*What follows is a mixture of what I said in class (or will say in class) and additional material that I either left out for lack of time or thought of later. For complete citations and endnotes, visit the full commentary for this play.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from Folio. (The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Comb. text 358-447.)
Preliminary Notes on Hamlet
Theology. In Christian terms, revenge amounts to usurpation of God’s prerogatives. But this interpretation clashes with what we find in Classical literature: in Aeschylus’s trilogy The Oresteia, Orestes would be wrong not to take vengeance for Agamemnon’s murder. The Elizabethans loved Senecan revenge tragedy, as Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy shows, but in Hamlet, Shakespeare faces squarely the revenger’s theological dilemma.
Skepticism. There is something to the idea that Hamlet is not fit to be a tragic hero. (See T. S. Eliot’s “Hamlet and His Problems.”) We can say only half in jest that Hamlet’s problem is he has read too many of Montaigne’s skeptical Essays. There is only a ghost who tells Hamlet what he wants to hear: Uncle Claudius is stealing Gertrude’s attention and her son’s kingdom.
Recognition. When does Hamlet attain clarity about the nature of his actions? He has come round to the idea that he needs to let things shape up as they may. But how did he get there?
Perhaps Hamlet’s realization is due to facing the shock of Ophelia’s death; meditating on an army going to its death “even for an eggshell”; bantering with a gravedigger; meditating on Yorick’s skull; escaping from the ship taking him to England; being ransomed by pirates; experiencing conflicted feelings about Ophelia and Gertrude; being a young man with his whole life ahead of him, and yet compelled to give his life for his dead father’s honor.
In The Poetics, Aristotle says that well-crafted tragedies turn upon the hero’s arriving at some insight (anagnorisis, recognition) about his or her mistake. What is Hamlet’s insight, and what has led him to it? What makes the play’s resolution possible—that Hamlet has been unable to act and something now makes him able, or should we account for the resolution differently?
Hamlet’s Romantic-Style Subjectivity. Harold Bloom wrote that Hamlet, thanks to his intense interiority and complexity, overflows the revenge tragedy that hosts him. Bloom’s notion resembles the Romantic-Era conception of the Prince of Denmark as a man “out of joint” with and superior to the action-hero task handed to him by his father’s ghost.
ACT 1
Act 1, Scene 1. (358-62, Marcellus and Barnardo wait with Horatio in the hope that the ghost they’ve seen will appear for yet a third time. The ghost materializes, but says nothing. Horatio suggests acquainting Hamlet with this news.)
Barnardo and Francisco await the changing of their watch at Elsinore Castle, and Marcellus shows up. Marcellus and Barnardo have seen a strange apparition twice, and Marcellus has invited Hamlet’s friend Horatio to watch with them tonight. Horatio remains dubious, and “will not let belief take hold of him” (359, 1.1.23).
A third sighting materializes, looking just like the late King Hamlet Sr. Even Horatio is a believer now, though the Ghost has nothing to say to him.
The Ghost was dressed in full battle armor, so Horatio offers a plausible conjecture: he suspects the apparition’s presence “bodes some strange eruption to our state” (360, 1.1.68), meaning that the Ghost intends to issue a security warning. After all, young Fortinbras is planning to take back territory his father had lost to Hamlet Sr.
Barnardo supposes much the same: “Well may it sort that this portentous figure / Comes armèd through our watch so like the King / That was and is the question of these wars” (361, 1.1.108-10). These men’s surmises do not address the Ghost’s real purpose.
Horatio wants Hamlet to engage with the Ghost and gain particular, intimate knowledge of its purpose. As Horatio says, “This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him” (362, 1.1.170).
Act 1, Scene 2. (363-69, Claudius and Gertrude hold court at Elsinore, sending ambassadors to Norway to thwart young Fortinbras; Claudius allows Polonius’s son Laertes to head for France, but, with Gertrude, disapproves of Hamlet’s mourning and his desire to return to Wittenberg; Hamlet broods on his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage; Horatio et al. inform Hamlet about the ghost; Hamlet agrees to join the watch.)
The new king, Claudius, has married his sister-in-law Gertrude after the death of his brother, King Hamlet Sr. Claudius is a skillful speaker, but betrays a schizoid sense of his actions: he has married Gertrude (“our sometime sister, now our queen”) “with a defeated joy,” and “With an auspicious and a dropping eye” (363, 1.2.10-11).
Claudius sends Cornelius and Voltemand to Old Norway, uncle of Young Fortinbras, and accedes to Polonius’s request that his son Laertes be allowed to return to France. The King rounds on Hamlet and asks, “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” (364, 1.2.66)
Hamlet’s grief seems to the royal couple impolitic, self-indulgent, prideful. Gertrude says to Hamlet, “Do not forever with thy veiled lids / Seek for thy noble father in the dust— / Thou know’st ’tis common, all that lives must die …” (364, 1.2.70-72).
Hamlet’s response already shows signs of the intense interiority that will cause him so much inward conflict later in the play. He tells Gertrude, “I have that within which passes show— / These but the trappings and the suits of woe” (365, 1.2.85-86).
Soon, Hamlet speaks his first soliloquy, beginning “O, that this too, too sallied flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew …” (366, 1.2.129-30). He laments that God has already “fixed / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter” (363, 1.2.131-32), reproaches women in the person of Gertrude—“Frailty, thy name is woman” (363, 1.2.146)—and disparages Claudius in comparison with Hamlet, Sr. The latter was “Hyperion” to Claudius’s “satyr” (363, 1.2.140),
Hamlet morbidly sees the whole world as “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed” (363, 1.2.135-36), one inhabited by “things rank and gross in nature” (363, 1.2.136). He is already obsessed with the dark intimation that people are not what they seem.
Hamlet knows he must repress this feeling in public: “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (366, 1.2.159). Privately, he already suspects that “some foul play” (369, 1.2.255) was involved in his father’s death, even though he questions Horatio sharply.
The Prince’s scene-ending thought is, “Foul deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes” (369, 1.2.256-57). Hamlet is about to receive his orders as a revenger, and his response will be anything but simple.
