ABSTRACT
Hamlet has a double centre: the play-within-the-play and the closet scene. The closet scene in Hamlet has been assailed and sifted through for centuries by spectators and critics in search of new details. The minutest detail has been studied and pored over by generations of theatregoers, actors, and scholars; it has been called “the greatest scene in Hamlet, the greatest of Shakespeare’s plays”. That William Shakespeare played the Ghost in Hamlet is one of the most ancient theatrical traditions concerning him. In the process Hamlet is seen as the dynamic active agent in the exchange, Gertrude as a passive, guilty figure. The pictures Hamlet verbally paints are indeed “lively”: the portrait of his dead father, too, gains more and more life, creating a keen sense of unease, as if his mother’s condition were of death-in-life, and life-in-death. The impression of an “abundance of theatrical energy” in the First Quarto may also derive from this different perspective on the visual.
