These reflections not only clarify this particular scene, but supply the key to the atmosphereof the entire play. This scene re-iterates the point that Hamlet is not a causally determined through-line of events, nor is it a random progression of "one damn thing after another", as many critics charge. It is rather more in the nature of a chiaroscuro landscape, a study in light and darkness. This scene brings together wholeness and corruption, madness and reason, health and disease , love and lust, sin and salvation in a way that makes them tangible and, above all, sensually accessible to the inner eye through metaphors of language, action and situation.
Claudius'situation at the beginning of Act III, scene iii is not dissimilar to Hamlet's. He, too, has every reason to fear sudden or unexpected appearances of strangers, or even of persons familiar to him. Wasn't it Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who brought the players to the attention of the court? Perhaps it was they who suggested a re-enactment of the murder of Gonzago.
And watch out for that scheming old fraud Polonius, whom Gertrude seems to like so much ("The good old man") . Doesn't he, as chamberlain, preside over all entertainments at the court? And what was the meaning of that account he gave of his amateur theatrics at the university - where, mind you, he played Brutus ! It is altogether normal that a man like Claudius would jump to the conclusion that a vast conspiracy, involving just about everyone present at the court, is afoot to dethrone him . That's probably why he was dished up The Mousetrap ! That was their way of sending him the message that his days were numbered! Even Gertrude is under suspicion! In the earlier versions of the story and play, Gertrude and Horatio are fully apprised of the king's crimes and agree to cooperate with Hamlet in overthrowing him.
Act III submits the play's principal figure to an ordeal by fire .Here in the chapel he is granted a momentary respite, a pause for reflection and meditation. For a brief interval Hamlet is permitted to regard his burden objectively and lay it aside. As for Claudius, he , knowing that there is no peace to be found anywhere on earth, does his best to find what he can of it from heaven. He lays bare the essence of the problem in a few words (III, ii, line 40) :
"My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent." Neither he nor Hamlet can find a suitable expiation for a crime of such enormity. The rest of the passage might have been spoken by Hamlet himself:
.... And like a man to double business bound
I stand in pause where I shall first begin
And both neglect. "
Claudius 'double business' is the expiation of his guilt without losing his grip on state, queen and crown. Hamlet's 'double business'is the avenging of his father's death without destroying the reputation of the royal family, his mother in particular, thus bringing about the ruin of the nation. A few lines in his dying moments state this position with great clarity:
Hamlet : O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown , shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story ( V,ii, 335-40 )
In the chapel scene both Hamlet and Claudius are pre-occupied with the same two things : expiation of the murder, and the security of the Danish crown. If Claudius is killed in such a manner that he appears as the aggrieved or innocent party, victim of a cowardly murder on hallowed ground, the country may well be torn apart by civil war.This, in some sense, is the metaphorical significance of the association of incest with barrenness, and must have conjured up in the minds of Elizabethan audiences echoes of the Wars of the Roses, as well as more recent events such as the bitter strife between Elizabeth and Mary Queen of Scots. Hamlet's hesitation is merely a reflection of the psychological toll taken by European theocratic politics over the last century.
Yet Hamlet's promise to the blade of his sword, (with which he "has been in continual practice "(V, ii, 208) ) ) , that it will "know a more horrid hent. "is grimly serious. Hamlet is neither joking , rationalizing, nor procrastinating. He dearly wishes to see Claudius in Hell. The way to Gertrude's redemption may then be opened. Then also may her son send forth new roots in fertile and unpolluted soil.
The play-within-a-play functions as an exorcism of tormenting doubts through the agency of the theater. The chapel scene brings in the mediation of Heaven. Finally, the bedchamber scene represents the exorcism of Gertrude by a son who discovers, in the activation of the infernal machine that drags him to his death , his fate as scourge and minister. These exorcisms are only partly successful. Sexual attraction, repulsed with exaggerated contempt, hence doubly suspicious , returns undiminished in the following scene. The performance of The Mousetrap satisfies Hamlet as to his uncle's guilt, but yields no information as to his mother's complicity. This is a subtle point: In the Mousetrap, the villain seduces the queen after he's murdered her husband. By the statement of the ghost, Claudius seduced Gertrude before he murdered him. The play and its consequences, in other words, do not answer the question of whether or not Gertrude has committed adultery. The queen in the Mousetrap is guilty of no crime beyond ignorance of the process whereby even the deepest passions that afflict the human heart must fade away, a rueful commentary on human nature that Shakespeare never tires of invoking.
