Introduction to Hamlet #

Hamlet is a Problem play that is not wholly resolved. That is, it may have a simple plot with many twists and turns, but it is full of rich ambiguity, many contradictions and multiple interpretations. Outstanding writers such as Goethe, Coleridge, Freud, Eliot have wrestled with the play throughout the ages without success.

As John Bellclaims, Shakespeare does not show his hand; he raises many issues, delineates both sides but then lets us the audience draw our own conclusions. With Shakespeare’s plays, there is always another interpretation.

“We can seldom be certain about anything. People want infallible answers; only liars or politicians have answers. Art should ask the questions” Michael Haneke, Film Director

Hamlet has been staged thousands of times, from 1599, over 400 years, as well as filmed many times in recent times. It is his most popular play.

Modern settings can make Shakespeare, our best playwright, relevant to old and new audiences. New adaptations can provide fresh insights and interpretations creating meaning for new times.

Aspects of the Play: (Double click on an item on the top left hand side bar menu to go to the topic:)

Hamlet’s predicament is a universal one; as Marcellus states, “Something is rotten in the State of Denmark” and Hamlet’s reflection, “O cursed spite that I was born to set it right” forms the basis ofthis play.

Throughout history millions of people have faced similar situations of corruption. As Edmund Burke said “Evil can only exist if good people stand by and do nothing.” As usual, the reformer/whistle blower gets crucified.

Revenge is an instinctual and basic impulse – a reaction, not a considered and Christian response. Though set in pagan and barbaric Viking Denmark, the play’s audience is a Christian England one of the 17 th century where revenge is God’s retribution; not man’s respite. The play is problematic in that it raises several Anti-Christian and barbaric practices such as revenge and suicide and deceit.

The problem facing Shakespeare is how can he satisfy Hamlet’s need for revenge in a satisfactory Christian, heroic and artistic way? Rather than portraying Hamlet as impulsive (cf. Leartes) he comes across as the rational considered renaissance man who acts only after ascertaining all the evidence and weighing it in a balanced way. Shakespeare’s uses the sporting tactic of the duel as an heroic and artistic device to kill the King and solve the revenge problem.

While Shakespeare’s audience was “Christian" in its ethos, it was well conditioned to the Horror mongering of the Gothic Revenge Tradition; Ghosts, supernatural, ghoulish skulls, graphic carnage and violence or the Black humour in the death of Polonius.

Shakespeare embodies the moral relativism of the Post-Modernists. One can never be sure whose side he is on. When Shylock denounces the Christians for their slave trading, he is giving back as good as he got for their abuse of his usury. Despite some leaning towards monarchy, the plays contain more than enough regicide and Bad Kings to satisfy the staunchest Republican.

Shakespeare is full of moral and philosophical ambiguities. As John Bell states: “he doesn’t commit himself to any one stance….he didn’t have to believe anything. His great objectivity lead to ambivalence.

We live in a Post-Modern world of subjective values, no absolute truths and a pluralistic world of varied cultures, beliefs and values. The Western world has accepted empirical knowledge, egalitarianism, feminism and tolerates a wide, diverse form of life styles. To someone from Shakespeare’s time this would appear chaotic, confusing and distressing.

Complications in Hamlet #

1. Hamlet’s madness - or is he extremely sane? Is it merely a ruse to play for time? Can we trust Hamlet? He reveals his inner reflections to us the audience candidly, yet conceals his real self from most of the other characters. He is an actor, acting several roles.

2. Hamlet lacks advancement “betwixt my election and my hopes”. His grievance is that his crown has been usurped by an uncle. Most dynasties practiced parricide.

3. Hamlet’s transformation into melancholia, dementia - genuine or fake? - inconsequential answers

4. Hamlet’s anger is turned inward - his soliloquies reveal an untellectual with inner turmoil and reflections. Shakespeare digs deep into Hamlet’s psychological state.

5. Hamlet’s misanthropic “antic disposition” - behaviour towards Ophelia

There is a “method in his madness” Polonius, or H. to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern, or his apology to Leartes.

