[In the following essay, Jenkins responds to the criticism regarding Hamlet's "To be, or not to be" speech, arguing that while it may not seem to be related to Hamlet's particular problems, the speech is evoked by Hamlet's dramatic role as revenger.]

Ham. To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to:'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep:
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

3.1.56-88

"To be, or not to be, that is the question" is a line which has some claim to be the best known line in Shakespeare, though perhaps not the best understood.¹ It is of course the first line of a famous soliloquy of Hamlet's—a "celebrated" speech, to use Dr. Johnson's word,² and one which seems to have been celebrated right from the beginning. It was echoed by other dramatists in Shakespeare's lifetime. Within half a century of his death we find Samuel Pepys recording in his Diary how he spent a Sunday afternoon indoors learning it off by heart—³and he also had it set to music.⁴ The first formal critique of the play, published anonymously in 1736, purposely omitted any comment on this speech because its beauties were already known to every English reader.⁵ By the time we come to the nineteenth century the habit of learning it off by heart had made it, according to Charles Lamb, "so handled and pawed about by declamatory boys" that he was beyond being able to appreciate it.⁶ I hope that is not the case with you in my present audience, because it is with this speech—as of course you will have gathered—that I want to start. Those who may not know it off by heart will, I imagine, be sufficiently familiar with it for me not to have to quote it now at length. But I will pick out what seem to me to be the essential stages in its argument.

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing . . .

The alternatives here are passively to suffer or actively to oppose; either to accept whatever life and fortune may inflict on you, or else to defy their onslaught, as expressed in the metaphor of taking arms against a sea of troubles. It is a metaphor that has often been objected to. An essay in Smollett's British Magazine in the seventeen-sixties said that nothing could be "more ridiculously absurd."⁷ You don't take arms against the sea. But that, I presume, is the point. To fight against the sea, a vast and uncontainable force, is futile, even ridiculous, and will result in your being overwhelmed. It is clear that Hamlet perceives what the likely end will be; for he goes on

And by opposing end them. To die—

The idea has its attractions; "To die—to sleep"; and to sleep, we may suppose, is to end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to.

Such an ending of our troubles is "devoutly to be wished;" and this wish to escape from the pains of living suggests how easily escape may be managed: without the need for a contest with a sea of troubles, one may procure death for oneself.

"For who would bear the whips and scorns of time" (1. 70)—a catalogue of which is given—when he could settle things once and for all with nothing more than a bodkin, a little dagger?

When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin?

(II.75-6)

But even while this thought of escaping by suicide is being expressed, another thought has already occurred to the speaker. That a peaceful sleep is the end is only one hypothesis: line 61, "by a sleep to say," to put the case that, "we end." There is another possibility: line 65, "to sleep, perchance to dream." And before we reach for the dagger, the thought of "what dreams may come" must "give us pause" (line 68). There is a conflict of impulses as the longing for release from "this mortal coil" meets with the fear of the unknown. And these conflicting impulses come together in the climax of the speech, which also indicates which of them triumphs: line 76ff,

Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death

. . . makes us rather bear those ills we have
 Than fly to others that we know not of?

And now the fear of the unknown is reinforced by conscience, and conscience, which includes, I take it, the awareness of our own misdeeds, "does make cowards of us all," in our fear of eternal punishment. Our choice is therefore for life, though it is hardly a choice of what is "nobler" when we choose to live only because we fear to die.

