CLAUDIUS                  For your intent

In going back to school in Wittenberg

It is most retrograde to our desire,

And we beseech you bend you to remain

Here in the cheer and comfort of our eye,

Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son.

GERTRUDE     Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet.

I pray thee stay with us, go not to Wittenberg.

HAMLET         I shall in all my best obey you, madam.       (1.2.112-120)

And as for your intent in going back to school in Wittenberg—ah, so Hamlet is definitely a student, at the famous university in Germany, associated with Martin Luther, and with Dr Faustus—it is most retrograde to our desire. Back to the royal plural: nope, we don’t want you to go back to university. (The most immediate contrast here is, of course, with Laertes being given permission to return to Paris, as well as perhaps between intellectual hothouse Wittenberg and decadent Paris, although it’s not impossible that Laertes is to be imagined as returning to the Sorbonne rather than Montmartre.) There’s no particular reason given, of course; it can just seem a kind of petty power-play: that’s what you want, clearly, and so you can’t have it. And we beseech you bend you to remain here in the cheer and comfort of our eye, our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son. I’m in charge here, I make the decisions, and I want you where I can see you at all times, in other words, but that’s being glossed over with some self-satisfied alliteration. Does that mostly go over Gertrude’s head? Is she genuinely asking on her own behalf or as a well-drilled addition to her new husband’s command, when she says let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet. Please do as I ask, as I’m begging you: I pray thee stay with us, go not to Wittenberg. Don’t leave me. (So much room for just a tremor of doubt and anxiety, a little glance at Claudius: how well does she know him really, what has she just done in marrying this man so precipitately? Who’s on her side now? She needs Hamlet as ally, as well as because she loves him as her son.)

I shall in all my best obey you, madam, is Hamlet’s only response, and it’s a kind of petty win, or at least a draw. He’s ignoring everything that Claudius has said about his mourning his father, about being his new dad now, and making it clear that he’s doing what his mother’s asking, not his uncle. Petty, but satisfying, at least in the moment, even if it means that he’s got to remain, for the time being, in Denmark, where it appears that he emphatically does not want to be.