Guildenstern is KIND of a lousy messenger. He’s referenced some commandment from Gertrude but has failed to state what that command is. Instead he gets all touchy and moody with Hamlet for bantering. Which is all the stranger since he previously had a bantering relationship with the prince. All previous exchanges were banter and now messenger Guildenstern can neither deliver the message nor fall into his usual style of conversation with his friend.

You’ve got to breed pedigree courtesies – make sure you mate them with well made courtesies.
It helps, too, to line their cages with handmade paper. If you put down newspaper, they’ll breed but they might not reproduce the best courtesy.
Breed them right and you can make a coat of the right courtesies. But – a coat with the wrong breed of courtesies will not only make you look like a fool – it won’t keep you warm either. Start with the right breed of courtesy and you’ll breed even better
courtesies.

What if Guildenstern has a special relationship with Gertrude?
She has specifically sent Guildenstern to Hamlet because Guildenstern, upon seeing Gertrude upset, has gone straight to her. What if the King and Queen sent for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern because the Queen knows exactly where to find Guildenstern and thinks he might be able to help her with her son.
What if Guildenstern has suddenly gotten a little paternalistic, a little Polonius like – with Hamlet because he’s just been getting busy with his mom?
What if it started years ago when Hamlet and Guildenstern were young and Guildenstern would come over and be all Eddie Haskell with Hamlet’s Mom.
“Hello, Mrs. Hamlet, you’re looking beautiful today.”
And since Mr. Hamlet was so often away at the wars, she found herself flattered and intrigued. Neither Rosencrantz nor Hamlet ever the wiser.
Nor Claudius Nor Hamlet Sr, either.
Gertrude and Guildenstern get it going.
Until of course it all falls apart.
Like everyone in this play.

It’s not so wild what Hamlet’s just said previously. He’s bantering. Very logically, it would seem to me. I have met many people who DID need to put their discourse into a frame, that did veer wildly. Hamlet does a good demonstration of that behavior elsewhere in the play, particularly when he’s talking with Polonius. His cloud analysis, for example, is much more wild than the joking suggestion that Guildenstern should go tell the doctor that Claudius is choleric.

It makes me think about how people so often see others according to how they expect to see them, rather than how they really are. There’s a study with rats where they told people that their rat was especially clever or stupid and held them, and the rats then performed better or worse in a maze depending on people’s perceptions of them.  Which is a slightly different thing – because Guildenstern thinking Hamlet is crazy doesn’t make Hamlet crazy but it does make Guildenstern interpret everything Hamlet says as being crazy, even when it really makes sense.

Expand this to the effect this idea might have on children, though, and we can see how kids would start to take on the qualities that are projected on to them. It happens with race, too. There was a story on This American Life about the biases that get pre-school African American kids sent home while white pre-schoolers don’t. You get sent home enough times for doing nothing – you’re gonna want to just go ahead and DO something. So black children get sent home more than white children and suddenly there’s a reputation.

Put a frame around that discourse.

This is curious. We see Claudius leave the play. He doesn’t SEEM particularly angry. He’s upset, certainly. He wants light and he leaves. The next time we see him, he’s in a state but it’s not choleric. Emotional. Anxious. Turning himself inside out. But choleric? Not so much. This indicates one of two things. Either Claudius has swung through a wide range of emotions, traveling a whole emotional spectrum from stunned to disturbed to choleric and back to disturbed. Or Guildenstern has no idea what he’s talking about. Or Gertrude is making things up and passing them through Guildenstern back to Hamlet.
OR! Maybe Claudius has gotten uncharacteristically mad at her. Has he suddenly shut her out, sent her way so he can wrestle with his conscience all by himself?
That actually makes a lot of sense to me.
I’ve seen many men lash out at women and seem angry when they’re really just troubled.

I’m interested in Claudius’ anger. He’s not much of a stormer. We don’t see him angry much, even though we know him to murder, we don’t see him full of fury for long. We just get flashes.

Seriously. Whose phrasing is this? Is it Guildenstern’s? We don’t have a LOT of his phraseology to know if this is possibly characteristic. It doesn’t SEEM like the terse Guildenstern we know. It doesn’t sound like Gertrude either, really. It’s a little more Polonius sounding – truth be told. This is his kind of phrasing. I might think he’d been sent from him with something to say. But he goes on talking this way.
Maybe Guildenstern was/is ambitious to become a Polonius and is beginning to ape his style. It is so very different than how he was.

Why does he start here?
Is this what Gertrude has told him to say? “Go tell my son the king is upset.”
What does she expect this to accomplish? Did this approach work when Hamlet’s Dad was the king?
Is this what she’s always done?

Apparently the queen is suffering under “great affliction of spirit”. Can she not say, “I’m upset and need to see my son?” I guess not. She’s got to deflect the difficulty. It’s not HER issue – it’s the King’s.
But while Hamlet MAY have been atuned to his father’s distemper, he doesn’t have much reason to care about his uncle’s distemper – murder and kingship aside.
I want to know what Gertrude and Hamlet’s routine was BEFORE the events of this play and how this exchange reflects either a continuation or deviation from it.

Now Guildenstern starts talking. Rosencrantz has taken the lead on chats with Hamlet up until this point and suddenly, here, Guildenstern steps up. What happened?
Is there something about the king’s choler or the Queen’s concern that has activated Guildenstern? Or have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had a conversation and somehow shifted their dynamic?

If I were directing this play or playing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, I would want to work this out. Why the change in behavior between these two? Why has the less verbal, more taciturn of the two suddenly stepped up to take the lead? And does Hamlet notice the switch? What does he make of it?
Do they think that Guildenstern will have more luck? Are they thinking that he’s the more diplomatic of the two? That Rosencrantz has made no progress so maybe they should switch up their good cop/bad cop dynamic?
There’s a lot to be considered.

This is the part I find hardest about working in the environments that I do. The wild insecurity of the field means that everyone spends most of their time pretending that everything is going great and that whatever new crappy thing isn’t really crappy.

I got to the point where I was no longer capable of forcing my disposition without throwing up. Partly that’s due to the extremity of the forcing but also it’s due to experience with the Feldenkrais Method. That is, I became so sensitive to the smallest change in my sense that I am actually now incapable of forcing myself into any box in which I do not fit. I catch the moments I begin to force my body before I catch myself forcing the mood and I just don’t have the ability to continue the forcing.

So I quit those jobs mostly. And while the poverty is earthshakingly frustrating and terrifying, I actually prefer it to the lying I was having to do otherwise. My disposition does better in unenforced situations.

Guildenstern! What are you up to here? With every thing Rosencrantz says, in this scene, Guildenstern seconds it with a shade of derision of Hamlet. Guildenstern escalates Rosencrantz’s assessment of Hamlet as distracted to a “crafty madness” taking something relatively benign and turning it into a something a bit darker.

Is he trying to curry favor with Claudius? Has he seen which way the wind is blowing and decided to side with the king instead of the Prince?

This portion of the scene might be played as a struggle between Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as to what side they’re on. Rosencrantz could seemingly be taking Hamlet’s side, Guildenstern, the King’s. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on with Guildenstern if you look closely enough.