Hamlet, Revenge!

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Last Updated August 15, 2024.

SOURCE: “Hamlet, Revenge!,” in The Hudson Review, Vol. 51, No. 2, Summer, 1998, pp. 310-28.

[In the following essay, Bell contends that Hamlet does not fulfill his expected role as a revenger because Shakespeare's intent was to satirize the revenge-play genre that was popular at the end of the sixteenth century.]

When, at the end of the second act, Hamlet bawls, “Bloody, bawdy villain! / Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless Villain! / Oh vengeance!”, the audience laughed, I guess, the way modern audiences laugh when viewing Mel Brooks's Young Frankenstein. They recognized a horror-thriller style old-fashioned enough to be funny; this was the way the Revenger hero of Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy had ranted on the stage fifteen years before. Shakespeare's modern editors disagree about the “Oh vengeance,” which appears only in the 1623 Folio version of the play. The editor of the Arden edition, who commits himself to an earlier Quarto text, where it is missing, thinks it must have been put in later by someone else, probably an actor. It jars, he feels, with the brooding self-reproach Hamlet has just expressed after hearing the player orate about the avenging of Achilles by his son Pyrrhus and about the grief of Hecuba over slaughtered Priam. The editor of the New Cambridge Hamlet thinks Shakespeare wrote it himself: “This cry, the great climax of the rant with which Hamlet emulates the Player, exhausts his futile self-recrimination, and turns, in proper disgust, from a display of verbal histrionics to more practical things.” I, too, think it was Shakespeare's, but I disagree about its tone and intent. It is really a nudge to the funny bone of the sophisticated theatergoer of 1602. It resulted from the irrepressible leaking out of the playwright's satiric impulse in the midst of high seriousness.

If so, it is a small sign of what happens elsewhere. The elocutionary set piece that has moved Hamlet is itself an imitation of the style of a creaky older play about Queen Dido of Carthage. Hamlet is not put off by its stiff rhetoric; the mercilessness of the blood-smeared Pyrrhus and Hecuba's lamentation stir him profoundly by their application to his case. But the theater buffs in the audience must have been amused. Perhaps also by “The Murder of Gonzago,” which the company of strolling players puts on according to Hamlet's instruction. This is to be another “Revenge Tragedy”—as the type is called—one, like Kyd's, with a Spanish setting, but it will represent his own father's murder and so cause his uncle to acknowledge his crime. Its parodic character is indicated by Hamlet's impatient exclamation to the actor who comes on as the murderer: “leave thy damnable faces and begin. Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.”

“The Murder of Gonzago” is, I would say, a fictitious play invented by Shakespeare as an example of the kind of play he makes fun of at various points in Hamlet. Though Hamlet is supposed to have added some lines there is no evidence of the voice we know him by in the fragment we hear before a terrified Claudius rises from his seat. It is stale bombast cast into out-of-style couplets, unlike the naturalistic dialogue enclosing it. Shakespeare seems to have wanted to exaggerate its theatricality. He sets it in contrast with the reality of a modern—though medieval—Denmark. At the same time, Shakespeare is letting the audience know it is going to see the unfolding in his play, despite its realism, of just another such tale of teeth-grinding and bloody setting-to-rights as those it used to find so thrilling. The Hamlet world is a contemporary realm, and the thought behind it, as I shall be suggesting, belongs to that latest Renaissance moment which Shakespeare shares with Montaigne. Yet it deliberately frames its modernity within an archaic kind of story (ultimately finding its model in Seneca), that of its probable source, a lost Revenge Tragedy, also by Kyd. This “ur-Hamlet,” as the scholars call it, was undoubtedly the play remembered by a contemporary as including a “ghost which cried so miserably at the Theatre, like an oyster-wife, Hamlet revenge.” Shakespeare's Hamlet has all the prescribed features of the once popular genre (and its surprising retro success helped bring the genre back into popularity). It has a ghost who demands revenge for a murder and a hero who promises to achieve it, pretends to be mad, indulges in philosophic soliloquies, and does not succeed in his purpose till the end of five acts. Even the play-within-a-play is a favorite of older plays of this kind. Like The Spanish Tragedy, which has all the features just mentioned, Hamlet also has a secondary revenge plot which brings about the completion of the main plot; it is Laertes' drive to avenge the death of his father, Polonius, which takes the action to its finish. The audience would recognize these reprises and wait for the turn Shakespeare would put on them. What he did was employ them all with a difference—make a teasing mystery of the delay of the execution of revenge which once had served just to extend suspense, make his hero’s detached soliloquies exceed in profundity and poetry anything the theater had ever heard, make the madness the Revenger is supposed to feign to conceal his purposes an occasion for paradoxical wit and cynical philosophy as well as a symptom of the hero’s mental anguish, introduce in Laertes the model of the effective Revenger yet use Hamlet’s relation to the Polonius family as an opportunity to contrast him with “normal,” or ordinary, persons. But, as though reminding the audience of his effort to reincarnate the old Revenger persona, Hamlet will still shout at the end, when Laertes threatens to outdo him in melodramatic grief for Ophelia, “I’ll rant as well as thou!”

