Today’s Totally Random
Line(s)
A
villain kills my father; and for that,
I,
his sole son, do this same villain send
To
Heaven.
-Hamlet
Hamlet Act III, Scene iii, Line 77
And we start the new year with two guys; one trying to figure out how he’s going to get to heaven after all the crimes he’s committed, and the other trying to figure out how to best kill the first to ensure that he doesn’t go to heaven. Ha!
Whilst it sounds a bit, ummm, what’s the word? It’s not evil, but it’s something with a strong negative connotation. The word escapes me, but my thought is that whilst this description of the scene makes it sound a bit evil, this is a very good scene for a number of reasons. In it, we find Claudius alone, lamenting his situation with his ‘O, my offence is rank…’ soliloquy, followed by Hamlet coming upon him unobserved. Hamlet sees Claudius on his knees and wants to kill him but talks himself out of it, telling himself that if he does it now, whilst Claudius is praying, the latter might go to heaven. Hamlet wants to send him straight to hell, so he walks away.
Of course, Hamlet (the play and the person) is filled with thought preventing action. And there’s a lot of talk about this throughout the play. At one point Claudius says ‘That we would do, we should do when we would.’ We had this on a recent Random Line. Remember? And of course there’s that part of Hamlet’s most famous soliloquy about the will to act being ‘sicklied o’er with the pale cast of Thought’.
Yeah, Will has a lot to say about taking or, more often, not taking action when perhaps we should. It’s a pretty interesting thought to start the new year with, don’t you think?
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