Sophie Gee

The quills are smoking today.

Yeah.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

And just to kind of produce a final little piece of evidence that she's deeply thinking about Hamlet, well, there's a couple, actually.

One of the early plot points is that we learn, and this is within the first couple of chapters, that Caroline Dacus is having an affair with Hayley Hambleton, who's the sort of leading man of the piece, and he begs her to leave her husband, he says, who's Mr Myers, the theatre impresario who's subsequently murdered, and he says...

I do ask you to come away with me at the end of this tour and let Alfred divorce you, either that or tell him how things are between us and give him the chance of arranging it the other way.

Darling, we've had this out so often before, says Carolyn.

I know we have, but I'm at the end of my tether.

I can't go on seeing you every day, working with you.

I'm 49, Carol, and I'm starved.

Why won't you do this for both of us?

And she says, because I'm a Catholic.

You're not a good Catholic.

Sometimes I don't think you care tuppence about your religion.

And then Caroline says eventually, I'd feel I was wallowing in sin, darling.

Truthfully, I would.

So it's very subtle, but it's the plot of Hamlet that Gertrude is having an affair with her husband's brother.

They end up getting married to one another.

He gets murdered.

And it all turns on this question of the differences between Catholicism and Protestantism in Hamlet.