“I know not should.” Hamlet never says this, …

“I know not should.”

Hamlet never says this, of course. His actual line is “I know not ‘seems,’” spoken to a mother who thinks his grief has lasted long enough. But let’s change the word to “should” and play with that.

Because Hamlet does know should.

The ghost tells him what a son should do. Claudius tells him how a prince should behave. Gertrude tells him how long grief should last. Even the play tells him what he should do: the ghost appears, the son receives his command, blood answers blood.

Everyone knows Hamlet’s lines except Hamlet.

Perhaps this is part of what slows him down. He isn’t standing before an empty page. He is buried beneath pages written by other hands, each claiming to be the true script.

A son should avenge his father.

A prince should preserve the state.

A Christian should not murder.

A man should act.

A mourner should recover.

Every duty seems a necessity.

That is why the grammar of my imagined refusal wants me to play.

Hamlet doesn’t say:

I don’t know what I should do.

That still accepts the authority of should. It merely asks for clearer instructions.

But:

I know not “should.”

Now the word itself has been called in for questioning.

Lift it out of the sentence. Turn it over in the hand as Hamlet will later turn Yorick’s skull.

Whose voice is lodged inside it?

Does it belong to conscience, custom, love, fear, shame? Did I choose it, or did it enter me so early that I mistook its voice for my own?

Is it asking me to keep faith with something I value?

Or is it another ghost speaking from beneath the floorboards?

A life can gather a remarkable number of ghosts.

You should have a proper career. You should own a house. You should be more ambitious. You should settle down. You should be productive. You should act your age. You should have figured this out by now.

At first, other people say these things. Parents, teachers, managers, priests, newspaper columnists, men in suits who seem to have received a map that somehow never reached you.

Then the voices move in.

Nobody needs to stand over you after that. You carry the court inside your own head: Claudius checking the figures, Polonius offering advice nobody requested, Gertrude wondering why you cannot simply cheer up, the ghost arriving after midnight with one more piece of unfinished family business.

There is freedom in catching the word before it passes your lips.

Not rejecting it. Not obeying it. Hearing it.

Because abolishing should solves nothing. “Nobody can tell me what to do” is another script, usually written during adolescence and performed long after the costume has stopped fitting.

Some obligations are necesssary. A promise creates a claim on us. So does love. If I say yes to a child, a friend, a reader or a piece of work, the yes brings consequences with it. A life without obligation might also be a life in which nothing had been loved enough to bind us.

Meanwhile, the kettle is boiling. Philosophy may interrogate the moral foundations of breakfast, but somebody may still be waiting for a cup of tea.

So I don’t want to banish should. I want to make it declare its provenance.

Where did you come from?

Who sent you?

What do you protect?

Are you keeping me faithful to someone I love, or merely obedient to an examiner who left the room thirty years ago?

Hamlet’s pause might be useful here. Not endless postponement, but the small arrest between receiving the script and speaking the line. The moment when the actor looks down at the page and notices the handwriting is not his own.

The ghost can speak. The court can whisper. The old examiner can clear his throat.

But before I obey, I want to look down at the script and ask whether these are still my lines.