Patrick Stewart

We chose this clip because it is one of the more famous film productions, but also because of Patrick Stewart's acting. He takes this soliloquy so simply in the movement, but portrays Claudius's emotions very strongly. His voice is almost breaking delivering the speech, showing the extreme remorse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ii44HuFQObQ
Unknown Actor
This clip is slightly more dark than other versions. While the actor shows remorse, he shows it in a more still but serious tone than a sad one. This is also shown in the lighting of the clip. Instead of an intricate set, it is just the actor alone in a room of black.

https://youtu.be/HqS7VyuD_Mg?t=32s
Alan Bates
This last clip is probably the closest to historically accurate, with a mixture of sadness and seriousness. It shows the setting descried in the play, along with the emotions that Claudius had, while not as extreme as Stewart's portrayal. Bates also moves more than the other actors.

We chose this soliloquy because it is one of Claudius's most famous and important ones. This is in the act after Hamlet's play, and Claudius knows that Hamlet knows he poised the late king. Claudius shows severe remorse for his actions, saying "My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent". Claudius wanted very much to be king, but now he regrets killing his brother and wants God to forgive him. He also asks "O, what form of prayer can serve my turn? 'Forgive me my foul murder'?". Praying is unusual to Claudius's character. Normally he is wrathful and will do anything necessary to accomplish what he needs, but now he is so desperate that he turned to a god he may or may not believe in, as some do in the face of death. Due to him praying, Hamlet will not kill Claudius at this point. Therefore Claudius lives on to deepen the plot of the play.

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Seeming to argue for the arbitrary fickleness of passionate extremes, the Player-King at the same time repeats an earlier relay of grief into joy: Claudius' formula for remarriage: "With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage" (I.ii.12). Claudius himself establishes the political nature of his topsy-turvy emotions:

Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature

That we with wisest sorrow think on him

Together with remembrance of ourselves.

(I.ii.6-7)

Discretion, the "wisdom" of political prudence, self-interest: Claudius uses an elevated version of Machiavellism to describe his marital motives. In the heights of emotion, there is method in madness. Like the Player-Queen's ratio of fear and love, shifting circumstance counterchanges laughter and tears: "Grief joys, joy grieves, on slender accident." Claudius and the Player-King, each defending remarriage, point to both the mutability and the rationality of emotion.
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The Player-King's speech addresses issues of faith and friendship current in Elizabethan Machiavellism.11 Mutability, a scepticism masquerading as "distrust," and a problem with promises characterize the court politician as both actor and inactor. So speaks Claudius later:

                              That we would do,

We should do when we would: for this 'would' changes

And hath abatements and delays as many

As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents.

(IV.vii.112-30)

Claudius, Hamlet and the Player-King all confront and embrace self-definition structured on discontinuity. This is, finally, a model of identity at once theatrical and political, as is the Machiavellism it finds and founds.

The presence of Machiavellism at the center of the play disables the apparent antinomies between Hyperion and satyr, Christian king and Machiavel. The Murder of Gonzago, by casting nephew as murderer, not only condenses Claudius and Hamlet as villains, but Claudius and the dead king as victims. The father appears on stage twice as a ghost of questionable origin, and then in the figure of the Player-King, whose Machiavellian speech aligns him as much with Claudius as with a fairer feudal order. The brothers speak the same language, the play-within-a-play rationalizing in political terms thrifty second weddings; the Player-King doth protest too much. The mirror at the center of Hamlet, contrary to the purpose of playing, confounds virtue and scorn, reflecting identity where there ought to be difference. The thematic overlap extends to the murder at the root of Hamlet and Hamlet's play, reinforcing the potentially disfiguring alliances between the drama's many princes: Claudius and the brother he murders, Hamlet prince of Denmark, and the Player-King at the center who ultimately mirrors them all.
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