A Sea of Troubles

O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword,
Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mold of form,
Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his musicked vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh;
That unmatched form and stature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me
T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see! (Hamlet, Act III, Scene ii, lines 163-175)

Much like an anthropologist can create a fairly reasonable model of what a skeleton's owner looked like in life, with a general knowledge of the plot, one can often come away with an accurate model of a play.

But not with William Shakespeare.

I'd compare a Shakespeare plot more to a coat rack than to a skeleton, as the final shape of one of his plays depends upon the vast array of objects he throws upon his coat rack, rather than the predictable collection of stuff that hangs on a skeleton, whether it belonged to a human being or to a more conventional, plot driven  play. These objects such as speeches, soliloquies, and other diversions may have only a tenuous connection to the action if that, and often do not move the plot along at all. 

But in the end, what we hopefully take away from a Shakespeare play are the things found in these diversions, the "real attractions --- the characters, themes, poetry, prose and philosophy" in short, what makes Shakespeare, Shakespeare, that is to say his unique ability to speak to the truth of what it means to be human. 

We already discovered this in one of my previous posts where we explored the idea that Hamlet is indecisive in avenging the death of his father. If we were to take the plot elements alone, plus a trace of knowledge of how things work in the real world, the amount of time it takes Hamlet from learning the truth about his father's death to taking action should not be surprising to anyone considering the grave nature of what he is asked to do. 

However as Shakespeare gives us deep insight into the character's mind, we are given a front row seat into the profound inner turmoil he is going through, which naturally colors our assumptions about him. 

It seems what many of us want from Hamlet is this:

Take away the speeches, the soliloquies, the asides, and the rest of the diversions within Hamlet the play, left with nothing but the plot, this is essentially what we get, an action hero play.

But instead of Hamlet the Terminator, what we get with Shakespeare is Hamlet the Ruminator. Sorry, can't take credit for that one. 

I find it interesting that many folks who produce Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet most notably, find the speeches and the soliloquies frustrating because they can grind the action to a complete standstill. Therefore it's not unusual for the diversions to be minimized, either by editing, moving them around, or eliminating them entirely.

Except for the last part, this is especially true for the most famous diversion of them all. the one which the noted portrayer of Hamlet, Scottish actor David Tennant responded in an interview to the cue: "To Be or Not to Be..." with: "that is the cliché."

I'm not aware of any production of Hamlet having the nerve to jettison that soliloquy, so tied at the hip is it to the play that removing it would be like serving Thanksgiving dinner without the turkey. For the record, I don't even like turkey all that much, but I certainly would leave the late November table not a little unsatisfied without it.

Rather, the speech is moved around to different parts of the play, usually placing it in a scene all to its own, where it supposedly won't interfere (that much) with the plotline. 

But again, I'm getting ahead of myself. The play Hamlet features seven soliloquies (inner thoughts of a character spoken aloud and shared only with the audience), from the title character alone, in addition to several other speeches (spoken discourse shared with other characters in the play), all of which represent the heart and soul of the play.

Let's look at them.

I'll quote from the speeches and soliloquies sporadically and as I've been doing in these Hamlet posts, give their location in the play (Act, Scene, lines) so you can read them in context and in their entirety, either from your own copy of the play, or online from any number of sources. The online version I'd recommend is the Folger Shakespeare Library's website which is fully indexed as any good print version, and searchable. 

Here's the link to their Hamlet page.

You can easily find performances of these speeches on YouTube but as each performance is an interpretation, I would recommend going to the source itself first so as not to be swayed by a particular interpretation, then moving on to the performances if you like. 

Of course hands down the best way to experience Shakespeare is in a live performance, shared with other human beings in an audience. And if you can do it in London where it all began as I had the tremendous opportunity to do in a West End production of Twelfth Night, all the better.  

OK let's get started, I'll begin each section with a line or two from the opening of the soliloquy or speech and give a little setup before getting to the speech itself. The soliloquies and speeches will appear in the order in which they appear in the play as Shakespeare wrote it.

Here goes:

OH THAT THIS TOO TOO SULLIED FLESH WOULD MELT,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew. (I, ii, 133, 164)

We are introduced to Prince Hamlet, as the newly coronated King Claudius and his queen, Gertrude hold court at Elsinore Castle. It is a bitter-sweet celebration as Claudius opens his speech by paying tribute to his brother, the recently deceased King Hamlet. Then his attention turns to Gertrude, his new bride, who happens to be the widow of the dead king, and mother of the prince:

Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen,
Th’ imperial jointress to this warlike state,
Have we (as ’twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage,
In equal scale weighing delight and dole)
Taken to wife.    (I, ii, 8-12)

Prince Hamlet is easy to spot in the crowd, he's the sulking guy completely dressed in black, still in mourning over the death of his father. 

Both Claudius and Gertrude chide him for this, bidding him to get over it.

When the ceremony ends, only Hamlet remains on stage where he gives his first soliloquy.   

As we'll see, the soliloquies of Hamlet not only serve as indications of what's going on in the mind of the character, but most of them also serve a similar function as the Chorus in plays of antiquity, filling in details that may have not been covered by the dialog or are simply overlooked. This is necessary because Hamlet the play, has a lot of moving parts. 

So in case you missed it in Claudius' speech, Hamlet reminds us in his soliloquy, that his uncle, (and not he, the Crown Prince) has succeeded his father to the throne, and that his mother married his uncle. He also points out that his father has been dead only two months, and Hamlet is not pleased. 

In the first few lines of the soliloquy, Hamlet contemplates death. Here's the second sentence:

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!

This is of tremendous significance to the play. First of all it tells us that Hamlet and Denmark at the time the play takes place, (which is never firmly established), are under the influence of Christianity. Previous to the arrival of Christianity at around 1000 AD, Denmark under the Vikings had no such rule against suicide. It is especially important because in what will play a tremendous role later, Christianity has a much different take on vengeance than did its predecessor in the Nordic lands.

Secondly, in this line Hamlet flat out rejects killing himself, an issue that will come up a couple acts later addressing a common misconception. Keep this in mind.

From Hamlet's first line of the play found at (I, ii, 67), we already know that he despises Claudius. 

In the soliloquy that follows, he compares his father to his uncle with the following: 

So excellent a king, that was to this
Hyperion to a satyr...

But he saves the bulk of his wrath for his mother who agreed to marry Claudius not long after his father's body turned cold: 

A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she followed my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears—why she, even she
(O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason
Would have mourned longer!), married with my
uncle,..
...O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

It's easy to see how psychoanalysts from Freud on have delved into the plethora of issues affecting poor Hamlet. Shakespeare who created the character and opened up his mind for all of us to see was three centuries ahead of them.

Today even an average bloke like me can check off items from a list of symptoms of depression found online that are exhibited in this soliloquy alone. Here are three:

• Thoughts of death or suicide: check. 

• Loss of interest or pleasure:

  How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
  Seem to me all the uses of this world.

• Persistent sadness or emptiness:

  Fie on't ah fie. 'Tis an unweeded garden
  That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
  Possess it merely....

There will be more visible symptoms of depression in Hamlet in his following speeches.

I remarked in my last post how much of Hamlet is informed by real life and vice versa. Depression of course is a real and debilitating disease. We can't know if Hamlet's depression is chronic although we do have an indication from Ophelia's soliloquy found at the top of this post, that his personality has exhibited a drastic change since the death of his father. 

It hardly matters. His treatment at the hands of both his mother and his uncle/stepfather in this scene is a painful reminder to anyone who has either suffered from depression or has lived with someone who has, how willing people are to dismiss the disease by saying: "just get over it."

In that regard, this is a truly heart-rending scene to anyone with skin in the game.

Now on to the next soliloquy:

OH ALL YOU HOST OF HEAVEN!   (I, v, 99-119)

After his first soliloquy, Hamlet's good friend Horatio enters along with two of the castle guards Marcellus and Barnardo. After exchanging greetings, the men have shocking news for Hamlet, they believe they have seen the ghost of his father, the late king.

This obviously gets the attention of Hamlet who agrees to meet the men upon the battlements of the castle that evening. 

Which they do two scenes later. After waiting around for a time listening to a rant from Hamlet about the character of the new king, the ghost of the old king shows up. He beckons Hamlet to follow him. Scared out of their wits, Hamlet's companions beg Hamlet not to comply, but he insists.

This leads to the next scene:

When he is alone with the spirit, the ghost starts talking. He promises a compelling story is to follow:

So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.  (I, v, 12)

You probably already know what comes next but if not, in a nutshell the ghost tells Hamlet that if he indeed loves his father, he will avenge his murder to which Hamlet cleverly replies:

MURDER???        (I, v, 32, emphasis and extra question marks mine)

It turns out the ghost is almost as loquacious as old Polonius so I'll skip the foreplay and cut to the chase:

The serpent that did sting thy father's life
Now wears his crown.   (I, v, 46-47)

Now the cat's out of the bag and Hamlet knows, if this ghost is on the up and up, that his father did not die accidentally as he thought; he was murdered by Claudius. 

With some lurid details about the relationship between the new king and Hamlet's mother, along with a bunch of other stuff, the chatty ghost bids Hamlet adieu with these parting words: 

...Remember me.   (I, v, 98)

I don't know about you, but I feel a soliloquy coming on...

Hamlet is naturally shocked to the core at what he has just witnessed. He begins this soliloquy by calling upon all the powers of the universe,  the angels of heaven, the forces of Earth, and even hell if necessary, to calm himself down and make sense over what he has just witnessed. Then he says:

Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial, fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter.

He finishes the soliloquy with this:

So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word.
It is “adieu, adieu, remember me.”
I have sworn ’t.

So far, Hamlet seems unequivocal to my ears anyway, that he has every intention to fulfil his late father's request.

Immediately after the soliloquy, Hamlet is rejoined by Horatio and Marcellus who are anxious to hear what transpired. Hamlet keeps his cards close to his chest, only demanding their pledge that they will not let a soul know what they have just seen. They oblige him.

Then he ups the ante, insisting they swear silence despite the fact that they can expect some strange behavior from him. as he puts...

...an antic disposition on... (I, v, 192)

...for the time being, as he investigates the situation. Given that, it's especially important for them to claim ignorance about his strange behavior.

Again they swear.

The scene ends with these parting words of Hamlet to his friends: 

---So, gentlemen,
With all my love I do commend me to you,
And what so poor a man as Hamlet is
May do t’ express his love and friending to you,
God willing, shall not lack. Let us go in together,
And still your fingers on your lips, I pray.
The time is out of joint. O cursèd spite
That ever I was born to set it right!
Nay, come, let’s go together.     (I, v, 204,212)

Commenters since Goethe have cherry-picked those two highlighted sentences to define Hamlet's reluctance to and flat-out resentment of having been burdened with the task of avenging his father's murder. Some even suggest the ghost picked "the wrong man for the job."

