Act V, Scene Id: A) Gertrude and Claudius temporarily smooth the waters as the scuffling Laertes and Hamlet are separated.

Hamlet is spared immediate repercussions for his outburst, which is good for him as far as it doesn’t get him into further procedural trouble. On the other hand, he’s spared by his enemy, which can’t be a good thing in the long run. Laertes responds easily to their entreaties, presumably out of his procedural alliance with Claudius. That makes this a persuasion interaction, not a dramatic one, and one between NPCs to boot. This brief beat momentarily arrests the deepening tragic spiral without reversing it, so we represent it with a lateral procedural arrow.

Act V, Scene 2: B) Confiding in Horatio, Hamlet reveals that he had a restless night, and justifies his graveside indiscretion as possibly useful.

Hamlet seeks assurance from Horatio and, as is usually the case with this confidant character, easily gets it. All along Horatio’s role in the narrative has in large part been to give our hero the emotional victories that every other character withholds from him.

This could easily be played by actors as an emotional down moment, however, with Hamlet’s self-assurance seeming like a rationalization, and Horatio’s acquiescence coming off as worried or otherwise double-edged.

Under the theory that the choice that a doubtful interpretation should be decided in favor of the one that grants the greatest rhythmic variation, let’s treat this as an actual emotional victory for Hamlet, and give it a dramatic up arrow.

C) Hamlet reveals further details of his escape from exile, culminating in the news that he’s sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths.

Another powerfully equivocal moment. This news fills in a procedural victory for Hamlet we already knew about. However, his decision to doom his erstwhile friends doesn’t actively further his vengeance against Claudius. He does it out of a sense of betrayal, satisfying an emotional goal by external, active means.

This raises the prospect of a victory for the protagonist that we in the audience don’t share. If we found R & G to be buffoonish poltroons, we probably feel (as Horatio will in the forthcoming beat) that they met a harsher fate than they deserved. The character we’re identifying with feels a sense of emotional victory, but our sympathies are split. Looks like another crossed dramatic arrow.

If this had been a game, we would have seen this sequence play out rather than hearing it in retrospect. That would have made it a suspense scene, as we wonder whether Hamlet escapes, and whether he succeeds in dealing with R & G as he wanted. (And face it, the spite and overkill of his decision is classic player character behavior.)



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