[A
lecture prepared for English 200 and revised for English 366: Studies in
Shakespeare, by Ian Johnston of Malaspina-University College, Nanaimo, BC (now
Vancouver Island University). It was last revised slightly on February 27, 2001.
This entire text is in the public domain and may be used free of charge and
without permission]
For
comments, questions, corrections, suggestions please contact Ian
Johnston. For other lectures on Shakespeare, please click here:Lectures.
A. Introduction
Shakespeare’s Hamlet, written
around 1600, is one of the most problematic texts in all of literature. With the
exception of certain Biblical texts, no other work has produced such a
continuing, lively, and contentious debate about how we are supposed to
understand it. In fact, one could very easily construct a thorough and
intriguing history of modern literary criticism based upon nothing other than
various interpretative takes on Hamlet (a task which has already been
carried out by at least one historian of ideas).
Given this critical confusion, we might
as well admit up front that we are not going to arrive at anything like a firm
consensus on what the play is about and how we should understand it. However,
wrestling with this play is a very important and stimulating exercise, because
it puts a lot of pressure on us to reach some final interpretation (that is, it
generates in us a desire to make sense of all the elements in it, to find some
closure), and, even if that goal eludes us, we can learn a great deal about
reading poetic drama and interpreting literature from a serious attempt to grasp
this most elusive work. If one of the really important functions of great
literature is to stimulate thought-provoking conversations which force us to
come to grips with many things about the text and about ourselves, then Hamlet
is a particularly valuable work.
I should also add that many of the
difficulties we wrestle with (like the age of the characters, for example) can
only be temporarily resolved by witnessing and responding to a production of the
play. Because there is so much ambiguity and uncertainly about many key
elements, Hamlet offers a director a great deal of creative scope, and
hence the variety in productions of this play is unmatched in all of
Shakespeare, perhaps in all tragic drama.
In this introductory lecture (and I
stress the word introductory) I would like to discuss three things: (a) first, I
would like to outline what the “problem” with this play is, the source key
of the disagreement, (b) second, I would like to review some of the attempts to
resolve this initial problem, and (c) third, I would like to outline three of
the main issues raised by the play, matters which any coherent and reasonably
complete interpretation has to deal with. If there is time, I might offer a few
suggestions along the way about the approach which I personally find
particularly persuasive.
B. Hamlet: What’s the Problem?
So what is the source of the
difficulties with this play? Well, we can begin by acknowledging that Hamlet is
a revenge play. That is, the story is based upon the need to revenge a murder in
the family. In a typical revenge plot, there are no authorities to appeal to,
either because the original criminal is too powerful (e.g., has become king) or
those in a position to act do not know about or believe in the criminality of
the original villain. Thus, the central character has to act on his own, if any
justice is to occur.
Hamlet clearly falls into
this conventional genre. There is a victim (Hamlet Senior), a villain
(Claudius), and an avenger (Hamlet). Early in the play the details of the murder
become known to Hamlet, he vows to carry out his revenge, and eventually he does
so, bringing the action to a close. The major question which arises, and the
main focus for much of the critical interpretation of Hamlet is this: Why does
Hamlet delay so long? Why doesn’t he just carry out the act?
Now, revenge dramas, from the Oresteia
to the latest Charles Bronson Death Wish film, are eternally popular,
because, as playwrights from Aeschylus on have always known, revenge is
something we all, deep down, understand and respond to imaginatively (even if we
ourselves would never carry out such a personal vendetta). The issue engages
some of our deepest and most powerful feelings, even if the basic outline of the
story is already very familiar to us from seeing lots of revenge plots (for the
basic story line doesn’t change much from one story to another).
Typically, the avenger assumes the
responsibility early on, spends much of the time overcoming various obstacles
(like having to find the identity of the killer or dealing with the barriers
between the avenger and the killer, a process which can involve a great deal of
excitement and violence of all sorts), and concludes the drama by carrying out
the mission, a culmination which requires a personal action (usually face to
face). The revenge, that is, must be carried out in an appropriate manner (just
getting rid of the villain any old way or reporting the villain to the
authorities is not satisfying). This formula, which is very old, popular, and,
if done well, a smash at the box office, was a staple of Greek theatre (not just
in Aeschylus), common in Elizabethan drama before Shakespeare, and characterizes
an enormous number of Western movies and detective fictions, among other genres.
So there’s nothing new about that in this play.
The puzzle here is why Hamlet just does
not go ahead a carry out the revenge. He vows to do so as soon as he hears the
news of the his father’s murder in Act I and repeatedly urges himself on to
the deed. But it takes him many weeks (perhaps months) before the revenge is
carried out. What’s the problem? The attempts to deal with this question have
sparked a huge volume of criticism.
C. Why the Delay? A Survey of Answers
Some critics attempt to resolve the
difficulty by magically waving it away. They maintain, for example, that there
is no delay, that Hamlet carries out the murder as soon as he can conveniently
do so (e.g., Dover Wilson). Others (e.g., E. E. Stoll) argue that the delay is
simply a convention, something we are not supposed to get hung up on, because if
there’s no delay, there’s no play (obviously the carrying out of the revenge
is going to be the final action of the story, so if that occurs very quickly,
the play will last only a few minutes).
Whatever plausibility one might find in
such interpretations is seriously undercut by many parts of the play. Hamlet
himself is constantly calling attention to the delay; he worries about it all
the time. The ghost has to remind him of it. In other words, the delay is not a
concept of our imagination, something we impose on the play; it is, by contrast,
an issue repeatedly raised by the play itself. So it cannot so simply be
conjured out of existence.
In addition, although we do not know the
exact time frame of the play, it does seem that a long time goes by between the
opening act and the conclusion. There is always a lot happening; that’s one of
the most theatrically appealing aspects of the play (Dr Johnson call it
Shakespeare’s most “amusing” play, by which he meant, not that it was
funny, but that it always held our attention with its speed and variety). At the
same time we get unequivocal signals that time is passing: the envoys have gone
to Norway and come back, Hamlet has sailed away and returned, we are told at the
start that it is two months since the funeral of Hamlet Senior and in the play
within the play that it is now twice two months since the funeral, and so on.
Given these details (and there are
others), I would conclude that these first two approaches to the problem are
unacceptable.
In this connection, we should note that
the play has two other revengers: Fortinbras and Laertes, both of whom have to
avenge insults to or murder done on their fathers. They act immediately, with
effective resolution and courage. Given that they are about the same age as
Hamlet, it would seem that we are invited to see in Hamlet’s response to his
father’s murder something quite different from what a normal prince with a
sense of honour might do. Hence the play itself puts a lot of pressure on us to
recognize in Hamlet’s conduct an unusual problem.
Others maintain that, as in many
conventional revenge dramas, Hamlet has external obstacles to overcome in order
to carry out the revenge. There is a delay, but only because Hamlet is not in a
situation where he can easily carry it out. He has to wait for an opportune
moment.