Act 1, Scene 3. (369-72, Laertes takes his leave of his sister Ophelia, lecturing her about Hamlet’s rank and the slipperiness of his vows; Ophelia teases him about his own moral challenges; Polonius regales Laertes with tedious advice, then reinforces his son’s warnings to Ophelia about Hamlet, forbidding her even to speak with him.)
Laertes lectures Ophelia about the dangers of romancing a man above her station. (369-70, 1.3.10-49) This advice is sound. Still, as Gertrude later admits, she had hoped the two lovers would in fact marry—the difference in rank never bothered the Queen.
Ophelia holds her own: “Do not as some ungracious pastors do / Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven / Whiles, a puffed and reckless libertine, / Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads …” (370, 1.3.46-49).
Polonius offers the departing Laertes tedious advice, such as “Neither a borrower nor a lander be” (370, 1.3.74). He then accuses Ophelia of being naïve about Hamlet’s intentions: Hamlet is a young, lusty bachelor, and is therefore not to be trusted. (371, 1.3.89ff) The sum is, “I would not, in plain terms … / Have you … / … talk with the Lord Hamlet” (371-72, 1.3.131-33).
Act 1, Scene 4. (372-74, On the watch, Hamlet reports to Marcellus and Barnardo that Claudius is over-enjoying a party; the Ghost beckons Hamlet to follow him; Hamlet’s friends fear for his safety, but he will not be restrained.)
Hamlet discusses the Court of Denmark’s fondness for alcohol, declaring that his country is “traduced and taxed of other nations” (372, 1.4.18) for this weakness. Hamlet is not certain what to think of the strange apparition that soon visits him: “What may this mean, / That thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel / Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon …?” (373, 1.4.51-53) Still, he will follow the Ghost.
Act 1, Scene 5. (374-78, the Ghost confirms his identity, recounts in detail his murder and references his current punishment in Purgatory; Hamlet vows to fulfill the Ghost’s demand for revenge; returning, Hamlet warns his friends never to reveal what they have seen, and to expect some “antic,” wild-seeming behavior from him.)
The Ghost affirms that he is Hamlet’s father, and then recounts in detail what happened to him. Hamlet’s excited “Oh, my prophetic soul!” (375, 1.5.41), suggests that he already suspected Claudius. The terms the Ghost uses resemble Hamlet’s: Gertrude has married “a wretch whose natural gifts were poor / To those of mine” (375, 1.5.51-52).
The revenge command is clear: “Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest” (376, 1.5.82-83). But there is also the impossible demand, “Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught …” (376, 1.5.85-86). Hamlet seems convinced, for now, and once Hamlet Sr. vanishes, the son commits himself to revenge.
Or at least that’s how it seems. Near the beginning of the Ghost’s recounting, Hamlet proclaims that he wants his revenge to come on “wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love …” (375, 1.5.29-31). But soon, his metaphor shifts: “Yea, from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / … / And thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain …” (376, 1.5.98-99, 102-03).
Hamlet’s scholarly metaphor is slightly comic in that he speaks of writing at the instant when he says he is most certain of his desire to act. Revengers may be stymied for a time, but they don’t need a note, so to speak, to remind them to keep revenge on their calendars.
When Hamlet returns, he swears his friends to secrecy, and says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (378, 1.5.168-69). He may need to “put an antic disposition on” (378, 1.5.173).
Hamlet’s concluding words indicate both acceptance and world-weariness: “The time is out of joint—oh, cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right” (378, 1.5.189-90). Do these words also indicate indecisiveness or resentment? It is hard to take these words as consonant with the initial desire to “sweep to … revenge.” From now on, Hamlet’s alternating enthusiasm and lack of enthusiasm will be a feature.
ACT 2
Act 2, Scene 1. (378-81, Polonius enjoins Reynaldo to travel to Paris to gather intelligence about Laertes’s conduct there; Ophelia enters, distressed by Hamlet’s behavior—he seems addled; Polonius presumes Hamlet is mad for Ophelia and resolves to tell the King.)
Polonius is endearing, but also a meddling intelligencer. He spies on Laertes (379-80, 2.1.1-71), and, having ordered Ophelia to stay away from Hamlet, he insists that she accompany him to see Claudius: “I will go seek the King. / This is the very ecstasy of love …” (381, 2.1.98-99).
Act 2, Scene 2. (381-94, Claudius and Gertrude ask Hamlet’s friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on him; Old Norway seeks safe passage for his nephew Fortinbras through Denmark; Polonius convinces the King and Queen to join him in watching Hamlet’s conversation with Ophelia; Hamlet mocks Polonius; Hamlet gets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to admit that they were “sent for”; Hamlet entreats the First Player to recite a revenge scene about the slaughter of Priam by Achilles’s son Pyrrhus; Hamlet reflects upon his own failure to act like a true revenger, and resolves to try the Ghost’s case against Claudius by means of an improvised play at court.)
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern make their first appearance in the play (379-80, 2.2.1-39), and Voltemand brings what seems to be good news about young Fortinbras: now the young blade wants to pass through Denmark’s territory on his way to Poland. (383, 2.2.60-79)
Polonius’s insistence that he has “found / The very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy” (382, 2.2.48-49) excites Claudius, who says, “Oh, speak of that, that do I long to hear!” (382, 2.2.50) Hamlet has evidently been taking up his “antic disposition” early in the game.
The Prince must attempt to draw Claudius beyond his false geniality towards Hamlet and into the active agent’s circle of consequence and blood revenge. Polonius declares to the King and Queen, “I’ll loose my daughter to … [Hamlet]. / Be you and I behind an arras; then / Mark the encounter …” (385, 2.2.160-62).
First, Hamlet wanders onto the scene and Polonius engages him in a conversation that is afterwards carried on with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Polonius says, “Though this be madness, yet there is / method in’t” (386, 2.2.201-02).
