[In the following essay, Hillman explores the relationship between loss of meaning in life and death, and maintains that Hamlet is plagued by a "suicidal fatalism" which conflicts with his avowed goal of revenge.]

In writing of Hamlet's spiritual isolation and agony, G. Wilson Knight used a phrase which rings resoundingly true: the "knowledge of death."¹ It is a potently catalytic phrase, crystallizing the elusive and Protean melancholy through which Hamlet relates to the world around him. But it is also only a starting point. On the one hand, human experience comprehends infinite ways and degrees of knowing; on the other, death ultimately lies outside that experience: it can only be known indirectly, through imagination. We need then to focus on Hamlet's imaginative encounter with death if we wish to use Knight's insight as a tool of analysis.

Hamlet's first scene should by rights belong to Claudius. He is its mainspring; its opening action is his business; its rhythm is his royal will. Hamlet's spoiling of that rhythm, like Cordelia's silent interruption of Lear's ritual, soon shifts the dramatic focus (and the center of power—Claudius is never really in control again). But even before he speaks, Hamlet has upstaged the king by flaunting "the trappings and the suits of woe" (I.ii.86).² He appears as the archetypal figure of death at the feast (here a virtual continuation of the marriage feast, still featuring the funeral leftovers). The disclosures that follow are superimposed on that indelible first impression. When Hamlet gets the stage to himself, the specific death he is memorializing is linked with an acute consciousness of personal and universal mortality. His own "too too sallied flesh" (129) ties him to a world dominated by corruption and decay within—in fact, produced by—natural growth: "'tis an unweeded garden/ That grows to seed, things rank and gross in nature/ Possesses it merely" (135-37).

The oppressive sense of physicality, the organic imagery, of this first soliloquy recur throughout the play as a standard feature of Hamlet's melancholy. Here they help to establish the basic premise of his melancholy: that existence itself is meaningless. Indeed, the thematic connection between the meaninglessness of life and the powerful presence of death is so strong and constant that the two themes are effectively one. The preoccupation with mortality becomes an index of existential despair in the "antic disposition," the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy (III.i.55ff), the graveyard scene, and elsewhere. The connection—not the causality—is all that concerns us here, but it may be argued that a Renaissance audience would recognize a definite psychological pattern: loss of meaning in life leads to a feeling that life is meaningless because death-dominated.³

It is a paradox, but not an enigma, that the only refuge Hamlet can envisage is also death—death, that is, conceived as absolute non-being, the melting of flesh, sleeping without dreaming. Consciousness of mortality may be a source of pain, but the real culprit is consciousness itself. Physical death is contrasted with spiritual death, death in life. Here too the first soliloquy defines terms that apply throughout the play. Only in the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy does Hamlet again directly express a longing for extinction, but it is clearly reflected in his attitudes and actions. So, however, is the inability to commit suicide, actively and consciously to embrace extinction, that he initially attributes to the "canon" of the "Everlasting" (I.ii.131-32). This leads to a cornerstone of my argument. I hope to demonstrate that a suicidal fatalism constitutes a powerful psychological undertow, pulling Hamlet, as he swims towards the shore of his revenge, ineluctably out to sea.

So far we have material for a case history, but not for drama. There is no drama because there is no apparent conflict, no movement. Although the inky-cloaked figure has drawn aside an inner curtain, he remains in tableau. What initiates drama, setting in motion the previously static psychological forces, not to mention the plot, is his encounter with the ghost. The ghost has preoccupied many critics, including the psychologists. Unfortunately, questions about its nature and origin cannot be settled on the evidence of the text: finality requires an appeal to some external dogma, such as the notion that all apparitions are diabolical agents. Similarly, the standard psychoanalytic view of the ghost's significance depends on the Oedipal complex. This does not mean that speculation in either scholarly or contemporary psychological terms is illegitimate.

In fact, Shakespeare typically makes matters provocative and leaves them open-ended precisely when speculation—even of a kind he could not have anticipated—helps to illuminate substantial issues. I shall eventually be speculating too. But I shall be doing so on the basis of the ghost's demonstrable impact on Hamlet's attitudes towards life and death.

When he imposes upon Hamlet the duty of revenge, the ghost precipitates an acute conflict in Hamlet's consciousness. In effect, he imparts the message that Hamlet's existence is—or should be—far from meaningless, that indeed there is a very specific and urgent source of meaning. Once Hamlet dedicates himself to the ghost's command, an inner voice sustains that message and its corollary—that despair and longing for extinction imply a shameful evasion of a sacred obligation. The voice is strong enough to drive those sentiments underground and transform their expression. The first soliloquy is crucial, then, for in later moments of apparent self-revelation, the problem of fulfilling his task replaces general disaffection from life as the focus of Hamlet's continuing discontent. And even in the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy the suicidal impulse is kept at arm's length.

While Hamlet's obligation is initially and superficially to the ghost, it takes root as an obligation to himself—it is a matter of conscience. If this sounds like a radical statement, it is only because we tend to associate conscience with a socially acceptable sense of right and wrong. Various commentators, indeed, have sought to explain Hamlet's delay by his scruples about revenge, despite the difficulty of documenting such scruples or of reconciling them with the carnage quite casually wreaked by Hamlet among the more innocent. In fact, the only moral responsibility Hamlet consistently acknowledges is to his task; the only constant source of self-blame is his failure to accomplish it. Thus there is in Hamlet a kind of conscience we may call existential, rather than social, dealing as it does with personal meaning in life, however defined. And its presence implies a uniquely human extension of the survival instinct common to all living things—a psychological need for meaning in the face of the uniquely human awareness of inevitable death. Shakespeare, then, seems to be endowing Hamlet with the "will to meaning" which Viktor E. Frankl, originator of so-called "existential" psychiatry, identifies as the basic dynamic force in man, more fundamental than the "pleasure principle" of Freud or the Adlerian "will to power."⁴ Frankl might almost be describing Hamlet when he relates melancholia to "a feeling of inadequacy in the face of a task" and speaks of "conscientious anxiety or guilt feelings" which result from "obligations that arise out of the responsibility of . . . being."⁵

