[In the following essay, Hunt analyzes Hamlet's corporeal imagery as a means of exploring Hamlet's persistent state of indecision, asserting that before Hamlet can respond to the demands of the Ghost, he must first come to accept his own physicality and overcome his contempt for the body.]

If Hamlet actually writes down moral lessons on his tablets as he studies his revenge, many of them surely have to do with how life is lived, and lost, in bodies. Far more even than in Macbeth or Coriolanus, the human body in Hamlet forms human experience, being the medium through which men suffer and act. But the body also deforms human beings and threatens ultimately to reduce them to nothing. The nonbeing lurking at the material center of being announces itself everywhere in the play's corporeal imagery, and occupies Hamlet's mind as he tries to find his way from the regal death that initiates the action to the regal death that concludes it. This essay examines the problem in two parts, using an analysis of the imagery as an approach to the great mystery of the play, Hamlet's quandary about how to act. It suggests that Hamlet cannot adequately respond to the Ghost's commands until he learns to accept physicality, with all its dissolute inconstancy, as the image of mentality. Not until he finds his way out of a despairing contempt for the body can he achieve the wish of his first soliloquy and quietly cease to be.

I

At the end of Hamlet, all the remaining members of the two great families of Denmark lie crumpled about the stage. Meta-theatrically doubling this tableau, Horatio asks Fortinbras to “give order that these bodies / High on a stage be placed to the view” (V.ii.379-80)—an order that is carried out as the play ends.¹ Polonius's “guts” have already been hauled off the stage less ceremoniously; Ophelia's body has been brought on with truncated ceremony and lowered into the pit beneath the stage, from which skulls have come flying up to make room for it; and all the carnage has been set in motion by the pale, glaring “dead corse” of King Hamlet. The eyes of the mind, if they are open, behold in the play's language a spectacle of ruined bodies fully as grim as what their physical counterparts behold on stage. Before hearing of and seeing the body's demise in the churchyard, we imagine an unorthodox autopsy when one gravedigger tells the other the results of the inquiry into Ophelia's suicide: “The crowner hath sate on her, and finds it Christian burial” (V.i.4-5). Grotesque visions arise when he responds to the suggestion of his companion that the original spade-wielder, Adam, was a gentleman, “the first that ever bore arms.” “Why, he had none,” the clown objects, only to be refuted in a manner that makes his statement monstrous. “What, art a heathen? How doest thou understand the Scripture? The Scripture says Adam digged. Could he dig without arms?” (V.i.30 ff.). Amputee gardeners, corpses used as sofas (perhaps two of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to), and many kindred figures drive the play's physical violence deep into the minds of the audience.

The body thus represented is no mere vehicle or Platonic instrument for the soul; it incarnates spirit, as Christ, His Church, and the Host incarnate God. Shakespeare's metaphorical figures go to eery lengths to show man deeply rooted in a material substrate. Thus Hamlet takes the saying of Genesis and Matthew that man and wife become one flesh as authority for his mocking valediction to Claudius:

HAM.
Farewell, dear Mother.
KING.
Thy loving father, Hamlet.
HAM.
My mother—father and mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh, and so, my mother.

(IV.iii.50-53)

Claudius himself imparts a corporeal facticity to the old figure of horseman as Centaur, telling Laertes of a Norman rider who “grew unto his seat” and seemed to have been “incorpsed and deminatured / With the brave beast” (IV.vii.85-88). And Laertes warns his sister not to love the prince because his ambitious mind grows along with his young body and, as lord of the kingdom, he will be “circumscribed / Unto the voice and yielding of that body / Whereof he is the head” (I.iii.22-24).

The body politic is more than a metaphor for social organization in this play; it describes a tightly integrated world where reality stems palpably from the centers of political and religious authority. Francis Barker, describing the public, spectacular quality of Hamlet and other Jacobean tragedies, has argued that the abundant corporeal images used in texts of this period were not the “dead metaphors” that they are now, but “indices of a social order in which the body has a central and irreducible place.” “With a clarity now hard to recapture,” he says, “the social plenum is the body of the king, and membership of this anatomy is the deep structural form of all being in the secular realm.”² The extravagant idea, examined by Ernst Kantorowicz three decades ago, that the king in fact has two bodies—his own plus a superbody equivalent to the corporate life of his nation—always threatened to revert to a mystical abstraction, and eventually disappeared from political theory. Discussing its role in Richard II, Kantorowicz observed that if the conceit “still has a very real and human meaning today, this is largely due to Shakespeare. It is he who has eternalized that metaphor.”³ There is nothing in Richard II to match the really astonishing concreteness that the metaphor acquires in one passage of Hamlet, when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern accede to Claudius's plan to “dispatch” Hamlet to England:

                                        We will ourselves provide.
Most holy and religious fear it is
To keep those many many bodies safe
That live and feed upon your Majesty.

(III.iii.7-10)

Calling up pictures of a bloated insect queen covered by her sucking attendants, or a convocation of politic worms feasting on a corpse, or a communion more literally cannibalistic than most, this violently arresting image locates the king at the dark center of a world dense with material significance. His universal Body, symbolizing religious authority over a commonality, does not hover in some library of legal abstractions, but pulsates with grisly vitality.