Hamlet receives his old friends kindly, and deftly unmasks their dishonesty preparatory to his later, much harsher dealings with them. After the pair admit that they were “sent for” (387, 2.2.237, 254), Hamlet suggests that the King and Queen are worried about his depression.
Hamlet’s next speech is a piece of Renaissance humanism, and it exudes aliveness to the beauty of a world that people were beginning to see afresh after centuries of otherworldliness: “What a piece of work is a / man—how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form / and moving how express and admirable, in action how like / an angel, in apprehension how like a god …” (388, 2.2.264-67). The speech should remind us about the Great Chain of Being.
Hamlet says all this only to bring the “majestical roof fretted with / golden fire” (388, 2.2.262-63) down on our heads: we are only the most refined sod in the cosmos, a “quintessence of dust” (388, 2.2.269). But hey, a troupe of actors is on the way to Elsinore! (388, 2.2.274-77)
Hamlet and Rosencrantz talk about what the audience would have recognized to be the current state of Elizabethan theater. He calls popular boy actors “an eyrie of children, little eyases [eagles], / that cry out on the top of question and are most tyran- / nically clapped for’t” (389, 2.2.292.3-5, Folio only).
In the course of this conversation, Hamlet slips in a confessional remark: “I am but mad north-northwest; when the wind is / southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw” (389, 2.2.306-07).
Denmark is disturbed as well: things aren’t what they seem. After mocking Polonius’s announcement that the players have arrived at Elsinore, comparing him to the biblical figure Jephthah (who sacrificed his daughter over a vow he made in exchange for success against the Ammonites) and thereby obliquely referring to Ophelia again, Hamlet solicits the First Player to give his rendition of the tragic ending of the Trojan War.
The Prince listens with interest as the Player recounts the moment at which Achilles’s son Pyrrhus, pauses briefly in is revenge task. (392, 2.2.399-404) But after this momentary pause, Pyrrhus returns to his bloody task and carries it out.
As for Hecuba’s grief, the player makes it seem so natural that even he gets worked up imitating it. But Hamlet has a murdered father to avenge, so why doesn’t he act at once? (393, 2.2.468-77) Things are simpler in fiction; a noble representation may allow us to perpetuate our highest ideals, but real life is weighed down with epistemological uncertainties, Machiavellian considerations, and “vicious mole[s] of nature” such as indecisiveness.
Hamlet’s revenge imperative is hindered by Christian scruples and by doubts about the Ghost’s purpose and provenance: “The spirit that I have seen / May be a devil, and the devil hath power / T’ assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps / Out of my weakness and my melancholy, / … / Abuses me to damn me” (394, 2.2.517-22).
Hamlet invests much hope in The Murder of Gonzago as a means of marking the guilty visage of Claudius. This plan does not give us license to despise fiction as the opposite of “real life”—here, the public and political realm, the world of cold, hard reality and necessity, is what allows Claudius to keep his murderous nature hidden. Exigent reality acts as a mask.
Hamlet’s method may seem dubious—he is a man of words who has decided to tip himself towards action precisely by means of words—but at the same time, this plan could work.
ACT 3
Act 3, Scene 1. (394-99, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern inform Claudius that they haven’t fixed the cause of Hamlet’s insanity; Polonius stations Ophelia where he and Claudius can watch her talking with Hamlet; the Prince soon begins speaking harshly to her, spewing misogyny, and taunting her with, “get thee to a nunnery”; Ophelia is heartbroken; Claudius sees that this is not lovesickness, and plans to send Hamlet to England; Polonius urges Claudius first to allow Gertrude to speak with Hamlet after the play.)
The King tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to encourage the players who have come to Elsinore. (395, 3.1.26-27) Perhaps it will draw out the reason for Hamlet’s eccentric behavior. He and Polonius will hide and listen to Hamlet talk with Ophelia. (395, 3.1.42-43)
But first, Hamlet speaks his famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy. In it, he asks whether one who is frustrated with life, like him, would do better to bear the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” or whether it is better to bury their consciousness in action.
Hamlet is drawn to this latter course, but any such resolution is blunted by the soliloquy’s other point: our ignorance of what comes after death keeps us from acting, and thus “enterprises of great pitch and moment / With this regard their currents turn awry / And lose the name of action” (396, 3.1.85-87).
Hamlet’s wild words to Ophelia concern mainly the impossibility of maintaining virtue in a corrupt world: “Get thee to a nunnery!” (397, 3.1.119) probably means just that: seek shelter from “arrant knaves.” Hamlet denies any past relationship with Ophelia, saying, “I loved you not” (397, 3.1.116-17). He asks her where her father is (397, 3.1.127).
At (142), Hamlet seems to lose his composure: “I say we will have no / more marriage. Those that are married already—all but one—shall live” (398, 3.1.143-45) Claudius gathers that Hamlet’s disturbed state is “not like madness” (398, 3.1.161). The Prince’s “melancholy,” says Claudius, “sits on brood” (398, 3.1.162) over something still darker.
Act 3, Scene 2. (399-408, Hamlet lectures the players, and solicits Horatio to watch King’s reaction to the play; seated, Hamlet makes lewd remarks to Ophelia; the actors perform a dumbshow and then a play with dialogue, both eerily following Claudius’s courting of Gertrude and his murder of Hamlet Sr.; rattled, Claudius calls for light and leaves in a panic; Hamlet is certain that Claudius betrayed his guilt; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern inform Hamlet—who rebukes them as spies—that Claudius is enraged and that Gertrude wants to speak with him; Hamlet stalks off to reproach Gertrude.)
Hamlet admonishes the players about their craft: his key bits of advice are that they “o’erstep not / the modesty of nature” (399, 3.2.17-18) and make certain “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature, to / show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very / age and body of the time his form and pressure” (399, 3.2.20-22).