Hamlet’s postmodern status as “metatheater”—theater about theater—is obvious enough. We might suspect a personal self-reflexiveness in it. Was not Shakespeare himself an actor? Shakespeare was a theater man, fascinated by the problems of his craft—and his Hamlet not only knows the history of Elizabethan drama but gives judicious advice to actors and can act creditably himself, can write a dramatic script or part of one, and he loves to see a play put on, quite aside from its possible use as a conscience-catcher. As a result, there are, from the earliest moment to the last, occasions when the curtain between the theatrical and the supposedly real is rent—beginning with Hamlet’s remark when the ghost can be heard groaning as it retreats to its purgatorial exile: “You hear this fellow in the cellarage”—“cellarage” being a term that reminds the audience that an actor is making noises down in the space beneath the stage.

“Metatheatricality,” as it may be too modish to call it, is detectable elsewhere in the literature of the Elizabethan stage, and Shakespeare’s earlier plays give an emphasis to common terms that suggest the theater, words like tragedy, play, perform, show, act, scene or part, are frequent. Hamlet is particularly rich in such language. What has not been noted is that Hamlet’s theater interest—and all the hints and references to the theatrical in the play—constitute a metaphoric motif and the tracking sign of a dominating theme. Hamlet abounds in situations in which the actors are audiences. When Hamlet observes Claudius at prayer, he is the unseen watcher who does not detect the deception in the performance; the King’s repentance is momentary only and will not gain him salvation. Hamlet himself is watched by Polonius from behind an arras both in the “nunnery” scene with Ophelia and parallel scene with his mother in her closet. With Ophelia, Hamlet is, perhaps, consciously “playing a scene” for her benefit but unaware of hidden witnesses. Most productions of the play want to make it somehow possible for Hamlet to demonstrate that he knows about Polonius’ proximity—and improvise a rustle behind the arras at which Hamlet starts before he asks Ophelia where her father is. But the theatricality of the situation lies precisely in Hamlet’s oblivion—as an actor must be oblivious of the audience in the darkened theater. Meanwhile, the “nunnery” scene itself is more than an occasion for the abuse of poor Ophelia; it is a commentary on the unreliability of appearances, for Hamlet will tell her not to trust the seeming in men, not even his own pose as a lover (“We are arrant knaves all, believe none of us”). He abuses her as though she were herself a deceiving person—or an actress (“God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another”).

In the play-within-the-play, the player king is a representation not only of the dead King Hamlet but of Claudius, an usurper who plays at being the true king (“a king of shreds and patches”), and brings to mind the way Richard II is represented continually as one who can say, “thus play I in one person many people.” “The Murder of Gonzago” is a representation of the main play’s actuality. But this actuality is itself the matter of the play, Shakespeare’s Hamlet. And this flow of theatricality expands outward from the edge of the stage. Those ranks of interested spectators in the Danish court who watch the performance by the visiting players are mirrored by the theater filled with the spectators of Hamlet. Each spectator in either audience is, besides, not only a viewer of the action but an actor, too. “All the world’s a stage,” as Jacques says in As You Like It. We who watch Hamlet are not only spectators but actors in parts prescribed—some larger cosmic theater enclosing us.

