"Why doth the drum come hither?" (V, ii , 363)
When the play begins, the two sentinels, Bernardo and Francisco are wandering about on the battlements of Elsinore in the bitter cold. They run into each other. Bernardo is the first to cry:
Who's there?
He's come to replace Francisco on the watch. He is in fact speaking out of turn: it is Francisco's job to ask the questions. Francisco reminds him of as much in his reply:
Nay , answer me . Stand and unfold yourself !
The audience may not understand at first which of them is the sentinel and which is the replacement. It isn't until Bernardo says :
" .... Get thee to bed, Francisco. "
that one begins to sort out their respective roles. Shakespeare deliberately exploits this initial confusion to create an atmosphere of fear amounting to panic. The reasons for doing so are plain: It is Bernardo , not Francisco , who has already seen the Ghost on two nights in succession . It is also near the time when the Ghost normally puts in an appearance:
"'Tis now struck twelve. "
Francisco: You come most carefully upon your hour.
Situations like this, in which certain characters are terrified for reasons inexplicable to others, occur frequently throughout the play. It is a basic motif. Not even the Ghost himself, though "as the air invulnerable", is invulnerable to such unreasoning terror:
Horatio : And then it started, like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons (I, i , 148-149)
It would appear that Claudius never confronts Hamlet directly with his fear of him. Yet his powerful aversion is evident right from the beginning, long before his suspicions are aroused by Hamlet's veiled threats . The hypocritical bombast of Claudius' opening speech is clearly an elaborate, if crude, effort at concealment. However it is followed immediately by a spiteful tirade against Hamlet (Act II, ii, 87), in which he presents no less than 12 arguments , most of them insulting, why Hamlet must immediately give over grieving for his father: stubbornness, unmanliness, God's displeasure, weakness of will, the mind of a simpleton, bad education, lack of common sense, peevishness, disrespect of God, of the dead, of nature, insanity, etc...
This is fear of vengeance with a vengeance! Everybody except Horatio ultimately becomes afraid of Hamlet. Hamlet himself, ( contrary to that shallow school which , following Schlegel, interpret his hesitation as cowardice) , is afraid of no-one except the Ghost - towards whom, it must be said, he manifests a mortal terror amounting to what the existentialists call "metaphysical dread" . What excessive fearfulness he does manifest comes only from that source. Hamlet does have a reasonable fear of Claudius' power, of his untrustworthy companions Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, of the stupid meddling of Polonius, etc. He's a human being before he's a hero; that is always Shakespeare's way, at least in the great plays.
The point is that Hamlet's irrational fear arises exclusively from his confrontations with the Ghost, while the irrational fears of the others, Claudius, Ophelia, Gertrude, Polonius , ( excepting only the keepers of the night guard ), arise exclusively from their confrontations with the so-called "madness" of Hamlet. It is as if the person of Hamlet had been delegated , by the supernatural agency that engaged him, to transmit, not so much an intellectual message, as the visceral horror, on the emotional level, of his personal sojourn in Hell.
Hamlet " I myself am indifferent honest, yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful ( etc.) ....... What should such fellows as I do, crawling between heaven and earth?" (III, i, 122) :
Claudius : "My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent
And like a man to double business bound
I stand in pause where I shall first begin
And both neglect..........." (III, iii, 40)
Gertrude: "... Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct...." (III, iv , 91)
Only Polonius does not share in this ambiance of sententious self-loathing. His spiritual nature is completely taken up with mercantile philistinism. Hamlet speaks truly when he calls him a fishmonger. Compare Polonius' instructions to Ophelia, that she should avoid Hamlet, with Laertes' advice to the same purpose. Laertes' is obsessed with the fear that she might stain her virginity by yielding to Hamlet's ardor:
Laertes : "Then weigh what lose your honor may sustain
If with too credent ear you list his songs,
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmastered importunity ( I, iii, 29)
Note the prudish disgust inherent in the following lines, especially in the phrase 'Contagious blastments" :
And in the morn and liquid dew of youth
Contagious blastments are most imminent. "
Up until the final moments of the play, when Laertes extends the hand of forgiveness to him, he despises Hamlet for his intentions upon his sister's innocence. It is this which fuels the distempered hatred that erupts between them in the fight beside Ophelia's grave.
Contrast this with Polonius. He's mainly interested in making sure that Ophelia doesn't saddle him with the inconvenience and embarrassment of a bastard brat:
Polonius : Think yourself a baby
That you have ta'en these tenders for true pay
Which are not sterling. Tender yourself more dearly
Or (not to crack the wind of the poor phrase,
Running it thus), you'll tender me a fool. (I,iii,105 )
i.e. , an illegitimate child. Later, when he has reason to believe that he may become the father-in-law of the heir apparent to the throne, Polonius changes his tune. The mercantile motive persists throughout.