One further element of Hamlet's initial attitude towards death can now be added to the picture—a key, as it turns out, to the working of his mind throughout the play. It takes the ghost to confront Hamlet with his "will to meaning," but the first soliloquy's expression of meaninglessness is painful—not a shrug—only because that force is constitutionally present. It is merely being repressed, as Hamlet, attempting to avoid inner conflict, superimposes his perception of life as death-dominated. His glib citation of the divine prohibition against suicide—an uncharacteristic expression of conventional religious scruples—masks deeper, nonetheless conscientious, feelings. The traditional reason-passion dichotomy is at work, with an existential dimension. Both modern psychological theory and Renaissance moral doctrine describe the pattern: the knowledge that we are going to die is a rational inference from experience and observation; our rebellion against death is emotional, a function of instinctual assumptions of immortality, the product of our senses, which cannot, after all, conceive of non-existence.⁶ Thus what seems to be an emotional outburst on Hamlet's part depends on the supression of the most fundamental emotional impulse of all—what Francis Bacon called "the strength of all other human desires."⁷

Approaching the ghost through its existential significance for Hamlet makes it easier to respond to Shakespeare's suggestions as to why and how the ghost possesses that significance. Not only are we putting a lesser burden on the limited evidence, but we have a clear indication of direction: the ghost's influence is exerted through Hamlet's perception of his position in life, his sense of self. The obvious starting point is the fact that Hamlet's task involves a test of a particular emotion—Hamlet's love for his dead father. The very form of the ghost's initial command establishes this, with Hamlet's ambiguous interjection highlighting the point:

If thou didst ever thy dear father love—
Ham. O God!
Ghost. Revenge his foul and most unnatural murther.

(I.v.23-25)

Later the ghost broadens the issue, again in conditional terms, to include Hamlet's possession of natural feelings in general: "If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not" (81). It is the same stick later used by Claudius to goad Laertes, in whom Hamlet sees, as we do, the "portraiture" of his own "cause" (V.ii.77-78). In fact, the king strikingly echoes the ghost of his predecessor: "Laertes, was your father dear to you?" (IV.vii.107). But even without direct formulations or suggestive parallels, a link between Hamlet's commitment to revenge and his love for his father would be apparent. It comes closest to the surface, perhaps, in his self-accusations of slackness after the conversation with the Players and when he encounters the ghost again in the closet scene. Hamlet's dissatisfaction with the progress of his mission thus extends to his attitude towards his father. This has insistent and far-ranging implications. It strongly suggests—and this is, then, one aspect of the Freudian interpretation which may claim textual support—that Hamlet harbors feelings about his father at odds with those which he professes and on which his revenge depends.

This coincides with our first impression that his mourning is unnaturally ostentatious and defensive. Having got him to admit that death is "common," Gertrude, with an edge of exasperation, queries: "If it be,/Why seems it so particular with thee?" (I.ii.74-75). Ignoring her point, which is contained in "particular," Hamlet responds, instead, as if he senses an accusation in "seems": "Seems, madam? nay, it is, I know not'seems'" (76). And he proceeds, with striking self-consciousness, to enumerate his outward signs of mourning, claiming that all of these "forms, moods, shapes of grief (82) are inadequate to express what he feels, although he makes no attempt actually to describe his feelings:

. . . These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play,
But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

(83-86)

Claudius will remind us of this moment, too, in challenging Laertes'sincerity: ". . .are you like the painting of a sorrow,/ A face without a heart?" (IV.vii. 108-09). Naturally, Hamlet is here attacking Gertrude and Claudius, and "actions that a man might play" alludes to the hollowness of their grief when his father died, but the phrase also helps to convey an uneasiness about his own.

Hamlet's way of speaking about his father sustains and extends this impression. He idealizes the former king extravagantly, actually portraying him as superhuman both in his first soliloquy and in the closet scene. But superhuman seems to imply inhuman. There is little warmth either expressed by himself or attributed to his parent. Even his father's feeling for his mother is described in terms of godlike power: " . . . so loving to my mother/ That he might not beteem the winds of heaven/ Visit her face too roughly" (140-42). Consistently, the emphasis is on the sort of heroic qualities—"An eye like Mars, to threaten and command" (III.iv.57)—which would impose a difficult burden of emulation on an only son and heir.

Shakespeare quite openly presents a contrast in nature and values between old Hamlet and his son—a contrast pointed up by giving them the same name, as is not the case in extant earlier versions of the story. The former king is from the first established as a type of the heroic; he staked part of his kingdom on single combat with old Fortinbras; he lost his temper during a truce. We later learn that he subdued England. And, of course, his spirit demands revenge. This is a quintessentially "valiant" Hamlet, as Horatio terms him (I.i.84). It is hardly to endorse the romantic stereotype of "young" Hamlet (Horatio so distinguishes the son [170]) to observe that his melancholy, even as it distorts his personality, helps to reveal very different qualities: sensitivity, inclination to the arts, and, above all, a continuously active, super-subtle, electric intelligence. There is life in the critical cliché that he is temperamentally disposed towards thought rather than action.

Hamlet's alienation from the heroic ethic is part of his feeling of inadequacy in the face of his task. Even in his first soliloquy he links his sense of meaninglessness with inferiority to his father's heroic stature when he describes Claudius as "no more like my father/ Than I to Hercules" (I.ii. 152-53). Only in the "mole of nature" speech, however, does he dissociate himself from heroic values, and then only backhandedly, by condemning the coarse revelling custom "More honor'd in the breach than the observance" (I.iv.16). Moreover, those who actually exemplify the heroic receive his admiration and envy—and help us to appreciate his own "falling-off" (the Ghost's phrase for Gertrude's change to Claudius [I.v.47]). Young Fortinbras—worthy bearer of his father's name, death-defying redeemer of his family's honor, ultimate inheritor of the kingdom—would perhaps have been a more suitable son for old Hamlet. Laertes makes a conspicuously committed revenger of his father, no less so because of the qualms he develops about his treachery.

