Knock, Knock. Who’s There?

Raven Culver

Dr. Starke

EN-306-01

29 October 2015

Knock, knock. Who’s There?

Hamlet and his mother seem to have a strange relationship in comparison to other well-known mother and son duos.  Hamlet confronting Gertrude seems to be the turning point in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, in which Hamlet truly turns mad.  The context of this particular scene seems to illustrate Hamlet’s true madness and that this is no longer an act as he claimed it to be.  Before Hamlet even enters the bedroom, the way he calls out his mother’s name is just in a strange, creepy context.  Once in her room, he then goes on yelling at her because she has married not only her husband’s brother right after King Hamlet’s death, but his murderer as well.  While ranting to his mother, he hears a noise behind the door which happened to Polonius, whom he shoots and kills, thinking it is Claudius.  He claims Gertrude’s relationship with Claudius is only for sex.  He says, “You cannot call it love; for at your age, the hey-day in the blood is tame, it’s humble” (III.iv.67-68).  The apparition of the ghost then appears.  Hamlet drops to the floor and curls into a ball and he seems to experience some type of distress upon seeing his father’s ghost.  After reminding Prince Hamlet not to take everything out on his mother, King Hamlet disappears into the cracked mirror.  After the talk with his father’s ghost, Hamlet seems to be a little less mad and on edge.  He says goodnight to his mother and then drags Polonius’ body out with him.  After Hamlet leaves, Claudius walks in and asks where Hamlet is.  Even his own mother believes he is mad.  Gertrude describes him as being, “Mad as the sea and wind when both contend” (IV.i.6).  This scene is very significant to the play as a whole because this seems to be Hamlet’s true turning point from being just depressed about his father’s death, to becoming truly mad.

Hamlet’s character develops from being depressed and wanting to seek vengeance for his father, to truly being mad.  Throughout the first half of the play, Hamlet has opportunities to kill Claudius, but he overthinks it and comes up with some excuse as to why he could not.  When Claudius was praying, Hamlet had the perfect opportunity to stab him, but he makes an excuse; he claims that because Claudius was praying, he would go to heaven and Hamlet would go to hell.  This opportunity shows that Hamlet wants to seek revenge for his father, but he is still somewhat rational in his thought.  In this scene I have chosen, Hamlet hears someone behind the doors while talking to Gertrude and fires a gun, killing Polonius almost instantly.  Before, Hamlet could not make the definite decision to kill Claudius because of his overthinking, but at this point in the play, he seems to have completely lost it and did not appear to have second thoughts about firing his gun at the voice.  The movie even goes as far as showing Hamlet restrained in a chair to show his true craziness and all it had taken for the guards to get him to calm down a little in order to find where he had put Polonius’ body.  This scene is also important to the theme of depression, death and mania in the play because after Polonius’ death, Ophelia seems to take on the same hysteria that Hamlet had exhibited.  

The play, as a whole, would not make sense without this scene.  This scene allows us, the audience, to see Hamlet’s sanity completely vanish.  He has lost all sense of rationality and his tone, words, and actions are all ones he had not really displayed previously.  Before this scene, we had seen Hamlet using his inner voice and reasoning to be sensible in his actions, but here, he exhibits no real thoughts.  From reading the script Hamlet alone, I had never been convinced that Hamlet was truly, one-hundred percent, mad.  I saw him more as giving the illusion that he was mad, which was his intention, and being slightly off from our stereotypical thoughts of ‘normal’, but the cause of this being his father’s death.  This scene in the BBC movie version seemed to convey, at least to me, Hamlet experiencing quite a bit more madness than I had initially felt while reading the script.  In the script, I had originally thought that there could have been some quick, rational thought behind Hamlet’s immediate actions of stabbing the sound behind the arras.  While reading the script, I think his motive was truly to kill Claudius and being in their bedroom, he did not really think anyone else besides his uncle/step-father would be there, so it was safe to assume that the sound was Claudius.  For some reason, I feel the movie had given me a different sense of Hamlet’s motives.  I feel as though the actor who portrayed Hamlet in the movie had convinced me that he was in fact one-hundred percent mad and that the shooting of the gun was just his insanity taking over.  

After reading the script and watching the film Hamlet, I was able to notice very minor differences between the two in this particular scene.  All of the stage directions in the script seemed to be followed throughout the scene.  The only small difference I had noticed was that Polonius had hid in what looked like a closet, rather than behind the curtains.  Also, Hamlet shoots Polonius with a gun, as opposed to stabbing him like the script say.  In Shakespeare’s time, guns were not really used, they were just known of, so there would not really be a reason for Shakespeare to have used a gun for this scene.  Also, the costumes are very different. I think there is a pretty apparent reason as to why the costumes, from a play written in the early sixteen hundreds, are different from ones that were in a movie that came out in 2010.  The movie has the characters in what we consider normal clothing today, such as a t-shirt and jeans, suit and tie, dresses, and pajamas.  This was done most likely to appeal to the audience of today’s world and trying to add a modern twist, while still keeping the beauty of Shakespeare’s writing.  Another very strange thing that I had seemed to notice was the fact that Hamlet stopped wearing socks and shoes about an hour into the film and did not wear them again until the very end at the gravedigger’s scene. This is also true for Ophelia, she had worn shoes throughout the whole film up until her father’s death. This act could represent the climax of Hamlet’s true madness and how death can affect ones mental being.  

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