The imagery that Shakespeare invents to establish man's corporeality startles most when isolated parts of the body function as metonymic or synechdocal equivalents for actions and states of being. Every audience remembers “The harlot's cheek, beautied with plast'ring art”; Hecuba's “lank and all o'er-teemed loins”; Fortinbras sharking up men “For food and diet to some enterprise / That hath a stomach in't”; Osric complying with his dug before he sucks it; Hamlet beating his brains; and countless similar figures. This usage pervades so much of the play that one can hardly read or hear twenty consecutive lines without encountering it. To maintain the motif's impact in the midst of such copious use, Shakespeare occasionally resorts to violently pressured and improbable images. “Let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp,” says Hamlet to Horatio in an indictment of the flatterer so suggestively lewd that even the compleat courtier might blush to hear it, “And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee / Where thrift may follow fawning” (III.ii.60-62). Shortly afterwards he asks Horatio to watch Claudius carefully, “For I mine eyes will rivet to his face” (l. 85). After this anatomical outrage has been performed upon him, Claudius decides that with Hamlet in Denmark he is not safe from the “Hazard so near's as doth hourly grow / Out of his brows” (III.iii.6-7). In such images, strangely transformed parts of the body—the flatterer's glazed tongue and pregnant knees, Hamlet's bolted eyeballs and malignantly hypertrophic forehead—figure forth morbid states of mind typified in the pursuit of some compelling action. One thinks of certain punishments in the lower reaches of Dante's Inferno: Mohammad's riven trunk fulfilling his schismatic mischief, Ugolino gnawing his enemy's malevolent skull. Indeed, the Ghost hints that, were it not for the intolerable effects that such a tale would have on the living, he could tell of such a treatment of the body's parts in his purgatory: “But this eternal blazon must not be / To ears of flesh and blood” (I.v.21-22).

It has, I believe, never been observed that these images of body parts in Hamlet add up to a virtual anatomical catalogue (or, to use the Ghost's grim little joke about dismemberment, “blazon”) of the human form. “Considered curiously,” as curiously as Hamlet considers the dust of Alexander, the play looks like a dissecting room, stocked with all of man's limbs, organs, tissues, and fluids. Certain parts are mentioned incessantly: eyes, ears, heads, hearts, hands, faces, tongues, brains. These major melodies in the carnal concerto are accompanied by numerous lesser themes. We hear (in varying degrees of frequency) of mouths, noses, lips, cheeks, jaws, teeth, eyelids, foreheads (“brows”), the crown of the head (“pate”), the skin, hair in general, beards, necks, limbs in general, arms, legs, knees, feet, heels, toes, fingers, the thumb, the palm, the wrist, the shoulder, the back, the loins, the waist, the breast in general (“bosom”), the mammary organ (Osric's “dug”), genitals in general (“privates”), male genitals (“cock” and the “long purple” flowers whose common name has been euphemized to “dead men's fingers”), female genitals (“country matters”), and the anus (“bunghole”).⁴ Of internal organs, there is mention not only of the heart and brain, but also the throat, lungs, stomach, spleen, liver, guts, bones, marrow, nerves, sinews, spinal cord (“pith”), and arteries. Of the fluid products of the body, we hear of blood and tears incessantly, and also of sweat, milk, fat, and gall. The play also refers to various corrupting growths in the body—moles, cankers, warts, ulcers, abcesses, sores, scabs, and “contagious blastments.” Finally, it alludes to such bodily functions as speech, hearing, sight, touch, taste, smell, eating, drinking, chewing, digestion, vomiting, evacuation, sleep, dreaming, hallucination, yawning, weeping, laughing, breathing, copulation, pregnancy, suckling, pulse, disease, fever, death, and decomposition.

More than simply painting a bloody backdrop for his tragedy of revenge, in the manner of Webster, Shakespeare seems to be methodically deconstructing the body. His universal cataloguing of particulars does to the human body what Hamlet tells Osric it would be hard to do to Laertes: “divide him inventorially” (V.ii.114). Like Montaigne, who sought to examine the unknown totality of human experience through its genesis in many particular, irreducible phenomena experienced by the organism, Shakespeare seeks to reduce life to its corporeal elements. His characters in this play think of every psychological quality, every rational deliberation or spiritual choice, in terms of the physical equipment that locates them in a world of action. Claudius's unsuccessful attempt to pray is a good example, demonstrating as it does the limitation of human possibility implied by this procedure. He thinks throughout his soliloquy in corporeal images: the smell of his offense, the blood on his hand, the face of a reprobate and a penitent, “stubborn knees” that will not bow down, a “bosom black as death” hiding a “heart with strings of steel,” and so forth (III.iii.36 ff.). Claudius's “limed soul” reflects conditions of corporeal limitation that Montaigne suggests, at the end of “Raymond Sebond,” man can overcome only through the extension of divine grace:

For to make the handful bigger than the hand, the armful bigger than the arm, and to hope to straddle more than the reach of our legs, is impossible and unnatural. Nor can man raise himself above himself and humanity; for he can see only with his own eyes, and seize only with his own grasp.

