If the audience weren’t present, four entire acts of brooding would not have occurred as soliloquies revealing interiority wouldn’t have been necessary and Hamlet’s purpose of murdering Claudius would be immediately realized. Thus “the audience is in complicity with the tragic action. Does the convention of noninterference, the very role of audience and spectator in which we have been cast by the playwright, place [the audience] in complicity” with Rosencrantz’s execution of Claudius’s will to murder Hamlet and by extension The Bard (Gerber 80)? Through the use of vassal character’s, Shakespeare’s Hamlet answers with a resounding yes. Hamlet recognizes the presence of the audience themselves once Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are presumed dead, after Horatio asks “so Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't” and replies “Why, man, they did make love to this employment” (5.2.63-64). Hamlet, and Shakespeare, realize that the audience enjoys the play, enjoys the suffering of Hamlet, enjoys playing a role in the interpretation and very presentation of the
If the audience weren’t present, four entire acts of brooding would not have occurred as soliloquies revealing interiority wouldn’t have been necessary and Hamlet’s purpose of murdering Claudius would be immediately realized. Thus “the audience is in complicity with the tragic action. Does the convention of noninterference, the very role of audience and spectator in which we have been cast by the playwright, place [the audience] in complicity” with Rosencrantz’s execution of Claudius’s will to murder Hamlet and by extension The Bard (Gerber 80)? Through the use of vassal character’s, Shakespeare’s Hamlet answers with a resounding yes. Hamlet recognizes the presence of the audience themselves once Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are presumed dead, after Horatio asks “so Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't” and replies “Why, man, they did make love to this employment” (5.2.63-64). Hamlet, and Shakespeare, realize that the audience enjoys the play, enjoys the suffering of Hamlet, enjoys playing a role in the interpretation and very presentation of the