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? (more…)