Now the remarkable thing about this best-known of Hamlet's soliloquies is that, notwithstanding all it says about the ills we have to bear in this life, it says nothing at all about Hamlet's particular grievances. It makes no reference to his murdered father, nor to the revenge he has promised to take. In this it differs strikingly from all his other soliloquies. Even his first soliloquy, uttered before he knows anything about the murder, is a lament for the father who is dead and for the marriage by which his mother has replaced him. In what we may call the soliloquies of self-reproach the sight of a player weeping for a fiction or of Fortinbras risking thousands of lives for a straw reminds Hamlet that he has a real substantial cause, "a father killed, a mother stained," and is doing nothing. By contrast the soliloquy of "to be, or not to be" seems strangely unconnected with his personal predicament. Paradoxically this is one reason for its fame: it has been able to be learnt off and recited by generations of schoolboys simply because it is easily detachable from its context. But this detachment makes criticism uncomfortable: from Charles Gildon in 1721⁸ to Martin Dodsworth in 1985⁹ there have been objections to "irrelevance." We look for causes and effects, ask what does this speech arise from or lead on to. The moment when it occurs is after all one of great tension and expectancy. Only in the previous scene—as the text goes, a mere sixty lines back—Hamlet has devised a scheme for testing the King's guilt by having the murder re-enacted in a play, and we are eager to see what happens. On his side the King is engaged on a scheme devised by Polonius to test Hamlet's madness by watching his behaviour to Ophelia. And Ophelia is even now on stage, where she is waiting for Hamlet to notice her—as also indeed are we, in our desire to see these two, for the first time in the play, together. Two plots, then, have been laid, one by Hamlet, and one against him, which will bring his relations with the King and Ophelia to a head. And then plot and counter-plot are both suspended; and just when Hamlet might be supposed to be impatient to know what the result of his play-experiment will be, he occupies his mind and ours with these seemingly relaxed and irrelevant meditations. One could learn a good deal from this sequence about Shakespeare's dramatic technique.

But the critics, as I say, are uncomfortable. This soliloquy "evades the issues," Dodsworth says, it is not "adequate to the situation": and there have been numerous attempts to make it more adequate by relating it to the circumstances in which Hamlet utters it, to apply the question of "to be, or not to be" to some specific choice which the speaker is having to make. Malone held that Hamlet was debating "whether he should continue to live or put an end to his life,"¹⁰ and Malone is representative of a long ling of critics who suppose Hamlet to be actually contemplating suicide. It is a line not yet extinct: the Diaries of Peter Hall regard this speech as expressing Hamlet's "current problem"—was he to be or not?¹¹ Others suppose that "the question" is not whether Hamlet shall kill himself, but whether he shall kill the King. Kenneth Muir says the alternatives are "whether to endure the reign of the usurping murderer . . . or to attempt to kill" him.¹² There was also an article a while since which insisted that "the question" must concern Hamlet's immediate problem and is therefore whether he shall go ahead with his murder-play at all.¹³ And just a few years ago another article, in The Modern Language Quarterly, came up with a solution to end all solutions: Hamlet, it supposed, must have caught sight of the King and Polonius as they slipped into their hiding-place to eavesdrop on his meeting with Ophelia and so deliberately avoids all reference to his own affairs in order to put the listeners off the scent.¹⁴ It seems, however, something of a letdown, don't you think, to discover that this wonderful speech is a fake?

What all these interpretations have in common is that they assume the speech to be occasioned by some particular circumstance. Even Kittredge, who insists that Hamlet's reflections are not personal but general, finds it necessary to explain what provokes them: it is the weary wait before Hamlet's plan can be executed that induces a depression of spirits which leads to thoughts of death.¹⁵ And no less a person than Dr. Johnson supposed that Hamlet would have applied these general reflections to his own case if he hadn't happened to be interrupted by discovering Ophelia.¹⁶

But since he discovers Ophelia when it suits the dramatist that he shall, must we not rather conclude that he could have discussed his own case if it had been the dramatist's purpose that he should? Is it then that the soliloquy is inadequate in that it "evades the issues," or we who inadequately perceive what the issues are? One book on Shakespeare which dares to ignore tradition takes a fresh look at the problem.¹⁷ Justly observing that Hamlet's question arises from nothing specific in the text, it decides that "it could refer to whether or not to carry out revenge on his uncle," "whether to live or die," but "could apply to almost anything," so that "one is not sure—nor does Hamlet seem sure—what it means." But I venture to think that Shakespeare would have been somewhat surprised to learn that.