Taken out context from the rest of the paragraph, it does sound like Hamlet would just like to go back to his books and forget the whole thing ever happened. 

It all seems so easy. Just kill Claudius whom he hates anyway, claim his throne, take Ophelia as his queen, then go on to live happily ever after; why all the hand-ringing? 

Of course all of that is fantasy, Hamlet knows as did Shakespeare's original audience, that killing the king would certainly result in Hamlet's own death, execution for the crime of high treason. This would be true not only in the real world of Shakespeare's time, but in the world of the revenge tragedy genre that Hamlet the play belongs, where the formula not only the requires the death of the perpetrator of the original murder but also his avenger. 

And it is vastly more complicated than that. Killing Claudius alone would not have "set things right" in the rotten state of Denmark, as Claudius' alleged crimes would need to be made known to the public for any justice to have been served. Sure in his defense before the axe is dropped, Hamlet could have made the claim that Claudius murdered his father, but the only evidence to back that up would be the word of a ghost, who most likely would not have made himself available for the trial. 

In that same vein Hamlet could kill Claudius clandestinely as Claudius killed his father but again Claudius' evil deeds would die along with him. And in doing so, Hamlet's actions in his mind would be no better than those of Claudius.

On top of that is the moral aspect. As I mentioned earlier, Christianity takes a dim view of vengeance unlike the old days of Viking culture where taking vengeance for a father's murder would not only be acceptable for Hamlet, it would have been expected. This clash of cultures and doctrine plays a significant role in Hamlet's dilemma.

Until his father's death, Hamlet was a student of philosophy and most likely also theology.* Since his birth he had every expectation of becoming king one day.

Becoming an assassin likely never occurred to him. Nor did death on the chopping block, nor eternal damnation for that matter. 

Given all that, I think if any reasonable person were to put himself in Hamlet's shoes at that moment, the sentiments found in those two sentences make perfect.sense, and don't necessarily mean that he is not up to the task. 

Now on to Act II scene ii:

DENMARK'S A PRISON  (II, ii, 262)

Roughly two months have elapsed between Act I and Act II. In that time as promised, Hamlet has put on his "antic disposition" to divert attention from trying to glean information about his father's death. This has caused great concern for King Claudius as he suspects correctly that Hamlet might be on to him. It has also concerned his mother because, well, because she's his mother.

At 634 lines, this magnificent scene is by far the longest in the play and it could be described in its entirety as a massive distraction from the play's action broken up sporadically by a plot element thrown in here and there for good measure. 

Hamlet has no soliloquy until the very end of the of the scene, but a prolonged dialog between him and his two old school buddies who were sent by Claudius and Gertrude to spy on him is of particular interest here. There are two things I'd like to mention about this part of the scene which Lawrence Olivier felt insignificant enough to cut from his 1948 film, along with the characters of Rosenkranz and Guildenstern, his school chums.

First is the line above which Hamlet uses to greet the two, here's the setup: 

...What
have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of
Fortune that she sends you to prison hither?        (II, ii, 258-260)

The political situation in Denmark under the rule of King Claudius may be a subplot, but it's the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room throughout the play. Hamlet immediately suspects Rosenkranz and Guildenstern as having been sent to spy on him. The entire MO of Claudius' reign in fact is paranoia and surveillance. The "get thee to a nunnery" (III, i, 96-175) and "Gertrude's closet" (III, iv, 1-240) scenes which we discussed in earlier posts are two notable examples. The first scene of Act II is another. It features the king's chief advisor Polonius sending one of his lackies to Paris to spy on his own son who's away at school.

Needless to say, practically every audience in the last 400 years could relate in one way or other to this level of government interference into people's lives, "the insolence of office" as Hamlet would call it in the next act. 

To add my own little distraction here, this post being written on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of 9/11, I was reminded this month of the Patriot Act, a unilaterally passed act of Congress "that greatly expanded the surveillance and investigative powers of U.S. law enforcement agencies in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks." This is a subject for another post, but here I'll refer you to this article from the New York Times, titled: Civil Libertarians Knew This Would Happen. We Should Have Listened, published last Thursday, September 10, 2026.

All I'll say here is that by giving up certain expectations of privacy, we are currently reaping the drawbacks of that Act (which was passed mostly with good intentions), as we speak.

Yet another case of real-life informing Hamlet and vice versa.

The second part of this remarkable half-scene I'd like to mention is a mini speech Hamlet gives to R&G, describing his state of mind. I mentioned above that one of the "real attractions" of the play is its magnificent poetry and prose. This is only my opinion, but what follows I think are some of the finest lines (in this case prose) in the entire play, if not ever written in the English language:

I have of late, but
wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, forgone all
custom of exercises, and, indeed, it goes so heavily
with my disposition that this goodly frame, the
Earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most
excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging
firmament, this majestical roof, fretted
with golden fire—why, it appeareth nothing to me
but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in
reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving
how express and admirable; in action how like
an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the
beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and
yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?      (II, ii, 319-332)

Like the psychoanalysts, Shakespeare preceded the Existentialist philosophers by centuries.

Now on to the second half of the scene:

O WHAT A ROGUE AND PEASANT SLAVE AM I!   (II, ii, 577-634)

Hamlet's longest soliloquy follows what has to be to the uninitiated, a head-scratching interlude which seems to have nothing to do with the play, the Phyrrus and Hecuba speech.

And yet, it has everything to do with the play.

I think it's safe to say that Hamlet is Shakespeare's most personal play. It's become common knowledge after the tremendous success of the Chloé Zhao film Hamnet based on the historical novel of the same name by Maggie O'Farrell, that the loss of Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway's young son, had a great role in influencing the play which is why the themes of death, loss, grief and hopelessness are so prevalent. 

Shakespeare's own life in the theater takes center stage in this act as a group of actors arrive at Elsinore to entertain the Court. Hamlet for the first time in the play throws off his cast of sorrow as he is delighted to welcome them. 

After a prolonged greeting, Hamlet asks the leader of the troupe to recite a speech he once heard him deliver from an obscure play:

Twas Aeneas’ tale to Dido, and
thereabout of it especially when he speaks of
Priam’s slaughter.         (II, ii, 471-473)

The speech from the fictional play is based upon Virgil's Aeneid, the Roman version of the story of the Trojan war, told from the viewpoint of the Trojans. In the speech, Aeneid tells the story of Phyrrus, one of the Greek soldiers hiding inside the Trojan Horse. As the city is being sacked, Phyrrus looking to avenge the murder of his father Achillies at the hands of the Trojans, bursts into the palace and confronts King Priam. The aged Priam makes a valiant effort to defend himself but is slain by Phyrrus. Meanwhile Priam's ghastly murder is witnessed by his wife, Hecuba.

Shakespeare greatly enhances the story from the original, writing it in a slightly dated style, the over-the-top drama of the verse harking back ten years or so, parodying his own earlier work and perhaps that of his contemporary, Christopher Marlowe. 

The speech reflects Hamlet's own revenge story. Shakespeare even has Phyrrus hesitate briefly before  killing Priam, anticipating Hamlet's retracting his sword while Claudius is praying. Hecuba is a stand in for Gertrude, yet her profound grief over witnessing her husband's murder stands in marked contrast to Gertrude's "most unrighteous tears" as she followed her husband's body then married "with most wicked speed" her brother-in-law within a month of her first husband's death.   

All to bring up the question, what is real and what is not and, who is acting and who is not, one of the central themes of the play. 

Since this speech is a performance of a performance, I'll make an exception here to my moratorium on videos of performances as this one is too good. From Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film adaptation of Hamlet, here is Charlton Heston performing the role of the First Player, performing Aeneas' tale to Dido:

Now THAT'S acting! It can be said here that Heston puts the ham in Hamlet. **

Which is precisely the point. After the actors leave the stage Hamlet is left all alone. Why is it he says that this actor who has absolutely no personal connection to the story...

What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba
That he should weep for her?

... have the ability to conjure up such a tremendous reaction while Hamlet whose father has been slain cannot come close to mustering up that level of emotion:

What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.

Then Hamlet relentlessly tears into himself: 

Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing... Am I a coward?
Who calls me “villain”? breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? ...
But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall
To make oppression bitter...
Why, what an ass am I!...

And so on. 

All of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, Hamlet throws on the brakes and does a complete 180, tying everything we've just witnessed together. In doing so, he comes up with the plan that sets everything into motion:

Hum, I have heard
That guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have, by the very cunning of the scene,
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions;
For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks;
I’ll tent him to the quick. If he do blench,
I know my course.

This sets the stage for the turning point of the play. Now on to Act III.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE      (III,i, 64-96)

This soliloquy is distinct from the rest of Hamlet's soliloquies in a number of ways.  First, it is the only speech of the seven, not to comment on what has just or is about to happen in the story. ** It is the only one spoken entirely in general terms; in it, Hamlet never refers to himself, no first person-singular pronouns are to be found. It has no emotional climax nor impactful final cadence. The biggest difference is that it reads more like a philosophical discourse than the venting of the soul, which would best describe the other six soliloquies.

I'd be willing to bet that in the last four hundred years, this speech has been recited out of context far more times than it has been spoken during a performance of the play. Generation upon generation of school children and amateur thespians have memorized it by rote without pondering its true meaning.  That's because taken out of the context of the play, it's meaning changes. 

If you don't already have the speech committed to memory, here's a link to its out-of-context version.

Here's a more contemporary, prose version written by yours truly, which sums up I think the gist of the "To Be Or Not To Be" speech when taken out of the context of the play:

Living or dying, that's the issue.

What would be better, putting up with all the crap that life throws at us, 

or putting an end to it all by dying, which when you think of it, is really no different from sleeping. 

When we sleep we forget our troubles and if death is permanent sleep, then we put an end to them for good.

Not such a bad idea is it?

But here's the problem,

If death is prolonged sleep, when we sleep, we dream.

What might those dreams of the sleep of death be like?

This is what has troubled people from time immemorial, because who would suffer all the indignities of life by keeping on living if it weren't for the fear that what we experience after death could be so much worse?

That's the problem with awareness, it prevents us from doing so many of the things we set out to do.

Not too impressive without the elevated language, brilliant use of metaphor, and the sheer beauty of the poetry is it?