The change Hamlet has undergone is lamented by the distressed Ophelia. She portrays him as having been the consummate Renaissance prince, combining intellectual with martial and courtly accomplishments, highly conscious of his position, and while she is undoubtedly exaggerating, there is no reason not to accept the picture as essentially valid:

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword,
Th'expectation and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
Th'observ'd of all observers . . .

(III.i.151-54)

Such a son could surely have been counted on, in the play's terms, to revenge his father. It seems, then, that with his father's death, by whatever psychological mechanism, this role collapsed, revealing a nature fundamentally at odds with it, yet unable to generate any other source of meaning. When to this is added his apparent expectation, conveyed through his references to frustrated ambition, that he would succeed his father as king, we must conclude both that Hamlet depended upon his father for his sense of self and that this sense involved a denial of his true feelings parallel to that which he practices throughout the play. This takes us a long way towards understanding why his father's death should have deprived life of its meaning for Hamlet and elicits a definite connection between the problem of meaning and repressed hostility.

Thus the proof of love that the ghost requires is for Hamlet a means of expiating the feelings of guilt produced by less-than-loving impulses. This interpretation is strikingly in accord with modern understanding of the sort of melancholia, developing out of severe grief, with which Hamlet's condition has long been identified. There has been ample clinical confirmation of Freud's theory that the ambivalence present in every close relation can give rise to guilt feelings after the loss of a loved person.⁸ Hamlet's symptoms are typical. They include his idealization of the deceased and preoccupation with his image (witness the closet scene, when Hamlet forces his mother to compare likenesses of the two kings). Characteristic, too, is the alteration of his behavior. Afflicted persons may engage in apparently motiveless activities detrimental to their well-being. Changes in relations with friends and relatives are common: a person at once avoids former social contacts and is afraid of alienating them. He may also direct irrational hostility at particular persons, blaming them for the death or even imagining that the death was not natural, although he probably will not take any action against those he accuses. Elements of all these reactions are combined in Hamlet's case with the melancholic's suicidal feelings, loss of interest in the outside world, and sense of worthlessness. It is a condition which, according to Freud, tends to arise out of normal mourning when low self-esteem is involved. Moreover, extreme reactions often occur when the object of inadmissible hostility was also someone on whom the mourner's way of life and place in society depended.

This pattern suggests a straightforward psychological explanation of the violent hostility which Hamlet does express towards his mother. That hostility is associated with both instances of extreme idealization of his father and hence with his insecurity about his own feelings; it is also linked in the closet scene with his difficulty in performing the deed that serves as the love-test. Gertrude's essential crime, in Hamlet's eyes, is emotional betrayal of his father as the result of an ugly passion, and it would seem that he is trying to avoid facing up to the same thing, in effect deceiving his conscience. Indeed, in the closet scene, when his energy is directed towards awakening her remorse, it is almost as if he is seeking to transfer conscience itself to her. The ghost, however, intervenes, enforcing its earlier prohibition: "nor let thy soul contrive/ Against thy mother aught . . ." (I.v.85-86).

We are now ready for a natural extrapolation. There is no need to resist symbolically identifying the ghost with Hamlet's conscience. Such an identification (more the rule than the exception with Shakespearean ghosts) is consistent with—and adds depth to—the idea of the return of his father's spirit, the ghost's incarnation of the heroic, and Hamlet's ambivalent reaction. It also suits the remarkably close connection between the ghost and Hamlet's mind. This is impressed upon us by the ambiguity of the ghost's origin and the fact that it will speak only to Hamlet—in effect, has direct significance only for him. Even before he actually sees it, Hamlet intuits its message. And when it speaks, there is a striking fluidity of communication:

Ham. Alas, poor ghost!
Ghost. Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing
To what I shall unfold.
Ham. Speak, I am bound to hear.
Ghost. So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.
Ham. What?

(I.v.4-8)

The distance between speakers is far less than between father and daughter in The Tempest when Prospero recounts his painful history—the sort of structure Shakespeare might have employed had he wished to convey the ghost's supernatural remoteness from Hamlet. In addition, the ghost's emphasis on his sufferings after death, his own superiority to Claudius, and Gertrude's infidelity to his memory coincides strikingly with Hamlet's preoccupations. Hamlet himself actually links the ghost with his imagination twice, first in suggesting that the devil may have subjected him to this apparition "Out of my weakness and my melancholy" (II.ii.601), later in declaring to Horatio that if Claudius'response to the Mousetrap does not reveal his guilt, "It is a damned ghost that we have seen,/ And my imaginations are as foul/ As Vulcan's stithy" (III.ii.82-84).⁹

The changing presentation of the ghost mirrors changes in Hamlet's relation with his conscience. The inner force that the ghost represents is at first compelled to take wholly independent form by Hamlet's refusal to acknowledge it. In keeping with Hamlet's incipient recognition of responsibility, which began with his first news of the apparition, the ghost sheds some of this independence by going off alone with Hamlet before it speaks. As soon as its point is made, the specter vanishes, and there is a strong suggestion, as Hamlet reduces and concretizes its message in his "tables," then attempts to keep above its voice in the "cellarage" scene, that he is assimilating the ghost, taking it inside himself.¹⁰ This implies not only acknowledgment and acceptance of conscience, however, but the potential for gaining control over it. Indeed, the ghost appears to him only once more, when he is digressing flagrantly from his purpose, as well as disobediently attacking Gertrude. Even so, on this second occasion, the ghost is incompletely objectified and feebler: it is visible only to Hamlet, clad in a nightgown instead of armor, and both less assertive and less effective. Hamlet anticipates its message ("Do you not come your tardy son to chide . . . ?" [III.iv.106 ff.]), thus heading off any real chiding, and warns, improbably, that its appearance may soften his bloodthirsty dedication to his purpose. As if exorcized, the ghost silently "steals away" (134), and never again is Hamlet's commitment challenged by it.