For the question itself, surely, whatever you choose to make of it, is perfectly precise. "To be, or not to be," esse aut non esse—taking the verb in its absolute and basic sense, if one were able to choose, would one choose to exist or not? or, since to put the question at all, one must already have being, would one choose one's existence to continue or to cease? The question is thus a fundamental one—has indeed been called the fundamental one—concerning human life, the desirability of having it at all. But like so much else in Hamlet, it is not a novel question; it has been since ancient times a traditional matter of debate. One finds Augustine, for example, in his treatise on Free Will (De Libero Arbitrio), arguing the proposition that a man would rather be unhappy than not be at all.¹⁸ Augustine pertinently observes that many who are unhappy yet show no wish to die; but he tries to put all hypotheses, and he can envisage a man retorting, "If I am unwilling to die, it is not because I would rather be unhappy than not be at all; it is because I fear that after death I may be still more unhappy." This is of course the position that Hamlet arrives at when he admits that "the dread of something after death" makes "cowards of us all" and so causes us to go on living. Hamlet, no less than Augustine, is working out a theorem, which is of general application. Throughout the soliloquy, we notice, the first person singular does not occur. The argument is concerned with "the shocks that flesh is heir to" (all flesh), with what happens to "us all." Hamlet is not deciding on a course of action for himself, and I think we need not suppose there was ever any serious danger that the hypothetical bodkin might be brought into use.

Why, though, since it seems not to be prompted by present circumstances, why is Hamlet busy with this theorem, and why does he argue it now? Perhaps this question is best answered by another. When the Players arrive and Hamlet calls on one of them for "a passionate speech," why does he choose the tale of "Priam's slaughter?" Priam, a king who had fifty sons, is the archetypal royal father, and here is a prince who has to avenge his royal father's murder asking to hear recited how Priam was killed. But that surely does not mean that Hamlet asks for the story of Priam's death because he is brooding on his father's, nor, as I have found suggested, that he looks to Pyrrhus, the killer of Priam, for some hints about revenge. The analogies arise not so much in Hamlet's mind as in Shakespeare's, an explanation of them is less likely to be found in the psychology of the unconscious than in the principles of dramatic design. (Similarly, the songs which exhibit Ophelia's madness do not describe her own plight; but they are related to her plight because they are all variations on the archetypal theme of the maid who is forsaken by her lover.) The need for the Player to recite a speech gives the dramatist the opportunity to introduce in another key a variation on the theme of the killing of a king and father with its concomitants of cruelty, vengeance, and grief. In something of the same way, when the play requires Hamlet in his solitary musing to be confronted with Ophelia and some moments have to pass before he sees her, Shakespeare takes the opportunity to make the subject of Hamlet's musing a variation on a basic theme of the play. What I want to suggest is that the question of "to be, or not to be," though it does not relate directly to Hamlet's particular problems, is nevertheless evoked by Hamlet's dramatic role, so that the hero's particular dilemma is set in context with an archetypal dilemma which enables it to be viewed in a universal perspective.

What, then, is Hamlet's dramatic role? And what is it in this role which can provoke this large question of whether life is better escaped from or endured? At its simplest the role is the familiar Elizabethan one of a revenger, and its essentials, I hardly have to tell you, are given us by an old Danish story as we have it in Saxo Grammaticus and as it was retold in Shakespeare's lifetime by the Frenchman Belieferest—the story of a prince who has to avenge his father, when the father has been murdered by his own brother for his kingdom and his queen. This story, before it came to Shakespeare, had already been the subject of an older play now lost but known to have added the Ghost "which cried so miserably at the Theatre, like an oyster-wife, Hamlet, revenge."¹⁹ The obvious effect of the Ghost is to give the call to revenge an added dramatic power. This is not merely a matter of theatrical sensation, though it is that. A command that comes from beyond our mortal world has a more than mortal authority, which a man is not expected to resist; and when the Ghost ultimately speaks to Hamlet (in a scene which has always been acclaimed as one of the most powerful ever written for the English stage), the command which it delivers and Hamlet accepts has tremendous solemnity and awe. Yet it is important to observe that what the Ghost appeals to is the natural human instinct, the force which binds the son to the father in filial allegiance and love.

If thou didst ever thy dear father love . . .
Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.

And again,

If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not.

It is, then, an impulse inherent in man's nature that the supernatural voice here reinforces.