He will rise, if God by exception lends him a hand.⁵

None of the angels whom Claudius begs to “Make assay” offers him an incorporeal hand; caught within the paralytic compound of his heart, hands, brain, face, voice, he looks in vain for a way out of the dwelling that he has made a prison. Nor do any of the other characters in Hamlet find “exceptional” release from their natural condition. In their variously less desperate ways, all struggle against the web of matter that life has woven round them and in which they implicate themselves further every time they act.

Montaigne's challenge, after skeptically weighing the particulars of human experience, was to put them back together in a living totality. Shakespeare's intention appears to be very different. Far from even attempting to present the life of the body as an organically functioning entity, he portrays it more in the manner of Donne's Devotions, as a collection of pieces whose morbidity intimates their ultimate violent dissolution. The play's countless parts and functions, linked with various extreme and unhealthy states of mind, engender a disturbing sense of ontological dislocation. Things fall apart in Hamlet—or are torn apart. Shakespeare does not use the currently popular metaphor of anatomy here (as he does, for instance, for Jaques's lacerating intelligence in As You Like It), but throughout the play we are made to think of the fragmented state of a body that has been cut open, probed, dissected. When, in the first line of the play, Barnardo inappropriately demands the identity of Francisco, the sentinel he is replacing, Francisco responds, “Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.” In the claustrophobic heart of Elsinore, the politicians try to make Hamlet stand still so that they can unfold him and find what lies within. Seeing Hamlet's disturbed behavior, Claudius resolves to discover (surgically, as it were) “Whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus, / That opened lies within our remedy” (II.ii.17-18). Polonius, supposing that he has found the answer, points (according to the commonest editorial reading) to his head and shoulders and says:

Take this from this, if this be otherwise.
If circumstances lead me, I will find
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed
Within the center.

(II.ii.156-59)

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Fortune's privates, who make love to their employment, who would play on Hamlet's stops as on a pipe, reaching for the heart of his mystery, are themselves ground up in their obscene probings, doomed “by their own insinuation” (V.ii.59). The king keeps them, as Hamlet tells Rosencrantz, “like an ape, in the corner of his jaw, first mouthed, to be last swallowed” (IV.ii.19-20). Finally they become inert matter in Hamlet's own perversion of Claudius's plans.

Other insinuations of partition or dismemberment come in reference to “parts” or “pieces,” as in the fragmented lines that open the play. When two more figures enter, Barnardo asks, “What, is Horatio there?” and Horatio answers—perhaps in numbness at the frigid weather, perhaps in disdain for the spooky proceedings, but certainly strangely—“A piece of him” (I.i.19). Laertes, “the continent of what part a gentleman would see” (V.ii.112-13), suffers often from such usages, several of them in the scene in which Claudius reduces him to a tool of his murderous intentions (IV.vii.57 ff.). Laertes agrees to obey Claudius on the condition that “you will not o'errule me to a peace,” and Claudius replies “To thine own peace.” Laertes is content, but wishes it could be arranged “That I might be the organ” of Hamlet's punishment; and Claudius agrees that, of Laertes's courtly “sum of parts,” he will use one “part,” his fencing, to entice Hamlet to his doom. The ideas of incision and partition are combined in the closet scene, where Hamlet's promise not to let Gertrude go until he has made her see her “inmost part” makes her fear that she is literally to be carved up (III.iv.20 ff.). After her hasty exclamation has caused that fate to befall the vigilant Polonius instead, and after Hamlet has thrust his merely verbal daggers in her ears, the queen laments that her heart has been “cleft in twain” and is told, “O, throw away the worser part of it, / And live the purer with the other half” (III.iv.157-59). Hamlet teems with such figures of a body that has been dislocated, broken into its parts. “The time is out of joint” in Denmark, and the young prince has been called upon to plant his foot in the socket and violently “set it right”—an action that involves him in causing still more violation and dislocation.

All this imagery pertaining to the unmaking of the body bears some resemblance to the imagery of the Henry IV plays, which Neil Rhodes discusses in the course of his study of the Elizabethan tradition of isolating and distorting parts of the body for comic and admonitory effects.⁶ Food metaphors in particular attach themselves to the person of Falstaff, alternately evoking joyous physicality and miserable corporeal degeneration. A similar emphasis on what Rhodes calls “the mere materiality … of existence” inheres in the somewhat different corporeal metaphors of Hamlet, which derive ultimately from the Ghost who hovers behind the scenes and impels the action. Despite his relatively brief time on stage, the Ghost fills the linguistic fabric of his play with images of broken bodies, much as the fat knight generates images of sensory gratification and discomfort. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” and he symbolizes it. Since Wolfgang Clemen's book on Shakespeare's imagery, it has become a commonplace in Hamlet criticism that the motif of ulcerous infection and corruption that runs throughout the play centers on the speech in which Hamlet is told how poison was poured into his father's ears, coursed through his blood, and ate away his body from within, covering it with sores.⁷ It could be added to Clemen's important observation that the figure of the dead king also organizes corporeal imagery implying dislocation and dissolution. The physical undoing of King Hamlet accounts ultimately—in terms of both the structures of imagery and those of plot—for the physical, psychological, moral, and political undoing suffered by the play's living characters.

