7. Hamlet -for TSPSC JL/DL
SHAKESPEARE( 23rd of April 1564- 23 April 1616.)
Shakespeare was born at Stratford-on
Avon
(He is known as Bard of Avon), a village in Warwickshire. His father
was a prosperous grain dealer. He was sent to a Grammar school where he learnt
“small Latin and less Greek”. In his 19th year, he
married Anne Hathaway, who was 8 years senior. It is certain from the death bed
words of Green who called him an ‘upstart crow’ that by 1592, he had quite
established himself as a playwright. Hehad three children-two daughters and a
son(Susanna, Hamnet and Judith). Between 1610 and 1012 he retired to his
hometown, Stratford, where he bought the largest house in the town named the New
Place.
Besides acting in Ben Jonson’s plays,
he acted as the Ghost in Hamlet, Adam in As You Like It, King
Duncan in Macbeth, and King Henry in Henry-V (Nicholas Rowe, his
biographer said Ghost in Hamlet was the top of his performance). The first
notice of Shakespeare as a dramatist occurs in Green’s pamphlet A
Groatsworth of Wit (1592).
The theatrical
company to which he was attached at the time known as Earl of Leicester’s players, later became Lord Chamberlain’s and finally after
Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the King’s Men. Shakespeare’s company
performed at various theaters the Theatre, the Rose, the Curtain, etc. before
acquiring the famous Globe theatre built in 1599. As his prosperity grew, he
became a share holder of the Globe(1599) and Blackfriar’s theatres with which
the whole of his remaining professional career was identified.
Shakespeare’s dramatic career covers
roughly a period of twenty years from 1591 to 1611. During this period, he
wrote 38 plays, besides two narrative love poems and 154 of sonnets. The love
poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594), dedicated
them to the Earl of Southampton.
Sidney Lee’smonumental Life of Shakespeare is the most authoritative source of information
available to the students. He began his career as reviser of old plays seems to
have thus collaborated with Marlowe and Kyd in such plays as Titus Andronicus, Henry VI and Richard III.
Only sixteen of his 87 plays were
published in quarto(on a sheet folded twice,2 folds=4 leaves=8pages) during his
life time.It was in 1623 seven years after his death, two of his fellow-actors,John
Hemmings and Henry Condell, published the first collected editions of his plays
now known as the first Folio(1623).
It contains all the plays except Piricles and The Noble Kinsmenwhich had
added in a later year.First folio was prefaced
by Ben Johnson in which he wrote, “Shakespeare was not of and age but for all time”.
He died on 23 April 1616.
Quotes:Chronicle
plays of Shakespeare are mirror for kings- Schlegel (German critic).
Shakespeare is an
upstart crow beautified with our feathers (about Shakespeare’s plagiarism)
-Greene
Shakespeare is an
absolute Johannes Factotum (=Jack of all trades) -Greene.
No man will ever write a
better tragedy than King Lear- G.B.Shaw.
He had small Latin and
less Greek -Johnson.
Sweetest Shakespeare,
Fancy’s Child! -Milton.
Shakespeare has only
heroines, no heroes- Ruskin.
Shakespeare is compared
to Homer -Dryden.
The most excellent in Comedy
and Tragedy- Francis Meres.
Three
main Categories of Shakespeare’s plays(38):
|
Comedies(18) ü Most comedies are Romantic type. ü Main theme is love. ü Frequently all conflicts gets resolved and ends with marriage/
celebration. ü Set in imaginative world. Ex: Magical Forest in Midsummer
night’s dream; Forest of Arden in As you like it.
1.The
comedy of Errors(1592-93) 2.The
Taming of Shrew(1593-94) 3.Two
Gentlemen of Verona(1594-95) 4.Love’s Labor
Lost(1594-95) 5.A midsummerNight’s
Dream(1595-96) 6.The Merchant
of Venice(1596-97) 7.Much Ado
about Nothing(1598-99) 8. As you
Like it(1599-1600) 9.Twlelfth
Night(1599-1600) 10.Merry
wives of Windsor(1600-1601) 11.
Troilus and Cressida(1601-02) 12.All is
Well that Ends well(1602-03) 13.Measure
for Measure(1604-05) 14.Pericles,
Prince of Tyre. (1608-09) 15.Cymbeline(1609-10) 16.The
winter’s Tale(1610-11) 17.The
Tempest(1611-12) 18. The
Two noble Kinsmen(1612-13) |
Tragedies(10) ü Concerned with a person of high rank, suffers as a result of
tragic flaw (error of judgment) ü Ex: Sexual Jealousy in Othello Lack of Judgment in King Lear Indecision in Hamlet. Black and Deep desires in Macbeth 1.Titus
Andronicus (1593-94) 2.Romeo
and Juliet (1594-95) 3. Julies
and Caesar (1599-1600) 4. Hamlet
(1600-01) 5. Othello
(1604-05) 6. King
Lear (1605-06) 7. Macbeth
(1605-06) 8. Antony
and Cleopatra (1606-07) 9.
Coriolanus (1607-08) 10. Timon
of Athens (1607-08)
|
Histories(10) ü Related to history. ü Usually episodic in plots. ü Primary source is Hollingshead’s Chronicles of England Scotland
and Ireland.
1.Henry
VI, part-II (1590-91) 2. Henry
VI, part-III (1590-91) 3. Henry
VI, part-I (1591-92) 4.
Richard- III (1592-93) 5.
Richard- II (1595-96) 6. King
John (1596-97) 7. Henry
IV, part-I (1597-98) 8. Henry
IV, part-I (1597-98) 9. Henry V
(1598-99) 10. Henry
VIII (1612-13) |
|
Other Categories are: 1)
Roman Plays: Plays set
in Rome; blood, violence, mayhem(confusion), suicide are common features.
Inspired from North’s Translation of Plutarch’s “Lives of the Noble Grecians
and Romans. Ex: Julies Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, Timon of Athens,
Cariolanus.
2)
Problem Plays: Term coined by Ibsen and Shaw, used by Frederick S.Boas. They are
centered on problems. Ex: All is well that ends well, Measure for measure,
Troilus and Cressida.
3)
Romances: sometimes
his late comedies are grouped together as romances. These plays seem more
like tragedies than comedies but they have happy ending. Ex.Pericles,
Cymbeline, The winter’s Tale, The Tempest. |
||
Shakespeare’s plays in chronological order:
1.
Henry
VI Part-II: Historical play, based on the life of Henry VI on the back drop of War
of Roses.
2. Henry VI Part-III:Historical play, a new king maker Richard Neville emerges to throne. Famous
line: “My crown is in my heart, not on my head”
3. Henry VI Part-I:about the young King Henry-VI, War of Roses&Defeat of his armies by
Joan of Arc(French)
4. Richard-III: Richard-III taking over the throne by murders of his own family members
and his marriage to Queen Anne. His victory was short lived as Henry-VII
succeeded him.
5. Comedy of Errors: Inspired by Plutus’ Menaechmi. Comical drama of mistaken identities,
involving two sets of identical twins, separated since birth, united at the
end.
6. Titus Andronicus: Shakespeare’s first tragedy modelled on Spanish Tragedy. Set against
the back drop of Roman Empire. Story of Titus, Roman General, and his thirst of
bloody revenge against Tamora, Queen of Goths. Famous
line: ‘Vengeance
is in my heart, death in my hand, blood and revenge are hammering in my
head”(act2, scene3), "These words are razors to my wounded heart"
7. Taming of a Shrew: Taming a shrew’s(unpleasant, nagging, aggressive and ill-tempered
woman) independent spirit by man. Story of Petruchio, taming Katherine with
various psychological torments. It is a misogynistic play. It inspired
Heywood’s “Women killed with Kindness”. Famous
phrase: Breaking the ice.
8. Two Gentlemen of Verona: first play to introduce cross dressing(heroine dresses as male). Story of two friends, Proteus and Valentine,
who fall in love with the same women, Silvia. Second heroine, Julia fiancée of
Proteus disguises herself as a boy to spy on him. Ends with marriages.
9. Love’s Labor Lost: Don Adriano character satirizes Peele’s Euphemism. Story of Ferdinand,
king of Navarre, and his companions who takes oath not to allow women within a
mile of the court. When Princess of France and ladies arrive, king and his
companions try to woo the ladies. Ends with a famous song: “When daises pied and
violets blue”
10. Romeo and Juliet: Based on the Arthur Brooke’s
“Tragical history of Romeus and Juliet(1562). it is
considered as the prelude to his great tragedies. Love Story
of Romeo and Juliet from two rival families, Montagues(their only son
is Romeo) and Capulets(their only daughter is Juliet).To cancel her
marriage with Paris prince, Juliet takes a drug to pretend herself as dead to
call Romeo. Romeo believes her dead and poisons himself. Julies wakes up and
stabs herself. Brutus is the famous character. Famous
phrases/lines: “Wild Goose Chase”; “Good night! Good Night! Parting is such
sweet sorrow”; Juliet says, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any
other name would smell as sweet."; “Thus with a kiss I die(final words of
Romeo at Juliet’s tomb)”;
11. Richard-II: historical play about Richard-II.
12.
A Midsummer
Night’s Dream – set in Magical
Forest. about the marriage of Theseus, Duke of Athens and Hippolyta,
Queen of amazons; andadventures of 4 young lovers and 6 actors in the forest. Nick
Bottom is one of the greatest comic characters in Shakespeare’s plays who
provides comic relief throughout the play.Bottom’s head was transformed
into that of a donkey by Puck(robin Goodfellow).Famous song: “the
spotted snakes with double tongue”
13.
King
John:historical
play
14.
The
Merchant of Veniceor the Jew of Venice-story of two fiends Antonio (good
moneylender) and Bassanio. Shylock was a cruel money lender. Antonio borrows
money from shylock to arrange it for Bassanio to get her lover Portia. Antonio’s
ships sank and losing all his wealth, falling in debt to Shylock. Shylock
demand for a “Pound of Flesh” as per the agreement, when Antonio fails
to pay it on time.Portia disguises as lawyer pleads the case and delivers her
famous “mercy speech” in court and saves the life of Antonio.Famous
songs/lines: Bassanio’s song” Tell me where is the fancy bred”; “All
that glitters is not gold"; “Love is Blind”.
15. Henry IV Part-I: Falstaff is a famous comic character in it.
16. Henry IV Part-II: Famous line: “A man can
die but once”
17.
Much
Ado About Nothing –Noting(Nothing)
means gossip, rumour.set in Messina
and centers around two romantic couples, the first, between Claudio and Hero, the
secondbetween Claudio's friend Benedick and Hero's cousin Beatrice. Comedy is redeemed by the delightful
wit-combats of Benedick and Beatrice. Balthazar’s
song “sigh no more ladies, sigh no more;
men were deceivers ever; one foot in sea, and one in shore; to one thing
constant never.” (song about men’s infidelity)
18.
Henry V:
historical play.
19. Julius Caesar – Based on Thomas North’s translation of
Plutarch’s lives. It is the first play to be performed at The Globe. Play opens
with the victory of JuliesCaesar, with a famous line: "“I came, I saw, I conquered’’(Veni, vidi, vici)". A soothsayer warns him to “Beware
of Ides of March” (March15th). Conspirators forged letters of support from
Roman people and tempts Brutus to kill Caesar. Conspirators stabbedCaesar and
Brutus too stabbed him. Caesar utters thefamous
lines: "Et Tu, Brute?" ("You too, Brutus?"); conspirators
says that they did it for the sake of Rome.Brutus’ says: “Not I love Caesar less, But that I loved
Rome more” and for the
moment crowd is on his side.Mark Antony’s famous
speech at the corpse: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, Lend me your ears!” and
all the public was turned by his speech and drove the conspirators from the
Rome. Conspirators(Brutus, Cassius, Casca) prepared a civil war against the
Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar (son of Caesar), but was defeated at the battle
of Philippi. Brutus commits suicide by
stabbing.
Caesar famous lines are:
“Cowards die many times before their deaths, The Valiant never taste of death
but once”; “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our starts, But in ourselves,
that we are underlings”
Casca’s famous lines:“It
was Greek to me”
20.
As You
Like It – Plot from
Thomas Lodge’s Rosalind. set as a long picnic in the Forest of Arden(fictional).
Duke Senior was exiled to forest when his brother Frederik usurps the throne.
Orlando falls in love at first sight with Rosalind, daughter of Duke senior
results in punishment to Rosalind and Celia(daughter of Frederik). Rosalind(disguised
as Ganymede), Celia(disguised as Alena) along with Touchstone(clown)flees to
forest. Frederick repents and makes his brother Duke Senior as king. Play ends
with marriages of Rosalind with Orlando, Celia with Oliver and Touchstone with
Audrey.
Famous speech by Jacques: “A Fool! A Fool! I met a
fool in the forest”.
Speech by Jacques: ‘All the world's a stage, we have
mere entrances and exits (about 7ages of man)
Song by Amie
“Under the greenwood”(inspired Thomas
Hardy to write a novel with this title).
21. Twelfth Nightor What you
will– set in Illyria.Viola shipwrecked and lost contact with her
brother, Sebastian. Viola disguised as Cesario and enters the service of the
Duke Orsino. Orsino uses Cesario to convince her lover Olivia, but Olivia has
fallen in love with Cesario, thinking him as man. Comic subplot involves Malvolio(Olivia’s
steward), Sir Toby(Olivia’s uncle) and Feste(a fool). Return of Sebastian(who
looks similar as Viola), adds confusion. Play ends with the marriages of Duke
Orsino with Viola, and Sebastian with Olivia. Famous
lines: “If music be the food of love, play on”(Orsino); “Better a witty fool
than a foolish wit”(Feste); “Some are born great, some achieve greatness”(Malvolio);
“O Mistress mine, where are you roaming?”(Feste’s song);
“Dost, thou think,
because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more Cakes and Ale”(Sir Toby to Malvolio)-
Somerset Maugham’s “Of Cakes’ and Ale”
title drawn from this play.
22. Hamlet– Full title: The tragedy of
Hamlet, prince of Denmark”. It is the Shakespeare’s longest play.Set in
Denmark. The play begins with the lines: “Something
is rotten in the state of Denmark” (Marcellus in the opening scene). Prince
Hamlet, incited by the Ghost of his father, decides to take revenge on Claudius
(brother of King Hamlet) who seized both the throne and Gertrude(wife of the
King). Prince Hamlet vows to affect madness. Hamlet plans to perform a play
within the play, “Murder of Gonzago”to confirm Claudius as villain. Hamlet
stabs Polonius (father of his lover, Ophelia) who spies on him. Claudius plans
him to kill Hamlet with the help of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but Hamlet
escapes. Ophelia distressed over her father’s death and Hamlet’s behavior
drowns. Laertes (brother of Ophelia) plots with Claudius to kill the Hamlet
with a poisoned sword in a duel. Laertes wounds Hamlet, and Hamlet with the
sword cuts Laertes. Gertrude drinks the poisoned cup intended for Hamlet and
dies. Knowing the truth from Laertes, Hamlet stabs Claudius too.Horatio (friend
of Hamlet) is the only person survived at the end of the play.
Famous lines: “To be or
not to be that is the question”(soliloquy by Hamlet, in Act-III, scene-1).
‘‘Frailty thy name is
woman’’(Hamlet to Gertrude).
“Though this be madness,
yet there is a method in it’’ (Polonius to Frederick).
“Neither a borrower nor
a lender”, “Brevity is the soul of wit” and “Clothes maketh man”
(Polonius).
“There is nothing good
or bad, but thinking makes it so”- (Hamlet in Act-II,scene-2).
23. The Merry Wives of Windsor- It was written at the behest of
Queen Elizabeth who desired to see Falstaff in love. Fallstaff (clown), in
short of money, to obtain financial advantage, tries to woo rich married woman.
24. Troilus and Cressida: Back drop of Trojan war, Troilus,
Trojan Prince, woos Cressida (beautiful widow) before Cressida is exchanged to
Greek side. This play ends without climax.
25. All is Well that Ends Well: Based on Boccaccio’s Decameron. story of Helena, daughter of a doctor
who cures a king’s disease and as a gift she has chosen a young count, Bertram
as her husband.
26. Measure for Measure:main theme is Justice, love and mercy
in Vienna.Famous song “Take O take those lips
away”.
27. Othelloor full Title: The Tragedy of Othello, The Moor of
Venice– Based on Cinthia’s
Hecatommithi. Othello is a great captain in Venetian army. Iago, enemy of
Othello, hatches a plan to wrongfully accuse Othello’s wife Desdemona (she is
innocent) of infidelity by using a hand kerchief. Maddened by jealousy Othello
kills Desdemona. Emilia, wife of Iago, discloses her husband’s plot and
tormented by grief, Othello kills himself. “Motiveless Malignity” phrase
belongs to Iago was coined by Coleridge.Famous lines: “Put out the light and then put out the light” (Othello
in Act-V,Scene2).
28.