In the chapel Claudius does not find the courage through prayer to relinquish his crown. In the bedchamber, the abrupt intervention of the Ghost, who cares little about his wife's salvation and only wants his brother's blood, puts an end to Hamlet's hopes that Gertrude will join forces with him in riding Denmark of the bloody tyrant.
Last and cruelest of all his rites of passage is the bedchamber scene. Hamlet, who had wished to wait until Claudius was "fit and seasoned for his passage" , now finds himself 'fit and seasoned ' for his own! Upon entering the parental bedroom, he tastes of the apple of forbidden knowledge, he looks upon, unflinchingly, that which must never be revealed to mortal eyes, that by virtue of which Polonius was slain without a moment's hesitation: his mother's shame.
In this scene Hamlet commits the twin crimes of murder and incest, corrupting a once innocent heart and mind so that he may take on the character of the blood avenger. The experience of murdering is gained on the body of Polonius. Incest is present in the desecration of his mother's dignity through physical and verbal violence .
As Hamlet comes up the stairs he calls out: "Mother , mother , mother . "One senses a cry of desperation, much as a child might cry out when frightened. Or, allowing for significant pauses between each repetition, he may simply be calling out to let her know that he's coming. Again, being in mortal danger, he may be calling out in a loud voice to invoke the protection of the queen.
As "Hamlet" abounds in triple puns, one might even suggest that the 3 re-statements of the word "mother"refer to 3 levels of meaning: (1) His biological mother (2) The perpetrator of incest, which makes her simultaneously a "queen"and a "queen mother", thus an unnatural or monstrous mother and (3) metaphorically, the seat ofdisillusioned affections, a "mother of (blighted) invention". So much for the kind of over-interpretation dear to all interpreters, whether scholarly, literary or Thespian, of "Hamlet" !
Polonius now withdraws behind the curtain . He's convinced that Hamlet is completely mad - even Hamlet's high intelligence has been taken as confirmatory! ( "There's method in his madness. ") And the mad, as we all know, are capable of anything. Polonius is no doubt well versed in the latest theories of medical experts and intellectuals, of Shakespeare's time as well as ours, situating the causes of madness in unnatural relationships between parents and children. His enthusiasm for indecent spectacles is about to be sated. Primed to witness dark and ugly acts, his inflamed eyes fill with both fear and delight, anticipating some grotesque tableau out of Seneca, some unimaginable spectacle of sin.
Hamlet enters the bedchamber. The night's been long and much has happened. It is "the very witching hour of night "; all the torches are blazing. Yet all things before him lie enveloped in an everywhere penetrating cloud of spiritual darkness. This is the forbidden realm, the cistern overflowing with poison which has engendered the catastrophe now engulfing the royal house. It is also the site of the insemination that lead to his own birth; the place from which all responsible parents shield children, arena of those shameful acts to which they owe their very existence. And on this very night, the Ghost of his father will again return to bar the way, to chastise him for entering too dangerously upon his domain.
Gertrude has been awaiting him with indignation and impatience. It is this woman, whose body mocks the gestures of the living yet whose soul is dead, whose mind is sick with that lustful poison that corrodes both life and the after-life, who intends to punish him for daring to accuse her of wrong-doing.
Hamlet knows, or at least dimly suspects, that the crucible of his birth is about to become that of his rebirth, born anew to a destiny that awaits him in the form of an unavoidable murder that will seal his doom. From the womb of the parental bedchamber Hamlet will re-emerge transmuted, hardened and annealed, his soul now black and heavy as the king's, capable of the crime he is bound, by filial obligation, to commit. Following Fredson Bowers he will even give utterance to his foreknowledge of fate:
"... heaven hath pleased it so
To punish me with this and this with me
That I must be their scourge and minister
I will bestow him and will answer well
The death I gave him ....." (Act III, iv , 180)
Hamlet's initiation is accomplished in two phases, two savage rituals. The first is the slaying of Polonius. There was no way to prevent this. Polonius has been stomping all over territory anybody with a grain of common sense would have shunned: he's been asking for it. Without the pressure of immediate danger Hamlet might have bided his time, waiting until Claudius himself ordered the old fool's head struck off. Nemesis, the tragic motor of the drama, forces his hand. The cosmology of Elizabethan revenge tragedy now makes Hamlet's own death by violence inevitable.