As the king was “cut off” (I.v.76) from all that he loved, so Ophelia finds herself, in Claudius's words, “Divided from herself and her fair judgment, / Without the which we are pictures or mere beasts” (IV.v.86-87). Deprived of the coherent form of reason, but still obscurely intelligible, “Her speech is nothing, / Yet the unshaped use of it doth move / The hearers to collection; they yawn at it, / And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts” (IV.v.7-10). Claudius correctly says of this psychic mutilation, “O, this is the poison of deep grief; it springs / All from her father's death” (IV.v.76-77)—just as he discerned earlier that some ruinous “matter” in Hamlet's heart was distorting his appearance and behavior (III.i.165 ff.). Claudius can see that the same psychic recapitulation of King Hamlet's poisoned disfiguration is taking place in Laertes, who “wants not buzzers to infect his ear / With pestilent speeches of his father's death, / Wherein necessity, of matter beggard, / Will nothing stick our person to arraign / In ear and ear” (IV.v.91-95). Noting all these changes, and the political trouble that they are bringing—Hamlet has just been sent to England, “For like the hectic in my blood he rages,” and Laertes is about to burst in upon the inner sanctum of the palace “in a riotous head”—Claudius too succumbs to a feeling of violent psychological disruption. The swelling disaster in his kingdom, he tells Gertrude, “Like to a murd'ring piece, in many places / Gives me superfluous death” (ll. 96-97).

In the closet scene, Hamlet analyzes in terms of corporeal disfigurement the moral depravity that reaches out from Claudius to all those who come under his sway. Gertrude's vice appears in her having abandoned the physical arrangement of parts that was King Hamlet—“a combination and a form” that proclaimed manliness—for a demonstrably inferior form (III.iv.56 ff.). “Have you eyes?” Hamlet asks, suggesting that only some physical mutilation could account for such blindness. To choose Claudius indicates not merely sensual weakness, but sensory derangement:

                                                                                                                        Sense sure you have,
Else could you not have motion, but sure that sense
Is apoplexed …
Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight,
Ears without hands or eyes, smelling sans all,
Or but a sickly part of one true sense
Could not so mope.

(ll. 72-74, 79-82)

Hamlet continues his indictment of Claudius with a comparison to the dismembered body of the dead king. The new ruler of Denmark's government and Gertrude's affections is, he tells the queen, a sum of parts that do not make up a whole, a living body that has already been reduced to fragments: he is “a king of shreds and patches,” “not twentieth part the tithe / Of your precedent lord” (ll. 103, 98-99).

The physical imitation of King Hamlet's undoing that culminates in the play's final scene with four deaths by poisoning—five if Horatio could have his way—begins with the death of Polonius, whose corpse is made an emblem of physical decay. After Hamlet has rendered the old courtier “most grave” and lugged his guts offstage, Claudius asks where Hamlet has gone and Gertrude replies, with echoes of dismemberment: “To draw apart the body he hath killed” (IV.i.24). Claudius sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to “bring the body / Into the chapel” (ll. 36-37), but their persistent inquiries are parried by Hamlet, who makes the absent corpse a kind of absent prop for dramatizing the mystery of undoing revealed by his father's ghost:

ROSEN.
What have you done, my lord, with the dead body?
HAM.
Compounded it with dust, whereto 'tis kin.

.....

ROSEN.
My lord, you must tell us where the body is, and go with us to the King.
HAM.
The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body. The King is a thing—
GUILDEN.
A thing, my lord?
HAM.
Of nothing. Bring me to him.

(IV.ii.5-6, 26-31)

The death of kings is the beginning and the end of Hamlet's study in this play. Polonius offers him an imaginative link between the live king who attaches so much importance to bodies and the dead king who knows how little they amount to. Brought before Claudius and asked once more “where the dead body is bestowed,” Hamlet waxes philosophical about kings, beggars, and the worms that consume them both. Considering that even a king, whose mystically double Body represents the corporate being of all his subjects, “may go a progress through the guts of a beggar,” he recites the lesson of the play's corporeal images. The body personal and politic is a provisional structure, both a form that sustains human being and a shadow through which nonbeing beckons. As a composition of parts that will inevitably fall apart and decompose, human life is paradoxically “a thing … of nothing,” an existence constructed around the void.

II

In his famous subtilization of the Romantic idea that Hamlet is unnecessarily and morbidly reflective, T. S. Eliot argued that Shakespeare himself failed in Hamlet to establish any clear correspondence between thought and action, idea and image. The play is “full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art,” Eliot suggested; and since nothing in the fictional occasion is sufficient to account for the protagonist's great apprehension and disgust, his thoughts and feelings cannot be expressed by “a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions.”⁸ The morbid corporeality of the imagined sensory impressions described in the first section of this essay may provide an answer to Eliot's charge, in that they constitute something like an “objective correlative” for Hamlet's obsessive withdrawal from the world of action. The attitude toward corporeal existence inherent in the play's imagery figures prominently in the protagonist's thinking as well; it contributes to his inability to “act” by challenging what he regards as the integrity of his being.