King
Lear – Based on Monmouth’s “Historia
RegumBritannia”. King Lear divided his inheritance to his 2 elder
daughters(Goneril and Regan) who showed fake affection and ignored his youngest
daughter, Cordelia. The Earl of Gloucester and King Lear is bosom friend but
they both have failed to judge their eligible children. “Earl of Gloucester
subplot” concerns the Earl of Gloucester, who gullibly believes the lies of
his illegitimate son, Edmund, and spurns his honest son, Edgar. Driven into
exile disguised as a mad beggar, Edgar becomes a companion of the truly mad
Lear. Excessive egoism, ungovernable temper, Lack of judgement is the reason
for the tragedy.After the ill treatment from his 2 daughters, King Lear
realized his mistake, but leads to the deaths of Cordelia and Lear. Reason
inmadness” phrase belongs to King Lear. Famous lines: “Ripeness is all” (Lear); “I love your majesty
according to my bond, not more, nor less”.
“As
flies to wanton boys, are we to gods”(Act 4, Sce1, Golding used this phrase in
Lord of the flies).
29.
Macbeth – Set in Scotland. play begins with
three witches talking “When shall we three meets again in thunder, lightning,
or in rain?”. They prophesy
that Macbeth will become king and Banquo as a successor to throne. (Shakespeare
uses three witches in the play as a type of chorus to foretell Macbeth's
demise). Persuaded by his wife Lady Macbeth, he kills King Duncan, but Duncan’s
sons Malcom and Donalbain flee to England and Ireland. Later he kills Banquo. The Ghost of
Banquo(only visible to Macbeth) creates fear in Macbeth. The three witches
visits Macbeth once again and preaches: (1)Beware of
Macduff (2) No one born to woman can kill him (3)He is safe until, Birnamwood
comes to Dunsinane Hill. (4) Banquo’s son will reign. So, afraid of
Macduff, he seizes his castle kills lady Macduff and children, but Macduff fled
to England. Lady Macbeth’s Sleepwalking sceneshows the reverse of
her earlier claim, i.e., “A little water can
clears us of this deed”. Lady Macbeth’s suicide makes him to deliver his famous speech “Tomorrow,
and tomorrow, and Tomorrow”. Prince Malcom and Macduff raised an army and invaded Macbeth and cuts
Birnam Wood to camouflage their number. In the battle, Macduff declares that he
is “Untimely Ripped (born by Caesarian, and is not of woman born)” and
beheads Macbeth and becomes king. “Stupid Full of Horrors” phrase belongs to Macbeth.Famous line: Fair
is foul, and foul is fair. (This
phrase is the theme of the play which highlights the hypocrisy that people
adopt to hide their true intentions.; King Duncan loves Macbeth dearly, it is
Macbeth who ends his life).Famous line: “what's done, is done" and “What's done
cannot be undone”- By Lady Macbeth in Act3; "blood will have blood"-
Macbeth in Act3.
30. Antony and Cleopatra – Love story of Mark Antony of Rome
and Cleopatra of Greek. Mark Antony marries Caesar’s widowed sister, Octavia.
He learns about the Cleopatra’s charms: “Age
can’t wither her, nor custom stale”. He marries Cleopatra and raises
a war against Rome but was defeated. He denounces Cleopatra for his failure,
she kills herself by a snake bite and then Antony kills himself by sword.
31. Coriolanus: story of Caius Marcus (known as
Coriolanus), Roman army general who angers easily at trivial things. The Senate
nominates him as consul but he cannot win the people's vote, so he is banished
from Rome and allies with his old enemy. He comes to attack Rome, his mother
persuades him not to, and his new-found ally kills him for the betrayal.
32. Timon of Athens:Timon, An Athenian noble man, who is
generous, ultimately bankrupt. None of his friends helped him. He leaves Athens
and lives in a cave by the sea and discovers gold. It is a tragedy of
misanthropy (hatred of mankind).
33. Pericles –Based onGower’s Confesso Amantis.Gower is the narrator. Play opens in
the court of Antiochus, who offers his daughters hand who can answer the
riddle, but those who fail shall die. He discovered that the king but discovers
that its answer reveals the incestuous relationship between father and
daughter. Pericles doesn't reveal the truth, and Antiochus gives him 40 days
before his death sentence. Pericles flees to Pentapolis and marries Thaisa, a
princess, in a tournament. While he is going back to Tyre with his pregnant
wife, the storm separates the baby, mother and father. They all united at the
end. This play was not included in first Folio.
34. Cymbeline, the king of
Britain – Based on
Boccaccio’s Decameron. Cymbeline is the Celtic King of Britain. His two
sons were kidnapped as infants. Play revolves around Imogen, his daughter. Play
ends with the king united with his two sons. Its notable character isImogen,
one of his greatest heroines. It contains the
beautiful funeral song “Fear no more the heat of the sun”
35.
The
Winter’s Tale–Based on
Greene’s romance Pandosto. It is unforgettable for the character of that
charming rogue Autolycus. Story of two childhood friends Leontes and Polixenes.Famous for Autolycus’ song, “When daffodils begin to
peer(bloom)”.
36. The Tempest–Inspired by a shipwreck that occurred
in 1609 within the Bermuda Triangle. Story of Prospero, former Duke of Milan,
and his daughter Mirinda(only female character in the play). Prospero
was punished to exile to an island (His throne was usurped by his brother
Antonio) along with his magic books, and savage creatures Caliban and Ariel.
When a group of people washed ashore on same Island in a shipwreck,
Antionio(usurper), Alosnso(king of Naples), Sebastian(brother of Alonso) and
Prince Fredninand were among the passengers. Mirinda sees a ship full of men
from outside world for the first time and ddleivers her famous speech: “Oh Brave World, that has such people in it” (Aldus
Huxley used the phrass ‘Brave New world’ as title for his novel). Ferdinand
falls in love with Mirinda and marries her. OtherCharacters:, Stephano (the
drunken butler), Sycorax (a witch),
Trincilo. Famous song in Act-I, scene-2:
“Full fathom Five thy Father lies, of his bones are coral made”
37. Henry-VIII: story of Henry -VIII’s courtship with
Anne Boleyn, separation from Catholic church.generally considered a
collaboration between Shakespeare and Fletcher.
38. Two Noble Kinsmen:dramatization of Chaucer’s Knights
tale (story of Palamon and Arcite). Attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s SonnetsHe is the greatest sonneteer of his
age. The majority of his sonnets were written probably in 1594 when he had
gained the patronage of the Earl of Southampton. He preferred the pattern
introduced by Surrey. Thomas Thrope printed a collection of 154 sonnets
of Shakespeare in 1609.
The first 126 are addressed to the Mr. W.H (may beEarl of Southampton), the next 28
are addressed to ‘a dark lady’.
The rhyme scheme of Shakespeare sonnet is ‘abab-cdcd-efef-gg’.(4+4+4+2)
Mathew Arnold’s sonnet on him is “Others abide our
question – Thou art free”
His famous
sonnets are:
“Shall
I compare love to thee” (sonnet 18)
“Love
is not time’s fool” (sonnet 116)
“My
mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun, Coral is far more red, than her lips
red.”(Sonnet 130).
Shakespeare’s poems:He wrote
narrative poems when the theatres were closed between due to Plague (1593-94).
1.
Venus and Adonis(1594):
from Ovid’s
Metamorphosis, about unsuccessful seduction of Adonis, a young man, by Venus,
goddess of love.Shakespeare
describes it as the "first heir of my invention."
2.
The Rape of Lucreece(1594): story of Lucrece, who was raped by his husband’s friend. She writes
letter her husband and stabs herself. The angers citizens banished the rapist’s
family.
3.
The Passionate
Pilgrim(1599):
4.
The Phoenix and Turtle(1601)
5.
The Lover’sComplaint(1609)
The story of the play originates in the legend of Hamlet (Amleth)
as recounted in the twelfth-century Danish History, a Latin text by Saxo the
Grammarian. This version was later adapted into French by Francois de
Belleforest in 1570. In it, the unscrupulous Feng kills his brother Horwendil
and marries his brother's wife Gerutha. Horwendil's and Gerutha's son Amleth,
although still young, decides to avenge his father's murder. He acts the fool
in order to avoid suspicion, a strategy which succeeds in making the others
think him harmless. With his mother's active support, Amleth succeeds in
killing Feng. He is then proclaimed King of Denmark. This story is on the whole
more straightforward than Shakespeare’s adaptation. Shakespeare was likely
aware of Saxo's version, along with another play performed in 1589 in which a
ghost apparently calls out, "Hamlet, revenge!" The 1589 play is lost,
leading to much scholarly speculation as to who might have authored it. Most
scholars attribute it to Thomas Kyd, author of The Spanish Tragedy of 1587. The Spanish
Tragedy shares many elements with Hamlet,
such as a ghost seeking revenge, a secret crime, a play-within-a-play, a
tortured hero who feigns madness, and a heroine who goes mad and commits
suicide.
The Spanish Tragedy was one of the first and
most popular Elizabethan "revenge tragedies," a genre that Hamlet both
epitomizes and complicates. Revenge tragedies typically share a few plot
points. In all of them, some grievous insult or wrong requires vengeance. Often
in these plays the conventional means of retribution (the courts of law,
generally speaking) are unavailable because of the power of the guilty person
or persons, who is often noble if not royal. Revenge tragedies also emphasize
the subjective struggle of the avenger, who often fights (or feigns) madness
and generally wallows in the moral difficulties of his situation. Finally,
revenge tragedies end up with a dramatic bloodbath in which the guilty party is
horribly and often ritualistically killed. Hamlet is not
Shakespeare's first revenge tragedy - that distinction belongs to Titus Andronicus, a Marlovian horror-show
containing all of the elements just mentioned. But Hamlet is
generally considered the greatest revenge tragedy, if not the greatest tragedy,
if not the greatest play, ever written.
The central reason for the play's eminence is the character of
Hamlet. His brooding, erratic nature has been analyzed by many of the most
famous thinkers and artists of the past four centuries. Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe described him as a poet - a sensitive man who is too weak to deal with
the political pressures of Denmark. Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud viewed
Hamlet in terms of an “Oedipus complex,” an overwhelming sexual desire for his
mother. This complex is usually associated with the wish to kill one’s father
and sleep with one’s mother. Freud points out that Hamlet's uncle has usurped
his father's rightful place, and therefore has replaced his father as the man who
must die. However, Freud is careful to note that Hamlet represents modern man
precisely because he does not kill Claudius in
order to sleep with his mother, but rather kills him to revenge his father’s
death. Political interpretations of Hamlet also abound, in which Hamlet stands for
the spirit of political resistance, or represents a challenge to a corrupt
regime. Stephen Greenblatt, the editor of the Norton Edition of Shakespeare,
views these interpretive attempts of Hamlet as mirrors for the interpretation within
the play itself - many of the characters who have to deal with Hamlet,
including Polonius,
Claudius, and Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern, also develop theories to explain his behavior, none of which
really succeeds in doing so. Indeed, nothing sure can be said about Hamlet except
that it has been a perennial occasion for brilliant minds to explore some of
the unanswerable questions of human existence.
Something is amiss in Denmark -- for two successive nights, the
midnight guard has witnessed the appearance of the ghost of Old
Hamlet, the former King of Denmark who has recently died. The guards
bring Horatio,
a learned scholar and friend of Hamlet,
Prince of Denmark, to witness this apparition. Though skeptical at first,
Horatio sees the ghost and decides to report its appearance to Hamlet.
Meanwhile, a new king of Denmark has been crowned: Claudius,
Old Hamlet's brother. Claudius has taken Old Hamlet's widow, Gertrude,
as his wife. We watch their marriage celebration and hear about a threat from
the Prince of Norway, Fortinbras,
which Claudius manages to avoid by diplomacy. Hamlet is in attendance at this
wedding celebration; he is hardly in joyous spirits, however. He is disgusted
by his mother's decision to marry Claudius so soon after his father's demise.
Horatio tells Hamlet of the appearance of the ghost and Hamlet determines to
visit the spirit himself.
Meanwhile, the court adviser, Polonius,
sends his son, Laertes,
back to Paris, where he is living. Laertes and Polonius both question Ophelia (sister
and daughter, respectively) about her relationship with Hamlet. Ophelia admits
that Hamlet has been wooing her. They tell her to avoid Hamlet and reject his
amorous advances, emphasizing the importance of protecting her chastity.
Ophelia agrees to cut off contact.
That night, Hamlet accompanies the watch. The ghost appears once
more. Hamlet questions the ghost, who beckons Hamlet away from the others. When
they are alone, the ghost reveals that Claudius murdered him in order to steal
his crown and his wife. The ghost makes Hamlet promise to take revenge on
Claudius. Hamlet appears to concur excitedly. He has Horatio and the guards
swear not to reveal what they have seen.
Act Two finds us some indefinite time in the future. Hamlet has
been behaving in a most erratic and alarming way. Claudius summons two of
Hamlet's school friends, Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern, in order to discover the meaning of this strange behavior.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's attempts to discover the reason for Hamlet's
madness are met with evasion and witticism. Meanwhile, Polonius hatches a
theory of his own: he thinks that Hamlet is insane due to Ophelia's rejection
of his love. He arranges to test his theory by setting Ophelia on Hamlet when
they are apparently alone and then observing the proceedings with Claudius.
Hamlet's only consolation appears to be the coming of a troupe of
players from England. Hamlet asks the player's whether they could play a
slightly modified version of a tragedy. We realize that Hamlet plans to put on
a play that depicts the death of his father, to see whether Claudius is really
guilty, and the ghost is really to be trusted.
In Act Three, Ophelia approaches Hamlet when they are apparently
alone; Claudius and Polonius hide behind a tapestry and observe. Hamlet behaves
extremely cruelly toward Ophelia. The king decides that Hamlet is not mad for
love of her but for some other hidden reason.
Hamlet prepares to put on his play, which he calls "The Mouse
Trap." After instructing the players in their parts, Hamlet retires to the
audience, where Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, and Polonius have gathered, along
with many others. In the course of the play, both Gertrude and Claudius become
extremely upset, though for different reasons. Gertrude is flustered by
Hamlet's veiled accusation that she was inconstant and hypocritical for
remarrying after Old Hamlet's death; Claudius is shaken because he is indeed
guilty of his brother's murder. Claudius decides that he must get rid of Hamlet
by sending him to England.
Following the play, Gertrude calls Hamlet to her room, intending
to berate him for his horrible insinuations. Hamlet turns the tables on her,
accusing her of a most grotesque lust and claiming that she has insulted her
father and herself by stooping to marry Claudius. In the course of their
interview, Polonius hides behind a tapestry; at one point, he thinks that
Hamlet is going to attack Gertrude and cries for help. Hamlet stabs Polonius
through the tapestry, thinking he has killed Claudius. When he finds that he
has merely killed a "rash, intruding fool," Hamlet returns to the
business of "speaking daggers" to his mother. Just as Gertrude
appears convinced by Hamlet's excoriation, the ghost of Old Hamlet reappears
and tells Hamlet not to behave so cruelly to his mother, and to remember to
carry out revenge on Claudius. Gertrude perceives her son discoursing with
nothing but air and is completely convinced of his madness. Hamlet exits her
room, dragging the body of Polonius behind him.
After much questioning, Claudius convinces Hamlet to reveal the
hiding place of Polonius' body. He then makes arrangements for Hamlet to go to
England immediately, accompanied by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Claudius
writes a letter to the English court asking them to kill Hamlet immediately
upon his arrival and places the letter with his two cronies. On their way to
the ship, Hamlet and his entourage pass Fortinbras' Norwegian army en route to
a Polish campaign.
Back at Elsinore (the Danish palace), Ophelia has gone mad
following her father's death. She sings childish and bawdy songs and speaks
nonsensically. Laertes soon returns to Denmark with a mob in tow, demanding an
explanation of Polonius' death. Claudius gingerly calms the young man and
convinces him that Hamlet was the guilty party.
Letters arrive attesting to a strange turn of fortunes on the sea.
Hamlet's ship to England was attacked by pirates, who captured Hamlet and
arranged to return him to Denmark for a ransom. Hamlet sends Claudius an
aggravating letter announcing his imminent return. Claudius and Laertes decide
that Hamlet must be killed. They decide to arrange a duel between Laertes and
Hamlet in which Laertes' sword is secretly poisoned so as to guarantee Hamlet's
immediate death. As backup, Claudius decides to poison a cup of wine and offer
it to Hamlet during the contest.
Just as Act Four comes to a close, more tragic news arrives.
Gertrude says that Ophelia has drowned while playing in a willow tree by the
river.
Act Five begins at a graveyard. Two gravediggers joke about their
morbid occupation. Hamlet and Horatio arrive and converse with them. Soon,
Ophelia's funeral begins. Because there are doubts about whether Ophelia died
accidentally or committed suicide, her funeral lacks many of the customary
religious rites. Laertes bombastically dramatizes his grief, prompting Hamlet
to reveal himself and declare his equal grief at the loss of his erstwhile
beloved. After a short tussle, Hamlet and Laertes part.
Later, Hamlet explains to Horatio that he discovered Claudius'
plot to have him killed in England and forged a new letter arranging for the
deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. While they are conversing, Osric,
a ridiculous courtier, approaches and proposes the duel between Laertes and
Hamlet. Hamlet eventually accepts this challenge.
The duel begins with Osric as referee. Hamlet wins the first two
passes, prompting Claudius to resort to the poisoned drink. Hamlet refuses the
drink. In his stead, Gertrude drinks a toast to her son from the poisoned cup.
