Hamlet

When King Claudius takes a drink, he orders the cannons and trumpets to sound. It was a custom in Denmark apparently. Hamlet says "it is a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance." In other words, it is a custom which it is more honourable not to follow. Hamlet's dislike of this custom is probably brought on by Claudius's love of doing it (he does it again in Act 5 at the contest between Hamlet and Laertes); anything Claudius likes, Hamlet feels bound to hate.

The skull of Yorick

Bernardo. He says, "Who's there?"

"Springes" (not springs) are traps. Hamlet is all about people trying to trap other people. First we have Claudius and Polonius trying to trap Hamlet into making some admission about the cause of his apparent lunacy. The bait they use in these traps is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, then Ophelia, and finally Gertrude. Meanwhile Hamlet sets a trap "The Mousetrap" to get a confession of guilt out of Claudius and it works. By the end of act three, Hamlet and Claudius no longer need to set traps for information. Claudius sends Hamlet to England to collect Danegeld, but it is really a trap to kill Hamlet. Hamlet is not caught, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are "hoist with their own petard" and die. Claudius and Laertes set new traps for Hamlet, but these end up killing Laertes and Gertrude and exposing Claudius, enabling Hamlet to kill him without opposition from whoever is left alive at that point.

The soliloquy itself tells us why. "Is it not monstrous that this player here, in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force his soul so to his own conceit that from her working all his visage wanned, tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect, a broken voice, and his whole function serving with forms to his conceit. And all for nothing! For Hecuba! What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba that he should weep for her?"

The player presents the image of a man in the grip of a great emotion. But it is all false--he is an actor, not the real Aeneas. But Hamlet is the real Hamlet and so he asks, "What would he do had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have?" If the actor had Hamlet's troubles, wouldn't he be even more passionate? But Hamlet upbraids himself for peaking like John a' Dreams and saying nothing. He should be screaming! He should be cursing like a very drab! He should call Claudius a villain, a bloody, bawdy villain, a lecherous, treacherous, kindless villain! He should scream out for vengeance!

To haunt them.

It is a sign of strange violence which is about to take place.

Claudius sent with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern an order to the king of England to have Hamlet put to death. I assume this is the "murderous commission" you are talking about. Hamlet finds it and substitutes another which is worded just the same, except it is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who are to be killed, not Hamlet.

She is in Act 1 Scene 2 ("Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off."), Act 2 Scene 2 ("I doubt it is no other but the main: his father's death and our o'erhasty marriage"), Act 3 Scene 1 ("And for your part, Ophelia, I wish that your good beauties be the happy cause of Hamlet's wildness"), Act 3, Scene 2 ("The lady doth protest too much methinks"), Act 3, Scene 4 (The Closet Scene, her big scene "O Hamlet thou hast cleft my heart in twain!"), Act 4, Scene 1 ("Mad as the sea and wind when both contend"), Act 4 Scene 5 ("So full of artful jealousy is guilt it spills itself in fearing to be spilt"), Act 4 Scene 7 ("There is a willow grows aslant the brook"), and Act 5 Scene 2 ("No, no, the drink, the drink!")

That's nine of the twenty scenes--she's on stage a lot.

nunnery

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Hamlet's childhood friends. Claudius sends them to spy on Hamlet.

Yes (apex)

Yes in his night club acts and on record

They don't really change his attitude, but perhaps help to focus it. As he explains in his soliloquy "How all occasions do inform against me" you don't have to have thought a thing through consistently to do it. He looks at the soldiers who are happy to risk their lives for no good reason, "for an eggshell" and realizes that if he is going to do something about his problems, he has to spend less time thinking about them and more time doing something about them. He has already partially realized this when he acted spontaneously in stabbing the spy in his mother's bedroom, but as the play progresses he will increasingly take the initiative and grasp at opportunities as they arise: the chance to change the orders carried by Ros and Guil, the opportunity of boarding the pirate ship, and the proposed duelling match with Laertes, which puts him feet away from Claudius with a deadly weapon in his hand. He becomes a fatalist, and things work out a lot better for him when they do.