This position, too, is hard to sustain,
given the facts of the play. Hamlet has ready access to Claudius, he even meets
him in an unguarded moment (at prayer), and there is no suggestion from Hamlet
himself that there are any such external difficulties. In his fretting about his
delay, Hamlet never mentions the existence of such external obstacles. And, as
if to underscore the point, when Laertes returns to avenge his father, he has no
trouble in confronting Claudius instantly in a situation where he might easily
have killed him. If Laertes can so quickly put Claudius’s life in jeopardy,
why cannot Hamlet do the same? So this line of inquiry does not seem all that
helpful.
The vast majority of critics on this
play have agreed with the analysis on this point, and have thus argued that, in
the absence of any serious external obstacles, Hamlet’s troubles must be
internal, and the major debates about the play thus turn into a character
analysis of the young prince. What is going on inside of him to make the
carrying out of this revenge so difficult?
There are many suggestions concerning
what this internal condition might be. And the possibilities range from the
silly to the intriguing. I would like to review some of these, beginning with
some fairly implausible suggestions and moving at the end to some serious
possibilities.
Some have maintained that Hamlet is a
coward and that his delay is a manifestation of his fear of getting hurt. This
seems inherently unlikely. He’s capable of very decisive action when necessary
(as in the killing of Polonius, the confrontation with the ghost, or the duel
scene). So I think we can safely lay that suggestion to rest. There are too many
occasions when Hamlet reveals a spontaneous and active courage, even, in the
eyes of his companions, a foolhardy valour.
Certain medically minded interpreters
have suggested that Hamlet’s problem is physical, perhaps an excess of adipose
tissue around the heart (hence his reference to having trouble breathing) or
that he is just mad. Such suggestions do nothing to resolve our desire to
understand this character. If he is clinically abnormal, then so far as I am
concerned he is of little interest to me, except as a clinical specimen. To
paste a convenient abnormal label over Hamlet is to explain nothing, it is to
beg the question which we are seeking to answer. If one of the chief attractions
of the this play is the quality of Hamlet’s intelligence, which comes through
in many of his soliloquies and in his verbal dexterity and so on, then simply
writing him off as a bit of a mental freak is inherently unsatisfactory. If we
are tempted to see, as many are, that there is something strange or significant
about Hamlet’s emotional state, then we need to explore that further, rather
than just writing him off as crazy. The task is to find some emotional coherence
in his thoughts and actions, some illuminating insight into his behaviour.
Casual medical terms which close off such an explorations are of no analytical
use.
If we stray into the realm of
off-the-wall suggestions about Hamlet, we might want to consider the idea that
Hamlet is really a woman raised as a man. Her troubles stem from the fact that
she is in love with Horatio. We probably wouldn’t pay any attention to this
interpretation if there was not a film based upon it, an early silent movie. In
the concluding scene, as Horatio grasps the dying Hamlet in his arms, he
inadvertently clutches her secondary sexual characteristics. At that point the
written script reads something to the effect “Ah, Hamlet, I have discovered
your tragic secret.”
If you find that suggestion interesting
you might want to investigate the suggestions that the key people in the play
are Horatio’s wife or girl friend Felicity (“If thou didst ever hold me in
thy heart,/ Absent thee from felicity a while” the dying Hamlet urges Horatio)
or Hamlet’s invisible Irish companion, Pat (to whom Hamlet is clearly speaking
when he sees Claudius at prayer, “Now might I do it pat. . . .”). And
so on.
In my view the realm of serious
possibilities begins with the claim that Hamlet has great trouble in carrying
out this revenge because he is too good for this world, he is too sensitive, too
poetical, too finely attuned to a difficulties of life, too philosophically
speculative or too finely poetical. This line of criticism has often been
offered by people who feel themselves rather too finely gifted to fit the rough
and tumble of the modern world (like Coleridge, for example). A particularly
famous example of this line of interpretation comes from Goethe:
Shakespeare
meant . . . to represent the effects of great action laid upon a soul unfit
for the performance of it. . . . A lovely, pure, noble and most moral nature,
without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which
it cannot bear and must not cast away. All duties are too holy for him; the
present is too hard. Impossibilities have been required of him; not in
themselves impossibilities, but such for him. He winds and turns, and torments
himself; he advances and recoils; is ever put in mind, ever puts himself in
mind; at last does all but lose his purpose from his thoughts; yet still
without recovering his peace of mind.
This view has a good deal to commend it.
After all, Hamlet is much given to moody poetical reflections on the meaning of
life, he is a student (and therefore by definition too good for this world), and
he seems to spend a great deal of time alone wandering about Elsinore talking to
himself or reading books. He has a tendency to want to explore large universal
generalizations about life, love, politics, and the nature of human beings. From
his first appearance on stage, it is quite clear that he doesn’t much like the
political world of Elsinore; he is displaced from it. Again and again he talks
about how he dislikes the dishonesty of the world, the hypocrisy of politics and
sexuality and so on. So there is a case to be made that Hamlet is just too
sensitive and idealistic for the corrupt double dealing of the court and that
his delay stems from his distaste at descending to their level.
An interpretation which belongs with
these explanations links Hamlet’s inability to act with his sense that the
world is simply too brutal, meaningless, and chaotic to justify any active
intervention in human affairs.Hamlet,
as it were, has seen into the true nature of things and has no redeeming
illusion, no faith in anything, on the basis of which he can act.A well-known expression of this approach is the following comment from
Friedrich Nietzsche (in The Birth of Tragedy, Section 7, Johnston
translation):
In
this sense the Dionysian man has similarities to Hamlet: both have had a real
glimpse into the essence of things. They have understood, and it
disgusts them to act, for their action can change nothing in the eternal
nature of things. They perceive as ridiculous or humiliating the fact that
they are expected to set right again a world which is out of joint. The
knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are
covered with the veil of illusion—that is what Hamlet has to teach us, not
that really venal wisdom about John-a-Dreams, who cannot move himself to act
because of too much reflection, because of an excess of possibilities, so to
speak. It’s not a case of reflection. No!—the true knowledge, the glimpse
into the cruel truth overcomes every driving motive to act, both in Hamlet as
well as in the Dionysian man. Now no consolation has any effect any more. His
longing goes out over a world, even beyond the gods themselves, toward death.
Existence is denied, together with its blazing reflection in the gods or in an
immortal afterlife. In the consciousness of once having glimpsed the truth,
the man now sees everywhere only the horror or absurdity of being; now he
understands the symbolism in the fate of Ophelia; now he recognizes the wisdom
of the forest god Silenus. It disgusts him.
Against this group of interpretations,
of course, is the very clear evidence that Hamlet is quite capable of swift
decisive action should the need arise. He kills Polonius without a qualm and
proceeds to lecture his mother very roughly over the dead body. He can dispatch
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, without a scruple. He is very
gifted at dissembling, at playing the Machiavelli-like figure. And he has no
hesitation in taking Laertes on in a duel. In addition, there is a violent
streak in Hamlet (especially where women are concerned). So on the basis of the
evidence there is a good deal to suggest that the vision of Hamlet as a soul too
good for this world might be problematic. However, that is one you might like to
consider.
Allied to this view of Hamlet as too
poetical or reflective is the idea that he is just too weak willed to make the
decision to undertake the revenge. Again the evidence does not seem to bear out
the contention that Hamlet is, by his very nature, incapable of making
decisions. Once he sets his mind to the play within the play or tricking
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern or undertaking the duel or facing the ghost he can
act quickly and decisively.