After a third pass also goes to Hamlet, Laertes sneak-attacks the prince and
wounds him. A scuffle ensues in which Hamlet ends up with Laertes' sword. He
injures Laertes. Just then Gertrude collapses. She declares that she has been
poisoned. Laertes, also dying, confesses the whole plot to Hamlet, who finally
attacks Claudius, stabbing him with the poisoned sword and then forcing the
poisoned drink down his throat. Hamlet too is dying. He asks Horatio to explain
the carnage to all onlookers and tell his story. Hamlet dies.
Just then, Fortinbras arrives at the court, accompanying some
English ambassadors who bring word of the death of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern. With all the immediate royalty of Denmark dead, Fortinbras
asserts his right to the crown. He arranges for Hamlet to receive a soldier's
burial.
Character List
Hamlet
The
son of Old Hamlet and Gertrude, thus Prince of Denmark. The ghost of Old Hamlet
charges him with the task of killing his uncle, Claudius, for killing him and
usurping the throne of Denmark. Hamlet is a moody, theatrical, witty, brilliant
young man, perpetually fascinated and tormented by doubts and introspection. It
is famously difficult to pin down his true thoughts and feelings -- does he
love Ophelia, and does he really intend to kill Claudius? In fact, it often
seems as though Hamlet pursues lines of thought and emotion merely for their
experimental value, testing this or that idea without any interest in applying
his resolutions in the practical world. The variety of his moods, from manic to
somber, seems to cover much of the range of human possibility.
Old Hamlet
The
former King of Denmark. Old Hamlet appears as a ghost and exhorts his son to
kill Claudius, whom he claims has killed him in order to secure the throne and
the queen of Denmark. Hamlet fears (or at least says he fears) that the ghost
is an imposter, an evil spirit sent to lure him to hell. Old Hamlet's ghost
reappears in Act Three of the play when Hamlet goes too far in berating his
mother. After this second appearance, we hear and see no more of him.
Claudius
Old
Hamlet's brother, Hamlet's uncle, and Gertrude's newlywed husband. He murdered
his brother in order to seize the throne and subsequently married Gertrude, his
erstwhile sister-in-law. Claudius appears to be a rather dull man who is fond
of the pleasures of the flesh, sex and drinking. Only as the play goes on do we
become certain that he is indeed guilty of murder and usurpation. Claudius is
the only character aside from Hamlet to have a soliloquy in the play. When he
is convinced that Hamlet has found him out, Claudius eventually schemes to have
his nephew-cum-son murdered.
Gertrude
Old
Hamlet's widow and Claudius' wife. She seems unaware that Claudius killed her
former husband. Gertrude loves Hamlet tremendously, while Hamlet has very mixed
feelings about her for marrying the (in his eyes) inferior Claudius after her
first husband's death. Hamlet attributes this need for a husband to her
lustiness. Gertrude figures prominently in many of the major scenes in the
play, including the killing of Polonius and the death of Ophelia.
Horatio
Hamlet's
closest friend. They know each other from the University of Wittenberg, where
they are both students. Horatio is presented as a studious, skeptical young
man, perhaps more serious and less ingenious than Hamlet but more than capable
of trading witticisms with his good friend. In a moving tribute just before the
play-within-the-play begins, in Act Two scene two, Hamlet praises Horatio as
his soul's choice and declares that he loves Horatio because he is "not
passion's slave" but is rather good-humored and philosophical through all
of life's buffets. At the end of the play, Hamlet charges Horatio with the task
of explaining the pile of bodies to the confused onlookers in court.
Polonius
The
father of Ophelia and Laertes and the chief adviser to the throne of Denmark.
Polonius is a windy, pedantic, interfering, suspicious, silly old man, a
"rash, intruding fool," in Hamlet's phrase. Polonius is forever fomenting
intrigue and hiding behind tapestries to spy. He hatches the theory that
Ophelia caused Hamlet to go mad by rejecting him. Polonius' demise is fitting
to his flaws. Hamlet accidentally kills the old man while he eavesdrops behind
an arras in Gertrude's bedroom. Polonius' death causes his daughter to go mad.
Ophelia
The
daughter of Polonius and sister of Laertes. Ophelia has received several
tributes of love from Hamlet but rejects him after her father orders her to do
so. In general, Ophelia is controlled by the men in her life, moved around like
a pawn in their scheme to discover Hamlet's distemper. Moreover, Ophelia is
regularly mocked by Hamlet and lectured by her father and brother about her
sexuality. She goes mad after Hamlet murders Polonius. She later drowns.
Laertes
Polonius'
son and Ophelia's brother. Laertes is an impetuous young man who lives
primarily in Paris, France. We see him at the beginning of the play at the
celebration of Claudius and Gertrude's wedding. He then returns to Paris, only
to return in Act Four with an angry entourage after his father's death at
Hamlet's hands. He and Claudius conspire to kill Hamlet in the course of a duel
between Laertes and the prince.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
Friends
of Hamlet's from the University of Wittenberg. Claudius invites them to court
in order to spy on Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are often treated as
comic relief; they are sycophantic, vaguely absurd fellows. After Hamlet kills
Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are assigned to accompany Hamlet to
England. They carry a letter from Claudius asking the English king to kill
Hamlet upon his arrival. Hamlet discovers this plot and alters the letter so
that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are put to death instead. We learn that they
have indeed been executed at the very close of the play.
Fortinbras
The
Prince of Norway. In many ways his story is parallel to Hamlet's: he too has
lost his father by violence (Old Hamlet killed Old Fortinbras in single
combat); he too is impeded from ascending the throne by an interfering uncle.
But despite their biographical similarities, Fortinbras and Hamlet are
constitutional opposites. Where Hamlet is pensive and mercurial, Fortinbras is
all action. He leads an army through Denmark in order to attack disputed
territory in Poland. At the end of the play, and with Hamlet's dying assent,
Fortinbras assumes the crown of Denmark.
Osric
The
ludicrous, flowery, stupid courtier who invites Hamlet to fence with Laertes,
then serves as referee during the contest.
The gravediggers
Two
"clowns" (roles played by comic actors), a principal gravedigger and
his assistant. They figure only in one scene -- Act Five scene one -- yet never
fail to make a big impression on readers and audience members. The primary
gravedigger is a very witty man, macabre and intelligent, who is the only
character in the play capable of trading barbs with Hamlet. They are the only
speaking representatives of the lower classes in the play and their perspective
is a remarkable contrast to that of the nobles.
The players
A
group of (presumably English) actors who arrive in Denmark. Hamlet knows this
company well and listens, enraptured, while the chief player recites a long
speech about the death of Priam and the wrath of Hecuba. Hamlet uses the
players to stage an adaptation of "The Death of Gonzago" which he
calls "The Mousetrap" -- a play that reprises almost perfectly the
account of Old Hamlet's death as told by the ghost -- in order to be sure of
Claudius' guilt.
A Priest
Charged
with performing the rites at Ophelia's funeral. Because of the doubtful
circumstances of Ophelia's death, the priest refuses to do more than the bare
minimum as she is interred.
Reynaldo
Polonius'
servant, sent to check on Laertes in Paris. He receives absurdly detailed
instructions in espionage from his master.
Bernardo
A
soldier who is among the first to see the ghost of Old Hamlet.
Marcellus
A
soldier who is among the first to see the ghost of Old Hamlet.
Francisco
A
soldier.
Voltemand
A
courtier.
Cornelius
A
courtier.
A Captain
A
captain in Fortinbras' army who speaks briefly with Hamlet.
Ambassadors
Ambassadors
from England who arrive at the play's close to announce that Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are dead.
Themes
Death
Death has been considered the primary theme of Hamlet by
many eminent critics through the years. G. Wilson Knight, for instance, writes
at length about death in the play: "Death is over the whole play. Polonius and Ophelia die
during the action, and Ophelia is buried before our eyes. Hamlet arranges the
deaths of Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern. The plot is set in motion by the murder of Hamlet's father, and
the play opens with the apparition of the Ghost." And so on and so forth.
The play is really death-obsessed, as is Hamlet himself. As as A.C. Bradley has
pointed out, in his very first long speech of the play, "Oh that this too
solid flesh," Hamlet seems on the verge of total despair, kept from
suicide by the simple fact of spiritual awe. He is in the strange position of
both wishing for death and fearing it intensely, and this double pressure gives
the play much of its drama.
One of the aspects of death which Hamlet finds most fascinating is
its bodily facticity. We are, in the end, so much meat and bone. This strange
intellectual being, which Hamlet values so highly and possesses so mightily, is
but tenuously connected to an unruly and decomposing machine. In the graveyard
scene, especially, we can see Hamlet's fascination with dead bodies. How can
Yorick's skull be Yorick's skull? Does a piece of dead earth, a skull, really
have a connection to a person, a personality?
Hamlet is
unprecedented for the depth and variety of its meditations on death. Mortality
is the shadow that darkens every scene of the play. Not that the play resolves
anything, or settles any of our species-old doubts and anxieties. As with most
things, we can expect to find very difficult and stimulating questions in Hamlet,
but very few satisfying answers.
Intrigue
Elsinore is full of political intrigue. The murder of Old
Hamlet, of course, is the primary instance of such sinister workings,
but it is hardly the only one. Polonius, especially, spends nearly every waking
moment (it seems) spying on this or that person, checking up on his son in
Paris, instructing Ophelia in every detail of her behavior, hiding behind
tapestries to eavesdrop. He is the parody of a politician, convinced that the
truth can only be known through the most roundabout and sneaking ways. This is
never clearer than in his appearances in Act Two. First, he instructs Reynaldo in
the most incredibly convoluted espionage methods; second, he hatches and
pursues his misguided theory that Hamlet is mad because his heart has been
broken by Ophelia.
Claudius,
too, is quite the inept Machiavellian. He naively invites Fortinbras to
march across his country with a full army; he stupidly enlists Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern as his chief spies; his attempt to poison Hamlet ends in total
tragedy. He is little better than Polonius. This political ineptitude goes a
long way toward revealing how weak Denmark has become under Claudius' rule. He
is not a natural king, to be sure; he is more interested in drinking and sex
than in war, reconnaissance, or political plotting. This is partly why his one
successful political move, the murder of his brother, is so ironic and foul. He
has somehow done away with much the better ruler, the Hyperion to his satyr (as
Hamlet puts it).
It's
worth noting that there is one extremely capable politician in the play --
Hamlet himself. He is always on top of everyone's motives, everyone's doings
and goings. He plays Polonius like a pipe and evades every effort of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to do the same to him. He sniffs out Claudius'
plot to have him killed in England and sends his erstwhile friends off to die
instead. Hamlet is a true Machiavellian when he wants to be. He certainly
wouldn't have been as warlike as his father, but had he gotten the chance he
might have been his father's equal as a ruler, simply due to his penetration
and acumen.
Language
In Act Two scene two Polonius asks Hamlet, "What do you read,
my lord?" Hamlet replies, "Words, words, words." Of course every
book is made of words, every play is a world of words, so to speak, and Hamlet is
no different. Hamlet is distinguished, however, in its
attentiveness to language within the play. Not only does it contain extremely
rich language, not only did the play greatly expand the English
vocabulary, Hamlet also contains several characters who show
an interest in language and meaning in themselves.
Polonius, for instance, is often distracted by his manner of
expressing himself. In Act Two scene two, for example, he says, "Madam, I
swear I use no art at all. / That he is mad, 'tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity, / And
pity 'tis 'tis true. A foolish figure, / But farewell to it, for I will use no
art." Of course this is typical Polonius -- absurdly hypocritical,
self-enamored, dull-witted. Just as he is extremely windy in recommending
brevity, here he is fussy and "artful" (or affectedly artificial) in
declaring that he is neither of those things. Polonius' grasp of language, like
his political instinct, is quite shallow -- he gestures toward the mastery of
rhetoric that seems like a statesman's primary craft, but he is too distracted
by surfaces to achieve any real depth.
Another angle from which to consider language in the play -- Hamletexplores
the traditional dichotomy between words and deeds. In Act Four, when talking
to Laertes,
Claudius makes this distinction explicit: "what would you undertake, / To
show yourself your father's son in deed / More than in words?" Here deeds
are associated with noble acts, specifically the fulfillment of revenge, and
words with empty bluffing. The passage resonates well beyond its immediate
context. Hamlet himself is a master of language, an explorer of its
possibilities; he is also a man who has trouble performing actual deeds. For
him, reality seems to exist more in thoughts and sentences than in acts. Thus
his trouble fulfilling revenge seems to stem from his overemphasis on reasoning
and formulating -- a fault of over-precision that he acknowledges himself in
the speech beginning, "How all occasions do inform against me."
Hamlet
is the man of language, of words, of the magic of thought. He is not fit for a
play that so emphasizes the value of action, and he knows it. But then, the
action itself is contained within words, formed and contained by Shakespeare's
pen. The action of the play is much more an illusion than the words are. Hamlet invites
us to consider whether this isn't the case more often than we might think,
whether the world of words doesn't enjoy a great deal of power in framing and describing
the world of actions, on stage or not.
Madness
By the time Hamlet was written, madness was already a
well-established element in many revenge tragedies. The most popular revenge
tragedy of the Elizabethan period, The Spanish Tragedy, also features a main character,
Hieronymo, who goes mad in the build-up to his revenge, as does the title
character in Shakespeare's first revenge tragedy, Titus Andronicus. But Hamlet is
unique among revenge tragedies in its treatment of madness because Hamlet's
madness is deeply ambiguous. Whereas previous revenge tragedy protagonists are
unambiguously insane, Hamlet plays with the idea of insanity, putting on
"an antic disposition," as he says, for some not-perfectly-clear
reason.
Of course, there is a practical advantage to appearing mad. In
Shakespeare's source for the plot of Hamlet, "Amneth" (as the legendary hero is known)
feigns madness in order to avoid the suspicion of the fratricidal king as he
plots his revenge. But Hamlet's feigned madness is not so simple as this. His
performance of madness, rather than aiding his revenge, almost distracts him
from it, as he spends the great majority of the play exhibiting very little
interest in pursuing the ghost's mission even after he has proven, via
"The Mouse Trap," that Claudius is indeed guilty as sin.
No wonder, then, that Hamlet's madness has been a resilient point
of critical controversy since the seventeenth century. The traditional question
is perhaps the least interesting one to ask of his madness -- is he really
insane or is he faking it? It seems clear from the text that he is, indeed,
playing the role of the madman (he says he will do just that) and using his
veneer of lunacy to have a great deal of fun with the many fools who populate
Elsinore, especially Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Perhaps this
feigned madness does at times edge into actual madness, in the same way that
all acted emotions come very close to their genuine models, but, as he says, he
is but mad north-nothwest, and knows a hawk from a handsaw. When he is alone,
or with Horatio,
and free from the need to act the lunatic, Hamlet is incredibly lucid and
self-aware, perhaps a bit manic but hardly insane.
So what should we make of his feigned insanity? Hamlet, in keeping
with the play in general, seems almost to act the madman because he knows in
some bizarre way that he is playing a role in a revenge tragedy. He knows that
he is expected to act mad, because he thinks that that is what one does when
seeking revenge -- perhaps because he has seen The Spanish Tragedy.
I'm joking, of course, on one level, but he does exhibit self-aware
theatricality throughout the play, and if he hasn't seen The Spanish
Tragedy, he has certainly seen The Death of Gonzago,
and many more plays besides. He knows his role, or what his role should be,
even as he is unable to play it satisfactorily. Hamlet is beautifully miscast
as the revenger -- he is constitutionally unfitted for so vulgar and
unintelligent a fate -- and likewise his attempt to play the madman, while a
valiant effort, is forced, insincere, anxious, ambiguous, and full of doubts.
Perhaps Hamlet himself, if we could ask him, would not know why he chooses to
feign madness any more than we do.
Needless
to say, Hamlet is not the only person who goes insane in the play. Ophelia's
madness serves as a clear foil to his own strange antics. She is truly,
unambiguously, innocently, simply mad. Whereas Hamlet's madness seems to
increase his self-awareness, Ophelia loses every vestige of composure and
self-knowledge, just as the truly insane tend to do.
Subjectivity
Harold Bloom, speaking about Hamlet at the
Library of Congress, said, "The play's subject massively is neither
mourning for the dead or revenge on the living. ... All that matters is
Hamlet's consciousness of his own consciousness, infinite, unlimited, and at
war with itself." He added, "Hamlet discovers that his life has been
a quest with no object except his own endlessly burgeoning subjectivity."
Bloom is not the only reader of Hamlet to see such an emphasis on the self.
Hamlet's soliloquies, to take only the most obvious feature, are
strong and sustained investigations of the self -- not only as a thinking
being, but as emotional, bodily, and paradoxically multiple. Hamlet, fascinated
by his own character, his turmoil, his inconsistency, spends line after line
wondering at himself. Why can't I carry out revenge? Why can't I carry out
suicide? He questions himself, and in so doing questions the nature of the
self.
Aside
from these massive speeches, Hamlet shows a sustained interest in philosophical
problems of the subject. Among these problems is the mediating role of thought
in all human life. "For there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes
it so," he says. We can never know the truth, he suggests, nor the good,
nor the evil of the world, except through the means of our thoughts. Certainty
is not an option. And the great realm of uncertainty, the realm of dreams,
fears, thoughts, is the realm of subjectivity.
