Hamlet as the "Player"

In the first video, Hamlet senses they are referring to him when they speak, “I hear him coming,” leading Hamlet to believe that they want something with him. And in this circumstance, he is a pawn because they want to see if he truly loves Ophelia. Polonius sets up the meeting to see if Hamlet’s heart was truly with Ophelia, because her father and brother were worried that Ophelia would fall for this prince that could not love her because she was basically a nobody in the royal court. Also, Polonius reads a love letter from Hamlet to Ophelia, and he reads some of the inappropriate things that Hamlet has written to Ophelia, and that is another reason why Polonius wants to be sure that Hamlet’s heart is in it, and not just there for sexual reasons.

In the second video, Hamlet speaks his “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. It is here that Hamlet dances with the idea of death to relieve himself of being this “player” in the “play” that is his life, in which he is not the director or the writer. He can no longer deal with the pain of the act that he must put on, or that he is facing, and so, his gathers that he, himself, as a player is doomed to die and that will end his part of the play, and that he everyone else in the play should also meet the same end. To him, the close of this play, when the curtain is drawn, is when every “player” meets their fateful end, and when they truly can be “players” no more. 

As well as determining death as a means to an end, he takes advantage of the fact that he cannot be one-hundred percent controlled by Polonius and Claudius, and so he uses Ophelia as a tool. He does not see it now, but this brings about her sad end, with her committing suicide , embarrassed by the fact that she thought that her’s and Hamlet’s relationship was blossoming into something more, even though Hamlet only acted that it was not. This is the start of the “players” beginning to leave the “stage” that is the production of King Cladius’ play.