Hamlet – A. J. Drake's Shakespeare Site

Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from the 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 providential prerogatives. [1] But this interpretation of revenge clashes with a more ancient one that’s easily seen at work in Classical literature: in Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy The Oresteia, for instance, Orestes would be wrong not to take vengeance on his father Agamemnon’s killer. How could Orestes not kill Clytemnestra? He and we know that such an act will bring the Furies down upon his head, but it must be done in spite of the penalty incurred. [2]

The Elizabethans also love a good Senecan-style revenge tragedy, [3] as the popularity of Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy [4] shows, but in Hamlet, Shakespeare—author of the bloody revenge play Titus Andronicus [5] —seems to face most squarely the theological dilemma revenge entails.

Skepticism. There is something to the idea that Hamlet is a man out of his time, and not fit to be a tragic hero. [6] That’s true even if his problem isn’t “delay,” although the Prince accuses himself of it. He makes his share of false assumptions and rash mistakes. We can say only half in jest that Hamlet’s problem may be that he has read Montaigne’s Essays [7] and soaked in too much of their epistemological skepticism. The play’s proddings toward revenge don’t seem solid to Hamlet: there is only a ghost who tells him what he wants to hear; namely, that Uncle Claudius is stealing Gertrude’s attention and her son’s kingdom, so the traitor must be paid back.

Recognition. At what point in the play does Hamlet attain clarity about the nature of his actions? He must have come round to the idea that he needs to let things shape up as they may. But exactly how he has come that far isn’t clear to everyone.

Perhaps Hamlet’s realization is due to a number of experiences: facing the shock of Ophelia’s death; meditating on that army going to its death “even for an eggshell” [8]; bantering with a sexton or gravedigger; encountering the jester Yorick’s skull as an object of meditation; escaping from the ship that was taking him to his death in England; being ransomed by pirates at sea; experiencing conflicted feelings about Ophelia and Gertrude; facing conflicting feelings about being a young man with his whole life ahead of him, and yet compelled to give his life for the honor of an elder—his dead father. In this specific sense, Laertes is right when he lectures Ophelia about the Prince: “his greatness weighed, his will is not his own” (369, 1.3.17).

In The Poetics, [9] Aristotle says that well-crafted tragedies turn upon the hero’s arriving at some fundamental insight (anagnorisis, recognition) about the mistake he or she has made. If we want to characterize Hamlet’s insight into his situation, what should we say is the insight, and what has led him to it? We might connect this question to Hamlet’s musings during Act 5 Scene 1, the “Gravedigger” scene. What finally makes the play’s resolution possible—is it that Hamlet has been unable to act and something now makes him able to do so, or should the resolution be accounted for in some other way? [10]

Hamlet’s Romantic-Style Subjectivity. One of Shakespeare’s best-known critics, the late Harold Bloom, wrote that Hamlet, thanks to his intense interiority and complexity, overflows the revenge tragedy that hosts him. Bloom’s notion is a modernization of the Romantic-Era conception of the Prince of Denmark as a man who, to borrow his own words, is “out of joint” with, and indeed superior to, the straightforward action-hero task that has been handed to him by the ghost of his murdered father.

As modern readers, it seems worthwhile to register our own sensibilities about this interesting conception of Hamlet’s protagonist—do we arrive at a perspective on Hamlet similar to those of Bloom and the Romantics, or do we form a different opinion of this most complex of Shakespeare’s “tragic heroes”? [11]

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 outside Elsinore Castle. The ghost materializes, but says nothing, and the men ponder its purpose. Horatio suggests acquainting Hamlet with this news: surely the Hamlet Sr.-like ghost will address his son.)

As the play opens, Barnardo and Francisco are waiting for the changing of their watch at Elsinore Castle, and Marcellus shows up in good time. Marcellus and Barnardo have apparently seen a strange apparition twice, and Marcellus has invited Hamlet’s skeptical, philosophical friend Horatio along to watch with them tonight. Horatio remains dubious, and, says Marcellus, “will not let belief take hold of him” (359, 1.1.23).

All the same, before Marcellus can even explain in detail the circumstances of the previous two visitations, the hoped-for third materializes, looking just like the late and renowned King of Denmark, Hamlet Sr. Even Horatio is a believer now, though the Ghost has nothing to say to him any more than it did to the watchmen previously.

Still, the Ghost (now gone) appears to have been dressed in full battle armor, so Horatio offers what sounds like a plausible conjecture about the Ghost’s purpose: he suspects that the apparition’s presence “bodes some strange eruption to our state” (360, 1.1.68), meaning that the eerie specter intends to issue some security-grounded warning. Marcellus and Barnardo, after all, are on watch because young Fortinbras is planning to take back territory his father had lost to Hamlet Sr. Denmark is expecting trouble, so perhaps the Ghost has come to reinforce that expectation.

Barnardo supposes much the same when he says, “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 feel foreboding and a sickness at heart, but they have only general knowledge, and as it will turn out, their surmises do not really address the Ghost’s purpose for visiting the living in Denmark.

Horatio’s main idea is to seek out Hamlet and have him engage with the Ghost. It seems logical to him that the young Prince will be able to attain particular, intimate knowledge of the spirit’s purpose. As Horatio says, “upon my life / This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him” (362, 1.1.169-70). That assumption, as we’ll soon find, proves true.

Act 1, Scene 2. (363-69, Claudius and Gertrude hold court at Elsinore, sending ambassadors to Norway to thwart young Fortinbras’s military threat; Claudius allows Polonius’s son Laertes to head for France, but, with Gertrude, disapproves of Hamlet’s protracted mourning and his desire to return to his studies at Wittenberg; in soliloquy, Hamlet broods on his father’s death and his mother’s hasty remarriage to Claudius; Horatio, Marcellus, and Barnardo inform Hamlet about his father’s ghost; Hamlet questions them sharply, but agrees to join the next watch.)

Our first impression of the Danish Court comes in the person and voice of the new king, Claudius, who has married his sister-in-law Gertrude not long after the sudden death of his brother, King Hamlet Sr. Claudius is a skillful speaker in his way, but his ceremonious rhetoric betrays a schizoid sense of his own conduct: as he says, 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).

There is a kind of derangement underlying this sort of talk, even if Claudius means only to come across as measured in his emotions, speech, and expectations. As such, the new king’s scoffing at young Fortinbras’ supposition that Denmark is “disjoint and out of frame” (363, 1.2.20) is already a bit ironic, even before the disorder in Claudius’s realm makes itself more apparent.

In any event, Claudius duly sends Cornelius and Voltemand off to conduct official business with Old Norway, the uncle of the troublesome Fortinbras, and decorously accedes to his chief advisor Polonius’s request that his son Laertes should be allowed to return to France. The King has a point when he rounds on his mourning nephew Hamlet and asks him, “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?” (364, 1.2.66)

To Claudius and even to Gertrude, Hamlet’s grief seems impolitic, self-indulgent, even prideful—at least to them, who must face the realities of governing a kingdom. We might say that it’s “reasonable” to be unreasonable and immoderate about grieving, but that is perhaps too modern a sentiment by which to judge medieval characters, who lived more intensely and insistently with death than we do today. Gertrude speaks more eloquently than Claudius when she says to the brooding 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, / Passing through nature to eternity” (364, 1.2.70-73).

Hamlet’s response already shows signs of the intense interiority that will cause him so much inward conflict later in the play, but which also makes him the strong and remarkable character that he is: 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 after Claudius posts his own response, which is characteristically both ostensibly loving and undoubtedly castigating, 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). In this self-unburdening, Hamlet laments that God has already “fixed / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter” (363, 1.2.131-32), reproaches the general run of females in the person of Gertrude—“Frailty, thy name is woman” (363, 1.2.146)—and profoundly disparaging Claudius in comparison with Hamlet, Sr. The latter was, says the Prince, “Hyperion” to Claudius’s “satyr” (363, 1.2.140), which, in his view, makes Gertrude’s choice to remarry so hastily all the more contemptible.