Suicide
Like madness, suicide is a theme that links Hamlet and Ophelia and
shapes the concerns of the play more generally. Hamlet thinks deeply about it,
and perhaps "contemplates" it in the more popular sense; Ophelia
perhaps commits it. In both cases, the major upshot of suicide is religious. In
his two "suicide soliloquies," Hamlet segues into meditations on
religious laws and mysteries -- "that the Everlasting had not fixed / His
canon 'gainst self-slaughter"; "For in that sleep of death what
dreams may come." And Ophelia's burial is greatly limited by the clergy's
suspicions that she might have taken her own life. In short, Hamlet appears
to suggest that were it not for, first, the social stigma attached to suicide
by religious authorities, and second, the legitimately "unknown"
nature of whatever happens after death, there would be a lot more
self-slaughter in this difficult and bitter world. In a play so obsessed with
the self, and the nature of the self, it's only natural to see this emphasis on
self-murder.
It's
worth mentioning one of the major interpretive issues of Hamlet:
was Ophelia's death accidental or a suicide? According to Gertrude's
narration of the event, Ophelia's drowning was entirely accidental. However,
some have suggested that Gertrude's long story may be a fabrication invented to
protect the young woman from the social stigma of suicide. Indeed, in Act Five
the priest and the gravediggers are fairly certain that Ophelia took her own
life. One might ask oneself -- why does it make such a difference to us whether
she died by her own hand or not? Shakespeare seems, in fact, to inspire this
very sort of self-interrogation. Are we, like the characters in the play, so
invested in protecting Ophelia from the stigma of suicide?
Theater
Which is the star of this play, Hamlet or Hamlet?
T.S. Eliot, for one, unequivocally endorses the latter: "Few critics have
ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and
Hamlet the character only secondary." In effect, Hamlet is
a play about plays, about theater. Most obviously, it contains a play within a
play, detailed instructions on acting technique, an extended conversation about
London theater companies and their fondness for boy troupes, several references
to other theater (including to Christian mystery plays, and to Shakespeare's
own Julius Caesar),
and still more references to the stage on which it is being performed, in the
globe theater with its ghost "in the cellarage."
But what is the point of this constant metatheatrical winking?Hamlet,
among other things, is an extended meditation on the nature of acting and the
relationship between acting and "genuine" life. It refuses to obey
the conventional restrictions of theater and constantly spills out into the
audience, as it were, pointing out the "real" surroundings of the
"fictional" play, and thus incorporating them into the larger
theatrical experience.
Most specifically, Hamlet is an exploration of a specific genre and
its specific generic conventions. It is the revenge tragedy to end all revenge
tragedies, both containing and commenting on the elements that define the
genre. Modern audiences are quite comfortable with this sort of
"meta-generic" approach. Think of modern westerns, heist movies, or
martial arts movies. All of these genres have become almost obligatorily
self-aware; they contain references to past milestones in their respective
genres, they gleefully and ironically embrace (or alternatively reject) the
conventions that past films treated with sincerity. Hamlet,
in its relationship to revenge tragedy and to theater more generally, is one of
the first dramas of this kind and perhaps still the most profound example of
such post-modern concerns.
To
put it cutely, Hamlet itself is the main character of the play,
and Hamlet merely the means by which it explores its own place in the history
of theater. To make things yet dizzier, Hamlet seems, deep down, to know that
he is in a play, to know that he is miscast, to understand the theatrical
nature of his being. And who's to say that we aren't all merely actors in our
own lives? Surely, from a philosophical perspective, this is one of the basic
truths of modern human life.
important quotes:
ACT-I
"Long live the king"
(Bernardo to Francisco, Act-I, scene-i)
"For this relief much thanks: 'tis bitter cold, And i am sick at heart.
(Francisco to Bernardo, Act-I, scene-i)
The head is more native to the heart, The hand more instrumental to the mouth,
Than is the throne of Denmark to thy father. what wouldst thou have, Laertes?
(Cladius to Laertes while going to France, Act-I, scene-ii)
"A little more than kin, and less than kind"
(Aside)(The very first line spoken by Hamlet in the whole play., Act-I, scene-ii)
"I am too much i' the sun,'
(Hamlet to Claudius, Act-I, scene-ii. Figures of speech is Pun: It is a pun on the word 'son. ' Hamlet uses this pun to express his dissatisfaction of being a 'son' to too many people.)
"Seek for thy noble father on the dust: Thou knowst 'tis common: all that lives must die passing through nature to eternity"
(Gertrude to Hamlet, Act I, Scene ii )
“O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
.... let me not think on't--Frailty thy name is woman.....
....Married with my uncle, my father's brother, but no more like my father, Than I to Herculus: within a month....
...But break my heart , for I must hold my tongue. "
(Hamlet's 1st soliloquy, act 1 scene 2)
Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but thy means vulgar.
... beware of entrance to a quarrel, but being in bear it that the opposed may beware of thee...
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice..
Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgement.
...costly thy habit [cloths] as thy purse can buy..
...Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
For loan oft loses both itself and friend,
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
...This above all: to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.”
(Polonius, while bidding farewell to Laertes, gives instructions about how to behave, act 1, scene 3)
“…though I am native here
And to the manner born, it is a custom
More honoured in the breach than the observance.”
(Hamlet, act 1 scene 4)
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.“
(Marcellus, act 1 scene 4, Figures of speech is Imagery: this imagery draws our sense of sight and smell.)
“O all you host of heaven! O earth what else?
And shall I couple he'll?
[..... ]
O most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling damned villaian,
My tables, -- meet it is I set it down,
That one may smile and smile and be a villain.”
(Hamlet's 2nd soliloquy, act 1 scene 5)
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”
(Hamlet, act 1 scene 5)
ACT-II
“Brevity is the soul of wit.“
(Polonius to Cladius and Gertrude, act 2 scene 2, about the madness of Hamlet, as he is almost always verbose and overly detailed, repeating his words. Consequently, his phrase “brevity is the soul of wit” contradicts his actions )
"That he's mad, 'tis true, 'tis true 'tis pity, And pity 'tis, 'tis true—a foolish figure'
(Polonius to Cladius and Gertrude, act 2 scene 2, about the madness of Hamlet)
"Doubt thou the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love”
(Polonius reading Hamlet's love letter to Ophelia; and Cladius and Gertrude are listening, act 2 scene 2, about the madness of Hamlet)
"Excellent well; you are a fishmonger"
(Hamlet to Polonius, Act-II, scene-ii, Literally a "fishmonger," is seller of fish (lower class), but it is actually slang for "pimp." In Shakespeare's time, "fishmonger" had an association with men who used women for their own monetary gain. Hamlet thinks Polonius put his selfishness in front of his daughter's happiness.)
"Words, words, words."
(Hamlet to Polonius, Act-II, scene-ii, it is the answer to polonious question: what do you read, my lord?)
“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”
(Polonius, act 2 scene 2, it is an aside)
"Denmark is a prison"
(Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, act 2 scene 2, figures of speech is Meraphor)
“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”
(Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, act 2 scene ii, when Rosencrantz says Denmark is not a prison, Hamlet says this)
"A dream itself is but a shadow"
(Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, act 2, scene-ii )
“What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an Angel! in apprehension how like a god!
The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals! And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seem to say so..”
(Hamlet, act II, scene ii)
I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly,
.....I know a hawk from a handsaw.
(Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, act II, scene ii, As the wind only occasionally blows from the north-north-west, so too is he only occasionally struck by madness. Hamlet is warning his friends that he can tell the difference between a friend and an enemy.)
"For they say, an old man is twice a child"
(Rosencrantz to Hamlet, Act II, scene-ii, )
"Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor Plautus too light"
(Polinius to Hamlet, in Act-II, scene-ii, about a group of players)
“O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!" ...
.......What Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,...
.......But i am pigeon livered and lack gall
(Hamlet's 3rd soliloquy, act 2 scene ii)
ACT-III
“To be, or not to be: that is the question:Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?—To die,—to sleep,—
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to,—’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d.
(Hamlet's 4th soliloquy, act 3 scene 1)
Get thee to a Nunnery, go: farewell Or , if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool
(Hamletto Ophelia , act 3 scene 1)
“God hath given you one face, and you make yourself another.”
(Hamletto Ophelia , act 3 scene 1)
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.“
(Gertrude, act 3 scene 2)
“Oh my offence is rank, it smells to heaven".......
.........What form of prayer can serve my turn? Forgive me my foul murder?..."
The only soliloquy in the play not spoken by Hamlet. Claudius admits murdering his brother, and he describes his guilt in the language of decay.
(Only Soliloquy Spoken by Claudius, Act 3 Scene 3)
“Now might I do it pat, now he is praying; And now I'll don't, And so he goes to heaven"
(6th soliloquy Spoken by Hamlet, Act 3 Scene 3, Hamlet is ready to kill Cladius, but he is praying, so Cladius has a chance to go to heaven, so he did not killed him. Figures of speech is Dramatic irony: audience know that Cladius is not asking forgiveness in prayers, but Hamlet don't know this; and missed the chance to kill Cladius )
"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go"
(Cladius after prayer, Act 3 scene 3)
"How now! a rat? Dead, for a ducat,dead!"
(Hamlet to Gertrude, pointing to arras after killing Polonius , act 3 scene 4)
"O speak to me no more; these words, like daggers, enter in mine years; No more sweet Hamlet!"
(Gertrude to Hamlet, Act III, Scene iv)
"O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain"
(Gertrude to Hamlet, Act III, Scene iv, Figures of speech is Hyperbole)
“I must be cruel only to be kind; Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind.”
(Hamlet to Gertrude after killing Polonius , act 3 scene 4)
ACT-IV
"The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body."
(refer directly to Polonius, a "king" who's been separated from his body through death.)
(Hamlet to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, act 4 scene 2)
Cladius: Now Hamlet, Where's Polonius
Hamlet: Ar supper
Cladius: At supper! where
Hamlet: Not where he eats, but where he is eaten
(After Polonius death, Act 4, Scene-ii)
"A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of the worm"
(Hamlet to Claudius, Act 4, Scene-iii)
"Truly to speak with no addition,
We go to a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name
To pay five ducats, five, i would not farm it"
(Captain to Hamlet, Act 4, Scene-iv, The captain is from Norway and they are going to invade Poland for a piece of land which is useless in captain's opinion)
Two thousand souls and Twenty thousand ducats
will not debate the question of this straw:
(Hamlet to Captain of Norway, Act 4, Scene-iv)
“How all occasions do inform against me, and spur my dull revenge.“
(Hamlet's 7th and last soliloquy, act IV scene iv)
When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions
(Cladius, Act-4, Scene-v, to Gertrude , Figure of Speech is Personification: Here, the non-human entity, ‘sorrow’ has been personified as troops)
"Laertes shall be king, Laertes king"
(Gentleman with King and Queen , after the death of Polonius, Act4 Scene-v)
(Ophelia, Act-4, Scene-v, she sings song to Laertes after going mad)
ACT-V
What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?
(First Clown, act 5 scene 1, answers it as grave maker: his houses will last forever (he says until Doomsday)
“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: A fellow of infinite jest.“
(Hamlet, act 5 scene 1)
"I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love"
(Hamlet, act 5 scene 1)
"There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow, If it be now, ’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.”
(Hamlet, act 5 scene 2)
Why, as a woodcock to mine own springe, Osric; I am justly kill'd with mine own treachery.
(Laertes, act 5 scene 2, He is caught in his own trap, and shows his confession)
(Horatio to Hamlet, act 5 scene 2, Horatio feels that he is like a Roman soldier to go on living without his friend and so wants to drink from the cup of poison. )
“The rest is silence.”
(Hamlet, act 5 scene 2, Final words of Hamlet)
“Now cracks a noble heart. Good-night, sweet prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. ”
(Horatio, act 5 scene 2)
Summary and Analysis of Act 1
Summary
Scene 1
The play opens during a bitterly cold night watch outside of the
royal Danish palace. There is a changing of the guards: Bernardo replaces Francisco.
Soon two more characters arrive, Horatio and Marcellus.
We learn that Bernardo and Marcellus, two soldiers, have witnessed an
extraordinary sight on both of the previous nights’ watches: the ghost of the
former King of Denmark, Old
Hamlet, has appeared before them in full armor. On this third night,
they’ve welcomed Horatio, a scholar and a skeptic who has just arrived in
Denmark, to verify their ghost sighting. Horatio initially expresses doubt that
the ghost will appear. Suddenly, it does. The two soldiers charge Horatio to
speak to the ghost but he does not. The ghost disappears just as suddenly as it
arrived.
Soon after the ghost’s disappearance, Marcellus asks the other two
why there has been such a massive mobilization of Danish war forces recently.
Horatio answers, saying that the Danish army is preparing for a possible
invasion by Fortinbras,
Prince of Norway. We learn that Fortinbras’ father (also named Fortinbras), was
killed many years before in single combat with Old Hamlet,
the now-deceased king whose ghost we have just seen. Now that Old Hamlet has
died, presumably weakening the Danes, there is a rumor that Fortinbras plans to
invade Denmark and claim that lands that were forfeit after his father’s death.
After Horatio has finished explaining this political backstory,
the ghost of Old Hamlet appears once more. This time Horatio does try to speak
to the ghost. When the ghost remains silent, Horatio tells Marcellus and
Bernardo to try to detain it; they strike at the ghost with their spears but
jab only air. A rooster crows just as the ghost appears ready to reply to Horatio
at last. This sound startles the ghost away. Horatio decides to tell Prince
Hamlet, Old Hamlet’s son, about the apparition, and the others agree.
Scene 2
This scene begins at the court of Claudius and Gertrude,
the King and Queen of Denmark. They have just been married. This marriage has
followed quickly after the death of the former King of Denmark, Old Hamlet,
Claudius’ brother. Claudius addresses the quickness of the marriage,
representing himself as in mourning for a lost brother even as he is joyful for
a new wife, his one-time sister. Claudius also addresses the question of the
young Fortinbras’ proposed invasion. He says that he has spoken to Fortinbras’
uncle, the King of Norway, who has made Fortinbras promise to halt any plans to
invade Denmark. Claudius sends Cornelius and Voltemand,
two courtiers, to Norway to settle this business. Finally, Claudius turns
to Laertes,
the son of his trusted counselor, Polonius.
Laertes expresses a wish to return to France and Claudius grants permission.
At this point, Prince Hamlet, who has been standing apart from the
king’s audience this whole time, speaks the first of his many lines. Claudius
asks Hamlet why he is still so gloomy. Hamlet’s replies are evasive, cynical,
and punning. He declares that his grief upon losing his father still deeply
affects him. Claudius goes into a speech about the unnaturalness of prolonged
grief; to lose one’s father is painful but common, he says, and Hamlet should
accept this as nature’s course. He expresses a wish that Hamlet remain with
them in Denmark instead of returning to Wittenberg, where he is a student, and
when Gertrude seconds this wish, Hamlet agrees. The king, queen, and all their
retinue then exit the stage, leaving Hamlet alone.
In his first soliloquy, Hamlet expresses the depths of his
melancholy and his disgust at his mother’s hastily marrying Claudius after the
death of his father. He declares his father to be many times Claudius’ superior
as a man. After this soliloquy, Horatio, Marcellus and Bernardo enter. At
first, Hamlet is too aggrieved to recognize Horatio, his old school friend, but
finally he welcomes Horatio warmly. After chatting about the state, Horatio
tells Hamlet that he has seen his dead father recently – the night before.
Hamlet asks him to explain, and Horatio tells the story of the appearance of
the ghost. Hamlet decides to attend the watch that very night in hopes of
seeing the ghost himself.
Scene 3
As the scene opens, Laertes is taking his leave of his
sister, Ophelia.
In the course of their farewells, Laertes advises her about her relationship
with Hamlet, with whom she has been spending much of her time lately. He tells
her to forget him because he, as Prince of Denmark, is too much to hope for as
a husband. He adds that she should vigilantly guard her chastity, her most
prized treasure as a woman. Ophelia agrees to attend to his lesson. As Laertes
is about to leave, his father, Polonius, arrives. Polonius gives Laertes a
blessing and a battery of advice before sending his son on his way.
With Laertes gone, Polonius asks Ophelia what they had been
talking about as he arrived. Ophelia confesses that they had been talking about
her relationship with Hamlet. She tells Polonius that Hamlet has made many
honorable declarations of love to her. Polonius pooh-poohs these declarations,
saying, much as Laertes did, that Hamlet wants nothing more than to assail her
chastity and then leave her. He makes his daughter promise that she will spend
no more time alone with Hamlet. Ophelia says that she will obey.
Scene 4
At the night watch, Hamlet, Horatio and Marcellus await the
reappearance of the ghost. They hear cannons from the castle and Hamlet tells
them that this is a sign that Claudius is drinking pledges. Hamlet goes on a
short tirade against the Danish custom of drinking heavily. His speech is no
sooner over than the ghost appears again. Hamlet immediately addresses the
ghost, imploring it to speak. The ghost beckons for Hamlet to come away, apart
from the others. Horatio and Marcellus attempt to keep Hamlet from following
the ghost, warning him of the many evils that might befall him. Hamlet doesn’t
listen. He threatens to kill Horatio or Marcellus if they detain him, and when
they stay back he follows the ghost offstage. Horatio and Marcellus determine
to follow at a distance to make sure that no harm comes to their friend.