The second ordeal is the shriving of his mother, almost as painful for its audience as one can imagine it is for him. He begins, as he must, with physical force. (Ernest Jones'observation that an impulse to matricide may lurk in the background is not without merit.) [19b,pgs 105 -114 ] Fearing for her life, she cries out for help. Polonius responds and is murdered.
Hamlet next assails her with a vituperative tongue-lashing that wrenches out of her complacency. This is less purgative for Gertrude than it is cathartic for Hamlet: it was much easier for him to accept the evidence for Claudius's wrong-doing than it will be to demolish the image of his mother, transformed from a fount of devotion to a loathsome object of contempt. There is no joy in this disgusting task, and if he takes any pleasure in it at all, it is a pitiable delight in his own rhetoric, rising to heights wilder than anything yet heard in the play:
"Rebellious hell
If those canst mutine in a matron's bones
To flaming youth let virtue be as wax
And melt in her own fire. Proclaim no shame
When the compulsive ardor gives the charge
Since frost itself as actively doth burn
And reason panders will." (Act III, iv, 83)
Its images are so hysterical that it is doubtful that most audiences can untangle them through listening alone; they have to be studied in the script. An actor may well transmit their sense more effectively by his manner of presentation than by trying to make them comprehensible.
But now Hamlet goes too far. He actually treads into that treacherous no-man's-land where incest, (either its psychic equivalent or even the ultimate horror of its physical commission) , becomes a possibility. For it is the only moment in the play when actual complicity between mother and son appears likely. This possibility has tormented Claudius,( IV,vi, 11). Yet, blinded by his obsessive quest for vengeance, it had perhaps not occurred to the Ghost. Carried away with his tirade, Hamlet doesn't recognize the possible consequences of revealing to her that she has become the wife of a regicide, fratricide, adulterer usurper, and her own husband's murderer . What is more he is, by implication, accusing her of personal responsibility in these deeds.
In the moralizing tone of this scene, and in many other places, one senses the prevailing belief that it is the lustful wiles of women, vessels of Original Sin, that blind wretches like Claudius and drive them to commit mad deeds. Hamlet says as much in the diatribe against Ophelia : "For wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them. "
"All vows of women become void with changes of fortune , are dissolved by the shifting of time, and disappear with the play of fate , for their faith stands on slippery feet. Though they are quick to promise you something, they are slow to keep it. Slaves of pleasure, they leap headfirst and gaping in their continual longing for something new, and forget the old." [24,pg 117 ]
The revelation of her role in Claudius'crimes may well lead her to take her own life. So does Jocasta destroy herself when she learns that the man she'd married was her own son and her husband's murderer . So does Ophelia go mad from the conviction that her inherently sinful nature drove Hamlet mad and caused her father's death .
It is therefore not surprising that the Ghost uses this moment to rush into the room to destroy his son's credibility. Rescuing his widow from revelations too painful to bear, the Ghost convinces Gertrude that Hamlet is incurably insane. By appearing only to Hamlet's eyes and not to Gertrude's, he supplies the clearest evidence to any disinterested witness that Hamlet is mad. Were the audience unable to see or hear the Ghost it, too, would conclude that Shakespeare wants it to think that Hamlet is insane.
Thus does Hamlet exit, after a final spate of impassioned, luridly perverse homilies, deprived of the support of the one accomplice who might have assisted him in the execution of his filial duty. Departing with him is a useless bag of guts which he lugs into the neighboring room, corpse of the "great baby not yet out of his swaddling clouts." and inescapable reminder of that inviolable law of abortion crippling any and all attempts to quicken the desert of Elsinore Castle so that it may bloom again with life .