6. Admits to his mother:

Make you to ravel all this matter out,
That I essentially am not in madness,
But mad in craft.

7. Hamlet faces a fiendish situation: While the victim is his father, the perpetrator, Claudius, has become his step-father and the King.

8. Hamlet needs to challenge a Higher authority - The King. He would be guilty of treason and both regicide and patricide if caught attempting to kill him.

9. If Hamlet acted impulsively he could be accused of paranoia and peremptory justice; now he is depicted as neurotic, depressed, melancholic, or with an over reflective intellectualism?

If you switched the characters of Othello and Hamlet, both plays could turn out to be comedies,

• Are Claudius/Hamlet incestuous?

• Hamlet’s plight; a paralysis or overly agonizing or inhibited?

• Hamlet’s revenge; part of the grieving process?

• Oedipal instincts - Has Claudius done what Hamlet wanted to do? A favored interpretation from Freud until the 1990’s but not popular now.

Cause of delay in Hamlet’s action #

a) melancholia (mourning for father)

b) weakness of will

c) over—reflective intellectualism – His cerebral education drives him to investigate, evaluate and deliberate rather than spontaneously over-react in “hot blood”. A student of Wittenberg - where Luther nailed his theses on the Church door.

d) half—conscious revolt against morality of revenge. Shakespeare may be highlighting the tension between humanism and Christianity.

e) incestuous love of mother.

f) need to find objective proof of murder

The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil: and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent 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.

Contrary to common belief Hamlet does act:

He is split between the purity of symbolic action and the physicality of real action.

a) seeks out the secret of Ghost

b) arranges play

c) kills Polonius

d) foils the emissaries

e) deals with the pirates

f) fights Laertes (twice)

g) kills Claudius

By the time Hamlet becomes aware that providence is watching over him he no longer indulges in self-laceration.

Suddenly after observing Fortinbras’ resolve, Hamlet becomes aware of the irrationality of the world and that reflective thinking is futile, What counts is action regardless of the consequences.

Foils to Hamlet: #

(a device used to depict a character by contrast)

There appears to be a pairing of characters also acting as foils to each other - Ophelia to Leartes, Horatio (reflective) to Fortinbras (reactive) and the near indistinguishable Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Each of the following act as a foil to Hamlet:

Leartes – Impulsive - Quick to attempt to revenge his father’s death.

Fortinbras – Man of action and resolution – willing to fight for meaningless causes. When Hamlet thinks of Fortinbras’s army going off to invade Poland, he remarks that the warriors are willing to die “for a fantasy and trick of fame.”

Horatio, - Stoical, man of sober judgment Represents the Humanist philosophies of the Renaissance.

Pyrrhus, - Full or Passion and action

Lucianus - In the play Lucianus is nephew to the king.

Hamlet’s roles:

Hamlet represents the archetypal Renaissance eclectic man: As Ophelia pays tribute to him:

“O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown/The courtier’s, soldier’s,
scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword/The expectancy and rose of the fair
state,/Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite down!” - Ophelia on Hamlet.

1. scholar, 2. Dramatic critic, 3. Courtier, 4. Fencer, 5. Wit, 6. Son 7. Lover 8. Avenger

Fintan O’Toole, the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times writes:

Hamlet talks to us too. He is entertaining, brilliant, sensitive, charismatic, startlingly eloquent—and he has a filial purpose of vengeance that we understand. So what are we to do with his astonishing cruelties—his cold-blooded mockery of the corpse of a man (Polonius) he has just killed by mistake, his mental torturing of Ophelia, his casual dispatch of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, announced to us as a fleeting afterthought? How far would the play have to tilt on its axis for Hamlet to be not its hero but its resident demon?

Hamlet stabs Polonius to death, calls the dead man a fool and a knave, tells his mother, in one of Shakespeare’s most brutal phrases, that “I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room,” and exits dragging the body along like the carcass of an animal. It makes no sense that even after this shocking display of callousness, Hamlet still gets to be the tender philosopher considering the skull of Yorick. But he does. He is still the “sweet prince.”