Scene 5
Alone with Hamlet, the ghost finally speaks. He tells Hamlet that
he has come on a nightly walk from Purgatory, where his soul is under continual
torment for the sins of his life. The ghost then reveals that he was not killed
by a viper, as officially announced, but was murdered. Moreover, he reveals
that his own brother, Claudius, who now wears his crown and sleeps with his
wife, was the murderer. The ghost tells of how Claudius snuck into his garden
while he was taking his accustomed afternoon nap and poured poison into his
ear, killing him most painfully and sending his soul unpurified into the
afterlife. The ghost demands vengeance, telling Hamlet not to plot against his
mother, whom he describes as merely weak and lustful, but to focus the whole of
his revenge on Claudius. The ghost then disappears.
Hamlet, overwhelmed and half-raving, swears that he will kill
Claudius. After he has made this vow, Horatio and Marcellus arrive. Hamlet does
not tell them what the ghost has revealed, but nevertheless insists that they
swear not to speak of the apparition to anyone. They agree. Hamlet then insists
that they swear again on his sword. They agree again, confused at these
demands. The ghost of Old Hamlet, meanwhile, can be heard under the stage,
insisting along with his son that they swear themselves to secrecy. Hamlet
leads his friends to several different points on stage, insisting that they
swear over and over again. He then reveals, parenthetically, that they might
find his behavior in the next while to be strange – he might pretend to be mad
and act otherwise unusually – but that they must still keep secret what they
have seen. After this final agreement, Hamlet leads the others offstage,
uneasily determined to revenge his father’s murder.
Analysis
Even if this is your first time reading Hamlet,
it must already seem very familiar. Countless characters, ideas, and quotations
introduced in this play have become part of the cultural (and literal)
vocabulary of the western world – and, indeed, the whole world. Many of the
most famous critical minds of western history, from Samuel Johnson to Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, from Eliot to Empson, from Voltaire to Goethe to Freud, have
taken a crack at the play, and together they have left very few stones
unturned. Nevertheless, there is still much to be gained from an intelligent
appreciation of Hamlet. While one should not expect to resolve any of
the famous and bizarre conundrums of the play – “Is Hamlet really insane or
faking insanity?” “Did Ophelia commit suicide or not?” “Is Hamlet in love with
his mother?” – there is still great value in knowing what these conundrums are,
how they are presented, and why they are important. Sensitively and cleverly
acknowledging a puzzle to be a puzzle is where much Hamlet scholarship
begins – and ends.
The first scene of the play, like most every scene of the play, is
very well known, and very puzzling. Without explaining his reasons in detail,
T.S. Eliot once declared the first lines of the play to be the best lines in
English. He and many other critics have found this scene to be a microcosm of
the whole play, as it were. Shakespeare uses many deceptively simple rhetorical
tricks to introduce some of the major themes and concerns that he follows
through to the play’s end.
For example, in a play that contains many of the most famous, most
unanswerable questions ever expressed, whether literal questions (“To be or not
to be”) or interpretive questions of motivation (“Why doesn’t Hamlet just kill
Claudius straight away?”), it is remarkable that Shakespeare begins Hamlet with
a question, “Who’s there?” Who’s there, indeed.... On one level, this is a
simple question, one that is asked every day in the most innocuous contexts.
But on a deeper level (and everything in this play is richly rewarding on a
deeper level) it is one of the basic questions of philosophy. Who is there? Who
are we? What is man? Who is Hamlet? What is Hamlet? In this most
philosophical of plays, we begin with a moment of covert philosophy, a question
simple on the surface, but profound when pressed; and the first scene continues
this focus on questioning, giving us question after question. Horatio, the
quintessential scholar, skeptical and empirical, begins by questioning the
reality of the ghost; eventually, he is exhorted to “question” the ghost in a
more literal way – to ask the ghost questions. In general, then, the first
scene takes us from the no-nonsense world outside the theater, the world of
Horatio and his doubts, to the magical, metaphysical, ultra-theatrical world of Hamlet.
We may bring certainties to the play, but we are encouraged almost immediately
to abandon them.
Thus before we have even seen Hamlet (the younger Hamlet, that is)
we are deeply mired in the play’s dubious, spectral atmosphere. In the second
scene, after several long speeches by Claudius giving us political background,
we come to Hamlet’s first soliloquy. A “soliloquy” is a speech given by a
speaker alone on stage, exploring his or her own thoughts and feelings. Both
Hamlet and Hamlet are
practically synonymous with such speeches; in this play, Shakespeare exhausts
the possibilities of such on-stage introspection. Hamlet’s soliloquies are not
to be thought of as “actually happening” in any realistic way. Rather, they are
moments of suspended time, in which the overwhelming pressure of a single
thought, or group of thoughts, forces its way out of a speaker’s mind by way of
his mouth. They are moments where we, as audience members, can enter intimately
into Hamlet’s mind, exploring the patterns of his thought even as he does so
himself.
We might notice right away, in this first soliloquy, how difficult
Hamlet can be to follow – how much his speech jumps and roils around, allowing
interjections, playing with allusions and puns, becoming frequently side-tracked
by this or that image. This tendency of Hamlet’s, to become sidetracked by his
own train of thoughts, is crucial to the play, and crucial to the central
motivational mystery of Hamlet – the delay of the revenge. But we will
see much more of that to come.
We might also note that in his first soliloquy Hamlet appears
deeply “depressed,” as we would put it today, or “melancholic,” as the people
of the early seventeenth century would have put it. The audience of Hamlet’s own
day would have expected as much. The play belongs to a genre known as “revenge
tragedy.” Such plays occupied many of the greatest playwrights of the
generation directly preceding Shakespeare’s, including Thomas Kyd, but by the
time Hamlet was
written they had come to be seen as rather old-fashioned. Like any genre,
revenge tragedy has certain predictable conventions, one of which is that the
protagonist of the play is melancholic – dominated by saturnine, sluggish,
pensive “humors,” or bodily spirits. In Hamlet, Shakespeare, rather than simply repeating this
convention, explores it as a convention. That is, he gives us the
archetypal revenge hero, the most introspective, most melancholic, most pensive
hero ever seen on the English stage.
At the same time, Hamlet seems somewhat aware that he is, in fact,
playing a role on stage. He notices his own costume and makeup (“’Tis not alone
my inky cloak, good mother [...]” (I.ii.77 ff.)); he refers to specific areas
in the theater (as when he notes that the ghost is “in the cellarage”
(I.v.150)); in short, he seems at once to be the most typical of types, and to
be an audience to his own typecasting – and furthermore, he seems to be
distressed about being so typecast, and anxious to prove that there is
something genuine behind his theatrical veneer. In general, critics have long
noticed that Hamlet is a play about plays, most specifically a
revenge tragedy about revenge tragedy, and the pretzel-like self-referentiality
of the protagonist is the main reason why.
As a relatively light-hearted accompaniment to such ghastliness
and introspective misery, Act One features two appearances by Polonius and his
family. Nearly every Elizabethan play has at least one so-called “subplot,” and
this family occupies the primary subplot of Hamlet – the
question of Hamlet’s relationship with Ophelia. Polonius, you might have
noticed already, is long-winded, pedantic, and meddlesome, even while he is
somewhat loveable in his fussy way. He is always interested in being “in the
know,” whatever the occasion. Notice, for instance, how eagerly he questions
Ophelia about her earlier conversation with Laertes.
Act One contains Polonius’ most famous speech in the play, and one
of the most quoted speeches of Shakespeare, the advice speech to Laertes that
ends, “to thine own self be true” (I.iii.55 ff.). One can weigh the various
maxims here offered on the basis of their individual merits. However, it is a
common mistake of new readers of Shakespeare to take this speech simply at face
value – to think, in effect, that Shakespeare, not Polonius, is giving this
advice. This is never the case in Shakespeare – he never simply speaks
“through” a character – and most certainly not the case here. Notice, for
instance, that Polonius’ speech begins by telling Laertes to rush off to catch
his boat, and then detains him from doing just that. Notice also, that Polonius
begins by declaring that he will offer Laertes a “few precepts,” then goes on
to ramble for thirty lines. Polonius, in short, never misses an occasion for a
speech, and follows his own advice creatively if at all. His meddlesome,
didactic character leads to his undoing, as we shall see.
Summary and Analysis of Act 2
Summary
Scene 1
Act Two begins with Polonius speaking
to one of his servants, Reynaldo,
about his son, Laertes,
who has by this time returned to Paris. We see Polonius in the act of sending
Reynaldo after Laertes to inquire into his son’s conduct. He instructs Reynaldo
very precisely in the method of obtaining this information. First, Reynaldo is
to find out from strangers in Paris about the prominent Danes in the city
without revealing that he has any particular attachment to Laertes. When
Laertes’ name comes up, Reynaldo is to pretend to have some distant knowledge
of him, and is further to suggest that he knows of Laertes as something of a
happy-go-lucky youth given to gambling, drinking, fencing, swearing, fighting,
and whoring. By this path of insinuation, Polonius explains, Reynaldo will hear
from his hypothetical Parisian interlocutor the unvarnished truth about
Laertes’ conduct in France. Having thus prepared Reynaldo to spy on his son,
Polonius sends him off.
Ophelia enters,
distraught. She tells her father that Hamlet has
frightened her with his wild, unkempt appearance and deranged manners. After
Ophelia describes Hamlet’s behavior, she further reveals that, as per Polonius’
orders, she has cut off all contact with Hamlet and has refused his letters.
Polonius reasons, thus, that Hamlet’s madness is the result of Ophelia’s
rejection. He had thought that Hamlet was only trifling with her, but it turns
out (he now declares) that Hamlet was indeed deeply in love with Ophelia.
Polonius hurries off to tell Claudius and Gertrude that
he has discovered the reason for their son’s odd behavior.
Scene 2
King Claudius has made plans of his own to discover the reasons
for Hamlet’s supposed madness. He has summoned two of Hamlet’s school
friends, Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern, both to comfort his nephew-cum-son and to try to discover the
reason for his distemper (so he says). The two scholars are only too happy to
oblige in this task.
After Rosencrantz and Guildenstern leave the royal presence,
Polonius rushes in, announcing that he has found the reason for Hamlet’s
madness. Before he reveals his news, however, he entreats Claudius and Gertrude
to hear from the two ambassadors to Norway, Voltemand and Cornelius,
who have just returned. They report that the King of Norway, after looking into
his nephew Fortinbras’
actions, found out that he was indeed planning to invade Denmark. The King of
Norway then rebuked Fortinbras and ordered him to abandon his plan of Danish
conquest, which young Fortinbras agreed to do. Overjoyed at his nephew’s
acquiescence, Norway then rewarded Fortinbras with a generous annual allowance.
Further, Norway granted Fortinbras leave to levy war against the Polish.
Finally, the ambassadors report that Norway seeks Claudius’ permission to allow
Fortinbras passage through Denmark in this proposed campaign against Poland. Claudius
declares his approval of this message and says that he will consider its
details anon.
Polonius steps forward to reveal his discovery. He tells the king
and queen, in a very roundabout way, that he has discovered Hamlet’s foiled
love of Ophelia, and that he believes this lost love to be the root cause of
Hamlet’s madness. Claudius asks how they might prove this to be the case.
Polonius has a plan. He offers to loose Ophelia on Hamlet while he is reading
alone in the library. Meanwhile, he suggests, he and Claudius could hide behind
a tapestry and observe the meeting. Claudius agrees.
Just then, Hamlet enters, reading. Gertrude and Claudius exit
while Polonius attempts to speak to Hamlet. Hamlet plays with Polonius, mocking
him, evading his questions, and turning his language inside out. Nevertheless,
Polonius “reads between the lines,” as it were, and interprets Hamlet’s
nonsensical replies as motivated by a broken heart. Polonius leaves to contrive
the proposed meeting between Hamlet and his daughter.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern enter, surprising their friend
Hamlet. The three friends banter philosophically for a good while before Hamlet
asks the two why they have come to Elsinore. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try
to dodge this question, declaring that they have come for no other reason than
to visit him. Hamlet, though, won’t let them off the hook, and makes them admit
that the king and queen sent for them. When they admit it, Hamlet also tells
them why they were sent for – because he has been deeply melancholy, and has
foregone his accustomed behavior. He sinks deeply into a speech detailing this
misery.
Rosencrantz changes the subject. He tells Hamlet that he and
Guildenstern passed a troop of players on their way to Elsinore. They gossip
briefly about the city theaters the troop had left before coming to Denmark
(presumably those of London). Soon the players arrive with a flourish. Polonius
rushes back into the scene, bearing the already stale news that the players
have arrived. Hamlet banters with Polonius in the same mocking vein as before
until the players burst into court, at which point Hamlet rushes up to welcome
them.
Hamlet insists upon hearing a speech straight away, and in
particular requests a recitation based on a scene in Virgil’s Aeneid,
as related by Aeneas to Dido, recounting the death of Priam during the fall of
Troy. Hamlet himself begins the speech and then cedes the floor to one of the
players, who recites a long and fustian description of Priam’s death by
Pyrrhus’ hand. The player goes on to speak of the wild grief of Hecuba, Priam’s
wife, after her husband has been killed. While speaking of her agony, the
player begins to weep and shake. Polonius finally cuts him off and Hamlet
agrees.
Before the players retire, however, Hamlet pulls the main player
aside and asks him whether the company knows a certain play, “The Murder of
Gonzago.” The player says that they do, and Hamlet commissions it for the
following night, saying that he will write some speeches of his own to be
inserted into the play as written. The player says that this would be fine and
then takes his leave.
Left alone on stage, Hamlet muses about the strangeness of his
situation. He asks himself, “How can this player be so filled with grief and
rage over Priam and Hecuba, imaginary figures whom he doesn’t even know, while
I, who have every reason to rage and grieve and seek bloody revenge, am weak,
uncertain, and incapable of action?” He curses himself and his indecisiveness
before cursing his murderous uncle in a rage. Having regained composure, Hamlet
announces his plan to make sure that the ghost of his father is genuine – that
the apparition was not some evil spirit sent to lure his soul to damnation. He
declares his intention to stage a play exactly based on the murder of his
father. While it is played he will observe Claudius. If the king is guilty,
Hamlet figures, surely he will show this guilt when faced with the scene of the
crime.
Analysis
This Act begins by establishing the atmosphere of political
intrigue at Elsinore. Polonius plots to spy on Laertes by means of Reynaldo;
Claudius and Gertrude plot to spy on Hamlet by means of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern; Norway foils Fortinbras’ plot to invade Denmark, only to assist
him in a venture against Poland. It seems that everyone in Elsinore is plotting
against everyone else. Significantly, though, these intrigues are represented
as very clumsy, if not stupid. Polonius’ instructions to Reynaldo are so
comically complex and so circuitously related that he himself loses track of
them at one point. And his attempt to relate his great discovery of Hamlet’s
broken heart to Claudius and Gertrude in the second scene does not go any
better. “Brevity is the soul of wit,” he says (another instance of Polonius
getting one of Shakespeare’s most famous and most often decontextualized
lines); and he then proceeds to be anything but brief, anything but witty.
Rather, he is dull, pedantic, self-important, pompous, flowery – and, more to
the point, dead wrong. As in Act One, Polonius obviously fancies himself a
great political mind. We might beg to differ.
Claudius, too, shows remarkable political stupidity in trusting to
the espionage of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two rather clownish fellows whom
Hamlet sees through instantly. Moreover, the Norway episode reveals Claudius’
blunt instincts quite clearly; he appears ready to agree to allow Fortinbras,
whom only days before had planned to take over his realm, to march through
Denmark on his way to conquer Poland. This is sort of like allowing Canada to
march through the United States in order to attack Mexico. In other words, it
makes no sense at all, strategically or logistically. Claudius and Polonius,
try as they might to play the part of Machiavellian lords of state, are really quite
out of their depth.
Hamlet, however, has found his element in Act Two. His language is
dazzling, full of wild puns, inventive jokes, and succinct and strong
observations – sheer mastery. His repartee with Polonius, for instance, plays
brilliantly with the notion of “method in madness” (as Polonius puts it). He
plays the role of the melancholic madman almost as though Polonius is a
gullible audience member. Hamlet toys with Polonius, leading the old fool to
think just what he wants. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, too, are no match for
the perceptiveness of Hamlet. He instantly plumbs the depths of their purpose,
calling them out for royal spies. In short, Hamlet appears in this Act as the
only truly gifted politician, the only accurate reader of men’s minds, in the
whole of Elsinore. Why, then, is he so reluctant to act – so incapable, it
seems, of action? Why does he not even mention revenge until the very last
speech of the Act? It seems that Hamlet is so obsessed with contemplating the
meaning of action that he is rendered unable to act himself.
