So, Wednesday night before Hamlet came on, I was lying in bed with my wife watching some other program that she likes.  Typically she falls asleep a lot sooner than I do, so it’s easier to just DVR my programs and watch them a little later.  She knew full well that I’d be watching 3 hours of Hamlet later, and since it was also my birthday I threatened to require that she watch it with me :), but I did not follow through on that threat.

Anyway, it’s getting late, she’s falling asleep and mumbles, “I know you want to go watch Hamlet, go ahead and go back downstairs.  Hark who goes there.”

Me:  “….”  <open mouth> ” …. ” <close mouth> “…..”  <shakes head> ” … what?”

Her: <mumbling> “Go downstairs, watch your show.  Who goes there.”

Me: ” ??? You know that’s the opening line to Hamlet?”   (* Yes I know it’s more like “Who’s there?”, work with me here.)

Her: “Yup.”

Me: “I had no idea you knew that.”

Her: <snore>

Boggles my mind when she does that.  Not “To be or not to be” or “what a piece of work is man”, quotes she hears the children say all day long.  No, she quotes (accurately or not) the opening line, which many people wouldn’t even recognize. I have no idea if she looked it up in one of my books just so she could do that (doubtful, otherwise she wouldn’t have waited so long to deliver it), remembered me talking about it (possible, though I certainly haven’t done so deliberately in months), or remembered it from an actual Hamlet production we’ve seen (less possible, as it’s been years since we watched Hamlet).

I think I’ll keep her.

If you haven’t seen the Tennant/Stewart Hamlet yet, read no more!  Spoilers follow about “the thing”.

Here, while you’re waiting, have a look at this completely unrelated clip of the “best death scene ever”…

Ok, let’s talk about this.  Claudius, holding a cup of poison and with Hamlet’s sword to his throat, *shrugs* before voluntarily drinking the poisoned wine.   I called it the biggest WTF moment in a movie full of them. I fast forwarded to that part just so I could show it to my wife, just so I could complain about it to a live person.

Can anybody come up with a logical interpretation for why he’d do that?  For that matter, the final scene is a real character switch for the man.  When Laertes is about to spill his guts (possibly literally), Claudius leaps up and begins frantically waving to have him taken away before he talks.  When Hamlet draws on him. Claudius *grabs the point of the sword*, which is rather unusual, but then at the ensuing booboo on his hand he shows the crowd and says “Help me, I am hurt!” 

I can even live with those, at least a little bit.  I can live with the idea that, once cornered, Claudius is basically a coward.  He has others do his dirty work for him, or he gets you in the ear while you’re sleeping.  But when he personally is called to the carpet?  He panics.  I can accept that.

It’s the shrug where I lose it.  Two seconds ago he was panicking that he’d been caught.  He makes a play to save himself (Help me, friends!), but no one comes to his aid.  So now he goes all stoic and with a “What the hell,” suicides?  No fight at all?  No *flight* at all? If you just declared him a coward, at least have him run for it and get it in the back or something.

Anybody got a justification for this one?

So Patrick Stewart played both Claudius as well as Hamlet’s ghost in the David Tennant production that we’re all still talking about.  I’m told that this is common practice.  Fair enough.  Never really thought about it one way or the other.

My question for discussion, though, is … why?  I understand a live theatre troop having to double up on actors because they don’t have the bodies, or need to keep costs/resources/complexity down or whatever the real world reasons are.  I’m not talking about that.  When you’ve got plenty of budget and big name stars to work with, double casting to begin with is clearly a choice.  To double cast the major roles obviously has a point, such as the fairly obvious one when we see Theseus and Hippolyta double cast with Oberon and Titania in Midsummer.

So then, why Claudius and his brother?  What’s the point of that particular choice?  Is it to show that Hamlet’s issues with Claudius are really unresolved issues with his dad?  Is it to suggest that Hamlet’s dad and his brother were so close in physical resemblance that we can forgive Gertrude for essentially replacing the former with the latter?  Hamlet several times plays up the differences between his father and Claudius (the line “like Hyperion to a satyr” comes to mind), so is it to draw a stark contrast to that, to suggest clearly to the audience that they weren’t really so different after all, and Hamlet just wishes that they were?

Any other “well known” double cast decisions you want to talk about?