Yet even this impalatable crumb, that tiny ray of comfort, like a temporary haven from the storm to one who has known expulsion from his home , is destined to be taken from him. For his father's ghost rises from Purgatory to command him, with all the authority of a millennial code of feudal honor, to assume the cursed fate of the blood avenger, thus to consign his own soul, his one consolation , to perdition.
The execution of his father's legacy must necessarily involve some kind of tradeoff, some compensation to balance off his unavoidable season in Hell. Deals are offered to Hamlet throughout the course of the play. All of them, often after acrimonious haggling, are rejected. First Polonius offers his daughter as a bribe for the peace of the realm. The offer is considered, spurned in the tirade scene, picked up again in the lobby while waiting for the play to begin. The manslaughter of Polonius puts an end to a negotiated settlement from this quarter.In the chapel scene, Hamlet agrees to fulfill his fatherÕs command provided the stain on the Danish nation is cleansed: Claudius must be killed in a state of sin. Claudius'regret for his criminal act is sincere. As Claudius himself admits, Hamlet is "most generous, and free from all contriving " ( IV, vii, 134 ) ; he cannot murder anyone at a moment when he is in the process of craving the protection and mercy of God. Imagine the kind of villain Hamlet would have become in our eyes, had his creator permitted him to do that !
Hamlet must somehow keep our sympathies to the end. Shakespeare's skill is shown to best effect in the way he navigates his hero between the Scylla of villainy and the Charybdis of cowardice. So that even when we learn that Hamlet has arranged that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern be put to death , "no shriving time allowed "(!) , our shock is overruled by our unstinting admiration. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are foils, stock figures, character parts. One feels no more compunction towards their sudden departure than one does towards a cowboy movie extra who falls because a gunman has shot off a toy pistol .
Claudius on the other hand engages our sympathies, as well as our contempt, in the circumference of his total humanity . He cannot be so lightly disposed of.Yet Claudius'final hurdle, his inability to relinquish the rewards that came from the commission of the crime, also makes it impossible for Hamlet to relinquish the obligation to seek revenge. They are caught together in a double bind.
Then Claudius offers Hamlet the chance to evade his duty via life in exile, much like a draft resister who chooses to go abroad and live in a country where he will not be conscripted . This is how the plot is developed in the original Saxo Grammaticus saga. From every indication in the play, it's clear that Hamlet, though unable to form an image of its objective correlative, has no intention of shirking his responsibility. After outwitting his executioners Hamlet returns to Denmark of his own free will. He will not be bribed by the offer of a one-way vacation, all expenses paid.
Finally Laertes'offers him a refuge as secure as any he could have hoped: his death. Though the ever-increasing bitterness of his disillusion - the sight of Ophelia's body being lowered into the ground being the final blow - makes this more than welcome to him, this relief will not be accepted before his mission is accomplished. Unable to save his mother, it is her public destruction which permits him to redeem the name of Denmark . His own fate in the afterlife is forever unknown..."The rest is silence ".
This being a play, not the chronicle of a real person, and since nobody knows what happens in the afterlife anyway, we might as well concur in the cheery Tierce de Picardie delivered by Horatio that gives assurance of his happy reception in Heaven: "Good night , sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! "(V,ii,348 ) As observed by virtually all of the play's serious commentators, negotiations between father and son revolve about their differing conceptions of revenge . In the brilliant phrase coined of T.S. Eliot , Hamlet cannot find an "objective correlative" for his father's instructions . Peter Mercer's excellent essay fully carries out Eliot's program [10] Through a comparative study of all Elizabethan revenge plays contemporaneous with Hamlet, Mercer convincingly shows how the antiquated 'rhetoric of the avenger'as established by this tradition is no longer available to him.
There is however another point that needs to be given equal weight: that of the even more fundamental falling-out of father and son over the disposal of the queen. The Ghost's admonition that Hamlet should:
"..... Leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her." (I, v, 86-88 )
is hardly compassionate. Hamlet does not accept it; he deems it his primary, not his secondary, duty to shrive her soul. ("both scourge and minister") . One then understands the logic of placing the Ghost's re-appearance at the very moment that he is beginning to get somewhere with her in the accomplishment of this goal . The cuckolded former king and husband may desire a form vengeance to be visited upon the woman who spurned him and may have cooperated in his murder , far in excess of that which he seek for Claudius :
".... But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand on end
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine." (I,v,13-20 )
Hamlet has but to observe his father in torment to understand the gentle remedies which Heaven bestows on women who fornicate with their husband's murderers, who commit adultery and incest ( as so defined in Leviticus ) with a man marked by the sign of Cain. Briefly stated: Hamlet wants to send Claudius to Hell, but save his mother from the same place. His father has no use for theological quibbles: he doesn't seem to care what happens to Gertrude in the after-life, just as long as Claudius is eliminated.
Yet Hamlet would not have its magnetic power over audiences were it constrained by a rigid consistency; having sabotaged his efforts at wringing repentance from her , the Ghost now urges him to restore Gertrude's mental equilibrium:
"But look, amazement on thy mother sits.