That Shakespeare did not take the Revenge plot altogether seriously is signified by the way he let its coherence lapse. Much has been made of Hamlet’s reasons for delay. He himself gives no reasons. What is clear is that his slowness to execute revenge against Claudius is not due to the explanation available in his sources—that it is difficult to get at a monarch surrounded by his guards; Shakespeare omits the guards present in these earlier versions of the story. Hamlet never complains of lack of opportunity. Though he pretends to be mad it is not evident what purpose this really serves; in the revenge plays it diverts suspicion while in Hamlet it actually arouses it, and it is not always clear if or when Hamlet is pretending to be crazy or when indulging in a bizarre humor or when expressing his desperate but sane anguish. The soliloquies seem even more disconnected from the action surrounding them than is true in other plays of the type. The first announces Hamlet's desire for suicide—that this “too too solid flesh would melt”—without justifying cause beyond his mother's remarriage, since he still has not learned about his father's murder. In “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I,” having just heard the player's Pyrrhus-Hecuba speech, Hamlet reproaches himself because he can “say nothing” to match such passion, then shifts, illogically, to accuse himself of having been like “a whore” who can only “unpack [his] heart with words” instead of acting. “To be or not to be,” following shortly upon his resolution to confirm Claudius' guilt by means of his expectable reaction to “The Murder of Gonzago,” reverts to the theme of suicide so inappropriately that some scholars feel that it must have been misplaced in the texts we have. “How all occasions do inform against me,” which follows the appearance of Fortinbras and his troops in the fourth act, renews his resolution (“from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody”) when the moment for action may well be passed, even though it is at this time that Hamlet most clearly reproaches himself (“I do not know / Why yet I live to say this thing's to do, / Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means / To do't”). The fact of the matter is that he is about to board ship in forced exile to England. But precisely these “weaknesses,” these denials of the dramatic coherence the standard Revenge plot provides, open up larger questions of human identity and destiny. In his indifference to causality even when available in his models, Shakespeare reveals the nature of his struggle to evade tradition and audience expectations.

There is a discrepancy between the hero and the play, but this results from what I take to be a general skepticism to be felt in the tragic plays Shakespeare would write from Hamlet on—a skepticism threatening our confidence in the consistency of character and in the linking of character to either its origin in outer circumstance or its effect in action. The cavalier way in which Shakespeare ignores the logic that his sources often provide, inferior as they are, has not been sufficiently observed—so great is our admiration for his wonderful art. But as he does in the case of Hamlet, Shakespeare will actually reduce the motivation available in his source for Macbeth. In Macbeth he seems to want to show us the inexplicable spectacle of a good man doing an evil deed. Othello, also, ignores the suggestion of comprehensible causes for Iago's malignity which Shakespeare's source provides. And it is not only Iago who is “motiveless,” as Coleridge said, having no real reason for his fiendish malice. Othello's jealousy arises from provocation so inadequate that it is difficult to understand how anyone so reasonable could have been inflamed by it—and so, Iago's persuasive powers must be made nearly demonic. In acting out his preposterous rage Othello's character must be temporarily transformed from what it was.

Hamlet is a mystery play, and concealment and secrecy are essential to its style, but they serve, also, to reinforce the idea that appearances, like the actor's role, are deceptive. The ghost itself is forbidden, it tells Hamlet, to tell the secrets of its prison house; otherwise, it could a tale unfold of horrors to make the hearer's hair stand on end like porcupine quills! The murder is known only to the perpetrator; Claudius' guilt is “occulted.” As the ghost relates, Hamlet's father was killed, significantly, by poison in the ear, “by which the whole ear of Denmark is by a forged process of my death rankly abused.” Hamlet himself continues to keep it secret, swearing Horatio and Marcellus to silence not only about the ghost but about his plans to assume a mask himself, to put on an “antic disposition” to hide his purposes. Of course the usurping murderer is the supreme example of dissembling; and Hamlet cannot get over the way “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.” The play is full of spying—another way of seeing those spectatorial moments when a hidden witness watches a performance as though shown in a theater. Polonious, who sends a spy to look into the life abroad of his own son, is ludicrous and inefficient in his secret-service surveillance of Hamlet, and dies for his spying upon the Prince. Only when he is dead is he said by Hamlet to be, at last, “most still, most secret, and most grave.” But deception and disguise do not break down, finally, to reveal the unchangeable truth—as in detective fiction; the character of Hamlet remains identified only with a succession of appearances.