Put thus, the command, I take it, is one of which the play expects us to approve. Whatever we may think of the primitive code of requiting murder with murder, and although Elizabethan divines preached against revenge, the Hamlet story clearly belongs to an ethos in which the duty of the son to avenge the father is unquestioned. Already in Saxo, in the persons of the two brother kings, the murderer and his victim, good and bad, are diametrically opposed. The moral contrast is consciously developed by Belieferest, and the full resources of Shakespeare's art are used to heighten it. "Murder most foul, as in the best it is," is here intensified: "most foul, strange"—and in the murder of a brother by a brother—"unnatural." As described by the Ghost, the secret crime, sensational both in method and effect, with the magically potent poison curdling the blood and covering the body with a leprous crust, becomes a deed of fabulous horror. When its perpetrator is referred to as a "serpent," we respond to the satanic connotations of the word. He is further denounced as "that incestuous, that adulterous beast," whose seduction of the Queen from her virtuous husband shows how Lust will desert a "radiant angel" and instead "prey on garbage." Such imagery, celestial and bestial, is recurrent. Hamlet, in his first soliloquy, before he knew anything of the murder or the full extent of his mother's "frailty," reflected that "a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer" than she did for a husband who was, compared to her present husband, "Hyperion to a satyr." This striking image sets against one another the god of the sun in human form and a creature who is part man and part beast.

The play is constantly reminding us of the dual nature of man as the Renaissance mind conceived him: in his intellect he is like a god, while he shares the appetites of the beasts. And in the figures of the two brother kings the complementary attributes of man—nobility and baseness, the animal and the god—are separately embodied and opposed. When in the Queen's chamber Hamlet shows his mother the pictures of her two husbands, the first combines the attributes of various gods:

Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself,
An eye like Mars

—to give a portrait of an ideal and perfect man; while the second husband, who has stolen the kingdom, is one with whom she lives

In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty.

Again the suggestion of bestial sensuality. Through such imagery the play presents a moral vision of a kingdom in which the godlike man is dead, overcome and supplanted by the beastlike; and it enables us to see Hamlet's task of revenge as the destruction of the satyr and the restoration of Hyperion. He himself recognizes what the familiarity of the words should not prevent us from recognizing too, that "the time is out or joint" and that it is his task "to set it right."

Hamlet, then, by the promptings of his own nature reinforced by the authority of the Ghost, seems to be called upon to take the part of outraged virtue against vice. But the Ghost, as well as lending a supernatural authority, creates dangers, mysteries, uncertainties. From the beginning its status is ambiguous. The "thing" that appears to the soldiers on the watch "like the King that's dead"—is it the ghost of Hamlet's father or an evil spirit which may "assume" his "father's person"? If the second, Hamlet knows that in having to do with it at all he risks damnation. Horatio warns him against following it lest it tempt him to destruction. What it is and whether it portends harm is a source of dreadful apprehension. Yet when Hamlet finally confronts it, its solemn proclamation, "I am thy father's spirit," and its vivid tale of his uncle's crime carry such conviction that he assures his companions,

It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you.

Later of course it suits the play to let Hamlet's doubts return:

The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil . . . . . .
and perhaps . . .
Abuses me to damn me.

But when the stratagem of re-enacting the murder in a play has succeeded in making the King betray his guilt, Hamlet says he "will take the Ghost's word for a thousand pound," and he never doubts it again. Significantly, when it reappears in his mother's chamber, he accepts it without question as his father "in his habit as he lived" and, accepting it, acknowledges himself a "tardy son" who "lets go by" the performance of the "dread command." There are of course critics who, themselves disapproving of revenge, regard the command as wicked.²⁰ For Wilson Knight it is "devilish";²¹ and one whole book has been written to maintain with much erudition that the Ghost was an evil spirit which should not have been obeyed.²² One reviewer of my edition of the play was extremely scornful because I had failed to perceive that the Ghost is an infernal spirit anxious only to get Hamlet into its toils. But that is not the view that Hamlet comes to, nor, I make bold to say, is it one that the play endorses. And it would be a much lesser play, to my mind, if it did. Once the Ghost is finally established as a truthful witness and, hence, as what it claims to be, Hamlet never questions that he should fulfil the mission it has assigned to him. The burden of his self-complaint is that he has not already done so.

Yet although the Ghost's authority has thus to be obeyed if Hamlet is to be true to his nature and his lineage, the doubts about the ghost have raised questions concerning the good or evil of its purposes. At the dramatically emphatic moment when Hamlet first encountered it the crucial alternatives were three times put:

Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable . . .

There are terrible uncertainties which the acceptance of the Ghost's story does not quite dispel. When the Ghost leaves Hamlet on the words "Remember me," the speech in which he vows to do so begins

O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?
And shall I couple hell?

This sinister question may stay in our minds as Hamlet's demand for his companions to swear secrecy is echoed by the Ghost's voice from below. Later he does couple hell when, in the soliloquy on the Player at the end of the second act, he reproaches himself for inaction in a revenge to which he is "prompted . . . by heaven and hell." Does the play not suggest therefore that the spirit to whose command he cannot but respond is subject to both heavenly and hellish influences? The father in whom he perceives man like a god died after all in his human imperfections and speaks to Hamlet with his sins still unpurged. The nature through which the son and father are united and by which and to which the Ghost appeals may have both good and evil in it.

There is indeed something alarming, even horrifying, in Hamlet's reaction to the success of his play in proving the Ghost true and Claudius guilty. In the moment of his triumph his taunting of the King rises to a kind of savage glee, and as soon as he is alone his mood responds to "the witching time of night,"

When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world.

This passage is sometimes passed over as mere Senecan rhetoric, but I think it must be taken seriously as suggesting that Hamlet in this mood has the contagion of hell upon him. There are hints of witches and vampires when he boasts

Now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.

And he is surely not yet free of hell's contagion when he straightway finds the King on his knees and, having drawn his sword to kill him while he is praying, decides to wait for an opportunity of killing him in his sins so that his soul may go to damnation. Dr. Johnson recoiled from such a thought as "too horrible to be read or to be uttered";²³ but a more sentimental criticism was able to explain that the "sweet prince" could not possibly have meant it and was only finding excuses for his reluctance to kill a defenseless man.²⁴

Yet it has been amply shown that in Elizabethan literature a connoisseur of revenge would seek to destroy his foe, soul as well as body. There is the notorious example related by Thomas Nashe and others of a victim who was promised his life if he would abjure God's mercy and then in the moment of doing so was killed before he had time to repent. Wilson Knight justly remarks that Hamlet's desire for the King's damnation takes revenge to its "logical and hateful"²⁵ extreme; but if it therefore illumines and implicitly condemns the very nature of revenge, that is something which Shakespeare must surely have perceived and indeed purposed. The play in some of its central scenes shows that revenge, even when undertaken to requite the bad man who destroys the good, may have hate and vindictiveness at its core. And that Hamlet was not in fact restrained by scruples about killing a defenceless man appears from the very next scene; for he goes straight from sparing the King at prayer to kill like a rat the man behind the arras who squeaks for help. The pursuit of revenge involves a readiness to shed blood.

That the dramatist saw quite clearly the dreadful potentialities of revenge is apparent from his presentation of other revengers in the play. Fortinbras, aiming to recover what his father lost, sharks up his "lawless resolutes" and threatens war on Denmark. Laertes actually brings war into the palace. He gloats over the prospect of killing his foe, and for the satisfactions of revenge he courts his own damnation. But especially significant, I think, are those figures who occur not in the story of Hamlet himself but in those inset dramas which give a heightened reflection of it. First, Pyrrhus in the play-excerpt describing "Priam's slaughter." "The hellish Pyrrhus," as he is called, black as the night in armour as in purpose, yet red from head to foot with blood, is the very symbol of a killer and, as he seeks out Priam, the Trojan King and father, a monstrous version of Claudius. Yet Pyrrhus, whose father Achilles was slain by a Trojan prince, is also a revenger, who compares and contrasts with Hamlet. Like Hamlet he momentarily stood with poised sword and "did nothing," but then, aroused to vengeance, with gigantic blows he fell on Priam and with his sword chopped up his aged limbs. In such a figure the appalling potentialities of both killer and revenger are contained, and the two are ultimately indistinguishable.

