That complements – in the sense of completing – his famous “to be or not to be” soliloquy – Hamlet trying to decide what it means to be human, what it means to act. Or, perhaps more precisely, how to act. In his madness, or feigned madness, things come to tap him on the shoulder, events bombard him – he has visitations, perhaps from angels, perhaps from demons. He fears they may be the same. He is frightened, desperately aware of needing to do something, but awkwardly frozen in place. He cannot move, but he is fully ready to move. Hamlet, like a filament in a light bulb, has passed into a state of excitation. To be and not to be at the very same time.

The “to be or not to be” speech, for me, then, is less an exploration of suicide and more an exquisite rendering of a state of pure potentiality, where anything (or everything) is possible. It’s neither action nor inaction, but the sheer tingling excitement of being alive – with all of its attendant problems and possibilities, fears and failures – a twinning of the self. But that moment in the word’s history fades fast. Who can sustain such a raffling excitement? By the nineteenth century, physicians use excitement to denote a state of abnormal activity, a pathology in any organ.

In the modern sense, Hamlet is turned on. Excitement comes to turn us all on. We are not passive agents in the face of it. We invoke it. Does Hamlet like the state of excitement? I do not know. Clearly, he helps to bring it on. He certainly feels alive, so alive, so electrically charged, that he cannot stand it. Contrary to most interpretations, that Hamlet feels dead and emasculated, I say he feels too much alive. He lives in that liminal state suspended between being and non-being, alive at an emotional midnight hour. I know that at least some of us in the room have experienced that state, reading a great writer’s sentences and having to drop the book, not out of regret or repulsion, but because the pages just take your breath away and you need for the moment to stop. If it were two hundred years earlier – during Maria Maddalena’s time – and I would say Hamlet had fallen into a rapture – conscious and unconscious at the same time – in contact with something otherworldly.