As the play, in the first act, shifts from Hamlet to the Polonius family, Laertes' counsel to his sister to resist the sweet speeches of the Prince suggests that human nature, especially a prince's, is determined by social position—and has no other meaning. “He may not, as unvalued persons do, / Carve for himself, for on his choice depends / The sanctity and health of this whole state.” Hamlet's love is definable only by his limited power to “give his saying deed.” Polonius' advice to his son, which seems a string of stale truisms—because so often repeated as counsel to the young—boils down to the idea that self-expression should not be attempted. “Give thy thoughts no tongue, / Nor any unproportioned thought his act.” But if the self should not be expressed, what is the meaning of the famous conclusion, “This above all, to thine own self be true”? Is there a self to which one can be “true” without letting it be heard or seen in speech and action? To Ophelia he gives advice that echoes her brother's resort to the familiar metaphor of theatrical costume. Hamlet's vows, he tells her, wear false vesture (he uses the unusual word “investments”). They plead “unholy suits” while pretending holy intent. The idea that personal reality is something shaped or “carved,” not inherent in character, may be implied even when Hamlet facetiously ponders with Polonius over the shapes of clouds. He seems to have in mind the arbitrariness of all our interpretations which impose form and meaning on the meaningless, but it has been noted that the passage resembles one in Antony and Cleopatra when Antony says to Eros, after describing cloud shapes that resemble now this, now that,

My good knave Eros, now thy captain is
Even such a body. Here I am Antony
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave

I suspect that in Hamlet the talk about clouds also implies something about the way our characters seem fixed in one form or another but are really capable of infinite change. Hamlet tells Ophelia that he has “more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.” He is all potentiality. There is no limit to the unenacted, unthought, unimagined “offences” of which he might be capable.

Hamlet's first utterance in the play is a reference to the problematic relation of essence and appearance and, at the same time, to the representation of this problem by the theatrical. He comes on stage clothed in the black of mourning, and the Queen, already speaking metaphorically, asks him for a change of mood, saying, “cast thy nighted colour off.” She asks him why death “seems so particular” to him, and he answers,

Seems, madam? nay it is. I know not seems.
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. 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.

This is more complex than appears at first glance. Hamlet is not saying that he has put on a false appearance to cover a true self. He does not deny the message of his appearance, for it declares his grief. Yet the way he looks and behaves constitutes only signs, after all, “actions that a man might play” as on the stage, a collection of gestures established by tradition for a role and easily enacted by the accomplished actor. If there is an inner mystery of some sort it is one that escapes all arts of action or expression and can hardly be spoken of, for no terms of description or manifestation exist for it. Shakespeare, the creator of theatrical character, expresses his own recognition of the conventionality of all the ways in which drama represents the self, and also the conventionality and insufficiency of all self-conceptions by means of which men and women carry on.

Hamlet resists all typological confinement. Is he bold or hesitating, passionate or sluggish, loving or cold, refined or coarse? The evidence for the first term in these pairs is what attracts us to him, yet the evidence for the second set of terms is plentiful—and those many attempts to summarize his character and explain his behavior in a unitary way must founder. Some of his negative aspects are off-putting enough to threaten his position as the hero. His reluctance to kill Claudius when he was kneeling in prayer—because then he might not send him straight to hell—shocked Dr. Johnson. His contrived killing of his sleazy false friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, has seemed to many to be something that should have been beneath him. He is too brutal and vulgar with his mother and Ophelia. Yet we endure these spectacles for the glimpses given of that noble nature that Ophelia remembers, his tender filial memory and his appreciation of Horatio's friendship, and his generosity to the rash Laertes, who deals him his death blow. And the elevation of his mind, his play of wit and philosophy, his keen understanding of others and of society. Horatio's loyalty is a warrant we accept, for Horatio is our representative in the play—the sensible, decent, ordinary man who gives his complete loyalty to someone worthy of it. But the contradictions remain. Shakespeare's hero may be seen as someone who wants to be undetermined, unclassifiable, though, ultimately, he can find no selfhood outside of prescribed forms, no history but in established plots. He cannot be anything other than the Revenger the play sets out to make him.

Some say too quickly that Hamlet is a humour type—a melancholic, or a victim of an excess of black bile; he himself wonders if the devil has not been able to delude him with a false ghost “out of my weakness and my melancholy, / As he is very potent with such spirits.” Then there is his madness to which one might refer his inconsistency; sometimes put on but perhaps not always. At the very end he apologizes to Laertes for his intemperate wrath.

                                                                                I am punished
With a sore distraction. What I have done,
That might your nature, honour and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.