But when taken out of context from the play, this speech really doesn't say anything more than "life sucks and we'd all just kill ourselves if it weren't for the fear that death could be worse."

That's not especially profound, considering it deals with the immensely fraught, complicated and heartbreaking issue of suicide. Imagine a therapist reading this speech to a patient suffering from suicidal thoughts. Would that be grounds for malpractice?

I think it's because we're all so used to hearing To Be or Not To Be read outside of the context of the play, that we assume Hamlet is contemplating suicide when he makes this speech.

He is not. 

 

Remember the second sentence of his first soliloquy where he flat out rejects self-slaughter because it goes against God's law? Of course in real life one could reject suicide at one moment then revisit it at another. But within the context of the play, at least as Shakespeare wrote it, the last time we saw Hamlet before this soliloquy was at the end of the last act when he told us" the play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king. "After two months of inaction, Hamlet finally has a viable plan to determine his uncle's guilt. Wouldn't it be strange if the next time we see him, he's back to where he was in the opening lines of the first soliloquy?

Indeed it would. 

As I read it, during the two months when Hamlet was figuring out how he could prove to himself that Claudius was or was not guilty, taking vengeance on his uncle was an abstract idea. Now he has a plan which if goes as expected and Claudius proves himself guilty, that vengeance will become very real and Hamlet will be faced with either suffering in his mind the slings and arrows of knowing his king murdered his father, or taking arms against him.

It is here where Shakespeare's brilliance particularly shines. In the fourth line of the soliloquy, he uses a whopper of a mixed metaphor: "... take arms against a sea of troubles." Centuries of grammarians and high school English teachers have assailed Shakespeare for this most basic faux pas. After all, how do you take arms against a sea? The Enlightenment poet Alexander Pope who published his version of the complete works of Shakespeare in the 1720's, replaced sea of troubles with "siege of troubles." There have been in fact a plethora of historical suggestions to "improve" the line by folks who claimed they knew better than Shakespeare.

But think about it. In your mind's eye, picture a fully armored warrior standing at the shore, prepared to do battle against a tidal wave. 

Sea wins. 

Now picture a battalion or even an entire army of warriors fighting against the sea. 

Sea wins.

This is Hamlet's dilemma; he is charged with fighting a battle he cannot possibly win. He is faced with two excruciating choices, much like the poor souls who found themselves trapped in the Twin Towers above the point where the planes struck. They had the choice of either suffering the toxic smoke and immense heat from the fire below in the ever-diminishing hope that someone might come along to rescue them, or end their suffering almost immediately by jumping. 

I brought up in one of my earlier posts the "money quote" of this speech:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all.

The following sentence is:

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er by the pale cast of thought.

Are we to believe, as so many commenters over the centuries seem to have believed, that the message here is that it is better just to act than to think?

I hope not.

Yet Shakespeare does seem to be implying here that this "God-like reason" of ours, (a phrase borrowed from another soliloquy) can be both a blessing and a curse.

One more thing I'd like to add about this soliloquy is its position in the play. In Shakespeare's version it occurs in Act III scene i just after Polonius directs Ophelia where to stand for her "chance" encounter with Hamlet, and just prior to the "Get thee to a nunnery" confrontation between the two lovers. In fact Hamlet spots Ophelia during his soliloquy...

And lose the name of action. Soft you now 

The fair Ophelia. .—Nymph, in thy orisons

Be all my sins remembered.speak 

Notice how the sentence "Soft you now the fair Ophelia" begins on the same line as the last line of the soliloquy?****

The reason at times I use the word speech to describe this soliloquy is because Hamlet is not alone when he delivers it. In addition to Ophelia lurking around, her father and the king are in the wings, awaiting to spy on their arranged meeting between the two. It becomes clear during his unpleasant encounter with Ophelia that Hamlet knows he's being watched. But Shakespeare's text never tells us exactly when he realizes it***** Could it be that he is aware of their presence the entire time he is delivering his soliloquy? 

That might explain why he is so careful in his choice of words in the speech. To the eavesdropping ears of Polonius and the king who don't know what we know about Hamlet's motivations, the speech IS out of context and can easily be interpreted to mean that Hamlet is indeed contemplating suicide. Which might not have bothered Claudius very much at this point in the story.

Yes, the most famous speech-soliloquy in the English language could all have been an act on Hamlet's part, like the Phyrrus and Hecuba speech, but the sentiments expressed in it are very real. 

If a suicidal Hamlet might have relieved Claudius, that relief would be short lived. His concern over his stepson would rekindle in a moment after Hamlet's brutal encounter with Ophelia, 

At this point, Claudius decides to send Hamlet off to England on a "diplomatic mission." He tells Polonius that maybe the trip would do him good. 

Claudius ends the scene with this:

...It shall be so,
Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.  (III, i, 202-203)

Next comes the real turning point of the play but I think by now I've reached the unofficially sanctioned length limit for blog posts. Ok I probably reached that limit a while ago. I know I promised you a tetrology but I think since we have three more soliloquies and a few speeches to go, we'll have to make this a Hamlet pentology. Five's a good number don't you think?

The last soliloquy is indeed a doozy, for my money the most powerful of them all so it's definitely worth the wait, as is what takes place in the last act of the play when Hamlet experiences both literally and figuratively a sea change.

If you're still reading, thank you for your patience!

 NOTES:

* Prior to his father's death, Hamlet attended university in Wittenberg, Germany. This in itself is greatly significant to the story as Wittenberg is inextricably tied to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. It sets up yet another conflict in the play which was a burning issue in England at the time of its writing, that between Catholicism and Protestantism. I told you this play has a lot of moving parts.    

One prine example of this conflict is the ghost who tells Hamlet that he is: 

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night
And for the day confined to fast in fires
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.   (I, v, 15-18)

This tells us the ghost is spending time in Purgatory, an inherently Catholic concept that was rejected by the Protestants, This perhaps more than anything leads Hamlet to question the authenticity of the ghost's testimony. It should be noted that while Shakespeare himself was baptised into the Anglican Church, his family had strong roots and sympathies toward the Catholic Church, which likely caused great conflict within his own life.

** Note in the film scenes used to illustrate the action of the speech. the cameo performances of two great Shakespearean actors, both of whom played Hamlet, John Gielgud as Priam and Judi Dench as Hecuba. 

*** Because the soliloquy doesn't refer to the immediate action surrounding it, producers feel it can be placed in different parts of the play to serve their purposes. When this is done much is lost, especially the notion that Hamlet might be aware that he is being spied upon. In the movies, we often see him very much alone, reciting the speech with only the sea as his witness.

**** The brilliant 1964 Grigory Kozintzev adaptation has the speech moved to its own scene after the "get thee to a nunnery" conflict. In the subtitled translation English from the Russian, the translator was obviously taking his cues directly from the play and not paying attention to what was actually coming out of the mouth of Hamlet (played by Innokenty Smoktunovsky), as the last line of the soliloquy in the translation concludes with "Soft you now", when Hamlet realizes Ophelia is in the room with him. Of course in the scene as presented, Ophelia is nowhere to be found!

***** Some productions make Hamlet's discovery of Polonius and Claudius spying on him clear. In the Kenneth Branagh version it's pretty obvious he knows from the get go as the two are hiding behind a two way mirror and Branagh as Hamlet stares into the mirror without breaking his gaze toward them for the entire speech. Some other's have him make the discovery right before he asks Ophelia where her father is.

Twenty Five Years

 We remember.

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy.

O, Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love; For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; it is in dying that we are born again to eternal life.

The prayer of St. Francis

Peace.

Soft You Now...

Two posts ago I quoted an online study guide that called the character of Hamlet "one of theater's greatest enigmas of all time." 

I don't know, perhaps there's something to that. 

But I would argue that Hamlet is not even the most enigmatic character in the play named for him.

You see, Hamlet is an open book. In his roughly 1,500 lines, the lion's share of which he bears his innermost soul, it's as if he were on the couch with us the audience collectively serving as his therapist. Consequently, there are few secrets left with him, very little to be enigmatic about.

On the other hand, Shakespeare gives us little to grasp onto with the only character in the play who comes close to the title character, perhaps even eclipsing him in having captured the public's imagination for over 400 years.

After all, how many songs about Hamlet do you think Taylor Swift has written? 

In that regard, at the moment the score is Ophelia 1 - Hamlet 0. If popular music is any indication of the public's imagination being captured, then the score's not even close when you take into account all the songs written about Ophelia compared to the handful written about Hamlet. Actually, are there any?

That's pretty impressive considering Shakespeare gives Ophelia less than 200 lines to work her magic on us.

Like Hamlet's, Ophelia's public image has evolved over the centuries. 

In the years shortly after the play was written, before the influence of literary critics, psychoanalysts and scores of independent commentary, the public must have considered Ophelia, despite being moved by the pathos of her story, to have been a relatively minor character, the perfunctory love interest of the protagonist, just another predictable element in a revenge tragedy genre play. 

I can only guess that the public of Shakespeare's time would have taken for granted her obedience to her father Polonius, as that would have been expected of young women and to a lesser extent, young men of that era. They probably would not have questioned her loss of sanity after the horrific death of her father. After all, four characters in the play lose their fathers violently, and all of them reacted in the extreme, albeit quite differently. 

The idea that Ophelia may have had an intimate relationship with Hamlet probably wouldn't have shocked many people as in the day, a good number of brides, including Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's wife, showed up to the altar pregnant. It was another story for children born out of wedlock which may have played a role in Ophelia's actions.

What would have scandalized Elizabethan/Jacobian society was Ophelia's likely suicide. To give an idea of the zeitgeist regarding suicide, which was regarded as a punishable criminal offense in Shakespeare's time*, at the outset of Hamlet's first soliloquy, (Act I , Scene ii, lines 129-134), the character flatly rejects the idea of killing himself because of God's steadfast law against "self-slaughter." Then there is Gertrude's ambiguous description of Ophelia's death (IV, vii, 64-181). Finally, not one but two gravesite conversations take place before and during Ophelia's funeral, (V, i,1-31) and (V, i, 215-231), about the appropriateness of a Christian burial for someone who took her own life.

Flash forward to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and values had flip-flopped. Suicide began to be discussed as an issue of mental illness rather than as a crime and at least within the realm of the arts, a certain mystique developed around the act, especially when committed by women. In this macabre comment written by the master of 19th Century macabre, Edgar Allan Poe wrote: 

The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.

Throw suicide into the mix, and its causes such as depression, melancholia, erotomania, you name it, and you had an irresistible mix whose poster child was Ophelia. The character's stock rose in the Victorian era not only in the form of her character in the play, but in her image as well, most famously (but not exclusively) portrayed by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, and his model, a young woman named Elizabeth Siddal.

