The Mousetrap

A hall in the castle. Hamlet briefs the players — "speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue" — in what is also Shakespeare's only surviving statement on how acting should be done. Acting, he says, should hold the mirror up to nature; it should not saw the air with the hand or out-Herod Herod. The first player promises restraint. Hamlet stations Horatio in the audience: watch the king during one specific scene; observe whether his face changes; we will compare notes.

The court enters. Hamlet sits at Ophelia's feet — "a fair thought to lie between maids' legs"; he is publicly cruel — and the play begins. First as a dumb-show: a king and queen, the king sleeping in a garden, a man entering with a vial, pouring something into the king's ear, the king dying, the murderer taking the crown and the queen. Claudius gives no sign. Then the spoken play. The lines are heightened, the language deliberately stilted; Hamlet has inserted the dozen lines he wrote.

As the poisoner approaches the sleeping king, Hamlet — playing chorus — explains the action loudly. "He poisons him in the garden for his estate." Claudius rises. "Give me some light! Away!" The play breaks up in confusion. Hamlet, alone with Horatio afterwards, is exhilarated. "I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand pound." The ghost was telling the truth. The proof has been delivered, in front of the entire court, by the king's own panic. Now, finally, the killing can be done. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern arrive with the message that the queen wishes to see him in her chamber. Hamlet promises he will go — "I will speak daggers to her, but use none."