Hamlet needs to gain and keep control over his conscience in order to avoid acknowledging that revenge is a fundamentally unwelcome and uncongenial duty. At only one point during the initial turmoil does he give way to his reluctance and resentment: "The time is out of joint—O cursed spite,/ That ever I was born to set it right!" (I.v. 188-89). But his subsequent self-reproaches for deficient passion, though used to reinforce his resolution, echo that outburst in a way that takes us to the heart of his difficulty in carrying out his task. Revenge, as Shakespeare and a number of his contemporaries present it, is fundamentally an act of passion, though reason must be employed in the performance. And as I have argued, it is essentially to prove his possession of particular emotions—love for his father and the impulse to counteract death's negation of life—that Hamlet undertakes his mission. That dedication, however, is founded on false premises, since these emotions, as functions of his sense of what he ought to feel, are actually rational fabrications, while his true emotions remain repressed. Thus Hamlet has no access to the emotional energy he must tap if he is to fulfill the role of revenger. No matter how hard he tries to reason himself into passion, no matter how successful he denies his real feelings, Hamlet simply cannot make himself believe, on the deepest level, in what he is doing. This is surely the most natural way of understanding the instability of the revenger role and, therefore, Hamlet's delay.

Since Hamlet can keep his conscience at bay only by convincing himself that he is faithful to the ghost's command, his behavior after the initial encounter is largely conditioned by the problem, now at once more difficult and more urgent, of repressing his instinctual faculty and substituting the proper artificial emotions for it. But the other component of his original posture, the inclination to escape his inner burden through simple extinction, accepting death's verdict of meaninglessness, becomes an increasingly important influence. For the very confrontation with his responsibility that makes this inclination unacceptable to consciousness greatly enhances the attraction of the solution. And Hamlet's mission of revenge proves the perfect means, not only of concealing but of advancing his suicidal tendency, for it allows him to create dangers to which he may expose himself on the pretext of passionate commitment to his task.

Hamlet's pretence of emotionalism begins, as we have seen, with the ostentatious mourning which Claudius, playing straight into his hands, dismisses as "To reason most absurd" (I.ii.103). The "mole of nature" speech makes a claim, it seems, for a more generalized irrationality, through which Hamlet's distrust of the passions and contempt for the heroic are nonetheless discernible. With his first sight of the ghost, a reckless passionate heroism becomes the essence of the self-image he seeks to develop, while suicidal fatalism slips smoothly into place beneath the surface:

I do not set my life at a pin's fee,
And for my soul, what can it do to that,
Being a thing immortal as itself?

(I.iv.65-67)

In contrast to his earlier invocation of the "canon gainst self-slaughter," religion here serves the suicidal impulse: if Hamlet were really concerned about his immortal soul, he would not be in doubt as to what could happen to it.

Hamlet's "antic disposition" similarly advances both his need to appear recklessly irrational and his self-destructiveness. To be perceived as acting contrary to reason now bolsters his sense of dedication to revenge, as do his insinuations of grievance against Claudius. At the same time, his behavior seems to have no practical purpose; certainly, its effect is merely to alert and provoke the king. Hamlet is setting in motion, however unconsciously, the forces that will destroy him. Indeed, the self-fulfilling fatalism built into the "antic disposition" can be related to the element of genuine mental disturbance often perceived in his pretended madness. For his state of mind is characterized, not by the suspension of reason's control over the irrational, but by indulgence of his constant tendency to give way to pure rationality, including the rational perception of life as meaningless and death-dominated. Thus the outstanding feature of his "madness" is his racing intellect, the free association of ideas on rational rather than emotional principles, as manifested, notably, in word-play. Instead of projecting an inner reality upon the outside world, he inflates, distorts, and virtually wallows in his perceptions of that world.

Hamlet's need to repress his real emotions contributes to this unfeigned component of his distraction. When his emotions are aroused and in danger of coming to the surface, his rational faculty must ruthlessly contain them and put the proper substitutes in their place. This helps to account for his agitation and assertiveness, with manic overtones, when he is first attempting to adapt himself to the role of revenger and when, following the success of the Mousetrap, he finds his duty all too plainly set out for him again. Similarly, his extreme treatment of Ophelia can best be explained as involving—and symbolically suggesting—the rejection of his emotional faculty. As she describes it, his behavior in her closet suggests that he is actually identifying himself with the ghost (he looked, she tells us, "As if he had been loosed out of hell/ To speak of horrors" [II.i.80-81]) and ritualistically repudiating their relation—a relation that has evidently been an outlet for true emotion. In the encounter we later witness, Ophelia seems to awaken unacceptable feelings that Hamlet must violently deny; hence he refuses to acknowledge the tokens of his former commitment: "I never gave you aught" (III.i.95). Associating Ophelia with sexuality has the effect of cheapening his emotion, making it contemptible and therefore deserving of repudiation. The probable double meaning of "nunn'ry" (120, 137, etc.)¹¹ reflects not only the classically melancholic perception of corruption beneath apparent virtue, but also the essential equality in his mind of promiscuity and absolute chastity: either condition would remove Ophelia as the threat which, as a legitimate object of passion, she currently poses to his reason-dictated identity.

The "antic disposition" is hardly sufficient to sustain Hamlet's sense of himself as a revenger, as his self-reproaches and continuing obsession with mortality indicate. Accordingly, he engages in a series of maneuvers calculated to strengthen this sense by appearing to bring revenge closer, if only by proving his commitment to or capacity for it. In fact, these actions, which largely determine the subsequent course of the play, take him steadily farther from his goal, so that his eventual success becomes fortuitous and highly ironic. At the same time, they serve Hamlet's suicidal fatalism by further goading Claudius and advertising his own vulnerability. And, consistently, the rational element is so pronounced as to vitiate the pretence of strong emotion.

