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The Rest is Silence

Canadian actor and director Richard Monette tells this story about Hamlet's death scene:

Hamlet's last line, as he dies from being poisoned by the point of Laertes's rapier, is "The rest is silence." Poison can be a nasty way to die, so I worked hard on my death throes. Having gasped out "The rest is silence," I'd cough and gurgle and puke and bubble and squeak, until finally I expired. Brilliantly realistic, I thought, and terribly moving. After seeing me do this a few times in rehearsal, Robin [Phillips, the director] finally said. "I have a note for you. When Shakespeare wrote, "The rest is silence," he meant it."

Nearly 20 years later, when I directed Stephen Ouimette as Hamlet in 1994, he too decided to go to town on his dying noises. So I told him my story and suggested that he rein it in, which he did. During the play's run, though, I went to see one of the matinees, only to find that Stephen had slipped back into his old ways. His final line was all but lost amid retching and spluttering, whereupon an elderly lady in the audience turned to her husband and asked, very loudly, "WHAT DID HE SAY?" Equally loudly, her husband replied, "HE SAID, 'THE REST IS SILENCE.'" At that, those corpses strewn around the stage in the last scene of Hamlet started heaving with uncontrollable laughter. I don't think Stephen did it again.

From This Rough Magic: The Making of an Artistic Director, by Richard Monette, as told to David Prosser.

To See or Not to See

And Peter O'Toole told this one on the BBC's Michael Parkinson Show in 1972:

I came up to do 'To be or not to be' from the bowels one night. And I was "To being or not to being..." I could hear slight titters... It was afternoon performance and I thought "What are they laughing at?" And of course when you do that soliloquy everybody knows it, so they could all join in anyway. The should lower a song sheet. But I'm not used to too many titters. By this time I was feeling much better with the way things were going and, I don't know, I did some fine gesture (he puts his hand up to his face) and found I was wearing my bloody glasses! Because I'd been down below with the stage hands—picking out winners!

And I just sort of trudged through as far as I could and I thought, "how can I get rid of these glasses?" I was wearing horn rims. And the only thing I could do was to sling 'em as Ophelia.

From The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, edited by Gyles Brandreth.