Mocking Rosencrantz and Guildenstern here, Hamlet also seems to be mocking the audience, who would try to “pluck out the heart of [his] mystery” by interpreting his psychology and motivations.

Many readers and audiences have found in Hamlet (and Hamlet) the heart of Shakespeare’s own mystery. After 400 years, countless performances, and thousands of pages of criticism, can anyone definitively claim to have “solved” the mystery of Hamlet–let alone Shakespeare?

Compare Polonius’s boast in 2.2:

If circumstances lead me, I will find
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed
Within the centre.

pith and moment: force and importance.

The First Folio version of the text has “pith”; the Second Quarto has “pitch.” The latter word “may allude to ‘pitching or throwing the bar,–a manly exercise, usual in country villages’…or to ‘the height to which a falcon or other bird of prey soars before [swooping] on its prey’” (Jesús Tronch, A Synoptic Hamlet, 2002).

bourn: boundary.

The claim that “no traveller returns” from the border of death seems straightforward until you remember that Hamlet has been visited by his father’s ghost! Either he doesn’t count that as a full-fledged return to life, or his doubts about the nature of the ghost have grown since he expressed them in 2.2 (“The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil”). Also, the Ghost reveals little information about the afterlife, so technically, “we know not of” still holds.

Alternatively, Hamlet may be speaking to a general truth about death and the human condition, not his specific situation.

The metaphor of death as a separate country has recurred often in post-Hamlet literature. In Anne Sexton’s “The Truth the Dead Know” (1962), the grieving speaker remarks: “In another country people die.” In Joshua Mehigan’s “Believe It” (2013), the speaker rejects several Hamlet-esque metaphors by saying that death is “not night, or a country, or a sleep, or peace, / but nothing…” In a series of 2010-11 essays, Christopher Hitchens adapted the metaphor to the ordeal of illness or dying, writing of the cancer that took him “from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.”

Lennon will serve as our spirit guide on this journey–into memory? into a trippy hallucinogenic landscape? into the world of the unreal?

As Michael Lewis and Stephen J. Spignesi note in 100 Best Beatles Songs: A Passionate Fan’s Guide (2009):

John’s original opening line for the song was “Let me take you back,” not “Let me take you down.” (His acoustic demo of the song can be heard on Anthology 2.)

https://youtu.be/50JhY-UIuwQ?t=1m6s

The original “let me take you back” most likely referred to his childhood, when he often visited the Salvation Army’s children’s home ‘Strawberrry Field’ for the summer garden parties with his aunt Mimi.

A famous example is the first line of Hamlet’s first soliloquy: “O that this too too solid flesh would melt.” “Solid” is from the First Folio; the Second Quarto has “sallied.” (And some editors disagree with both and prefer “sullied.”)

See the MIT’s Complete Works of William Shakespeare, created by Jeremy Hylton.

See Act 3, Scene 2.

The Riverside Shakespeare (2nd ed., p. 1196) glosses “fools of nature” as:

the children (or the dupes) of a purely natural order, baffled by the supernatural.

The word nature is used in Hamlet some 32 times, and the distinction between natural and unnatural is a crucial theme of the play. As the encounter with the Ghost gets weirder in 1.5, Hamlet claims to “welcome” the supernatural order the Ghost represents, and attempts to broaden Horatio’s mind too:

HORATIO
O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!

HAMLET
And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Antony admires Caesar and serves as his right-hand man.