What Does the Imagery Do for Actor, Character, and Spectators?
This activity immerses students in the King’s soliloquy and uses performance to foreground some functions of Shakespeare’s imagery. We focus on the moment when the King says: Oh wretched state! Oh bosom black as death! O limed soul that struggling to be free Art more engaged! (3.3.67-69) we read the note by Edwards, which states that “The image is of a bird caught by the smearing of a very sticky substance, called birdlime, on twigs and branches”.
I ask students to stand up to enact the image, flapping their arms to realize the desperation of the King’s experience. Feeling its feet gripped by the lime, the bird would flap its wings to escape; and as the lime hardened, it would flap with greater desperation until it had exhausted itself. For the actor, the image offers a means for understanding and seeking to convey, in his voice and through his body, the King’s visceral sense of his damning situation. The actor playing the King will not flap his arms, but the image teaches actor and spectators to register in their bodies the isometric tension created by his desire to keep the effects of his murder yet still be saved. The image helps us grasp how the attempt to pray intensifies rather than relieves his despair. In exploring this image in action, students have an opportunity to learn how the dramatist can not only speak to our ears but also touch our minds through our bodies. Like the allusion to Niobe, this image reminds us that the medium of drama is not only the actor’s body but the body of the spectator as well. You can also proceed to examine parallel images spoken by Hamlet (3.3.88—95) and the Queen (3.4.88—91). Since all three characters speak of suffering in terms of visceral images that invoke the image of blackness, you open the door to explore another aspect of Shakespeare’s dramatic language, namely his use of iterative imagery that invites us to make connections between characters who have no idea that their imagery unites them even as their intense conflicts divide them.
Another key element you can begin to explore is the three responses Hamlet makes to killing Polonius. You can start by having students perform each of these responses one after the other so as to reveal how these responses vary from each other and how they map out a trajectory for Hamlet in this scene. After Hamlet kills Polonius, his mother is horrified but Hamlet himself seems dismissive. While we may share Hamlet’s assessment that Polonius is a “rash, intruding fool,” and while his repeated efforts to spy on Hamlet render him unappealing, nonetheless his death is a shock, and, like the Queen, we recognize that Hamlet has made a mistake—especially since we know, as she does not, that he has just passed up a perfect opportunity to kill the King. We will be struck by the apparent flippancy of Hamlet’s first response, especially since “Take thy fortune” seems the verbal equivalent of a shrug—as if killing the King’s minister (and the father of the woman he later claims he loved) was a trivial action.
The second and third apologies come later in the scene, after the appearance of the Ghost, who chides Hamlet for his delay in pursuing revenge and implores him to attend to the suffering he is causing his mother by his astonishing behavior: For this same lord, I do repent; but heaven hath pleased it so, To punish me with this, and this with me, That I must be their scourge and minister. I will bestow him, and will answer well The death I gave him.
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