Hamlet’s remark is similar to the moral statements of Samuel Johnson about art: actors should display virtue as it is, and compel vice to confront itself head on. See “On Fiction” in The Rambler No. 4. 1750: “Vice, for Vice is necessary to be shewn, should always disgust….” Hamlet’s “mirror” metaphor does not ratify the neoclassical claim that spectators are fooled into taking what they see on the stage for reality. To gaze into a mirror is to know in a heightened way that one is looking at a representation, not “the thing itself.” Still, a representation can refer us to real or true things. Hamlet means to do just that: showing and then speaking Claudius’s sin should make its effects register on his face. (400, 3.2.70-79)
A Dumb Show follows (402, 3.2.122ff, stage dir.). This eerie scene shows Claudius the essence of what he has done, and so it prime Claudius’s imagination and conscience for the blows still to come from the “talkie” version. We might even say that this strange, silent presentation speaks to Claudius in a direct way that it couldn’t to anyone else.
Next comes a brief prologue, asking for the audience’s patience. Then the Player King and Queen preview the plot, uttering words that with damning precision hit upon what Hamlet himself must consider the guilty consciences of both Claudius and Gertrude.
The Player King intimates that he may die soon, and wishes that his Queen may find another faithful husband. The Player Queen’s shocking reply is, “None wed the second but who killed the first” (403, 3.2.164), in almost proverbial form implicating herself in her husband’s death.
The Player King offers his Queen some worldly wisdom: once he is dead, her resolution will fade: “So think thou wilt no second husband wed, / But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead” (404, 3.2.198-99). The passions are not things we can will to remain constant: they are subject to circumstance, to fate, and to the needs of the body.
Claudius’s annoyance now shows: he asks Hamlet, “Have you heard the argument? Is there no offense in’t?” (404, 3.2.216) Hamlet says, “No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest. No offense i’th’ world” (404, 3.2.217-18). Gertrude’s opinion is, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” (404, 3.2.214)—a point that is easily re-aimed at Claudius. His stability of mind depends on repressing consciousness of his conduct.
Hamlet cleverly slips in a mention of “poison” when he says of the Player King and Queen, “they do but jest, poison in jest” (404, 3.2.217).
Hamlet is sharp with Ophelia throughout 3.2: he seems to bait her and accuse her of lewdness, effectually blaming her for Gertrude’s failings. This treatment of Ophelia is another twist of the knife by Hamlet into her already wounded soul. Her grief in 3.1 was genuine: “Oh, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!” (398, 3.1.147)
Ophelia is not to blame for obeying her father’s scheme to use her as bait, but Hamlet spreads guilt all over instead of keeping it where it with Claudius. The Ghost told Hamlet not to taint his mind against Gertrude, but he should have added Ophelia.
Still, the blame is strongly affixed to Claudius when in the Mousetrap where “one Lucianus, nephew to the King” (404, 3.2. 226) shows up and “pours the poison in the Player King’s ears.” Claudius says, “Give me some light, away” (405, 3.2.249) and abruptly exits.
Hamlet and Horatio agree that Claudius’s behavior is revealing. Horatio’s “I did very well note him” (405, 3.2.269) may be taken as confirmation of guilt.
Hamlet’s anger now turns toward Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom he disabuses of any hope that they may “play upon” him (407, 3.2.344), and then to Gertrude, who is perhaps the main target of the scene, so savage is Hamlet’s portrayal of her role in Hamlet Sr’s death. The Prince’s rejection of being an instrument is interesting: he wants to take control.
With respect to Gertrude, Hamlet’s words are exceptionally harsh. He says, “Now could I drink hot blood / And do such business as the bitter day / Would quake to look on” (407, 3.2.361-63). This violent thought is for Claudius, but it may also apply to Gertrude: “Let me be cruel, not unnatural. / I will speak daggers to her but use none” (407, 3.2.366-67).
Act 3, Scene 3. (408-10, Claudius tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to hustle Hamlet off to England; Polonius tells Claudius he will eavesdrop on Hamlet’s talk with Gertrude; Claudius attempts to pray; Hamlet overhears Claudius, but delays killing him; Claudius admits to himself that since he won’t give up the fruits of his wicked deeds, he’s damned.)
The King has decided that Hamlet must be trundled off to England, and Rosencrantz says to Claudius, “The cease of majesty / Dies not alone but like a gulf doth draw / What’s near it with it …” (408, 3.3.15-17). Guildenstern, too, flatters the King that what he does is necessary to protect the welfare of the state and the people: “Most holy and religious fear it is / To keep those many bodies safe / That live and feed upon your Majesty” (408, 3.3.8-10).
This must be comforting to Claudius since the political realm itself is like an exoskeleton protecting the usurper-king from the ravages of introspection and guilt. This is the same “tyrant’s plea” of necessity that accounts for the hollowness of Satan’s rhetoric in Paradise Lost.
Alone with his tormenting thoughts, Claudius kneels and tries to confront “the visage of offense” (409, 3.3.47). But he won’t give up his crown or his queen. It is painful to behold a person in such spiritual distress, even if it is his own fault. It may be that Claudius isn’t so much sorry as determined to indulge himself in remorse, or in what Oscar Wilde calls in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Ch. VIIIthe “luxury of self-reproach.” The results of Claudius’ prayer are nil: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; / Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (410, 3.3.97-98).
Before the King arrives at that conclusion, Hamlet reveals his un-Christian desire that Claudius’ soul at death “may be as damned and black / As hell whereto it goes” (410, 3.3.94-95). That sounds like something the revenger in a Senecan tragedy would say. In any case, the ineffectuality of Claudius’s prayer relieves Hamlet of the need to contrive such an outcome.
Act 3, Scene 4. (410-16, Hamlet frightens Gertrude, whose call for help elicits a cry from the concealed Polonius; Hamlet stabs Polonius; Hamlet berates Gertrude for her remarriage, but the Ghost reminds him to stay on track; Gertrude thinks Hamlet is hallucinating; Hamlet tells Gertrude not to sleep with Claudius, and reveals the King’s plot to send him to England; Hamlet apologizes tersely to Polonius’s corpse and drags it away; Claudius asks Gertrude where Hamlet is, and sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find Hamlet.)