Then, too, there is the ever popular
notion that Hamlet has to delay because he’s not sure whether or not the ghost
is from heaven or hell. That is, he must confirm the validity of the ghost’s
information and his mission, and his delay is therefore a necessary part of the
revenge plan. In assessing this idea you have to be prepared to sort out the
complex issue of whether what Hamlet says on the point is sincere or whether it
is just one more excuse for delay. For the fact is that Hamlet entertains
absolutely no doubts about the ghost’s honesty when he first encounters it,
and the idea of testing it more or less pops into his head when he is wrestling
with his own failure to carry out the deed. Moreover, even after he has
confirmed the truth of the ghost with the play within the play he does not carry
out the murder, although immediately after the play and the confirmation of the
ghost’s story he has a supreme opportunity to do so. In addition, of course,
if the motive of checking out the ghost’s credentials is the major motive for
the delay, then how do we account for the anguish that Hamlet seems to go
through in thinking about the delay? Why isn’t that reason more in evidence?
This, in fact, is a crucial point and
one that makes Hamlet so very interesting. Why is he himself so insistently
guilty about not being able to go through with it? Any interpretation of the
play which suggests either that there is no delay or that there is a perfectly
justified reason for it comes crashing down on one overwhelming fact of this
play, which we have to confront again and again, especially in the soliloquies:
Hamlet himself agonizes over his inability to carry out the deed and is
constantly searching for reasons why he is behaving the way he is. He doesn’t
himself understand why he cannot carry out the revenge. That point, I would
suggest, is one of the main reasons we are interested in the prince—he is in
the grip of something that he cannot fully understand, no matter how much he
rationalizes the matter.
And in this connection I really want to
repeat a critical question that you are going to have to wrestle with in order
to sort out where you stand with the prince. When Hamlet says something, does he
really mean it or is he deliberately inventing another reason for the delay? Is,
for example, his concern about the validity of the ghost a real concern or just
a convenient rationalization for his strong emotional reluctance to carry out
the deed? Similarly, is his excuse for not killing Claudius at prayer a
convincing reason or just one more excuse? Such questions are crucial to an
understanding of Hamlet’s character, yet they are not easy to answer on the
basis of the text itself. I mention this point here in order to stress that one
has to be very careful before accepting whatever Hamlet says as an up front
truth—it may be an evasion or evidence that he very poorly understands himself
and the world around him.
All of these suggestions (and I’m
cutting a long story short) drive one to a tempting conclusion put forward most
famously by Ernest Jones, the famous disciple of Freud. Jones argues that Hamlet
has no doubts about the ghost, is perfectly capable of acting decisively, and
yet delays and delays and agonizes over the delay. Why? If he has motive,
opportunity, the ability to act decisively, and a strong desire to carry out the
action, then why doesn’t he? Jones’s conclusion is that there’s something
about this particular task which makes it impossible for Hamlet to carry
out. It’s not that he is by nature irresolute, too poetical or philosophical,
or suffers from medical problems or a weakness of will. It is, by contrast, that
this particular assignment is impossible for him.
That leads Jones to posit the very
famous and very persuasive suggestion that Hamlet cannot kill Claudius because
of his relationship with his mother. He has (now wait for it) a classical
Oedipus Complex: he is incapable of killing the man who sleeps with his mother
because that would mean that he would have to admit to himself his own feelings
about her, something which overwhelms him and disgusts him. Jones’s argument
in the book Hamlet and Oedipus (especially in the first half) is a very
skillful piece of criticism, always in very close contact with the text, and it
is justly hailed as the great masterpiece of Freudian criticism. Just to point
out one salient fact: Jones indicates, quite correctly, that Hamlet can kill
Claudius only after he knows that his mother is dead and that he is going to
die. Hence, his deep sexual confusion is resolved; only then can he act. Up to
that point, he constantly finds ways to evade facing up to the task he cannot
perform, because to do so would be to confront feelings within himself that he
cannot acknowledge (by killing Claudius he would make his mother available and
be attacking the ideal nobility of his real father).
I’m not going to put forward a defense
of the Jones’s thesis, except to suggest that the initial logic of his
argument seems quite persuasive: Hamlet does have a very particular inability to
carry out this action and that this inability is not a constitutional
incapacity for action but stems from some very particular feelings within
Hamlet, feelings which he himself has trouble figuring out and which he often
thinks about in explicitly sexual terms (whether we follow Jones in identifying
these feelings with an Oedipus Complex is another matter), terms which insist
upon a pattern of disgust with female sexuality and with himself.
So for me the question of Hamlet’s
delay boils itself down to trying to answer the following question: What is it
about this situation that turns an intelligent, active, and often decisive
person into some emotional paralytic? Where are we to locate the source of the
difficulties Hamlet is constantly acknowledging?
In order to answer this question, we
have to take into account some important facts of the play, that is, first of
all, we have to acknowledge the particular evidence we have to work with. In
this play, that is not always easy. But the test of any interpretation of the
key question is going to depend upon its ability to coordinate in a plausible
way what we are given. So at this point, let me review three of the more salient
facts. However you interpret this play, you are going to have to take into
account these issues.
Please note that I am not suggesting
that these are the only important facts one has to account for. However, they
are of central importance and, it seems to me, present the major challenges to
any interpretation.
D. The Facts of the Case
Hamlet’s Language
One of the most obvious features of Hamlet
is that the hero is a compulsive talker, who processes experience and wrestles
with his feelings and copes with other people primarily through language. In the
context of that earlier lecture about Richard II, Hamlet has many of the
characteristics of a chatterer, a person who uses words to protect himself from
coming to grips with the reality of his situation and the need for action.
Hamlet, among some critics, has acquired a reputation as something of a
philosopher, a profound thinker. But how profound are Hamlet’s inner
speculations? He tackles big issues, to be sure, but where do his thoughts take
him? Does the philosophical content of his speculations ever move very far
beyond the platitudinous? Might it be the case that he is merely talking
in order not to have to act (rather like Richard II)? I raise this as a question
because one’s response to Hamlet’s soliloquies (and he has more than any
other Shakespearean character) will shape our understanding of him more than any
other factor in the play.
Hamlet’s use of language, in fact, is
obviously a crucial key to his character. Having introduced a comparison
with Richard II (and one could include Jaques from As You Like It in any
list of Shakespearean chatterers), one needs to remain alert to the distinctions
as well as the similarities. For Hamlet’s language reveals that he is
constantly wrestling with something inside, something which torments him,
something at times he clearly would not like to think about but which he cannot
dispel from his thoughts. This quality sets him apart from Richard and
Jaques, both of whom use language very complacently to close themselves off from
external complexities, to impose upon the world their own given sense of what it
all means or of what really matters and what does not (and to drown out any
competing understanding which might come to them from outside). Hamlet’s
language, in that sense, does not reassure him or calm him down: it is an
expression of and a contribution to his suffering. That’s the reason the
emotional quality of his language commands so much more attention than does the
emotional quality of anything Richard or Jaques say.