But neither melancholy nor madness is really the right explanation for the overmastering philosophic doubt—and the mood that leads to Hamlet's desire for death. In Hamlet the incoherence of what men do is profoundly and continuously explored. The famous “To be, or not to be” soliloquy at the beginning of the third act, spoken on the day the court play is to be presented, says not a word about this imminent test of Hamlet's suspicions and does not mention revenge. The question it opens is, most critics have supposed, again the issue of suicide. “To be” may be read as, simply, “to live,” and “not to be” as, simply, “to die.” If this is the choice that poses “the question” and if it is meant to be paralleled (A:B as C:D) in the alternatives then offered—whether it is “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”—one must assume, somewhat implausibly, that the ending of his troubles by the taking of arms against them is deliberate and certain suicide. But the choice is phrased so abstractly that one can also say that these terms are syntactically in opposition (“chiasmatically,” their order reversed to make the comparison A:B as D:C) with the ideas of passive suffering and active battle. In this way, to act is “to be.” Merely to feel is “not to be.” Hamlet may be reflecting that there is no being aside from our deeds. Still, are we only our acts? If Hamlet seems to be appealing to an “inmost part” of Gertrude when, in the closet scene, he proposes to set a glass before her in which she may view her true self, he also pleads with her to be an actress, “to assume a virtue if you have it not,” with the hope that the appearance of virtue will, somehow, create an essence.

That Hamlet is inconsistent, variable, even uncertain himself as to who he is—this corresponds to his skepticism about human conceptions in general. The play, we must remember, is contemporaneous with Montaigne's Essays. Florio's English translation was published in London only months, perhaps, after the staging of Shakespeare's play. Perhaps Shakespeare saw the Florio Montaigne even before it was published; the very phraseology of the English version as well as Montaigne's balancing of contrary arguments is echoed, some think, in the soliloquies. Hamlet brings Montaigne to mind when he says about Denmark being a prison, “There's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so”—a reflection expressed in Montaigne's essay, “That the taste of goods or evils doth greatly depend on the opinion we have of them.” But Montaigne particularly denied the stability—or even reality—of personal essence, saying, “there is no constant existence, neither of our being, nor of the objects. We have no communication with being, for every human nature is ever in the middle between being born and dying, giving nothing of itself but an obscure appearance and shadow.” Montaigne also wrote, in the essay, “Of the Inconstancie of our Actions,” “We are all framed of flaps and patches and of so shapeless and diverse a contexture, that every peece and every moment playeth his part. And there is as much difference found betweene us and our selves, as there is betweene our selves and other.” What being we have, then, is only what we assume in that phantasmic play in which we struggle to escape and to fulfill an idea of ourselves which owes its shape to cultural formulations.

“All the world's a stage” has so long been a platitude that one is apt to forget how revolutionary it might have sounded when first uttered, and how the idea is likely to shock us still when expressed by a modern thinker like Clifford Geertz in his well-known statement, “There is no such thing as human nature independent of culture.” In Shakespeare's time the tension felt by those who adventured out of the bounds of inherited status—new classes, new professions—was intense, and what one was, as an individual, became more problematic. The process that Stephen Greenblatt calls “Renaissance self-fashioning” was strenuous and fraught with anxiety. For Shakespeare, a “new man” who was making a name and a fortune for himself in a once-despised trade, the problem of selfhood was fundamental. But the literature of the theater, changing with such rapidity in the few years of his participation, directly dramatized the contest between prescribed form and innovation. The standardized types into which mankind might be classified were no longer fixed in society nor were they for more than a moment useful literary conventions. What Shakespeare thinks of such types is represented in his portrait of Laertes—the perfect avenger, but stupid and not really so honorable when he consents to have his rapier poisoned in order to make sure he will win the duel with Hamlet. Osric, the courtier fop, a comic type himself, is the spokesman for fading categories when he describes Laertes in typecasting terms as the “absolute gentleman … the card or calendar of gentry; for you shall find in him the continent of what part a gentleman would see.”