In the painting, Ophelia is captured in her last moments before she sinks into eternity, surrounded by flowers of the same species (except one) as those she handed to members of the Court and to her brother during her "mad scene".

The following is a beautiful description of the painting I found online, written by James Lucas, a man of many talents: 

Every flower in the water is real, painted with the obsessive botanical precision the Pre-Raphaelites were famous for, and almost every one carries a hidden meaning. The pansies floating on her dress stood for love in vain. The violets around her neck meant faithfulness. The daisy near her hand, innocence. The weeping willow leaning over her was the old symbol of forsaken love. And bright against her gown, one red poppy: the flower of sleep and death, which Shakespeare never mentioned, and which Millais added himself. He built the whole tragedy into the foliage, in a language his Victorian viewers could read like text, and which we drift right past today...

And here is the detail that turns this painting into something almost unbearable to look at: ten years later Elizabeth Siddal died of an overdose of laudanum, the opium drug that Victorians took by the spoonful. She was thirty-two. Look again at that single red poppy Millais slipped into the picture, the flower that has always meant both sleep and death, and that opium is made from. He painted a beautiful young woman playing a girl who drowns. He could not have known he was also depicting her fate.

In this case of life imitating art, you simply can't get more Romantic and Victorian than this: 

John Everett Millais, Ophelia, c.1852. Photo: © Tate, London, 2017.

While Ophelia was portrayed as a tragic object of beauty and desire, what the Victorians would not have gone for was any intimation of sexuality on her part. To that end, the play was edited to take out all the naughty bits such as the suggestive banter between Ophelia and Hamlet before and during the play within the play, and her not at all subtle recounting of a jilted lover during her mad scene.

But the tide began to turn as:

...a few Victorian actresses and women writers were revising Ophelia in feminist terms. Ellen Terry played her as a victim of sexual intimidation.

writes American feminist literary critic Elaine Showalter. She goes on:

20th-century Freudian interpretations emphasized Ophelia's own neurotic sexual desires, and hinted at her unconscious incestuous attractions to Polonius or Laertes. Around the 1970s, Ophelia on stage became a graphic dramatic study of mental pathology, even schizophrenia, sucking her thumb, headbanging, even drooling.

That's a far cry from Bernard Grebarnier's 1960 depiction of Ophelia:

Shakespeare's portrait of Ophelia is perhaps the most interesting depiction in world drama of a thoroughly uninteresting young woman.

It seems as if his interpretation, harsh and sexist as it may be, has been the basis for many of the portrayals of Ophelia in the last half century. At least that is, the Ophelia before her father is murdered. 

And according to supporters of this idea, the reason she is so uninteresting, (granted, most feminists would not use that term), is because she has been thoroughly repressed by the men in her life which has given her a complete lack of "agency" in her actions.

With her chief repressors gone, Polonius dead, Hamlet sent away, and her brother Laertes, mad as a hatter over his father's death, it is Ophelia's insanity that allows her to express who she truly is. Since the 1970s according to Elaine Showwalter:

...we have had a feminist discourse which has offered a new perspective on Ophelia's madness as protest and rebellion. For many feminist theorists, the madwoman is a heroine, a powerful figure who rebels against the family and the social order; and the hysteric who refuses to speak the language of the patriarchal order, who speaks otherwise, is a sister. In terms of effect on the theater, the most radical application of these ideas was probably realized in Melissa Murray's agitprop play Ophelia, written in 1979 for the English women's theater group “Hormone Imbalance.” In this blank verse retelling of the Hamlet story, Ophelia becomes a lesbian and runs off with a woman servant to join a guerrilla commune.

How cool is that?

If you are familiar with Hamlet but not the rest of Shakespeare, it may occur to you that the playwright was unwilling or unable to write parts for women who (at least while maintaining their sanity), had agency over their lives. The only other female character in Hamlet is Gertrude, who is also often thought to be an empty vessel.

But if Gertrude and Ophelia are submissive to the men in their lives, (in a moment I'll challenge that idea), they are definitely the outliers among Shakespeare's female characters:

The most obvious character who is not the least bit submissive is Juliet who defies her father and the rest of her family by falling in love with and marrying Romeo of the despised Montague Family.

Desdemona defies her father by marrying a black man, Othello.

Cordelia, daughter of King Lear, at great personal cost, refuses to play along with her father's game of forcing his three daughters to publicly declare their unlimited love for him.

Isabella in Measure for Measure, denies the chance of saving her brother's life by refusing to sleep with Angelo, deputy duke of Vienna who sentenced him to death.

There's agency galore among these Shakespeare heroines, and they are just the tip of the iceberg.

That's not to mention the lady villains who are certainly no shrinking violets, Lady Macbeth for example, need I say more?

The truth is, unless a character was meant to be nothing more than a comic prop, Shakespeare didn't create simple, one dimensional characters, and Ophelia and Gertrude are no exceptions. 

------

So why is Ophelia considered to be so lacking in agency?

To address the question, we need to go back to Act One Scene Three. Ophelia's brother Laertes is about to leave Denmark to go back to school in Paris. He suspects that Ophelia and Hamlet are involved romantically and tries to dissuade his sister from carrying on the relationship because he believes Hamlet's intentions may not be honorable. Besides as prince, the choice of whom he marries may not be his own. Better according to Laertes, that she leave her honor (chastity) intact for Mr. Right.

Taking her brother's advice with a grain of salt, Ophelia chides him for his sanctimonious hypocrisy in a sentence that sounds as determined and defiant today as it must have 425 years ago:

But, good my brother,
Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven,
Whiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads
And recks not his own rede.            (I, iii, 50-54)

Or as Madonna might say: 

Papa don't preach.

After Laertes' departure, their father Polonius picks up on the theme. Ophelia intimates there's indeed something going on saying Hamlet has:

...of late made many tenders
Of his affection to me.

Her father responds: 

Do you believe his “tenders,” as you call them?

Ophelia answers:

I do not know, my lord, what I should think.

(This line could be interpreted as either being submissive or ironically dismissive, take your pick.)

"Well, let me tell you what you should think" is essentially Polonius' response. 

Ophelia protests that Hamlet has been quite honorable in his actions.

Speaking it seems from personal experience, Polonius tries to convince his daughter that all men are pigs and that the prince is just using her until his Princess Charming comes along.

He closes his catechism by insisting his daughter have nothing to do with the prince:

This is for all:
I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth
Have you so slander any moment leisure
As to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet.

To which she responds:

I shall obey, my Lord.             (I, iii, 108-145)

Let's pause here for a moment. It's that one sentence, "I shall obey my lord" that defines Ophelia's character for so many; to them she's just a good girl who does what she's told, even if it means giving up the love of her life. 

Ophelia is not the first person in the play to pledge obedience to a parent. When the subject of Hamlet returning to school in Germany comes up in the previous act, Gertrude, Hamlet's mother beseeches him:

Let not thy mother lose her prayers, Hamlet.
I pray thee, stay with us. Go not to Wittenberg.

To which Hamlet replies: 

I shall in all my best obey you, madam.             (I,, ii, 122,124)

He keeps that promise and does not return to school. He probably should have, but that would not have made for a very interesting play.

 

Despite that, no one ever has accused Hamlet of lacking agency. 

 

OK, back to the story:

 

After the next scene ending Act I, Act II  picks up two months later. **

Those two months correspond with the time between Hamlet meeting his father's ghost (which happens in the scene after Ophelia's pledge to her father), and his staging of the play to trap his uncle. Shakespeare leaves it up to us to imagine what went on during that time between Hamlet and Ophelia, but the text suggests she cuts off all communication with him.

After the two months, Ophelia reports to her father that a disheveled Hamlet acting very peculiarly has just paid her a visit. He grabs her by the wrist, stares intently into her face all the while grunting and sighing. Finally he walks away without uttering a word, glaring back at her as he walks out the door.

Now could this encounter with Ophelia be merely an act, part of the "antic disposition" he promised Horatio and Marcellus after his encounter with his father's ghost?

Or, as Polonius suggested, could Hamlet be acting out of "love sickness" for Ophelia?

Again, we're not given an answer; it's up to us to figure it out.

Hamlet's erratic behavior certainly attracts the attention and concern of the Court. Upon hearing this report from his daughter, in order to prove his theory that Hamlet's behavior is caused by love sickness, Polonius arranges a "chance" encounter between Ophelia and Hamlet, while the king and Polonius hide behind the curtains to observe the couple's every move.

Polonius brings his daughter to a place Hamlet often frequents and instructs her how to act when they meet. 

What follows is the famous "Get thee to a nunnery" scene where Hamlet goes ballistic at Ophelia.

The scene begins innocently enough when the two lovers exchange pleasantries, but it goes downhill fast.

So why all the drama?

Ophelia announces that she'd like to return the "remembrances" Hamlet had given her over the course of their relationship. At first, Hamlet denies ever having given those things to Ophelia.

She replies incredulously: 

My honored lord, you know right well you did,
And with them words of so sweet breath composed
As made the things more rich. Their perfume
lost,
Take these again, for to the noble mind
Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.         (III, i, 106-112)

At this point Hamlet, pardon the expression, starts to lose his shit. 

Here's a link to the text of the entire scene, Hamlet's confrontation with Ophelia begins at line 96. 

Now remember, this is their first actual conversation in two months, or so we're led to believe. During that time, Hamlet's world has crumbled around him as he desperately looked for answers surrounding the death of his father. Meanwhile his girlfriend without explanation, has cut off all communication with him.

With that act of returning his love letters and other effects of his devotion, at least to Hamlet's mind, Ophelia is breaking up with him. 

At some point in the scene, the text never states explicitly when, Hamlet becomes aware that they are not alone in the room.

The tension ratchets up exponentially when Hamlet asks Ophelia where her father is. 

She lies to him:

At home my Lord  (III, i, 106,)

At that, Hamlet's response to Ophelia is devastatingly cruel. 

Are his words justified? 

Probably not. 

Are they understandable? 

Have you ever had someone you love break up with you AND simultaneously betray your trust during the most devastating and vulnerable time in your life?

If not then no, you probably wouldn't understand.

Or maybe it's all an act as some people suggest, but I don't think so.