The first of these revenge-substitutes is the Mousetrap, which will supposedly advance Hamlet's cause by testing the veracity of the ghost. Yet its practical value is highly suspect. Hamlet is certain to arouse Claudius further. Public exposure of the king—the obvious possible advantage he might gain—seems to play no part in his thinking, and he makes no attempt to bring it about. (The court apparently puts Claudius'ambiguous reaction down to "choler" [III.ii.303] over what is, after all, a flagrant insult and implicit threat.) Hamlet's soliloquy after the departure of the Players presents his device as conceived in passionate fury—an inspired solution to his chief problem. In fact, the need to test the ghost never occurs to him until the opportunity is thrust into his hands, while the movement in the speech from a complaint of insufficient passion to passionate display is carefully controlled. Following as it does on the heels of Hamlet's intense interest in Pyrrhus, the archetypal ruthless revenger, the soliloquy is all the more clearly self-dramatizing, aimed at supplying a plausible emotional foundation for his surrogate revenge. Shakespeare even suggests, by having Hamlet arrange for the inserted speech before the Players leave the stage, that he has arrived at the idea well before he pretends to have to jog his reason into action with "About, my brains!" (II.ii.588 ). It seems that he is able to admit even limited guilt over his slackness because he has already developed a means of defusing it. When Claudius'crime is confirmed, however, responsibility is bound to return upon him even more oppressively. Ironically, it is precisely the "conscience of the King" (605) that will prevent Hamlet from deceiving his own.

In the meanwhile, he has not overcome his concern with death any more than he has completely persuaded himself of his dedication to revenge, to judge from the "To be, or not to be" soliloquy. True, that soliloquy does possess a new detachment, which, despite the wish for extinction expressed in it, might indicate an advance over his painfully helpless consciousness of mortality. The source of this detachment, however, precludes any such interpretation. For Hamlet now initiates a psychological sleight-of-hand that proves extremely important to the succeeding action. He begins to deal with his continuing sense of death's domination of existence by reducing it to a simple fear of physical death, susceptible in a straightforward way to two forces—courage, however produced, and intellect, which is Hamlet's natural strength and the medium of the soliloquy itself. It is the same trick he will very shortly employ in his encounter with Ophelia, where threatening love becomes contemptible sex. But this re-definition is of the deepest "question" of all. The principle has been defined by Paul Tillich: "Anxiety strives to become fear, because fear can be met by courage."¹²

As with revenge itself, therefore, Hamlet is turning to substitution and surrogate in an attempt to avoid confronting responsibility. He pretends that he is actually changing the balance of power between himself and death, when in fact he is taking death's negation of life for granted. This evasion is intertwined with another: he can think of mastery of the fear of physical death as bringing him closer to revenge, while beneath the surface it is supporting his suicidal fatalism. These maneuvers will come into their own as the play progresses. Already, however, he is able to provide himself with a further relatively acceptable excuse for his failure to take more decisive action: it is almost with relief that he counts himself among the "cowards" (III.i.82) at the conclusion of the soliloquy.

A rhetorical irony, I believe, unfolds Hamlet's self-deception.¹³ "To be, or not to be" (55) does indeed impress us as the question confronting Hamlet, since "being" and "not being" strongly suggest having meaning in life and not having it, respectively. But Hamlet is actually talking only about physical survival. His main point is that fear of physical death (including fear of consciousness after death and eschatological uncertainty in general) deters him from action that would lead to death, whether suicide or revenge. Indeed, he virtually equates the two—to the point of referring to both collectively as "enterprises of great pitch and moment" (85). This at once confirms that he is thinking of death in physical rather than in existential terms and signals a distortion of the risk in support of that perspective. We know, however, that action really offers Hamlet an opportunity of overcoming death through meaning, while a passive physical existence implies meaninglessness and so subjection to death. His much-discussed conclusion that "conscience does make cowards of us all" (82) may be intended to highlight the discrepancy: he appears to be using "conscience" to mean "consciousness," hence the sort of intellectual consideration in which he has been engaged, whereas "conscience" in the moral sense demands that he risk physical death in the service of spiritual life.

In his second question, then, which transposes the first into moral and universal terms as if to make his dilemma less immediately painful, Hamlet follows the natural order of thought and creates a simple parallel structure, associating "being" or "life" with the first possible course: "to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune" (56-57)—endurance for the sake of survival. "Not being" or "death" is identified with action, which he presents as involving a doomed and desperate heroism: to "take arms against a sea of troubles" (58) suggests a hopeless struggle, even apart from the seeming allusion to suicidal Celtic warriors.¹⁴ It is the prospect of death inherent in this alternative that sets Hamlet thinking directly of non-existence: "To die, to sleep—" (59). Yet on the existential level, chiastic order obtains: the passive choice implies "not being," the active, "being." Thus the notorious difficulty of the first lines, the overlay of reductive syntax and logic upon resistant ideas, is functional: it develops a crucial ironic distinction between our point of view and Hamlet's.

After the success of the Mousetrap, Hamlet takes refuge from his renewed sense of responsibility in verbally abusing his mother—an exercise less obviously concerned with her spiritual welfare than he pretends. That it is a diversion from the course of his duty is highlighted by his failure to seize the salient opportunity for revenge offered him on the way to her closet. The underlying reason for this failure is the same as for his larger one: he does not have access to the emotional energy which would be necessary to initiate an attack on the praying king. Having tried and failed to reason himself into action ("Now might I do it pat . . ." [III.iii.73 ff.]), he admits reason in its own guise ("That would be scann'd . . ." [75 ff.]) to supply the pretence that sending the king's soul to heaven would not constitute true revenge—a use of the concept of immortality that tends to strengthen our scepticism concerning his faith.

