e business occurred in many stageperformances. The first, which seems to go back at least as far as
Robert Wilks, involved Ophelia's fan. Hamlet would take her fan and
hide his face behind it so as to spy on Claudius (and perhaps Gertrude
too). Hamlets from Garrick on through the nineteenth century developed
various pieces of stage business to do with Ophelia's fan, while other
Hamlets, in a variation upon the use of the fan, would instead have
with them a manuscript of the play to which Hamlet had added some
additional lines. Like the fan, this could be used as a means of
concealing the face, as a pointer, and, if gnawed upon or destroyed,
as an indication of Hamlet's extreme emotions. The second piece of
stage business went back to at least as early as Edmund Kean and
William Charles Macready and could still be seen at the end of the
nineteenth century, Sarah Bernhardt's performance providing an
example. It involved Hamlet crawling on the floor away from Ophelia
and towards Claudius as the scene progressed and the tension mounted.
At the climactic moment when Hamlet believes that Claudius displays
his guilt, Hamlet rises from the floor to confront the murderer of his
father.
The Play Scene (3.2): Fans and Manuscripts
So memorable was the first of these two pieces of stage business that
a number of Hamlets seem to have had portraits made of themselves
lying on the ground with a fan or manuscript. An anonymous undated
wood engraving of Macready as Hamlet shows him on the floor, his head
supported by his lef
