I mean. I don’t include all the stage directions in this project but with a stage direction like this one…I could not resist.
I don’t know whether this particular phrasing comes from the folio or one of the quartos or even an editor from centuries later but it is so charmingly succinct. It is not: Gertrude dies or She dies.
Just: Dies.
Dies.
And all on its own like that it starts to look funny and I suddenly want to pronounce it in Latin – as in Dies Irae – and then I start singing the “Dies Irae” section of The Magnificat I know and it’s all over.
The Hamlet Project 