Hamlet: the play within the play | The British Library

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• Acted by Players trauelling that way, Wherein a woman that had murtherd hers Was euer haunted with her husbands ghost:

• sighs and tears ‘seem’ to express his grief, Hamlet insists they are not significant: his inner feelings are his true meaning.

• unsettles distinctions between performance and reality and how it thus exposes the mechanisms of theatre.

• Hamlet ignores her main point (why does he grieve more intensely than other bereaved sons?) and snatches at the idea of ‘seeming’:

• ‘performance’ and ‘reality’,

• his endless soliloquising makes him all the more theatrica

• he seems deliberately to parade his grief for all to see.

• What kind of truth can be told through theatre?

• What sort of impact do plays have on those who watch them?

• the performance leaves him reeling:

• Once again Hamlet is tormented by the ‘monstrous’ relationship he perceives between acting and authenticity.

• And this performed outpouring of emotion is somehow more authentic than Hamlet’s response to his father’s murder, or at least, so he fears.

• how if the player had Hamlet’s experiences, his performance skills would enable him to expose courtly corruption.

• Still uncertain about the veracity of the ghost’s murderous tale, Hamlet turns to theatre and all its artful contrivance to find the truth:

• Such anecdotes defend theatre as morally valuable, countering the accusations of anti-theatricalists who claimed that plays not only encouraged vice by staging bad behaviour, but were also fundamentally fraudulent because they work by illusion.

• Instead, the murder we do witness – right in the middle of the action – is showily theatrical.

• The mirroring nature of the play

• The play-within-a-play structure keeps us at a frustrating distance from the definite truth of things

• four, grieving children (Hamlet, Fortinbras, Ophelia, Laertes)

• two suicidal mourners (Hamlet, Ophelia)