Ophelia fooled you.

Hey, welcome to the Happy Place Book Club with me, Fern Cotton.

To obey or not to obey had been my question.

Today, she speaks what Shakespeare's women might have said by Dame Harriet Walter.

A chance cheat death and leave my body to hibernate a while, then reappear a reinvented, unconnected person,

not sickly doer with thinking or with fear.

Observing Hamlet carefully, I aped him, like him, escaped by faking antic ways.

If he was mad northwest, I'd be his tailwind.

Distract them with distraction, seeming crazed.

From there it was a breeze to stage my drowning.

I sought the help of one who digs the graves.

Beside poor Yorick's corpse, there is an orphan, not buried yet.

I'll see how much she weighs.

Then later, as an unobserved observer, I watched them trail my understudies' beer.

It worked a treat.

So totally enshrouded, she fooled them, and they drenched her with their tears.

Did Hamlet or my brother howl the loudest? I own I had to eavesdrop on their griefs.

The sad truth is, whichever way you sound it, the person they were mourning wasn't me.

One last obedient act I did,

for Hamlet. He bade me to a nunnery, so I went. And oh, what marvellous people I have found here, encloistered in these deep, sequestered walls. No saintly nuns to speak of, but some sisters that

narrow tongues do fast, loose women call. The learned and the simple, young and ancient, the

harlots and the headstrong, wits and bores, the accidental mothers and their offspring,

...