Hamlet can easily generate violence towards his mother, however, and it reaches out fatally to include Polonius. This murder, in Hamlet's view, manifests his blood-thirsty passion, specifically his capacity for killing Claudius. Yet Shakespeare pointedly portrays Hamlet's lethal response to the noise he hears as a further abdication of responsibility. The unusually careful continuity of scenes leading up to the incident ensures (all the more because of the generally loose conventions of stage time and place) that we do not expect Hamlet to suppose, any more than we do, that the eavesdropper might be the king. He has just passed Claudius, after all, on his way to the chamber. His automatic first response to his mother's horrified, "O me, what hast thou done?" (III.iv.25), is a spontaneous admission of ignorance: "Nay, I know not" (26). Only then does the hopeful thought creep in that he somehow might have accomplished his task: "is it the King?" (26). When the truth is discovered, wishful thinking reverses the balance between fantasy and reality to produce the confident claim that he had believed the eavesdropper to be Claudius: "Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!/ I took thee for thy better" (31-32). "Take thy fortune" (32), he adds, expressing a new sense of identification with, hence control over, fate. And when, towards the end of the scene, he depicts himself as the "scourge and minister" (175) of heaven, he even more boldly uses his supposed fidelity to his task to rationalize his irresponsibility. Hamlet has moved still farther from revenge, has indeed substantially hastened his own destruction, but the illusion of commitment has received powerful support.

So strong is this illusion that Hamlet is able not only to disarm the ghost, as suggested earlier, but also to evade the knowledge that his forthcoming journey to England, which he mentions almost casually at the end of the closet scene, promises to put even greater distance between himself and the possibility of achieving meaning. He has been aware, we now learn, both that his recent opportunity of killing Claudius might well be his last for an indefinite period and that failure to act would put his life in danger, for he rightly suspects a plot against him. Despite the secret attraction of extinction, conscience compels him to parry the anticipated blow—in such a way, moreover, as to reinforce further his sense of himself as a revenger, since he will be striking at Claudius'agents. The almost grotesque rationality of the projected murder—he looks forward to it as a sort of intellectual game ("'tis the sport to have the enginer/ Hoist with his own petar" [III.iv.206-07])—confirms that he is again intellectually manufacturing evidence of emotional commitment to revenge. Yet there is no indication even that he intends to return to Denmark: in fact, his return is almost wholly beyond his control—and therefore highly ironic.

In his soliloquy on the march of Fortinbras'army just before his departure, Hamlet again focuses on courage and attempts to hold cowardice responsible for his slackness. Not surprisingly, there is an undertone of contempt in his admiration of the soldiers'readiness to face death for "a fantasy and trick of fame" (IV.iv.61). This suggests both his real feelings about the heroic ethic and his deep conviction that all self-assertion is pitifully futile. As in the soliloquy proposing the Mousetrap, he can acknowledge even limited guilt only because he has established a revenge substitute. He again uses reason to work himself up to his supposedly passionate resolution: "O, from this time forth,/ My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!" (65-66). Indeed, his starting point is the self-revealing assumption that reason must direct him: "Sure He that made us . . . / . . . gave us not/ That capability and godlike reason/ To fust in us unus'd" (36-39). His concession that overactive reason may have caused his delay is understandably guarded—"Bestial oblivion" (40) is, absurdly, given equal weight as a possible cause. More significantly, this admission is made to serve the pretence that fear of physical death is his main obstacle: when he talks of "thinking too precisely on th'event" (41), he surely means "event" in the common sense of "outcome" or "consequences."

Hamlet's new surrogate for revenge involves a carefully managed confrontation with and triumph over death. As it happens, he gets the chance to reinforce this pattern by recklessly courageous conduct during the sea-fight. The attack of the pirates enables him to expose himself to danger fatalistically while fostering an heroic self-image in defiance of physical death. It is particularly ironic that this action, so thoroughly evasive in character, should bring him face to face with his responsibility again. And yet his unexpected return lends the voyage exploitable symbolic overtones of rebirth, especially in light of his earlier reference to death as "The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn/ No traveller returns" (III.i.78-79). He has provided, after all, surrogate victims not only for Claudius, but for himself.

Hamlet arrives back in Denmark, then, however involuntarily, with a sense of having mastered death and so, he imagines, removed the only barrier to his revenge. In his vaguely menacing declaration to Claudius, ". . . I am set naked on your kingdom" (IV.vii.43-44), he projects an image of himself as the king's great adversary. Surreptitiously, though, he is inviting conspiracy: "naked" may bring out the suggestion of rebirth, but for Claudius the effect, reinforced by the postscript, "alone" (52), must be to highlight Hamlet's vulnerability. The trap Hamlet has set for himself will shortly be sprung. Indeed, his strong sense of impending doom exposes the fatalism of his deliberate encounter with physical mortality in the graveyard scene. Hamlet evidently wishes further to demonstrate and consolidate his power over death, but the underlying reality of his surrender is powerfully communicated. For even as he applies reason to death to diminish its horror, he associates himself more closely with reason's message of meaninglessness: "Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till'a find it stopping a bunghole?" (V.i.203-04). Even for Horatio, the rationalist, this is reason taken to an extreme—"to consider too curiously" (205).

Before Hamlet's self-destructive impulse finds fulfillment, however, his conscience produces yet another more public renewal of the role of passionate revenger, although the gap between illusion and reality is almost pitifully wide. His obvious pangs of guilt on witnessing Ophelia's funeral have little to do, it seems, with his responsibility for her death—he never refers to this. Instead, they are a direct response to Laertes'passionate outburst, which arouses in him a sense of emotional deficiency. Ophelia's earlier association with his emotional faculty helps to define the threat he perceives. So does the suggestion of passionate defiance of death in Laertes'leap into the grave, when he embraces the corpse and proclaims his wish to be buried with it. Conscience compels Hamlet to declare his own passion and imitate this leap, challenging Laertes'identity—"What is he whose grief / Bears such an emphasis" (V.i.254-55)—and asserting his own in self-consciously royal terms: "This is I, / Hamlet the Dane!" (257-58). The role of revenger, his image of himself as his father's son, is at stake. His wildly rhetorical affirmations of grief and love, his defiance of Laertes to absurd proofs of feeling, are flagrant attempts to demonstrate the presence of emotion. Yet here, too, Hamlet's actions secretly advance his suicidal fatalism. He could hardly have chosen a more effective way of impressing Claudius with his increasingly dangerous unpredictability, as well as his openness to countermeasures. And he has even further antagonized Laertes.