Hamlet’s dilemmas:

1. Is the Ghost true or a trick of devil?

Ghosts were considered instruments of the devil.

The Ghost claims he was “cut off even in the blossom of my sin, Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled” (deprived of his last rites, sent to his final judgment with his imperfections) On the contrary, Hamlet hesitates to kill Claudius at his prayers.

2. Is his mother knowingly disloyal? She appears totally engaged with her new husband

3. Is Claudius guilty of incest and murder?

This had been a contentious issue when Henry VIII, who married his brother Arthur’s wife, Catherine of Aragon. Leviticus twice refers to “if a man take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing : he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.” Yet Deuteronomy provides the exception: “If brethren dwell together, and one of them die, and have no child … her husband’s brother shall go into her, and take her for his wife.”

4. Has Ophelia betrayed him? “are you honest are you fair?”

Eventually Ophelia claims, I was the one more deceived.

Self-knowledge:

Aristotle emphasised self-knowledge; Katharsis, transforming and cleansing us so that we feel emotionally purged. The hero’s suffering leads to Disclosure, (Anagnorisis) or self-recognition as they become aware of their true predicament, puncturing all their illusions of themselves. Self- knowledge leads to understanding - an apotheosis.

What are the steps to Hamlet’s self-awareness?

Margaret Atwood is just one of many who seek to change the perspective from one character to another. Claire McCarthy’s film viewed it from Ophelia’s perspective, Tom Stoppard from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s.

Here is an excerpt from Margaret Atwood’s satiric Good Bones

I always thought it was a mistake, calling you Hamlet. I mean, what kind of a name is that for a young boy? It was your father´s idea. Nothing would do but that you had to be called after him. Selfish. The other kids at school used to tease the life out of you. The nicknames! And those terrible jokes about pork.

I wanted to call you George.

In Atwood´s text he is construed as a youngster who moves awkwardly (“That´ll be the third [mirror] you´ve broken”), and a student of uncleanly habits who lives in a “slum pigpen” and does not bring laundry home often enough. Even his sombre clothing, so inseparable of the character´s psychological portrait, is parodied through his black socks, which now read simply as one of the many fashions young people are tempted into in contemporary society. What´s more, Hamlet´s very reason of being in Shakespeare´s play, his heart-felt wish to take revenge on Claudius, is deflated in Atwood´s, and their antagonism transformed into the average friction between a grown-up stepson and a newly-acquired stepfather:

“By the way, darling, I wish you wouldn´t call your stepdad the bloat king. He does have a slight weight-problem, and it hurts his feelings” Yes, I´ve seen those pictures, thank you very much. I know your father was handsomer than Claudius. High brow, aquiline nose and so on, looked great in uniform. But handsome isn´t everything, especially in a man, and far be it from me to speak ill of the dead, but I think it´s about time I pointed out to you that your Dad wasn´t a whole lot of fun. Noble, sure, I grant you. But Claudius, well, he likes a drink now and then. He appreciates a decent meal. He enjoys a laugh, know what I mean? You don´t always have to be tiptoeing around because of some holier-than-thou principle or something.

Go get yourself someone more down-to-earth. Have a nice roll in the hay. Then you can talk to me about nasty sties.

And let me tell you, everyone sweats at a time like that, as you´d find out very soon if you ever gave it a try. A real girlfriend would do you a heap of good. Not like that pasty-faced what´s-her-name, all trussed up like a prize turkey in those touch-me-not corsets of hers. Borderline. Any little shock could push her right over the edge.

The rank sweat of a what? My bed is certainly not enseamed, whatever that may be. A nasty sty, indeed!

Oh! You think what? You think Claudius murdered your Dad? Well, no wonder you´ve been so rude to him at the dinner table!

If I´d known that, I could have put you straight in no time flat.

It wasn’t Claudius, darling.

It was me.