Shakespeare, Hamlet

I have a tendency to champion the importance of the various books we cover here. Sometimes it’s helpful, as with the Islamic philosophers, whose influence I would argue is largely unheard of outside of philosophical circles. This is not the case with our book for today, and accordingly I would like to take an influence-agnostic approach to today’s post. Hamlet has more virtues as a work of art than most everything else, and I don’t think spending thousands of words stressing its place in literature is the best use of our time. We will discuss, then, the interesting aspects of the play and various critical responses to it, and we will casually slide past the fact that we are coming face to face with the most staggering, towering, masterful…er, nevermind.

The Question

I’ve heard that Hamlet is the most written about work of literature in the world, and I believe it. There is a sense that the desire to understand Hamlet the play is reflected in the desire to understand Hamlet the character. This is a relatively basic observation: the introduction notes the “ceaseless interrogation” in the play, not the least of which is the opening line, “Who’s there?” Similarly striking is the distinct lack of answers: the response to Bernardo’s opening question is not an identification, but a negative, “Nay.”

We encounter this proliferation of questions elsewhere. The famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy is a long string of questions and meditations without answers, even without a subject. Hamlet does not ask “Shall I be or not be?” Rather, he uses the infinitive. Moreover, the original question does not simply go unanswered but breeds more questions like ripples on the water. Which is unsurprising, given the metaphysical nature of the soliloquy. We’ve encountered before in Shakespeare the conflict between philosophy and daily life. Recall the supremely articulate but incredibly unhelpful speech the Duke gives to Claudio in Measure for Measure, which does nothing to allay his spiritual concerns: “Ay, but to die and go we know not where.” Philosophical comfort has its time and place, but for a man like Claudio, who does not have the intellectual mettle to absorb it, it is unhelpful; for Hamlet, who has intellectual mettle to spare, it is no comfort at all.

While Hamlet is asking these Big Questions, the rest of the cast are asking smaller ones, namely, What’s going on with Hamlet? Laertes and Polonius have an idea: he’s in love with Ophelia. They warn her of this, because she must know that “his will is not his own,” though this is true for more reasons than they think. He is the prince of Denmark, sure, but there is also the matter of the ghost of his father, whose existence only a handful of people are aware of, and whose reason for (non)being only Hamlet knows. This is another common point regarding the play: What the hell is Hamlet doing putting on his “antic disposition”? Of course, this is the point on which so many debates about the play hinge: it is unclear why Hamlet pretends to go mad. We can go into discussions in a moment, but we would do well to take the advice of the introduction: we must not “tame into knowledge” the “heart of [the play's] mysteries.” Perhaps the play does have answers, but I would find that difficult to believe when the answers that are provided are so flimsy, e.g., when Marcellus asks if the ghost didn’t bear some resemblance to the deceased king, Horatio answers, “As thou art to thyself,” which, knowing Shakespeare, isn’t as solid of an answer as Horatio might think.

Sickness Unto Death

Wilson Knight sees two madnesses in Hamlet: one feigned, the other sprung from contemned love. He does not discount the observations of the characters in the play who, unlike Hamlet, are men and women of the world, that is, the living world. Hamlet probably was rather mad from love. That love, he points out, “can recreate the sense of purpose, it inspires to heroism and action. And it is self-creative.” Love is the “supreme enemy… of neurotic despair.” This, it seems, is one of his madnesses, but it is not the only one, and it is not the solution to the riddle of Hamlet. Wilson Knight continues:

“Hamlet’s soul is sick…He can describe the glories of heaven and earth—but for him those glories are gone. And he knows not why. The disease is deeper than his loss of Ophelia, deeper than his mother’s sexual impurity and his father’s death. These are, like his mourning dress, the ‘trappings and the suits of woe.’ They are the outward symbols of it, the ‘causes’ of it: but the thing itself is ultimate, beyond causality… He does not avenge his father’s death, not because he dare not, not because he hates the thought of bloodshed, but because his ‘wit’s diseased’; his will is snapped and useless, like a broken leg.”

