In my edition, this sentence gets its own line of verse. This leaves 9 beats of silence.
But it would seem like you’d want to use those 9 beats BEFORE the “No” and not after it. Like, to really feel the weight of this decision those 9 beats need to be full of struggle, to be thinking, really and truly – “Am I revenged? Should I do this now?”
If you say the “No” and THEN wait 9 beats. Well, I’m not sure what you do. But that too might be interesting. If he says, “No” and then doesn’t know what to do with himself for a little while. Like he spends 9 beats trying to work out where to put his sword and then determines that he should put it up, away from its target.
Of course, I imagine some editions would put this NO at the end of the previous line or, probably, more likely, the beginning of the next – both of those lines are somewhat irregular already – it might be just fine to, say, put three stressed words in a row to read. “No. Up, sword.”
But no – all on its own is definitely bold. And dramatic. But you’d have to really fill it.

I find I am confused by the way revenge fits into religion. Like, do you get a pass for murder if you’re doing it for revenge?
Because Hamlet here is very concerned for Claudius’ soul but has no real concern for his own. Like – wouldn’t it better to kill Claudius now if he’s going to do it? Won’t his own set of sins be slightly reduced by doing his murdering at this moment?
It’s like two competing codes of ethics here – the Honor code, which would seem to be in direct opposition to the Religious order.
And yet they are also intertwined.
They sit a little uncomfortably next to one another – Religion probably not going so far as to say a murder done for revenge isn’t a sin – but probably giving more of a pass in this area than would seem QUITE right in the Thou Shalt Not Kill department.
And then Revenge – which is not only concerned with a violent kind of redemption – but which is also seemingly concerned with the souls of the murdered.
The two ways are both ancient and have probably been doing this funny little dance for ages. Old primal urges competing and cooperating.

We’re still talking about Hamlet Sr, right? We haven’t switched to Claudius yet? Because him could be either him.
I’m not entirely clear what our circumstance and course of thought actually is. Who is “Our”?
I can try and make this mean something like “on further thought” or “now that I think about it, the weight on my Dad is definitely pretty heavy – now I’m remembering all the sulphorous and fiery and flames and what not.”

But I’m not entirely sure that this is what’s actually going on.
Is the air a royal air?
A reference to what’s just happened with the Mousetrap?
If so, it would seem to point to Claudius’ heaviness, not Hamlet Sr’s.
Things are heavy with both kings, it would seem. That’s probably part of the deal of being king – things are heavy with him always.

I assume he means his father’s spiritual audit. And not his father’s financial audit. But he must have a SMALL sense of how his father’s audit stands because his father has told him that he’s enjoying some flames to purge away his sins – so it’s not a clean bill of soul health. If I were Hamlet, I’d be pretty curious about what my dad did that merited the tormenting flames treatment.

It’s funny to call it an audit. It makes me think of the soul audit as an excel document. St Peter – or some middle manager officer – comes along with his empty spreadsheet and gives the dead man a soul once over. He puts a mark in each column for each sin – and some columns are more heavily weighted than others. The auditor takes a look at the whole picture and then decides the final equation.
X number of sins = X number of tormenting flames.

I think I’d like to go full of bread. In my final hours, I’d have been able to eat warm loaves, fresh from the oven, spread with butter, some with jam or honey too.
There’s something comforting about the idea of going with a belly full of bread. It suggests that even if something awful happened afterwards, there was sure tasty warm comfort before.

I’m not sure quite why it’s a problem that Hamlet senior went while full of bread but I suspect it’s a religious issue.

I’m guessing that the really penitent way to go would be to do some fasting and confessing. Luckily, through, I am not religious and have nary a religious bone in my body – unless freshly baked bread could be my religion and being full of it is the most devout expression of good doughy goodness.

It’s funny that hire and salary are words with such a long history. They seem so contemporary somehow or maybe a few decades ago, at the most.

In our freelance society, getting hired or getting a salary are increasingly Rare things. But I don’t know how these words meanings have shifted and changed over the years. I know that a while back people would hire coaches and horses and so on. Has a salary always been a regular payment system? Usually a yearly sum? Maybe it was once a little different.

Hire AND salary would suggest that Hamlet’s been FIRST, SELECTED to do the job of killing Claudius at prayer and also PAID for it.
This seems a tiny bit redundant but there is a slight raising of the idea with “AND salary”

It would seem that Hire and Salary wasn’t an everyday phrase. This is Shakespeare inventing.

It also would be a great name for a pub or a rock band.

Is Hamlet an only child?
If he has or had any sibling, they are nowhere to be seen in the play. We know he’s the only boy but does he have a sister stashed somewhere? Maybe married off to the King of Sweden or something?
Or did he have brothers who didn’t survive?
It is rare for a Royal family to have just one child. Part of the deal with having a Royal Family at all is to insure lots of heirs. So I’m curious about Hamlet’s only-ness.
I’m part only child (on one side) but no one’s concerned about middle class lineage.
And I am the sole daughter both of my mother – to whom I am also the sole child and to my father, who has two sons.
It never occurred to me to wonder about Hamlet’s siblings before – why he doesn’t seem to have any and what happened there.
Was Gertrude unable to have more? Did she become a little like Lady Macbeth and lose a child or two?
Are there sisters somewhere?
I’d like to imagine that there are three sisters and one is Queen of Sweden, another is in a nunnery (the one where Hamlet would send Ophelia) and the third has been discovered, since she ran off, joined up some pirates off the coast.
It’s a natural extension of Virginia Woolf’s imagining of Shakespeare’s sister – this extra fictional step of imagining Hamlet’s sisters. If I started a band again, I might call it Hamlet’s sister, since someone already took Shakespeare’s sister.
It’s the next best thing.

We start with scanning text, with verse
Analyzing words and then
Somewhere sometime
A thing that was text based
Becomes image based
And before long we have
A piece of technology
(Created in my lifetime)
that places scanning firmly
in the image camp)

And yet
Despite its transition from word to image
There is some essential thing in the word
that remains.

There was that interesting moment in theatre history when revenge plays were all the rage, of which this is one. It makes me curious about why. Why, in this particular moment in history, was revenge so important? What social anthropologist has worked out the significance of revenge to the English people in the Renaissance? Because, yes, it is fantastic fodder for drama. This drive – this vengeance is delicious in the Revenger’s Tragedy, The Spanish Tragedy and of course, here in Hamlet. But we don’t really write Revenge stories much anymore – Is it that we’ve somehow evolved past them? That we are driven less by honor and revenge and use more of our common sense in this area? It would be nice to believe so. But I’m not entirely sure – it could just be that once Shakespeare wrote this one, no one ever felt they could top it – so the trend just dried up.