This mortal coil

I suppose it’s inevitable that, if you’re going to produce Hamlet, at some point you’re going to have to talk about suicide. Luke and I have been spending a lot of rehearsal hours one-on-one working soliloquies and character, but during one of our sessions we ended up talking about our personal experience with suicide – not the people we know who have ended their lives, but our own thoughts about our own lives and the occasions when we’ve thought about ending ourselves. Obviously, I’m not going to provide particulars, but I will say that it was difficult for both us because you really put yourself on the line when you share thoughts that are that deep and that scary. We talked about the reasons and the times that we’ve thought death would be preferable to continuing to live. We talked about the conversations we’ve had with ourselves at those times and what we said. We talked about alternative ways to do it we’ve considered. We talked about the reasons we didn’t do anything about this most dark longing. And we agreed that the reason we consider suicide at all is that, after all the nasty self talk, it’s simply that there is a part of us that believes we don’t deserve to live. Hamlet speaks a lot of self-hating words in his soliloquies. In the Hecuba soliloquy in particular, Hamlet abuses himself terribly. He says these things about himself to himself: You are a rogue. You are a slave. You are dull. You are pale. You are a coward. You are a villain. You are pigeon-livered. You are an ass. You are a whore. You are a drab. You are a scullion. At its core, the speech is about why he’s not fit to live. It twines Hamlet’s hatred of himself with his reluctance to take his uncle’s life. This is not the only scene in which Hamlet abuses himself, and the “To be or not to be speech” is not only time in the play that he contemplates suicide. It’s clear that he’s thinking about it with almost his very first words. I’ve come to think that Shakespeare knew that most everyone carries inside venomous self hatred that boils into a pus sack that oozes thoughts of suicide. Hamlet is a play with a horrific ending, but many people claim that it’s their personal favorite. People identify with Hamlet on a level that I don’t believe they understand. Probably, they don’t want to understand it – it’s enough to watch an actor say and do the horrible things we seldom admit we say and do to ourselves.