For the rest of the principal characters, moral rebuke against themselves is expressed in a straight-forward fashion : Hamlet is ashamed because he cannot work out some narrow-minded conception of revenge that will satisfy his father; Laertes becomes ashamed of his own treachery, and deems his death a just one; Claudius is disgusted by his crimes, though he cannot repent; under the brow-beating of her son, Gertrude is stricken with guilt and shame for her adultery and her o'er hasty marriage . Polonius only berates himself because he did not grasp the opportunity present in Hamlet's infatuation with his daughter quickly enough.
Ophelia's guilt feelings run deeper than anyone else's, making the decisive contribution to her insanity. One doesn't need to have any truck with psycho-analysis to conclude that she blames her "inherently sinful nature" for causing her father's death, or that it was her lustfulness that aroused Hamlet, drove him mad (her father's pet theory in fact ) , and led him to murder Polonius. One may need an Ernest Jones to argue that the old King Hamlet, young Hamlet, and Claudius are fighting over Gertrude, but it is Shakespeare himself who plainly indicates that Hamlet, Polonius and Laertes are fighting over Ophelia.
Evidences of an over-powering sense of guilt may be found in the stray bits of folk songs and legends uttered in her state of distraction:
Ophelia : They say the owl was a baker's daughter. ( IV, v, 42).
This refers to a legend whereby a maiden turned into an owl by refusing Jesus' bread, that is to say, virginity:
'Quoth she, 'before you tumbled me,
You promised me to wed'
So would I 'ha done by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed.'" (IV,v ,62)
"It is the false steward that stole the master's daughter" (IV,5,177)
Guilt extends even to the Ghost, who " starts, like a fearful thing, upon a guilty summons. " And when Hamlet states that "Conscience doth make cowards of us all ", he is including everyone . All-penetrating doubt, hesitation, guilt and fear are not the exclusive provinces of any individual character.
Certainly Polonius sees enough from behind the arras at their encounter in the lobby to gratify his prurient appetites for some time to come. If he wanted a burlesque show, he got it. Furthermore, as Dover Wilson plausibly suggests [23] there are many indications in the script that Hamlet knows very well that he's there, and is putting on an act for his benefit. In the original Saxo Grammaticus saga this situation is made explicit.
Perhaps Polonius hoped to be gratified by a repeat performance in witnessing the hi-jinks between queen and son in the royal bedroom. Indeed, had he lived a little longer, he might have enjoyed quite a spicy strip-tease: what erotic "interest" Hamlet feels for Gertrude usually comes out in the form of moral blackmail, a child's attempt to take possession of its' mother through scoldings on the theme of her wickedness. In this scene, this habitual interaction is further darkened by his cruel masochistic obsession with the details of her love -making with Claudius.
With respect to Hamlet's "sexuality" in general, there is clearly something necrophiliac to it , delighting so readily and so frequently as he does in the details of the process of corruption. In the course of amusing himself at the expense of Polonius' dotage , Hamlet conjures up the ingenious conceit comparing the sun's generation of maggots from a dog's carcass, to copulation with Ophelia:
Hamlet: For , if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog,
Being a good (or God?) kissing carrion - Have you a daughter?
Polonius: I have, my lord.
Hamlet: Let her not walk i'the sun. Conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive, friend, look to't . ( II, ii, 181-186 )
With Claudius as unwilling and befuddled listener, Hamlet delights in detailing how the body of a king may go through the guts of a beggar via the intermediaries of worms and fish. Discoursing in the graveyard he reconstructs, with the passion of a paleontologist, the transformation of Alexander's body into the dust that may be shaped into the plug of a beer barrel. In the gorgeous imagery of his graveyard oration one senses a morbid fascination with death and decay amounting to a sexual passion. Sexual desire per se appears to disgust him. Only in the exceptional moments before the performance of the Mousetrap does he let down his guard and permit himself a moment's horseplay with Ophelia. (This of course is another central motif: how his mother's revolting conduct appears to have transformed the virile sexual appetite of a young man into a disgust so total that even a confirmed blue-stocking might think him a bit strange.)
As a final observation on the prevalence of voyeurism in the daily life of Elsinore castle, we notice the Ghost himself entering the bedchamber dressed (In his nightgown! The strange stage indication may be Shakespeare at his most perverse, or it may have been added by later editors) , as if anxious to reassert his marital privileges through spying, invisible to her , on the behavior of his errant widow.
Indeed, one might say that everyone in Elsinore seems to be his or her own species of Peeping Tom. The tone is best summarized in this exchange between Hamlet and Ophelia as they await The Mousetrap :
Ophelia : Will's tell us what this show means?
Hamlet: Ay, or any show you will show him. Be you not ashamed to show, he'll be not ashamed to tell you what it means. (III,ii,141)
5. The Barren Womb
Dominating all other emotive determinants of the spiritual landscape is the central theme of barrenness: sterility, infertility, blight, toxic harvests, the seed falling upon stony places, the fruit that withers on the branch. These phenomena, eternal to the natural order, ( together with the mental states of melancholy and depression to which they correspond ) , infect the discourse, underlie the many deviations and digressions from the plot, and infiltrate the personal interactions of its characters.
