The moral logic works thusly: vengeance is the setting into motion of the talionic machine, the return of crime for crime. Its adherent must believe that his enemy's crimes are permissible under the right set of conditions. There are therefore no crimes, only criminals. The general public deems a bloodthirsty serial killer a hero when his murders are done in the name of his country. Avengers therefore emulate, eventually become, their victims. Vengeance is vicarious identification.
To be a fit instrument of his father's will, Hamlet steeps himself in the crimes of murder and, (through immersion at the source of forbidden knowledge), incest. The idea does not originate with Shakespeare. It is as old as the tradition of the 'revenge tragedy' with its origins in the plays of Seneca.
Hamlet's transmutation takes the form of a series of initiations in the theater , chapel and bedchamber, three realms of the sacred. Each of them constitutes a distinctive mode of entry onto the supernatural. Each has its own prescribed rituals, taboos, costuming, modes of conduct, techniques of exorcism, liturgy and priesthood. Each offers its characteristic mode of transcendence.
The setting for The Mousetrap, the stage, always has been and will be the domain of dreams - "To sleep, perchance to dream "- When Ophelia permits Hamlet to lay his head on her lap, she invites him to sleep, perchance to dream, to fall into a slumber "like the fat weed, That roots itself at ease on Lethe wharf. "He succumbs to, then resists, this temptation. At a time when he should be examining his uncle's face for signs of his guilt, he forgets himself so far as to indulge in bawdy jesting with the woman he'd spurned that very morning.
Dreams have always been assigned a sacred function. They bring revelations, resolutions of mysteries, clairvoyance and, while they last, absolute certainty. Dreams carry more conviction than waking, one of the evidences for their unreality.
The data provided by the experiment of the play will fire him up with the kind of zeal notably lacking in all of his encounters with the Ghost of his father. With independent confirmation in hand, Hamlet will rush, sword unsheathed and ready, to his inexorable confrontation with fate.
But initiation requires purification together with its ritual tortures: in the antechamber of circumcision stand baptism and prayer. On the way to his mother's bedchamber, Hamlet passes through the royal chapel, the neutral ground between natural and supernatural realms , sanctuary of ritual cleansing, pardon and salvation. Here he discovers his uncle in prayer, desperate for an absolution which Hamlet cannot refuse him.
Following that he enters the parental bedchamber, that dark and terrible domain of forbidden knowledge, haven for all the unholy acts between mother and uncle, for acts of engendering, that cesspool from which the mind recoils in horror, yet to which , ceaselessly, it is drawn by incurable fascination.
These are the three stages of the Rites of Passage: Hamlet will be temporarily released from spiritual doubt and torment by confirmation by the results of the play. He will pause before the spectacle of his uncle's futile abasement before God, only to be abruptly hurled into a maelstrom of pitiless horror. In this third, and final, stage Hamlet will dare to step into the arena of forbidden knowledge, to ope the seals and peer, like Perseus, yet without his protecting shield, into the Gorgon's face, the black pit of the enseamed bed.
Take one example, the drinking habits of the Danes. The king's personal physician, writing in mid-sixteenth century Denmark, observed:
' Most Danes, particularly the nobility, are inordinately given to drink and could spend both day and night emptying goblets. They especially find it impossible to hold a wedding, banquet or party without the one's urging the other to keep drinking, while doing the same himself , until they ( if you will excuse my saying ) spew out the ale again, and in the presence of the servers and guests take care of another matter under the table without the slightest shame. And when one of them, half or wholly unconscious, must be brought to bed, the fact causes immense jubilation and is the occasion for roars of laughter.
And in Pierce Penilesse Thomas Nashe writes:
The Danes are bursten-bellied sots, that are to bee confuted with nothing but Tankards or quart pots, and Ovid might as well haue read his verses to the Gretes that vnderstood him not, as a man talk reason to them that haue no eares but their mouths, nor sense but of that which they swallowe downe their throates . [24, pg. 68]
In Act I,iv, 17, Shakespeare makes a direct reference to these ethnic prejudices:
Hamlet: This heavy-headed revel east and west
Makes us traduced and taxed of other nations
They clept us drunkards, and with swinish phrase
Soil our addition....