Hamlet soon reaches his mother’s chambers, and engages with her in all strictness, insisting, “You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you” (410, 3.4.19-20). When Gertrude screams for help, Polonius echoes her cry and pays for that incautious mistake with his life: he is abruptly and shockingly stabbed to death by Hamlet, who dispatches the meddling counselor with a catchphrase: “Dead for a ducat, dead” (411, 3.4.24).
The Prince goes on to berate Gertrude. Hamlet has little time now for the “wretched, rash, intruding fool” (411, 3.4.31) Polonius, and he makes Gertrude confront her sinfulness as directly as he made Claudius behold his guilt.
His efforts succeed without too much trouble since Gertrude cries out, “O Hamlet, speak no more! / Thou turn’st my very eyes into my soul, / And there I see such black and grievèd spots / As will leave there their tinct” (412, 3.4.88-91).
Here, Ernest Jones’s Oedipal reading of the play comes into its own. Hamlet imagines his mother in bed with Claudius, where they linger “honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty” (412, 3.4.92-94). The Ghost steps in to admonish him about his “almost blunted purpose” (413, 3.4.110) of taking revenge against Claudius. Gertrude is unable to see the Ghost.
For Polonius there is some remorse, but it is quickly smoothed over with philosophizing: “For this same lord / I do repent. But heaven hath pleased it so / To punish me with this and this with me, / That I must be their scourge and minister” (414, 3.4.173-76). Hamlet tells Gertrude not to let on that he’s not exactly insane, and he confides in her about his plans.
Knowing he cannot trust Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are the King’s agents, the Prince says, “Let it work, / For ‘tis the sport to have the enginer / Hoist with his own petard—and’t shall go hard / But I will delve one yard below their mines / And blow them at the moon” (415, 3.4.206-10). This is an odd exclamation since, presumably, Hamlet knows only that he’s being “marshal[ed] to knavery” (415, 3.4.206).
Claudius enters after Hamlet’s encounter with Gertrude, and he is now, by his own admission to his Queen, “full of discord and dismay” (416, 3.4.263). He knows that Hamlet’s sword was meant for him, and he must try to clean up the damage Hamlet has done in killing Polonius.
Act 3, Scene 5. (416-17, Hamlet again mocks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as Claudius’s tools; running away, he refuses to tell them where he has stashed the body of Polonius.)
Hamlet calls Rosencrantz a “sponge” (417, 3.5.12, 14-15) who “soaks up the King’s countenance, his / rewards, his authorities” (15-16). As for Claudius, he is “a thing,” says Hamlet, “of nothing” (417, 3.5.27, 29). His remark that “The body is with the King, but the King is not with / the body” (417, 3.5.26-27) refers to Polonius’ corpse, but it might refer to the political doctrine that the king has both an imperishable civil or corporate body and a natural, mortal one. (See Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton UP, 2016. Orig. 1957.) Hamlet may thus be making an oblique threat.
Act 3, Scene 6. (417-19, Claudius discusses his straits with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; Hamlet mocks Claudius with reminders of his own mortality and calls him “mother”; the King tells him that he must depart for England; in soliloquy, Claudius admits that he has commanded the death of Hamlet as soon as he arrives in England.)
Talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Claudius realizes the perilous state he is in: “Diseases desperate grown / By desperate appliance are relieved / Or not at all” (417, 3.6.9-11). Then follows Hamlet’s quizzical conversation with the King, which culminates with “a king may go a prog- / ress through the guts of a beggar” (418, 3.6.29-30).
The Prince’s implication may be that the adornment and aggrandizing of a king’s decaying body that is easily reduced by nature’s processes, is what Claudius has traded his soul for, so in this respect he truly is “a thing” and “nothing.” Hamlet calls Claudius “dear mother” (418, 3.6.47), a slip-up that seems sincere.
Claudius is disturbed by Hamlet’s presence, and he intends for him “present death” (419, 3.6.62). The King seeks security: “Till I know ‘tis done, / Howe’er my haps, my joys will ne’er begin” (419, 3.6.64-65).
ACT 4
Act 4, Scene 1. (419-20, Hamlet catches sight of Fortinbras’s army crossing through Denmark to fight in Poland; he reflects on the soldiers’ honor, and resolves to avenge his father.)
Young Fortinbras seeks conveyance through Denmark on his way to Poland, and the Captain sums up the mission: “We go to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name” (419, 4.1.17-18). Hamlet rededicates himself to vengeance. He admires Fortinbras and his men for “Exposing what is mortal and unsure / To all that fortune, death, and danger dare, / Even for an eggshell” (420, 4.1.50-52).
Hamlet’s new resolution is, “Oh, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth” (420, 4.1.9.64-65) This vow, as we shall see, is no more permanent than the ones Hamlet made earlier: it isn’t his nature to be circumscribed by revenger’s oaths.
Part of the interest in Hamlet is that not only is the time “out of joint,” so is the hero. He is not well adapted to the traditional revenger’s role, not at once subservient and yet heroic in the old medieval fashion. The Romantic reading of the tragedy, in which Hamlet is too aloof, too philosophical, too modern to carry out his task, is worthy of respect.
Hamlet is a young man with his whole life before him, yet he is subjected to the will of an imperious Dead Father. As such, Hamlet is another casualty of what, in Civilization and Its Discontents and elsewhere, Sigmund Freud casts as the longstanding struggle between individuals in their quest for satisfaction and the demands of a cruel, irrational society—one that expresses itself through the demands of an exacting, unforgiving “superego.”
Act 4, Scene 2. (420-25, Gertrude hears that Ophelia has gone mad; Ophelia enters, singing bits of folk songs about death and men’s betrayal of maids; Claudius tells Horatio to watch over Ophelia; Laertes bursts in at the head of a mob, demanding an explanation for Polonius’s death; Claudius protests his innocence; Ophelia reenters, much to Laertes’s grief; Claudius promises to reveal privately to Laertes what happened to Polonius.)