This is the central question of Hamlet, of course, and
one that has frustrated and intrigued readers for centuries. The transition
from the Hamlet of Act One Scene Five, so willing and eager to kill Claudius,
to the Hamlet of Act Two Scene Two, where he is witty and evasive and
ultimately impotent, is really quite absurd. It’s almost as though we’ve
suddenly landed in another play – one not about revenge, but about something
else, about madness or politics or about the very meaning of acting.
This theme comes to a head, of course, with the appearance of the
troop of players. The handling of the players in Hamlet places
the play firmly in the genre of “metatheater,” or theater about theater. The
scenes with the players are full of in-jokes about theatrical happenings in
Shakespeare’s own day – the rise in popularity of boy acting troops, for
instance. In another winking moment in Act Three, Polonius declares that he was
an actor in his younger days. “I did enact Julius Caesar,”
he says. “I was killed i’th’Capitol. Brutus killed me.” In fact, scholars
surmise, Shakespeare staged Hamletimmediately following his own Julius Caesar.
Here are two moments among many, then, where Shakespeare refers outside of the
play, to the reality of London stage culture (where, in fact, the play is actuallytaking
place, at the time of its first performances). What is he up to with these
references? Are they simply jokes, or do they point to some deeper concerns?
It seems that Shakespeare is blurring the lines between
theatricality and reality. He insists that we see his play as occurring at the
same time in the fantasy world of Elsinore and in the actual world of the Globe
Theater in London in the early seventeenth century (which for us, at our
historical remove, is yet another layer of fantasy). He writes elsewhere,
in As You Like It,
“All the world’s a stage.” In Hamlet, he takes this notion a step farther, giving us
a play that presses relentlessly on the primordial relationship between acting
in the theater and acting in “real life.” Is there ever a moment when we, as
human beings, are not “playing a role” in one way or another? Are the tears
that we shed for the loss of our loved ones any more genuine than the tears
that an actor sheds for the imaginary death of Priam, the imaginary grief of
Hecuba? If so, how? Why?
And this, of course, is the subject of Hamlet’s second soliloquy,
which closes the Act. “What’s Hecuba to him or he to her?” he asks of the
player who has just wept for his fictional subject. Shakespeare has layered
this speech so carefully and so vertiginously that it might be helpful simply
to bracket out the several planes of meaning on which it operates. First,
Hamlet speaks of the man on stage who has shown such an outpouring of emotion
for Hecuba while he, Hamlet, who has every reason to show such grief himself,
remains cold and reluctant to act. But on another level, “Hamlet” himself is an
actor on stage, and has no more reason to wail and grieve and gnash his teeth
than the player who spoke of Hecuba does. While he is philosophizing about the
nature of pretend grief versus real grief, all is ultimately pretend. There is
no Hamlet. There was no poisoning, not really. On this second level, it seems
almost as though Hamlet “knows” that he is in a play. He does not hurry along
the revenge because he knows there is nothing really to revenge; nothing really
happened; it has all been staged. Of course, he can’t really “know” this, but
Shakespeare creates the effect of self-awareness and self-doubt that reaches
beyond the limitations of the stage. Somehow he is able to explore these
philosophical questions while maintaining a compelling plotline.
By the way, this notion of Hamlet as "metatheater" is explored,
among several other places, in Lionel Abel's book, Tragedy and
Metatheatre: Essays on Dramatic Form.
Summary and Analysis of Act 3
Summary
Scene 1
An entourage consisting of the king and queen, Polonius and Ophelia,
and Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern enters to begin the Act.Claudius asks
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern what they have learned about Hamlet’s
malady. The two reply that they have not been able to find its cause. They do
mention, however, that Hamlet was very enthusiastic about the players’
performance that night, which prompts Claudius to agree to attend the play.
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern leave. Polonius and Claudius then begin their plan
to loose Ophelia on Hamlet and mark their encounter, hoping to find the root of
his madness. They instruct Ophelia to pretend that she is simply reading a book
and withdraw behind a tapestry.
Hamlet enters and delivers the most famous speech in literature,
beginning, “To be or not to be.” After this long meditation on the nature of
being and death, Hamlet catches sight of Ophelia. After a short conversation
she attempts to return some of the remembrances that Hamlet gave when courting
her. Hamlet replies caustically, questioning Ophelia’s honesty. He then berates
Ophelia, telling her off sarcastically and venomously, with the refrain, “Get
thee to a nunnery,” or in other words, “Go become a nun to control your lust.”
After this tirade, Hamlet exists, leaving Ophelia in shambles.
Claudius and Polonius step out of their hiding place. The king
states that he does not believe that Hamlet is mad because of his foiled love
for Ophelia, or really mad at all, but tormented for some hidden reason. He
determines to send Hamlet on a diplomatic mission to England before he can
cause any serious trouble. Polonius endorses this plan, but persists in his
belief that Hamlet’s grief is the result of his love for Ophelia. He consoles
his daughter. Polonius suggests in parting that Claudius arrange a private
interview between Hamlet and his mother after the play that evening and
Claudius agrees.
Scene 2
Just as the play is about to begin, Hamlet instructs the players
on the art of acting, telling them to act naturally and to avoid bombast. He
sets the players to their preparations and then conferences with Horatio.
After complimenting Horatio in the most sterling terms, Hamlet asks his friend
to assist him in watching the king’s response to the play they are about to see
(apparently Hamlet has by this time told Horatio what the ghost revealed).
Horatio seats himself so as to view the king properly. The royal entourage
enters. Hamlet manically chatters with Claudius, Polonius, Gertrude and
Ophelia, reserving special attention for the latter, whom he sits next to and
teases.
The play begins with a “Dumb Show,” which is a pantomime of the
drama to come. On stage, the basic form of the alleged murder is repeated: a
king and queen are shown happily married; the king takes a nap; a poisoner
enters and pours something in the king’s ear, killing him; the poisoner than
takes possession of the queen. Ophelia seems confused by this plot but Hamlet
tells her to wait for the speaker of the prologue to explain.
The prologue is a short little jingling rhyme. The player king and
queen then immediately enter the stage. The king mentions that they have been
married thirty years. The player queen expresses a hope that their love last as
long over again. The king encourages the queen to remarry if he dies. The queen
protests against this notion vehemently, swearing never to love another if were
to she turn widow. With this, the king falls asleep and the queen exits. Hamlet
asks his mother, Gertrude, how she likes the play, and Gertrude replies with
the famous line, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Claudius is also
outspokenly apprehensive about the nature of the play. It continues, however,
with the entrance of Lucianus, the sleeping king’s nephew. This evil character
creeps up to the sleeping player king and pours poison in his ear. Hamlet,
unable to contain himself, erupts, telling everyone that Lucianus will soon win
the love of the king’s over-protesting wife.
At this, Claudius rises and orders the play to end. He retreats
with his retinue. Hamlet and Horatio laugh together, certain now that the ghost
was telling the truth. After a short celebration, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
enter and tell Hamlet that he has made Claudius very angry. They also say that
Gertrude has ordered Hamlet to meet her in her chamber. They then entreat
Hamlet to tell the cause of his distemper. Hamlet replies mockingly by saying
that they are trying to play him like a pipe and that he won’t let them.
Polonius enters and entreats Hamlet again to see his mother. All exit but
Hamlet. In a short soliloquy, Hamlet reflects that he will be cruel to his
mother, showing her the extent of her crime in marrying Claudius, but will not
actually hurt her.
Scene 3
Claudius gives Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a sealed envelope with
orders to convey Hamlet to England and give the envelope to the king there. In
highly flattering terms, they agree to do the king’s bidding and exit. Polonius
then enters, saying that Hamlet is going to meet with his mother, and declaring
his intention to hide behind an arras and listen to their conversation. He
exits. Alone, the king looks into his soul. He is deeply disgusted by what he
sees. He kneels to pray, hoping to purge his guilt, but reflects that this
penance will not be genuine because he will still retain the prizes for which
he committed murder in the first place, his crown and his wife.
As Claudius is vainly attempting to pray, Hamlet comes up behind
him. He reflects that he now has an opportunity to kill his uncle and revenge
his father, but pauses, considering that because Claudius is in the act of
prayer he would likely go straight to heaven if killed. Hamlet resolves to kill
Claudius later, when he is in the middle of some sinful act. He continues on to
his mother’s chamber.
Scene 4
In the chamber, awaiting Hamlet’s arrival, Polonius hides himself
behind one of Gertrude’s curtains. Hamlet enters. Gertrude attempts to be firm
and chastising, but Hamlet comes right back at her, saying that she has sinned
mightily in marrying her husband’s brother. He pulls his mother in front of a
mirror, saying that he will reveal her inmost part, and Gertrude momentarily
misinterprets this, thinking that Hamlet may attempt to murder her. She cries
for help. Polonius, hidden from view, also cries out for help. Hamlet thinks
that the hidden voice belongs to Claudius. He stabs Polonius through the
curtain, killing him. When he sees that he has killed Polonius, Hamlet declares
the old man to be a “rash, intruding fool.”
Quickly forgetting about this death, Hamlet seats his mother down
and presents her with two portraits, one of her first husband and the other of
Claudius. He describes the two as opposites, the one all nobility and virtue,
the other all deformity and vice. Gertrude is deeply affected by this
comparison and seems to comprehend the enormity of her sin. Hamlet continues to
berate her and describe Claudius in the most foul and hurtful language. While
in the middle of this harangue, Old
Hamlet’s ghost appears once more, telling Hamlet to stop torturing his
mother and to remember his duty to kill Claudius. At the ghost’s command,
Hamlet consoles his mother. Gertrude, unable to see the ghost, sees Hamlet
talking to thin air and resolves that he is indeed insane. The ghost exits.
Hamlet tells his mother that he is not in fact insane. He
reiterates that she should repent her marriage to Claudius and tells her in
particular to stay away from their shared bed for the night. After describing
the importance of this abstinence in the most colorful terms, Hamlet reminds
his mother that he is ordered to England. Hamlet says that although he will go
to England, he will not trust Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He exits his
mother’s bedroom, dragging the body of Polonius behind him.
Analysis
On of the most remarkable things about the speech that begins, “To
be or not to be,” the most famous speech in western literature, is how
out-of-place, how offhand it seems in the larger context of the play. Hamlet
has, only a few lines before, hit upon the play as his means of exposing the
king – why, then, is he suddenly contemplating suicide (if that’s what he’s
doing in “To be or not to be”)? This psychological strangeness is true, at
least, of the version of the play that most of us read – which is a conflation
of two Renaissance texts, as explained in the “Additional Content” section. (In
the first printed version of Hamlet, the speech occurs at perhaps a more logical
place, in Act Two scene two, in place of Hamlet’s mocking repartee with
Polonius.) In these longer, more literary versions of Hamlet,
“To be or not to be” arrives as a surprise – it slows down the action just as
the action is really beginning to move.
This odd, out-of-place effect of the speech is a testament to
Hamlet’s tendency to become wrapped up in his own thoughts, regardless of his
surroundings. In the middle of the urgent business of revenge, Hamlet takes the
time to explore the nature of death and human life with a subtlety and
eloquence that renders the speech unforgettable. Think of his brain as a sort
of obsessive problem-solving machine, a focused, powerful instrument that
exhausts one subject and then another indiscriminately in short-term bursts –
now theater, now death, now sex, now filial duty – and that can only with great
difficulty (if at all) focus on a longer-term plan, such as, “I must kill
Claudius.”
So what is “To be or not to be” about, anyway? This is an enormous
question. Entire books have been written on the speech, most recently Douglas
Bruster’s To
Be or Not To Be, and critical consensus as to its nature is far
from settled. Most casual readers of Hamlet take the speech to be, at its simplest
level, a contemplation of suicide. Hamlet is saying, in effect, “Wouldn’t it be
nice to die? We don’t know what to expect after death, though, and so that
keeps us alive. We would rather suffer the woes we know, painful as they are,
than go on to possible woes we cannot conceive of.” But of whom is he speaking?
Himself, or human beings in general? In other words, the speech can be thought
of as a general contemplation of the human condition rather than a specific
expression of a desire to die. In an interview in the Atlantic
Monthly, the famous Shakespearean Harold Bloom offers an
idiosyncratic reading of the speech along the latter lines: “It is a testimony,
indeed, to the power of the mind over a universe of death, symbolized by the
sea, which is the great hidden metaphor.” You can read more about this
interpretation in his book, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited.
This speech, which is really tangential to the action, threatens
to dominate most readings of Act Three. But there are many more interesting
exchanges and famous scenes in the Act. The play-within-a-play, for instance,
is the culmination of the theme of theatricality that we’ve already looked at
in Act Two. The play-within-a-play, like other features of Hamlet (the
madness of the revenger, the appearance of a ghost, etc.), is a convention
found in several revenge tragedies, including The Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare’s own early
tragedy, Titus Andronicus.
In Hamlet,
naturally, Shakespeare takes this convention to its extreme. Hamlet seems to
take great pleasure in the exposure of Claudius’ guilt by theatrical means,
relishing the self-referential potential of the scenario, exploring the
multiple forms of drama capable of representing the same action (the dumb show
versus the spoken verses), and filling the whole scene with London theatrical
in-jokes.
After all this, though, the exposure does not actually lead to the
satisfaction of vengeance. Just after the play, Hamlet has a chance to kill
Claudius and talks himself out of it; two scenes later he is shipped off to
England, no questions asked. One can speculate on his reasons. To me, it seems
almost as though the exposure, the “catching of the king’s conscience” in the
play, is fulfillment enough for Hamlet, who is at home in a realm of
contemplation rather than action. He has had his revenge on Claudius’
conscience, which is aptly demonstrated by the king’s moving prayer soliloquy
(the only soliloquy in the play that does not come from Hamlet), and this is
what counts for him. The body is simply a silly machine for Hamlet; the mind,
the spirit, is where the action really is.
Another strain that goes through Hamlet, and a disturbing one, is
the abuse by Hamlet of his former beloved and his mother, Ophelia and Gertrude.
In his scenes with Ophelia, Hamlet is relentlessly cruel, charging her with a
lustful nature, a dishonest heart, a dissembling appearance, and so on. He
builds up, in scene three, to an utterly misogynistic rant, beginning, “I have
heard of your paintings well enough.” Men in the English Renaissance were
obsessed with women’s make-up, which they took to be a symbol of feminine
wiles, excuses, manipulations, artifices, and hypocrisies. Shakespeare,
especially, has a long rhetorical history with this line of vitriol; it shows
up in many of his plays and features strongly in his Sonnets.
Readers have long sympathized deeply with Ophelia’s position in the play; as
far back as 1765, Samuel Johnson wrote, “[Hamlet] plays the madman most, when
he treats Ophelia with so much rudeness, which seems to be useless and wanton
cruelty.”
Up to this point, Ophelia has been given few lines and hardly a will
or mind of her own; she has done her father’s will, her brother’s will, and
Hamlet’s will. All three of the men in her life have defined her almost
exclusively in terms of her sexuality and her beauty. Remember Laertes’
parting instruction to Ophelia, that she should not open her “chaste treasure”
to Hamlet? Here, throughout Act Three, is Hamlet’s own iteration of the same
patriarchal order, only now in a mocking, sarcastic, ghastly tone. The young
and presumably innocent Ophelia is besieged and defined by fantasies of female
lewdness and she has little power to do anything about it.
Hamlet’s conduct with his mother is also probably repulsive to
most readers. Their encounter in scene four is full of even more ripe and fetid
language of corrupt sexuality. Can you imagine saying to your parent, to your
mother, “Nay, but to live / In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stewed in
corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty.” This is
ridiculously hurtful language, and seems motivated by something very deep and
dark in our protagonist. Sigmund Freud claimed to have discovered the buried,
primeval cause of Hamlet’s flare-up in his Oedipal theory, his assertion that
all little boys go through an original sexual drama in their childhood, in
which they want to murder their fathers and possess their mothers. Ensuing
scholars have questioned this theory, but this scene provides continuing fuel
for speculation as to the exact nature of Hamlet’s feelings toward his mother.
Again, at the very least we can agree that he is here uselessly, excessively
cruel. His cruelty toward both Ophelia and Gertrude seems at least as motivated
by a deep-seated and virulent hatred of women as by the logic of the revenge
plot. Act Three, then, gives us Hamlet as his most sublime, in his meditations
on death, and his most inexcusably depraved, in his cruelty toward the women.
Summary and Analysis of Act 4
Summary
Scene 1
Immediately after Hamlet exits,
dragging Polonius’
body, we see Claudius asking Gertrude to
explain what has happened. She tells him of Hamlet’s accidental killing of
Polonius and Claudius realizes that he could have just as easily been slain.
Claudius asks where Hamlet has gone and Gertrude says that he has taken the
body away. The king orders Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern to find Hamlet and discover where he has taken Polonius’
corpse.
Scene 2
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern question Hamlet about Polonius’
whereabouts. Hamlet evades their questions playfully, accusing his former
friends of sycophancy to the king and leading them on a wild goose chase.
Scene 3
Claudius is greatly distracted by the death of Polonius and the
attempt to find the body. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern enter with Hamlet.