For Hamlet is not quite like these two
in how his language registers. If, like them, Hamlet shows little
inclination to listen to other people sensitively and to learn from their
conversations with him and if there is a sense that he frequently uses language
as a shield to protect himself from interacting with the world (as he clearly
does with his often nonsensical patter), Hamlet is also at times trying to find
some way of expressing what he feels and is constantly frustrated by his
inability to formulate exactly what it is that is troubling him. In that
sense, his habit, for example, of summing up issues with sweeping reductive
generalizations about the world (and women in particular) is linked to serious
inner turmoil and registers as, in some sense, a desperate way to hold in check
the pressures of his inner contradictions (rather than as some fixed and firmly
held opinion).
That point helps to explain the curious
and significant pattern of Hamlet’s soliloquies, which are marked by sudden
changes of subject, self-urging to put something out of his mind accompanied by
an inability to do so, attacks on himself for all his verbalizing, and a sense
of despair that all this talk is getting him no closer to any sort of answer
which will clarify the world sufficiently to enable him to act. It may
also account for his habit of lashing out verbally (and sometimes physically)
when the world presses against him too closely (and for the fact that such
lashing out characteristically occurs in the face of those who love him most or
who are most concerned about him, e.g., Gertrude and Ophelia).
In addition to these characteristic
rhythms in Hamlet’s language (especially in his soliloquies) there is the
matter of the images he fixes upon to express his inner turmoil. From his
very first soliloquy in 1.2, these images typically insist upon the wholesale
corruption of the world. As often as not, they carry with them a sense of
powerful disgust with sexuality, especially women’s sexuality (a view which
clearly issues from his feelings about his mother), a revulsion so powerful that
it fills him with a desire for suicide in the face of the worthlessness a life
which reduces all of us to an empty skull, dust, and a foul smell.
Allied to this feature, of course, is
Hamlet’s vocabulary, which characteristically features short colloquial words
evocative of a mood of exhaustion, contempt, disgust--a range of feelings of
extreme unpleasantness: “fardels,” “grunt,” “sweat,” “nasty
sty,” “vicious mole,” “rank and gross,” “slave’s offal,” and so
on. How we determine what such a language has to reveal to us about
Hamlet’s maturity, intelligence, emotional sensitivity (especially in relation
to his situation) will play a major role in how we resolve some of the
interpretative difficulties of the play.
However we explore the details of
Hamlet’s character and seek to find some ways of describing it, we need to
account for these prominent features of his language, which are hard to
reconcile with the idea of a settled, noble, philosophical frame of mind.
And a central issue in our evaluation will almost certainly be trying to
determine if the language indicates a morbid over-reaction to a set of harsh
circumstances or is in some ways a worthy response which can be justified
without an appeal to serious deficiencies in the prince’s emotional make up.
The Politics of Machiavellianism
Any assessment of the prince’s
character, however, has to take into account his setting, the royal court of
Elsinore, simply because Hamlet thinks of himself very much in relation to the
political life around him. We can easily acknowledge that Elsinore
is a very political place, in a very Machiavellian sense. In this court, we are
in a political realm based on duplicity, power, and fear, and the outcome of the
political actions is serious: the security of the kingdom. Everyone is
constantly eavesdropping on everyone else (behind the arras, outside a door, on
a battlement above). This spirit is best exemplified in the person of Polonius,
the most important and successful courtier, who is a master spy, subordinating
all the concerns of life to a quest for knowledge and the power which knowledge
brings.
Polonius’s instinctive response to any
problem is to spy out the solution. If that means running the risk of
dishonoring his son or using his daughter as bait, that doesn’t bother him. If
one has to spread lies abroad in order to gain the knowledge necessary for
power, then that is quite acceptable, as he tells Reynaldo:
See you now--
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth;
And thus do we of wisdom and of reach,
With windlasses and with assays of bias,
By indirection find directions out. (2.1)
Polonius’s operating principle is
fear. If one doesn’t attend to finding out what is going on, if one is not
very careful, then trouble will come quickly. One needs to be constantly on
guard, vigilant, and careful of any serious consequences of any action:
This
must be known; which, being kept close, might move
More grief to hide than hate to utter love. (2.1)
This ethic of Polonius is prepared to
ride roughshod over any emotional problems. When Ophelia confesses her love for
Hamlet and his for her, Polonius dismisses the matter as rubbish: all Hamlet’s
romantic declarations she must treat as simply tricks to get her into bed to
satisfy his lust. Love, for Polonius, like everything else, can be understood in
the lowest common denominator of human activity as a power struggle. Hence,
Ophelia’s relationship with Hamlet is potentially dangerous politically and
must be stopped. He tells Ophelia she’s to stay away from Hamlet, because
he’s not telling the truth. The implication is clear: in the power political
world of Polonius, love has no place. That’s why he can simply manipulate her
into trying to engage Hamlet in conversation while he and Claudius listen in
while concealed. The fact that at the end of that conversation Ophelia is crying
in great distress he hardly notices--his daughter’s emotional dismay is
inconsequential; what really matters is the political implication of what he and
Claudius have witnessed: “How now, Ophelia?/ You need not tell us what Lord
Hamlet said./ We heard it all” (3.1.178).
It’s significant, I think, that in
sorting out what must be done about Ophelia’s confessions about Hamlet’s
relationship to her, his immediate response is a military metaphor:
Set
your entreatments at a higher rate
Than a command to parley. (1.2)
For Polonius all of life, including
love, is a power struggle, and the operative principle is fear. Human beings are
motivated only by self-interest; thus, Ophelia’s notion that Hamlet may be in
love with her is simply the immature response of a foolish adolescent, unaware
of the brutal competitiveness of a world in which the basic rules of human
interaction are what’s in it for me and fear of what someone with power might
do to you.
Similarly in his famous speech to his
son, there is a remarkable absence of a certain kind of advice. Polonius’s
words have acquired for some reason the reputation of being good moral advice,
but the most remarkable thing about the speech is the absence of any moral
exhortation. What he says is good hard-headed practical advice for success in a
rough and dangerous public world: avoid trouble, conceal feelings and
intentions, and control one’s environment through one’s appearance. The most
frequently quoted part of the speech one needs to consider very carefully:
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. (1.3.78)
Think about this for a while. It is not
a sound piece of moral advice—and Polonius’s conduct makes that clear
throughout the play: in serving his own interests, in following his vision of
being true to himself he is prepared to hurt anyone, even members of his own
family. Polonius, I think, cares deeply about his family. That is not the issue
here. It is the quality of the care, the characteristic manner in which he
shapes his understanding of what are the problems in life and what must be done
about them. That is what seems curiously narrow. The fact that he does not
believe that dealing with people in this way is not being false to them tells us
a great deal about Polonius and about the world in which he functions with such
apparent success.
In exploring this issue, we need to
acknowledge that Polonius does not appear to be interested in his own personal
power. He sees himself as a loyal servant of the royal family and as a
loving parent. And he is both of those. But in serving both his
royal masters and his family, Polonius interprets the world as a dangerous place
where one needs to have one’s wits about one and walk carefully, without
taking any unnecessary chances of giving anything away.
Many people are deceived by Polonius’s
external pose as something of a doddering old fool. After all, in many scenes,
he plays the role of someone who is a bit silly. But we have to keep asking
ourselves what’s going on underneath. And there we can sense a shrewd and
hard-headed political imagination for whom the all important issue of life is
political survival in a complex and deceptive world. An essential part of that
is a deceptively innocent external mask.