Hamlet’s imagination at this point, even before he hears the ghost’s damning information, seems morbid: he sees the whole world as “an unweeded garden / That grows to seed” (363, 1.2.135-36), one inhabited entirely by “things rank and gross in nature” (363, 1.2.136). Hamlet seems to play with the amount of time that has passed between the old king’s death and Gertrude’s marriage, and the concession that she was apparently in genuine sorrow for her first husband only makes her subsequent conduct more unacceptable.

Hamlet is already obsessed with the dark intimation that people are not what they seem: Gertrude is not the loyal wife she seemed, and Claudius is not the rightful and righteous successor that the court and the people apparently believe he is.

Hamlet also knows, however, that he must repress this feeling in public: “But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (366, 1.2.159). Privately, things are different: when Horatio, Marcellus, and Barnardo come to acquaint him with what has occurred during the watch, Hamlet already seems to suspect that “some foul play” (369, 1.2.255) was involved in his father’s death or that “foul play” is now afoot, even though his questioning of Horatio about the ghost’s appearance indicates genuine uncertainty about its provenance and mission.

The Prince’s scene-ending thought about what has been related to him is, “Foul deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes” (369, 1.2.256-57). Hamlet doesn’t know it yet, but he is about to receive his orders as a revenger, and his response to those orders will be anything but simple.

Act 1, Scene 3. (369-72, Laertes takes his leave of his sister Ophelia, lecturing her about Hamlet’s high rank and the untrustworthiness of his love-vows; Ophelia teases him about his own moral challenges; Polonius regales Laertes with sound but tedious advice, then reinforces his son’s warnings to Ophelia about Hamlet, forbidding her even to speak with him in future.)

Laertes has evidently been taught well in the arts of windbaggery by his father Polonius since he lectures Ophelia sententiously about the dangers of giving in to the importunate suit of a lustful young man far above her station. (369-70, 1.3.10-49) This advice is sound enough as such things go. Hamlet is, after all, a Prince, so he is not free to love as he wishes without thought of Denmark. Still, as Gertrude later admits when Ophelia is dead, she had hoped the two lovers would in fact marry—the difference in rank apparently never bothered the Queen at all.

In any event, Ophelia holds her own against Laertes, showing that while circumstances may constrain her, she is not lacking in understanding or the courage to speak her own mind. She tells her brother, “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 soon arrives and first offers Laertes some sound but rather tedious advice, such as the famous “Neither a borrower nor a lander be” (370, 1.3.74). To Ophelia, Polonius offers less amiable advice, accusing Ophelia of naivety about Hamlet’s intentions and showing that he himself reads the character of others as a function of stereotypes: Hamlet is a young, lusty bachelor, and is therefore not to be trusted, quite aside from his status as a prince. (371, 1.3.89ff) The sum total of it is, “I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth / Have you so slander any moment leisure / As to give words or 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 enjoying an alcohol-saturated party; the Ghost appears and beckons only to Hamlet to follow him; Hamlet’s friends fear for his safety, but he will not be restrained, and is determined to follow the Ghost.)

At the beginning of Scene 4, 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. In his 1948 film adaptation of the play, Laurence Olivier quotes directly from this passage and applies the words to the Prince himself, who by implication suffers from “some vicious mole of nature” (372, 1.4.24) not with regard to alcohol but rather in that sense that he cannot “make up his mind.” [12]

This is an overstatement, perhaps, since there is good reason to doubt the purposes of a ghost such as the one Hamlet sees in this scene for the first time, as he seems to agree when he first encounters the Ghost: “What may this mean, / That thou, dead corpse, again in complete steel / Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon . . . ?” (373, 1.4.51-53)

Hamlet is not as yet certain what to think of this strange apparition. All the same, he is so determined to follow this otherworldly visitor that he actually threatens to harm the friends who have brought him to encounter it: “By heaven,” he shouts, “I’ll make a ghost of him that lets me” (374, 1.4.85). [13]

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 from the encounter, Hamlet warns his friends never to reveal what they have witnessed, and to expect some “antic,” wild-seeming behavior from him in the near future.)

The Ghost affirms that he is indeed Hamlet’s departed father, and then recounts in bloodcurdling detail exactly what happened to him and who is responsible for it. This information elicits from Hamlet an excited “Oh, my prophetic soul!” (375, 1.5.41), as if he had suspected all along that Claudius had killed his father. The terms the Ghost uses to describe both Claudius and Gertrude are strongly reminiscent of the very ones Hamlet had used shortly before. For example, he complains with genuine-seeming disgust that Gertrude has married “a wretch whose natural gifts were poor / To those of mine” (375, 1.5.51-52).

The command to take revenge could not be clearer: Hamlet is told, “bear it not; / Let not the royal bed of Denmark be / A couch for luxury and damned incest” (376, 1.5.81-83). At the same time, there is the all but impossible co-equal demand, “Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive / Against thy mother aught …” (376, 1.5.85-86). It seems reasonable to suggest that within the play-world, the Ghost “really” exists.

Still, the Ghost’s utterances at times so closely coincide with Hamlet’s prior thoughts that it’s almost as if the Prince is talking to himself. Either way, Hamlet seems utterly convinced, at least in the moment, and once Hamlet Sr. vanishes into the air, the son commits himself to the heavy task that his dead father lays upon him.

Or at least that’s how it seems until we consider the matter in somewhat more detail. On the one hand, near the beginning of the Ghost’s recounting, we heard Hamlet proclaim that he wanted nothing less than revenge, to be accomplished “with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love …” (375, 1.5.29-31).

But by the end of the Ghost’s speech and immediately after his departure, Hamlet’s metaphor shifts in a way that may well give us pause: he vows to the now absent Ghost, “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 wax-writing-tablet metaphor seems sincere and meant to give us a sense of the purity of his desire for revenge, but it’s slightly comic in that Hamlet, a young man who has become a byword for deferral and delay, speaks of writing at the very instant when he says he is most certain of his desire to act: “make a note to myself, take revenge,” so to speak. This is not the sort of thing one expects from a dedicated revenger. Revengers may be stymied or confused for a time, but they don’t need a note, so to speak, to remind them to keep revenge on their calendars. [14]

In any event, when Hamlet returns to his friends Marcellus, Barnardo, and Horatio, he seems reluctant to let them in fully on what has just happened to him. He swears them all to secrecy in the most extravagant manner, and tells his old friend, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (378, 1.5.168-69), and says that he may find it necessary to “put an antic disposition on” (378, 1.5.173). This is no doubt frustrating to the friends who have made Hamlet’s revelatory experience possible.

What are we to make of Hamlet’s concluding words in Scene 5? He admits to his friends, “The time is out of joint—oh, cursèd spite, / That ever I was born to set it right” (378, 1.5.189-90). They seem to indicate both acceptance and world-weariness.

Do these words also indicate a certain indecisiveness or resentment in the face of the task to which Hamlet has been called? It is hard to take them as consonant with the Prince’s initial desire, as he put it, to “sweep to my revenge.” For much of the rest of the play, Hamlet’s alternating enthusiasm and lack of enthusiasm will be a feature to contend with, and we will return to it and the reasons for it as the need arises.

ACT 2

Act 2, Scene 1. (378-81, Polonius enjoins his servant Reynaldo to travel to Paris to gather intelligence about Laertes’s conduct there; Ophelia enters, distressed by Hamlet’s strange behavior—the Prince seems addled; Polonius presumes that Hamlet is love-mad for Ophelia and resolves to tell the King at once.)

Polonius is both an endearing character, full of well-intentioned, if comically delivered, advice to his children (and the royal couple) and a meddling intelligencer who deals with those same children in a sneaky, underhanded way. He sets spies on Laertes to find out if the young fellow is behaving (379-80, 2.1.1-71), and, having previously ordered Ophelia to stay away from Hamlet, he now insists that she accompany him to relate to Claudius the Prince’s strange behavior—namely, his bizarre sighing and strange state of undress: “Come, go with me; I will go seek the King. / This is the very ecstasy of love …” (381, 2.1.98-99).