Ophelia madness dismays Gertrude. The Queen says, “To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is, / Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss” (421, 4.2.17-18). Has she resisted admitting Ophelia because the young woman might trigger Gertrude’s guilty conscience? What guilt, then? Ophelia’s songs have to do with death uncomemmorated and men’s betrayal of women.
Claudius is moved by Ophelia’s distress, and infers that her sorrow “springs / All from her father’s death” (422, 4.2.74-75). Her mournful words, “I can- / not choose but weep to think that they would lay him i’th’ cold / ground” (422, 4.2.68-70) suggest as much.
Ophelia has been used even by the father she mourns, and she has also been abandoned by Hamlet. Later, in 5.2, Hamlet justifies the deaths of R & G to Horatio by saying, “’Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes / Between the pass and fell incensed points / Of mighty opposites” (439, 5.2.59-61). Ophelia has paid the price, too.
Claudius is stricken at the pace of bad events he and Gertrude now confront: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies / But in battalions” (422, 4.2.77-78). Then Laertes bursts in with the common folk at his back, proclaiming him the new king.
Laertes presents an obvious contrast with Hamlet: unlike the Prince, Laertes is determined to “sweep to his revenge.” He has no scruples about revenge, shouting at the King and everyone else, “To hell allegiance, vows to the blackest devil. / Conscience and grace to the profoundest pit! / I dare damnation” (423, 4.2.131-33).
Claudius temporizes adroitly with Laertes, but it’s hard to miss the irony in his declaration to Gertrude that “There’s such divinity doth hedge a king / That treason can but peep to what it would, / Acts little of his will” (423, 4.2.123-25). Clearly, this truism afforded Hamlet Sr. no protection from Claudius. Still, Claudius steersLaertes’s rage away from his own person.
When Ophelia reenters and sings haunting ballads, Laertes bewails his sister’s madness, and he and Claudius point out that the songs lack coherence, but not significance. Ophelia hands out rosemary (“remembrance”), pansies (“thoughts”), fennel, columbines, and rue. These natural beauties are the elements of an Elizabethan language for expressing broad experience and sentiment. (See Jane Giraud’s The Flowers of Shakespeare, 1848.)
Ophelia’s disordered mind registers the corruption and disorder around her, beautifying it with floral symbolism and songs. She has lost her father, and Gertrude will wear her “rue with a difference” (425, 4.2.170-71, 174-79) because she has lost her son to England. Ophelia is the kingdom’s blighted flower, the beauty and innocence that has been sacrificed to ambition and lust. Her descent into madness, and soon her death, mark Denmark’s degeneracy even more clearly than the play’s violence.
Act 4, Scene 3. (426, a courier gives Horatio Hamlet’s letter telling him how he boarded a pirate ship and returned to Denmark; the letter asks Horatio to make sure the King receives the additional letters intended for him; Hamlet promises Horatio further explanation.)
At Elsinore, Horatio receives a letter from Hamlet telling him that the Prince is back in Denmark after becoming the sole prisoner of pirates who tried to take their ship as they crossed to England. These men expect ransom. Hamlet indicates that he has enclosed additional letters for the King himself, after which Horatio is to depart from Elsinore and rendezvous with Hamlet, who will offer a fuller explanation.
Act 4, Scene 4. (426-31, Claudius tells Laertes privately that Hamlet killed Polonius; a messenger arrives with Hamlet’s letter; Claudius promises to help Laertes devise a plot to achieve the revenge he craves: at a fencing match, Laertes will wound Hamlet using a poison-tipped rapier and, failing that, the King will poison Hamlet with a poisoned chalice; Gertrude reports that Ophelia has drowned.)
The King explains to Laertes that Hamlet, not he, was responsible for the death of his father Polonius and that he had to avoid confronting the Prince because of Gertrude and the people’s fondness. A messenger arrives with Hamlet’s letter to the King (another is for Gertrude). The letter is ominous, but opportune: it begins, “High and mighty, You shall know I am set naked / on your kingdom” (427, 4.4.42-43), and promises that Hamlet will soon explain his return.
Claudius must now change his plan to satisfy Laertes from simply explaining that he has had him sent to his “present death” in England to cooking up a plot against the still living Hamlet. The King promises Laertes, “I will work him / To an exploit now ripe in my device” (428, 4.4.61-62)—a plan that will keep the blame for Hamlet’s death away from them.
Claudius now sees in Laertes his earthly salvation: the young hothead promises that he would do no less to Hamlet than “cut his throat i’th’ church” (429, 4.4.125). Claudius therefore lays out the plot he has contrived (406, 4.4.84-88): a fencing match since the King knows Hamlet is jealous of Laertes’s reputation, and Laertes will choose an unblunted rapier.
Laertes adds a master stroke—he will dip the rapier’s point into a lethal “unction” (430, 4.4.140) that he bought from an apothecary. As surety, Claudius will offer Hamlet a poisoned wine chalice during the fencing match, just in case the rapier device fails. (430, 4.4.156-60)
The scene with the news that Ophelia has drowned. Gertrude’s beautiful, ekphrastic description of Ophelia’s death (430-31, 4.4.165-82) honors her loss, but it can’t redeem the mistreatment and neglect that caused her untimely end. The death isn’t described as suicide.
Gertrude’s description suggests that Ophelia was attempting to perform a traditional rite of spurned lovers: to hang garlands on willow tree branches. A thin branch broke, and “down her weedy trophies and herself / Fell in the weeping brook” (430, 4.4.172-74). She continued to sing until her clothing became saturated with water and dragged her down. Gertrude describes her as “like a creature native and endued / Unto that element” (430, 4.4.178-79).
From this description, it sounds as if Ophelia simply didn’t understand what was happening. So much for Claudius’s command that she should be carefully attended to.
ACT 5
Act 5, Scene 1. (431-37, while digging, a gravedigger and his assistant discuss Christian doctrine on suicide; Hamlet hears the gravedigger singing and muses on the work; Hamlet asks about the future occupant of the pit; the gravedigger casts up another skull and says it’s Yorick’s, a beloved jester; taking hold of the skull, Hamlet meditates on mortality; Ophelia’s funeral party arrives; Laertes quarrels with the priests; the body is laid in the grave; Laertes leaps in and trumpets his love for Ophelia and his bitterness against Hamlet; Hamlet, incensed, declares himself, and a fight ensues; Hamlet is escorted from the scene by Horatio, and Claudius reminds Laertes about their plot.)