The stage is strewn with visual metaphors of miscarriage: impotence within power, destitution within abundance, despair within triumph. Even in such details as the 'tables', the school notebooks that Hamlet still carries with him from Wittenberg, one detects the overtones of an inescapable futility. Odd, is it not, that he should be bringing them along with him to record the 'lecture notes' he may be receiving from the interview with his father? He picks them up after their encounter, and asks himself if he can employ these useless objects (which can now hold only the residues of Horatio's stale 'philosophy') to preserve some of his 'wild and whirling thoughts' .
"My tables...meet it is that I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain
At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark" (I, v, 107)
As the curtain rises on Act I, ii, we discover Hamlet dressed in drab mourning 'weeds' that drop pointlessly from his immobile shoulders. Indeed, following Roland Frye [11] they are anachronisms, the cloaks of an earlier time, suits of a mourning whose term is past, mourning that is itself dead.
The 'partisans' hurled against the Ghost strike the empty air. Claudius' trumpets, cannons and drunken revels are as empty as the man himself: they neither elicit the affections of his subjects, nor advance his own security. Hamlet's love notes to Ophelia fall like birds shot out of the sky. The funeral baked meats do (coldly) furnish forth the marriage tables: they have the tastes and odors of corpse flesh.
Both plots and counter-plots alike fail; save only The Mousetrap, which succeeds only because Hamlet, exasperated by the incompetence of the Players
" You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of the duke's wife! "
Hamlet's efforts at shriving his mother are fatally sabotaged by the unexpected eruption of the Ghost, convincing enough proof to her that all his far-fetched claims are but the ravings of a lunatic. His first attempt to murder Claudius is aborted by finding him at prayer at the wrong moment, then by the "brainless apprehension", ordained by a malevolent fate , that mistakes Polonius for him .
Ophelia's book of prayer is but a sham, used only to practice deceit, to 'sugar over the devil himself .' It is instructive to contrast the "pious devotion" of Ophelia in this scene, with Claudius' anguished plea for forgiveness in the chapel. Note how Hamlet's reactions differ with respect to both situations. The bald phoniness of the former is immediately evident to him: his distempered over-reaction comes partly from the realization that, once again, old Polonius blocks him at every step.
On the other hand, Claudius' abasement is, at least in intention, all too real. Despite his inability to repent, he has sincerely thrown himself upon God's mercy and begs to be spared His vengeance - which is, of course, standing right behind him, sword in hand. Hamlet simply cannot murder him while he is in such a state without appearing, both to us, and the stage world of Elsinore, as both a coward and a villain, judgments which we can be certain Shakespeare wants us to avoid making .
No one can play the recorders with which Hamlet taunts Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; Hamlet urges them to music which we will never hear. Gertrude's marriage is perhaps the most grotesque of all miscarriages. Under the command of Fortinbras, "two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats" go to claim a patch of land that " hath in it no profit but the name". And the opened coffin of Ophelia is one more mighty metaphor of blighted hopes, its mute accusing presence raised to the pinnacle of anguish by the cruel dance of brother and lover fighting above it in mortal hatred .
Of all these metaphors of futility, the most striking must surely be the sight of Polonius, the corpse in the bedroom, stretched out on the floor between mother and son, decomposing as rapidly as the 'funeral baked meats', its foul stench commingling with the odors of lecherous corruption permeating the room . The learned, dignified, Lord Chamberlain, once so highly respected as servant to the state, has been served up to us as the most potent of all symbols of miscarriage: the miscarriage of his and Gertrude's hopes for the joining through matrimony of their two houses; the miscarriage of Hamlet's schemes of revenge; the hopelessness of ever bringing Hamlet's mother around to his cause ; and the inevitability of the final catastrophe. It is through this act of manslaughter, that a traditional 'revenge plot' is transformed into a classical fate tragedy. The killing of Polonius', the turning point of plot and action, is also the high point of despair.
Gertrude, symbolizing as she does the womb sterilized by incest, sums up, in her one person, Hamlet's frustration, the Ghost's impotence, Claudius' indestructible guilt, Ophelia's hopeless love, Laertes' doomed vengeance, the defeat of all of Polonius' ludicrous schemes. Infertility hovers, omnipresent as the primal crime itself, over the reaches of Elsinore castle. It is altogether appropriate that she will be the first course at "Proud death's princely feast " ( Act V, ii, 366) .
Truly one can say that the very air is poisoned . Claudius has used poison to murder Hamlet's father. The poison with which he will attempt to murder Hamlet will murder everyone. It is with the poison of incest that Claudius kills Gertrude's body and soul. It would seem that Claudius, a Borgia reincarnate, poisons the very grass on which he stands.
The numbing of mind and body is accomplished by the slow progress of the poison of corruption through the veins of the body politic: Hamlet strives to convert his innate decency to the narrow barbarousness of an avenging villain; Polonius barters his daughter; Ophelia goes mad; from the martial military hero in Act I , Hamlet's father descends to the beggar in rags who visits his wife's bedchamber on the sly in Act III ; Laertes is corrupted from a 'worthy youth', to a treacherous liar, deceiver and breaker of oaths.