Insofar as Hamlet suffers from a psychological Problem distinct from the formidable moral and practical difficulties presented by his situation, it consists in questioning his own being; and this in turn has much to do with his inability to identify himself with that which decays, “passing through nature to eternity” (I.ii.73). A small eternity of dramatic time must pass before Hamlet can think of himself as a creature of flesh without experiencing paroxysms of anguish and disgust. His observation that a king may pass through the guts of a beggar is intended as a thinly veiled threat against Claudius's life, but it attacks also his sense of himself as a dignified, purposeful, heroic being. Fearing that physical actions may never adequately embody virtuous intentions, he makes the doubt self-fulfilling by shielding his high sense of himself within an overwhelming contempt for the body—a contempt that sabotages meaningful action.

Mark Rose has observed how Hamlet is “bound” to certain courses of action by his birth, by his uncle's calculating refusal to let him leave the corrupt “prison” of Denmark, and by his loyalty to the Ghost (“I am bound to hear”; “So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear”); he rebels against these constrictions, Rose argues, by becoming “obsessed with the idea of freedom, with the dignity that resides in being master of oneself.”⁹ But Hamlet is bound as well to his body, and obsessed with his contempt for it. Even before he is called upon to “set right” the unnatural murder and the incestuous marriage, he laments his connection to the royal couple's physicality. His mother's lascivious “appetite” prompts him to wish for a way out of the hateful body that can lead people to forget so quickly the spiritual goods that have sustained them for a lifetime:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter.

(I.ii.129-32)

Claudius's rowdy behavior with the boys becomes the occasion for another meditation on corporeal subversion of virtue. Denmark's “heavy-headed revel,” he tells Horatio, has taken “from our achievements … / The pith and marrow of our attribute” (I.iv.17-22)—hollowing out the bones, enervating the spine of a national reputation built up from the achievements of noble Danes. If an irruption of physical impulse can so damage the reputation of an entire nation, it is not surprising that some “vicious mole of nature” or “the o'ergrowth of some complexion” can undermine the reputation of individual men, to such a degree that their virtues “Shall in the general censure take corruption / From that particular fault” (ll. 23-36).

The Ghost calls Hamlet deep into this world of disruption. Its invitation to decapitate the body politic seems a horrific charge (“O cursed spite”), and by the end of the play it will manifestly be so: Ophelia will have been emotionally brutalized and lost to lunatic distraction; the king and queen will have been pierced with hateful insight, their attempts to reconstitute a harmonious political entity shattered; the populace will have been raised to the brink of revolt; Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Ophelia, Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet himself will have fallen as more or less innocent victims before Claudius finally does; and Denmark itself will be put in the hands of the reckless young marauder whose hostile approach the sentries anticipated at the beginning of the play. In setting right two injustices, Hamlet will cause physical, psychological, moral, and political dislocations on a universal scale.

Nothing about the apparition gives Hamlet any confidence that the purposeful determination needed to persevere through the play's violence is grounded in substantial, lasting virtue transcending Oresteian futility. On the contrary, the Ghost is simultaneously insubstantial and a horrifying memento of all that rots, seeming to embody the very forces of corporeal ruin that Hamlet fears may be inimical to virtue. It recalls in appearance and dignity the majestic king who won honor destroying the Poles and conquering ambitious Norway. But the Ghost is a weak and ephemeral substitute for the king, referred to by Horatio and the guards as his “image,” “this thing,” “illusion,” “this portentous figure,” a “horrible form,” “a figure like your father,” something “like the King.” Hamlet's astonished prostration before it in the closet scene contrasts with the queen's equally great astonishment that her son is gazing wildly into “vacancy” and holding discourse with “th'incorporal air” (III.iv.118-19). The Ghost seems very much “a thing of nothing” when Hamlet's appeals for Gertrude to confirm its existence elicit only fears that her son is a victim of schizophrenic hallucination:

QUEEN.
To whom do you speak this?
HAM.
                                                  Do you see nothing there?
QUEEN.
Nothing at all, yet all that is I see.
HAM.
Nor did you nothing hear?
QUEEN.
                                                  No, nothing but ourselves.
HAM.
Why, look you there, look how it steals away!
My father, in his habit as he lived!
Look where he goes, even now, out at the portal!
                                                                                                                                            Exit Ghost.
QUEEN.
This is the very coinage of your brain.
This bodiless creation ecstasy
Is very cunning in.

(III.iv.132-40)

Hamlet answers his mother's charge of “ecstasy” convincingly. We cannot believe that the Ghost is a figment of his imagination: Horatio has raised precisely this issue in the first scene of the play, and has been quickly convinced that the apparition is “something more than fantasy” (I.i.54). But Shakespeare's stagecraft makes us feel poignantly how little Hamlet is able to rely on the Ghost as his justification for a murderous course of action. Cast on the defensive, forced to justify the right of a lunatic to catechize a sinner, Hamlet is in no way aided by the encore appearance that the Ghost makes to whet his “almost blunted purpose.”

