Have you ever fancied yourself as a bit of a Hamlet? Wanted to strut your stuff around a gloomy Danish castle, annoying your uncle the king and insulting his advisor? Thought of having your school friends murdered or fighting your dead girlfriend’s brother? Want to muse for hours over the question of mortality and existence?
If your answer to any of these questions is “I’ll have to think about it”, then you just might have the qualities necessary to make you one of the growing band of procrastinators much in demand in local government.
At the Elsinore University of Hamlet we will undertake to train you to fully fledged Hamlet in under a month at very competitive rates. We pledge that you will be able to avenge your father’s untimely death in under six weeks – or your money back!!
Still not sure? Excellent! You’ve obviously got what it takes.
How to be a Hamlet
Becoming a Hamlet is very easy, but before we enroll you, you need to follow the simple questions below in order to test your suitability for induction into the world of high quality dithering. It’s very simple. Just read the questions and decide which action you would take. At the end add up your score and compare it to the reports written by our especially trained Hamletologians.
1: You think your father is murdered, your Uncle did it and he has married your mother six weeks after your father’s funeral. Do you:
A) Run your uncle through with a sabre at the first opportunity?
B) Seek legal advice on the correct procedure to bring about a warrant for his arrest?
C) Do nothing except glower and talk a lot?
2: A ghost has been seen wandering around the ramparts of your family’s castle. It turns out to be your father who exhorts you to revenge his “Foul and most unnatural murder”. Do you:
A) Immediately kill your uncle and avenge your father, thus bring the play to a rapid conclusion?
B) Seek the veracity of the ghost’s words by exhuming your father and checking his ears for poison?
C) Do nothing but talk some more, then pretend to be mad.
3: Your girlfriend is a little strange but certainly no worse than the rest of her family. She obviously likes you a great deal and needs some sort of sign from you that everything will be okay. Do you:
A) Treat her with tenderness, love her and protect her from all evils?
B) Form a self-help group with her and some other female courtiers in order to better understand each other’s feelings?
C) Confuse her totally by never giving her a straight answer and being in turns tender, miserable, cruel and intractable?
4: It’s nearing the middle of the play and something has to be done to try and prove your uncle’s guilt. Do you:
A) Hold him at gunpoint, stare into his eyes and accuse him man-to-man?
B) Indicate that you are reopening the inquest into your father’s death?
C) Have a troop of actors that you once knew when you were at university come and act out a long play with a part of it showing a method of death similar to the one that killed your father, and then watch for your Uncle’s reaction?
5. You put on the play and it works; Your uncle is guilty as sin as you and your father’s ghost knew it. You find him kneeling at prayer, unprotected. Do you:
A) Fill him full of hot lead uttering the immortal line: “There’s something rotten in the State of Denmark, and it’s you!”?
B) Employ a Lawyer to see whether the circumstantial evidence you have collated would hold up in court?
C) Do nothing, then go to talk things over with your mother?
6: While in your mother’s bedroom you see someone behind a curtain. Do you:
A) Decide not to just kill whomever’s randomly behind there.
- B) Open the curtain, find Polonius, and confide in him about the possible guilt of your uncle. With him on your side you convince him to reopen the murder enquiry.
C) Recklessly kill the unseen old man and then talk a whole lot more with your mother, exhorting her not to sleep with your uncle, then lug the old man’s guts out of the room?
7: You are arrested and sent off to England with two old schoolfriends, neither of whom you like very much. Do you:
A) Jump ship and return to Elsinore Castle with a huge quantity of weaponry and lay waste to the castle and its contents, killing your uncle and rescuing Ophelia?
B) Stoically accept your fate and make contact with a distant aunt in England to put you up for a few years?
C) Trick the English into killing your two old schoolfriends and return, an ambiguously long or short length of time later, to Denmark?
8: You arrive back home to find a grave being prepared for someone neither a woman nor a man, but dead. After a long battle of wits with a gravedigger, you discover that the grave is for fair Ophelia who was driven mad by you and drowned herself. The funeral party arrives and you and Laertes get into a scrap over you killing his father. Do you:
A) Kill everyone in sight?
B) Apologise to Laertes for killing his father and being the agent for his sister’s death and hope he forgives you?
C) Declare that you did love Ophelia – more than her brother – and that you have been grossly misunderstood and now, near the end of the play, you can reveal that what we were all really confused about was just part of a bigger plan – and that right now it is payback time? Then, you say nothing.
9: Your uncle decides to kill you off during a rigged fencing bout with Laertes. He is planning to kill you with a sword that has been poisoned and in case that doesn’t work, he has left a cup of poison within reach for you. How should the drama unfold?
A) Everyone dies except Hamlet, who rides off into the sunset ready to take on the world.
- B) No-one dies but all agree to sort things out by of arbitration?
C) You die a dramatic end, along with Laertes and your mother and the king.
SO …. HOW DID YOU DO?
Add up your scores and compare with the notes below as I haven’t figured out the java scripting that allows you to press a button and have it done automatically.
All or mostly “A’s”: Oh dear. You’ve been watching a few too many Chuck Norris/Arnold Schwartzenegger/Bruce Willis movies. This bold, heroic crowd-pleasing stuff is totally unsuited to life as a Hamlet. To be a Hamlet you need to be “all thought and no action” rather than “all action and no thought”. You had better look for another part.
All or mostly “B’s”: Well, you’ve tried hard but you are obviously too sensible and analytical to be able to undertake a sustained career in indecision. Try again next year after practising long pauses and saying whatever comes into your head. But well done anyway.
All or mostly “C’s”: Congratulations! You have all the skills necessary to become a fully fledged Hamlet. In only six short weeks you will have a wild and contradictory character, be able to talk the legs off a donkey, and brood for hours in silent introspection. You will find simple decisions impossible and may get an eight week run with the Royal Shakespeare Company.