To be fair, at this point Polonius’s assumption that Hamlet’s distraction is due to lovesickness seems reasonable, based upon what Ophelia has just told him.

Act 2, Scene 2. (381-94, warned by Polonius, 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 soon in watching Hamlet’s conversation with Ophelia; Hamlet mocks Polonius with wild quips; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern engage with Hamlet, and he gets them to admit that they were “sent for.” (SYNOPSIS CONTINUES …)

Everybody’s favorite nobodies 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 that troublesome issue of young Fortinbras “sharking up” an army of ruffians to take back what his father lost to the Danes: now the young blade wants only to use Denmark’s territory as a marching ground on his way to Poland, where he has other fighting to do. (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) Together these remarks suggest that Hamlet has been putting on a good show, taking up his “antic disposition” early in the game since “lunacy” would not be the right term with which to describe his initial surliness and melancholia in Act 1.

The Prince must, we presume, act in such a manner as to draw Claudius beyond his semi-comfortable geniality towards Hamlet, and into the active agent’s circle of consequence and blood revenge. Polonius is certainly moved to act: he 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).

This determination is made stronger still when Hamlet wanders into the scene and Polonius engages him (sans Ophelia as yet) in a strange conversation that is afterwards carried on with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern after Polonius exits. Not realizing the irony of his formalistic amazement at Hamlet’s “pregnant replies,” Polonius admiringly says, “Though this be madness, yet there is / method in’t” (386, 2.2.201-02).

Hamlet receives his old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern kindly, and he deftly, but gently, unmasks their dishonesty preparatory to his later, much harsher dealings with them. After the pair admit that they were indeed “sent for” (387, 2.2.237, 254), Hamlet suggests that the King and Queen are worried about his mopishness, nothing more, and he immediately utters one of the most famous invocations in Shakespeare.

It is usually read as a piece of Renaissance humanism, one that exudes aliveness to the beauty of a world that people were beginning to see afresh after centuries of medieval otherworldliness: “What 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 in its entirety should remind us how potent the concept of the Great Chain of Being was during Shakespeare’s time. [15]

Of course, Hamlet says all this only to bring the whole “majestical roof fretted with / golden fire” (388, 2.2.262-63) down on our heads, reminding us that we are but the most refined sod in the cosmos, a very “quintessence of dust” (388, 2.2.269). This letdown is deepened by Rosencrantz’s quibbling interpretation of Hamlet’s remark “Man delights not me” (388, 2.1.269), and the whole thing leads directly to the announcement that a troupe of actors (“players”) is on the way to Elsinore. (388, 2.2.274-77)

Hamlet and Rosencrantz talk briefly about what the audience surely would have recognized to be the current state of Elizabethan theater—delightfully implausible as that may be since, of course, the setting is medieval Denmark—with Rosencrantz’s estimation hardly amounting to a positive review. He calls the boy actors who are so popular of late “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). If we are to believe Rosencrantz, the mannerisms of child actors have become an object of mockery with their crude, bombastic acting. [16]

In the course of this conversation, Hamlet slips in an oddly confessional remark, probably intended to rattle Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “I am but mad north-northwest; when the wind is / southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw” (389, 2.2.306-07).

If the English stage is in turmoil, Denmark is disturbed as well; things aren’t what they seem. After suitably mocking Polonius’s silly announcement that the players have arrived at Elsinore, comparing him to the biblical figure Jephthah [17] 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 especially rapt interest as the Player recounts the moment at which Achilles’s son Pyrrhus, carrying out the task of taking revenge against the Trojan King Priam for his slain father, nevertheless pauses briefly and seems unable to act. (392, 2.2.399-404) But after this momentary pause, Pyrrhus returns with all swiftness to his bloody task and carries it out. [18]

As for Hecuba’s grief at the murder of her husband, the player makes it seem so natural that even he gets worked up imitating it. Unlike the First Player, Hamlet faces such a situation in real life—he has a murdered father to avenge—so why doesn’t he act at once? (393, 2.2.468-77) Things are so much simpler in fiction; a noble lie or mere 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, as the end of his soliloquy shows: “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).

Basing his plan on the literary gossip that “guilty creatures sitting at a play / Have by the very cunning of the scene / … / … proclaim’d their malefactions” (394, 2.2.508-11), Hamlet invests much hope in his additions to The Murder of Gonzago as a means of discovering certainty in the guilty visage of Claudius. This plan does not give us license to despise fiction as the mere opposite of “real life”—in this instance, the public and political realm, the world of cold, hard reality and necessity, is exactly what allows Claudius to keep his murderous nature hidden from everyone but himself.

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 seems likely to elicit a deep, gut-level response from the usurper-king.

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 sets Ophelia in a spot where he and Claudius can watch her talking with Hamlet; the Prince soon begins speaking harshly to her, saying he never loved her, asking where her father is, spewing misogyny, and taunting her with, “get thee to a nunnery”; Ophelia is heartbroken; Claudius sees that this alleged madness has nothing to do with lovesickness, and plans to pack Hamlet off to England to collect tribute from that country; Polonius urges Claudius first to allow Gertrude to speak with Hamlet after the play.)

The King tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to encourage this new business of the players’ coming to Elsinore. (395, 3.1.26-27) Perhaps it will draw out the reason for Hamlet’s eccentric behavior. He and Polonius will conceal themselves to hear Hamlet talk with Ophelia. (395, 3.1.42-43)

But first, Hamlet utters 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 confront the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”—the various blows and insults life throws at one—and bear them in the intellect, harbor them perhaps as partially deadened passions; or whether it is better to bury and ultimately kill consciousness in furious action.

It’s clear that Hamlet is drawn to this latter course, but any resolution stemming from that attraction is blunted by the soliloquy’s other main point, which is to say that our ignorance of what comes after death keeps us from acting on our resolutions in this life, 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 virtue maintaining itself in a corrupt world: “Get thee to a nunnery!” (397, 3.1.119) probably means just that—remove yourself from this wicked world, and seek shelter from the “arrant knaves” who go about in it. Hamlet denies that he ever established any relationship with Ophelia, that he ever made any promises, saying, “I loved you not” (397, 3.1.116-17). He asks Ophelia where her father is (397, 3.1.127), a line usually taken to indicate that he knows he’s being overheard.

At line 142, Hamlet seems to lose his composure in a way that does not seem entirely scripted, and he utters words that frighten Claudius: “I say we will have no / more marriage. Those that are married already—all but one—shall live” (398, 3.1.143-45)

Claudius derives from this outburst the thought that Hamlet’s disturbed state of mind is “not like madness” (398, 3.1.161), so he must be watched even more closely. The Prince’s “melancholy,” says Claudius (whose guilt had already been spurred by Polonius’ unwitting words about “sugar[ing] o’er” (395, 3.1.47) the most damnable deeds with piousness), “sits on brood” (398, 3.1.162) over something still darker, and that is what he finds most troubling about the young man’s hostility toward him.

Act 3, Scene 2. (399-408, Hamlet lectures the players on their craft, and solicits Horatio to watch King’s reaction to the play; with everyone seated, Hamlet makes lewd and unpleasant remarks to Ophelia; the actors perform a dumbshow and then a play with dialogue, the story 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. (SYNOPSIS CONTINUES …)

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).

Aside from any ontological issues it may raise, Hamlet’s remark is a moral statement akin to what we may find in Samuel Johnson much later: actors should display virtue as it is, and compel vice to confront itself head on. [19] Hamlet means to do just that by means of his spectacle: simply showing and then speaking Claudius’s sin should make that sin’s effects register on his countenance. (400, 3.2.70-79) No embellishment is necessary for such a hideous offense as that of Claudius, and working together, Hamlet and Horatio plan to read it on the man’s face, and in his gestures.

A Dumb Show soon follows (402, 3.2.122ff, stage directions). It is an eerie scene that shows Claudius what he has done, no more, no less, and so the images of this silent preview of the play-within-the-play’s action prime Claudius’s imagination and conscience for the blows still to come when the “talkie” version hits him. We might even say that this strange, silent presentation speaks to Claudius in a direct way that it couldn’t possibly do with respect to anyone else in the room, with the possible exception of Hamlet himself.