Hamlet is not the only victim of this disease. Elsinore and Denmark at large are suffering as well; “something’s rotten” etc, etc. And again, the cause is unclear. As an example, take the argument that the murder of King Hamlet has upset the balance. Has it? Wilson Knight points out that under Claudius’ leadership, “tact has found an easy settlement where arms and opposition might have wasted the strength of Denmark.” Claudius is, for all intents and purposes, a great king. We may be tempted to yearn for the bygone days when disputes were settled not with diplomacy but with “arms and opposition,” but we need only to remember Laertes foaming at the mouth, screaming that he’ll cut Hamlet’s throat in the church, to be reminded that force isn’t necessarily that appealing.

Whatever the cause, Hamlet is in pain, suffering from something we’d probably simplistically call depression:

“This goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’verhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire – why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me…”

In Shakespeare’s time, one might’ve said that Hamlet suffered from melancholy. If I were smart, I would’ve read Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy in preparation for this post, but alas, I’m not. But there are still some things we can say. Some of those things are transcribed from a pretty, er, unique class I took on Hamlet, so I may start asserting very grand statements without any support.

What is the nature of Hamlet’s melancholy? We can say for now that it is a sort of detachment, which is suggested by his statement that “man delights not me.” He is detached from the world that Claudius and the rest of the castle are living, those who possess a "worldly elegance" that he does not. That worldly elegance is something philosophical, the ability to not take things too seriously, to not attach too closely to things, and thereby to achieve security and happiness. Hamlet, on the other hand, does not have such a philosophical detachment, but an emotional detachment, a loss of eros. Both are related to not caring about the world, yet one is happiness and the other is unhappiness. One is wholesome--that is, complete--and the other is incomplete, rotten, diseased: it is banal. Which was basically the point of the class I took: unhappiness is banal, just as evil is banal. (H/T to Hannah Arendt.) Why is it banal? Because it isn’t real: only the good is real.

Hamlet cannot accept the comfort of worldly philosophy, at least not at the beginning of the play, and certainly not from either Claudius or Gertrude. He has to learn it for himself. Which is not to say that the point of the play is self-knowledge, because such an observation seems sort of, well, banal.

Strike a Balance

To me, the most interesting aspect of the play is one that goes unnoticed, at least in common discussions. Hamlet is set at the threshold of a new era, a time when the surest certainties were eroding. We will go over two of these: the traditional conception of power and the traditional conception of religion.

Hamlet goes to school in Wittenberg, a detail that is mentioned once and immediately forgotten. What an odd choice, you might say, for a Danish prince to go to school in a random German town. Yet it is all but random: it is the town where Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the church, inaugurating the Protestant Reformation, an event that has everything to do with Hamlet.

Religious uncertainty pervades the play. Hamlet struggles both with the philosophical implications of death and the religious implications. In his "to be or not to be," he mentions that death should be a land from which “no traveler returns,” yet just an act prior, the ghost returned.

Its return introduces a “terrible ambiguity,” as Northrop Frye puts it, the ambiguity of “life in death.” Rather than expand the world, the ghost’s presence “seals it in by surrounding us with an ‘afterlife’ that has no infinite presence in it.” Why not? Because death no longer seems an ending. The concerns of life are the same as the concerns of death. If the ghost were Catholic and in a Catholic afterlife, he would ask Hamlet to pray for him; instead, he merely perpetuates the cycle of worldly hatred. Moreover, Hamlet is tasked not only with killing Claudius, but with another, perhaps more terrifying duty: to remember his dead father, to remember a ghost. Whether or not Hamlet obeys the first decree well is up for discussion; yet he cannot but adhere to the second. In remembering the ghost—the ghost itself, not his father but “all the death of which it is a symbol,” as Wilson Knight writes—Hamlet’s world is altered: “the universe smells of mortality” to him.

The other surety losing its power is the old conception of power. King Hamlet, dressed even as a ghost in his armor, represents the might of brute force. Yet such power feels anachronistic in Claudius’ world of cool diplomacy. Despite being a murderer, Claudius is a pretty good king. His virtues, though, are not the old virtues; the “men” of the play are gone, those who possess active virtue, and have been replaced by those like Claudius, with Christian, feminized virtues. I am reminded of Cheryl Churchill’s play Cloud Nine, in which the patriarch is shot dead out of the blue at the end of the first half, symbolizing the death of the old way of life.

All this presents to Hamlet a very strange world, since he is caught in between everything. He is called to forget his father by his new “father”; he is also called to remember his father by his “old” father. He is melancholic but sees no way out, again, due to his father’s presence; yet he does not wish to participate in the farcical life lived by the rest of Elsinore. It is almost enough to drive someone mad.

