Pain makes for stronger memories, and last night’s performance of Hamlet for this year’s Shakespeare in the Park series will haunt me accordingly. It is hard to pin down precisely why migraines are so traumatic, compared to more serious ailments that threaten actual body integrity or, indeed, more intense pain from traumatic injury. Is it that they are localized within the inner space of the head, seemingly out of reach of comfort? That they are triggered by often unpredictable clusters of probabilities – this change in temperature, that delay in eating, some other slight to the circadian rhythm? That they magnify sense experience into maddening affronts, transmuting elemental light, sound, smell into staggering assaults? Or simply that they mete out an unmerited vengeance, as you can commonly do little more than endure them like stages of grief, anger leading to bargaining, to depression, and occasionally acceptance that one must simply wait and pray for the release of unconsciousness while aggrieved capillaries dilate back to their mundane configuration. Indeed, it seems the greatest injustice to wake from a hard-fought fevered delirium to find that despite finally achieving that occluding release of insensateness, that the pain mockingly remains.

So, what does that tell us about Hamlet? To paraphrase the Mad Hatter, how is a migraine like a melancholy prince of Denmark? As already stated, there is that foreboding sense of having been cast into an unjust universe. You mourn alone in gasping sorrow as life continues on apace in what seems a pageant of now-insipid frippery. The face is drawn pale, temples throb with dark passion, and one may even wail and gnash and cry out at the cruel wind and stars. To all outward observers, you have grown withdrawn, sullen, and aggrieved by the slightest provocation. Will no one shutter the lamps of the world, muffle the trumpets and percussion of man and nature, and lead us to a cool dark place where we may plot revenge on the Fates that have betrayed us?

In retrospective sympathy, I recall B saying how he had overcome his own migraine before the show began, the floating lights slowly vanishing. I found it curious how he had the classic symptom of aura, or halo, which I have never encountered. And indeed, how evocative those terms themselves are. Halos are of course associated with angelic embodiment, or general holiness, often taking on a diffused glow as aureola in religious pictography. Aura have been most recently adopted by late 19th century mystic practices such as Theosophy, which associated particular colors with emotional state, but also with paranormal manifestation which are sometimes nothing more than ‘floating lights.’ Curious, then, that all of the characters that actually observe the Old Hamlet on the battlements are established as anxious and troubled in some fashion – the guards Marcellus and Bernardo at the play’s opening, who are jumpy and quick to challenge strangers, as did the exiting Francisco who is “sick at heart.” And Hamlet’s schoolmate Horatio, who has come for reasons never made clear – those he states later don’t make sense given the timeframe – but who seems compelled out of concern with Hamlet’s state as his closest confidante. And Hamlet himself, who in the deepest state of disquiet can not only view but interact fully with the ghost of his late father.

His father speaks of entrapment between Purgatory and Hell, for he roams at night but burns by day to purge away his sins. But he cannot expressly speak of “the secrets of my prison-house” which cannot be communicated to anyone not already suffering alike. This type of solitary prison is likewise inhabited by Hamlet, who later describes all of Denmark and indeed the world as being such – “A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th’ worst.” Clearly he is the only one present who believes it thus, and says as much – “thinking makes it so/To me it is a prison.” It is a prison of the mind, in which the suffering occurs only in the head of the afflicted. And so confined, Hamlet both announces intent to take on the appearance of madness – “put an antic disposition on” – in pursuit of revenge on his father’s killer, and acts so contrary to the courtly norm elsewise that even when he is speaking truly, he is taken as mad.

This duality of personality, and the underlying question of its ground – namely, is Hamlet truly ‘mad’ or merely acting the part – runs throughout the analytic literature and has filled many a student essay. For my purpose, I am mainly intrigued by the incongruence of Hamlet’s sincere speech with its interpretation by others. The notion of insanity simply being out of step with the dominant social paradigm has come across in myriad sources of late. For example, this is a lament made by another self-identified victim of the system of professional psychiatry, Robert Pirsig’s narrator Phaedrus in both Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and its sequel Lila. In response to his theories, the response is progressively hostile – “they only thought him eccentric at first, then undesirable, then slightly mad, and then genuinely insane.” This equating truthtelling with insanity is rife in sympathetic treatments of other countercultural theorists, from Nikola Tesla to Wilhelm Reich, Horton-Who-Heard-A-Who, perhaps even the anarchic McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Popular media has genius – practically the definition of the capacity to see more than others from the same information – overlapped heavily with madness, whether the coldly charismatic Hannibal Lecter, the true-life John Nash of A Beautiful Mind, or the Fringe mind of Walter Bishop. An episode of Numb3rs even comments on research suggesting that the same brain area indicated for exceptional mathematical ability is also correlated with schizophrenia. In The Protest Psychosis, Jonathan Metzl writes of the reclassification of schizophrenia in the psychiatric bible DSM to institutionalize being ‘angry and black’ in response to activism during the civil rights era.  And then there is “Poor Yorick” of Hamlet’s childhood, the court jester who – by tradition – is alone able to speak truth to the divine monarch without fear of retribution. Truth, hidden in the motley dress of calculated madness. (For extensive references to how Hamlet is treated as mad by others when he speaks frankly, see Ed Friedlander’s insightful “Enjoying Hamlet“).

And despite his playacting, Hamlet is truly suffering, and several times wishes that the option of suicide were not precluded by religious decree as a mortal sin. He has seen his father in literal torment after death, watches as Ophelia is buried with “maimed rites” as an assumed suicide (which Friedlander asserts is a misreading of events), and reflects on how even the release of death is not worth the risk of something worse to follow. Yet until he is finally able to act concretely on his plan of revenge, he is tantalized by the prospect of a way out. How many migraine sufferers have, in the grip of templed agony, not wished even idly for something similar? To escape the primacy of pain, I once endeavored to construct a proper orthodoxy of migraine severity so that I could grade each occurrence compared to past incidences. Taking the model of weather classification, particularly that of hurricanes and tornadoes, I came up with 5 tiers:

1. Pre-Migraine. The warning symptoms of tensing temple capillaries, and perhaps the beginnings of a slow throb. The only phase where intervention has been successful for me.
2. Stable Migraine. A low-grade version that has developed past M1, but is not progressing to higher stages. Highly irritating, but still possible to engage in some activities so long as they avoid further sense irritants. This is often the result of not intervening soon enough at M1, but soon enough to keep it from developing further.
3. Full Migraine. If the start conditions were more extreme (no meals instead of late meals, for example), then the more debilitating form develops. At this stage, the main aim is to crawl into a cool dark hole as soon as possible and simply hope that I can avoid it getting to stage 4.
4. Nausea Migraine. After a full migraine onset, not lying down soon enough can bring on nausea and dizziness, generally just compounding the “please let it end” awfulness of the experience. Sometimes the only recourse is to give into the nausea and hope that lets it subside back to stage 3. Or, worst case, it becomes a
5. Cyclic Nausea Migraine. The most destructive, dispiriting, life-negating form. Thus far I have only been inflicted with a class 5 twice, and those represent two of the worst days of my life, particularly as they were both compounded by severe exigent stress from external events.

Last night I would rate a 4.5, making it easily the third worst incident in my life. And yet, due to delayed onset, I still managed to enjoy the entirety of the show before almost immediately succumbing to that hazy removed state of walking dead, only able to count breaths while heading homewards towards the cave and the succor of oblivion.

The rest, one might say, was silence.