Next, the briefest of prologues is spoken, asking for the audience’s patience. Then the Player King and Queen preview the plot, in the process 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 after many years of faithful union, he may not be long for this world, and expresses the wish that his Queen may find another faithful husband. The Player Queen’s shocking reply to this wish is, “None wed the second but who killed the first” (403, 3.2.164), strangely and in almost proverbial form implicating herself in her own husband’s death, or at least in a betrayal that in effect amounts to murder.

The Player King offers his Queen some worldly but distressing wisdom: she may firmly believe what she says now, but once he is dead, her resolution will quickly and inevitably 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, suggests the Player King, are not things we can simply will to remain constant: they are subject to circumstance, to fate, and to the needs of the body.

Claudius’s annoyance shows as soon as he hears this preamble: he asks Hamlet, “Have you heard the argument? Is there no offense in’t?” (404, 3.2.216) Hamlet the playwright’s words have struck home, and he tells the irritated Claudius, “No, no, they do but jest, poison in jest. No offense i’th’ world” (404, 3.2.217-18). Gertrude’s critical opinion of the Player Queen’s words is, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks” (404, 3.2.214)—a point that is easily re-aimed at Claudius, whose anger is so easily sparked, perhaps, because he has insistently failed to consider the consequences of his evil actions. 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)—a mention that underscores the Dumb Show’s images and is unlikely to go unregistered by Claudius.

Then, too, Hamlet is cruelly merry with Ophelia throughout Act 3, Scene 2: he seems to be baiting her and accusing her of lewdness, effectually blaming her for Gertrude’s failings. This kind of treatment of Ophelia is another twist of the knife by Hamlet into her already wounded soul, and it is entirely undeserved. Her grief over what she believed in Act 3, Scene 1 was Hamlet’s descent into madness 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 abusive scheme to use her as bait to draw Hamlet’s mindset out into the open, but at this point, Hamlet seems as determined to spread guilt wherever he can as to pin it where it really belongs, with Claudius. The Ghost had told Hamlet not to taint his mind against Gertrude, but he would have done well to add Ophelia to that protective command.

Still, to be fair, the blame is strongly affixed to Claudius when we reach the point in the so-called Mousetrap where “one Lucianus, nephew to the King” (404, 3.2. 226) shows up on stage with his “drugs fit” and “pours the poison in the Player King’s ears” (stage directions following 405, 3.2.241). Forced to watch his fictive double commit the same dark sin twice (once in the Dumb Show, and now here in the play proper), Claudius says, “Give me some light, away” (405, 3.2.249) and abruptly exits the theater space.

Hamlet and Horatio appear to agree that what they have seen in Claudius’s behavior is more than significant. Horatio’s “I did very well note him” (405, 3.2.269) is not as dramatic as Hamlet’s “I’ll take the Ghost’s word for a thou- / sand pound” (405, 3.2.265-66), but given all the circumstances, it may be taken as confirmation of guilt.

With the King out of the picture for the moment, Hamlet’s anger turns first towards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom he disabuses of any hope that they may “play upon” him like a musical instrument (407, 3.2.344), and then to Gertrude, who is perhaps the main target of the whole scene, so savage is the representation of her role in the disturbing affair of Hamlet Sr’s death. The Prince’s rejection of anyone who thinks he is their instrument is interesting in its own right—at this point, what Hamlet seems to need most of all is to take control of events.

With respect to Gertrude, Hamlet’s words are even harsher than were those in The Murder of Gonzago; 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). Perhaps this violent thought is directed towards Claudius only, but it’s hard to avoid supposing from what follows that it also applies 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 Guildensternto hustle Hamlet off to England; Polonius tells Claudius he will eavesdrop on Hamlet’s talk with Gertrude; alone, Claudius attempts to pray in earnest; Hamlet overhears Claudius, but delays killing him until he is doing something “with no relish of salvation in it”; Claudius admits to himself that since he won’t give up the fruits of his wicked deeds, he can’t pray—he’s damned.)

The King has decided in his panic and rage that Hamlet must be trundled off to England, and Rosencrantz speaks more truly than he knows when he 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 somewhat comforting to Claudius since the political realm itself is like an exoskeleton protecting the usurper-king from the ravages of introspection and from the guilt that comes when one knows one is fending off such inward-tending thoughts. This is the same sort of “tyrant’s plea,” indeed, that accounts for the hollowness of Satan’s rhetoric in Paradise Lost. [20] There is probably no character in literature who thrives more on denial than Milton’s Devil, but self-deluders like Claudius are not far behind.

Alone with his tormenting thoughts, however, Claudius now kneels and tries to confront “the visage of offense” (409, 3.3.47), as he admits is the main use of mercy, but he cannot because he won’t give up his crown or his queen, the fruits of his sin. It’s doubtful whether we are to understand this attempt at repentance as entirely sincere—it is painful to behold a person in such spiritual distress, even if it is his own fault.

Even so, it may be that Claudius isn’t so much sorry for killing the king as determined to indulge himself in remorse, or in what has been called the “luxury of self-reproach.” [21] Is he just feeling sorry for himself? Whatever the truth may be, the results of his kneeling in 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 sorry conclusion, Hamlet reveals his earnestly 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 hardly seems like a proper Christian sentiment—it sounds more like something the revenger in a Senecan tragedy would say. [22] In any case, the ineffectuality of Claudius’s prayer relieves Hamlet of the need to contrive such an outcome: the usurper is completely unable to repent for his mortal sin, or even to take the first necessary steps that would reclaim his chance at salvation.

Act 3, Scene 4. (410-16, with Polonius concealed behind a curtain, Hamlet enters and frightens Gertrude, whose call for help elicits a cry from Polonius; Hamlet stabs Polonius, wrongly assuming he must be the King; Hamlet berates Gertrude for her remarriage and forces her to look within, but the Ghost appears and reminds him that his command is to kill Claudius, not his mother; Gertrude thinks Hamlet is hallucinating; Hamlet tells Gertrude not to sleep with Claudius, and tells her about the King’s plot to send him to England (SYNOPSIS CONTINUES …)

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 the frightened 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, and even accuses her of taking part in Claudius’s murder plot. His killing of Polonius he admits to have been “A bloody deed!” but he continues with, “Almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king and marry with his brother” (411, 3.4.28-29). Gertrude seems genuinely shocked at the suggestion. Hamlet has little time now for the “wretched, rash, intruding fool” (411, 3.4.31) Polonius, a man everyone else held in high regard and with whom they showed considerable patience, and he drives onward to make Gertrude confront her sinfulness as directly as he made Claudius behold his guilt during his staging of The Murder of Gonzago.

Hamlet suggests that Gertrude’s lust is surely not excusable by reference to the heat of youth. At her age, he insists, “The heyday in the blood is tame, it’s humble / And waits upon the judgment” (412, 3.4.69-70). 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).

At this point, Ernest Jones’s Oedipal reading of the play comes into its own, if it hadn’t already. [23] Hamlet can scarcely stand to imagine—and yet can’t help but imagine—his mother in bed with Claudius, where they spend their time “honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty” (412, 3.4.92-94). The Prince’s mother-obsession is so deep that the Ghost must step 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, but the sense of its reality and presence is no less powerful for that.

As for Polonius, to the thought of whom Hamlet now returns, 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, at least to a degree, what he has in mind.

It’s worth noting that what may appear a contradiction to Hamlet’s advice to his mother to avoid sexual intercourse with Claudius is actually reinforcement. The Queen asks, “What shall I do?” and Hamlet responds ironically, “Not this, by no means that I bid you do: / Let the bloat King tempt you again to bed … / [And] Make you to ravel all this matter out / That I essentially am not in madness / But mad in craft” (414-15, 3.4.182-83, 187-89). The rest of Hamlet’s advice makes it clear that he is again telling Gertrude not to reveal any such thing.

