Get Thee to a Notary!

Master Shakespeare, are you ready?

SHAKESPEARE:
As ready as any man may be, entering a room where love is examined like evidence.

GEORGE:
That’s exactly it. Because what happens here is not romance. It’s a controlled experiment—and Ophelia is the instrument.

GEORGE:
Let’s start with the setup. Claudius and Polonius plan to spy. They stage-manage Ophelia. They put a book in her hands. They position her.
What’s the moral temperature of this plan?

SHAKESPEARE:
Cold. And convenient.
They call it “care for her.” They call it “care for the prince.”
But the act is simple: they use her presence to harvest Hamlet’s secrets.

GEORGE:
And what’s chilling is how normal it seems to them. “We’ll just hide over here.”
It’s like a household trick.

SHAKESPEARE:
Power always wishes to be ordinary.
If it feels ordinary, it feels permissible.

GEORGE:
So right away, Ophelia enters a room where her feelings aren’t the point. Her feelings are the bait.

GEORGE:
Now—Ophelia. I want to underline something for listeners: she’s not “weak.” She’s trained.
She has been coached to obey father, brother, court—every authority that tells her what “good” looks like.

SHAKESPEARE:
A young woman in that world is praised for being governable.
They call it virtue.
But it is also control.

GEORGE:
So when Polonius gives her instructions, it isn’t just advice. It’s a system:
“Speak when told. Hold this. Stand here. Offer the tokens.”Four

Transcript

Conversations with Shakespeare — Hamlet
Act 3, Scene - 1 get thee to a notary

GEORGE (Host):
George Bartley here. Today we’re in Hamlet, and we’ve reached one of the most famous—and most misunderstood—moments in the play. But I don’t want to treat this as only “Hamlet’s big speech scene.”

I want do not want to forget Ophelia’s role.

Master Shakespeare, are you ready?

SHAKESPEARE:
As ready as any man may be, entering a room where love is examined like evidence.

GEORGE:
That’s exactly it. Because what happens here is not romance. It’s a controlled experiment—and Ophelia is the instrument.

GEORGE:
Let’s start with the setup. Claudius and Polonius plan to spy. They stage-manage Ophelia. They put a book in her hands. They position her.
What’s the moral temperature of this plan?

SHAKESPEARE:
Cold. And convenient.
They call it “care for her.” They call it “care for the prince.”
But the act is simple: they use her presence to harvest Hamlet’s secrets.

GEORGE:
And what’s chilling is how normal it seems to them. “We’ll just hide over here.”
It’s like a household trick.

SHAKESPEARE:
Power always wishes to be ordinary.
If it feels ordinary, it feels permissible.

GEORGE:
So right away, Ophelia enters a room where her feelings aren’t the point. Her feelings are the bait.

GEORGE:
Now—Ophelia. I want to underline something for listeners: she’s not “weak.” She’s trained.
She has been coached to obey father, brother, court—every authority that tells her what “good” looks like.

SHAKESPEARE:
A young woman in that world is praised for being governable.
They call it virtue.
But it is also control.

GEORGE:
So when Polonius gives her instructions, it isn’t just advice. It’s a system:
“Speak when told. Hold this. Stand here. Offer the tokens.”

She’s placed between two forces: Hamlet’s unpredictable grief—and the court’s surveillance machine.

SHAKESPEARE:
And she must smile while standing in the gears.

GEORGE:
Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” happens while Ophelia is onstage—or at least present nearby—depending on how it’s staged.

Either way, the emotional truth is: Ophelia has to wait while Hamlet debates existence itself.

Master Shakespeare, does that matter?

SHAKESPEARE:
It matters greatly.
For she waits with a task: to meet him.
But he arrives already deep within himself, wrestling with death as if death were a philosophy.

GEORGE:
And that imbalance matters. Because when they finally speak, they are not meeting as equals in the same emotional weather.
Hamlet is in a storm.
Ophelia is trying to be calm because she has been instructed to be calm.

To be or not to be—that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And, by opposing, end them. To die, to sleep—
No more—and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep—
To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub,
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

GEORGE:
Hamlet sees her and says she’s fair, and there’s tenderness in it—at least for a second.

But then the scene pivots.

Ophelia returns the gifts—letters, tokens—whatever the production chooses.

From the audience’s point of view, it can look simple: a breakup gesture.

But from Ophelia’s point of view… what is this?

SHAKESPEARE:
It is surrender and betrayal in one motion.
She gives back what once proved intimacy.
And she does it under instruction.

GEORGE:
So she becomes the messenger of rejection even if she doesn’t fully choose it.
And Hamlet—who already believes the world is false—reads her action as proof that love is a lie.

GEORGE:
Listeners miss how careful Ophelia is. Her language is measured. She speaks respectfully even when she’s hurt. She keeps trying to do the “right” thing.
She’s being good in the way she has been trained to be good.

SHAKESPEARE:
Yes.
She is doing what society calls “reasonable.”
But reasonableness here is not wisdom—it is self-protection.

GEORGE:
And it’s heartbreaking: she’s trying not to make anything worse.
But in this family and this court, “trying not to make it worse” still gets her punished.

GEORGE:
Now the hard part. Hamlet says “Get thee to a nunnery.”

And by the way, in modern ears, “nunnery” can land like “convent.” But it can also carry a much dirtier slang edge. Either way, it’s not gentle.

Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be
a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest,
but yet I could accuse me of such things that it
were better my mother had not borne me: I am
very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses
at my beck than I have thoughts to put them
in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act
them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling
between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves
all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery.

Let me make a little aside here that doesn't have that much to do with the transcript. I was using voice control on the Macintosh computer and when I said the line get the to a Nunnery, it would always come out get thee to a notary. Now during Shakespeare's time Nunnery could mean a place where nuns lived or a brothel, however I doubt that it had anything to do with H&R Block.  That makes your mind wander. “Ophelia didn’t choose a convent. She chose H&R Block. If the men of Denmark are going to file her life as evidence, she might as well itemize the trauma.”

“At H&R Block, at least someone will look you in the eye and say, ‘Let’s figure this out together.’ No one does that in Elsinore.”

“If this court loves anything, it’s paperwork: letters intercepted, gifts returned, people audited for loyalty. So yes—maybe the ‘nunnery’ scene is actually the ‘notary’ scene.”

“But behind the joke is the gut punch: Ophelia is being used as a test. She walks in carrying a book like a prop, and she walks out carrying the emotional wreckage.”

But I have really digressed!

Master Shakespeare, I want you to answer as the playwright:
Is Hamlet trying to protect Ophelia?
Or is he trying to hurt her?
Or is he acting?

SHAKESPEARE:
All three may live in one human moment.
He is furious at the world’s corruption.
He is wounded by what he believes she has become.
And he suspects eyes and ears are listening.

GEORGE:
So he speaks like someone who thinks the room is wired.
Because it is.

And here’s what I want to emphasize: whether Hamlet means it as protection or punishment, Ophelia receives it as harm.

GEORGE:
This is the thesis of the scene for me:

Ophelia is not the cause of Hamlet’s collapse.
She is the cost of everyone else’s decisions.
Polonius uses her.

Claudius uses her.

Hamlet—whatever his motives—breaks her in public.

And the audience watches a young woman get turned into a test.

SHAKESPEARE:
She is the field where men fight.
And then they ask why the field is ruined.

GEORGE:
Exactly.

GEORGE:
After Hamlet exits, Ophelia delivers one of the most lucid emotional diagnoses in the play.
She mourns not just losing a lover, but losing the version of Hamlet she believed in.

She lists what he used to be: courtly, scholarly, noble.
And she sees what he is now: chaotic, cruel, fractured.

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue,
sword,
Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mold of form,
Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his musicked vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh;
That unmatched form and stature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me
T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see!
Why give Ophelia that clarity?

SHAKESPEARE:
Because she is honest.
And because she is not performing madness; she is witnessing it.
She becomes the audience inside the play—reacting with a heart that still believes in wholeness.

GEORGE:
And she says, in effect:
“I loved him. I saw what he could be. And now it’s gone.”
That’s not small. That’s enormous.

GEORGE:
Then Claudius steps out and decides Hamlet’s problem isn’t love. It’s something else—something that threatens the state.
So Ophelia doesn’t just get hurt. She also becomes evidence used to justify political action.

SHAKESPEARE:
The personal becomes policy.

GEORGE:
And Ophelia gets no vote in that.
She’s the one who suffers the most—yet she has the least agency in the room.

Ophelia’s Silence Is Not Emptiness

GEORGE:
I want to end on this, Master Shakespeare:

People sometimes talk as if Ophelia is “passive.”
But what I see is a person forced into obedience until obedience becomes a cage.

Her silence isn’t emptiness.
It’s pressure.
And pressure does not vanish.
It goes somewhere.

SHAKESPEARE:
And when it breaks, those who used her will call it mystery—
as if they did not build the trap themselves.
And Ophelia finds herself saying
O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue,
sword,
Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mold of form,
Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his musicked vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh;
That unmatched form and stature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me
T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

But one more soliloquy that I have to include - now when I was much younger I went with my family to New York City to see the musical hair. And the lyrics to one of the songs comes directly from some of Hamlet's lines in the scene. And I'd like to end the formal part of this episode by quoting those words -

I have of late, but
wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging
firmament, this majestical roof, fretted
with golden fire—why, it appeareth nothing to me
but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in
reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving
how express and admirable; in action how like
an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the
beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and
yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man
delights not me, no, nor women neither, though by
your smiling you seem to say so.

I believe these words are especially beautiful, Master Shakespeare. - right there was to be or not to be - which we will go into later.

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in
reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving
how express and admirable; in action how like
an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the
beauty of the world, the paragon of animals

GEORGE:
Next time, we’ll follow the consequences of this scene—the way the court responds, the way Hamlet escalates, and the way Ophelia’s world keeps tightening.

For now: remember Ophelia here.
Not as a footnote to Hamlet’s philosophy—
but as a human being turned into a strategy.
Sources Include:  The Norton Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Essential Shakespeare Handbook, Asimov’s Guide to Shakespeare: A Guide to Understanding and Enjoying the Works of Shakespeare by Isaac Asimov, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human by Harold Bloom, Shakesfear and How to Cure It, by Dr. Ralph Cohen, Shakespeare’s Characters for Students, edited by Catherine C Dominic, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt, The Essential Shakespeare Handbook by Leslie Dunton-Downer and Alan Riding, The world of Shakespeare by Anna Claburne and Rebecca trays, and ChatGPT four.