O, step between her and her fighting soul!
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.
Speak to her , Hamlet." (III, iv, 112-115)
Today's popular, and even learned opinion maintains that mentally healthy people ought to regard all sexual activity, (short of physical violence ), as being as morally inoffensive as eating a good meal or getting on the bus. It is thus difficult for modern audiences to imagine how any age could have been so full of 'superstition' as to believe that Gertrude's considerable list of offenses, ( even discounting the foolish social prohibition against re-marriage with the brother of one's deceased husband), could destroy a mother's soul. If the scholars of our day agonize over the ŅHamlet Problem" , it may be because our shallow positivism does not admit that crimes can actually kill their perpetrators inwardly . In Shakespeare's day, recognition of this phenomenon was taken for granted in civilized persons. It remains for each of us to decide whether or not present attitudes represent an advance or retrogression relative to the past.
This is a masterstroke, the emblem of Shakespeare's genius, that unique moment of the classic stage wherein the eloquent immobilized silence of an unintroduced character completely steals the thunder from all the dazzle and bluster of a hypocrite king. For Hamlet is more than a grieving son, more than a prince, more even than a would-be monarch whoÕs aspirations have been frustrated. He is in fact the true king of Denmark, lying like a beggar at the foot his own throne. A verse by Ted Hughes comes to mind:
"My sires had towers and great names
And that their effort brought to an edge
Honed their bodies away, dreams
The tramp in the sodden ditch" [50]
Personal, dramatic and political: these three levels of identity are ever- present in Hamlet . Even Shakespeare's fondness for triple puns reflects these three co-ordinate axes - as in the encounters of Hamlet and Polonius in Acts II and III , bubbling over with furious word play commingling anger, comic variations on the interpretations of the word 'madness', and hard bargaining. In a moment we will have more to say about this .
It is however the dramatic which is central; for it is through their dramatic expression that all other overtones resound . Hamlet's initial appearance on-stage has been contrived to draw the attention of both audiences, that of the theater and of the stage, to the serious nature of some yet unstated moral outrage. All eyes are riveted upon him like a blackbody absorbing all heat from its vicinity.
The occasion, Claudius' first court reception, his first exercise of temporal power, could not be more appropriate. One might interpret it as the second burial of HamletÕs father: who knows better than Claudius that power is not real unless it is exercised? Physical death was but the initiating phase of a process culminating in his rival's civil death.
Hamlet has set out to rob the King's triumph of its thunder. Shakespeare sets out to make this theft work for its audience(s) . He has to make the expression of Hamlet's grief so convincing that no-one will doubt that Claudius' pomposity conceals the basest fraud. Hamlet cannot do this alone. A single mute individual could not hope to sustain the interest of the king, the ambassadors to Norway, Laertes, Polonius and all others indefinitely. He pulls it off however because he captures the anxiety concern of his mother. The spectacle of two major characters involved in a silent ( yet therefore all the more gripping) relationship, towards which the King, now and again, cast a drooping, hardly an auspicious eye, is enough to cue the witnesses in on the fact that "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark ".
Hamlet's grieving silence at the opening of Act I, ii, constitutes a strategy of moral blackmail . One may conjecture that it has always been his standard method for dealing with his mother, his peculiar mode of childish dependency. Observe how children behave when they feel neglected or unloved, or regard their parents with disapproval. They may refuse to eat, deliberately starving themselves until their parents grow wild from the fear that they are hurting themselves.Or they throw temper tantrums; or run away from home, soon returning to take a peek at the plight of their unhappy elders .
The leitmotif of Ostentatious Grief, of grieving, ever so real, employed to political ends, is re-iterated throughout the play. Hamlet's grieving is intended to focus attention on himself. One sees this most clearly when he attacks Laertes at Ophelia's burial, competing as it were for first place in the competition of mourning. Claudius'grief is intended to allay our suspicions, yet succeeds only in arousing them. Gertrude grieves for the life she's ruined by rushing too quickly into marriage. Towards her former husband she seems to feel nothing. When pressed on the issue of a widow's devotion to the memory of her departed husband she replies, with some impatience, "The lady doth protest too much, methinks".
As for Ophelia, she must truly be mad to feel so much grief for a man who has never been presented to us as much other than a conniving fool. Then again, children never see what is obviout to others, ( and vice versa). Laertes's grief comes to us as a bit of a riddle. It is genuine enough; no -one who cries :
ŅO heat, dry up my brains!
Tears seven times salt
Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye!"( IV, v, 154 )
when witness to his sister's derangement, can be accused of blustering for effect. Yet the contrast between Laertes' loud aggressive wail, a breast-beating which falls just short of mere boastfulness, with Hamlet's protracted silence, indicating his deeply felt intuition that all action by word or deed is useless against the bitterness of loss, persuades the spectator that Hamlet's grief is the more real because it is the least arrogant. It is not only his father which he mourns, but the death of the whole universe of honor. It is instructive to consider another example of the dramatic depiction of moral blackmail in the form of ostentatious grief: ChekhovÕs Seagull. [47] The first two lines of the play are:
Medvedenko : Why do you always wear black?