Knowing he cannot trust Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are the King’s agents in hustling him off to England, the Prince says nonetheless, “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). He can’t know the precise plan, but speaks with a mixture of fanciful expression and military precision, promising to turn the evildoers’ intended harm back upon them.

Claudius enters after Hamlet’s harrowing encounter with Gertrude, and he is now, by his own admission to his Queen, “full of discord and dismay” (416, 3.4.263) at this turn of events. He knows that Hamlet’s sword was meant for him, and he must try to clean up in a politically sustainable way the damage Hamlet has done in killing the beloved counselor Polonius.

Act 3, Scene 5. (416-17, Hamlet again mocks Rosencrantz and Guildensternas 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 odd remark that “The body is with the King, but the King is not with / the body” (417, 3.5.26-27) most obviously refers to Polonius’ corpse, but it might be interpreted along the lines of the longstanding political doctrine that the king has both a civil or corporate body (imperishable) and a natural, mortal one. [24] In this sense, Hamlet may be making an oblique threat against Claudius.

Act 3, Scene 6. (417-19, Claudius discusses his desperate straits with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; Hamlet, forced to face Claudius, mocks him with reminders of his own mortality and calls him “mother”; the King tells him that he must depart for England at once; 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 “fishing” conversation with the King, which culminates with the fine demonstration that “a king may go a prog- / ress through the guts of a beggar” (418, 3.6.29-30).

The Prince’s implication would seem to be that the adornment and aggrandizing of a king’s decaying body, so easily inducted into the indifferent processiveness of nature, 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 since he has had so much trouble keeping the two apart in his mind.

Claudius is increasingly disturbed by Hamlet’s presence, and even by his very existence: requesting “The present death of Hamlet” (419,3.6.62), Claudius says, “Do it, England, / For like the hectic in my blood he rages / And thou must cure me” (419, 3.6.62-64). But what the King seeks most of all is security: “Till I know ‘tis done, / Howe’er my haps, my joys will ne’er begin” (419, 3.6.64-65). [25]

ACT 4

Act 4, Scene 1. (419-20, Hamlet catches sight of Fortinbras’s army crossing through Denmark to fight in Poland; he casts these men as models of honor, and yet again resolves to take bloody revenge on Claudius the usurper.)

Young Fortinbras seeks conveyance through Denmark on his way to Poland, and the Captain to whom Hamlet speaks doesn’t think much of his assignment: “We go to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name” (419, 4.1.17-18). Hamlet takes the point to heart, making yet another resolution that his mind will contain only thoughts of vengeance from now on. He admires Fortinbras and his men, who, he says, are “Exposing what is mortal and unsure / To all that fortune, death, and danger dare, / Even for an eggshell” (420, 4.1.50-52).

As for Hamlet’s resolution, this time it runs, “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 in the play: Hamlet’s nature is simply not to be contained in or by such revenger’s oaths, if we may endow a literary character with such a thing as a “nature.”

Part of the interest in Hamlet is, of course, that not only is the time “out of joint,” but the hero himself is out of joint, not immediately adapted to the traditional role he must play—a role that is both subservient and heroic in the old medieval fashion. In this way, the Romantic reading of the tragedy, in which Hamlet is too aloof and philosophical to carry out such a task as revenging a murdered father, is worthy of respect.

We might even prefer to read Hamlet’s actions in light of his standing as a young man with his whole life before him, yet subjected to the will of an imperious “dead father.” As such, Hamlet could be construed as yet another casualty of what Freud casts as the longstanding struggle between individuals in their quest for satisfaction and the impossible demands of an often cruel, irrational society. [26]

Act 4, Scene 2. (420-25, Gertrude, anxious, hears that Ophelia has gone mad; Ophelia enters, singing bits of folk songs about death and men’s betrayal of maids; Claudius agonizes over Ophelia’s distress and bids Horatio watch over her; Laertes bursts in at the head of a party of citizens, 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, and provide direction on how to get satisfaction for the event.)

Ophelia is ushered into the presence of Gertrude and causes the Queen much dismay by showing clear signs of madness in her speech and gestures. Gertrude says somewhat obscurely, “To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is, / Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss” (421, 4.2.17-18). Does Gertrude mean that she has resisted giving Ophelia admittance because the young woman’s distracted nonsense might trigger Gertrude’s own guilty conscience? What guilt might she be referring to, then? Ophelia’s songs have to do mainly with death improperly marked and with men’s acts of betrayal against women.

Claudius is moved by Ophelia’s distress, and is no doubt partly right when he 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, even without the song fragments she sings.

Ophelia’s sad condition comes as no surprise, of course, since she has been used even by the father she mourns—used as an agent against Hamlet, dangled before him like a piece of meat to draw out the cause of his own alleged madness, and abandoned by Hamlet, too. In Act 5, Scene 2, Hamlet justifies the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 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, entirely without being the “baser nature” Hamlet speaks of, has paid the price, too, for the unseemly struggles of the men around her.

Claudius seems stricken at the pace of bad events that he and Gertrude now confront. He says to her, “When sorrows come, they come not single spies / But in battalions” (422, 4.2.77-78), and no sooner has he said it than Laertes bursts in with the common folk at his back, shouting him up for the new king.

The young man’s key function is, of course, to present an obvious contrast with Hamlet: unlike the Prince, Laertes is determined to “sweep to his revenge” without delay. He has no scruples about the concept of revenge, shouting at the King and anyone else within earshot, “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, whose treason did much more than “peep to what it would.” What Claudius manages to do by the end of Act 4, Scene 2 is begin to steer Laertes’s rage somewhere else than towards his own person. As always, Claudius is a slick politician, and not the heroic figure that Hamlet Sr. was.

When Ophelia reenters and continues to sing her haunting, fragmentary ballads, Laertes is distracted for a time from his rage, and falls to mourning for his sister’s loss of sanity, which, as Laertes and Claudius themselves point out, may lack coherence but not significance. As for Ophelia’s famous gesture of distributing flowers to her distressed audience, she hands out rosemary (“for remembrance”), pansies (“for thoughts”), fennel, columbines, and rue. Flowers are natural beauties, but they are also, for the Elizabethans far more than for us today, the elements of a kind of language by which to express a whole range of human experience and sentiment. [27]

Ophelia’s mind is disordered, and she registers the corruption and disorder all around her, beautifying it with floral symbolism and songs. She has lost her father, and Gertrude—if we can venture a guess about who gets which flowers—will wear her “rue with a difference” (425, 4.2.170-71, 174-79) because she has lost her son to England. [28] Ophelia is the blighted flower of the kingdom, the beauty and innocence that has been sacrificed for the sake of ambition and lust. Her descent into madness, and soon her death, show the consequences of Denmark’s degeneracy even more clearly, perhaps, than all the play’s violence.

Act 4, Scene 3. (426, a courier gives Horatio a letter from Hamlet telling him how he boarded a pirate ship and how he has managed to return to Denmark; in his letter, Hamlet asks Horatio to make sure the King receives the additional letters intended for him; Hamlet promises Horatio further explanation when they meet in person.)

At Elsinore Castle, Horatio receives a letter from Hamlet telling him that the Prince is back in Denmark after having ended up the sole prisoner of pirates who attempted to take their ship at sea as they crossed over to England. These men expect ransom. Hamlet also indicates that he has enclosed additional letters and that they must be delivered to the King himself, after which Horatio is to depart from Elsinore and rendezvous with Hamlet, who will thereupon offer fuller explanation.

Act 4, Scene 4. (426-31, Claudius tells Laertes in private that Hamlet killed Polonius in attempting to kill Claudius himself; a messenger arrives with Hamlet’s letter, which baffles the King; he promises to help Laertes devise a plot whereby to achieve the revenge he craves against Hamlet; the two of them work up a scheme whereby a fencing match will be arranged and Laertes will wound Hamlet using a poison-tipped rapier and, failing that, the King will poison Hamlet with a chalice full of tainted wine. (SYNOPSIS CONTINUES …)

In private, the King explains to Laertes that Hamlet, not he, is responsible for the death of his father Polonius and that he had to avoid confronting Hamlet because of Gertrude and the people’s fondness for him. Just then, a messenger arrives with Hamlet’s letter addressed to the King (and another one is addressed to Gertrude). The letter is ominous, but also opportune: it begins, “High and mighty, You shall know I am set naked / on your kingdom” (427, 4.4.42-43), and goes on to promise that Hamlet will soon explain the manner in which he has returned.