Polonius, we should note, is an
important political figure, the executive arm of the king. And his position (and
Claudius’s endorsement of Polonius in words of high praise) tell us clearly
that Polonius’s tactics work in Elsinore; they bring success. Moreover, as I
have mentioned, he is not an evil man. He has the best interests of his family
and his monarch at heart and puts his talents to work on their behalf. He has no
agenda to capture or wield more power than he has already. In a sense, he
is a recognizably normal person, quite at home in the adult world of business
and politics.
Claudius, too, is a very shrewd and
successful political operator, who understands, like Polonius, that the
political world requires deception and betrayal. He employs Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet, agrees readily enough to Polonius’s various
spying suggestions, and finally is prepared to deceive Hamlet into going to his
own death.
This Machiavellian quality in Polonius
and Claudius makes them very effective political operators. When Polonius
challenges Claudius to name one occasion on which he has been wrong, Claudius
concedes that Polonius is unmatched in his ability to find out the truth of a
situation. Claudius, we know (especially from his superb performance in 1.2,
when we first meet him), is no fool, and this firm endorsement of Polonius
should alert us to recognize that the frequently foolish pose is just that, a
pose. We should note, too, that Claudius has the full support of the court. That
is a mark that he is recognized as an effective, perhaps even a popular leader.
No one in the play, except Hamlet, ever makes the suggestion that Claudius is
not an effective monarch (and Shakespeare in other plays typically allows us to
see growing discontent in quiet conversations between malcontents). In fact,
during the course of the play we see his policies about the political problems
with Norway work to the evident approval of those around him.
In this connection, it’s important to
pick up on the fact that the monarch in Elsinore has been elected by the
council. So Claudius is king because he was chosen by the senior politicians in
Elsinore. And, equally important, as he makes clear very early on, there has
been no political opposition to the marriage with Gertrude. If he had wanted to,
Shakespeare could obviously have provided clear evidence that people in general
think that this remarriage was immoral. The fact that there is no such
suggestion, that by and large everyone has approved of the remarriage is an
important fact when we consider the extreme language with which the ghost and
Hamlet describe it. For example, if the remarriage is truly incestuous, then
there would have been hostility to it (we see that the clergy here are not above
challenging the court). So the general harmony of the court, which we witness in
the first scenes tells us that Claudius is perceived as an effective and perhaps
even a popular ruler and that, so far we can tell, the people in Elsinore see
nothing wrong with the marriage.
One final point about the political
world of Elsinore. It does not seem to be a place where women matter very much,
where they have much of a say in anything. The movers and shakers in this world
are all men, and where necessary they are prepared to use women, even their own
family, in the power political game. The chief example of this, of course, is
Ophelia, who spends much of the play bewildered about what is happening around
her, as she tries to follow what her father, brother, and Hamlet tell her to do.
Gertrude, too, initiates very little from any political power base. In Elsinore,
Claudius and Polonius call the shots.
But Claudius does love Gertrude and
respects her opinion. He clearly has all the power, but he often involves her in
the conversations, asks her advice, and defers to her. Early in the play,
the stand together as equals. Gertrude appears to have very little
political imagination (she is not a power player and at times is clearly out of
the loop), and we don’t get any suggestion that she knows anything about the
murder of her first husband. The fact that Claudius makes so much of her is one
of those qualities that makes Claudius, in some ways, a more sympathetic
character (much here obviously depends upon how they behave together, so that we
have to witness a production to make an informed judgment).
And both women die. Ophelia’s
death is particularly significant, because she is clearly driven to it by events
over which she, as a young woman, has no control. In this connection it
might be worth asking some pointed questions about Ophelia as a victim of life
in Elsinore and, in particular, of Hamlet himself. If we see her, as I think
most people do, as an innocent young girl trying to sort out her feelings about
people in a complex and difficult world where she is constantly told what to do
and how to think by various men (Hamlet, Polonius, and Laertes), and if there is
some substance to the love between her and Hamlet, there may very well be an
explicit sexual edge to the frustration which drives her into madness. That
seems certainly possible in the light of the sexual bullying (not too strong a
term) which seems to be such a constant feature of the advice men around
constantly direct at her, and the sexual innuendo in her lunatic songs lends
support to the idea.. Such a view gives some weight to Robert Speaight’s
remark that no part in Shakespeare has suffered more than Ophelia from the
sentimental evasion of sexuality (a comment recorded in Peter Brook: A
Biography by J. C. Trewin, London, Macdonald, 1971, p. 92).
We don’t have to see Ophelia this way,
of course, but if we give her behaviour that edge (something entirely consistent
with the evidence of the text) her destruction acts as a powerful indictment of
the corrupting effects of the male-dominated political realm of Elsinore, which
simply has no room in it for love.
Appearance and Reality
Given this nature of Elsinore, which is
impossible to ignore, we come to a second important fact of the play, namely,
that people in this world have to live two lives, the one they present to the
world and the inner world of their own thoughts and feelings. For Elsinore is a
world where the appearance of things does not always or often mesh with the
inner reality. Claudius, for example, is on the outside a smooth, popular, and
effective political operator; inside he is tormented by his own guilt and
carries, as he puts it, the most serious sin of all, a brother’s murder.
Polonius appears to be something of a bumbling fool; inside he is a capable
Machiavel always unerringly on the trail of new information. Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern are apparently Hamlet’s university friends; but in reality they
are spies in the service of Claudius, especially commissioned to ferret out the
truth about Hamlet. And so forth.
This is a deceptive world. One can never
be sure whether someone is spying or eavesdropping. Elsinore is full of nooks,
arrases, upper galleries where someone may be lurking in secret. It’s a place
where you have to keep your wits about you if you want to survive. When someone
approaches you with a smile on his face, you can never be sure whether he is a
friend or a foe, whether what he is saying to you is what he really means or
whether it is all just a temporary role he is playing in this dangerous and
duplicitous game.
In this connection, I think one of the
most important moments is the very first line of the play. In the first scene we
see someone whom we don’t know alone, wandering about in the dark, cold and
lonely and scared in a foggy night, where one has difficulty seeing clearly.
Suddenly a figure emerges out of the mist. The first response is defensive:
“Who’s there?” And figure hailed is equally suspicious: “Nay, answer me.
Stand and unfold yourself.” And if you read the scene aloud, you notice in the
short, choppy lines a nervous intensity, a jitteriness, which sets the mood for
the world of Elsinore. In one way or another that question “Who’s there?”
shouted out into a fog which makes clear perception impossible haunts the play.
Who in this play is not acting a role?
Well, those that do not seem to be, that is, Ophelia and Gertrude and perhaps
Horatio, stand rather on the sidelines or get pushed around by the action.
Ophelia, in particular, is a really pathetic victim of so many people in the
play, because she is so innocent, so naive, so ill equipped to understand, let
alone deal with, the world around her. In this world, as in so much of
Shakespeare, innocence is never enough, and those who have only that to guide
them in a complex political world, who are not able to develop a survival
strategy of some kind, are going to suffer. Gertrude, too, appears much of the
time painfully bewildered. Those two ladies are poorly equipped to deal with
Elsinore, in part because they cannot hide their feelings in an effective public
role.
