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!

I love when Hamlet gets all horror movie. He’s best known for intellectual philosophizing – but this part of him often gets ignored. The version of Hamlet that is the most Vincent Price, the most gothic, the most macabre.

It’s kind of a great impulse – to be personally wound up – to have your uncle’s crime confirmed, to finally tell your “friends” where they can stick their pipe – and rather than say ANY of that, just set the scene for a dark story.

It feels to me like someone who’s just gone through something dramatic and instead of dealing with that thing, sits down at a desk and writes, “It is a dark and stormy night…”
And then, from there, of course, go on to drink blood, like any good vampire story.

As Royalty, of course, Hamlet has the authority to dismiss people at will. Of course, he will use that authority when he has to.

But there’s something about this particular dismissal – something slightly disingenuous about calling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “friends” at this point. Something that is highlighted by the preface of “Leave me” to “friends.” It’s like – “Get out of here,” and the “friends” doesn’t soften the effect of the order. It just makes friends slightly sarcastic. Even if he doesn’t say it that way or mean it.

It is, too.
Though not often said these days.
I’m trying to think of an instance of it that isn’t in an old movie or song, or play, for example.
“In the sweet by and by…” a song, I think.
And it’s one of those phrases that if you elide it a little bit, it starts to sound very odd. Nor would it be entirely clear what it meant if you didn’t speak English, I imagine. Or just never heard this expression.

Hereafter means essentially the same thing but “by and by” has a sense of lackadaisical ease to it that “hereafter” lacks. And hereafter breaks down to the elements it is when you look at the words. It’s – here – after.
But “by and by” – one of these “by”s on its own would be meaningless – and it doesn’t break down to any sense at all.

But it is easily said.

As soon as I am explicitly summoned, I start to drag my heels. When someone calls me and demands I call them right away, I do not. In fact, I call them even later than I might have had they not demanded an immediate response. If I call them at all.

If someone says, “I need you down here right away!” My first thought is, “Oh yeah?” And then, slowly, if I feel like it – I’ll give a response like Hamlet’s here.

I don’t take orders well.