Yesterday someone on Reddit said they had just read their first Shakespeare play. To my surprise, it was Hamlet. Not that it isn’t the greatest thing ever. But it’s too long, dense in meaning, and full of subtext to be close to accessible.
Talk about skipping the bunny trail.
My advice: read something else by Shakespeare first. Then, if you are still up for a challenge, have at Hamlet. That way, you don’t risk putting yourself off the Bard by biting off more than you can chew. As the hero of our play says in Act I: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio/Then are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
The play is set in medieval Denmark, where its king just died. His son, Hamlet, is unhappy about this, as well as by the fact his mother married the king’s brother soon after. Now the brother is king. Hamlet knows something is rotten, only he can’t be sure what. His father’s ghost then appears to tell him his brother murdered him.
GHOST
Murder most foul, as in the best it is,
But this most foul, strange, and unnatural...
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damnèd incest. [Act I, scene v, lines 27-28; 82-83]
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| A ghostly apparition, dressed like the late King Hamlet, appears before Horatio and others, setting in motion the events of the play. Horatio's response foreshadows all that follows: "In the gross and scope of my opinion/This bodes some strange eruption to our state." [Act I, scene i, lines 68-69] 1796 drawing by Henry Fuseli from https://www.pinterest.com/ideas/ |
The last charge is tricky but has to do with the fact Queen Gertrude married her brother-in-law Claudius, and so fast. There is even a charge of unfaithfulness, though this isn’t spelled out. [In the original source material, Gertrude and Claudius had been secret lovers before her husband Hamlet’s death.] Whatever the state of affairs, it leaves young Hamlet hugely disturbed, for himself and his country.
Why is Hamlet such a great play? For one thing, it is stuffed with so much life, both interior contemplation and fantastical adventure. There is a remarkable synergy in the way the narrative builds suspense. Each scene has its own unique vibrancy that sets it apart, yet at the same time connects with the whole of the work.
And then there is Hamlet himself, a character like no other in Shakespeare for the way he keeps us riveted and simultaneously at bay. Possessed of what is apparently paranormal intelligence, he perpetually struggles with his human condition and a sense of existential ennui that makes him seem more a product of our times than his:
HAMLET
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on ’t, ah fie! ’Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. [I, ii, 133-137]
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| Laurence Olivier as Hamlet contemplates the skull of Yorick, a clown who entertained him in childhood, in a scene from the 1948 adaptation. It won Olivier an Oscar for Best Actor, and another for Best Picture. It remains a standard for every cinematic Hamlet since. Image from https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/william-shakespeare/10782898/Shakespeare-Laurence-Olivier-as-Hamlet-original-1948-Telegraph-review.html |
The challenge of defining the play and the character has been with us since the beginning. Every hero of Shakespeare’s tragedies has some fatal flaw; Hamlet’s tendency to deliver long monologues about what to do has led many to say his flaw is indecision. “This is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind” is how he is introduced in Laurence Olivier’s Oscar-winning 1948 film adaptation.
Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge sounded that theme back in the early 1810s by calling the hero “full of purpose, but void of that quality of mind which accomplishes purpose.”
A century later, critic A. C. Bradley fired back against this charge of inaction, even making it personal: “… it is downright impossible that the man we see rushing after the Ghost, killing Polonius, dealing with the King’s commission on the ship, boarding the pirate, leaping into the grave, executing his final vengeance, could ever have been shrinking or slow in an emergency. Imagine Coleridge doing any of these things!”
Hamlet is a man of action who opts for a wait-and-see approach about his duplicitous uncle. Charging his stepfather with murder on the basis of literal phantom testimony is dubious, even if he has witnesses like his friend Horatio who saw the spirit, too. (The possibility the Ghost is diabolic and lying is considered, if briefly).
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| The play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king. [II, ii, 616-617] Hamlet baits a trap to prove his uncle's guilt and thus exact revenge by staging a play about a regicide before Claudius and observing his response. Events move quickly after this. 1842 painting by Daniel Maclise from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Daniel_Maclise_(1806-1870)_-_The_Play_Scene_in_%27Hamlet%27_-_N00422_-_National_Gallery.jpg |
Hamlet must marshal enough evidence to satisfy his own mind before acting, meanwhile playing for time by acting crazy. This constitutes most of the plot.
