Hamlet!
Lord Hamlet!
-Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Hamlet Act
IV, scene ii, line 2
Since this is only the second line of the scene, I’m going
to give you the whole thing so far and let’s see what we can surmise.
Scene II
Another room in
the castle.
Enter HAMLET
HAMLET.
Safely
stow’d.
ROSENCRANTZ and GUILDENSTERN [within].
Hamlet!
Lord Hamlet!
And that’s it. I mean to say, that’s all we’ve got so far.
We don’t know what he’s safely stowed until a few lines further on when
Rosencrantz asks, What have you done, my lord, with the dead body? So
it’s a body that’s safely stowed. Wait, whose body? Well if we’ve been
reading/watching/listening to the action so far, we’d know that it was
Polonius, whom Hamlet stabbed whilst the former was hiding behind a curtain. And
if I’m not mistaken, Hamlet presumed at the time that it was Claudius behind
the curtain. Of course, if it had been Claudius, well then the play is pretty
much over: revenge extracted – game, set, match. But it wasn’t Claudius, and so
nothing has been resolved, and the action continues.
And R&G cry Hamlet! Lord Hamlet!
I searched all over for a picture to go with the Hamlet, Lord Hamlet yell, but I came up empty. So I settled for this picture of the most famous site of the Rebel Yell. It's the field in Gettysburg where Pickett's charge took place. Did you know that when they recreated the charge on the fiftieth anniversary of the battle in 1913 they actually recorded the sound of a bunch of seventy year-old survivors re-creating the Rebel Yell. Or maybe it was the seventy-five year anniversary in 1938 with ninety year-olds. I'm not quite sure.
In any event, just like with Polonius's death, I'm not sure all that much got resolved by all those Rebel yeller deaths either.
And R&G cry Hamlet, Lord Hamlet!
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