So too with Lucianus in the play of The Murder of Gonzago. Lucianus, murdering a sleeping king by pouring poison in his ears, is the exact replica of Claudius: but when he is announced not as brother but "nephew to the King," he suddenly identifies with Hamlet. The ambivalence of his role countinues when Hamlet, impatient, urges him, first, "Begin, murderer . . . begin" and immediately goes on, "The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge." Murder and revenge appear to be equated. And finally, the murderer's single speech, an invocation to a midnight poison distilled under a witches'curse, will find an echo in that speech of Hamlet's which I have already cited vaunting his readiness for a deed which "the day would quake to look on." Such things are surely clues, though singularly little followed up in criticism, which enable one to see how the dramatist regards the revenger. The play never directly discusses, nor permits Hamlet to discuss, the ethics of revenge; but it says much to our imagination when the revenger's role keeps merging with that of the murderer himself.

Now this, I take it, is what ultimately happens in the case of the hero of the play; and it happens of course when Hamlet kills Polonius. When the Ghost appears in the Queen's chamber and Hamlet confesses that he has neglected the command to revenge, there is something very ironic in the presence of Polonius's corpse lying on the stage as a sign of what Hamlet has done. In the old Danish story, when Hamlet kills the spy in his mother's chamber, he throws the body in the sewer, where pigs soon make an end of it. But this is not the end of it in Shakespeare, where the nuisance of the corpse persists, spreading its stench of corruption; and where the dead man has a son, so that the "rash and bloody deed" has its inevitable consequence in the son's determination on revenge. Hence the role of the hero significantly shifts. The man who is summoned to avenge his father becomes the killer of another man's father, and the compulsion on Laertes to avenge his father, though without a ghost to enforce it, may be seen to repeat Hamlet's case. As Hamlet will say in the final scene,

by the image of my cause I see
The portraiture of his.

But in the cause of Laertes, Hamlet is in the position that in Hamlet's own cause is occupied by Claudius: Hamlet must avenge King Hamlet, who has been killed by Claudius; Laertes must avenge Polonius, who has been killed by Hamlet. The tragedy reveals that in actions of revenge the same man may play both parts. In seeking to right a wrong he may commit one and have to suffer a penalty such as he himself inflicts. Looking down on the corpse of Polonius, Hamlet says

heaven hath pleas'd it so,
To punish me with this and this with me.

Polonius, the King's spy and surrogate, suffers at the hands of Hamlet, who is himself punished by the guilt which he has accordingly to bear. It is this dual role of Hamlet's that ultimately gives the play its shape. And it is clear that Shakespeare so designed it from the start. For, although Laertes has nothing to do until after his father has been killed when the play is over halfway through, he is from the first made prominent. In the first act, which has its climax when Hamlet receives the command from his father's ghost, Laertes is shown with his father, who, having given him leave to depart, speeds him on his way with a blessing and a famous speech of fatherly advice, and even then sends after him to spy out what he is up to. T.S. Eliot oddly thought these scenes otiose, "unexplained scenes . . . for which there is little excuse";²⁶ but they begin the story of the antagonist, who in a revenge play will have to work the hero's death. When Hamlet kills the father, the son must be expected to take action. As revenger Laertes exhibits, along with the nature and duty of a son, all the less admirable features, and finally shows himself a fit partner for the murderer Claudius when he kills treacherously by poison. But through Laertes'revenge Hamlet has already received his death-wound when he at length achieves his own revenge by giving Claudius his.

The story of Hamlet's revenge, then, as Shakespeare's play presents it, is of a dual revenge which is both righteous and guilty. The hero, in his respect for his father, is true to the approved instincts of nature. In admiration of the godlike man he upholds the cause of virtue. But his own virtue is stained by the presence of baser passions and their consequence; so that the revenger becomes contaminated with the guilt which he would punish. The hero to whom is assigned a role in which good is thus mingled with evil might well be reluctant to perform it; and indeed, although Hamlet never acknowledges reluctance, nor, once the Ghost's identity is established, questions what he ought to do, something very like reluctance seems to be dramatized for us in his continual and inexplicable failure to act. In a revenge play, where revenge is the hero's function and raison D'etre, the hero who lets go by the acting of the dread command may come to symbolize all those whom life confronts with a destiny they would escape from if they could. The situation in which Hamlet is shown to hesitate seems to invite the question "To be." But the question is nevertheless not "To be, or not to be a revenger"; Hamlet never questions that he is required to be that. When the question is asked, in the very centre of the play, it is applied to the universal man in whom the particular revenger is subsumed. "To be," for a man who has man's nature in him, includes the conflicting passions which the play recognizes in revenge. Indeed, is it not the concept of revenge, as compounded of good and evil, which attracts into the play all those ideas about the nature of man as partaking of both god and beast? And so doing, it gives us a hero who is summoned to remember his heritage, to live out his human destiny, and whose wish is to decline.