Hamlet's personal speeches, even aside from the soliloquies, often express an excessive despair that has baffled the critics. He tells Rosencrantz and Gildenstern,

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appeareth no other thing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

It is complained that Hamlet's expression of such thoughts to such auditors, who can only respond with stupid snickers, is preposterous. Besides, he does know why he has lost all his mirth. The explanation generally offered is that he is trying to throw these spies off the scent. The Cambridge editor of the play says, “So often pointed to as a brilliant perception of the anguish of Renaissance man in general and of Hamlet in particular, it is a glorious blind, a flight of rhetoric by which a divided and distressed soul conceals the true nature of his distress and substitutes a formal and conventional state of Weltschmerz.” But I would say that the instinctive response of reader or hearer to the power of the famous speech is sounder than this critical insistence upon its plot-logic. Hamlet has ceased to be, as he so often ceases to be, simply the character whose motives advance the plot. What he expresses is the root of his gloom, his sense of the paradox in the contradictions of human nature. Hamlet's desire for suicide, which continually erupts in the midst of the action and seems to have no sufficient explanation in the plot, derives from the discrepancy between what is felt and what is done that the play will go on to reinforce after the first soliloquy. To lose all one's mirth without apparent cause is to be someone whose altered response to life is all-inclusive and goes beyond specific occasions. In contrast with his ghostly, impalpable sense of self, the outer man and his roles are “too too solid.”

Hamlet's “lunacy,” as Polonius calls it, may have been apparent before Hamlet heard the ghost's tale. His melancholy, as the first soliloquy showed, has already aroused that loathing for sexuality which even causes him to wish that his own flesh would melt. But he can put on the madman act, as he shows in his exuberant teasing of Polonius or of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—and yet baffle them by the famous “method” in his madness. Ophelia's report to her father about Hamlet's strange behavior makes it appear that he has been driven out of his mind by the repulse she has administered at her father's command. Polonius is conversant enough with conventional typology to recognize in Ophelia's description the standard symptoms of what was called “love ecstasy.” But the audience may legitimately suspect it was all “an act”—an exhibition of that pretended madness Hamlet has resolved upon. Beyond this uncertainty, however, I want to point out another which is generally overlooked. Simulated or no, Hamlet's appearance of madness is a representation of the fragility of that notion of identity in which he has ceased to believe. It is this uncertainty that is even expressed in Ophelia's authentic mad talk. “Lord, we know what we are, but we know not what we may be,” she says. Is not madness what we call “not being oneself”—an alienation from the essential consistency one prefers to believe in? But what if one has ceased to believe in it? By keeping us in continual doubt about Hamlet's madness, Shakespeare raises this suspicion of essences and of any truth beyond appearance.

Hamlet's transformation into an avenger requires him to surrender, as much as he can, his character as lover. He has sworn to the ghost that he will wipe away from the table of his memory “all trivial fond records” and let only the ghost's command remain. In this process his previous character has been constricted. The nature of man as a sexual being, and of woman as one, also, is reduced. From the outset of the play Hamlet is oppressed by the idea of sex as a perversion; his mother has caused him to look at the consummation of marriage with loathing, as an incestuous horror. In retrospect, he regards even her feeling for his father as a kind of gluttony: “she would hang on him / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on.” No one is chaste in the Danish court—not even Ophelia, in his view. It is unnecessary, I think, to psychologize this, as has so often been done—to see Hamlet as suffering from oedipal fixation on his mother, hatred for the usurper father now represented by Claudius. Hamlet's rejection of the “normal” sexual and familial set of attitudes is still another mark of the shrinking of identity with which he is afflicted.

Does Hamlet ever come close to accepting entirely—or rejecting without question—the Revenger model? There is one moment when, I believe, he invokes it consciously—and puts it aside. As he goes to meet his mother in the third act he revs himself up with an old-style invocation of dark powers—then dismisses their prompting,

'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on. Soft, now to my mother.
O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom.
Let me be cruel, not unnatural:
I will speak daggers to her but use none.

“When churchyards yawn” is a reminder to himself of the ghost who returned from the realm of death to lay its demand upon him. Now it is the “witching hour,” as we still say, when he “could drink hot blood,” as murdering witches were believed to drink the blood of their victims. Now he could do the unnamable horror that “the day would quake to look on.” But he draws back. He will “speak daggers” to his mother but he will not commit the crime of Nero, the matricide. He calls upon something almost never acknowledged in this drama of borrowed, fabricated selfhood—upon the promptings of the heart, “of nature.” But it is not “nature” that keeps him from killing the King when he comes upon him in prayer—on the way to the Queen.

