CW: suicide

HAMLET         O that this too too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God, God,

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on’t, ah, fie, ’tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely.      (1.2.129-137)

It’s an exhalation: the relief of being alone, of Claudius (and his mother) not being there, of no one looking at him, of not having to keep everything held in, until it spills over in angry sarcasm. And what Hamlet breathes out is desperate; he’s at rock bottom. O that this too too solid flesh would melt. (I’m mostly sticking to the Q2 text but I’m exercising an editorial prerogative and taking F’s solid over Q2’s sallied, rather than emending to sullied.) I don’t want to die, necessarily, he says, or at least he’s not going to start with a completely stark statement of that desire. I just want not to be. I want to disappear; specifically I want this body, which feels such pain and inadequacy, which feels the grief of absence so palpably, to melt away, to become something else, some other substance, purer, perhaps, and more refined, thaw and resolve itself into a dew. I don’t want to be me, here and now, at least for a bit.

Or—let’s not pretend—that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon ’gainst self slaughter. I wish—sometimes—now—that it wasn’t against the law of God to kill yourself. There, I’ve said it. I think I want to die. O God, God—a cry of desperation, to the God whose law he’s just disparaged—how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world! I’m so tired, I’m so sick and tired of all of this. Everything’s turned to grey, nothing matters; nothing gives me pleasure or makes me happy. What’s the point anymore? What have I got to live for? Fie on’t, ah, fie—or other f-words—the world can go to hell, and everything in it; it disgusts me. Screw this. ’Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature possess it merely. Everything’s disordered and diseased, everything’s corrupt, overgrown and out of control. It’s foul, and it stinks. It makes me SICK. I make me SICK.