Here's why:

In the play as written, line 96 mentioned above happens to contain the last line of the soliloquy that begins with the words, "To be or not to be" (you may have heard of it), where Hamlet contemplates the "slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" that we all suffer in our minds. Mid-speech he enumerates things that make our lives unbearable, and coming in at number three, right after "the proud man's contumely" (now there's a good Scrabble word for you), he mentions "the pangs of despised love", in contemporary speak, unrequited love. Clearly, his troubled relationship with Ophelia is on his mind before he encounters her in the scene.***

Hamlet's words to Ophelia in the "nunnery" scene are so piercing and vicious, they leave an indelible imprint on our minds leading many of us to understandably assume it is Hamlet who is rejecting Ophelia and not the other way around. 

And discussions of the scene often lead to what can be only described as an exercise in circular logic:

Q: Why does Hamlet treat Ophelia that way?

A: Because she returns his love letters.

Q: Why does she do that?

A: Because she feels he has treated her unkindly. 

Q: Why is he unkind to her?

A: Because she returns his love letters...

And so on.

Since Shakespeare doesn't tell us what transpired between Ophelia and Hamlet in those two months, something indeed could have taken place during that time, (or even before) that led Ophelia to feel betrayed by him. Some productions suggest that the two continued to see each other on the sly, but there is no evidence of that in the text of the play.

Maybe Ophelia is taken aback because Hamlet didn't make enough of an effort get together with her during those two months when she was playing "hard to get". 

Maybe as some suggest she returns the remembrances not as a gesture of breaking up but rather as a bit of reverse psychology, trying to remind him of the deep love he once had for her. And being a very literal minded man, Hamlet simply misunderstood her intentions.

Or maybe Ophelia took her brother and father's words to heart when they suggested Hamlet was just using her. She does make that graphic, pointed reference in the mad scene about a man promising to marry a woman before they have sex only to refuse her afterward because she is no longer a virgin. (IV, v, 63) Could she be referring to personal experience? 

There are dozens of possible explanations for Ophelia's actions in that scene but whatever the reason, Ophelia was not doing her father's bidding as many suggest, by returning Hamlet's gifts.

She does that completely on her own.

To explain, we need a few words on Polonius:

Insufferable, meddling, an "officious, garrulous and impertinent" busybody, and a "dotard of the most limited horizons" are just a few of the descriptions critics over the years have made regarding Ophelia and Laertes' father. In the play, Shakespeare often casts Polonius as the butt of a joke, such as when he has him declare that "brevity is the soul of wit" then go on ad nauseam to prove a point that could have been made in a few words. 

Beyond that there is something truly sinister about Polonius. Scholars believe the character is based upon the real-life William Cecil, the Lord High Treasurer and Chief Councilor to Queen Elizabeth I. A political operator par excellence, Cecil was the chief spymaster to the Court of the Queen. Audiences in Shakespeare's time, at least those with some political savvy would have recognized the resemblance immediately and understood that Polonius' proclivity for eavesdropping represented the surveillance culture of the Court of Claudius, which led Hamlet to comment that "Denmark is a prison" (II, ii, 62) to Rosencranz and Guildenstern. Polonius was indeed an integral part of what was rotten in the State of Denmark.

But as they say: "even a broken clock is right two times a day", and as we already know, Shakespeare never created uncomplicated characters. 

Despite being on the whole a foul character, I see no evidence in the text indicating that Polonius did not love his children and did not have their best interests in mind. His methods of showing that love may have been (check that, were) heavy handed and suspect, but I believe his intentions were not.    

Which is why I reject the idea many have, that Polonius uses Ophelia to advance his own position in the Court. If that were the case, it would stand to reason that he would do everything in his power to encourage the relationship between his daughter and Hamlet. After all, what could be a bigger feather in his cap than have the Crown Prince and future King as his son-in-law?

I can't help but think that Polonius was primarily concerned for his daughter's best interests when he discouraged her from pursuing a relationship he felt was destined to fail and which would no doubt leave her in the lurch, especially given the attitudes of the time if the relationship resulted in a pregnancy and illegitimate birth. Heavy handed as his words to her were, it's hard to say they were not prudent.

When he discovers two months later that Hamlet really is broken up over losing Ophelia, Polonius  has a change of heart and admits the error of his ways, first to Ophelia in this exchange after she reveals Hamlet's strange appearance to her::

POLONIUS

This is the very ecstasy of love,
Whose violent property fordoes itself
And leads the will to desperate undertakings
As oft as any passions under heaven
That does afflict our natures. I am sorry.
What, have you given him any hard words of late?

OPHELIA

No, my good lord, but as you did command
I did repel his letters and denied
His access to me.

POLONIUS

That hath made him mad.
I am sorry that with better heed and judgment
I had not coted him. I feared he did but trifle
And meant to wrack thee. But beshrew my jealousy!
By heaven, it is as proper to our age
To cast beyond ourselves in our opinions
As it is common for the younger sort
To lack discretion.             (II, i-114-130) 

Then to the King and Queen:

...I went round to work,
And my young mistress thus I did bespeak:
“Lord Hamlet is a prince, out of thy star.
This must not be.” And then I prescripts gave her,
That she should lock herself from his resort,
Admit no messengers, receive no tokens;
Which done, she took the fruits of my advice,
And he, repelled (a short tale to make),
Fell into a sadness, then into a fast,
Thence to a watch, thence into a weakness,
Thence to a lightness, and, by this declension,
Into the madness wherein now he raves
And all we mourn for.            (II, ii, 148-160)

The "chance meeting" was intended to bring the couple back together and "cure" Hamlet's bizarre behavior, not to throw a wedge between them and drive Hamlet even more crazy. That is made clear by this exchange between Queen Gertrude, whom we will find out much too late, would have been more than happy for the two to be together, and Ophelia just before the encounter:

QUEEN  

...And for your part, Ophelia, I do wish
That your good beauties be the happy cause
Of Hamlet’s wildness. So shall I hope your virtues
Will bring him to his wonted way again,
To both your honors.

OPHELIA 

Madam, I wish it may.            (III, i, 42-47)

Finally, here are Polonius' instructions to his daughter just before the encounter:

Ophelia, walk you here.—Gracious, so please you,
We will bestow ourselves. Read on this
book,
That show of such an exercise may color
Your loneliness.—We are oft to blame in this
(’Tis too much proved), that with devotion’s visage
And pious action we do sugar o’er
The devil himself.            (III, i, 48-55)

So if Ophelia thought she was carrying out her father's will by returning the remembrances, thereby inciting Hamlet, she completely missed the boat.  

I simply can't believe that was the case, there had to have been something more to it.

Which is why I believe Ophelia has far more agency than people give her credit for.

Again, being Shakespeare, it's up to us to figure what that something more was. 

Shakespeare's failure to paint a more complete picture of her character is why Ophelia has been such a compelling and adaptable figure for over four hundred years. 

Thanks to that, Ophelia has been portrayed over the centuries as among other things a pure, tragic object of beauty and melancholia, a victim of sexual intimidation, a woman with neurotic sexual desires including incestuous feelings for her father and brother, a schizophrenic, a woman succumbing to male oppression who is only permitted agency after she goes mad, a lesbian guerilla, and even as Taylor Swift walking out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting in a museum.

Did Shakespeare have any of this in mind when he wrote the play?

Probably not.

Should we care?

Probably not, because in my opinion anyway, it's all fair game.

When I think of the question, "why should we care about Shakespeare in the 21st century?", I hesitate to use the term relevace, because that implies other works of art from the past are irrelevant to us. What I think sets the work of William Shakespeare apart from that of his peers is the way his work speaks to us from across the ages, not as a relic from a bygone era, but as a living, breathing reminder of what it means to be a human being. 

Since I began writing this Hamlet tetralogy, yes folks you can expect one more post, there have been no fewer than five personal experiences that have either informed or have been informed by some part of the play. ****

Over the ages, values, principles, morals, ethics, ideals, standards, ideologies, customs and norms have adapted or outright changed, which is why Ophelia can be depicted reflecting the values, principles morals, ideals, etc. of any particular era. 

But...

Love, death, loss, grief, sex, mental illness, loyalty, jealousy, betrayal, hopelessness, joy, loneliness, arrogance, oppression, generosity, greed, injustice, and on and on are all essential themes common to the human experience throughout the ages, themes we can all understand. 

Which is why we continue to be moved and touched by Ophelia's story, regardless of the way she is depicted. 

I'll close this post, (whew, about time!) again with the words of Elaine Showwalter from the closing of her piece Ophelia, Gender and Madness, written in 2016, which perfectly reflects the values of our current time. 

Ophelia has become a heroine. Plot devices of pretended madness, feigned death, and amazing rescue have allowed her to survive the trauma of dating Hamlet, and to choose her own path. Ophelia may have no usable past, but she has an infinite future.

As for the values of tomorrow, one never knows;  the only thing for certain is that Ophelia will be there in all her tragic glory, taking on whatever form the era imposes on her.

-----

After three long posts I still don't feel I've scratched the surface of the play. Next up, the real nitty gritty of Hamlet, I hope.

Stay tuned.

NOTES:

* In Shakespeare's time it was not unusual for the courts to try people suspected of committing suicide, in absentia of course, and if found guilty would seize their assets, often times leaving their survivors high and dry.

** How do we know it's been two months between Act I and Act II? At the opening of the play it is established that Hamlet's father has been dead two months. Then in the play within a play scene which takes place a day or two after we resume action in Act II, Hamlet says to Ophelia:

...look you how cheerfully
my mother looks, and my father died within ’s two
hours.

To which Ophelia responds:

Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord.  (III, ii, 133-136)

If my math is correct, twice two months equals four months, then minus the two months that King Hamlet died before the start of the play makes two months between ACT I and ACT II. 

*** Some productions move the soliloquy to other parts of the play so as not to interfere with the dramatic flow between the setup to, and the meeting between Ophelia and Hamlet. When this is done, this important connection between Hamlet's bemoaning unrequited love, and his confrontation with Ophelia is lost.  

**** And since I wrote that line there have been at least two more examples of real life informing the play or vice versa.

A Man of Infinite Jest

We left the last post and its superficial description of the plot of Hamlet at the part where the prince is about to be sent off to England by King Claudius. It is not clear if Hamlet is yet aware that he is due for un unpleasant appointment with an axe upon arrival, but he finds out soon enough en route when he opens the order written by Claudius, carried by his "friends" Rosencranz and Guildenstern that requests from the English officials that his nephew/stepson be executed upon arrival.

Thus, the hunter becomes the hunted.