“Nature” as a term for an original human nature that persists despite the impositions of borrowed form appears rarely in Hamlet. The principal reference that comes to mind is that curious comment on Danish drunkenness which Hamlet makes as he listens in the first act to the “heavy-headed revel” of the royal wedding feast. Hamlet speaks here of “nature” as a source of human defect: “So oft it chances in particular men, / That for some vicious mole of nature in them, / As in their birth, wherein they are not guilty, / Since nature cannot choose his origin.” The passage, deleted from the Folio, seems out of place as a reflection Hamlet might make as he waits for his father's ghost to appear—except, perhaps, for the fact that the ghost refers to his own “days of nature” when he committed the crimes for which he suffers now.

But “histrionics” is never discarded altogether by Hamlet. He had wondered, after hearing the player's recital, that he himself was so inferior in expression, having “the motive and the cue for passion” that he had. He found himself in competition with an actor who lacked his own great “cue”: “What's Hecuba to him?” He is in a similar competition later on, in the fourth act, with the Norwegian Prince, Fortinbras. Fortinbras, who has put aside his original desire to revenge his own father's death and recover his property, now marches to Poland with an army of twenty thousand to gain a worthless scrap of land, finding “quarrel in a straw”—while Hamlet, “a father killed, a mother stained,” still has not acted. And Hamlet is stirred and humbled by such an exhibition of pure performance without motive—which is really like the actor's. “How all occasions do inform against me / And stir my dull revenge,” he begins his last soliloquy.

Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell.

The difficulty with Fortinbras' presence in the play has not been addressed properly by the critics. Most commentators think of him in comparison or contrast with Hamlet because he is heard of at the very beginning as a son aroused to reprisal by a father's cruel death; one is tempted to see a parallel between him and Laertes and even ancient Pyrrhus as instances of unhesitating filial action. Laertes really is a misguided hothead and Pyrrhus a butcher who makes Hecuba, with her copious tears, a foil to Gertrude who has dried her own too quickly. But they fulfill their avenger roles. Fortinbras, however, disappears as an avenger promptly. Claudius averts his threat to Denmark by sending envoys to Fortinbras' uncle, the King of Norway—and by return mail, one might say, news arrives that this rash young man has promised to give up his personal project and embrace instead an assignment to lead his soldiers elsewhere. Has he any persisting role in the play? Well, someone has to be there at the end to pick up the pieces and assume the throne—Horatio would hardly do as Denmark's new king; he is not a royal person. The great Harvard Shakespearean, George Lyman Kittredge, made the matter even simpler. The dramatic character of highest rank customarily spoke the speech which brings an Elizabethan play to a close, and so “this accounts for the presence of Fortinbras in Hamlet. But for him there would be no one left of sufficient rank to fulfill this office.” But there may be a special meaning in the resemblance of Hamlet's late envy of Fortinbras and his early envy of the stage actor who performs his part with such noble fervor. In both cases it does not seem to matter that the brilliant performances of the theatrical actor and the soldier are without personal motive. Their merely spectacular action for action's sake seems superior to Hamlet's inadequate expression of what he calls “excitements of my reason and my blood.” Hamlet's envy even expresses that existential lack of confidence in essences and in the connection of character and deed which is at the heart of the play, for only acts, in this skeptical view, count, not intention. Pragmatically, Man is no more than “a beast” if “capability and godlike reason … fust in us unus'd.” Inner selfhood has no real existence compared to the show of those who “find quarrel in a straw / When honour's at the stake.” Earlier, in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, as I have noted, “to be,” may be interpretable as action, mere “in the mind to suffer” as “not to be.” But such a challenge to the importance of essential being and the necessary relation it bears to doing may have been too radical and disturbing a skepticism for Shakespeare's audience. Because Hamlet seems finally ready to acknowledge his laggardliness as an avenger, modern directors often retain the fourth act Fortinbras passages even though self-reproach seems out of place at a moment when Hamlet has been rendered powerless and is a virtual prisoner. Shakespeare might have had second thoughts about this dramatic illogic. But, besides, the skeptical paradox posed by the Fortinbras model was bound to puzzle many. This final soliloquy of Hamlet and the preceding scene which provokes it are found in the quarto, probably Shakespeare's own earlier script, but they are absent from the later Folio text of Hamlet, the longest of such cuts in a revision which may have been made with the playwright's consent. Perhaps the acting company's director or even Shakespeare himself cried “Cut!” at this point when the play was first run through.