Masha : I am in mourning for my life. I am unhappy.
In the background, carpenters leap about the charming little stage that is being prepared for amateur theatricals on Sorin's estate . We anticipate some amusement that night, a bit of theater to relieve the provincial monotony. Then Masha lurches by in grim black announcing to all the world that she is unhappy. The contrast is dramatic, but Masha's objective is political. She wants to draw the thunder from the stage production, announced as a tribute to her rival Nina, by focusing attention on herself. To her mind it is the world of the theater itself , personified by Arkadina and Nina, which has robbed her of the attentions of Konstantin Treplev . Her unhappiness is quite real, yet somewhat in the way that a hypochondriac has a real disease called 'hypochondria'. Her extroverted display of Slavic melancholy has an overt political purpose, brilliantly translated by Chekhov into stage action.
Osric , for example, is every inch your classic cameo. Recall that he is the opportunist fop who arrives to set in motion the series of events culminating in the final blood bath. In the meantime he amuses Hamlet, Horatio and the rest of us by his ridiculous exhibition of obsequious punctilio. We all know of the standard device employed by Shakespeare, of off-setting the tragic dˇnouement by some ludicrous bit of stage business : the hall porter in Macbeth ; the sooth-sayer in Julius Caesar ; the botched attempt to kill Cassio in Othello ; etc. Osric succeeds for better than Yorick in distracting us from the horror waiting in the wings.
Reynaldo, Polonius's spy on Laertes' way of life in Paris, is a stick figure. Horatio is essentially a foil for Hamlet. He appears to be a role that , initially conceived as integral to the plot, was whittled away to the mere suggestion of a person . [ 12 ]
Gertrude, Claudius and the Ghost are shadows; which does not mean that they are unimportant. One might describe them as fully reified shadows. Claudius the tyrant, though both hypocrite and poisoner, performs very few acts of overt tyranny. Roland Frye presents quite a lot of evidence to show that Claudius is being portrayed as the traditional tyrant of Renaissance theater; yet when we compare him with Macbeth, Richard III, or Angelo . we see how Shakespeare goes about the depiction of real tyranny .[ 11 ] Gertrude the adulterer is not even flirtatious, let alone adulterous. The terrifying Ghost, apart from conveying a highly sinister atmosphere of omniscience, doesnÕt do anything exceptionally terrible. These qualities are but suggested as possibilities, and remain in a latent form.
Laertes and Ophelia begin their careers as sketches. Each receives more than adequate characterization in the latter part of the play, just before their deaths. Indeed, one of the interesting challenges posed by the part of Laertes is that it must be transformed into that of a full personality at a very late moment in the play. Perhaps it rests with him to fill in the void created by the demise of all the rest of his family!
Yet from his initial entrance, Polonius is drawn in minute detail. We laugh at him, ridicule him, find him preposterous and exasperating. We admit a certain shrewdness in him. Like every other principal character, we are driven to speculate about his deeper motives. From Act I, iii, to his sordid death in the bedchamber in Act V, v , Polonius and Hamlet are the only continuously interacting figures on-stage; most of that action consists in their feuding . One might entitle the first half of the play, Acts I to III , as "The War Between Hamlet and Polonius", Act III, v as 'Hamlet's murder of Polonius"and Acts IV and V, as "The Aftermath".
Polonius is a man out for himself, with a strong personal agenda, and a formidable if not altogether worthy, adversary to Hamlet. One might describe the situation thusly: the struggle between Hamlet and Claudius supplies the large-scale structure of the play; that between Hamlet and Polonius dominates the local context. Indeed, up to the moment when Hamlet runs him through we do not know which is going to win.
Their incessant wrangling can be understood in many ways. Here we want to examine their quarrel from the viewpoint of being a species of perverse haggling over the marriage contract. In these stormy negotiations each is claiming his respective proprietary rights over Ophelia. Polonius insists on maintaining a controlling interest over Ophelia's will, as a kind of rent for Hamlet's acquisition of her person . Any male who has endured the frustrating experience of attaching himself to a woman whose every action is subject to interference from a meddling busy-body of a father, will recognize Shakespeare's portrayal.
Hamlet's weapon against Polonius is sharp-pointed ridicule. He takes every occasion to discredit him and make him look like a fool, no difficult matter since the man, evidently once a shrewd, respected state councilor, is now in his dotage . The deliberate sadism in the harrying of his quarry can at times get out of hand ( pulling his beard , Act III, ii, 487, etc.). One is reminded of the excessively malevolent sport, in Twelfth Night, of Sir Toby Belch, Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Maria at the expense of Malvolio.
Although 'dreadfully attended', Hamlet does wrong to sort Polonius 'with the rest of his servants'. Indeed this comment, though addressed to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, more aptly characterizes them, as he learns to his , ( and ultimately their ), cost ! Polonius is the only person in the court who has the complete trust of the royal couple. Could Hamlet change places with him he could dispatch Claudius to Hell in less than an hour. Thus Polonius is in possession of two treasures which Hamlet desperately needs:
These two issues underlie a feud spread out over three entire acts.