One key element in the roles people play
is the language they use to interact with others. In public, Claudius is smooth,
polished, confident; in private or with Gertrude he is a troubled spirit; in
public Polonius is frequently something of a verbal buffoon; in private he is
matter of fact and shrewd. Hamlet plays all sorts of roles, shifting gears from
one scene to the next, using language as a survival tool to keep the people he
interacts with off guard, puzzled, on the defensive. His famous “antic
disposition” is part of a world where you have to play a public role in order
to guard your innermost thoughts and plans. He clearly uses his famous “wit”
to erect a defensive barrier between himself and others and at times to lash out
cruelly at them. That is the reason why, in reading Hamlet, we have to be
very careful about immediately believing what people say to each other: they may
not be telling the truth.
That may also be the reason why everyone
enjoys the arrival of the actors so much. Hamlet is never happier in this play
than when he is with the actors. He gets excited and, for the first time,
displays a passionate and joyful interest in something going on around him. With
the actors we do get our only strong sense of what a giving and amusing
character Hamlet might be. And this has nothing to do with his plans for the
play within the play (that comes later). No, the suggestion is clearly that he
can in some ways deal with the actors differently from anyone else. With them,
and this is very noticeable in the scene, Hamlet can relax and let his
imagination, wit, and intelligence play without worrying about the consequences.
And I would suggest that in a world like Elsinore, where almost everyone is
playing various roles in a dangerous game, the professional actors are a huge
relief because you know exactly where you stand with them. They do not conceal
the fact that they are taking on roles; there is thus nothing duplicitous about
them. Those who professionally pretend to be other people are, in a sense, the
only ones in this play whose actions one can clearly sort out, because they are
what they appear to be, with no inner agenda working against the role they play.
Hamlet’s Relationship to Elsinore
The third fact about this play which I
would like to consider is particularly obvious: that in some fundamental way
Hamlet feels alienated in the court of Elsinore. He physically and emotionally
refuses to take part in the proceedings, and generally acknowledges to others
that he is profoundly dissatisfied with the court, with Denmark, and even with
life itself. This is made very clear to us before he learns anything about the
ghost, the murder, and the need for revenge. The first soliloquy (in 1.2) makes
the initial stance of Hamlet clear enough (while raising some important
questions about the cause of this behaviour, given that he’s much more upset
about the remarriage of his mother than the murder of his father). The behaviour
of Hamlet towards the normal business going on at Elsinore is a source of great
puzzlement to his mother and to Claudius.
Now, a great deal of the interpretation
we favour about this play is going to turn on how we deal with this displacement
of Hamlet from the normal world around him. Prima facie, it strikes me
that there are three immediately obvious possibilities. My description of these
is going to be oversimple, but I think it will be enough to make the point and
perhaps get your interpretative imaginations working.
E. Some Interpretative Possibilities
Given these facts, there are a number of
routes we might explore (and which have been explored) to seek to find some
interpretative unity in this frequently ambiguous work. The following list is
not meant to be exhaustive, but it does chart some of the main paths
interpreters have followed:
Hamlet as a Noble Prince in a Corrupt
and Evil World
First, we can see Elsinore as an
essentially corrupt place, an environment in which the nobler aspects of human
life have been hopelessly compromised by the excessive attention to duplicity,
double dealing, and Machiavellian politics, that, in a sense, Claudius and
Polonius are clearly the villains of the place and wholly responsible for the
unsatisfactory moral and emotional climate there; they are the source of the
something rotten in the state of Denmark. If that is so, if, that is, we see
Elsinore and the prevailing powers in it, Claudius and Polonius, as in some
sense degenerate specimens of humanity, then Hamlet’s rejection of that world
becomes something with which we can sympathize. He is right to feel about that
world the way he does; his inability to adjust to an evil environment is a sign
of his noble nature. He is being emotionally hammered by a cruel and corrupt
world, and he is trying to hang onto his integrity.
Such an approach would make much of
Hamlet’s apparently “philosophical” nature, his intellectual superiority
which enables him to place the actions of Elsinore in a much wider and fairer
context. And it would emphasize the degenerate nature of Claudius and Polonius.
Given this quality, we readily enough understand why Hamlet cannot accept a
world of deceit, compromise, and short-term power grabs. He has to displace
himself from this world in order to survive, in order to protect himself from
the general rottenness, while he tries to sort out how he is to act in a world
which he finds so morally unacceptable.
Such an initial displacement would of
course be powerfully reinforced by the news about the murder, since it would
simply confirm for Hamlet the nature of the world he does not want to enter. So
his anguish comes from the inner conflict of a spirit who wants to understand
the ultimate significance of human actions, especially his own, before acting in
a world empty, so far as he can see, of significant value. He has looked at life
in Elsinore and has become disgusted by what he sees, and we can sympathize with
that because Elsinore is, thanks to the actions of particular people, an evil
place.
This stance, one might maintain, is the
source of Hamlet’s cruelty (and he can be very cruel, especially to Ophelia).
Once he suspects that she is complicit in the corruption around her, he lashes
out. Whatever hopes he might have entertained about there being an alternative
to the world he sees around him have been disappointed; she is part of the
problem and must be pushed away. Similarly Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in his
view, betray his friendship and thus deserve to be dealt with harshly. His rough
treatment of his mother, too, may well stem from a sense that she has
collaborated in the murder of his father (he virtually accuses her of the deed,
although it seems clear to us from her reply that that is the first she has
heard of that matter), and her remarriage is a constant reminder of the
emptiness of promises and honest relationships in the world of the court.
In this connection, it’s worth
remarking that Hamlet never finally decides to kill Claudius, formulating a plan
and carrying it out. Whatever it is that his holding him back from acting
decisively in the political world retains its hold over him until the very end
when he learns that his mother is dead and that he has only a few minutes to
live. Then he kills, just as he killed Polonius, with a spontaneous speed
that does not pause to ground itself in reason. What this establishes
about the moral quality of the Prince’s character, I’m not sure, but it is a
significant fact of the play.
Hamlet as a Death-Infected Source of the
Rottenness in Elsinore
A second possibility concerning
Hamlet’s estrangement from the goings on in Elsinore is that the source of the
problem is not the corruption in Elsinore but some deep inadequacy in Hamlet
himself. The world of Elsinore is indeed full of compromises and evasions and
political intrigue. But it is a recognizably normal adult world, and it does
possess some important worth in the love of Gertrude and Claudius, in the
respect and popularity of Claudius, in his political effectiveness, and perhaps
in the loyalty of Polonius to the King and in his concern for his own family
(even if we find that concern often overly pragmatic and emotionally limiting).
Hamlet’s displacement from that world is thus, not so much an indication of
his noble, sympathetic character, as a sign of his emotional or intellectual
inadequacy. He is, more than anyone else, the source of something rotten in the
state of Denmark.