For whatever may be said or not said about Hamlet's role as a revenger, his dissatisfaction with the role of man in this world is notoriously stamped upon the play. The famous eulogy, "What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties . . . how like an angel . . . how like a god," ends with the "quintessence of dust" and with Hamlet's explicit declaration, "Man delights not me." And his dissatisfaction with man is exemplified in many scattered observations. He finds no honesty in the world; the fickle public who scorned his uncle in his father's time now give good money for his picture; the Queen shows the falseness of marriage vows; it is the nature of beautiful women to be unchaste. The world is like a garden in which all that flourishes are the weeds, the things in nature which are "rank and gross." "Conception is a blessing," but the example of procreation that Hamlet gives is that of the sun breeding maggots in a dead dog. In such a world he has lost all his mirth; he has bad dreams; Denmark is a prison. At the heart of his dissatisfaction of course is the knowledge that what disgusts him in life is present in himself. It is the sense of his own defilement which opens his first soliloquy with a wish—if you will permit this reading—that his "sullied flesh" would melt. As he says in his scene with Ophelia, he feels himself to belong to a diseased stock, which, despite anything you graft on to it, will still retain its original taint. His first words to Ophelia request her to pray for his sins, and he presently adds that he could accuse himself of such things that it were better his mother had not borne him. "What," he asks, "should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven?" In fact, what justification can there be for his existence? Perhaps we ought not to be surprised, at least ought not to find it irrelevant, if all Hamlet's questions about what he and fellows like him are doing in the world focus in the centre of the play upon the all-embracing question "To be, or not to be."

The answer which the famous soliloquy gives might be described as a grudging affirmative: one decides in favour of life from a fear that death might be worse. That (as exemplified by Augustine) seems to be the traditional answer. But the answer that springs from Hamlet when he speaks of his own individual plight and gives vent to his personal feelings is most often negative, the answer which Augustine thought improbable and even reprehensible. His first soliloquy opens with a wish that he could melt away or that the everlasting God had not forbidden self-slaughter. He wishes he could choose "not to be." Polonius has only to ask if he will "walk out of the air" to get the answer "Into my grave?" And Hamlet confides in Ophelia that it might have been better if he had never been born.

This negative answer of Hamlet's is nowhere more apparent than in his dealings with Ophelia. It seems to me very strange that this unhappy love-story has often been thought obscure; its significance is hardly in doubt. Ophelia is the woman Hamlet has loved and hoped to marry; but in their famous encounter in the middle of the play (in fact directly after the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy), he denies his love, denounces marriage, and bids her go to a nunnery. The reason why he rejects her is made clear; for when Ophelia confesses that she has believed in his love and betrays that she has returned it, he exclaims "Why, wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?" Love and marriage lead to the propagation of one's kind; and the man who wishes he had not been born or that he could escape from the world by dying recoils from passing his life on. The rejection of Ophelia poignantly dramatizes Hamlet's rejection of life and its opportunities for love, marriage and procreation. It is the choice of "not to be."

Yet this negative answer is not the plays's final answer. In the last act we find Hamlet in the churchyard with the grave-digger, who took up his trade he tells us, on the day of Hamlet's birth. This will remind us that from the day a man enters the world his grave is being dug; and as Hamlet looks at the hideously grinning skulls he recognizes that this is what all men come to. So he sees death as natural; it belongs to the pattern of existence. Accordingly it is neither feared nor welcomed; and when Hamlet has a presentiment of his own death he can say "If it be now,'tis not to come . . . if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all." And the hero's readiness to accept his mortal destiny coincides, we notice, with this readiness to do the deed of revenge which he has so long delayed. Thinking of the King he says "Is't not perfect conscience / To quit him with this arm?" And although time is short, he says "The interim is mine." There are other indications that he now accepts what he formerly rejected. When he announces himself as "Hamlet the Dane," he claims the monarch's title: Denmark, which he once called a prison, is now his kingdom. At Ophelia's funeral he asserts the love he formerly denied. Finally he does vengeance on thé King, though at the cost of his own life. For the avenger of Claudius's crime suffers for a like crime of his own when Laertes takes vengeance on him, while at the same time Laertes with the poison on his sword is repeating Claudius's crime, for which he also dies when the sword is turned against him. Yet these two revengers, both noble and both guilty, in killing one another also forgive and absolve one another.

