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.
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.
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