Hamlet, who up to this point has failed to kill Claudius in retribution for the murder of his father, in the most chilling soliloquy of the play, mercilessly derides himself and vows that from this point further:

My thoughts be bloody, or they be nothing worth. (IV, iv, 69)

He lives up to those words as he takes Claudius' order and re-writes it, substituting the names Rosencranz and Guildenstern for his own. Then with his late father's official seal which he prophetically took along with him on his voyage (moral of story: always be prepared), he seals the letter making it appear official. 

This scene does not appear in the play* but is recounted by Hamlet after his return to Denmark to his friend Horatio. Much to Horatio's surprise, Hamlet does not express one bit of remorse for sending his former friends to their deaths. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch in Denmark, with her father Polonius' sudden death at the hands of her once lover Hamlet, not to mention his cruel treatment of her back in Act 3, scene 1 (we'll get to that in a bit), Ophelia has gone over the edge. Gertrude who was present at Ophelia's father's death, is so guilt ridden and filled with a sense of imminent doom (rightfully so), she instinctively refuses to see Ophelia. But ever the voice of reason, Horatio suggests to the queen that avoiding the stricken young woman in her time of need might cause her act to incite:

Dangerous conjectures in ill breeding minds (IV, v, 20).

People will talk after all. 

The queen reluctantly agrees to see Ophelia, then as an aside says:

Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.

To my sick soul (as sin's true nature is),

So full of artless jealousy is guilt. 

It spills itself in fearing to be spilt. (IV, v, 22-25)

In most productions, Ophelia appears before the queen soon to be joined by the king with her hair down, wearing a white nightgown and barefoot, your traditional mad scene attire. She sings songs whose lyrics are filled with laments over her lost father and her lost love hinting not too subtly at the real, intimate relationship she and Hamlet once shared** tinged with not a little resentment:

   By Gis (Jesus) and by Saint Charity, 

    Alack and fie for shame, 

   Young men will do ’t, if they come to ’t; 

    By Cock, they are to blame. 

  Quoth she “Before you tumbled me, 

    You promised me to wed.” 

He answers: 

   “So would I ’a done, by yonder sun, 

    An thou hadst not come to my bed.” (IV, v, 63-68)

As Ophelia departs, the king says to his wife:

Oh Gertrude Gertrude, 

When sorrows come, they come not in single spies,

But in battalions: first her father slain;

Next your son gone, and he the most violent author 

Of his own just remove, the people muddied,

Thick and unwholesome in their thoughts and whispers

For good Polonius' death, and we have done but greenly

In hugger-mugger to inter him; poor Ophelia...   (IV, v, 82-91)

As if that weren't enough, Claudius adds (in much more eloquent language), that Polonius' other child, Ophelia's brother Laertes has returned from France, 

and he's pissed.

In the play, Laertes serves as a foil of Hamlet; in this case, Shakespeare uses Laertes' rashness and impulsive behavior to contrast it to Hamlet's more deliberate nature.

And how. Laertes who blames Claudius for his father's death and hasty burial, has brought with him an angry mob who demand that Laertes be made king. The mob manages to overwhelm the guards and break into the castle.

Soon Laertes finds himself before the king, who remains steadfastly calm.

Claudius tells Laertes (truthfully) that it was Hamlet who killed his father, but as Hamlet is popular with the general public, and naturally with his mother, the king's wife, Claudius did not punish him so as not to cause public (and marital) unrest. Rather, he sent him on a "diplomatic" mission to England. He didn't mention the part about the axe. 

No good play would be complete without a deus ex machina and Hamlet's s a doozy. Hamlet's return to Denmark is made possible by pirates who raid his ship headed for England. ***  They take only Hamlet hostage and knowing who they had in their custody, agree to return him to Denmark in return for Hamlet doing 

a good turn for them. (IV, vi, 22)

News of Hamlet's cheating the Grim Reaper and his plans to return to Denmark reaches the surprised Claudius while he's still with Laertes. But the news works to the benefit of both men as Laertes will now have the opportunity to take revenge upon his father's killer and in doing so, Claudius will finally be rid of his troublesome stepson. Claudius proposes a scheme where Laertes will challenge Hamlet to a fencing match. The catch is Laertes' weapon would be unbated, (without the protective button positioned at the tip). To add insult in the form of death to injury, Laertes agrees then adds: 

And for that purpose I’ll anoint my sword.
I bought an unction of a mountebank
So mortal that, but dip a knife in it,
Where it draws blood no cataplasm so rare,
Collected from all simples that have virtue
Under the moon, can save the thing from death
That is but scratched withal. I’ll touch my point
With this contagion, that, if I gall him slightly,
It may be death.  (IV, vii, 160-168)

But just to be on the safe side, Claudius will have a chalice on hand, spiked with poison for Hamlet to drink.

As their plan is finalized, Gertrude enters to deliver the news that Ophelia has just drowned in the most poetic fashion: 

There is a willow grows askant the brook
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
Therewith fantastic garlands did she make
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do “dead men’s fingers” call
them.

There on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. 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 endued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.  (IV, vii, 190-208)

Laertes leaves in tears of rage over his sister's madness resulting in her death and the ever-compassionate Claudius laments to his wife that this means he's going to have to calm Laertes down all over again.

The scene shifts to a graveyard. Hamlet has returned to Denmark where he and Horatio encounter two gravediggers at work. While engaging one of the men in some gallows humor banter, Hamlet discovers the skull of Yorick, the court jester who had in his childhood, carried the young prince "upon his back a thousand times". A rather subdued conversation ensues about the ultimate destination of us all.

Then a funeral procession arrives. It is Ophelia's. The grief-stricken Laertes jumps into his sister's grave. Hamlet announces his presence and all hell breaks loose. 

Later that day, a messenger arrives with the offer of the fencing challenge. Despte Horatio's warning that it may be a trick, duh, Hamlet accepts the challenge. 

The moment of truth has arrived. Before the match Hamlet tries to make amends with Laertes but to no avail. The match begins and Hamlet scores the first two hits. Claudius drinks to his stepson's initial success, then slips a mickey into the drink which he offers to Hamlet. He refuses but Gertrude drinks instead, despite a rather timid protest from her husband. Laertes then takes a cheap shot at Hamlet with the poisoned rapier. Gertrude swoons, realizing the cup she drank from was poisoned. In the commotion that follows, swords are exchanged and Hamlet wounds Laertes with the poisoned weapon.  

Realizing he is doomed, Laertes confesses his treachery, and implicates the king:

It is here, Hamlet. Hamlet, thou art slain.
No med’cine in the world can do thee good.
In thee there is not half an hour’s life.
The treacherous instrument is in thy hand,
Unbated and envenomed. The foul practice
Hath turned itself on me. Lo, here I lie,
Never to rise again. Thy mother’s poisoned.
I can no more. The King, the King’s to blame.  (V,ii,346-351)

Now mortally wounded but with the king's treachery out in the open for all to see, Hamlet forces Claudius to drink from the poisoned cup, then stabs him for good measure. 

In his last words, Laertes asks Hamlet's forgiveness:

He is justly served.
It is a poison tempered by himself.
Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet.
Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee,
Nor thine on me.  (V,ii,360-363)

Devastated at the turn of events, Horatio picks up the chalice to drink from it himself, but Hamlet insists he live as the last man standing, to tell the prince's story.  

Prince Fortenbras of Norway arrives on the scene with his army fresh from their campaign in Poland, more than ready to fill the new void in the Court of Denmark. His invasion of Denmark settles the score for him, avenging his own father's death years earlier at the hands of Hamlet's father. 

There in one fell swoop, three men successfully avenge their fathers' deaths but only one, Fortenbras, lives to tell about it.

And there in a nutshell, is the plot of Shakespeare's famous revenge tragedy, one of a boatful of popular plays, truly a dime a dozen from the late 16th and early 17th centuries, that share similar plot devices**** 

Why then, more than four centuries after its creation, do we still speak reverently and endlessly of Hamlet, while the other works of that genre are all but forgotten? 

One thing that sets Hamlet apart is that a summary of its plot doesn't begin to scratch the surface of the work. Saying that Hamlet is a play about revenge is like saying the film Citizen Kane is about finding the meaning of the name Rosebud. 

In Hamlet, Shakespeare starts with the theme of revenge, then uses it as a springboard to take the work to loftier places, much like a composer might take a piece of music and compose a whole cycle of variations around it. The Diabelli Variations is one example of such a work where Beethoven took a trivial waltz and expanded it into one of the greatest works in the canon of keyboard works. 

Of that work, my favorite pianist, the late Alfred Brendel wrote this:

The theme has ceased to reign over its unruly offspring. Rather, the variations decide what the theme may have to offer them. Instead of being confirmed, adorned and glorified, it is improved, parodied, ridiculed, disclaimed, transfigured, mourned, stamped out and finally uplifted.

With those words, Brendel could have been writing about Hamlet.

Harold Bloom, mentioned in my previous post, called Hamlet "A revenge on revenge plays."

Bloom insists that it remains, "the most experimental play ever written." He writes:

The play's subject … 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.

That consciousness resides not within the plot of the Hamlet, but within the seven soliloquies and other speeches of the title character that form the heart and soul of the work.

Bloom insists that the character Hamlet is much too intelligent and multi-dimensional to be confined within the limits of a revenge drama. Not only is Hamlet smarter than everyone else in the play, he is smarter than us. And while he obviously cannot be smarter than the man who created him, Bloom suggests Hamlet has even escaped the grasp of Shakespeare.

Which is why it is so tempting to remove the speeches and soliloquies from the context of the play, as they exist on an entirely different level.

It is the inward war of consciousness within Hamlet that has made commentators through the centuries note the character's indecisiveness and lack of action, even though his outward actions as we've seen, lean in the opposite direction.

Like any great work of art, Hamlet leaves us with more questions than answers. When there are answers,  there are usually more than one of them to a single question, and more often than not, none of the answers are wrong. That is, if you pay attention to what Shakespeare actually wrote. 

The question of why Hamlet delays avenging the death of his father as we saw in the previous post, is probably the most frequently asked question about the play, and different eras have provided different answers. While none of them may be wrong per se, I believe that Shakespeare provided the best answer to probably the easiest question of the entire play.

That answer is not obscure at all, it is in fact, the money quote of the most famous speech from the most famous play ever written by the most famous playwright of them all:

Thus, conscience does make cowards of us all. (III, i, 91)

Yet even here what exactly does he mean? Is he referring to conscience as we use the term, the part of us that distinguishes right from wrong, or consciousness in terms of our ability to understand that our actions have consequences?

Being Shakespeare, both are correct.

Again Harold Bloom:

You can make of the play ‘Hamlet' and the protagonist pretty much what you will, whether you are playgoer or reader, critic or director, actor or ideologue; push any stance or quest into it and the drama will illuminate what you have brought with you.