The Gravedigger scene is sandwiched between the announcement of Ophelia’s death and the violent deaths of Hamlet’s main characters in 5.2. This vignette serves as comic relief, of course, but it also gives us and Hamlet a broader perspective on what has happened so far.
The Gravedigger calmly goes about his business, which is death itself since everyone will one day need his services. Some of his jests, say the Norton editors, refer to an actual law case concerning suicide. (Hales v. Petit, 1558; see Shakespeare Law Library.) We will get no maudlin meditations from the Gravedigger; he’s full of riddles and legal-eagle shop-talk. The crux is, “If the man go to this water and drown / himself, it is, willy-nilly, he goes, mark you that. But if the / water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself” (431, 5.1.15-17).
That seems like a humane conclusion for Ophelia’s case since, if we follow Gertrude’s description, Ophelia did not “go to” the brook and drown herself. She seems to have clutched a branch that broke, and to have then fallen into the brook in a state of madness.
After this discussion, the Gravedigger sings and tosses up a skull. This act spurs Hamlet’s philosophical musings on the universality of death—the skull so casually tossed up and aside becomes a memento mori object, common in Medieval and Early Modern times. Hamlet conjectures the skull “might be the pate of / a politician …” (433, 5.1.70-71), or a courtier.
Another skull is thrown to the surface, and Hamlet wonders if it might be “the skull of a lawyer.” If it is, “Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his / cases, his tenures, and his tricks? Why does he suffer this / mad knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty / shovel, and will not tell him of his action of battery?” (433, 5.1.89-92)
Hamlet’s questions compel us to admit that the law’s fine points, its emphasis on procedures and rules and court decorum, its concerns for the minutiae of property deeds, etc., matter not a whit when a lawyer dies—at least, not to him.
This happens when the Gravedigger tosses up yet another skull, and this time he recognizes the identity: Yorick, Hamlet Sr’s court jester when the Prince was a little boy, 23 years ago.
At the sight of this skull, Hamlet turns sad: “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio—a fellow of / infinite jest, of most excellent fancy” (435, 5.1.166-67). His loving childhood memories confront his nausea at the ugly sight of a skull, and he admonishes any fine lady at her cosmetics table that her efforts are nil: “to this / favor she must come” (435, 5.1.174-75). What happened to Yorick will happen to her, Alexander the Great, and Julius Caesar.
It was a Medieval saying that “life is loan,” and Greek and Roman Stoicism and Epicureanism were developed in part to allay the fear of death. Nobody goes broke trading on this fear.
Still, as others have pointed out, Hamlet’s confrontation with death has a kind of freshness, as if he really is facing this fact of life for the first time. Perhaps it’s always like that: the shock of death never quite wears off, so that every earnest consideration of it seems like the first.
Hamlet’s meditations end abruptly when he and Horatio see a funeral procession, truncated to support only “maimed rites” (435, 5.1.198), coming towards the burial grounds. Hamlet and Horatio stand to one side to avoid detection, and Laertes begins wrangling with the priests.
Why is Ophelia being carried to her burial with so little ceremony? The priest’s reply is that “Her death was doubtful” (436, 5.1.206). Laertes responds with scorn, and Hamlet recognizes the body to be that of Ophelia.
Gertrude scarcely has time to say, “Sweets to the sweet. / Farewell. / I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife …” (436, 5.1.222-23) when there ensues a bit of graveside theater of the absurd (or bad reality TV), an outrageous contest between Laertes and Hamlet over who loved Ophelia more. At least one of the men (Laertes) actually jumps into her grave.
This is not how Hamlet meant to reveal himself to the King, but events have got the better of him, so he vents. The two men have ruined Ophelia’s funeral as thoroughly as if they’d both spent three days planning. It’s one final, if unpremeditated, insult to the hapless Ophelia.
What has Hamlet learned from his brief sojourn in the graveyard, and indeed by means of some of his experiences in Act 4? He now fully appreciates that the earthly prize of a kingdom, of reputation, of a patch of land one may go or be sent to fight for, is a thing more to be mocked than contended for. He has confronted the universality of death earnestly thanks to the Gravedigger and Yorick’s skull, and Ophelia has demonstrated it for him by her death.
Why does all this matter? Perhaps because if the demanded and sometime-sought-for revenge is to be accomplished, it can only happen when Hamlet’s mind isn’t tainted by pride, anger, or earthly attachment. Hamlet is not merely a Romantic dreamer or a distant intellectual, but he is a peculiar kind of revenger, and his meditation on death is vital. Why, indeed, should we cling to life? And why should we try to control the outcomes of our actions?
These are questions that Hamlet is able to ask now, and in a manner that the “To be, or not to be” soliloquy in Act 3, Scene 1 addressed brilliantly, but on a more abstract level. In the final scene, we will see Hamlet addressing these “big questions” in a more effectual way.
Act 5, Scene 2. (437-47, Hamlet tells Horatio how he returned to Denmark: discovering R & G’s orders to shepherd him to his death in England, Hamlet used his own royal seal to rewrite the commission so that they should be executed instead; Osric delivers the King’s challenge to a fencing match; Hamlet accepts; Gertrude drinks to Hamlet’s success from the poisoned chalice; Hamlet declines to drink; Laertes wounds Hamlet with his poisoned rapier, and is wounded by Hamlet with the same weapon; the Queen collapses and dies, indicating the drink; Laertes reveals the truth; Hamlet stabs the King and forces him to drink poison; Hamlet and Laertes exchange forgiveness, and Laertes dies; Hamlet calls upon Horatio to tell his story; Hamlet offers his dying support to Fortinbras; Hamlet dies, and Fortinbras expresses shock; the English ambassador asks who is to thank him for bringing news that “R & G are dead”; Horatio promises to reveal all to Fortinbras and the assembled lords; Fortinbras claims the kingdom and orders military rites for Hamlet.)