Hamlet always seems to me a very moral play. It recognizes original sin, the presence of evil in man's nature; and it accepts that guilt must be atoned for, as in the catastrophe it is. But for all that, it does not commend a negative virtue, or, to use Milton's word,²⁷ a fugitive virtue, which consists in avoiding rather than confronting life's challenge. It offers us a hero who, in a world where good and evil inseparably mingle, is tempted to shun the human lot but comes at length to embrace it, choosing finally "to be."

Notes

¹ The text of a lecture originally given to the Association Belgo-Britannique in Liège on 23 February 1983 and subsequently, in the revised form here printed, on the occasion of an International Shakespeare Seminar in Delhi, 5 December 1989.

² Shakespeare, Plays, 1765, viii.207; quoted in the Furness Variorum Hamlet, i.204.

³Diary, 13 November 1664.

⁴ See Shakespeare Quarterly VI (1955), 161-70.

⁵ [George Stubbes], Some Reflections on the Tragedy of Hamlet, 1736, p. 38.

⁶ "On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, considered with reference to their Fitness for Stage Representation" (Lamb, Works, ed. Lucas, 1912, i. 115.)

⁷ "On Metaphors." Goldsmith, Works, ed. Gibbs, 1884, i.370. Though formerly included in editions of Goldsmith, this essay is no longer attributed to him and is probably by Smollett. See PMLA, xxxix (1924), 325-42.

⁸The Laws of Poetry, 1721, p. 206: "That famous soliloquy, which has been so much cried up in Hamlet. . . as it was produced by nothing before, so has it no manner of influence on what follows after, and is therefore a perfectly detached piece, and has nothing to do in the play."

⁹Hamlet Closely Observed, 1985, p.110: "His speech . . . must be felt by us as not altogether adequate to the situation actually obtaining for him; it is tainted by irrelevance." Cf. also pp. 111-12.

¹⁰ Shakespeare, Plays and Poems, 1790, ix.286; quoted in the Furness Variorum Hamlet, i. 205.

¹¹Diaries, 1983, p. 188.

¹²Shakespeare: Hamlet, 1963, p. 34.

¹³ A. Newell, "The Dramatic Context and Meaning of Hamlet's'To be, or not to be'Soliloquy," PMLA, LXXX (1965), 38-50.

¹⁴ J.E. Hirsh, "The'To be, or not to be'Scene and the Conventions of Shakespeare's Drama" MLQ, XLII (1981), 115-36.

¹⁵Hamlet, ed. G.L. Kittredge, 1939, p. 208.

¹⁶ Shakespeare, Plays, 1765, viii. 207; quoted in the Furness Variorum Hamlet, i.205.

¹⁷ CM . Manlove, The Gap in Shakespeare, 1981, p. 43.

¹⁸De Libero Arbitrio, III. vi. 19.

¹⁹ Thomas Lodge, Wit's Misery, 1596, p. 56.

²⁰ E.g. L.C. Knights, An Approach to'Hamlet', 1960, pp. 44-48.

²¹The Wheel of Fire, revised ed. 1949, pp. 30, 39.

²² Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 1967; 2nd (revised) ed., 1971.

²³Shakespeare, Plays, 1765, viii; 236; quoted in the Furness Variorum Hamlet, i.283.

²⁴ For some instances of this aberrant but once fashionable interpretation see Hamlet, Arden ed. 1982, pp. 513-14.

²⁵The Wheel of Fire, revised edn. 1949, p. 318 n.

²⁶Selected Essays, 1932, p. 143.

²⁷Areopagitica, 7th paragraph (Milton, Complete Prose, Yale, ii. 515).