Claudius questions Hamlet as to where he has taken Polonius. After some
morbidly humorous replies, Hamlet reveals that he hid Polonius “up the stairs
into the lobby.” The king sends attendants to find the body. Claudius then
tells Hamlet that he is to depart immediately for England, as planned. Hamlet
mockingly departs, leaving Claudius to reflect on his plans for Hamlet. He has
prepared letters asking the English king, whom Denmark has recently defeated in
war, to kill Hamlet as part of the duties owed by right of conquest.
Scene 4
Next we see Fortinbras’
Norwegian army. They are at the borders of Denmark. Fortinbras sends one of his
captains to the court of Claudius to ask permission to cross Denmark in the
course of their march to Poland. The captain travels on and Fortinbras and the
rest of the army exit.
The captain meets with Hamlet, who is being conveyed by Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern to the ship to England. Hamlet asks the captain about his army
and his purpose in going to Poland. The captain says that in Poland there is “a
little patch of ground” which Norway claims as her own. He describes this land
as perfectly worthless and small. Hamlet suggests that the Poles will not
likely defend such a piece of land, but the captain sets him straight, saying
that Poland is already garrisoned and ready for their dispute. Hamlet wraps up
his conversation with the captain. He hangs back from the others marching to
the ship and delivers a long soliloquy on the irony of this occasion – these
men are off to risk their lives for a worthless piece of land, while he, who
has every reason to risk his life in the cause of revenge, delays and fails to
act. Hamlet resolves to recast his mind to bloody thoughts. Ironically,
however, just after making this resolution he continues on toward England,
leaving Denmark behind him.
Scene 5
Back in the court of Denmark, we see Gertrude speaking with a
gentleman who explains that Ophelia has
gone mad. She is rambling nonsensically about her father and insisting on
seeing Gertrude. The queen reluctantly admits Ophelia, who proceeds to sing a
number of simple and haunting songs, some of them quite bawdy. The king enters
and witnesses her madness. Ophelia then speaks openly of her father’s untimely
demise and hasty, unofficial burial. She threatens, “My brother shall know of
it,” and exits. Claudius reflects on the difficulty of their situation,
admitting that their decision to cover up Hamlet’s deed and bury Polonius so
covertly has gone against them. He says that Laertes has
come from France, egged on by people who see the court as responsible for
Polonius’ death.
On cue, a messenger arrives with word that Laertes has come to
court with a mob of followers who wish to depose Claudius and make Laertes
king. Laertes bursts in and tells his followers to wait outside. In a
half-crazed state he insists that Claudius give him Polonius. Claudius attempts
to calm Laertes and tells Gertrude to keep out of their talk and let Laertes
question him to his heart’s content. Claudius tells Laertes that Polonius is
dead. He also insinuates that he and Laertes are on the same side – that he has
been injured by Polonius’ death too.
Just as Claudius is about to explain what he means, Ophelia enters
again, bearing a bundle of flowers. The sight of his insane sister deeply
grieves Laertes. Ophelia handles all those present gifts of flowers, each
symbolizing a reproach to the receiver. She sings another song about her dead
father and exits abruptly. As she leaves Claudius tells Laertes to inquire into
the matter as deeply as he wishes, confident that he will find himself aligned
with Claudius against Hamlet. Laertes agrees.
Scene 6
A messenger approaches Horatio,
saying that some sailors have news for him. Horatio receives from these sailors
a letter from Hamlet. He reads the letter aloud. It recounts an amazing turn of
events: on his way to England, pirates attacked Hamlet’s ship. During the fray,
Hamlet boarded the pirate vessel. The two ships parted with Hamlet still
aboard. The pirates treated Hamlet “like thieves of mercy,” promising to return
Hamlet to Denmark in return for some favors. Hamlet also alludes to a startling
development having to do with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern but says that he
must delay telling of this until they meet. He tells Horatio to follow the
sailors to where he is hiding. Horatio says that he will help to deliver the
rest of their letters, one of which is addressed to the king, and then go with
them to see Hamlet.
Scene 7
Claudius and Laertes are in conference. The king seems to have
explained the strange occasion of Polonius’ death to Laertes’ satisfaction. He
says that he did not try Hamlet for two reasons, first, because his mother
loves him so much, and second, because the people of Denmark are supporters of
Hamlet. A messenger arrives and delivers a letter to Claudius, who is greatly
surprised to learn that the letter comes from Hamlet. The letter announces
Hamlet’s imminent return to court.
With this in mind, Claudius and Laertes plot to find a means of
killing Hamlet without upsetting Gertrude or the people. They propose to
arrange a duel between Hamlet and Laertes, both of whom are accomplished
swordsmen, though Laertes is the more reputed. Claudius suggests that Laertes
be given a sharp sword while Hamlet’s remains blunt. Laertes does him one
better, saying that he will dip his sword in poison so that the least scratch
will kill Hamlet. Claudius says that on top of this he will prepare a poisoned
cup and give it to Hamlet during the fight.
Gertrude enters with yet more tragic news. She says that Ophelia
has drowned. She was watching Ophelia play in the branches of a willow by the water
when she fell in. Gertrude says that Ophelia seemed ignorant of danger and went
to her death slowly, singing songs. This news reignites Laertes’ rage and
Claudius goes to console him.
Analysis
You can see simply from the quickness with which the scenes of Act
Four proceed that the action has reached a point of great tension following the
death of Polonius. We see more evidence of Claudius’ lack of political talent
when we learn that he has simply hushed up Polonius’ death, burying his
longtime advisor without pomp or circumstance, and keeping the nature of the
death a mystery. This, as much as the death itself, prompts the two events most
central to Act Four, the return of Laertes and the madness of Ophelia.
First, though, it’s necessary to note that the fourth scene
contains another of Hamlet’s famous soliloquies – “How all occasions do inform
against me.” This speech reiterates, basically, the point that Hamlet made in
his previous soliloquy about the actor playing Hecuba. The basic position of
Hamlet is one of befuddlement that these soldiers can go off to their deaths
over a patch of worthless ground while he, who has every reason to rage and war
and battle Claudius, is introspective and melancholy, and chokes off his action
with excessive contemplation. He remarks, “Rightly to be great / Is not to stir
without great argument, / But greatly to find quarrel in a straw / When honor’s
at the stake.” In other words, the greatness of man comes not with the
greatness of an occasion, but with treating any occasion, however petty, as an
occasion for greatness. One should not overthink, but do. Of course, this is
not Hamlet’s character at all, and as soon as he has resolved that his thoughts
be bloody or be nothing worth, he is off to England, leaving revenge for
another day, if ever. Indeed, Hamlet seems to express the central irony in his
case – it is not enough that his thoughts be bloody. They already are bloody. What
he needs, or what his father’s spirit needs, is bloody deeds,
not thoughts, and those are, as ever, beyond our protagonist.
Laertes, though, provides precisely the model of what Hamlet is
not. The early twentieth century critic A.C. Bradley once illustrated
Shakespeare’s gift for characterization by observing that if Othello were in
Hamlet’s place the play would be about thirty minutes long – as soon as he
learned of the murder, he would kill Claudius – and likewise if Hamlet were in
Othello’s he would immediately see through Iago’s plottings and simply laugh
the intrigue away. Just so, Laertes’ vengeful return, like Fortinbras’ military
example, serves as a contrast to Hamlet’s own hesitating, over-thinking
character. This is a true avenger. When he bursts into court demanding
satisfaction, he says, “That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard, /
Cries cuckold to my father, brands the harlot / Even here between the chaste
unsmirched brow / Of my true mother.” In other words, Laertes proclaims that he
has a blood-bound duty to avenge his father’s death impetuously and bloodily,
or else he proves himself not his father’s son. In contrast, Hamlet has been
calm, reflective, passive, playful, morbid, and impotent in his own
long-delayed quest for revenge – a quest which has led rather to an attempt to
find motivation to revenge, to reflect on the nature of revenge, the nature of
man, and the nature of Hamlet. In short, Hamlet has thought and thought but has
not acted. Laertes, we will see, acts without thinking.
The other major event of this Act is the madness of Ophelia. We
have seen Ophelia, up to this point, represented as a chaste, innocent,
obedient, bewildered little girl. With her madness, however, she suddenly has a
deluge of lines and a rich, multi-layered, startling consciousness. The songs
she sings are quite sexual – especially the one that begins, “To-morrow is
Saint Valentine’s day.” This ballad, which documents the duplicity of a man who
promises to marry a young maid in order to get her into bed, and then abandons
her because she relented to him, has been read by some as evidence that Ophelia
herself gave up her virginity to Hamlet, who then left her in the lurch. In
Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of Hamlet, for instance, the filmmaker explicitly shows
flashbacks to Hamlet and Ophelia in bed.
However, it may not be necessary to read the song, and the other
songs, so straightforwardly. In her mad scenes, Ophelia is perhaps
demonstrating the cultural pressures of a young woman of her time, forced into
the impossible position of simultaneous chastity and sexualization. Ophelia,
throughout the play, is forever urged to be chaste, be chaste, be chaste – as
in Laertes’ instructions, or the “get thee to a nunnery” scene – as a means of
controlling her sexual identity. This emphasis on chastity contains, of course,
the other side of the coin, a concern with lewdness. She must know nothing
about sex, yet know enough to avoid it. In her madness, it seems as though
Ophelia’s inner dam, so to speak, has broken, and all of her contained
knowledge of sexuality, and of the unfair position of women within her culture,
has come rushing out.
Ophelia’s death by drowning is one of the famously
impossible-to-settle questions of Hamlet. Did she die accidentally or did she commit
suicide? If one looks forward to Act Five, it seems as though she was indeed a
suicide. Given the immediate evidence of Gertrude’s testimony, however, there
is no reason at all to believe that she killed herself. Gertrude describes her
as dying almost in slow motion: “Her clothes spread wide, / And mermaid-like
awhile they bore her up, / Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds, / As
one incapable of her own distress, / Or like a creature native and indued /
Unto that element.” Indeed, the question to ask given this description is not,
“Did Ophelia kill herself?” but rather, “If she had time to sing songs while
dying, why on earth didn’t Gertrude try to save her?” Perhaps, though (as
suggested in the television series, Slings & Arrows, among other places), Gertrude's
narrative is an attempt to protect Ophelia. She knows that Ophelia is better
off dead and tries to hide the fact of her suicide with her narrative. As with
so many aspects of this play, the truth is not forthcoming.
These shifts in meaning from Act to Act are difficult to pin down,
but they serve to underline one of the most prevalent trends in the play,
toward interpretive uncertainty. Any account of things in this play – whether
the testimony of the ghost, the murmurings of Laertes’ followers, or this
eye-witness account of Gertrude’s – leads to quite divergent interpretations.
As Hamlet says in Act Two, “[T]here is nothing either good or bad, but thinking
makes it so.” If there is one lesson to take from Hamlet,
it is this – that by our very nature we cannot ever know the truth, only
interpretations of the truth.
Summary and Analysis of Act 5
Summary
Scene 1
The final Act begins with a conversation between two gravediggers
as they dig Ophelia’s
grave. They repeat a rumor that Ophelia committed suicide and wonder whether
she ought to be buried in hallowed ground. We learn that the king has
overridden the objections of the clergy and provided for her burial. After some
witty and macabre banter on the nature of gravedigging, Hamlet and Horatio enter.
The main gravedigger sends his partner off for a cup of liquor and then
commences to dig, singing songs all the while. Hamlet appears fascinated by the
gravedigger’s indifference to the gravity of his profession. As the
gravediggers throws various skulls out of the grave, Hamlet wonders whom they
might have belonged to in life – whether a courtier or a lawyer.
Hamlet approaches the gravedigger and exchanges witticisms about
this morbid work. The gravedigger informs Hamlet about the length of time it
takes bodies to decay in the ground. He then produces a skull from the grave that
he says has been lying there for twenty-three years. The gravedigger says that
this is the skull of Yorick, the old king’s jester. Hamlet is amazed – he knew
Yorick and loved him as a child. He takes up the skull and speaks about Yorick,
a topic that leads him to consider the nature of mortality more generally.
A procession interrupts Hamlet’s reveries – Claudius, Gertrude,
and Laertes march
toward the grave along with a priest and an entourage bearing a body. Hamlet
notices that the burial is less elaborate than usual, signifying that the
deceased was a suicide. He and Horatio stand aside while Laertes argues with
the priest about the paltriness of the burial rites. In the course of his
arguing with the priest, Laertes reveals to Hamlet that the dead body is that
of Ophelia. Gertrude steps forward to say farewell to Ophelia. Laertes follows.
In his intense grief, Laertes leaps into his sister’s grave to hold her body
again and orders the gravediggers to bury him alive. Provoked by this show of
grief, Hamlet then reveals himself. After grappling with Laertes, Hamlet
declares that he loved Ophelia more than forty thousand brothers could. The
king and queen dismiss his avowal as madness. Hamlet then exits and Horatio
follows him. After they have left, Claudius reminds Laertes of their plan to
take care of Hamlet.
Scene 2
Hamlet explains to Horatio what happened on his journey to
England. He says that he strongly suspected Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern of foul play, and so decided to apprehend their letter to
England. In the letter he found an order for his death. Hamlet then devised a
substitute letter asking for the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. He
happened to have a signet ring in the shape of the seal of Denmark, and so
sealed the letter. Hamlet then replaced the letter while Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern were asleep. At this point, pirates attacked the vessel, as
related previously.
A courtier, Osric,
interrupts Hamlet and Horatio. In very ornate and silly language, Osric declares
to Hamlet that Claudius has proposed a contest of swordsmanship between Laertes
and he. Hamlet and Horatio mock Osric’s pompous and artificial mannerisms.
Eventually Hamlet agrees to enter the contest. When Horatio worries that
Laertes is better at swordplay than he, Hamlet declares that he has been in
continual practice for some time.
A table is prepared and the king, queen and other figures of state
gather to watch the swordfight. Hamlet begs Laertes’ pardon both for his
outburst at Ophelia’s grave and for his rash killing of Polonius.
Laertes appears to accept this apology but declares that his honor will not be
satisfied until they have had their contest. Hamlet and Laertes choose their
swords. Laertes nonchalantly chooses the unblunted sword with the envenomed
blade. As they prepare to fight, Claudius proposes a drink to Hamlet.
The fight begins with Osric as referee. Hamlet wins the first
point and the king offers him a drink to refresh himself, dropping a poisoned
pearl in the wine just before he hands it over. Hamlet declines to take the
drink for the time being. They play another round and Hamlet again wins a
point. After this second pass, Gertrude toasts to Hamlet’s health. She takes up
the poisoned chalice and has a drink despite Claudius’ protestations. Hamlet
and Laertes have a third pass which ends in a draw.
After this pass, while Hamlet is unguarded, Laertes wounds Hamlet
with the poisoned rapier. They scuffle and Hamlet ends up with Laertes’
poisoned sword. He wounds Laertes with it. Just then, the queen collapses. She
declares that she has been poisoned by the drink and then dies. Hamlet asks for
the treachery to be found out and Laertes confesses the plan hatched by the
king and he. He says that they are both inevitably going to die, having been
wounded by the poisoned blade. Hamlet takes the envenomed sword and wounds
Claudius, then forces the king to drink from his poisoned cup. Claudius dies.
Laertes asks Hamlet’s forgiveness and then also dies. Hamlet, knowing that he
is about to die also, asks Horatio to explain this bloody spectacle to the
confused onlookers. Horatio, on the contrary, wishes to die with his friend,
but Hamlet convinces him to live a while and clear his name. Hamlet declares
that Fortinbrasshould
become King of Denmark. He then dies – “the rest is silence.”
A flourish is heard and Osric brings news that Fortinbras has
arrived from his victory in Poland with ambassadors from England. Fortinbras
enters the court only to find four noble bodies sprawled out on the floor. The
ambassadors from England enter with news that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have
been killed. Horatio explains that Claudius would not have welcomed this news
even if he had been living to receive it. He orders that the royal bodies be
taken up. Horatio further promises to explain the story behind the deaths, a
story full of “carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts; / Of accidental judgments,
casual slaughters; / Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause.” In short,
he promises to tell the story of Hamlet. Fortinbras agrees to hear it. He adds that,
given the death of the Danish royalty, he will now pursue his own claims to the
throne. Finally, Fortinbras declares that Hamlet shall receive a soldier’s
burial. Some soldiers take up his body and bear it from the stage.
Analysis
No surprise, this final Act of Hamlet is as
mysterious, ambiguous, and controversial as those that precede it. The play
begins rather straightforwardly, if ironically, as a revenge tragedy – Old
Hamlet’s ghost spurs his son to revenge – and it would seem that Act
Five, like the Act Fives of all major revenge tragedies preceding Hamlet,
should fulfill this initial plotline. Indeed, in Act Five Hamlet kills Claudius
– finally. But he does so in such a roundabout, half-cocked, off-hand way, we
wonder whether this really counts as revenge. The death of Claudius certainly
lacks the poetic justice that vengeance seems to require. What on earth is
Shakespeare trying to do with this strange play – why doesn’t he give it a
proper ending?
