The King and Queen of Infinite Space

‘When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose’ sang Bob Dylan and ‘A little less conversation, a little more action, baby’ sang Elvis Presley. Whilst not exactly Shakespeare, it’s a pity Hamlet didn’t have Spotify, he may have moved things on a little quicker. Denmark’s famous sad Prince has been bothering me.

The famous ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy isn’t just about suicide; it is a metaphor about grief, overcoming oppression and love. Should you face your troubles head on and defeat them, risking that things may get worse, or hold back and see how it plays out, risking losing what little sanity you have? 

I am no expert on Iambic Pentameter but even I can see that our titular hero is missing a beat. Hamlet has gone back to his hometown, sulking about having a dead Dad and the fact that that his Mother is making some bad choices; she’s married the man who killed her husband, which is up there with wearing novelty socks and buying cheap cling film.

His girlfriend is depressed. Okay, she's not exactly his girlfriend, but there's something going on. Whether it’s infatuation, love or something else, it doesn’t seem to be going away. A tale as old as time, as a talking cartoon teapot once said. 

Never one for an easy life, he complicates things by accidentally killing her Dad. Oops. Then she drowns herself, then he gets stabbed to death with a poisoned sword. This is five hours of tragedy, a long old play- so if you go to see it, I recommend going to the toilet before it starts. I’d also advise not downing a few ciders before kick-off like I once did before a production of ‘Cabaret’ I saw as a student. Wedged in to the centre of a row, I couldn’t escape. Young me seemed to make a habit of this. It was kidney stone level of pain but I am too English to uproot anyone.

As if life isn’t bad enough, two lads from his class at school turn up with lame advice. Were I him, I’d refuse the pint of Carlsberg and some pickled herring with a couple of randoms I sat next to in Biology in the nineties (there is a reason we didn’t keep in touch, you listened to bad techno and smoked orange peel). Just in case you don’t know, they wind up dead too, the moral being, don’t be such nosy bastards.

In a nutshell, and let’s be bound in one for a moment, Hamlet and Ophelia are not helping each other despite the big feelings. It’s dawning on them that perhaps this is love but life has thrown them together at the worst point of both of their lives. They are both physically and mentally suffering. Would they be best as a team, or should they go alone? They mull it over for what seems like forever then go in separate directions. Lots of people then die, make of that what you will.

It's important to keep our eyes and ears open when people are throwing us a branch. There is no disgrace in having someone rescue you, there are no prizes for heroic suffering just like there are not for refusing to abandon a sinking ship. We will never know what the right path is, so we have to risk something on finding out. Sometimes we demand attention because we are scared of being alone and sometimes we scream for space because we are terrified of intimacy. ‘I’m overwhelmed, leave me alone’. To whelm or not to whelm, that is the question.

A friend recently said that the thing he missed most about his last relationship wasn’t the bells and whistles of romance but the feeling of having his life observed by someone special. Whether it’s the friendship that lies at the centre of every good relationship or the fire that keeps it alive, feeling seen and appreciated is a lot. So is laughing together, something our Danish love birds don’t manage. It is a scientific fact that you are less likely to suffer a grisly end when you have someone to make fun of your accent every now and then. Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you drown in a duck pond, as the saying goes.

Scientists say that the chance of each of us being alive today are billions to one, what with the right sperm meeting the right egg and our ancestors not being eaten by sabre tooth tigers. Perhaps the odds are the same for finding someone to help carry our weight. At the end of the famous soliloquy, Hamlet says something about great ideas losing their momentum because of too much thinking and not enough doing.

Take arms against a sea of troubles, I say, but I don’t know what it’s like to walk a mile in your high heel shoes, so I’ll shut up.