A Tale of Two Brothers

And what about the ghost? Without even mentioning the gross religious overtones present in King Hamlet’s death (killed in a garden, killed by his brother), he claims that he is in a place where “the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away,” which sounds like purgatory, a Catholic idea, yet his request for Hamlet to kill Claudius doesn’t sound Catholic: it sounds Greek. Specifically, it sounds like something out of a classical tragedy; in fact, one might be inclined to agree with the introduction, which says that the ghost’s demand “has a frank simplicity, almost an ordinariness.” The notion of revenge for one’s father, even in our time, is not so ridiculous. Which is the great irony, that Hamlet is presented with a simple, an ordinary demand that he cannot fulfill.

This is not the only ordinary demand that Hamlet is unable to fulfill. Claudius is not only a masterful politician and a murderer, but a worldly man who enjoys giving advice. Take the advice he gives Laertes to motivate him to kill Hamlet sooner:

“Not that I think you did not love your father, / But that I know love is begun by time, / And that I see, in passages of proof, / time qualifies the spark and fire of it. / There lives within the very flame of love / A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it, / And nothing is at a like goodness still, / For goodness, growing to a pleurisy, / Dies in his own too-much. That we would do / We should do when we would, for this ‘would’ changes, / And hath abatements and delays as many / As there are tongues, are hands, are accidents, / And then this ‘should’ is like a spendthrift sign, / That hurts by easing.”

This is not only lovely poetry, but very reasonable advice. Despite how much Laertes loves Polonius—also a fan of giving advice, though not good advice—time heals wounds, and in this case, he needs to act before they do.

Compare this to his advice to Hamlet:

“'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, / To give these mourning duties to your father.  / But you must know your father lost a father, / That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound / In filial obligation for some term / To do obsequious sorrow. But to persever / In obstinate condolement is a course / Of impious stubbornness. 'Tis unmanly grief. / It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, / A heart unfortified, a mind impatient, / An understanding simple and unschooled. / For what we know must be and is as common / As any the most vulgar thing to sense, / Why should we in our peevish opposition / Take it to heart? Fie! 'Tis a fault to heaven, / A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, / To reason most absurd, whose common theme / Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried, / From the first corse till he that died today, / ‘This must be so.’”

There’s some interesting mirroring going on here. Claudius’ advice to both young men is related to the death of fathers, which makes sense, but his advice also emphasizes the relationship between human suffering and time. In Laertes’ case, he assures him that in the future his pain will cease, and therefore he should strike while the iron is hot. In Hamlet’s case, he argues that one should not mourn as much as Hamlet has because the death of fathers is the common theme throughout history, that is, throughout the past. In one case, Claudius looks forward, in the other, back. We should notice first that Claudius truly is wise. He is able to tailor his advice not only to the temperament of the advisee, but to the ends he hopes to achieve. He wants Hamlet to forget, for the death of King Hamlet to be remembered only in history books; he wants Laertes to remember, at least until the memory has served its purpose. In this way, the advice is like the ghost’s: when he asks Hamlet to remember him, perhaps Hamlet is taking it too literally. He does not need to remember forever his dead father, but only until the demand has been fulfilled. Perhaps it wasn’t Hamlet’s fault for taking him too literally: the ghost is not one for careful elaboration, preferring direct, “masculine” prose to Claudius’ flowery language.

"What Dreams May Come"

But no matter how good Claudius’ advice is, it suffers from a crucial limitation: it is advice for this world. Moreover, it is advice for a happy family, one that has not suffered from a murder, an “incestuous” marriage, and a son who cannot let any of it go. The nobility at Elsinore are not a happy family: they are, whether they know it or not, putting on an act. When Hamlet says he has that which passes show, he is not talking only about his clothes; he is talking about the show being put on by everyone around him. From Wilson Knight:

“This contrast [between Hamlet and Claudius] points the relative significance of the King and his court to Hamlet. They are of the world—with their crimes, their follies, their shallownesses, their pomp and glitter; they are of humanity, with all its failings, it is true, but yet of humanity. They assert the importance of human life, they believe in it, in themselves. Whereas Hamlet is inhuman, since he has seen through the tinsel of life and love, he believes in nothing, not even himself, except the memory of a ghost, and his black-robed presence is a reminder to everyone of the fact of death. There is no question but that Hamlet is right. The King’s smiles hide murder, his mother’s love for her new consort is unfaithfulness to Hamlet’s father, Ophelia has deserted Hamlet at the hour of his need. Hamlet’s philosophy may be inevitable, blameless, and irrefutable. But it is the negation of life. It is death.”

