Tom Rutter explains his close reading of the passage from ‘Hamlet’.
As Tom shows, this dialogue suggests that the arrival of the actors hasn’t been pre-arranged with Hamlet. It also gives some indications of Hamlet’s preconceptions about drama and about why actors tour. Fictional texts such as ‘Hamlet’ can help us to get a sense of the practices of real-life actors; but because they are fictional, they can also be misleading.