In exploring this possibility we might
like to consider, for example, that Hamlet is a multiple killer, who takes seven
lives for one. He kills without any compunction, a response that surprises even
Horatio. He has what one critic (Wilson Knight) has called a “death
infected” imagination, always dwelling on the futility, aridity, and
pointlessness of life. Far from having an uplifting philosophical or poetical
nature, he is morbidly obsessed with the fact that he can find no adequate
reason for living in the he world. He is also, in a very real sense, the biggest
liar in the play. For all his talk of the deceptive world of Elsinore and the
tactics of Polonius, Hamlet himself is always acting, deceiving, lying,
shielding himself from people and using people to promote his own ends. And most
significant of all, he has a very warped sense of female sexuality, talking of
it always in gross terms which indicate an enormous disgust. Hamlet’s actions
are destructive of others and ultimately self-destructive. For example, in any
comparison between Claudius and Hamlet as moral creatures, it would not be hard
to make the case that Claudius is clearly the superior of the two, with a much
more intelligent sense of personal responsibility and a searing sense of his own
sinfulness.
This line of interpretation would
encourage us to see in Hamlet’s cruelty to Ophelia, to Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, and to Gertrude the expression of a sensibility corrupted by its
own inadequate feelings. His disgust for female sexuality, for example, would
stem from a basic immaturity rather than from a sense of betrayal. Hamlet cannot
accept that his mother is a creature with an active sexual life. And he cannot
accept that because he has come to see sexuality as something depraved, animal
like, and disgusting. The response to such feelings is to lash out at her
verbally and perhaps even physically.
It’s particularly interesting that the
only other person to talk with such disgust about sexuality is the ghost. And if
we are interested in the origins of Hamlet’s emotionally insecure nature, that
scene with his father is of pivotal importance. We know that Hamlet idealizes
his father excessively (constantly comparing him to a god), and in the
similarity of their sentiments on some things and even in their manner of
frequently speaking in triplets (“Words, words, words,” “Remember me,
remember me, remember me,” and so on), there seems to be a strong link between
the two, as if to underscore the idea that for the deficiencies of Hamlet’s
character, his father bears a major responsibility.
Those who favour this sense of a
significantly corrupting quality in Hamlet’s character and who wish to link it
to his parentage often cite as the “theme” of the play a particularly
interesting passage which comes just before the appearance of the ghost:
So,
oft it chances in particular men, That for some vicious mole of nature in them, As, in their birth—wherein they are not
guilty, Since nature cannot choose his origin— By the o'ergrowth of some complexion, Oft breaking down the pales and forts of
reason, Or by some habit that too much o'er-leavens The form of plausive manners, that these men, Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect, Being nature's livery, or fortune's star,-- Their virtues else--be they as pure as grace, As infinite as man may undergo-- Shall in the general censure take corruption From that particular fault: the dram of eale Doth all the noble substance of a doubt To his own scandal.
Enter
Ghost (1.4)
Hamlet is here, as usual, making a
generalization about human nature or about one particular character type. The
fact that he makes this speech just before the encounter with his father would
seem to underline the fact that there might be a vicious mole of nature in the
character of Hamlet Senior or Hamlet junior or both (this device of making the
speech immediately before the entry of a character carry a strong ironic
implication about that character is very common in Shakespeare)..
I should mention here that one very
important decision one has to make in one’s imaginative interpretation of
these two possibilities is Hamlet’s age. For that is going to determine to a
large extent whether we see his reaction to Elsinore as something with which we
can readily sympathize or as something fundamentally immature or emotionally
inappropriate. Now, we are told Hamlet’s precise age by the gravedigger,
of course, but that piece of specific information is often overlooked in the
interests of a particular interpretation. After all, if Hamlet is, say, eighteen
years old, then his disgust with the political world, with its hypocrisy and
double dealing, with his mother’s sexuality and apparent betrayal of his
father, is much easier to accept as a natural reaction by an intelligent and
sensitive personality. If, on the other hand, he is in his mid- thirties then
this response might seem an overreaction, something about which we would expect
someone at that stage of life to have reached a more mature understanding. He
might still find it very distasteful, but it would not paralyze his emotional
faculties in quite the same way as in an adolescent, unless there were something
wrong.
The Real Villain: The Condition of the
World
A third possibility to account for
Hamlet’s odd relationship with the court at Elsinore (there are others), and
the one I tend to favour, is that this is a particularly bleak play in which all
the characters, in one way or another, fail, because in the world of Elsinore
there is no possibility for a happy fulfilled life; the conditions of life are
loaded against the participants and, in a sense, they are all victims of a world
which will just not admit of the possibilities for the good life in any creative
and meaningful sense.
I find, for example, that in the world
of Elsinore my sympathies are constantly aroused and then canceled out in
various ways. I admire and respect Claudius at first, I respond with admiration
to his evident love and affectionate and courteous treatment of Gertrude, but I
recognize that he is an evil man, guilty of a horrible crime, and then I see him
wrestling with an enormous guilt, which is a factor only because he is a deeply
religious person who believes in his own damnation and will not take an easy way
out. This is not a simple villain, but a complex human being locked into a
situation where there is simply nothing he can do.
Hamlet, similarly, constantly arouses
conflicting responses. One of the great attractions of this play is the protean
quality of the Prince’s character. His mind is always interesting, and his
suffering is very genuine. Like Claudius he is wrestling with the world, and he
is not being very successful. He does not see any way out of his distress, and
when he reflects on the final meaning of everything, he can reach no joyful
conclusion. All of this makes Hamlet an immensely interesting and sympathetic
character. On the other hand, he is so often brutal, in language and deed,
especially to those who love him, he is so deceitful and vacillating, that again
and again I find myself questioning his moral sensitivity.
Gertrude also is in a similar situation.
She genuinely loves Hamlet and Claudius. But the two men in her life are on a
downward spiral and so is she. Life is too much for her. What she seems to want
is something very basic: a happy family. But life is denying her that, no matter
how she tries.
In this play, it doesn’t matter how
people try to deal with life: they all fail. Life is too much for them. Whether
they embrace the conditions of Elsinore, like Polonius, and seek to operate by
the Machiavellian principles of the political world, or seek for love, like
Ophelia or Gertrude, or try to find some intellectual understanding of things,
like Hamlet, life defeats all of them. They all die in the mass killing at the
end. The two main survivors, Horatio and Fortinbras, are interesting exceptions.
The first is essentially a spectator of life, a student, perhaps even a
Montaigne like figure, a friend of Hamlet but unable to offer any useful
insights into what might be done and someone who initiates nothing. The other is
a mindless romantic militarist, who defines his life in terms of pointless
conquests in the name of glory. Life does not seem to trouble him because he
comes across as an unreflecting man who asks nothing of life except that it
provides him with some barren ground which he and his troops can fight over in
the name of military glory.
Who is happy in this play? Who has life
figured out? I can see only one character leading a fully realized happy life,
and that is the gravedigger. He spends his life surrounded by death, by the
disintegrating remains of his friends and companions. And what does he do? He
sings, he jokes, he turns what he has into a joyous acceptance of the world. He
is the only person in the play with a creative sense of humour, using language
and wit, not to protect himself from encounters with life but to transform the
horror of his surrounding into an affirming human experience. It’s important
to note that his humour is quite different from Hamlet’s. The latter is
essentially a rhetorical defense, often bitter and caustic, an expression of an
unwillingness to engage the world. The gravedigger’s humour, by contrast, is
affirming and transforming, something playful, healthy, and creative. I don’t
think it’s an accident that the gravedigger is the only person whose humour is
clearly superior to Hamlet’s. But he is only a gravedigger, and his spirit is
entirely absent from the court.
