I’ve seen this played with a period as well. As in, “At supper.” As in, “At supper, you asshole. Please don’t fuck with me.”

O now the King’s calling the dead body “Polonius”?
It’s been dead body this and body that all this time but now… it’s Polonius. When it suits his purposes, he will give the dead body its identity.
It is hard, I grant him, to reconcile a person with their dead body. Or to un-reconcile them.
In the last few days, I’ve thought much more deeply into the circumstances of my grandmother’s body’s journey to ashes than I would like to have considered. An error in cremation has sent my imagination on an uncomfortable journey with her dead body. From the hospice to bags to slabs to fire… and never, even though I know she is no longer in there, never was I able to think of her as a thing and not as a her. Claudius here has gone straight to thing and returns Polonius to a him when talking to Hamlet.

I have leadership and authority on the brain.
This line has an authoritative ring.
I rarely sound authoritative.
I realized this when teaching young people about directing. I remember a game of Mother May I (AKA Grandmother’s Footsteps) that opened my eyes.
When in the role of the Mother, the leader is charged with telling the others what to do. The usual method is:
“Betty, take 3 giant steps forward.”
And Betty is supposed to reply, “Mother, May I?”
And the leader says, “Yes, you may.”
Anyway – in playing this with a group of kids, I noticed a lot of them saying, “Betty, could you take 3 giant steps forward?”
At first I suggested that they be more direct – and then I realized that they were doing exactly what I had done.
It was me who was leading by saying, “Could you…” instead of direct instruction. So I worked on becoming more direct. But also on embracing a softer leadership that could ask, “Could you…”

Of course the king is most concerned with Hamlet’s location. He’s probably worried about him popping out behind an arras at any moment. Is he hiding in a cabinet? The broom cupboard? Check under the bed before you go to sleep.

You could be eating breakfast – and BLAM – he comes out from under the tablecloth. There could be a Hamlet hiding in the garden, behind a tree during an afternoon walk – or a Hamlet under the stairs – or a Hamlet rolled up in a rug like Cleopatra delivered to her lover. There could be a Hamlet in the basement, a Hamlet in the throne room, a Hamlet in the hall.
He could be anywhere.

I decided to re-write this one because the first one was just so brief and so disconnected from the line and the spirit of it was so different than the sense of the line. I wrote that one after the first day of a process I’d been painfully nervous about but which had turned out beautifully. Nothing had befallen because it went so much better than I feared.

Now, today, in a year wherein it feels like something new and horrible befalls us very day, I actually received good news, which is overriding all the bad for me. So once again, I have a good artistic surprise on a day when I’m encountering this line that asks what bad has happened.

Throw a rock in this town and you will hit an actor. Unless you need one for your project and then somehow they all disappear.
I cast more than I need because I know I will lose them. And then I lose more than I expected – and I have to expand my search, beyond my first tier.

That’s when I start looking around me whenever I find myself, wondering, “Are you an actor? Might you be free tomorrow?” And no one looks like they are. I see marketing execs and social media managers and salespeople and graphic designers – but I can’t spot any actors.

Normally, they drive me crazy by appearing to be everywhere. Today they must all be at auditions.

Ooooh. An instance of historical context being very illuminating. Apparently, this line has a lot in common with something Guy Fawkes said. This boosts up Claudius’ villain cred. Because Guy Fawkes was clearly enemy # 1 and if Claudius is using his language, it is a cue to the audience for how to feel in this moment. Even if you don’t know it consciously, if that language is in the water, it might be working on your villain responsiveness.

If I had to guess Claudius’ survival strategy up to this point, I’d say it could be summed up in the first part of this line. I bet he’s trained himself to bear all smooth and even. He has a finely crafted public persona. Despite the fact that he is a murderer, he almost never lets anyone see his feathers ruffled. He probably has said this thing about bearing all smooth and even to himself his whole life.

Where did Claudius learn this? How does he know that punishing Hamlet outright will blow back on him? It feels like he’s had some experience with this. He hasn’t been king for very long so it would seem likely that he learned his politics in the court before becoming King. What was his position before? Something like Polonius’?
Was he charged with delivering some punishments to beloved people in the past?
I can imagine a time in the past where Claudius had to do some dirty work like this for Hamlet Senior and it blowing back on him, feeding the fire of bitterness that had likely been glimmering since their childhood. Perhaps it was the moment that Claudius began hatching his plan.

So Claudius thinks Hamlet’s popular with the people because he’s handsome? Is that the idea here? It’s funny because the distracted multitude must not be so enamored of Hamlet, otherwise they might have clamored for him to be king after the death of his father. It takes no time at all for Laertes to hustle up some multitudes to support him – so one would think that if Hamlet were popular enough, the people might have been moved to at least pipe up and be like, “Hey what’s going on here? Isn’t Kingship supposed to travel from father to son?”
But as far as we know, nothing like this happens. Maybe the people don’t like Hamlet quite as much as Claudius thinks.