...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 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 to reduce 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 in 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, 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 criticism, 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.
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 certainly 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 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 he (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 of the play 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 indeed become suspicious of Hamlet's antic disposition and enlists the help of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet's old schoolmates, to help find the root cause of his strange behavior. Might he have something to hide?
- 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 chapel 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 is 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 in Claudius's chapel 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. By 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. Then a noise shouts 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 immediately 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, but 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 gave folks the idea that Hamlet is indecisive in the first place.
Trust me, it's not at all complicated, if you read the play.
Until then, adieu, remember me!
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