Many of the earliest extant critics of the play, those of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, found the strange and abrupt manner of
Hamlet’s revenge to be as puzzling as we might. These critics often found fault
with the play’s lack of moral meaning. After all, if Claudius was wrong to kill
his brother and marry his brother’s wife (and surely he was), shouldn’t the
lethal correction of these crimes feel more satisfying, more “right,” than it
does in this play? Samuel Johnson, writing in 1765, voices critical
dissatisfaction quite clearly: “The poet is accused of having shown little
regard to poetical justice, and may be charged with equal neglect of poetical
probability. The apparition left the regions of the dead to little purpose; the
revenge which he demands is not obtained but by the death of him that was
required to take it; and the gratification which would arise from the
destruction of an usurper and a murderer, is abated by the untimely death of
Ophelia.” In other words, Johnson charges that the ending of Hamlet is
both unjust and improbable. The earlier part of the play, including the role of
the ghost in giving the death of Claudius a moral shape, seems to have been
forgotten. Hamlet seems to bring the drama to a close almost accidentally, and
Johnson accuses Shakespeare on these grounds of dramatic clumsiness and moral
ineptitude.
Later critics have been much less quick to fault Shakespeare’s
dramatic instincts. Indeed, some of them have found the ending of Hamlet to
signal a shift to a “higher,” more self-aware theater, a purposeful rejection
of the simple morality of revenge in favor of a richer, deeper investigation of
the nature of performance itself. The critic Harold Bloom, for instance, has
written at length about Act Five as Hamlet’s rejection of his own dramatic
role. He seems to have grown bored with his own play, in other words, and
shrugs off its generic requirements. Bloom writes: “Any Fortinbras or Laertes
could chop Claudius down; Hamlet knows he deserves the prime role in a
cosmological drama, which Shakespeare was not quite ready to compose.” In this
view, Hamlet’s
final Act transcends the play itself. The plot, the action, has only been an
occasion for Hamlet’s own tremendously powerful self-exploration, and the
culmination of the requirements of "revenge tragedy" appropriately
occurs almost despite the play itself.
Shakespeare’s abandonment of the central focus on revenge, then,
perhaps amounts to his finally agreeing with his protagonist, so to speak.
Hamlet has been, from the very first moments of the play, reluctant to carry
out the absurd and generic task that is his as a character in a revenge tragedy
– “The time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it
right!” Shakespeare has purposefully miscast his hero and given us a character
whose accomplishments are intellectual and verbal, not violent and physical. By
the final Act, it seems as though the playwright has finally given up trying to
tie his hero down to conventions. Hamlet has forced Hamlet off
the rails, taken it from a simple and predictable genre play to something
inscrutable, massively significant, and, for lack of a better term, post-theatrical.
Meanwhile, in between the two major events of Act Five (the burial
of Ophelia and the duel between Hamlet and Laertes), Shakespeare includes
several very famous setpieces. The range of Hamlet’s verbal and philosophical
variety becomes clear as he goes from trading macabre jokes with the
gravedigger, to his moving rumination on the dead court jester, Yorick, to his
declaration of love for Ophelia and his attendant mockery of Laertes’
over-the-top mourning display, to a scathing parody of Osric’s ludicrous
courtly mannerisms. As noted before, Hamlet’s mind seems to work as an intense
magnifying glass of sorts. He looks at one subject – say, the gravedigger’s
macabre humor – and scrutinizes it to exhaustion before turning to another –
say, the nature of mortality as occasioned by the discovery of Yorick’s skull –
and treating it with a similar thoroughness. The variety of his curiosity is
matched by depth of penetration. He is both wide-ranging and profound – truly a
Renaissance mind.
In this final Act, Hamlet seems no longer to curse this tendency
of his to become distracted by thought in favor of action, as he does for
instance in his soliloquies on Hecuba and on Fortinbras’ army, but to celebrate
it. He says to Horatio, for instance, when his friend seems concerned that he is
walking into the trap set by Claudius and Laertes, “[W]e defy augury. [...] If
it be now, ’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.” Hamlet rejects “augury” – that
is, he rejects any predictive phenomena, or any future-oriented thinking at
all. In a way, he rejects the ghost’s order to fulfill a set goal. (By the way,
we might ask what Hamlet means by “it” in the above sentence. Does “it” refer
to his plan to kill Claudius? – “If I will kill him now, so be it.” Does “it”
rather refer to death itself? – “If I am to die now, so be it.” Or is “it” a
placeholder for anything, any event?) At any rate, Hamlet has achieved a point
of philosophical “quietus,” an acceptance of the world with all of its flaws
and absurdities, which he has made not with “a bare bodkin” but with his own
mental powers. His gaze is focused on some spiritual realm beyond the pettiness
of Danish political intrigue.
Of the four deaths that occur in the final scene of the play, only
one – Hamlet’s – is planned. The other three are, if not senseless, at least
spontaneous and chaotic. The entire gory episode seems to be a playing-out of
Hamlet’s new understanding of the world – death strikes randomly, senselessly,
absurdly. The only meaning that matters must be made out of apparent
meaninglessness. Hamlet’s dying words, in fact, are a plea to his friend,
Horatio, to help the court audience sort out the carnage that they have seen:
“[I]n this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story.” Hamlet
emphasizes that significance comes only in retrospect, with storytelling, with
sense making, not in prospective action. His death thus demonstrates the value
of introspection over action, and the triumph of thought over fate, against the
uncertainty and confusion of death.
With the arrival of Fortinbras, the tone shifts dramatically in
the other direction. Fortinbras, whose own barely-limned plot is extremely
similar to Hamlet's (his identically-named father dead, his rise in Norway
impeded by his uncle, etc.), in nonetheless Hamlet's opposite. He is a man of
action, a man like Laertes, or Old Hamlet. As Hamlet predicts, he hardly wastes
a moment in declaring his intention to take the throne of Denmark for his own.
And, as a final irony, Fortinbras misunderstands the dead prince, and gives him
a soldier’s funeral. Though we know very little of him, it seems that
Fortinbras is the anti-Hamlet – a man who can only understand others in light
of his own simple and straight-forward mind. Hamlet, because he was a prince,
was probably a soldier, so he is given a soldier’s burial. In an exact opposite
way, Hamlet finds a universe of variety within his own mind; he explores the
world from many perspectives, searches many questions, revolves all but
resolves nothing. Fortinbras’ arrival marks the end of the true reign of Hamlet,
not Claudius’ petty and incompetent rule, but Hamlet’s regime of the mind and
the possibilities of subjectivity.
Editions of Hamlet
As with all of Shakespeare's plays, it is extremely important that
you use a thoroughly annotated critical edition to help you through your
reading. Shakespeare's language is so difficult and full of obscurities that
even a study guide such as this one can only begin to help the student to
disentangle problems of style, usage, allusion, and vocabulary.
Three editions were used in preparing this ClassicNote: the Pelican Edition,
edited by A.R. Braunmuller, the
Norton Critical Edition, edited by Cyrus Hoy, and the Arden Edition,
edited by Harold Jenkins. All three are highly recommended. The Pelican is
quite affordable and has a useful introduction to contemporary critical
approaches. The Norton Critical contains an invaluable appendix full of past
and recent criticism on the play. The Arden is the most exhaustive scholarly
treatment -- it sells for quite a bit more money but it can be readily found in
most college libraries and is probably the best edition to use if you're
writing a college-level essay.
Many more comparable editions of Hamlet are
available, including editions from Signet Classics, the Folger Library, Bantam
Press, and several university presses (Cambridge, Oxford, Yale, etc.). Do
yourself a favor and pick up one of these scholarly editions, if only from a
library.
Versions of Hamlet
Hamlet was
published in two different quarto editions during Shakespeare's life as well as
in the First Folio, the "complete works" edition that appeared within
a decade of his death. These editions are known among scholars as Q1 (the first
quarto, 1603), Q2 (the second quarto, 1604) and F1 (the first folio, 1623).
Almost all modern editions of Hamlet conflate
passages from Q2 and F1, largely ignoring the first printed version of the
play. Scholars have surmised that this Q1 version, often referred to as
"the bad quarto," was a faulty version copied from the memory of an
actor or a group of actors who performed the play. The sequence of action, the
length of speeches, and many more details both significant and not are
different in Q1 than they are in either Q2 or F1. (Indeed, Q1 is only about
2200 lines long, compared with almost 4000 lines in the conflated Q2 and F1
editions.)
In recent years, however, scholars have argued that Q1 is not
necessarily an inferior text, but is rather a performing version of the play.
Q1 has a much more dramatic plot than that found in the later editions, and
cuts much superfluous dialogue. Kathleen Irace, editor of the New Cambridge
edition of the play, has suggested that Q1 was used in smaller, traveling
companies, and other critics have done much to resist the notion that Q1 is
necessarily "bad." As a result of such efforts, performances of the
Q1 version of Hamlet have become less uncommon. In their Arden
edition of the play, Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor have accounted for
twenty-eight performances of Q1 since the late nineteenth century.
Moreover, the Shakespearean Lukas Erne has proposed, in fact, that
Shakespeare himself oversaw multiple versions of his plays -- performing
versions, like Q1, which were short, snappy and dramatic, and longer, literary
versions, like Q2, designed primarily for an educated readership. This thesis
flies in the face of prior critical consensus, which has held that Shakespeare
was uninterested in publishing his plays. In his book, Shakespeare
as Literary Dramatist, however, Erne culls a great deal of evidence
that has led to a widespread critical reevaluation of this assumption.
Nevertheless, this ClassicNote uses a standard conflation of Q2
and F1 in considering Hamlet.
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Summary
Hamlet Summary provides a quick review of the play's plot
including every important action in the play. Hamlet Summary is divided by the
five acts of the play and is an ideal introduction before reading the original
text.
Act I.
Shakespeare's
longest play and the play responsible for the immortal lines "To be or not
to be: that is the question:" and the advise "to thine own self be
true," begins in Denmark with the news that King Hamlet of Denmark has
recently died.
Denmark
is now in a state of high alert and preparing for possible war with Young
Fortinbras of Norway. A ghost resembling the late King Hamlet is spotted on a
platform before Elsinore Castle in Denmark. King Claudius, who now rules
Denmark, has taken King Hamlet's wife, Queen Gertrude as his new wife and Queen
of Denmark.
King
Claudius fearing Young Fortinbras of Norway may invade, has sent ambassadors to
Norway to urge the King of Norway to restrain Young Fortinbras. Young Hamlet
distrusts King Claudius. The King and Queen do not understand why Hamlet still
mourns his father's death over two months ago. In his first soliloquy, Hamlet
explains that he does not like his mother marrying the next King of Denmark so
quickly within a month of his father's death...
Laertes,
the son of Lord Chamberlain Polonius, gives his sister Ophelia some brotherly
advice. He warns Ophelia not to fall in love with Young Hamlet; she will only
be hurt. Polonius tells his daughter Ophelia not to return Hamlet's affections
for her since he fears Hamlet is only using her...
Hamlet
meets the Ghost of his father, King Hamlet and follows it to learn more...
Hamlet
learns from King Hamlet's Ghost that he was poisoned by King Claudius, the
current ruler of Denmark. The Ghost tells Hamlet to avenge his death but not to
punish Queen Gertrude for remarrying; it is not Hamlet's place and her
conscience and heaven will judge her... Hamlet swears Horatio and Marcellus to
silence over Hamlet meeting the Ghost.
Act II.
Polonius
tells Reynaldo to spy on his son Laertes in Paris. Polonius learns from his
daughter Ophelia that a badly dressed Hamlet met her, studied her face and
promptly left. Polonius believes that Hamlet's odd behavior is because Ophelia
has rejected him. Polonius decides to tell King Claudius the reason for
Hamlet's recently odd behavior.
King
Claudius instructs courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to find out what is
causing Hamlet's strange "transformation," or change of character.
Queen Gertrude reveals that only King Hamlet's death and her recent remarriage
could be upsetting Hamlet.
We learn more of Young Fortinbras'
movements and Polonius has his own theory about Hamlet's
transformation;
it is caused by Hamlet's love for his daughter Ophelia. Hamlet makes his famous
speech about the greatness of man. Hamlet plans to use a play to test if King
Claudius really did kill his father as King Hamlet's Ghost told him...
Act III.
The
King's spies, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern report to King Claudius on Hamlet's
behavior. Hamlet is eager for King Claudius and Queen Gertrude to watch a play
tonight which Hamlet has added lines to.
King
Claudius and Polonius listen in on Hamlet's and Ophelia's private conversation.
Hamlet suspects Ophelia is spying on him and is increasingly hostile to her
before leaving.
King
Claudius decides to send Hamlet to England, fearing danger in Hamlet since he
no longer believes Hamlet is merely lovesick. The King agrees to Polonius' plan
to eavesdrop on Hamlet's conversation with his mother after the play to
hopefully learn more from Hamlet. The play Hamlet had added lines to is
performed. The mime preceding the play which mimics the Ghost's description of
King Hamlet's death goes unnoticed.
The
main play called "The Murder of Gonzago" is performed, causing King
Claudius to react in a way which convinces Hamlet that his uncle did indeed
poison his father King Hamlet as the Ghost previously had told him... Hamlet
pretends not to know that the play has offended King Claudius. Hamlet agrees to
speak with his mother in private...
King
Claudius admits his growing fear of Hamlet and decides to send him overseas to
England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in order to protect himself. Alone,
King Claudius reveals in soliloquy his own knowledge of the crime he has
committed (poisoning King Hamlet) and realizes that he cannot escape divine
justice...
Queen
Gertrude attempts to scold her son but Hamlet instead scolds his mother for her
actions. Queen Gertrude cries out in fear, and Polonius echoes it and is
stabbed through the arras (subdivision of a room created by a hanging tapestry)
where he was listening in. Hamlet continues scolding his mother but the Ghost
reappears, telling Hamlet to be gentle with the Queen. For her part, Queen
Gertrude agrees to stop living with King Claudius, beginning her redemption....
Act IV.
King
Claudius speaks with his wife, Queen Gertrude. He learns of Polonius' murder
which shocks him; it could easily have been him. Queen Gertrude lies for her
son, saying that Hamlet is as mad as a tempestuous sea. King Claudius, now
scared of Hamlet, decides to have Hamlet sent away to England immediately... He
also sends courtiers and spies Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to speak with
Hamlet to find out where Hamlet has hidden Polonius' body so they can take it
to the chapel.
Hamlet
refuses to tell Rosencrantz and Guildenstern where Polonius' dead body is
hidden. He calls Rosencrantz and Guildenstern lapdogs revealing his true
awareness that they are not his friends. Hamlet agrees to see King Claudius.
Hamlet
continues to refuse to tell Rosencrantz and Guildenstern where Polonius' body
is. Hamlet is brought before the King. The two exchange words, clearly circling
each other, each aware that the other is a threat. Hamlet tells King Claudius
where Polonius body is. King Claudius ominously tells Hamlet to leave for
England supposedly for Hamlet's own safety. With Hamlet gone, King Claudius
reveals his plans for Hamlet to be killed in England, freeing King Claudius
from further worry from this threat...
Young
Fortinbras marches his army across Denmark to fight the Polish. Hamlet laments
that he does not have in him the strength of Young Fortinbras, who will lead an
army into pointless fighting, if only to maintain honor. Hamlet asks himself
how he cannot fight for honor when his father has been killed and his mother
made a whore in his eyes by becoming King Claudius' wife.
The
death of Polonius leaves its mark on Ophelia who becomes mad from the grief of
losing her father. Laertes storms King Claudius' castle, demanding to see his
father and wanting justice when he learns that his father, Polonius has been
killed. King Claudius remains calm, telling Laertes that he too mourned his
father's loss...
Horatio
is greeted by sailors who have news from Hamlet. Horatio follows the sailors to
learn more... King Claudius explains to Laertes that Hamlet killed his father,
Polonius. Deciding they have a common enemy, they plot Hamlet's death at a
fencing match to be arranged between Laertes and Hamlet. Laertes learns of his
sister Ophelia's death by drowning...
Act V.
Hamlet
and Horatio speak with a cheerful Clown or gravedigger. Hamlet famously
realizes that man's accomplishments are transitory (fleeting) and holding the
skull of Yorick, a childhood jester he remembered, creates a famous scene about
man's insignificance and inability to control his fate following death.
At
Ophelia's burial, the Priest reveals a widely held belief that Ophelia
committed suicide, angering Laertes. Hamlet fights Laertes over Ophelia's
grave, angered by Laertes exaggerated emphasis of his sorrow and because he
believes he loved Ophelia much more than her brother.
Hamlet
explains to Horatio how he avoided the death planned for him in England and had
courtiers' Rosencrantz and Guildenstern put to death instead. Hamlet reveals
his desire to kill King Claudius.
Summoned
by Osric to fence against Laertes, Hamlet arrives at a hall in the castle and
fights Laertes. Queen Gertrude drinks a poisoned cup meant for Hamlet, dying
but not before telling all that she has been poisoned.
Hamlet
wins the first two rounds against Laertes but is stabbed and poisoned fatally
in the third round. Exchanging swords whilst fighting, Hamlet wounds and
poisons Laertes who explains that his sword is poison tipped.
Now
dying, Hamlet stabs King Claudius with this same sword, killing him.
Hamlet,
dying, tells Horatio to tell his story and not to commit suicide. Hamlet
recommends YoungFortinbras as the next King of Denmark. Young Fortinbras
arrives, cleaning up the massacre. Horatio promises to tell all the story we
have just witnessed, ending the play.
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