No need for a treachery detector if one of the perpetrators has a conscience.
Laertes has just enough conscience to own up to his misdeeds but not enough to not do them.
There he stood – the murder “almost” against his conscience – but he went ahead and committed it. He has the kind of conscience that leads to regrets but not to prevention.
It would be so cool if there was such a thing as treachery detector. It would look like a metal detector and you could run it over corners (where treachery tends to hide). When treachery was detected, it would flash red and hiss.
It’s pretty great that treachery is connected to trickery. Apparently, treachery comes from the French word related to deceit and trickery.
Its contemporary usage suggests something much more extreme than trickery. Roads that are treacherous are dangerous – they are deceptive, perhaps but also potentially deadly. I suppose death is the ultimate trick.
And I think Hamlet uses it here because poison is a more deceitful murder weapon than a sword, for example – or a dagger.
It’s not just murder that’s happened – it’s deceitful murder.
We know who did it. And Hamlet probably does, too. But the facts are still obscured, veiled in treachery.
Is this order followed?
Is the door locked?
If so – how does Fortinbras get in?
Is the door unlocked again?
Or does he break the door down?
It would give him quite an entrance.
In contemporary productions, I’ve seen people swallow their hos. Because of the contemporary meaning of ho, actors will get afraid to put the ho to its proper use.
The Hamlet I saw last night, just for example, sort of added it as a syllable to O Villainy. So it sounded like O Villainy
And the ho is not there just to be an added syllable. It is a call. In this case – it’s a call to get some authorities to step in or come in.
O Villainy O doesn’t make any sense.
He doesn’t take a moment to grieve his mother.
He doesn’t stop to say “Goodnight sweet mother” or any of it. He just goes right to villainy. With good reason, of course. There has, in fact, been some villainy afoot. Hamlet responds to the poisoning of his mother not her death.
Which is probably good. He can do more about the villainy than he can do about her death and he has not yet even taken in his own poisoning. It would be nice if there were a sort of St. Peter’s Gate because given how quickly these deaths follow on one another, mother and son would likely show up there at the same time. Also Laertes. And Claudius. It’d be a very crowded intake.
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’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.
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.
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.
Archive 1980–2024
Feldenkrais for Artists in NYC
You aren't stuck in traffic. You are the traffic.
The Hamlet Project 