Is it any wonder someone gets killed in the scene with Gertrude?
He takes his hot blood drinking energy and then INSTANTLY suppresses it, quiets it, tamps it down, in order to talk with his mother.
The violence that is bubbling in him must be so quickly subverted, it will take nothing to bring it to the surface again.
All it will take is a couple of words behind a curtain. He’s a powder keg, really.
Logically, he should know that it can’t be the king behind the arras in his mother’s rooms.
He has, after all, just left him – on his knees, in prayer, somewhere else.
But he’s taped up the gushing wound of his violent wishes with a couple of pieces of off-brand medical tape – and it doesn’t take much movement to burst through the tape and pour all of that violence. It is an extraordinary transition actually – to go from hot blood drinking to a “hush – go see my mother.” The whole rest of this speech is a papering over of the dark crack revealed.
The Hamlet Project 