Hamlet does his best to sustain, in the final scene, the impetus he has given the role of revenger by interrupting the funeral. In his conversation with Horatio, he triumphantly presents his highly rational machinations against Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as showing "rashness" (V.ii.7)—the very quality he had spontaneously disclaimed with Laertes'hand on his throat (V.i.261). His use of his father's signet to seal the forged letter further links his actions with his task and the assertion of his identity as his father's true son. Now he self-dramatizingly enumerates his injuries at Claudius'hands (V.ii.64 ff.), finally affirming the morality of revenge as if doubt of this has caused his delay. This is a new pretence, and it would be transparent at this point, even if it were not attached to more familiar self-deceptions: the attempt to produce passion intellectually and the identification with a higher power. His reference to "a divinity that shapes our ends,/ Rough-hew them how we will" (10-11) conclusively exposes the despairing reality beneath the illusion of commitment: here, in the very shadow of death, Hamlet is objectifying and formalizing his submission to events, to meaninglessness—to death itself, as "ends" helps make us aware. He carries this attitude even further just before the fencing match, when, with intense fatalism, he justifies his imprudence and supposed impetuosity on the grounds that a time is appointed for the death of all things ("If it be now . . ." [220 ff.]). He thereby makes it unmistakable that he anticipates his own, but then defiance of physical death has become, in his mind, an expression of active dedication to revenge. It is surely heroic fortitude and noble scorn for this transitory existence that he wishes to project.

Hamlet's identification with the passionate Laertes ("For by the image of my cause I see/ The portraiture of his" [77-78]) provides an appropriate background for his acquiescence in their specious reconciliation and the fencing match itself. That he senses a plot is self-evident, although direct confirmation of how much he anticipates could hardly be expected. If Hamlet allowed definite suspicions into consciousness, conscience would prevent his participation; as it is, his query about the length of the foils (265) hints at a need to assure himself that he is on his guard, while there is no question that he defends himself against Laertes with all his considerable skill. And, paradoxically, it is conscience, I think, which compels him to continue the match beyond the first hit, refusing the king's offer of drink. For the dramatic and the psychological contexts combine to suggest that Hamlet guesses the wine is poisoned.

Surely, alert and intuitive as we have seen him to be, Hamlet could not fail to suspect the ploy in Claudius'clumsy attempt to make him drink after merely gaining a single hit. And this suspicion cannot be suppressed because it is based on concrete unignorable evidence: the king ostentatiously puts a foreign object, the supposed pearl, into the cup just before urging it on Hamlet. That Hamlet later believes this to have been poison is the point of his sarcastic taunt, "Is thy union here?" (326), and it is far less natural that he should make the connection retrospectively, after the presence of poison is confirmed. When Gertrude drinks, then, Hamlet would also know that she is taking poison, and his ejaculation, "Good madam!" (290), is more likely to be in response to this fact than to her bland encouragement. Any doubt must be dispelled, we sense, by Claudius'urgent "Gertrude, do not drink" (290), presuming that this is spoken within Hamlet's hearing (surely the natural staging). His own refusal, "I dare not drink yet, madam; by and by" (293), resonates, for us, with a secondary meaning: conscience will not permit him to taste death as she has done, but he will follow her in his own way before long.

So understood, his continued participation in the contest comprises a microcosm of the action from the point at which Hamlet is assigned his task: confronted with death in the form of the poisoned cup, he can neither give himself up to it, despite the attraction of oblivion, nor encounter and overcome it through emotion-based action, thus satisfying his conscience. Rather, he continues to expose himself to danger while attempting to sustain the image of himself as capable of such action. When he is wounded by Laertes, however, he cannot any longer ignore the treacherous character of the match, and with Gertrude's collapse response to Claudius himself also becomes necessary. Even so, instead of directly challenging the king, Hamlet diffuses and depersonalizes his accusation in what seems a final attempt, at once feeble and desperate, to avoid responsibility: "O villainy! Ho, let the door be lock'd!/ Treachery! Seek it out" (V.ii.311-12).

Unexpectedly, the answer to his demand comes from Laertes, together with the news that he is virtually a dead man. Hamlet is reacting to this when he echoes Laertes'disclosure of the fatal device: "The point envenom'd too!" (321). Only when he has felt the full impact of the revelation does he exclaim, "Then, venom, to thy work" (322), and turn to attack Claudius. The clear connection, pointed up by "then," between his ability to do so and the knowledge that he is dying implies that this knowledge has liberated his emotions at last. The mechanism is easy to grasp: not only has his suicidal fatalism been fulfilled, but he has expiated his guilt over his feelings about his father by incurring a similar fate. His sense of an obligation to revenge his father collapses, together with his false reason-produced emotions, and he is free to act according to his own emotional impulses and on his own behalf. It is the injuries to himself, not to his father, which he finally revenges upon Claudius. Thus, contrary to revenge convention, Hamlet makes no reference to his father or to the fulfillment of his task: he merely calls Claudius "incestious, murd'rous, damned Dane" (325)—more an evocation of his general iniquity than an invocation of specific past crimes.

There is another source of energy. Hamlet's impulse to assert himself in the face of death has been liberated with the emotional faculty as a whole. This is confirmed by his strong reaction in his last moments against death. Despite his formulaic "Heaven make thee free of it!" (332) in response to Laertes'wish for forgiveness, he speaks as if he believes he is facing the end of real existence: "the rest is silence" (358). His concern with the proper preservation of his memory impels him to interfere violently with Horatio's attempted suicide; he seeks to project himself into the future through his "dying voice" (356) for Fortinbras'succession. His killing of Claudius, then, again contrary to revenge convention, has not made his own death superfluous: Hamlet's true nature could hardly derive ultimate fulfillment from such an act. It is an essential part of his tragedy that his spirit is freed sufficiently to begin its quest for that nature only by the certainty of imminent death.

