I’ll set something down.
Put one word on the paper to start with even if I don’t have another to follow it. I’ll make at least one mark and then the next might just follow on.
Sometimes I can sit and stare at the page, waiting for something to come to me – especially with this Hamlet Project. I’ll look at the line and think about it and little bubbles of thought will rise and sometimes I’ll seize one.
And then sometimes there’s nothing and I feel like I could stare out the window for an hour before anything occurs to me. I could feel that about to happen today – perhaps due to the sheer amount of possibilities in a line like, “And now I’ll do it.”
So I just did it – instead of standing at the threshold waiting.

This bit is where a lot of character analysis goes a little bit bananas. Those who believe Hamlet to be too hesitant, too wishy-washy or INDECISIVE as they usually say – use this speech as evidence.
“He ought,” they usually say,” to have killed Claudius outright in this moment when he gets the opportunity.”
They say, “He knows he’s guilty now. Why does he pause?”
They see Hamlet’s explanation for NOT killing him now as a convenient excuse. And then the final evidence is the fact that Claudius’ prayers have been ineffective.
“See,” they say, “He should have killed him here.”
But while it is a convenient moment to kill Claudius, I think we have to take Hamlet at his word. As far as Hamlet knows, Claudius is in the midst of getting absolved. As far as Hamlet knows, killing Claudius now is actually a terrible idea – given his worldview. If he is well and truly after revenge in a world where hell is real – he truly would believe that he’d be sending his murderous uncle to heaven.

For many contemporary viewers of this play, hell is an abstract concept that doesn’t pack a real emotional punch. So Hamlet’s concern about sending his uncle to heaven instead of hell doesn’t seem legitimate.

But – a little cultural anthropology is useful to apply to this moment. To try and see this from the actor’s point of view and also the views of a lot of the audience. Sure, it is ironic that, with this worldview, he could have killed him and still sent him to hell despite the appearance otherwise – but that irony packs no punch at all unless you can believe that killing him while praying would send the murderer to heaven.

You can’t really have both things- a Hamlet who’s just using the praying as an excuse and an ironic end to the scene. But that’s how a lot of people see it. They see the end at the beginning and discount the character’s very real concerns of heaven and hell.

Happy Mother’s Day, Gertrude!
Your son got you a scolding for your special day. Isn’t that what every mother wants? A little shaming from her son?
At least, though, he’s not gone totally bonkers and even though he was afraid he’d be tempted, he has NOT also gotten you some matricide – so. . .something to Be Grateful for!
Some sons get their mothers flowers or chocolate – at the very least, a card. This son gets his mom some sharp words. What a prince!

This makes me think of the Benjamin Franklin effect. This is when performing an action can change how you feel about a thing (or a person.) It’s named after the time Ben Franklin asked his enemy if he could borrow a book. It basically states that the things we do can change how we feel, how we are.

I was thinking about how this impacts actors – how when you’re doing murderous actions day in and day out, you start to feel a bit murderous. How when you’re pretending to be in love with someone, you can end up falling in love with them very easily. I once played a pregnant character and suffered a kind of postpartum depression when I stopped walking around with my pregnancy bump costume.
Sometimes it feels like the way to manage a life in the theatre – on stage – is to learn to both connect and disconnect simultaneously – to allow some part of yourself to be a hypocrite – the soul part. Your tongue can say horrible things every night at 8 but then you can go home undamaged. That’s the trick.

Does he really have to plan not to stab his mother? Or plan to not stab his mother?
I mean, I suppose, in a culture wherein everyone has a blade on them at all times, it might be quite easy to cut or stab someone that you hadn’t quite intended to.
Maybe even your mother.
I mean, there it is, at your hip, like Chekhov’s gun – just waiting to be used. Sure, you can slice cheese with it or open letters and packages but what a dagger is mostly for is dagger duties – for cutting or stabbing or what have you.
It feels like his planning on threatening her -but with what?
Stabbing?
I’ve always interpreted the speaking daggers as just more of the cruelty he mentioned before, like saying sharp words.
But the following line seems to suggest a plan of a threat.
Like, I’m going to threaten to stab her but I won’t do it.
But what does he want her to do?
That’s what unclear to me.
Confess?
Plot against Claudius with him?
Mightn’t she be persuaded some other way?
Why does he have to go talk to his mom before he kills Claudius?
Does he need her approval?
But I’m glad he’s got a pre-meditated stab-free afternoon or evening planned. . .

Why does Hamlet think he needs to be cruel to his mother?
I get that cruelty sometimes happens. That life hands you lemons and so you, sometimes, in the heat of the moment, squirt lemon juice in someone’s eyes.
But to PLAN it. . .I don’t get it.
I mean, I understand that sometimes we have to say things to people that hurt their feelings and sometimes we have to gird our loins a little bit to say the uncomfortable thing. I’m working on a little problem like that myself right now. I have to tell someone something that might well feel bad to him – that might be hard to hear. My aim, though, will not be to speak it with cruelty. Hard things are better delivered with kindness – lemonade in a glass is better than a squirt of lemon in the eye.

Who let Nero’s soul out of the bottle?
I specifically told the entire staff that this soul was especially volatile. I told you all that if this soul got out, there would be trouble – not just cruelty – but extreme cruelty. Terrible terrible acts everywhere it manages to find its way in. Was someone just careless or was someone dangerously curious?
Well – the soul’s out now –
now it will be up to those with firm bosoms to keep him out.
Keep your eyes on anyone with a weak bosom or one too soft – he’ll be likely to try his luck there first.
We’re on high alert.
You’ve all been issued a new bottle – if you catch him at it, you’re under instruction to extract Nero’s soul and bring it back here.
He did enough damage the first time around.

O heart.
It was in thy nature to hope, to dream, to see the best in people, to see possibility.
Did you lose it?
Or did it simply go underground?
You were so open
And when someone showed up to love you,
You happily opened all the doors.
But the one who came in
Was sad and dark
He mourned and railed
And nothing could make him happy.
And you,
My empathetic, sympathetic heart felt all of the darkness with him.
You held him and felt the despair and then you began
To be confused about whose despair it was.

O heart you forgot who you were
How it felt to feel joy
How it felt to hope.
Let’s not forget again.

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.

With a line like this, how on earth do people think of Hamlet as wimpy or indecisive or anemic?
This is the language of a man who is ready and willing to do all kinds of atrocities. He’s channeling his inner Pyrrus – ready to be caked in blood. This is the language of a man like Macbeth, for example. It’s the language of a murderer.

I just read a little blurb about Peter Saarsgard’s Hamlet and how he decided to do the part. Apparently, the director told him Hamlet was a murderer – and that sold him. I’m interested, too.

What is a Hamlet who is more like Macbeth like?
Not just in this line – but throughout. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to play it that way myself but I’m intrigued.

I want to see a hot blood drinking Hamlet. Or a vampire Hamlet. Surely that’s been done already somewhere?

If not – Dibs!