A table prepared. Trumpets, Drums and Officers with cushions, foils and daggers. [Enter] CLAUDIUS, GERTRUDE, LAERTES, [OSRIC] and all the state.
CLAUDIUS Come, Hamlet, come and take this hand from me.
[Puts Laertes’ hand into Hamlet’s.]
HAMLET Give me your pardon, sir. I have done you wrong,
But pardon’t as you are a gentleman.
This presence knows, and you must needs have heard,
How I am punished with a sore distraction.
What I have done
That might your nature, honour and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness. (5.2.203-210)
And then everyone’s there, a fanfare, a procession, officials, and weapons; there may be chairs for the king and queen, a table, racks for the weapons. Claudius takes charge—come, Hamlet, come and take this hand from me—he wants to be the one seen to be reconciling Hamlet and Laertes, is prepared perhaps to knock their heads together a bit—and Hamlet goes along with it, perhaps even pre-empting Claudius’s little prepared speech on forgiveness and gentleman-like conduct. He speaks straightforwardly to Laertes: give me your pardon, sir. I’m sorry, I have done you wrong, but pardon’t as you are a gentleman. Please forgive me. Is he being disingenuous? Possibly? Especially given that he goes on to excuse his behaviour: this presence knows, and you must needs have heard, how I am punished with a sore distraction. I’ve been—out of sorts, not myself—everyone here knows that, you must have heard it too. What I have done that might your nature, honour and exception roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness. I plead not guilty by reason of insanity, I can’t be held to account for my actions—although I’m still terribly, terribly sorry to have hurt you and your family. Although Hamlet has been pretending to be mad, he can also have been properly disturbed, having a breakdown, genuinely insane; these things do not have to be mutually exclusive. I think that it can be played with Hamlet genuinely seeking Laertes’s forgiveness, being properly stricken by the harm he’s caused, and still allow for Hamlet to have been both mad in craft and mad indeed. All of these are possible, and in performance, choices can be made. But I think I want Hamlet to be genuine in his remorse, and genuine in his desire for forgiveness and reconciliation. Because he knows that something’s up, and that his time may be running out—and one of the aspects of his father’s death that has caused him the most horror is that his father died suddenly, unprepared, unconfessed, and unabsolved.