In addition to being “incorporal,” insubstantial, the Ghost dwells on the terrifying processes by which corporeal creatures are reduced to fragments of themselves. Its first words seem calculated to plunge Hamlet deep into thoughts of undoing. “My hour is almost come, / When I to sulf'rous and tormenting flames / Must render up myself,” it begins, evoking visions of human flesh “rendered” to its elements like animal fat (I.v.2-4). The Ghost may be Hamlet's “father's spirit,” but it is a spirit bound by “foul crimes,” doomed to wear away by fasting and fire the impurities that it acquired in nature (ll. 9-13). The punishments of its “prison house” are not less intense than what flesh is heir to; in fact, they are so much more intense that hearing of them

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand an end
Like quills upon the fearful porpentine.
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.

(ll. 16-22)

The Ghost spares Hamlet the sympathetic undoing that would befall him if he heard this tale of the Almighty's purging fires, but it treats him to the next worst thing, an account of the effects of Claudius's poison. When he is told the manner of his father's death—cut off instantly from life, wife, and crown, with venom coursing through his body, his blood congealing and skin crusting, and unrepented sins weighing upon his head—Hamlet hardly requires the Ghost's accompanying injunction: “O, horrible! Most horrible! / If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not” (ll. 80-81). Reeling as beneath a physical blow, he feels that his own body may no longer cohere, no longer support his consciousness: “Hold, hold, my heart, / And you, my sinews, grow not instant old, / But bear me stiffly up” (ll. 93-95).

Earlier, the sight of the Ghost has left Marcellus and Barnardo “distilled / Almost to jelly with the act of fear” (I.ii.204-5). The tale of how his father's body sank from admirable beauty to horrifying monstrosity in an instant, and how in the same instant invisible sins overwhelmed his father's soul, plunges Hamlet into a horror as much ontological as physical, into a world where man the effectual ethical agent seems distilled to utter inconsequence. Is ambition a shadow, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern suggest in a feeble attempt to broach the topic of Hamlet's political intentions? “Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretched heroes the beggars' shadows” (II.ii.267-69). Just as a king's body might be imagined going a passage through the guts of a beggar, his ambitious, “outstretched” spirit may be nothing more lasting than a ghostly shadow. In this world, thoughts may be no more capable of transcending ruin than are bodies. The earth now seems “sterile” to Hamlet, the firmament a morbid exhalation of infectious “vapors,” and godlike man a handful of dust waiting to return to its disorganized state (II.ii). The best things in himself—his fidelity to his father, and the love of Ophelia—are seen now as compromised by the old corrupt “stock” of mankind that virtue can “inoculate” but never supplant (III.i). Linking himself with men such as Claudius—and Ophelia with women such as Gertrude—by the corruptible material in which they are commonly rooted, Hamlet sees virtuous purpose and rational significance threatened everywhere by corporeal corruption.

This perception of bodily experience as corrupt and corrupting drives Hamlet into disdainful, alienated contempt: contempt for his own flesh, contempt for those parts of his experience that seem tainted by corporeality, contempt for people who threaten to harm or to compromise him by insinuating themselves into his thoughts. When Horatio warns him of the possible dangers of following the Ghost, he welcomes the destruction of his body: “Why, what should be the fear? / 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.64-67). Horatio's reasonable reminder that the soul is no more immutable or invulnerable than the body, but may itself be wrecked in madness as it hovers over the abyss, drives Hamlet into what seems to Horatio a “desperate” violence: “Unhand me, gentlemen. / By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me!” (ll. 84-85). This violent withdrawal from his body and from his companions is augmented shortly by withdrawal from his own worldly self. Hamlet imagines that, in order to honor the Ghost's parting command, he must obliterate from memory all the experience and learning stored in his brain, uprooting past impressions until only those of the avenging spirit live there, “Unmix'd with baser matter” (I.v.104). Forsaking for the moment the prudential considerations that his years of “observation” would suggest to him, and also his trust in his companions, he contents himself with “wild and whirling words,” like a falcon towering high above the earth.

Hamlet's transcendent contempt is dramatized most powerfully in his treatment of Ophelia, the one creature who ties him inextricably, physically, to the corrupt world of Elsinore. His alienation from her begins soon after the encounter with the Ghost. At the end of II.i, she tells Polonius how Hamlet has withdrawn himself in ghostly silence from her society. The antic performance that Polonius takes for “the very ecstasy of love” is indeed ecstatic, though hardly amatory. Hamlet, in Ophelia's description, resembles the literary figure of the distracted and dishevelled lover, but he more strongly evokes the corporeal ruin suggested by the figure of the Ghost. He has entered her room, Ophelia says, in a manner ominous enough to strike terror into her heart, very pale (as the Ghost was said to be), “And with a look so piteous in purport, / As if he had been loosed out of hell / To speak of horrors” (II.i.82-84). Silently scrutinizing the amazed object of his visitation, as the Ghost silently stood before his interlocutors before finally yielding up speech to Hamlet, and three times imitating its action of lifting its head up and down (described by Horatio at I.ii.216), he at last raises “a sigh so piteous and profound / As it did seem to shatter all his bulk / And end his being” (II.i.94-96)—then drifts out of the room without the use of his eyes, they being constantly fixed on Ophelia, as the Ghost's were said to be on Horatio. In thus affecting the shattering of bulk and ending of being that tore his father from the queen, Hamlet declares his intention to tear himself from his erotic attachment to Ophelia.

