“Shakespeare does a great job making us really wonder if
Hamlet is crazy.”
From
a student’s essay
I’m sure that in his crumbling grave
at this moment
the Bard is spinning in his dusty tights
at this compliment,
born across continents and centuries
from a 21st century American teenaged boy.
He was told for his whole life
to be positive and supportive,
a parental edict, he figured,
which extended to every clumsy nerd,
every boy who struck out,
every pimple-faced girl who grew out her hair
to shade the world away,
and even to an oak desk
in an early 17th century London inn
full of the scratchings of the hopeful quill afire
with the brilliant confusion of the Danish prince.
I can almost see the boy’s encouraging smile
as he typed this introductory sentence.
I want to penalize him for having
the nerve for thinking that someone
who doesn’t even shave every day
could extend this compliment to the world’s greatest writer
but in his own way he has exposed Hamlet’s greatest gift,
the protean speech,
the chameleon mystery of him.
I smile looking at this essay,
knowing that my hero lives on at the moment
in Johnny’s mind, beneath the Family Guy poster
in a bedroom thousands of miles from the Thames
and four centuries away from Shakespeare’s London.
I imagine Shakespeare smiling from the great beyond,
having always loved applause, after all.
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