Hamlet Quotes for Stages, Rightly Understood

1. Hamlet Quote for Toddlers (I.i.149)

So you toddle already. But where are your pangs?
Everyone starts like a guilty thing, right?
Innocence was before travail as
Much as leisure before labor.
Who did ever begin blank, without
Giving some contractions to someone?

To cause pains to someone in the family
Is still the smoothest way out.
A stranger’d ask for
Forceps right off the bat
Or even aspirate you cumbrous brat, such a
Person wouldn’t care about the fix.

Summoned into a world of fellow strangers
All learned to roll with the punches
As a first trick they have you start meeting
Some lenient relative; your anticipated revenge
Hurts the likeliest dope. Can you call that
Training? Later on, you’ll encounter
Less and less of them, guilty thing.


2. Hamlet Quote for Midlifers (V.i.96)

Sure, that may soon be the skull of a lawyer.
Or of any other shaven-pate professional.
It was juvenile pride, I kept it too long
Too long, so now it goes clogging the plughole.
No more quiddities or quillets or whatever – even
The one in the mirror won’t talk that away:
I am outwardly balding.

When most other people take latter shapes, they
Simply obey nature, and as they remain
The ones they always were, why not
Getting shysters’ noodles?
Since these trade on having most
Other peoples’ beans. But both-sided mine?

I have never considered myself one of them.
I have but ripened. And this is surely not
Enough reason that some departed
Souls – sporting fancy skulls
Far too early – should
Appropriate me.


3. Hamlet Quote for the Elderly (III.i.67)

This isn’t an easy quote, especially for
The elderly, those prompted to
Shuffle off this mortal coil.
You might say: Yes, I see, old bones
At that age there is easily some shuffling;
But, sonny, where’s the coil?
We’re not talking about curlers.

I always thought that decent
Decease, under any circumstances
Transpires without being properly induced.
Now we might say: ’conda coils up till
That gimp in the middle suffocates.
But what about shuffling off?

If the elderly aren’t fast enough
To just shuffle away, but still capable of
Shuffling it off, as you say, when proverbial
Coiling occurs, they’re half redeemed. It takes
A lifetime of wizening to acquire the wisdom that
Eventually a cunning sort of shuffle prevails
Over plain impossible runaway.


September 14, 2009