A violent attempt to free himself from corporeality, resulting paradoxically in a deep immersion in it, characterizes all of Hamlet's dealings with Ophelia. When he turns his assumed madness upon the unfortunate girl with full force in Act III, he reviles her as a pretty snare for the spirit—one of those creatures who substitute new faces for the ones God gave them, who jig and amble and lisp, who excuse their moral depravity by pleading their rational incapacity—and urges her to take herself out of sexual circulation. The next scene finds him attacking her body with ribald jokes about country matters, lying between maids' legs, and games of show and tell. In thus bitterly doing violence to the creature who most has access to his inner self, Hamlet does not find freedom from the danger of love, but only reduces himself and her to ruin. The deformation of his former self that Ophelia thinks she sees in his harangue—“That unmatched form and feature of blown youth / Blasted with ecstasy” (III.i.160-61)—prefigures her own madness in the next Act. It foretells also Hamlet's distracted expressions of anguish at her death:

'Swounds, show me what thou't do.
Woo't weep? Woo't fight? Woo't fast? Woo't tear thyself?
Woo't drink up eisel? Eat a crocodile?
I'll do't.

(V.i.274-77)

Hamlet finds excessive and violent degradations of his own body the only adequate testimony to the falseness of his earlier contempt. All of his efforts to remove himself from the compromising infection of corporeality only drive him more deeply into the understanding of his dependence on the frail body.

Hamlet's violent, and ultimately futile, ambition to transcend bodily weakness can be seen not only in his dealings with Ophelia, but also in all of his attempts to respond adequately to the death of his father. In his first speech of the play, while manifestly acting the part of a mourner, he disdains dramatic action as being limited by the opacity of the flesh. No physical “show,” he insists, can adequately convey the immensity of his grief. His black clothes and the expressive corporeal actions that accompany them fall short of the indescribable state of suffering that resides within him. Hamlet's separation of “actions that a man might play” and the invisible anguish of his alienated soul is an admission of futility, suggesting that no physical acts—whether dramatic or heroic—can serve the purposes of the spirit. And his words ring false when compared to the authentic alienation of Ophelia, whose mad meanderings and distracted gestures, while opaque to reason, nevertheless move their audience to anguished commiseration as coherent utterance never could—prompting Laertes to exclaim, “This nothing's more than matter” (IV.v.174).

The Ghost's demand for vengeance requires some stronger resort to physicality, and when Hamlet asks the Player for “a passionate speech” he seems briefly to have found a model for “suiting” corporeal action to mental state. He admires the Player's capacity to so translate a fictional intention into dramatic action that all of his corporeal “function” can be seen lending “forms to his conceit” (II.ii.561-62). But it soon appears that Hamlet is not chiefly interested in the harmonious suiting of body to soul. Rather, he has asked for the speech in order to excite himself to a still more violent contempt for the body. He imagines that, given the magnitude of his wrong, he should “drown the stage with tears,” “cleave the general ear with horrid speech,” “and amaze indeed / The very faculties of eyes and ears” (ll. 567-71). He fixes obsessively on corporeal excitation as a standard for dramatic and ethical action, contemplating imaginary injuries to his own body in order to work himself up into violence:

                                                                                                                        Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain? Breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? Gives me the lie i' th' throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?
Ha, 'swounds, I should take it, for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should ha' fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal. Bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance!
Why, what an ass am I!

(ll. 577-89)

Hamlet's bitter self-hatred in these lines stems from his conviction that, in order to act the part of the revenger, he must plunge deep into the bodily passion that he so despises, and perhaps become a bloody villain himself. He quickly abandons the part, determining instead to have other actors enact a play that will determine the king's guilt or innocence.

His instructions to the players correct his bitter contempt for the body, assigning corporeality its due place in dramatic imitation. Renouncing his ecstatic exaggeration of physical violence, Hamlet says, “O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings” (III.ii.8-11). Use the body in your acting, he tells the players, but “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action” (ll. 17-18). He no longer disdains the capacity of bodily actions to execute ethical intentions. The purpose of acting, he says, is to mirror the lineaments of human experience on stage—“to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (ll. 21-24). Like a mirror that faithfully receives the physical forms of things, dramatic art takes the bodily impress of men and women and re-presents their moral nature in its living outlines. Hamlet achieves in these prescriptions for art a conception of its ethically effective function, and he manages to implement the conception when he uses other artists' works to probe the psyches of Claudius and Gertrude. The starkly mimetic tableau of courtly bodies played before Claudius literally shows the king the form of his actions, and achieves its intended effect of driving him from cover. The portraits of Gertrude's two husbands engage her conscience with similarly stunning effect, confronting her inescapably with the lineaments of her desires.

