🕹 Eating Mangoes with Hamlet

Hamlet is also, yeah, I mean,… like us! Random!!

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

Introduction

Hamlet in 4 Minutes

Let us read the famous soliloquy from Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, prince of Denmark, the famous nunnery scene: Hamlet: To be or Not to be…

Hamlet’s ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ Speech, Act 3 Scene 1

Shakespeare	Plain English (hopefully)
To be, or not to be: that is the question:	The first six words of the soliloquy establish a balance. There is a direct opposition – to be, or not to be. Hamlet is thinking about life and death and pondering a state of being versus a state of not being – being alive and being dead.
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them?	The balance continues with a consideration of the way one deals with life and death. Life is a lack of power: the living are at the mercy of the blows of outrageous fortune. Should we nobly suffer or should we take arms and fight against these random things?
To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d.	The only action one can take against the things he lists among those blows is to end one’s life. That’s the only way of opposing them. The ‘sleep of death’ is therefore empowering: killing oneself is a way of taking action, taking up arms, opposing and defeating the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Living is a passive state; dying is an active state.
To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life,	Death is something desirable – devoutly to be wished, a consummation – a perfect closure. It’s nothing more than a sleep. But there’s a catch, which Hamlet calls a rub. A ‘rub’ is a bowls term meaning an obstacle on the bowls lawn that diverts the bowl, so the fear of the life hereafter is the obstacle that makes us pause and perhaps change the direction of our thinking. We don’t control our dreams so what dreams may come in that sleep in which we have shuffled off all the fuss and bother of life? He uses the term “mortal coil1”, which is an Elizabethan word for a big fuss. With that thought, Hamlet stops to reconsider. What will happen when we have discarded all the hustle and bustle of life?
But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of?	The problem with the proposition is that the sleep of death is unknown and could be worse than life. Hamlet now lets his imagination wander on the subject of the voyages of discovery and the exploratory expeditions. Dying is like crossing the border between known and unknown geography. One is likely to be lost in that un-mapped place, from which one would never return. The implication is that there may be un-imagined horrors in that land.
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.	But there is more to it than that. It is not just about killing himself but also about the mission he is on – to avenge his father’s death by killing his father’s murderer. Throughout the action of the play, he makes excuses for not killing him and turns away when he has the chance. ‘Conscience does make cowards of us all.’ Convention demands that he kill Claudius but murder is a sin and that conflict is the core of the play. At the end of the soliloquy, he pulls himself out of this reflective mode by deciding that too much thinking about it is the thing that will prevent the action he has to rise to.
–Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember’d.	Saraswati Namostute ! Grant me Grace and Knowledge on How to Proceed!

Do you see a lot of “randomness” in that famous soliloquy? What do you reckon was Hamlet’s problem? In this soliloquy, Hamlet gives a list of all the random things that annoy him about life: the whips and scorns of time, the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, the insolence of office and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes. There’s a sense of agonized frustration in this soliloquy that however bad life is we’re prevented from doing anything about it by fear of the unknown.

And yet, being Prince of Denmark, and having a lot of Questions, and unmistakable Authority, he has to Act! How did he solve that problem? We don’t know for sure if Hamlet believed in Goddess Saraswati, Shakespeare doesn’t say, but Christopher Isherwood seems to think so, on Page 3.

Aside: in Hindu mythology, who are the two who went into Hamlet’s “the undiscover’d country” and actually did return? She and he. But how did they manage it?

Yes, they asked Questions!

Suppose we were Hamlet….

What would we want to know? What Questions would we have?

• Who is our friend?
• What is the chance that we will survive?
• Who killed Dad?

Did Hamlet have an idea, any suspicion, that he might have wanted to prove? Yes, he did, and that is why he feigned madness, so people would open up and tell him things, in an unguarded way. So there was craft in his madness!!

So here Hamlet tells his friends, Horatio and Marcellus, what he is going to do, what prank he is going to play, his plans for a naatak, and swears them into silence:

Here as before. [For the third time, Hamlet places his sword for the others to swear upon]
Never, so help you mercy,
How strange or odd soe’er I bear myself
(As I perchance hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on)
That you at such time seeing me never shall,
With arms encumbered thus, or thus head shaked,
Or by pronouncing of some doubtful phrase
As, “Well, we know,” or “We could an if we would,”
And especially don’t say Hakuna Matata, Dude!!

A Hypothesis worthy of Hamlet

So we know what Hamlet wanted to know, and how he planned to find out.

What about us?

If we wanted to know the truth of something, some guess, a hunch, or a Hypothesis that we had, then we would need to conduct an “Experiment”, rather like Hamlet did, without quite going or feigning madness of course. But there is a Madness to/in the Method, as we will see…

“Design of Experiments - A Workflow: A Madness in the Method”

From StatsRef :

The PPDAC summary table suggests a relatively linear flow from problem definition/Hypothesis through to conclusions — this is typically not the case. It is often better to see the process as cyclical, with a series of feedback loops. A summary of a revised PPDAC approach is shown in the diagram below. As can be seen, although the clockwise sequence (1→5) applies as the principal flow, each stage may and often will feed back to the previous stage.

In addition, it may well be beneficial to examine the process in the reverse direction, starting with Problem definition and then examining expectations as to the format and structure of the Conclusions (without pre-judging the outcomes!). This procedure then continues, step-by-step, in an anti-clockwise manner (e→a) determining the implications of these expectations for each stage of the process.

References

1. Randomized Trials:
   

Randomized Trials

2. https://safetyculture.com/topics/design-of-experiments/

3. Mahashweta Devi, The Why Why Girl, https://www.tulikabooks.com/picture-books/the-why-why-girl-english.html,read by Sarah Dryden Peterson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNcV5DZhg4c

4. Could this song indicate what our situation might be?

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qan0Y9hXpPQ

   https://www.filmyquotes.com/songs/1381

5. https://gramener.com/comicgen/v1/

Fun Stuff: Words Belong Hamlet

Hamlet’s To be or not to be in Pidgin English Tok Pisin!

Which way this time? Me killem de finish body b’long me. Or me no do ’im? Me no savvy.
Might ’e better ’long you-me catchem this fella, string for throw ’im this fella arrow.
Altogether b’long number one bad fella, name b’long him fortune? Me no savvy.
Might ’e better ’long you-me For fightem ’long altogether where him ’e makem you-me sorry too much.
Bimeby him fall down die finish? Me no savvy.

References

1. David Spiegelhalter (2019) The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data, Basic Books, New York, NY, USA.
2. Derek Rowntree (2018) Statistics Without Tears: A Primer for Non-Mathematicians, Penguin Books, London, UK.
3. David Deutsch (2011) The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World, Penguin Books, London, UK.

Footnotes

1. https://nosweatshakespeare.com/quotes/famous/mortal-coil/