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 Hamlet. The King thinks quickly and says to Laertes, “I will work him / To an exploit now ripe in my device” (428, 4.4.61-62)—one that, says Claudius, will keep the blame for Hamlet’s death away from him and Laertes.

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 will be proposed since the King knows that Hamlet is jealous of Laertes’s reputation as a fencer, and Laertes will administer a lethal thrust with an unblunted rapier.

Laertes then adds a master stroke—he will dip the rapier’s point into a lethal “unction” (430, 4.4.140) that he bought from some quack apothecary. As surety, Claudius will offer Hamlet a poisoned chalice during the fencing match, just in case the rapier device fails. (430, 4.4.156-60)

The scene concludes with the terrible news that Ophelia has drowned. Gertrude’s beautiful, ekphrastic [29] description of Ophelia’s death (430-31, 4.4.165-82) honors the loss of this innocent soul, but it can’t redeem the mistreatment and neglect that caused her untimely end. The death isn’t described as suicide, even if the “churlish” priests will later treat it as such at Ophelia’s funeral.

We can gather from Gertrude’s presumably imaginative description [30] the following: as Ophelia was attempting to perform a traditional rite of spurned lovers, which was apparently to hang garlands on willow tree branches, a thin branch (“an envious sliver”) broke, and “down her weedy trophies and herself / Fell in the weeping brook” (430, 4.4.172-74). She continued to sing her mad, haunting songs 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, and so she drowned. So much for Claudius’s earlier command that she should be carefully attended to [31]—she just wanders off, it would seem, and drowns in the nearest brook.

ACT 5

Act 5, Scene 1. (431-37, while digging a grave, a gravedigger and his assistant discuss the ethics and subtleties of Christian doctrine on suicide; Hamlet hears the gravedigger singing and muses while he watches him cast up old skulls; stepping forth, Hamlet questions him about the person for whom the grave is being dug, eliciting a battle of wits; the gravedigger casts up another skull and says it’s that of Yorick, a beloved jester during Hamlet’s youth; taking hold of the skull, Hamlet meditates on the all-embracing nature of mortality. (SYNOPSIS CONTINUES ...)

The Gravedigger scene that starts off Act 5 is probably the most famous scene in the entire Shakespearean canon. Sandwiched between the announcement of Ophelia’s death and the violent deaths of Hamlet’s main characters in Act 5, Scene 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 in the face of death; indeed, we might say that his business is death since, after all, everyone will need his services sooner or later. He even jests about the subject. His jests, as the Norton editors inform us, refer to an actual law case concerning the precise nature and legal implications of suicide by drowning. [32] We will get no maudlin speeches or meditative musings from the Gravedigger; he’s full of riddles about the sturdiness of the “houses” that gravediggers build, and fascinating, macabre law cases from decades ago.

The crux of Ophelia’s case, as our trusty legal counsel the Gravedigger has it, 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 with regard to Ophelia since, if we attend to Gertrude’s description of the young woman’s death, she really did not “go to” the brook and deliberately drown herself. Instead, she seems to have clutched a tree branch that broke, and to have then fallen into the brook in a state of extreme distraction so that she couldn’t even conceive the danger she was in.

After this discussion, the Gravedigger sings and tosses up a skull that his spade has encountered in digging a fresh grave. This act spurs Hamlet’s dark philosophical musings on the universality of death—the skull so casually tossed up and aside becomes a memento mori object, [33] something common in Medieval and Early Modern times. Hamlet conjectures that the skull “might be the pate of / a politician …” (433, 5.1.70-71). Or it might belong to a courtier.

Another skull is thrown to the surface, and Hamlet wonders if it might be “the skull of a lawyer.” And 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 all of the law’s fine points, its emphasis on procedures and rules and court decorum, its concerns for the minute details of things like property deeds, and so forth matter not a whit the moment a lawyer dies—at least, not to him. All that’s left to such a man, the Prince says, is a few feet of soggy earth to non-exist in forever after. It takes considerable banter for the conversation to become more intimate.

This happens when the Gravedigger tosses up yet another skull, and this time he recognizes the identity of the man whose skull it is: Yorick, Hamlet Sr’s court jester when the Prince was a little boy, twenty-three 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 of this madcap jester confronts his nausea at the ugly sight of a barren skull, and he admonishes any fine lady at her cosmetics table that no matter how much makeup she applies, it’s all for naught: “to this / favor she must come” (435, 5.1.174-75). What happened to Yorick will happen to her, just as it happened to Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, and will happen to everyone when their time is up.

It’s an ancient thought, of course: it was a Medieval saying that “life is loan,” and every age has its way of saying the same thing. Greek and Roman Stoicism and Epicureanism were developed as philosophical means by which to allay the fear of death in anxious humans a millennium-and-a-half before Shakespeare’s time.

As other critics have surely pointed out, though, when Hamlet confronts death as he does, the confrontation has a kind of freshness, as if he really is confronting this basic fact of life for the first time, in spite of the recent death of his father, and the even more recent death of Polonius. Perhaps it’s always like that: the shock of death never quite wears off, so that every genuine, earnest consideration of it seems like the first in our personal history, though it be the thousandth.

In any event, Hamlet’s meditations (and Horatio’s attempts to get the Prince to stop “consider[ing] too curiously” at 435, 5.1.186) come to an abrupt end when he and Horatio see a funeral procession, evidently truncated to support only “maimed rites” (435, 5.1.198), coming towards the burial grounds. Hamlet and his friend stand to one side so as to avoid detection, and Laertes begins wrangling with the officious priests.

Why is Ophelia being carried to her burial with so little ceremony? Laertes demands to know, and the priest’s rude reply is that “Her death was doubtful” (436, 5.1.206), and if it weren’t for Claudius’s great power, she would have been subjected to the humiliating burial the law and the Church prescribe for suicides. For these, the priests would no doubt say, are guilty of “self-murder,” so they don’t deserve a full Christian burial. Laertes responds with scorn, and just then Hamlet recognizes the body about to be buried to be that of Ophelia.

Gertrude scarcely has time to speak the memorable words, “Sweets to the sweet. / Farewell. / I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife …” (436, 5.1.222-23) when there ensues an offensive bit of graveside theater of the absurd, an outrageous contest between Laertes and Hamlet over who loved Ophelia more. At least one of the men (Laertes) actually jumps into her uncovered grave. [34]

This is obviously not the way Hamlet had meant to reveal himself to the King, but events have got the better of him for the moment, and he vents his grief. It almost goes without saying that the two men have ruined Ophelia’s funeral about as thoroughly as if they’d both spent three days planning that very result. Everyone present seems justly horrified, and it’s one final, if unpremeditated, insult to Hamlet’s most cruelly put-upon character.

What has Hamlet learned from his brief but significant sojourn in the graveyard, and indeed by means of some of his experiences in Act 4 as well? For one thing, 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 the fondly remembered Yorick with his still-abhorred skull, and the hapless Ophelia has in her person demonstrated it for him with her own unexpected quietus.

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 seems 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 abstractly philosophical level. In the play’s final scene, we will see him addressing these “big questions” in a different, more effectual way.

Act 5, Scene 2. (437-47, Hamlet tells Horatio how returned to Denmark: discovering Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’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 of him; Osric delivers the King’s challenge to a fencing match with Laertes; Hamlet accepts; Gertrude drinks from the poisoned chalice to Hamlet’s success; 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. (SYNOPSIS CONTINUES ...)

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 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

In the process of 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 instead that his longtime friends should be executed as soon as they set foot on English soil, without even time for Christian “shriving” so that they might face death with a clean moral slate.

