Hamlet Listening and Speaking

So in preparation for Thursday I looked up some audio-book and performance recordings of Hamlet. I looked here and simply listened to the first 7 recordings just to get an idea of variety. These are a few things that I found that we might want to consider:

• Narration - a few of the productions had a narrator who explained what was happening up to this point and then even said when characters entered and such. If we decide we want a narrator I don't think we should take it that far, but instead do sound effects of people moving. ---- An interesting note, one of the productions started off as though we were actually in the Globe Theater watching the production...not sure how I feel about that still.
• Voice - there were different voices for different characters and as we discussed this is highly effective.
• Sound Effects
• Explanations - one version actually had explanations of what words and phrases meant, personally I didn't really like it and it was distracting from the plot.

On another note I tried a cold reading of just a few different lines of Gertrude's. Here's a taste!