The frivolous, risqué banter that passes between Hamlet and Ophelia as they wait for the players to enter, may have been interpreted by the 'groundlings' in the Globe Theater as evidence that their "Danish national character" was bubbling to the surface! One otherwise finds it very difficult to reconcile such behavior between two principal characters that is so thoroughly at variance with the crude hostility of their confrontation a few hours earlier. With the sole exception of this scene, Hamlet's treatment of women always takes two forms: priggish, when not vicious moralizing; and mooning puppy-love.(Some people think that the whole play is about how the latter was converted into the former! )
When Polonius parades Hamlet's private letters to Ophelia before the King and Queen , we learn that adolescent infatuation has reduced the author of the existential monologue , the speech ' What a piece of work is a man' , and the graveyard oration, to a babbler of stuff like:
".... To the celestial and my soul's idol
The most beautified Ophelia"
Polonius's literary criticism is correct: "beautified Ophelia" is indeed a vile phrase, though it's also none of his business. The abrupt dislocations of psychological affect between this letter, the savage tirade scene, and the spectacle, played out before the entire court, of the two of them cavorting like a pair of bumpkins on the way to the nearest haystack, are not easily reconciled. Hamlet's behavior towards Ophelia is consistent only in its abusiveness. What Shakespeare is telling us is that his heart and mind are so thoroughly muddled through his involvement with her that his reaction to her presence will always be distempered or excessive. This confusion proved fatal to him in the tirade scene, and gave Claudius the upper hand.
Likewise their ribaldry before and during The Mousetrap comes dangerously close to sabotaging its purpose. It is only after the players commit the colossal blunder of staging the 'dumb show', (explicitly prohibited by Hamlet (Act III, ii 11-14)) , and begin bounding about the stage with exaggerated gestures and grimaces (Act III, ii, 243) , that Hamlet arouses himself out of their delectable flirtation and begins to concentrate on the business at hand.
Hamlet's lewd jesting may have been intended as antic disposition, but it makes more sense to suggest that it is a disguise for some ferocious internal turmoil. Certainly the immediate circumstances favor this interpretation. The importance of the play-within-a-play cannot be overstated: it is the only moment when, on-stage, Hamlet conceives, plans, and follows through on some effective action against Claudius. It is altogether a military initiative. Indeed it is an open declaration of war. It sets Hamlet naked before Claudius' anger and power. All that stands between him and his immediate assassination is the possibility that Claudius will want to put him to the torture to uncover his private sources of information: A circle of spies? The Norwegian enemy? Someone at the court, like his friend Horatio, whom the king caught staring into his face with something more than mere curiosity? Claudius himself ! During some drunken revel or debauch he may well have Òraveled all this matter out".
Like many another soldier preparing to go onto a battlefield in which he may be killed, Hamlet deems it nothing less than his right to indulge himself in a bit of sexual badinage beforehand. It may well be is last love -making on earth.
If, in addition, he possesses the depraved national character of the Dane!
Many things in Act III, scene ii reward close attention. For example, Dover Wilson is quite right in arguing that the scene is incomprehensible unless we assume that Claudius, perhaps because he is in conference with Polonius, is absent during the dumb show. [23 , pgs.144-163] When Hamlet enters the lobby, his mother wants him to sit beside her. He begs off, announcing that he finds Ophelia more attractive. Polonius is quick to point out this confirmation of his pet theory. Now Hamlet, who has been playing the priest to his mother ever since her marriage, (perhaps through the whole extent of their relationship) observes how she smiles knowingly to her chamberlain, how she appears to give her blessing to his courtship of Ophelia. His reaction must be something like the following:
She's smiling because she sees me slipping into that pattern of domestic mediocrity which she, and Ophelia , and Claudius , and yes, that damned Ghost , call maturity ! She dares imagine that I've dropped the Great Cause of her spiritual salvation! She doesn't understand a thing! She's never understood anything!