The play is crammed with characters and incident, so much so that a faithful staging of it takes over four hours. And it is not dull. Hearing or reading Hamlet talk in blank verse for long stretches may seem that way, but his lively intellect overcomes any qualms. He is by turns clever, warm, comical, morbid, romantic, faithful and suspicious, each of these parts weaved into one by a noble if fatalistic state of mind:
HAMLET
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. Since no man of aught he leaves
knows, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be. [V, ii, 221-225]
It’s not surprising that people have cited Hamlet as both a religious and an existentialist figure. Freudians have also claimed him for their own, given what they call his “mother issues” over Queen Gertrude. I actually see him more dominated by his dead father; Gertrude’s relationship with her son is remote at times, though not at the climax, when she finally realizes the threat Claudius poses to him. Still, you wonder why she wasn’t more protective or engaged about Hamlet’s situation before.
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| Julie Christie as Gertrude tries to reason with Kenneth Branagh as Hamlet in a 1996 film adaptation, which famously made minimal cuts of the source text and ran over four hours. Gertrude is often interpreted as a good person in a bad world, yet driven overall by lust and comfort. Image from https://english12aphamlet.weebly.com/gertrude.html |
The madness is another reason why this play resonates so much. In times that feel increasingly out of joint, who can not sympathize with a character who opts out by pretending to be insane, or as he phrases it, “put on a more antic disposition?” Then there are critics who say he really has lost his wits at times, such as when he suddenly kills one of his uncle’s top advisors, and the father of his love object, Ophelia.
If there is a legitimate fault to find with Hamlet, it may be in the handling of the female characters. It isn’t so bad in itself that there are but two of them in the play, Queen Gertrude and Ophelia, but rather that despite being focal points, they do and say so little. Gertrude is there to magnify the crimes of her second husband, while Ophelia is less a person than an accentuation of Hamlet’s morbid sensibilities.
Of course, these aren’t people but rather characters in a play. But nearly everyone else has some unique quirk or trait. The only other main character that seems even blander than the ladies is Horatio, Hamlet’s old friend, whose unwavering loyalty makes him an emotional support and monologue backstop for our hero.
Horatio does serve another function: By being so steadfast, he offers contrast to the moral murk around him. The phrase “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark” is uttered in Act I, scene iv; the rest of the play lays this statement out in detail. Basically, Claudius, having assumed the throne by clandestine murder, has befouled the throne and created a rule where deceit and corruption thrive.
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| Hamlet (Grantham Coleman) prepares to kill Claudius (Cornell Womack) while the king prays for forgiveness. But Hamlet can't bring himself to strike for fear his father's killer will die in a state of grace. From a 2017 Old Globe theatrical production in San Diego, California. Image from https://www.theoldglobe.org/pdp/17-summer-season/hamlet |
It is here the play scores most for me, in concert with Hamlet’s dilemma of how to act when he knows what is really up. The state is full of lackeys and lickspittles who play false with Hamlet at every turn, falling short because Hamlet in his mad behavior isn’t on the level, either.
Polonius, Ophelia’s father and Claudius’s top advisor, has the line “To thine own self be true,” ironic because he is the play’s most two-faced character. He is also deliciously funny in his long-winded way:
POLONIUS
My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time.
Therefore,
since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief. Your noble son is mad.
Mad call I it, for, to define true madness,
What is ’t but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go.
QUEEN
More matter, with less art. [II, ii, 86-95]
The fact Polonius is killed by Hamlet is not meant to disturb us, nor are the killings Hamlet arranges of a couple of old college friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It is clear the corruption of Denmark has overtaken them, too, as they ally themselves easily with Claudius when he asks them to chat up Hamlet and get him to let down his guard.
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| Is Hamlet mad, or faking it? In the great 1980 movie The Ninth Configuration, asylum inmates plan a production of Hamlet to suggest the madness is genuine, yet kept at bay by Hamlet acting more insane than he is. It is a solid theory, even if the director (Jason Miller, at left) is casting dogs in all the roles. Image from http://www.cultfilmfreaks.com/8999/04/9thCN.html |
Hamlet is more than a fantastic character study, then; it’s also a gripping socio-political melodrama with bits of color and comedy to engage and hold an audience through its unusually long run. Having so much texture is a reason I’d recommend holding off on reading Hamlet until one has read another Shakespeare play first; you have a better chance at appreciating its depth and not being thrown by all the blank verse.
Every
time I read Hamlet, something else about it gets my attention. Like the
fact there are three different extant versions of the play in the Shakespeare
catalog, reflecting different ways the play was absorbed by audiences and its
participants. The implications are fascinating.
Ultimately the question “Who is Hamlet” is one Shakespeare didn’t so much answer as build into something so enigmatic that his peers stepped into fill in the blanks, which civilization has been refilling ever since.
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