And what you will have of the play depends on what questions you ask.

Here is but a small sampling:

• Is Hamlet a good or a bad person? 
• Is he a hero?
• Is he mad?
• Is he suicidal?
• Is he too smart for his own good?
• Is the ghost that Hamlet sees really the spirit of his father?
• What kind of king was Hamlet's father?
• What kind of father was he?
• Was Yorick a surrogate father to Hamlet?
• What kind of mother was Gertrude?
• Did she know the cup intended for her son was poisoned?
• What kind of king was Claudius?
• Is it possible for a morally bankrupt man like Claudius to be a good king?
• What was the true nature of the relationship between Gertrude and Claudius?
• What was the true nature of the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia?
• Why was Hamlet so cruel to Ophelia?
• How involved was Gertrude in Claudius' treachery?
• How about Polonius?
• Was Polonius ever right about anything?
• Is justice served at the end of the play?
• What speaks more to a person's true nature, the inner workings of the mind, or outward actions?
• What was actually rotten in the State of Denmark? 
• Could we draw any parallels between the political state of Hamlet's Denmark and our own country?
• What is truly worth fighting and dying for?
• Does life have meaning?

Feel free to add your own questions, there are as many of them as there are stars in the galaxy.

As you might imagine, there is no simple or right answer to any of the above questions. Don't worry, I'll only try to address two, as promised, the one's about Hamlet and Ophelia.

Unfortunately, that will have to wait until next time.

Stay tuned...

NOTES:

*The scene is included in Russian director  Grigory Kozintzev's  magnificent film adaptation of the play, with its translation by Boris Pasternak and score written by Dimitri Shostacovich. For my money, this version is vastly superior to the Lawrence Olivier adaptation mentioned in the previous post, despite some key scenes also being cut from the film.

** Some suggest Ophelia might be pregnant.

*** This scene was also not included in the play but recounted to Horatio by Hamlet after his return to Denmark.

**** Courtesy of Wikipedia, here are eight common elements of revenge tragedies, most if not all are found in Hamlet:

• A shocking murder has been committed, crying out for revenge.
• Person, or persons, take up the vengeful mission as a sacred duty.
• Ghost of murdered person provides further stimulus for retribution; alternatively there are omens and presentiments.
• Machiavellian villain who, acting on his own behalf or for other causes facilitates a pandemic of blood shed whilst introducing new-fangled tortures and horrors.
• Objects of revenge are often better than the avengers.
• Some characters grow mad or feign madness.
• Play within a play that often mimics the core of the main action.
• Use of imagery and language befitting the violence of the events.

Tragedy, Comedy...

 ...history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, (tragical-historical-tragical-comical-historical-pastoral,) scene individable, or poem unlimited. (Hamlet Act 2, sc.2 421-424)

With all due respect to Homer's Odyssey, in the last 400 years, no work of literature, (with the possible exception of  holy scripture) has been scrutinized more than Hamlet. 

And no literary character, in the words of Professor Linda Charnes, has been...

explored, expounded upon, analyzed, psychoanalyzed, deconstructed, reconstructed, appropriated, situated, and expropriated...

more than the eponymous protagonist of Shakespeare's play, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

And I would dare add, misunderstood.

Here's an introduction to the play from a random study guide I found online:

Hamlet, a university student, delivers several long monologues and soliloquies throughout the play which plunge the depths of his psyche—or at least seem to—as he tries to figure out the difference between what society has led him to believe and what his own core beliefs truly are. For instance, though Hamlet’s father’s ghost charges him with securing vengeance for Claudius’s brutal act of regicide, Hamlet isn’t sure whether there is truly any honor in revenge—and his inability to decide one way or the other results in his halting, hobbling inaction, his endless musings on the nature of life and death, and his festering inability to tell the difference between what is real and what is perceived...

Hamlet's despicable treatment of his lover Ophelia and his mother Gertrude, his slaying of Polonius, and his public humiliation of Claudius are all consequences of his inability to act simply and decisively—and yet with every day that Hamlet refuses to take action, kill his murderous stepfather, and claim the throne for himself, the “rotten” core of Denmark grows more and more unstable, and vulnerable to foreign interference...

Hamlet’s contradictory personality, convoluted speeches, and tragic fate make him one of Shakespeare’s best-known characters, and one of theater’s greatest enigmas of all time.

One has to admire the chutzpah of a contemporary writer, reducing what is today almost universally regarded as some of the finest verse ever composed, to the level of convoluted speeches endlessly musing on the nature of life and death, but there you have it. 

It is said that Hamlet, unique among Shakespeare's plays, has been performed continuously over the centuries since it was written, around 1601.   

But in that time, the play has not been universally admired. Here's what the French author Voltaire, not one of the Bard's biggest fans had to say about it:

Hamlet is a gross and barbarous piece, and would never be borne by the lowest rabble in France or Italy. ...

One would think the whole piece was the product of the imagination of a drunken savage. And yet, among all these gross irregularities, which make the English theatre even at this day so absurd and barbarous, we find in Hamlet, which is still more strange and unaccountable, some sublime strokes worthy of the greatest genius. It seems as if nature took pleasure to unite in the head of Shakespeare all that we can imagine great and forcible, together with all that the grossest dullness could produce of everything that is most low and detestable. (From his Preface to the play, Sémiramis, 1748)

In Germany at the end of the 18th Century, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe did not share Voltaire's disdain for Shakespeare. He revered the man from Stratford and is considered by many to be the Shakespeare of the German language. Goethe wrote eloquently on the inadequacy of Shakespeare's most famous character to fulfill the mission entrusted to him by the spirit of his father. According to Goethe, Hamlet's sensitivity prevents him from carrying out the role of vengeful hitman. He begins with a quote from the play:

"'The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!'  (Hamlet Act 1, sc 5, 210-211)

In these words, I imagine, will be found the key to Hamlet's whole procedure. To me it is clear that Shakespeare meant, in the present case, to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it. In this view the whole play seems to me to be composed. There is an oak-tree planted in a costly jar, which should have borne only pleasant flowers in its bosom: the roots expand, the jar is shivered.

A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden it cannot bear and must not cast away. All duties are 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. (from the novel Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship,  Book IV, Chapter XIII, pg. 223)

In England in the first half of the 19th Century, poet and literary critic, (among many other things), William Coleridge was one of the first to suggest that Hamlet's hesitation to do the deed of avenging his father's murder came about because he thought too much. In Hamlet he says:

we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action consequent upon it, with all its symptoms and accompanying qualities. This character Shakespeare places in circumstances, under which it is obliged to act on the spur of the moment:—Hamlet is brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and loses the power of action in the energy of resolve. Thus it is that this tragedy presents a direct contrast to that of Macbeth; the one proceeds with the utmost slowness, the other with a crowded and breathless rapidity.

It should come as no surprise that a work filled with so many opportunities for a character to think to himself out loud and in doing so, share the innermost workings of his mind with the audience or reader, that Hamlet would draw the attention of psychotherapists chomping at the bit to analyze his character.  

As you might have guessed, the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud has given us perhaps the most famous assessment of all on why Hamlet is unable to kill Claudius for so much of the play. Using examples in the plot where Hamlet actually does kill people, Freud correctly refutes the idea that Hamlet is averse to extreme action because he is either too sensitive or too smart to act. The problem Freud says is that Hamlet can't bring himself specifically to kill Claudius. 

According to Freud:

Shakespeare's Hamlet, has its roots in the same soil as Oedipus Rex...

What is it, then, that inhibits him in fulfilling the task set him by his father's ghost? The answer, once again, is that it is the peculiar nature of the task. Hamlet is able to do anything except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father's place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of childhood realized. Thus the loathing which should drive him on to revenge is replaced in him by self-reproaches, by scruples of conscience, which remind him that he himself is literally no better than the sinner whom he is to punish.

And what exactly are Hamlet's wishes of childhood that he's repressing? Why sexual desire for his mother of course.

I can't help but interject here that the noted American literary critic and Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom in refuting Freud's analysis of Hamlet having an Oedipal Complex liked to point out that Hamlet's parting words to his dying mother at the end of the play are:

Wretched queen, adieu. (Act 5, sc 2, 365)

Despite that, the famed actor Lawrence Olivier, squarely in the Freudian camp, directed one of the most famous screen adaptations of Hamlet in 1948. In fact, for the film, Olivier, collaborated with Ernest Jones, a colleague and biographer of Freud's who in 1949 wrote a book summing up the connection between the two classic works titled Hamlet and Oedipus. 

In the "closet scene" of Olivier's film where Hamlet confronts his mother, already the cringiest scene in the entire play, the cringe factor is dialed up to 11 as Hamlet's repressed feelings for his mother appear to unrepress themselves, and the feelings on the part of mom seem quite mutual. This is only reinforced as the role of Gertrude, Hamlet's mother is played by Eileen Herlie, in real life 13 years Olivier's junior.

I can't lie, despite a fine enough performance I suppose by Olivier, there are several things not to like about this movie, not the least of which is that rather than cutting parts of Hamlet with a scalpel, as is typically done in performances and film versions of the play, Olivier used a chainsaw. Several key scenes AND important secondary characters such as Prince Fortenbras as well as the dynamic duo of Rosencranz and Guildenstern are nowhere to be found.

But what really sticks out for me is the introduction of the film  which features the voiceover of Olivier reflecting three centuries of literary analysis, distilling the play down to being "the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind."

In his fascinating book: The Soul of Hamlet: The Play Shakespeare Wrote, drama historian, literary critic and beloved teacher at Brooklyn College, Bernard Grebarnier doesn't buy any of it.

The book written in 1960 makes the point that much of what we've come to understand about the play Hamlet and assume about its protagonist, didn't come to be until at least 100 years after the play was written. Grebarnier suggests before that time, Hamlet the character was not the enigma he is today and that audiences of the 17th and early 18th centuries simply got the play, and him. 

And to get it and him, Grebarnier suggests to us in not so many words: "Just read the damned play!"

Grebarnier truly gets Shakespeare. He concludes the first chapter of his book in his rather dated but charming style with the following:

Is there anyone who does not admire Shakespeare?...

It is a curious fact that two kinds of people know and love him: the simplest and most untutored folk everywhere, and the most cultivated. All over the world people who can barely read their native languages know and love Shakespeare; countless Italians who would not dare approach the Papa Dante they worship by name, are familiar with Shakespeare in Italian translation. Needless to say, the most refined tastes in literature can never be satisfied if he is excluded. But the vast majority of Shakespeare-idolators really love him not at all. What crimes the grammar schools and high schools have committed against him! How thoroughly the school ma'ams have alienated all possible interest in the most rewarding of all writers! They speak of him as if he were a combination of Self-Help and Poor Richard's Almanac.... 

