Though this be madness, yet there is method in't

Act V plays out in around thirty two minutes (if you exclude the well-deserved applause at the end of the production). The music announcing the infamous gravediggers scene has a Calypso feel which sets an appropriately lighthearted, joyful even, and certainly irreverent tone - reinforced by the Gravedigger's ad lib of 'ya bastard' directed towards Yorick's skull. Hamlet's more measured response in contrast demonstrates his fascination with the physical processes of death and beyond. Ophelia's body, wrapped in a shroud, is carried in by Laertes. He lays her down tenderly by the grave and weeps over her form - echoing Ophelia's own lament for her father in the previous act. To the evident distress of all around, Laertes leaps right down into the grave as though he cannot bear to be physically separated from her. His action provokes what turns into an unseemly graveside brawl with Hamlet. Claudius hatches his plan for Hamlet's end with Laertes after...

There are many ways of revising, but a good way is to revisit parts of the play and explore them with a different lens from the one you used the first time round. We have known that Horatio is trustworthy from the opening scenes of the play. He has been a voice of reason since the skeptical intelligence he displayed at the appearance of the Ghost, and an accurate documenter of events in his explanation to Hamlet - and it is he who is chosen by Hamlet to let the ' story be known, 'report me and my cause aright/to the unsatisfied' (V.ii.344-345), at the end of the play. Begin, then, with this list of events from Horatio's final speech: And let me speak to the yet unknowing world How these things came about: so shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall'n on the inventors' reads: all this can I Truly...

Here we are in the final act of Hamlet , and one of the most iconic scenes of the play - the bit with the skull! Clue: Not Hamlet. Two gravediggers are going about their business of digging a grave (that we immediately find out will be the final resting place of Ophelia) and making a few lighthearted observations as they do so. Though the graveyard setting foreshadows the tragedy that is about to beset Hamlet and the court, there is now a moment's pause in the chaotic hurtling towards a bitter end. It's probably worth a few words on 'comic relief' in Shakespearean tragedy. The stage direction gives us 'Enter two clowns'. Although 'clowns' in Shakespeare's time would have referred to simple country folk (in this instance two manual workers doing their job, not connected with the court),something of the modern meaning is inherent in their comic purpose at this moment in the drama. Somehow they achieve comedic banter from the burial of the dea...