Death, of course, is the ultimate loss of selfhood, and the jesting of the gravediggers and of Hamlet in the last act is not merely comedy but reflects that mystery. Where are those selfhoods of the politician, the courtier, the lawyer, “with his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks,” of the lady painting herself an inch thick, and of Alexander the Great and Caesar, and of Yorick? Yet it is precisely at this moment when the awfulness of the loss of identity by death is brought to mind that Hamlet is also made to recall his own childhood, when, as a little boy, he was carried on Yorick's shoulders. When he leaps into Ophelia's grave to contest with Laertes, it is not only with the declaration of the love he has denied, but with a momentary sense of recovered selfhood. “This is I, Hamlet the Dane,” he shouts in thrilling tones as though setting himself into history along with his father, who bore the same name. Yet this renewed identity is, after all, the rage of the old action-man that his father was and expected him to be. To Laertes, he says in a desire not to be exceeded, “Woo't weep, woo't fight, woo't fast, woo't tear thyself? / Woo't drink up eisel [vinegar], eat a crocodile? / I'll do it.”

Finally, Hamlet is ready to acknowledge how impossible it is to avoid role-playing. He will accept the end shaped for him in the role he has been unable to elude. Describing to Horatio how he had—accidentally—discovered and foiled the plot against him on the ship taking him to England, and sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, he says,

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well
When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will—

A good many critics have found Hamlet's easy disposal of this paltry pair, “no shriving-time allowed,” as somehow too brutal for the “sweet prince” we love, and wince at the fact that when he kills Claudius at last it is not only with the “envenom'd” rapier but, gratuitously, by a forced swallow from the cup of poisoned wine as well. But Hamlet has accepted the Revenger role, and the crude ruthlessness which goes with it, by this time. The divinity that shapes our ends is commonly thought to be a reference to God's determination, to which, it is said, Hamlet at last acquiesces. But the religious note is so scantily sounded in this play that one may as properly think of the shaping force Hamlet calls “a divinity” as simply Destiny—something assigned to us as much by custom and circumstance as by Divine intention. Hamlet may be alluding to Matthew 10:19 when he tells Horatio, as he prepares for his duel with Laertes, “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.” But his sense of ineluctable necessity is a part of the acceptance of the role into which he has been “shaped” by determinants that are not necessarily heavenly. I think of them, in relation to my idea of Shakespeare and his times, as the determinants Geertz refers to when he speaks of “culture” as the definer of character.

The ghost (very uncertainly a divine messenger; there is strong Protestant theological argument behind Hamlet's idea that it could be an impersonating fiend) appears as an agent whose task it is to haunt Hamlet literally and figuratively with reminder of his Revenger role. In the closet scene with Gertrude it appears to “whet [Hamlet's] almost blunted purpose.” Hamlet has passionately inveighed against her “act / That roars so loud and thunders in the index”—her marriage to his uncle, “in the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, / Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty”—but has said not a word about the murder. There is a tradition that Shakespeare himself took the part of the ghost in performance. In a sense it is Shakespeare who is both haunted and haunting. It is he himself who tries to escape the expectations of his audience—yet, ultimately, cannot really do so. As the play wears on, the ghost quite disappears. At the last, when its appeal for revenge is about to be answered, Hamlet hardly speaks at all about his father except to mention that he used his signet to seal the death warrant of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and to refer to the murder of his father (whom he now calls, more impersonally, “my king”) as one item only in his charges against his uncle:

He that hath killed my king, and whored my mother
Popped in between th'election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage—is't not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is't not to be damned
To let the canker of our nature come
To further evil?

—a speech in which, among other reasons for killing Claudius, one hears of frustrate ambition, which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had scented in Hamlet (much to one's annoyance, when one heard them say so). The word “revenge,” which one would expect to hear at the end, is never sounded. Hamlet, in a last reminder of theatricality, turns to the audience in the theater as well as to witnesses on the stage when, dying, he says,

You that look pale, and tremble at this chance,
That are but mutes or audience to this act
Had I but time, as this fell sergeant death
Is strict in his arrest, oh I could tell you—
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead,
Thou livest; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.

But what account of Hamlet Horatio will give is no longer clear. “Story,” in a received sense, the story of Hamlet and his “cause”—has collapsed, and Horatio now speaks only of the “accidental” and “casual” and mistaken chances that produced the carnage on the stage. He does not speak of revenge, that chain of calculated steps leading inexorably to conclusion.

How these things came about. So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on th'inventors' heads.

If there is another story to tell, only the play itself tells it.

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Life, Crown, and Queen: Gertrude and the Theme of Sovereignty