as he always has. It is their old pattern: Hamlet talks, his words bright, his tones tugging in all directions at once. Horatio stays quiet. He is a steady hand, the center of the compass. Hamlet clings to him and then forgets he exists, doing it by turns. It changes with the hour of the day. He grows too good at his pretended madness.
Give me a man who is not passion's slave. An earnest request, and simple. He does not say it in the brutal lovers' tones he employs while shaking Ophelia's shoulders. It is small and true, and closer to love (Horatio suspects sometimes) than anything else he has allowed himself to feel. It is honest, not duty-bound and crown-haunted like all his other angles.
The truth is this: they know nothing of battle. They are learned men, happily kept in cages. They were not made for vengeance.
+
But then, the dead king is damned. A monster's on his throne. What else was vengeance made for?
Hamlet spends too many hours with damnation, swooping in and out of its intricacies, trying it on like too-big armor. He had never been one to stand in his father's shoes, 'til now. He was his mother's darling, and far enough away from Elsinore that parents seemed a distant memory, an occasional letter, a thought that grazed one's brain every few days (but lightly, briefly).
'A snake in the garden,' the prince takes to saying, mostly in midnight hours. He has taken on the habit of rocking back and forth. Of gibbering nonsense. It does not seem much like acting now. 'A snake in the garden. And he was alone -- and he was alone, with no one to warn him--'
The prince is not alone. So thinks his faithful servant ever. But solitude has its own romance, and makes fate such a noble burden to bear. Inevitable as hunger. Not nearly so easily satisfied. Fate is a sharp-brained mistress; she does not hesitate to ask for the grandest sacrifices.
And so Hamlet sits in corners, courting her.
I am here, Horatio wishes to tell him daily, daily, and doesn't. Madman, here I am, seeing your ghosts.
It is no wonder the dead king walks. This castle is no place for living flesh. It is cold, old, heavy air, the kind that drapes on you like mourning garb. There is nothing quite so egregious, here, as color. The dawns are sharp with frost. Under feet the grass blades snap like bones. The queen and her brother-husband are drunk on each other, laughing, kissing, to hell with age and old marriages. Small wonder the prince has grown thin, and seems half in love with his own silence.
+
Other times, there are words, endless streams of words that possess like a fever, leaving him trembling and luminous. Horatio listens as he always has. It is their old pattern: Hamlet talks, his words bright, his tones tugging in all directions at once. Horatio stays quiet. He is a steady hand, the center of the compass. Hamlet clings to him and then forgets he exists, doing it by turns. It changes with the hour of the day. He grows too good at his pretended madness.
Give me a man who is not passion's slave. An earnest request, and simple. He does not say it in the brutal lovers' tones he employs while shaking Ophelia's shoulders. It is small and true, and closer to love (Horatio suspects sometimes) than anything else he has allowed himself to feel. It is honest, not duty-bound and crown-haunted like all his other angles.
The truth is this: they know nothing of battle. They are learned men, happily kept in cages. They were not made for vengeance.
+
But then, the dead king is damned. A monster's on his throne. What else was vengeance made for?
Hamlet spends too many hours with damnation, swooping in and out of its intricacies, trying it on like too-big armor. He had never been one to stand in his father's shoes, 'til now. He was his mother's darling, and far enough away from Elsinore that parents seemed a distant memory, an occasional letter, a thought that grazed one's brain every few days (but lightly, briefly).
'A snake in the garden,' the prince takes to saying, mostly in midnight hours. He has taken on the habit of rocking back and forth. Of gibbering nonsense. It does not seem much like acting now. 'A snake in the garden. And he was alone -- and he was alone, with no one to warn him--'
The prince is not alone. So thinks his faithful servant ever. But solitude has its own romance, and makes fate such a noble burden to bear. Inevitable as hunger. Not nearly so easily satisfied. Fate is a sharp-brained mistress; she does not hesitate to ask for the grandest sacrifices.
And so Hamlet sits in corners, courting her.
I am here, Horatio wishes to tell him daily, daily, and doesn't. Madman, here I am, seeing your ghosts.