Many critics view Hamlet’s “rashness” in stabbing Polonius as a fault—it was, after all, the act that led Claudius to pack him off to England for immediate execution—but apparently 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 it occurred. Similarly, he has no trouble justifying to a shocked Horatio the harsh and deadly trick he has played on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

In the 1623 Folio edition, 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 that is shaping up between Hamlet and Claudius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are insignificant, and the absurdity of their fate, we might assert, is weirdly appropriate. [35]

Hamlet also brings up a motive that is new to Horatio: [36] he says that “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). In other words, Claudius’s hasty marriage with the Queen has deprived Hamlet of the succession that would otherwise most likely have been granted to him. [37] The Oedipal significance of this remark is not difficult to see: Claudius has come between Hamlet and Gertrude, supplanting the son’s love and pushing him aside.

When the foppish Osric enters bearing the King and Laertes’s fencing challenge, Hamlet teases the messenger for his silly phrases and mannerisms, but he calmly accepts the match, overriding Horatio’s misgivings when the two are alone with the inspiring statement, “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). This match is not of Hamlet’s making, but whatever happens, he will accept the outcome.

If we take a providence-grounded view of events, Hamlet’s reliance on the significance and order implicit even in “the fall of a sparrow” may be the insight, the “right attitude” (to borrow a Buddhist term for its resonance here) that he has been in search of all along. [38] 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 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, although all too willing to prostitute themselves to the designs of earthly rulers, nonetheless went to their deaths as instruments of forces larger than they could imagine, so in this sense they have shown Hamlet the way.

In the end, the insidious plan hatched by the glib-tongued usurper Claudius and his assistant Laertes is frustrated, and his union with Gertrude is nullified when she drinks from the poisoned chalice, responding, “I will, my Lord” (444, 5.2.268) to Claudius’s pathetic, cowardly “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 remarkably consistent in repeating the patterns of their evil. [39]

Hamlet, as we should expect, gains no earthly reward but death for his takedown of Claudius and Laertes, the latter of whom, at least at the point of death, reconciles with the Prince he has wounded mortally.

Hamlet checks Horatio’s impulse to commit suicide by drinking the remainder of the poisoned wine, and lays upon him the burden of preserving his “wounded name” (446, 5.2.322). Horatio is to tell Hamlet’s “story”; he is, says the Prince, to “report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied” (446, 5.2.317-18). Soon after uttering this final request, Hamlet dies, and Horatio sees him off with the graceful words, “Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest” (446, 5.2.397-98).

In the wake of the old order’s self-destruction, Fortinbras and other listeners will hear from Horatio of (among other things) “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. [40]

In marches Young Fortinbras, almost as if by accident (but not really so), accompanied by his guards and a couple of English ambassadors, and he is curious to learn what dreadful thing has just happened at Elsinore Castle. He has arrived in the wake of the Danish royal order’s miserable self-destruction, and the kingdom is his for the taking.

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 better ruler than his predecessors, though Hamlet’s final thoughts commend him for election. Young Fortinbras is simply an opportunist who has come to the right place at the right time—an outcome that scarcely amounts to a purification of the state of Denmark, though it’s fair to suggest that that was never the play’s emphasis anyhow.

Finally, whatever cast we may want to put upon Hamlet, whatever framework we may impose, 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 is accomplished, or “gets itself accomplished,” in the strangest but also the most appropriate manner.

Harold Bloom, in Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, rightly suggests that this most enigmatic of tragic characters overflows the production that plays host to him: his subjectivity is more complex than even a sophisticated drama such as Hamlet can properly absorb, or “use” just to get its action performed. [41] Aristotle had written nearly two millennia before Shakespeare’s time that in tragedy, plot is the most important element, followed by character. [42] 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 in death: “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.

ENDNOTES

*To return to exact part of the text referenced by the endnotes below, left-click on the endnote’s numbered link. By contrast, the blue scroll-up button at the bottom right of the page returns to the top of the document.

[1] King James I is insistent on “the divine right of kings.” See this excerpt from his ”Speech to the Lords and Commons of the Parliament at White-Hall” (1610). Accessed 6/1/2024.

[2] Aeschylus. The Oresteia: Agamemnon; The Libation Bearers; The Eumenides. Trans. Robert Fagles. Penguin Classics, 1984. ISBN-13: 978-0140443332. See also E. D. A. Moreshead’s translation. Accessed 6/1/2024.

[3] See, for example, Lucius Annaeus Seneca’s Thyestes. Trans. Paul Murgatroyd. Accessed 6/1/2024.

[4] Thomas Kyd. The Spanish Tragedy. Accessed 6/1/2024.

[5] Shakespeare, William. Titus Andronicus. (Folger Shakespeare Library.) Accessed 6/1/2024.

[6] See, for example, T. S. Eliot’s essay “Hamlet and His Problems.“ (poetryfoundation.org.) Accessed 6/1/2024. Laurence Olivier’s iconic 1948 film production of Hamlet takes the idea that the Prince can’t quite “make up his mind” as a key feature. Olivier’s film also seems to incorporate psychoanalytic insights into Hamlet’s dilemma, as does, of course, Freud’s disciple Ernest Jones in his 1910 essay “The Oedipus-complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery: A Study in Motive.” (Wikisource.) Accessed 6/1/2024.

[7] Montaigne, Michel de. Essays. Trans. John Florio. (Renascence Editions.) Accessed 6/1/2024.

[8] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447. See 420, 4.1.52.

[9] Aristotle. The Poetics. Trans. S. H. Butcher. Project Gutenberg. Accessed 6/1/2024.

[10] Sophocles, Oedipus Rex. This play combines recognition (anagnorisis) with reversal (peripeteia): expecting good news from a messenger, Oedipus instead learns that the guilt lies squarely on his own shoulders. See The Oedipus Trilogy. Trans. F. Storr. Accessed 6/1/2024.

[11] Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books, 1998. Ch. 23, Hamlet, 383-431.

[12] Olivier’s voiceover runs, “This is the story of a man who could not make up his mind.”

[13] The word “lets” here means “hinders or stops.”

[14] Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare after All. Anchor Books, 2004. Garber’s analysis is that by Act 3, Scene 2, when Hamlet stages his play-within-the-play The Mousetrap, he has learned how to convert his previously ineffectual words into action. See Hamlet, 466-505, esp. 500-01.

[15] Lovejoy, Arthur O. The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea. Harvard UP, 1976. First published 1933. Incidentally, the 1623 Folio copy of Hamlet’s soliloquy begins, “What a piece of work is a man….” The Norton editors have chosen to omit the first “a” in keeping with the Quarto editions. See also E. M. W. Tillyard’s excellent study The Elizabethan World Picture, first published in 1942. In it, Tillyard reminds us that such rhetoric as Hamlet utters about human excellence is easily found in medieval theological descriptions of prelapsarian humanity, so that there is more continuity between medieval and Renaissance conceptions than one might suppose. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960. See “Introductory,” 1-6.

[16] See Ackroyd, Julie. Child Actors on the London Stage, Circa 1600: Their Education, Recruitment and Theatrical Success. Liverpool UP, 2022. See also Hillebrand, Harold N. Child Actors: A Chapter in Elizabethan Stage History. Russell & Russell, 2nd ed., 1964.

[17] See Norton footnote 4 regarding the story of Jephthah’s sacrifice of his daughter over a vow he made in exchange for success against the Ammonites. Hamlet mentions this story at 390, 2.2.329-30.

[18] Pyrrhus is called Neoptolemus in The Iliad and The Odyssey. In Virgil’s Aeneid, he reaches Priam in his palace and kills him at 2.660-92. Trans. Robert Fagles. Viking, 2006. There is no trace of hesitation in Virgil’s account as Fagles renders it. It is the Trojan Prince Aeneas who is filled with horror at the sight of King Priam’s corpse because it puts him in mind of his wife Creusa and his father Anchises. Aeneas’s rage flows at once to perfidious Helen, and is only cooled by a vision of his mother Venus, who tells him to look to his family in their time of need. See 2.693-727. In Homer’s Odyssey (trans. Robert Fagles, Penguin, 1996), Odysseus’s brief account of Neoptolemus’s career at 11.575ff also has the young man behaving with great forthrightness throughout the Trojan War.