It is tragic, too, that Hamlet's private agony is largely lost on the survivors—even on his only friend, who can "Truly deliver" (386) little more than the bare facts. The renewal that Fortinbras effects is of the very heroic values that enslaved and repelled Hamlet. These will now circumscribe his memory:

Let four captains
Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage,
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have prov'd most royal; and for his passage,
The soldiers'music and the rite of war
Speak loudly for him.

(395-400)

The failure to recognize that Hamlet was indeed "put on," confronted with responsibility of the most fundamental kind, implies a failure to grasp the spiritual dimension of mortality, to understand that the final carnage is a metaphor for its ultimate cause:

O proud death,
What feast is toward in thine eternal cell . . .

(364-65)

But that understanding is ours.

Notes

¹ G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire, 4th ed., rev. and enl. (London: Methuen, 1949), p. 20. Other critics who have seen death as a central theme or principle of unity include Theodore Spencer, Death and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1936), pp. 180-81; Adrien Bonjour, "On Artistic Unity in Hamlet," English Studies, 21 (1939), 193-202; C. S. Lewis, "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?" Proceedings of the British Academy, 28 (1942), 139-54; L. C. Knights, "Prince Hamlet," in Explorations (London: Chatto and Windus, 1946), pp. 66-77, and An Approach to Hamlet (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), pp. 38-41 and 51-54; Robert Ornstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy (Madison, WI: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1960), pp. 237-40; and Harry Morris, "Hamlet as a Memento Mori Poem," PMLA, 85 (1970), 1035-40. There are inevitably many points of agreement between the ideas developed in the present study and the work of these and other commentators. As far as I am aware, however, such correspondences are either quite general or quite narrow, and to document them in such a broad reinterpretation as this would be more distracting than useful.

² The text cited throughout is The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

³ I have discussed this pattern in "Meaning and Mortality in Some Renaissance Revenge Plays," University of Toronto Quarterly, 49 (1979), 1-17.

⁴ Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, rev. and enl. ed. of From Death-Camp to Existentialism, trans. Ilse Lasch (Boston: Beacon, 1962), p. 99. A recent study by Walter N. King, Hamlet's Search for Meaning (Athens, GA: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1982) also finds this theory of Frankl to be relevant (pp. 127-34), although Freud and Erikson are given at least equal weight in his interpretation. While King's work employs some terms and concepts similar to my own, its application of them is very different. He sees Hamlet as engaged in an essentially religious quest, finally fulfilled through faith in divine providence. Hamlet's attitude towards death is not emphasized; the Oedipal complex is.

⁵ Viktor E. Frankl, The Doctor and the Soul, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, 2nd ed., rev. and enl. (New York: Knopf, 1972), p. 202.

⁶ These ideas are expounded, with reference to both Renaissance and modern sources, in my unpublished doctoral thesis, "Mortality and Immortality in Shakespeare's Later Tragedies and Romances," University of Toronto 1976, pp. 1-34.

⁷The Advancement of Learning, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al., III (1859; fac. rpt. Stuttgart: Friedrich Fromann Verlag G. Holzboog, 1963), 424.

⁸ See Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, trans. and ed. James Strachey in collab. with Anna Freud, XIII (London: Hogarth Press and the Inst. of Psycho-Analysis, 1953), 60 and 83-88, and Mourning and Melancholia, in Complete Psychological Works, XIV (1957), 250-51; Charles W. Wahl, "The Fear of Death," Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, 22 (1958), rpt. in The Meaning of Death, ed. Herman Feifel (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), pp. 22-25; Charles Anderson, "Aspects of Pathological Grief and Mourning," International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 30 (1949), 52; Helene Deutsch, "Absence of Grief," trans. Edith Jackson, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 6 (1937), 12; and Edgar N. Jackson, "Grief and Religion," in Feifel, ed., The Meaning of Death, p. 233. The account of typical manifestations which follows incorporates elements from Freud, Mourning and Melancholia, pp. 244-46; Jackson, p. 233; and Erich Lindemann, "Symptomatology and Management of Grief," in Death and Identity, ed. Robert L. Fulton (New York: Wiley, 1965), pp. 188-98.

⁹ The devil's responsibility for some melancholic visions was, of course, a conventional idea, but Robert Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy (ed. Holbrook Jackson, Everyman's Lib. [London: Dent, 1932]), affirmed that most such visions were self-generated: "But most part it is in the brain that deceives them, although I may not deny but that oftentimes the devil deludes them, takes his opportunity to suggest, and represent vain objects to melancholy men, and such as are ill affected" (I, 427).

¹⁰ Despite the contrary opinion of various commentators including A. C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 1905), p. 412, and Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, 2nd ed. (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 140, to keep above the voice seems to me the most convincing reason for Hamlet's shifting ground, since he responds approvingly to it and is attempting consciously to fulfill the injunction to "Swear" (I.v.149, 155, etc.), not to avoid it. While Hamlet assumes that the others also hear the voice, I think that they would react to it more explicitly if they did: as it is, they seem to be reacting merely to Hamlet's strange behavior. This is, however, a minority view—see Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1982), I.v.l59n.

¹¹ See the thorough review of the evidence for such a double meaning by Jenkins, p. 493.

¹² Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1952), p. 39. Tillich has just cited Hamlet's soliloquy to illustrate the principle that existential anxiety underlies the fear of death, although he does not consider that Hamlet may be engaged in the very psychological strategy he goes on to describe.

¹³ The following reading of the soliloquy takes sides on various long-standing controversies in proposing a substantially new interpretation. A comprehensive discussion of the chief issues and arguments may be found in Jenkins, pp. 484-93, although I by no means agree with all of his conclusions.

¹⁴ Jenkins, pp. 490-91.