Taking Horatio back to his time aboard a ship on the way to England and his death, Hamlet relates his impatience to know the “grand commission” (438, 5.2.18) of R & G.
In searching and finding what he sought, Hamlet tells Horatio, he learned an important lesson: “Our indiscretion sometime serves us well / When our deep plots do fall, and that should learn us / There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will . . .” (438, 5.2.8-11). This known—namely, his head is to be parted from his trunk as soon as he arrives—Hamlet forges a new commission requesting that R & G be executed in England, without time for Christian shriving.
Many critics view Hamlet’s “rashness” in stabbing Polonius as a fault—it’s what led Claudius to pack him off to England for immediate execution—but the Prince does not see things that way. He sees that awful incident as providential to a degree that he could not appreciate at the time. He also calmly justifies to a shocked Horatio the lethal trick he played on R & G.
In the 1623 Folio, Hamlet says dismissively, “Why, man, they did make love to this employment,” and continues, “They are not near my conscience; their defeat / Does by their own insinuation grow. / ‘Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes / Between the pass and fell incensèd points / Of mighty opposites” (439, 5.2.56.1, 57-61). In the grand struggle between Hamlet and Claudius, R & G are insignificant, and the absurdity of their fate seems weirdly appropriate.
Hamlet also brings up a new motive to Horatio: “He that hath killed my king and whored my mother” has also “Popped in between th’election and my hopes” (439, 5.2.64-65). Claudius’s hasty marriage to Gertrude has deprived Hamlet of his succession to the throne. The Oedipal significance of this remark is that Claudius has come between Hamlet and Gertrude.
Hamlet accepts Oscric’s fencing match offer, overriding Horatio: “We defy augury. There is special provi- / dence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be, / ‘tis not to come; if it / be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will / come; the readiness is all” (442, 5.2.191-94; Matthew 10:29, Luke 12:7). This match is not of Hamlet’s making, but he will accept the outcome.
If we take a providential view, Hamlet’s reliance on the significance and order implicit even in “the fall of a sparrow” may be the insight, the “right attitude,” that he has been in search of. (“Right attitude” is a Buddhist term we might import for its resonance; see also Krishna to Arjuna on action/outcome in the Gita.) The Prince must not be an agent of vengeance for his own part or even on his father’s say-so, but an instrument of God’s vengeance, which, the idea goes, will somehow turn the schemes of Claudius and Laertes against them.
We might recall that R & G, although all too willing to bend the knee to an earthly ruler’s designs, nonetheless went to their deaths as instruments of forces larger than they could imagine, so in an ironic sense, they have shown Hamlet the way.
In the end, Claudius’s insidious plan is frustrated, and his union with Gertrude is nullified when she drinks the poisoned wine, responding, “I will, my Lord” (444, 5.2.268) to Claudius’s feeble “Gertrude, do not drink” (444, 5.2.267). There’s an Augustinian lesson to be drawn from this: the wicked will ultimately will find a way to destroy themselves; they are consistent in repeating their patterns of evil. (See also Hopkins’s sonnet, “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day,” which ends, “I see / The lost are like this, and their scourge to be / As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.”
Hamlet gains no earthly reward but death for his takedown of Claudius and Laertes, the latter of whom, at least, reconciles with the Prince.
Hamlet checks Horatio’s impulse to commit suicide, and lays upon him the burden of preserving his “wounded name” (446, 5.2.322). Horatio is to tell Hamlet’s “story”—“report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied” (446, 5.2.317-18).
In the wake of the old order’s self-destruction, Fortinbras and other listeners will hear from Horatio of “purposes mistook, / Fall’n on th’inventors’ heads” (447, 5.2.362-63). This will in no way give him the full story, but it will have to do. (A point made by M. Garber in Shakespeare After All.)
In marches Young Fortinbras, accompanied by his guards and a couple of English ambassadors, and he is curious to learn what dreadful thing has happened at Elsinore. He has arrived in the wake of the Danish royal order’s self-destruction, and the kingdom is his.
Although the young man refrains from gloating, he is of course reversing the defeat of his own father at the hands of Hamlet’s much-revered warrior father, Hamlet Sr. There is really no question of Fortinbras’s being a superior ruler. Fortinbras is simply an opportunist who has come at a lucky time—an outcome that scarcely amounts to a purification of the state of Denmark, if that was ever the play’s objective.
Finally, whatever cast we may want to put upon Hamlet, it is a curious revenge tragedy in that it largely denies agency to the very character who is responsible for ensuring that the play’s villain gets what he deserves, and yet the revenge “gets itself accomplished” in the strangest but also most appropriate manner.
In Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom suggests that this most enigmatic of tragic characters overflows the production that hosts him: his subjectivity is more complex than even a sophisticated drama such as Hamlet can absorb, or use to get its action performed. Aristotle wrote nearly two millennia before Shakespeare’s time that in tragedy, plot is the most important element, followed by character. It’s hard to conjure a play that more thoroughly turns that dictum on its head.
Faced with the productive difficulty of a misfit between the hero’s excessive capacities and an action that needs completing, it’s no wonder that Shakespeare chose to end the play with an unsettling mixture of comic absurdity and military gravity. The English Ambassador, flummoxed, declares “The ears are senseless that should give us hearing to tell him his commandment is fulfilled / That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead” (447, 5.2.347-49). Fortinbras, for his part, honors Hamlet: “for his passage / The soldier’s music and the rite of war / Speak loudly for him” (447, 5.2.376-78).
Edition. Greenblatt, Stephen et al., editors. The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies + Digital Edition. 3rd ed. W. W. Norton, 2016. ISBN-13: 978-0-393-93860-9.
Copyright © 2012, revised 2024 Alfred J. Drake
Endnotes have been removed from these “teaching notes.” They may be found in the author’s full commentary on Hamlet.
Last Updated on November 13, 2024 by ajd_shxpr