Harold Bloom said that Hamlet is the conduit through which supernal forces enter into the world, and this reflects that. Hamlet’s appearance invites the ghost into their realm: he is not the first to see it, but it is as if he allowed it to enter, the way a vampire cannot enter a home without being invited (think Let the Right One In, not Twilight). Without Hamlet’s presence, the world would continue on as it does, in its “common theme”: but because he drags the specter of death into the world of life, it cannot but come.

Moreover, Wilson Knight makes the excellent point that Hamlet is right. It is easy to dismiss the guy moping around in the corner when that’s all he’s doing. Hamlet is not simply moping; something is rotten, and he is very much aware. Yet the extent to which he is aware before the ghost explains everything is unclear. I prefer to agree that Hamlet is a conduit, the intermediary that must be present in order for the ghost to communicate effectively with the world. Wilson Knight writes that the ghost is “the devil of the knowledge of death,” and as such, Hamlet “has walked and held converse with death.” He continues:

“Hamlet is so powerful. He is, as it were, the channel of a mysterious force, a force which derives largely from his having seen through them all. In contact with him they know their own faults: neither they nor we should know them otherwise.” [Emphasis mine]

On Guard

I have focused on a lot of different aspects of the play and skipped over even more, but I want to add one final thing. In high school, when we finished the play, our teacher (Hi Ms. McEvoy!) gave us each a pen, which she asked us to bring to the AP English exam. On it was printed the phrase, “The readiness is all,” and she told us it was her favorite quote. At the time, I didn’t think much of it, and I didn’t until this reading of the play (which I believe is my fifth?)

How does Hamlet find the cure to his melancholy? It must be while he’s in the cemetery. Throughout the play, Hamlet—and Elsinore at large—has wavered between being and non-being, between life and death, action and inaction. The core of the “to be or not to be” speech is in the chiasmus: in life, one finds death all around; in death, life. To be or not to be? What is the difference? When the ghost appears, he has even less reason to see a distinction: there is death, walking around for all to see.

Yet in the cemetery, he sees the skull of Yorick and perhaps because of this remembers something of the finality of death. After all, it is there that he wrestles with Laertes, and he is the one to make the first move. Holding the skull of a man he once loved might tell him something about death, namely, that it is not life.

And what is life? This remains unclear, but we don’t need it to be clear. From the man himself:

“Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.”

It is readiness. At the end of the play, Hamlet returns to Wittenberg, to the protestant notion of predestination which seems to be the only cure to his woes. Hamlet, who is so full of accidents and contingencies, finds peace in the idea that he need only be prepared. I’m not sure how correct this reading of the ending is. It may be too simple, and it may even be wrong. But I like it, and it makes me wish I still had Mrs. McEvoy’s pen. The readiness is all.

Stray Observations

• Hamlet: “’Tis very strange.” Horatio: “As I do live, my honored lord, ‘tis true.”
• Ophelia: “Now see that noble and most sovereign reason / Like sweet bells jangled, out of time and harsh, / That unmatched form and feature of blown youth / Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me / T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see.” That last line is great.
• Hamlet to Gertrude: “Good night – but go not to my uncle’s bed. / Assume a virtue, if you have it not. / that monster custom, who all sense doth eat / Of habits evil, is angel yet in this, / That to the use of actions fair and good / He likewise gives a frock or livery / That aptly is put on. Refrain tonight, / And that shall lend a kind of easiness / To the next abstinence; the next more easy; / For use almost can change the stamp of nature, / And either lodge the devil, or throw him out / With wondrous potency.”
• You may have noticed that I only quoted Harold Bloom once this time. I began reading his essay on Hamlet, but the first, like, 10 pages were just an extended circle-jerk about its importance and greatness; hence my remark at the beginning. I like the guy, even though I recognize that he's pretty eccentric in his criticism, but man, we get it, it's a great play, shut up.