When Fortinbras takes over Elsinore at
the end of the play, what has been resolved? What sense of moral order does he
bring with him? None whatsoever. This is a world which does not admit complex,
peaceful, and satisfying visions of the good life. It answers only to the
realities of military power. And those who try to demand more from life, as
Hamlet, Claudius, Gertrude, Opheila, and Polonius do, end up destroying each
other and becoming victims in their turn.
I sense that Fortinbras’s triumphant
entry at the end is a reassertion of the world of Hamlet Senior, who was, we
know, also a warrior who devoted his life to military glories. My own sense of
the ghost is that Hamlet Senior was something of a nasty piece of work--an
egocentric, hard, and unforgiving misogynist--successful in the very narrow
terms of this armour-plated world, which has little room in it for love,
understanding, forgiveness, or anything but those pointless power exercises
which increased his own glory. Once I have seen Hamlet Senior and heard him
talk, I have immense sympathy for Gertrude and no difficulty at all in
understanding how she could really love a man like Claudius. It also makes very
suspect the extraordinarily idealized vision of the dead king which Hamlet
carries around. The fact that Hamlet Senior is consistently motivated more by a
desire to hurt Gertrude for loving another man than to avenge his own murder
simply confirms in my mind the overwhelmingly hard egocentricity and misogyny of
the famous king.
It may well be that Hamlet’s distress
stems, in large part, from a desire to see his father in an idealized light when
part of him knows well enough that that’s a fiction. As an obedient son, he
wants to carry out the old warrior’s commands; he is desperate to follow his
father’s wishes. But that requires him to see his mother as the guilty party,
and part of him surely knows that the moral balance of his parents’ marriage
was not that simple. That’s why he just will not listen to his mother. He will
lecture her, but he doesn’t give her much of a chance to reply. If he
starts to listen to her, he is going to have to rethink entirely his
relationship with his father.
The one moment, in my view a decisively
significant one, when Gertrude almost gets a chance to answer Hamlet’s
suspicions comes in 3.4, her bedroom, when his aggressive verbal attack on her
drives her to shout “No more.” I sense here that there’s only one place
for this conversation to go, that is, Gertrude will reply to Hamlet’s charges
with some important confessions about her past life, some truths about herself
and Hamlet’s father. This does not happen, of course, because the ghost enters
at ends that part of the conversation.
There are two things about this entry of
the ghost of Hamlet Senior I find intriguing (apart from the timing of his
entrance). The first is that Gertrude cannot see him. How are we to interpret
this point? My assumption is that the Ghost has some control over who sees him
and who doesn’t, and for some reason he does not want to confront his wife in
their old bedroom. The second point is the stage direction, “in his
nightgown.” The authority of this stage direction is disputable, but I find it
a fertile suggestion. He has abandoned his armour, the symbol of his warrior
status, and is now dressed for bed. But he is not going to face his wife, let
her see him and exchange words with her. Perhaps this is a place where he knows
his authority is suspect, where he has failed. And he certainly does not
want some revelation of his relationship with Gertrude to be given to his son
Hamlet, the agent (let us remember) of his revenge. It’s important, at
this point, to recall that the Ghost also wants revenge against Gertrude.
He may tell Hamlet not to harm his mother, but he also makes it clear that, as a
result of the revenge against Claudius, Gertrude will have to sleep alone or, to
use the Ghost’s own language, that the only “prick in her bed” will be her
conscience.
Why then has he come? The reason is
clear. He wants to stop the conversation between Hamlet and Gertrude and get
Hamlet back on the focused track of revenge. And his intervention is effective.
Gertrude loses her growing emotional intensity (a quality which might well have
led her, as I say, to answer Hamlet with some telling indication of her past
life), and for most of the rest of the scene lets Hamlet do the talking.
I often wonder what might have happened
(a fruitless but intriguing exercise) if Hamlet and Gertrude had been allowed to
have a real conversation where Gertrude really confronted her son with
the truth of her feelings about Hamlet Senior and Claudius, where she had at
least once tried to make him see her side of the story and where Hamlet actually
listened carefully. The fact that the Ghost makes sure that doesn’t happen
suggests to me that the results would not have been particularly flattering to
him and might have acquainted Hamlet with some facts of life which would have
made the revenge impossible.
My own view is that the ghost of Hamlet
Senior and what that symbolizes are, more than anything else, responsible for
the conditions in Elsinore and for the climate which makes everyone in this play
a victim. Claudius and Gertrude tried to create a different form of life, Hamlet
tries to sort out just where one might find a different form of life, but the
ghost is ultimately too much for them. Hamlet Senior, together with his
reincarnation in Fortinbras, is the spirit of the world, and Hamlet’s
suspicions were right: the Ghost comes from the Devil, who is responsible for
the world of Elsinore against which no one can struggle successfully.
[In a recent (2008) production of Hamlet
in New York City (directed by Oskar Eustis) this harsh aspect of the play was
particularly emphasized at the end when Fortinbras uttered the line “Go, bid
the soldiers shoot.”In response
to the order, one of his officers pulled out a pistol and killed Horatio, thus
cancelling out any final tribute to Hamlet.]
I’m not suggesting that this
particular reading of the play is especially privileged over any other. As I
have said repeatedly, this is a very complex and ambiguous work which admits of
many possibilities. But I like this third main possibility because it answers to
my immediate response to the play, that combination of sympathy and distaste
which every main character in it elicits from me, the sense that they are all in
the grip of something which they cannot fully understand or fight successfully
against. That interpretation makes this play a particularly bitter and
despairing vision of life, without the potential affirmations of traditional
comedy or tragedy. But for me it makes the best sense of the puzzling
ambiguities at the heart of our most elusive literary work.
One Postscript: A Caveat
The view sketched out above sees the
Ghost as a (perhaps the) key to understanding a great deal of what
matters in this play. In dealing with this character, one has to be
careful about appeals to context, explaining away the complexities by references
to James I’s interest in the supernatural or to what people in Shakespeare’s
time believed, and so on. Such appeals can be used to prove almost
anything about the Ghost, as William Empson reminds us:
The
official Protestant position was that all apparent Ghosts are devils trying to
instigate sin; also that Purgatory does not exist, so that this Ghost in
saying it has come from Purgatory must be lying. . . . From the point of view
of James I, as I understand, any usurper once legally crowned had the Divine
Right, and only a devil could supernaturally encourage murder of him.
(“Hamlet” in Essays on Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press,
1986, p. 111)]
This may be true enough, but we have no
idea whether Shakespeare subscribed to such a view or whether his audience were
all orthodox. Nowadays, of course, we have a different “official” view
of witches, ghosts, and devils, but that doesn’t stop artists from using them
very successfully in fiction or the audience from entering fully into the world
of that fiction. The challenge in Hamlet (as in all of the plays)
is to let one’s understanding of the character arise from the details of the
text, not to make up one’s mind and then impose that view upon the text with
some contextual reinforcement. What matters is not the Jacobean view of
the supernatural but our response to this Ghost as a dramatic character.