On an impulse he stands up before the whole court and cries out:
"For look you how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father's died within two hours!" (III, ii, 120)
Ophelia reminds him that it is 4 months.(The only indication in the entire play fixing the chronology of its events: in Act I,ii we learned that Gertrude married Claudius less than two months after the funeral.) Hamlet is annoyed that Ophelia seems to think that the amount of time is the whole point of his remark, ( Humor him-he's a madman. He can't make the distinction between two hours and four months.), and snarls :
"So long? Nay then, let the devil wear black, for I'll have a suit of sables. Oh heavens? Die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there's hope a great man's memory may outlive him half a year. But by'r lady, 'a must build churches, then, or else shall'a suffer not thinking on, with the hobbyhorse, whose epitaph is ' For O, for O, the hobbyhorse is forgot.'" ( III, ii, 124-129 )
The reference to the hobbyhorse is Shakespeare's attack on the Puritans for abolishing Morris dancing, [3,pg. 73]. The remark about building churches may be a rueful commentary on his father's present plight, which the building of a few churches might have avoided. The comment 'die two months ago' refers to the length of time between funeral and wedding, and comes out of his usual pre-occupation with his mother's empty-headed insensitivity . On this occasion it is delivered with particular venom because he himself has been caught enjoying himself with a woman. Taken all together, this wild speech indicates a man lost between his roles and his intentions, between his real and apparent motives, most of them unclear to others and even to himself.
It is difficult to resist the temptation to interpret Hamlet's function for this scene as that of a grand puppet-master pulling the strings of all , friends, enemies, the royal family, spies, sycophants, even the theater audience. Up to a point this is true; but it does not tell the whole story. Although the spotlight focuses on the sick conscience of Claudius, it is upon Hamlet's soul itself that the cruelest exorcism is being imposed. Demons of fear, doubt, melancholy, hatred, self-loathing, disgust, world-weariness struggle for mastery, until their final collective exorcism at the instant when Claudius cries " Light!" Then it is Hamlet who is illuminated and Claudius who remains blind.
During the production however it is he, far more than Claudius, who might be compared to a patient on the operating table. Little surprise that he clings compulsively to Ophelia's skirts, eagerly imbibing that ageless narcotic giving instant relief and a slow poisoning thereafter; sexual indulgence.
With this interpretation the scene begins to make a bit more sense. We need no longer concern ourselves about which persons have been singled out as recipients for his erratic utterances. Hamlet is grand-standing; his play-acting is directed to the universe. The grim ordeal of exorcism encompasses all beings in his surroundings: we in the audience , the players, Ophelia, Gertrude, Claudius. All become foils for Hamlet's whirlwind of emotional turmoil. As everyone strains to understand what's happening, (for between the ineptness of the players and Hamlet's commentary, nobody can make head or tail of the sequence of events), Hamlet jumps up and screams apparent nonsense such as " Wormwood! Wormwood!" , or " If she should break it now!" " Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung!" ' The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge!"
As he sees his tormenting doubts take flight and his worst suspicions of uncle and mother confirmed, appearance and reality become totally confounded. At the same time it appears that the players are botching the job: The Mousetrap is on its way to 'bombing in Elsinore'.21 It is only when out of desperation he shouts in Claudius' face , ( or perhaps whispers in his ear ),
" You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago's wife." (III, ii, 253 ) , that the coup-d'Žtat is carried off. Even then it appears that Claudius' reaction is not so much to the content of the play, as it is to the way Hamlet's taunting statement is thrown at him.
The exorcism is concluded. Hamlet's depression is cast out and he can return to the momentary state of giddy exhilaration he experienced at the arrival of the troupe the previous day. He jests with Horatio and allows himself a salutary descent into doggerel:
" Why let the stricken deer go weep
The hart ungalled play
For some must watch while some must sleep
Thus runs the world away" (III, ii , 261 )
Within minutes the Arctic blasts of reality return to envelop him with their icy chill: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern enter and inform him that his uncle is "marvelous distempered", and that his mother wants to have a good long talk with him. From this moment forth he can trust no-one: anyone who intrudes upon his privacy will be under suspicion of being an assassin in the hire of the king. A curtain's faintest rustle will be grounds for drawing his sword. Choice has deserted him: he must needs be 'scourge and minister' whether he will or no. The depression that has haunted him since the beginning of the play is dissipated, and will remain so until the manslaughter of Polonius and the horrible shock of the renewed encounter with the Ghost. After the briefest respite it has been replaced by a now permanent anticipation of immanent peril.