What monsters may come?

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,
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?

Teaching Hamlet used to make me tired and bored. No effort seemed enough to prevent it becoming a seminar-by-numbers, about angst and revenge, procrastination and action, melancholia and sanguine heroism, fighting the tendency of teenagers to over-identify with Hamlet, his unloving mother and his unpleasant stepfather. It seemed a play of callowness, of tedious self-absorption, until Fortinbras arrives, deus ex machina, to tidy all that muddy psychodrama away with civic order.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. It is a story that could just have easily been told by Kafka, of the individual cut adrift, by virtue of education, geography, institutional drift and arbitrary power, left to stumble their way through half-lit corridors and shadowy motivations cloaked in obfuscating legalistic verbiage, unable to recognise landmarks, signs, the orientation of what once seemed transparent and right side up. Hamlet is Gregor Samsa or Josef K, cockroach or man on trial, awakening to a strangely changed reality. He sees differently. And is seen differently. That's all it takes to end up being killed by the regime.

Dwelling on the understanding of this process, that is what conjures up the monsters. 'Monster' is the name the regime gives to those who see differently. 'Monster' is a name for the nightmares that come when the regime turns its eye on you and finds you monstrous.