Horatio’s Orchard: Where Seven Loves Bloom
From the Lost Shakespeare Found on Saturday, July 26th.
SCENE – The Orchard Garden. Morning mist clings to the branches. Hamlet stands alone, pacing slowly. Birds do not sing.
Enter Horatio, stepping softly through the dew.
Hamlet: Horatio. What brought you here, to this grove where thoughts grow darker than the leaves?
Horatio (in Italian): Il mio amore presente, mio principe... L’amore mi conduce — non la ragione.
Hamlet: Ah, love — again that ghost. How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all its forms, Horatio. Tell me... are they but shadows chasing their own disappearance?
Horatio (smiling faintly, begins in Italian): Ah... il Principe di Danimarca. Così tormentato. Ma lasci che risponda in inglese, che l’amore possa fluire oltre i confini delle lingue.
Horatio (in English): You speak of love as if it’s a ghost, Hamlet—half glimpsed, never grasped. But I assure you, it is no specter. Love is not stale, though it rots in unattended corners. It is not flat, though it demands depth to perceive it. Let me show you how the Greeks whispered its names like incantations…
Eros burns like the fever you felt for Ophelia. It wants, takes, loses. Philia is what Horatio gave you—unshaken loyalty beside your disarray. Agape? That’s what you search for in the face of death: love without condition, love that forgives.
Hamlet (with a sardonic curl of his lip): And what of unlived love? That which poisons not with touch, but absence. Is that not the most honest of them all?
Horatio: Ah! The unlived. Yes, that’s the one that etches itself onto the soul, like frost that never quite melts. It’s the love you imagined, rehearsed, feared—and still carry. It lives without breathing. And in that way, it outlasts even death.
Hamlet (softly): Then I have loved greatly… but never freely.
Horatio (placing a hand upon Hamlet’s shoulder):
Yet love transformed you, didn’t it? The pain drew lines across your soliloquies, made your madness meaningful.
You didn’t need it to be requited. You needed it to be real.
Hamlet: Speak then, Horatio — what threads bind these forms of love?
Horatio (in Italian): Con immenso piacere, mon signore... lasci che cominci dai Greci.
Horatio (now in English, warming to his tale): Ah, the Greeks, Hamlet. They were no strangers to turmoil, to longing, to the many masks of love. They didn't reduce it to a single impulse — they saw it as a spectrum, a constellation of forces.
There was Eros, love that seizes — wild, urgent, the kind that leaves your heart raw. It’s what poets reach for and often drown in. Philia, though, is quieter. A bond of shared truths, the love between companions who weather the years together. Think of Horatio, perhaps.
Then there's Agape, the love that gives without asking. It’s divine in nature, yes — but it lives in mortals too, when they choose grace over bitterness. Storge wraps you in safety; it's the love of family, the remembered comfort of arms around grief. And Ludus—playful and flirtatious, a kind of dancing joy, love that teases and sparkles before it deepens.
Pragma is time-tested, like old wood polished by use. And Philautia—ah, that one, Hamlet—it begins in self-regard and can rise to healing or descend to ruin, depending on how one holds the mirror.
You see, love isn’t just one ghost, as you said. It’s many spirits walking beside us — some for a breath, some for a lifetime.
Would
you have me speak of the love that cannot be lived, or the kind that
transforms the soul even in silence? I have stories yet, if you're
willing to hear them.
Horatio (now in Italian): “Ma posso aggiungere anche le forme Psicologiche ed Emotive dell’amore, quelle che noi conosciamo più intimamente...” Amore sicuro, amore ansioso, amore trasformativo, amore ombra, amore non vissuto.
Horatio (switching to English): These are less mythic, perhaps, but more immediate. Secure love is like a well-built house—quiet but solid, sheltering you when the world feels too sharp. Anxious love, on the other hand, is like pacing in a room waiting for a knock that may never come. It loves desperately, and fears deeply.
Transformative love… ah, that’s the alchemist’s gold. It doesn’t comfort—it awakens. You meet someone, and you’re forced to grow, even if you didn’t plan to. It might hurt. It often does. But afterward, you’re someone new.
Then there’s shadow love—the one we don’t speak of openly. The kind that reflects back our missing pieces, sometimes cloaked in longing, sometimes in obsession. And the unlived love? It stays in letters never sent, glances not pursued. It carves space inside you—not for regret, but for depth.
Horatio (with a wistful smile, back in Italian): “Ma le forme più affascinanti, le più seducenti, sono quelle Simboliche e Mitiche...” Amore impossibile, amore sacrificale, amore della soglia, amore dell’anima, amore distaccato. Quelle che non si toccano, ma che ci toccano.
Horatio (continuing in English): Impossible love... that’s the one we remember longest. Two souls drawn together by fate but separated by everything else. It leaves poems in its wake.
Sacrificial love speaks through silence—it’s choosing someone else’s happiness over your own, without their knowing. It doesn’t parade—it disappears gently into the background.
Love on the threshold? It is love that blossoms at turning points – at birth, death, departure. It should not remain, but guide.
Soul love… well, that’s tricky. Sometimes you meet someone and feel the stir of recognition, as if they’ve walked with you through lifetimes. It can be terrifying. It can be sacred.
And detached love—that’s the rarest. Loving someone with your whole heart, and not needing them to stay. Letting go, not because you didn’t care, but because you truly did.
Hamlet (whispering): You make love sound like a path… but what path ever ends?
Horatio (in Italian, softly): Che cos’è, dunque, l’amore? Cosa ci sussurra, cosa ci insegna? Chi conosce veramente la risposta, quando l'amore arriva?
Ci trasforma, o ci rivela? L’amore è scelta, necessità, o mistero? Arriva come un sogno, o come un vento che ci scuote? E quando arriva... come lo accogliamo? Come lo riconosciamo? Come lo affrontiamo — con timore, con grazia, o con silenzio?
Horatio (epilogue, in Italian): In ogni amore, una parte di noi fiorisce... e un’altra, tace. Ma ciò che l’amore davvero fa — è svegliarci. Ci scuote dai nostri abiti quotidiani, ci costringe a guardarci — non come siamo, ma come potremmo diventare.
L’amore non chiede il permesso. Arriva come vento nella sera, come sogno che insiste. Non sempre è dolce — ma è sempre vero.
Ed è questo, forse, il suo insegnamento più grande: Che l’amore ci obbliga a vedere. A scoprire ciò che ignoravamo. A domandarci, non chi siamo… ma chi possiamo essere.
Does it transform us, or reveal us? Is love choice, necessity, or mystery? Does it come like a dream, or like a wind that shakes us? And when it comes... how do we welcome it? How do we recognize it? How do we face it—with fear, with grace, or with silence?
Horatio (epilogue): In every love, a part of us blossoms... and another, falls silent. But what love really does is awaken us. It shakes us from our everyday clothes, forces us to look at ourselves—not as we are, but as we might become.
Love doesn't ask permission. It comes like a wind in the evening, like an insistent dream. It's not always sweet—but it's always true.
And this, perhaps, is its greatest lesson: That love forces us to see. To discover what we didn't know. To ask ourselves, not who we are… but who we can be.
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