The final paragraph of Baines's document reads: These thinges, with many other shall by good & honest witnes be approved to be his opinions and Comon Speeches

Claire Bloom played Gertrude opposite Stewart when he played Claudius in 1982 in the BBC production starring Sir Derek Jacobi. Penny Downie played her in the 2009 production which starred David Tennant.

Yes. They are both completely privy to the plot to spy on Hamlet in Act III Scene 1. Gertrude is also privy to the plan to set Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Polonius as spies on Hamlet.

This is a misquotation of Gertude's line in Hamlet, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks." She is watching a play in which a woman swears up and down she will never remarry and does so immediately on her husband's death. The line is ironic since Gertrude herself did exactly what the woman in the play did. The line has come to be quoted (or as often or not, misquoted) to describe someone who is a little too insistent, and so is not believable.

Gertrude and Claudius were in-laws before the murder of King Hamlet. When they married afterwards, it was considered incest.

Hamlet was upset by his mother's speedy marriage because it suggests she didn't mourn for her husband properly. Also, the idea of marrying her husband's brother disgusts and angers Hamlet, particularly since Gertrude is getting old and "The heyday in the blood is tame".

Hamlet disapproves of the marriage which is why he's always thinking about it.

It is man vs. self.

Hamlet calls Rosencrantz a "sponge" because he always does as Cladius pleases. He obeys him no matter what. He has no thoughts of his own--he just sucks up the thoughts and plans of the king and they come out when he is squeezed. Hamlet says that like a sponge once Claudius is done with him, he will get rid of him.

He says as much. "I loved Ophelia! Forty thousand brothers with all their quantity of love could not make up my sum." Of course, whether he really believes it or is trying to make fun of Laertes' pomposity is another matter.

Because Hamlet says to Ophelia "Get thee to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be a

breeder of sinners?"

It's just a convenient term to identify the scene because it's such a memorable and striking line. It could just as easily be called the "To be or not to be" scene but that's more of a mouthful.

That there is a romantic relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia there can be no doubt, but the text is irritatingly vague on just how far along it has progressed. Ophelia tells her father that Hamlet is wooing or courting her: "My lord, he hath importuned me with love in honourable fashion." Laertes calls it "the trifling of his favour", and argues that Hamlet's interest in her cannot be honourable as, being royalty, he has no control over who he marries. Therefore, Laertes concludes, Hamlet is just trying to get into her pants, and warns her not to allow her "chaste treasure open to his unmastered importunity". Her father echoes this: Hamlet's vows are "springes to catch woodcocks".

Curiously both of them may have been wrong about Ophelia's chances of marrying Hamlet. Gertrude says at her funeral "I hoped thou should have been my Hamlet's wife."

On the other hand neither Polonius nor Laertes think that this Hamlet/Ophelia romance has gone very far. He has sent her letters (perhaps a little indecent: "in her excellent white bosom these &c . . ." makes us wonder just exactly what words the "et cetera" is replacing and why Polonius does not want to finish the sentence) and made protests of love accompanied with all the vows of heaven. Have they gone farther? Some of the songs Ophelia sings in her madness suggest that they have: Quoth she "before thou tumbled me, you promised me to wed." He answers, "So would I have done by yonder sun, an thou had not come to my bed." These line may well be expressing the anguish and betrayal Ophelia feels because she has indeed opened her chaste treasure to Hamlet, who has abandoned her.

Hamlet's feelings are difficult to discern. In the nunnery scene, he says one thing and then another: "I did love you once" then in the next line "I loved you not." Sometimes the nunnery he is talking about seems to be a convent, at others a brothel. Why is he so brutal to her during the Mousetrap play? His language is filthy. Could it be that Ophelia's complicity in Claudius and Polonius's spying have made him particularly bitter because they are closer than others imagine, and that she seems like a prostitute to him because she shares his bed one minute and betrays him the next? Or perhaps he knows that he is in terrible danger and is pushing her away to save her from being implicated in it.

Be that as it may, his last word is: "I loved Ophelia--forty thousand brothers could not with all their quantity of love make up my sum." Perhaps this is just a reaction to Laertes's posturing and "the bravery of his grief put [Hamlet] into a towering passion". Or maybe this is Hamlet's anger with himself for allowing this opportunity for love to slip by him, and for destroying one he loved by his indifference.

Willow

opinion