One motive for the Queen defending Claudius in this scene despite what Hamlet told her about him we haven't discussed is one of the mo...

Fodor's Laertes is a psychotic brute, never more apparent than in his return from France. Instead of leading a rebellion directly to t...

Seconds after Ophelia is carried off by security, Laertes comes out of nowhere to confront Claudius (well, security IS distracted...). It...

Laertes' arrival in the Kevin Kline-directed version of Hamlet is pretty standard. While there's no rabble at his heels, the pseud...

Laertes rides into Elsinore, a man alone, shouting at the castle and running in to look for the King. There's no rebellion here except...

The conflict between Claudius and Laertes works by contrast. David Robb gives us one of the angriest Laertes examined in this series of ar...

Olivier's treatment of this sequence is highly cinematic and focuses on Ophelia, not her brother, with massive cuts to his lines. Betw...

The gentleman's story (here, a female attendant's) is intercut with the racing feet of the rebels through the halls until the brea...

The second half of Act IV, Scene 5 sees Laertes return from France, in open rebellion against the King, with the support of the people who...

The original Probably because there was too much sexual subtext in the sequence, the original Classics Illustrated adaptation chose to ex...

Starting in front of the broken mirror, a metaphor now for Ophelia's broken mind, Gertrude's broken spirit, and Claudius' brok...

The more extreme relationships in this version of the play transform the meaning of almost every line in the scene (at least, those that s...

Hamlet 2000 uses heavy cuts to ramp the scene's momentum up, focusing on Ophelia's disruptive influence at "court". The ...

Diane Venora has such a deep voice, it's hard to see her as anything but an adult version of Ophelia, but perhaps that's why her d...

As usual, Zeffirelli plays fast and loose with the sequence of lines, but to good effect. Helena Bonham-Carter's waifish Ophelia is fi...

In this version, Gertrude clearly feels helpless to help Ophelia, which makes the girl's angry defiance even more shocking. Lalla Ward...

The scene starts with foreshadowing of Ophelia's suicide as we see her reflection in the famous brook, taking a flower floating upon t...

In one of Branagh's few changes to the text, he reorders Claudius' end speech (starting with "When sorrows come") in thi...

Allow me to upend the usual order by starting with Slings & Arrows, but while the scene is part of the onscreen performance (above), t...

Scene 5 can be split into two sequences, Ophelia's descent into madness and Laertes' return (though the latter eventually dovetail...