They debase the dramas into horrid little Sunday-school exercises: Kmg Lear teaches one to be kind to one’s father, and Hamlet to be true to one’s self. One almost wishes for a dictator’s fiat forbidding the teaching of Shakespeare below the college level. How is it possible to make comprehensible to immature minds the most adult writing ever penned? What high-school teacher, for example, could succeed in making a murderer credible as the hero of a tragedy for his students, even if he was unusual enough to know that Brutus is the central character in Julius Caesar? To make anything like a story out of the work for the youngsters it is common to transform Antony (sometimes Caesar) into the hero and Brutus into the villain; what happens to poor Cassius in the process is too painful to relate. 

Yet, in more than thirty years of college teaching I have found that every young man and woman old enough to have observed a little of life can be depended upon to love Shakespeare once the plays are given a chance to speak for themselves. I have never taught a boy or girl who did not capitulate to Shakespeare’s magic. It is the school ma'ams who have been killing interest in him. It is their large group — they who have eyes and see not — which goes to the theater to see Shakespeare in the same spirit in which many go to church — not at all religiously, I mean, but out of a sense of duty to be performed. Shakespeare is not to be approached as a divinity, but as the human being who possessed the warmest humanity on record. He is not to be read as though he were an Immanuel Kant. He is better than that. He is the world’s greatest poet and dramatist, and he knew more about human relationships than anyone who has ever written about them; and we can learn more about other people and ourselves through an understanding reading of him than we could gather in ten Hamlet lifetimes of personal experience. But we must come to him with some experience to begin with; and, above all, unless we come with our humanity ready to be touched and exercised, it is better not to come to him at all.

Grebarnier spends the rest of his book challenging many of the assumptions of Hamlet presented above by noting what actually takes place during the play.

Perhaps the most persistent assumption as presented in the clip from the study guide above, is that at the core of the tragedy is Prince Hamlet's indecision, leading to inaction, needlessly delaying his retribution against his uncle, which is the direct cause of the unnecessary bloodshed that takes place before the play's conclusion.

In other words, had Hamlet killed Claudius from the get go, the lives of "innocent" people, namely Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencranz, Guildenstern, Gertrude, Laertes, and even Hamlet himself who would have gone on to "claim the throne for himself" as proposed by the study guide, could have been spared, and in doing so, the Crown of Denmark would not have been ceded to foreign powers.

The last two parts of that scenario have to be dismissed outright as in killing Claudius the current King, Hamlet would certainly have been put to death himself for high treason. And the power vacuum caused by the deaths of both the King and the Crown Prince would have opened the doors to the attack of the Norwegian forces led by Prince Fortenbras, no different from the ultimate outcome of the play.

So what about the delay?

Flying in the face of much that is assumed today about the actions of Hamlet, I don't buy the idea that Hamlet is indecisive at all, nor does he unreasonably delay the act.

Let me explain.

First of all, in order to examine how much Hamlet delays his act of revenge, we need to consider how much time passes between Act One when he learns from the ghost of his father, (or so he believes), that he was killed by Hamlet's uncle, now King Claudius, and Act Five when Hamlet (spoiler alert) finally enacts his revenge at the end of the play. 

As is not uncommon in the works of Shakespeare, the actual timeframe of the work may be a bit ambiguous. There are two possibilities: 

Real Time:

We can put together a fairly accurate timeline of Hamlet taking cues from the events of the play of which there are many, regarding the amount of time that has elapsed between scenes. Putting them all together, if one strictly goes by these cues (with the possible exception of one), approximately three- or four-months pass between Act 1 Scene 1 with Barnardo, Marcellus and Horatio witnessing the ghost on the battlements of Elsinore, and the closing scene ending with Fortinbras ordering Hamlet's heroic funeral. We are also told explicitly that Hamlet's father the King, also named Hamlet, died two months previous to the opening of the play.

Shakespeare Time

Quite often, Shakespeare will expand or contract time in order to suit his dramatic purposes. He was after all, a storyteller not a watchmaker. One clue that may make the timeline stated above  questionable, is that toward the end of the play, in the graveyard scene it is established that Hamlet is thirty years old. At the beginning of the play, he is a student at Wittenberg University in Germany. Many reject the idea that Hamlet could have been a student at thirty years of age as such a thing would have been unlikely at the time the play is set. This means that up to perhaps ten years elapse from beginning to end.

This distinction matters as it greatly changes the extent to which Hamlet delays his action in killing Claudius.

If you buy the real time scenario, which I lean toward and Bernard Grebanier insists upon, the sequence of action is the following:

• Hamlet learns from the supposed ghost of his father that he was in fact, murdered by Claudius.
• Hamlet immediately tells his companions who also saw, but did not hear the ghost speak, that he needs to check out the story and by investigating it, would "put an antic disposition on" (Act 1, sc. 5, 192) in order to divert attention in the Court from his true motives. 

Two months pass.

• Claudius does become suspicious of Hamlet's antic disposition, (might he have something to hide?), and enlists the help of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet's old schoolmates, to help find the root cause of his strange behavior.
• Hamlet immediately catches on to the true nature of their visit and becomes outwardly hostile to the two.
• Meanwhile a group of travelling actors arrives to perform for the Court. Hamlet, who still has not established in his mind, proof of Claudius' guilt, has the brilliant idea of having the actors stage a play that closely resembles Old King Hamlet's supposed murder. If Claudius reacts suspiciously to the staging, Hamlet will be satisfied of his guilt.

The next evening:

• The play which Hamlet titles The Mousetrap, his riff on an actual play The Murder of Gonzago, has the desired effect by hitting its target too close to home. Claudius demands a stop to the festivities. Hamlet knows it's time to act. 

Later that evening:

• A shaken Claudius realizes Hamlet is on to him and retreats to a darkened room where he attempts to confess his crimes to God. Passing by, Hamlet sees his opportunity. Holding his weapon above his uncle's head, Hamlet is prepared to do the deed.

And cut... 

So far, two months have passed since Hamlet learned (or thought he did) the true nature of his father's death. Why did he delay avenging it for so long? I think the answer is obvious, the only evidence he had up to that point that Claudius murdered King Hamlet is the word of a ghost. And that ghost may have been jiving:

The spirit that I have seen

May be a Devil and the devil hath power

T'assume a pleasing shape, yea and perhaps,

Out of my weakness and my melancholy,

As he is potent with with such spirits,

Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds

More relative than this. The play's the thing 

Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King! 

(Act 2, sc.2, 427- 434)

 At the very least, Hamlet needed to convince himself that Claudius was guilty of the crime. 

"Ah mumbo jumbo..." they say, "all this Devil talk is just a stalling tactic to get out of doing the deed."

Perhaps.

But isn't it ironic that folks who have a problem with the Devil tricking people in order to steal their souls have no problem with ghosts talking people into murder? You'd think at least Goethe whose greatest work concerns that very subject would understand.

Gabanier points out that audiences in Shakespeare's day would have readily understood Hamlet's concerns in this regard and his need for more reliable evidence of the crime.

Hamlet's desire for clear evidence is not an example of over-thinking or being too sensitive, it's pure common sense that hopefully any reasonable person would follow.

Anyway, after Claudius' reaction to the play, Hamlet is convinced without a doubt of his uncle's guilt.

However, as Hamlet prepares to thrust his dagger into Claudius, it dawns on him that if he kills his uncle while he is in the middle of prayer, Claudius' soul will go straight to heaven. In doing so, Hamlet would in fact be doing his despised uncle a favor. Better kill him later while he's not in a state of grace, preferably:

When he's drunk asleep, or in his rage, 

Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed. 

At game a-swearing, or about some act 

That has no relish of salvation in it.

(Act 3, sc.4, 94-97)

"There he goes again, another example of Hamlet over-thinking the situation, just looking for an excuse to not kill Claudius."

But is it?

For Hamlet, it is not enough to merely take his uncle's life, he needs his soul to be damned for eternity. 

Goethe would argue that Hamlet is too principled a man to murder someone out of revenge. But Hamlet's action, or inaction as Claudius prays is not the act of a sensitive or moral person, it comes closer to being the act of a psychopath.

Regardless, the following scene would decidedly prove Goethe wrong.

Hamlet goes on to confront his mother, Gertrude.

Before he learns the true nature of his father's death, Hamlet appears to be just as hostile to his mother for marrying her late husband's brother a scant two months after she became a widow. At this point, that hostility toward her has not abated. It is only the command of his father's ghost to spare her, that keeps him in check. 

Shortly before the fateful visit to her room, Hamlet says to no one in particular: 

Let me be cruel, not unnatural.
I will speak daggers to her, but use none. (Act 3 sc. 2 428-429)

Gertrude truly believes her son intends to use those daggers and cries out for help. A noise cries out from behind the curtains. Hamlet immediately springs to his feet and stabs the intruder through the curtain.

Is it the King?

...Hamlet shouts. 

Then he drags the body out from its hiding place. It turns out he has just murdered Old Polonius, not the King. Hamlet shows no remorse:

Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell.
I took thee for thy better.

Take thy fortune.
Thou find’st to be too busy is some danger.

So here's the score so far: Hamlet waits two months until he can convince himself that Claudius indeed is guilty of murdering his father. Common sense. Once he has that evidence he springs into action but decides murdering his uncle while he's in a state of grace while praying is not vengeance enough. 

The very next scene he thrusts his dagger into a man he thinks is Claudius, but it's the wrong man.

Hamlet may be an incompetent hitman, but he's definitely not a man who refrains to act out of over-thinking, over-sensitivity or cowardice, just the opposite.

The next day Hamlet is sent packing for England where Claudius has sent a letter along with his companions Rosenkranz and Guildenstern stipulating he is to be killed upon arrival. 

Bernard Grebanier argues quite convincingly that it is Hamlet's rash killing of Polonius that sets the stage for the tragedy to come, not Hamlet's supposed indecision and delay.

Whew, that's enough for today. In my next post I'll talk about what comes next in the play, as if you don't already know, and other issues such as why Hamlet is so mean to Ophelia and what if the time frame of the play is indeed Shakespeare time, expanding the amount of time between beginning and end.

Most important of all, we'll explore what gives folks the idea that Hamlet is indecisive in the first place.

Trust me, it's not all that complicated, if you read the play and have some real life experience that is.

Until then, adieu, remember me!