Lens.
“Go, Captain, from me greet the Danish king
Tell him that, by his license, Fortinbras
Craves the conveyance of a promised march
Over his kingdom. You know the rendezvous.
”
I love Hamlet. Sorry to go for the low-hanging fruit, but it's a great play. Shakespeare is great. The Beatles are great. Chocolate is delicious. Just because something is obvious doesn't mean it's not true.
What puts an emphatic full stop (.) on my Hamlet appreciation is Fortinbras. Not only because of Rufus Sewell's lazy-eyed sexiness as the character in the Branagh film but also because Fortinbras crashes head-on with observation as only he can. In the final moments of the play, when Fortinbras the soldier strides into the castle expecting resistance but finding corpses, he sees a battlefield and even compliments the scene as evidence of a good fight. It's not the pile of bodies that bothers him, it's just that they are out of context, so he uses the military language he understands to make sense of what he's seeing.
Let four captains
Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have prov'd most royally; and for his passage
The soldiers' music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this
Becomes the field but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.
--Hamlet, Act 5 scene ii
Fortinbras contextualizes the carnage by saying "soldier" a few times, invoking the "rites of war," and shooting off some cannon. Ahhh, much better.
I don't want to go into a character analysis of everyone in Hamlet (well, I do want to, but I won't--Hamlet couldn't stop being a child) because I don't want you to get too distracted by my amateurish Shakespeare-ology. But I do want you to see what Shakespeare saw--that the parts of ourselves that we look through to make sense of the world create our lens. And when we know what our lens is, we can look through it or look past it, but when we don't, we're blinded by it.
I've given this lens assignment to my students many times. I ask students to draw big a circle on a piece of paper and inside of that circle, make sections that represent what pieces of their identity they look through to see the world. The bigger and closer the attribute is to the center of one's lens, the greater it affects what one sees. All those pieces working together create a metaphor that each of us, like Fortinbras, inhabits. We move through the world like a Vengeful Princely Soldier or an Loquacious Man-Child or, in my case, a Burned out Special Ops Commander.
I didn't find that metaphor for myself, I have been working with a coach who synthesized hours and hours of talking and talking about who I am and what I do into a metaphor of "Burned Out Special Ops Commander." Perhaps this is why I have such an affinity for Fortinbras--he barely steps on stage and still gets the vengeance, the kingdom, and the last words in the play. He gets shit done. I'm a guns blazing, charge-in, take over kind of girl. But my Special Ops Commander needs to remember that she is burned out.
The Special Ops Commander has one more mission: find a new metaphor for this second half of my life; a metaphor I won't burn out. Fortinbras walks in as soldier and takes a seat as king. I need to trust the plan and follow a script that's written down, constantly in revision, and always exactly what it is supposed to be. I know the rendezvous. I'll let you know when I arrive.
