Enter CLAUDIUS, GERTRUDE, POLONIUS, OPHELIA, ROSENCRANTZ, GUILDENSTERN [and] LORDS.

CLAUDIUS      And can you by no drift of conference

Get from him why he puts on this confusion,

Grating so harshly all his days of quiet

With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?

ROSENCRANTZ          He does confess he feels himself distracted

But from what cause ’a will by no means speak.

GUILDENSTERN        Nor do we find him forward to be sounded

But with a crafty madness keeps aloof

When we would bring him on to some confession

Of his true state.        (3.1.1-10)

A debrief, which has been going on perhaps for some time, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on the spot and Claudius frustrated; how aware are they already that they’ve botched this to some degree? And can you by no drift of conference—just by steering the conversation in that direction, it’s not HARD—get from him why he puts on this confusion, get him to talk about why he’s doing this, playing *scare-quotes* ‘MAD’ (Claudius seems to have worked out, or at least to suspect, that Hamlet’s madness is an act), grating so harshly all his days of quiet, disrupting in such a discordant way (a strikingly sonic metaphor; Hamlet’s madness imagined as nails down the blackboard, grinding metal, something out of place) his nice scholarly life (he didn’t use to be like this! the cry of acting-out teenagers’ parents through the ages) with turbulent and dangerous lunacy? You had one job—get him to tell you what’s going on!—and you seem to have failed. Explain yourselves.

Rosencrantz has a go, valiantly, a bit wretchedly: well, he does confess he feels himself distracted, Hamlet freely admits that he’s not in a good way, all over the place, up and down—but from what cause ’a will by no means speak. He won’t tell us WHY, though. (We tried, really! We did!) And Guildenstern joins in: it’s not our fault! Nor do we find him forward to be sounded—he wasn’t going to make it easy for us, he was defensive, obfuscating—he with a crafty madness keeps aloof when we would bring him on to some confession of his true state. He was always one step ahead of us, able to retreat into his ‘madness’ if it seemed like we were getting closer to some kind of truth, some kind of explanation as to what’s going on.

Sorry? Honestly, we did try? Hamlet’s a tricky guy. Boss. Your majesty.