Dies

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I mean. I don’t include all the stage directions in this project but with a stage direction like this one…I could not resist.

I don’t know whether this particular phrasing comes from the folio or one of the quartos or even an editor from centuries later but it is so charmingly succinct. It is not: Gertrude dies or She dies.

Just: Dies.

Dies.

And all on its own like that it starts to look funny and I suddenly want to pronounce it in Latin – as in Dies Irae – and then I start singing the “Dies Irae” section of The Magnificat I know and it’s all over.

I am poison’d.

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I’ve always wondered how someone would KNOW they’d been poisoned . Like – how does it feel different than, say, eating something rotten? When I played this part, I decided that since the poison is so fast acting , it must move through the blood somehow – swiftly freezing as it moved. I tried to play this line as a realization not a report. It’s hard to get that across, though, I acknowledge.

The drink, the drink!

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It is curious that Gertrude chooses such a general word for this at this moment. Claudius has specified that the drink is wine – though he, too, generalizes to drink after asking for the wine to be placed on the table at his request.
But – it is the wine that has been poisoned. Has it been rendered a drink by the poison?

Or is Gertrude referring to the act of her drinking? Is the drink the thing she took? Like, the swallow? It is, though, almost more clear in its generalness, I realize now.

For example, if she’d said, “The wine, the wine!” One might assume the wine was bad – like we were just dealing with a bottle gone off instead of poison.

I feel like if I had a sudden bad reaction to something I drank, I’m not sure if I’d go straight to “the drink” – unless it was a fancy cocktail with a silly name – then it would definitely be the drink, the drink that was to blame.

O my dear Hamlet –

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I think there’s a great deal more Gertrude wants to say before she dies. Is this line a simple expression of love for her son – a last cry out for the son she loved? Or is it a realization that he was the target for the death she’s in the middle of? Or the beginning of some death bed speech that she realizes she doesn’t have time to give as soon as she begins.

No, no, the drink, the drink.

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I think she’s working this out in the moment. She repeats “the drink” four times and I suspect each “drink” reveals a different layer of realization. The drink is doing this to her. She’s feeling it burn. She’s realizing what it is doing to her. She, at some point, works out who gave her the drink – though she doesn’t name him and ultimately declares that she is poisoned without saying who.

I wonder, if Claudius hadn’t attempted to cover his tracks by declaring her swooning to see them bleed if she might have just quietly expired without creating too much fuss.

But she has to respond to his assertion. She has to include one last act of defiance before she departs – due to the drink? The drink. The drink!

She swounds to see them bleed.

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Nice try, Kingy. Good attempt to create a counter narrative to the actual truth here. However, I suspect that the Queen has seen quite a bit of blood in her time. She was married to the man who sledded the pollacks (pole-axe) on the ice. She saw her son stab a man to death, the wound of which probably led to him bleeding out. While certainly she wasn’t happy about witnessing that slaying, she also didn’t seem particularly swoony around the blood. So – even before the Queen herself denies it, this explanation does not seem a likely one. I wonder if it feels insulting to the queen as well – like, not JUST – no, I was poisoned but also – I would NEVER faint at the sight of blood, how dare you!

How does the queen?

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Has Hamlet not heard what Laertes just said? Is he not processing the news that Laertes has just revealed or did he just not hear it or is he choosing to ignore it?

Laertes has just confessed to treacherousness and Hamlet asks about the queen.

Now – sure – the queen is visually taking attention at the moment, I suspect. She has fallen or fainted or swooned or stumbled and anyone shifting out of the vertical plane will draw someone’s eye.

I think, too, Hamlet probably hasn’t put together that this treachery Laertes is talking about is going to kill him. It takes Laertes really spelling it out in a few lines.

I am justly kill’d with mine own treachery.

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I wish this satisfying karma happened more often. Like, if murderers, planning their next kill got killed with their plans somehow.

Or, if like, rapists, got their dicks cut off while trying to rape someone.

Like – and then they realized – they got it while it was happening, the way Laertes does – where they look down at their severed member and go, “Yep. I guess I deserved that. Seems about right.”

Like, what if Brett Kavanagh got his dick caught in his zipper while he was trying to rape Christine Blasey Ford and what if, instead of being how we saw him being (defensive, furious, whiny, petty, pathetic) he just suddenly GOT it. He’d scream in pain and then go, “I am justly mutilated by my own treachery!” That would be a heroic Brett.

In real life, though, I’m 99% – sure that if he’d actually gotten his peen caught in his zipper he’d have blamed his victim and it would probably not have gone well for anyone.
But – that is why if more villains more like Laertes, we’d have a higher quality of villain. The noble villain who owns up to his treachery.

Why, as a woodcock to mine own springe, Osric.

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The previous person to use this metaphor in this play was Laertes’s father. It is clearly a family metaphor. Both woodcock and springe appear in other plays from other characters – but only this father and son team use them together in this manner.

I imagine Polonius often cautioned Laertes not to be a woodcock and taught him how to set a springe. And here is Laertes, at the very end of his life, drawing on his father’s language and caught in his own trap.

How is’t, Laertes?

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The note on Genius suggests that this line is evidence of Osric’s allegiance with Laertes and the king and/or his complicity in the plot against Hamlet.

I’m not sure it is. It could be, sure. But it could be that Osric is showing concern for Laertes because no one else is. Hamlet has Horatio so perhaps Osric sees Laertes as without a friend.

In the end, it is important that he asks Laertes how he’s doing because Laertes starts to give up the goods in response to this question.

I see how this line might support a case against Osric in a conspiracy case but there are other possibilities. Different productions will have different Osrics with different motivations. These kind of possibilities contribute to the reasons these plays can be produced over and over with seemingly endless variations.