SARAH:  Imagine that you are a film director making a movie version of Hamlet and you want to advise your leading actor how to perform this scene.

RALPH:  Remember, Hamlet’s a tough part to play.  We’ve seen him be satirical and funny, we’ve seen him be deeply philosophical, we’ve seen him in the pits of depression, and now we’re seeing him yell at his mother, just a few seconds after he’s killed a family friend and an important official. What’s most important to emphasize here?

SARAH:  If we look back at how critics have seen Hamlet in this scene, many of them depend on their larger vision of Hamlet’s character to help them interpret what’s happening in this thrilling scene.

RALPH:  So, for example, our old friend John Dover Wilson thinks that Hamlet is struggling to hold on to his mental balance, and has in fact already had a nervous breakdown.

SARAH:  Here’s how Wilson describes this scene:  “There is little sign of soberness here, certainly none of repentance, still less of nobility of nature. Hamlet whips himself up into greater and greater frenzy.”

RALPH:  Wilson points out that Hamlet has completely forgotten the ghost’s command to leave his mother alone.  You’ll remember that in Act I, scene 5, the ghost tells Hamlet “taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive against thy mother aught.”

SARAH:  In support of Wilson’s views, we might remember how Hamlet acted in his confrontation with Ophelia, back in Act III scene 1.  Hamlet’s angry escalation follows a similar pattern in both scenes:  first cool and distant, then biting and sarcastic, then finally uncontrollably angry.

RALPH:  But other critics see Hamlet as resolutely carrying out his mission. According to this view, Hamlet is getting himself, and his mother, ready for his final confrontation with Claudius.  Later on this scene, Hamlet admits that he’s only been pretending to be crazy – he says “I essentially am not in madness, / But mad in craft.”

SARAH:  Although Hamlet doesn’t go so far as to say that he’s planning to kill Claudius, he does ask his mother to stay out of Claudius’s bed, to keep her from sinning any more than she already has.

RALPH:  One of the most striking aspects of Hamlet in this scene is his clear willingness to act. He decisively kills Polonius, thinking it’s Claudius behind the curtain, and he shows no regret or concern.  Instead, he immediately proceeds to scold his mother for her relationship with Claudius.

SARAH:  Finally, there are critics who emphasize Hamlet’s continued discomfort or even disgust with female sexuality, and in particular, his mother’s sexuality.

RALPH:  Lisa Jardine, historian and professor of Renaissance Studies at University of London, describes Hamlet’s outburst in the context of their meeting in his mother’s closet.  As she puts it:  “Hamlet fills the space of intimacy with an excess of sexually explicit accusations levelled against his mother.”

SARAH:  Finally, some well-known film directors have made the erotic undercurrents in this scene quite explicit. In Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film, Hamlet cradles Gertrude in his lap before giving her a long kiss on the lips.

RALPH:  And then, in 1990, Franco Zeffirelli has Hamlet, played by Mel Gibson, almost physically assault Gertrude with a frightening mix of anger and lust.

SARAH:  Before we conclude, we should just return to T.S. Eliot’s famous words about Hamlet.  You remember that Eliot wrote “Hamlet’s … disgust is occasioned by his mother, but… his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her.”

RALPH:  Eliot is basically saying that what Gertrude has done doesn’t really seem to justify Hamlet’s reaction, and that perhaps she doesn’t deserve all the verbal abuse she receives in this scene.

SARAH:  In fact, Jardine has argued that, depending on which version of the play you read, Gertrude might not have been intended to get so much verbal abuse from Hamlet. This next bit is a little complicated:  try your best to follow along.

RALPH:  In the scene segment we’ve been examining, Hamlet does manage to say quite a few nasty things about his mother’s second marriage – he says them at some length, and you might begin to agree with Eliot that they’re a bit excessive.

SARAH:  Jardine notes that in the main early source we have for Hamlet, the Second Quarto, there are lot of Hamlet’s lines in this scene  - 27, to be exact - that just don’t reappear in the later source that we have for Hamlet, the First Folio.

RALPH:  In this later version of the play, Hamlet says similar, but differently nasty things about Gertrude and her romantic choices.

SARAH:  Because editors often want to give us as many great Shakespeare lines as possible, many editions add back in these earlier lines from the Second Quarto.

RALPH:  But they keep the later lines from the First Folio, giving us a great deal more of Hamlet’s outbursts against his mother.

SARAH:  So, the excess which Hamlet is often accused of is , as Jardine puts it, “a feature of the editorial process of textual conflation and accretion as much as of the dramatist’s original design.”

RALPH:  In other words, if Hamlet’s reactions are excessive, this might not be entirely Shakespeare’s doing.

SARAH:  But as always with Hamlet, it’s hard to know anything for sure.  Another critic, Frank Kermode, agrees that Shakespeare may have cut some of Hamlet’s lines here because they were repetitious – but he adds that Shakespeare also may have wanted repetition here.

RALPH:  As Kermode puts it, “redundancy is in the very nature of Hamlet, and so far from being inept, these passages, full of thought that is driven almost frantically along by emotion, are building up with a climax.”

SARAH:  You may think this scene is repetitious, or instead that it is furiously hectic; you may think that Hamlet is carefully plotting his actions, or spinning completely out of control.

RALPH:  But whatever you see as most important about this scene, chances are that you’ve put this scene in a larger framework of the entire play, and that this larger framework has helped you to understand its significance.

SARAH:  And this is an excellent way to make sense of Shakespeare’s work – his plays are unified wholes, and if we can get a sense of the larger picture of a play, then many of the smaller elements should fall into place.