SARAH:  Shakespeare leaves no doubt as to where this meeting between Hamlet and his mother occurred; he refers to it three times as Gertrude’s closet, which is a private chamber – like a sitting room.

RALPH:  In his book, What Happens In Hamlet, John Dover Wilson referred to this scene as the Bedroom scene, although that’s not quite what a closet is – Gertrude wouldn’t ever sleep in this room.

SARAH:  Nevertheless the name stuck, likely because it emphasizes the sexual undertones present in this scene.

RALPH:  Soon after Wilson’s book was published, a production of Hamlet, starring the actor Sir John Gielgud, actually put a bed on stage for this scene. This has been common ever since, and it’s especially useful if a production wants to suggest some sexualized aspect of the relationship between Hamlet and his mother.

SARAH:  Though we may not agree with the idea that there is an such an undercurrent of erotic tension here, recent historians have pointed out that an Elizabethan audience would likely have been shocked by a woman entertaining anyone other than her husband or lover in her closet.

RALPH:  A closet was truly only for its proper owner, and not even servants would have entered inside.  A book from the 1590s defines the room as follows:  “In this place we do solitary and alone shut up our selves, of this we keep the key our selves, and the use thereof alone do only appropriate unto our selves.”

SARAH:  The language here is a bit old-fashioned, but the sense is clear.  As Lisa Jardine puts it, a gentlewoman’s closet was “the sole place over which she ostensibly exercised total control, her one truly privy or private place.”

RALPH:  This makes it all the more remarkable that his very intimate space has been commandeered by Polonius for his eavesdropping.  This has caused some critics to see this as a clear instance of how Claudius’s regime in Denmark has allowed the political sphere to invade and overtake the personal sphere.  Nothing is truly private in Claudius’s Denmark.

SARAH:  The intimacy of this room actually helps shed some light on Hamlet’s own hasty actions in the scene. Hamlet may have been so quick to stab the person behind the curtain, without checking to see who it was, because it would have seemed obvious to Hamlet that it had to be Claudius, Gertrude’s husband.