Hamlet first asks the player if the troupe of actors can perform The Murder of Gonzago. He then asks him the following:
We’ll ha ’t tomorrow night. You could, for a need, study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down and insert in ’t, could you not?
The player says he could do that.
The lines Hamlet inserts are lines meant for Claudius's ears, implicating him as the murderer of Hamlet's father. Hamlet wants to watch Claudius's reaction and see if he shows guilt when the lines are recited.
Hamlet is using the empirical method: running an experiment to determine whether the ghost is telling the truth about Claudius or if the ghost is really a devil sent by Satan to tempt him to murder an innocent man.
Ironically, Claudius has been happy about Hamlet's interest in these traveling actors, believing they are helping to rouse his stepson from his melancholic lethargy. If he knew the reasons motivating Hamlet, though, he would not be so happy.
Technically, Hamlet makes two requests of the player: he first asks the actor to put on a play called The Murder of Gonzago and then asks whether he would be able to memorize and insert a short speech (roughly a dozen lines) that Hamlet himself will provide (2.2.563–569).
A few scenes later, of course, Hamlet makes many more demands of the players, specifying in detail how he wants them to perform the speech. His anxiety is understandable, though, given his reasons for adding the speech in the first place: Hamlet has tailored the play to more closely resemble his father's ghost's description of his own murder. By watching Claudius's reactions to the play—particularly the scene in which the murderer pours poison in the king's ear and then courts the widowed queen—Hamlet hopes to prove his uncle's guilt once and for all. The plan works in a sense because Claudius is visibly shaken and runs from the room, but Hamlet's plans to avenge his father are delayed by subsequent events, including his own killing of Polonius.
No comments:
Post a Comment