[19] In “On Fiction” in The Rambler No. 4. 1750, Samuel Johnson writes, “Vice, for Vice is necessary to be shewn, should always disgust; nor should the Graces of Gaiety, or the Dignity of Courage, be so united with it, as to reconcile it to the Mind.” Incidentally, the “mirror” image need not be understood to ratify the neoclassical claim that spectators are somehow fooled into taking what they see on the stage for a direct presentation of reality. In almost all cases, to gaze into a mirror is to know in a heightened way that one is looking at a copy or a representation, not the thing itself. This is not to dismiss the capacity of a representation to refer us to, or make us recognize, something real or true.

[20] Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Confronting Adam and Eve in Book 4, Satan says, “. . . Melt, as I doe, yet public reason just, / Honour and Empire with revenge enlarg’d, / By conquering this new World, compels me now / To do what else though damnd I should abhorre.” The Milton Reading Room, see Paradise Lost, Bk. 4. Accessed 6/10/2024.

[21] Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. In Ch. VIII, the narrator says with regard to Dorian, “There is a luxury in self-reproach. When we blame ourselves, we feel that no one else has a right to blame us. It is the confession, not the priest, that gives us absolution.” (Gutenberg etext.) Accessed 6/10/2024.

[22] Seneca. Tragedies. (Gutenberg etext.) Accessed 6/10/2024.

[23] See Jones, Ernest. “Oedipus Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet’s Mystery” (Wikisource).

[24] Kantorowicz, Ernst. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology. Princeton UP, 2016. Orig. published in 1957.

[25] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. Quarto. In The Norton Shakespeare: Histories, 3rd ed. 384-465. See 438, 4.2.4-5: The question that the newly crowned Richard III puts to his adviser Buckingham is, “But shall we wear these honors for a day, / Or shall they last and we rejoice in them?” And Macbeth says to himself, “To be thus is nothing, but to be safely thus” (938, 3.1.48). Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Macbeth. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. 917-69.

[26] Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Trans. James Strachey. W. W. Norton & Co., 2010. First published in German in 1930.

[27] See Jane E. Giraud’s The Flowers of Shakespeare, 1846 (Google).

[28] Amanda Mabillard writes that while we can hardly be certain about the distribution of flowers, “By a long established custom … which has become a fixed stage tradition, Ophelia assigns rosemary to Hamlet, who is present to her imagination; she gives pansies to Laertes; fennel and columbines to Claudius; and rue to the Queen and herself.” See “Ophelia’s End….” (Shakespeare-online.com.) Accessed 6/9/2024. Norton footnote 3 to pg. 425 points out that “Columbines were associated with ingratitude or marital infidelity, fennel with flattery.” Rue, says Norton’s footnote 4, “is associated with repentance ….”

[29] See “Explore Ekphrastic Poems: A Reading List.” Aunye Boone, June 8, 2023. (Nat. Endowment for the Arts blog). Accessed 6/10/2024.

[30] If anyone had actually witnessed what Gertrude describes, surely they would have tried to save Ophelia, not simply watched her drown over an extended period of time.

[31] Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Second Quarto with additions from the Folio. In The Norton Shakespeare: Tragedies, 3rd ed. Combined text 358-447. See 422, 4.2.73: “Give her good watch ….”

[32] The case is Hales v. Petit (1558). (See The Shakespeare Law Library’s account of that case.) Essentially, Sir James Hales’s property was forfeited and leased after he committed suicide, and his widow sued the leaseholder, Cyriac Petit, to regain the property. Her argument was that a person’s property couldn’t be subject to “forfeit” unless he was still alive. Sir James’s suicide, her attorneys argued, couldn’t have happened while he was still alive, so he couldn’t forfeit his property by such means. The widow lost the case, but as the Norton footnote 5 for page 431 suggests, the interesting thing is the splitting up of the suicidal act into “imagination, resolution, and perfection (accomplishment).” See also Edmund Plowden’s account of the case. In Shakespeare’s time, apparently, it would only have been available in complex “law French.” Here is the key passage in Plowden’s English account (modernized):

“… [I]t was argued by Walsh, Cholmley, Bendloe, and Carus Serjeants, that the Forfeiture of the Goods and Chattles real and personal shall have Relation to the Act done in the Party’s Lifetime, which was the Cause of his Death; and upon this the Parts of the Act are to be considered. And Walsh said that the Act consists of three Parts. The first is the Imagination, which is a Reflection or Meditation of the Mind, whether or no it is convenient for him to destroy himself, and what Way it can be done. The second is the Resolution, which is a Determination of the Mind to destroy himself, and to do it in this or that particular Way. The third is the Perfection, which is the Execution of what the Mind has resolved to do. And this Perfection consists of two Parts, viz. the Beginning and the End. The Beginning is the doing of the Act which causes the Death, and the End is the Death, which is only a Sequel to the Act. And of all the Parts the doing of the Act is the greatest in the Judgment of our Law, and it is in Effect the whole, and the only Part that the Law looks upon to be material…. Then here the Act done by Sir James Hales, which is evil and the Cause of his Death, is the throwing himself into the Water, and the Death is but a Sequel thereof, and this evil Act ought some Way to be punished.

[33] The memento mori tradition was very powerful during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. See the dailystoic.com’s article on this tradition, “History of Memento Mori.” Accessed 6/10/2024.

[34] Today, we would say this is the stuff of the worst kind of reality television.

[35] Perhaps the lethal duping of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern really is an injustice on Hamlet’s part, an act of disproportionate violence against men who know nothing of the evil Claudius has done. Still, it’s hard to feel much sympathy for them. Perhaps our minds are too thoroughly poisoned by listening to Hamlet for that to be possible. These two men serve the interests of a corrupt King against their friend. They are looking for preferment, and to Hamlet they are insignificant pawns in the deadly game of chess taking place between him and Claudius. [continued ….]

Well, if Hamlet’s annoying friends will be patient for about four centuries, Tom Stoppard will make it up to them by acknowledging them as the proto-postmodern loose ends that so many audiences and critics find them to be: he will write that witty absurdist play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. So does their untimely taking-off mean that Hamlet itself is absurdist, or postmodern, or nihilistic? Does it mean that the play’s conjectured providential design is “rough-hewn,” or at least that divine justice is not self-evidently “just”? In truth, this latter point would be nothing new since the alignment between God’s will and human will is always at the center of Christian representations of life’s struggles. Or does it mean that Shakespeare’s God, like Dante’s, has a rather pointed sense of humor—one that embraces the absurdity of the fates that human beings create for themselves when they sin in the peculiar, outrageous ways that they do?

[36] In speaking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet had already hinted at this other motive at 406, 3.2.315 when he said, “I lack advancement.”)

[37] On the theme of inheritance, see Anthony Burton’s “Laertes’s Rebellion as a Defense of His Inheritance: Further Aspects of Inheritance Law in Hamlet.” (shakespeareoxfordfellowship.org) Accessed 6/10/2024.

[38] See also The Bhagavad Gita. Trans. Stephen Mitchell. Harmony, 2002 repr. This sacred text comes to mind since one of the key lessons Lord Krishna teaches the Charioteer Arjuna is that while taking action is a necessary part of life, we should not claim credit or responsibility for the outcomes of the actions that we take.

[39] See, for example, the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’s Petrarchan sonnet, “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. The last three lines run, “I see / The lost are like this, and their scourge to be / As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.” Accessed 6/10/2024.

[40] Garber, Marjorie. Shakespeare after All. Anchor Books, 2004. Garber’s point is that Horatio hasn’t heard Hamlet’s private version of events, as related in the soliloquys.

[41] Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books, 1998. Ch. 23, Hamlet, 383-431.

[42] Aristotle. The Poetics. Trans. S. H. Butcher. In section 6, Aristotle writes, “The Plot, then, is the first principle, and, as it were, the soul of a tragedy: Character holds the second place.” (Gutenberg etexts.) Accessed 6/10/2024.

Commentaries onShakespeare’s Tragedies