Interpreting the Closet Scene in Hamlet in the Reflections Journal:
While preparing to write a research essay on Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a 1202 class themed “Literature and the Human Psyche,” students were given a set of reading questions to guide them through the crucial “Closet Scene” of Act 3, Scene 4, to be discussed in the next class followed by a viewing of the scene as interpreted by the director Kenneth Branagh in his film production.
The questions below were not original to me but have been gathered over the years from many different sources and were supplemented by more questions raised in our discussion of the scene before actually viewing the film clips.
Thought questions for this scene:
- how do we detect Hamlet’s confusion and hurt over his mother’s hasty re-marriage?
- how does Hamlet show his duty to the memory of his father in this scene?
- what is Hamlet’s state of mind here –changing (how? when?) Is it mad? Reckless?
- Angry? Mournful? Melancholic? More than one of these? Shifting between one and the other? How do we know? (point to lines)
- What can we determine about the mental state of Queen Gertrude’s character—is she frail, pragmatic, unfaithful, guilty, torn, cornered? (etc)
New Questions added during class discussion prior to the film clip
- Did Hamlet plan to kill Gertrude in that highly-charged scene in her bedroom?
- How do we know?
- Can we understand Gertrude’s perspective as compared to Hamlet’s in this scene? (not only in Branagh’s depiction, but in your own imagination?)
- How does the presence of the Ghost add to our understanding of Hamlet’s state of mind as compared to Gertrude’s?
Journal assignment
In class, we discussed the scene, viewed the clip and then discussed how the film represented the scene as compared to their own imaginings, looking for language and other cues in the text to understand how these different interpretations might be valid.
For a Journal entry for homework afterward, students were asked to do the following to close-read the scene and develop further their own interpretations for the research essay on Hamlet. Here are the instructions:
- Isolate 5-10 lines from the Closet Scene which you found particularly powerful for the way they shed light on the relationship between mother and son. Type them out on the page.
- Analyze those lines in a paragraph with a topic sentence, being sure to quote from those lines within the paragraph itself as you make a larger point about the relationship. A paragraph of 5- 7 well-crafted sentences should be enough. I am not looking for pages of commentary, but it is important to practice working closely with Shakespeare’s language and writing about it often as we work on Hamlet. Point to specific words in your analysis. If you need to look up any words using the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) on the Library databases (under “O”), do so.
- Include in your above reflection a “so what?” observation. For example, how does thinking on the mother-son conflict in this scene help to learn something about the way the human psyche works under duress in the context of the family? Can the common man (or woman) relate to the emotional battle between these two royals?
- What I wished I had asked them to do as well (but forgot for this assignment): Include a second separate paragraph of meta-commentary on our viewing of Kenneth Branagh’s film version saying how viewing the film helped you to rethink or sharpen your own interpretations of the scene.