But artistic imitations of bodily action do not help Hamlet to accomplish his most important ethical action. He uses the artistic fusion of body and soul, form and intention, to do what art can do according to the Renaissance aesthetic: convey the intelligible order of experience to an audience and stir their moral responses. He cannot—or will not—use it to accomplish regicide. Indeed, he lets even his “antic disposition” slip before and during the play, with the effect that Claudius understands exactly why the mousetrap has been sprung and determines to remove his enemy from Denmark.

Hamlet's explicit considerations of revenge, like his studies of models of dramatic action, suffer constantly from his ambition to transcend corporeal weakness. By associating heroic action with an escape from the flesh in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, he initiates a vain attempt to transcend the very conditions of action. He imagines that “taking up arms” will somehow liberate his soul from the indignities of the body. But hearing the story of how his father died has made it impossible for him to imagine the process of leaving the body (so “noble in the mind”) in any terms except those of corporeal calamity. Eternal sleep suggests eternal nightmares. Casting his mind up and out of corporeal misery only leaves him “sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,” his face drained of “the native hue of resolution” by a consciousness turned pathologically inward. Corporeality drags his heaven-seeking thoughts to earth; like the praying Claudius, he finds them miserably incapable of transcending the limitations of bodily existence.

His effort to draw inspiration from the soldiership of Fortinbras, like his very similar admiration for the Player, loses coherent ethical purpose as it sinks into violent disdain for bodily well-being. The Norwegian adventure against Poland seems to him a case of pathologically morbid violence, an “imposthume of much wealth and peace, / That inward breaks, and shows no cause without / Why the man dies” (IV.iv.27-29). But he forces himself to admire it, because of Fortinbras's eagerness to abandon bodily concerns for the sake of the spirit. His own small sum of bloodshed, he decides, indicates a beast's dull maintenance of corporeal functions, while Fortinbras's admirable “spirit,” his “divine ambition,” appear in his willingness to expose the great “mass” of his army to indiscriminate slaughter. Fortinbras's sacrifice of twenty thousand men for a piece of land not large enough to bury them outpaces in barbarity Laertes's willingness to cut his enemy's throat in the church, and his motives—“a fantasy and trick of fame”—are more insubstantial. Hamlet recognizes the monstrosity of the deed, and even the words that he calls up to defend it betray their ostensible purposes: “Examples gross as earth exhort me” (can such examples be exemplary?); “Rightly to be great / Is not to stir without great argument” (if he is affirming Fortinbras's action, does he not need another “not”?). In yearning to pattern his own revenge on this senseless promotion of catastrophe, Hamlet abandons all realistic consideration of good and evil in an effort to overcome his dull animal maintenance of corporeal life. Instead of deploring Fortinbras's failure to use the body for substantial purposes, he celebrates the way in which he contemptuously smashes it, and thereby entertains thoughts of moral depravity.

In the prayer scene, we see Hamlet caught once more in the division that he would make between body and spirit, and once more cultivating the pathological corruption that he so fears. Seeing Claudius engaged, as he thinks, in “the purging of his soul,” making himself “fit and seasoned for his passage”—whereas his own father died “grossly, full of bread, / With all his crimes broad blown”—Hamlet waits for a moment that will have “no relish of salvation in't,” and leaves Claudius's “physic” to give way to more “sickly days” (III.iii.80-96). An ill-intentioned consulting physician, he judges the alimentary system of the patient sufficiently free of obstruction to permit an unimpeded “passage” of the soul to paradise, and prescribes a period of waiting so that the organism may worsen and clog the hateful soul within it before it is killed. His false assumption that any human soul, much less one so corrupt as Claudius's, could free itself from the conditions of corporeality leads him to seek a barbaric revenge incompatible with Christian virtue, and prevents him from enacting the simpler revenge that lies possible before him. The dramatic irony that Claudius has not been able to transcend his body and the things that it still loves urges the insufficiency of Hamlet's attitudes.

Purposeful action cannot coexist with Hamlet's effort to distinguish the invincible soul from the ruinous body. Such an effort seeks to rescue the self from something that it depends upon for its being and doing. Consciousness in Hamlet is, like the body, an entity poised between substantial presence and ephemeral absence. The body grows and decays according to its own laws; by the same inscrutable laws, men find achievement in the midst of loss, security in the midst of fear, power in weakness, significance in accident. Hamlet defies these laws so long as he attempts to remove the spirit from ambiguity and lodge it in simplicity. Instead of cultivating the compound of kindred elements that is a spirited body, he tries to split it into a duality, and wastes his energy contemning half of himself.

When Hamlet breaks out of his dualism and more confidently treads the stage as a duellist, it is because he has finally acknowledged, without dread or anguish, that princes, like their swords, accomplish their ends in “passing.” A clown's tricks do not outlive his kicks: not only Yorick's lips have disappeared from the earth, but also his gibes, his gambols, his songs, his flashes of merriment. Nor, by the same token, can Caesar, “that earth which kept the world in awe” (V.i.215), expect to remain a substantial and functional presence, save perhaps as a patch on a windy wall. The great personages who may have owned the graveyard's bones dance again in imagination as creatures who mistook their power for something more substantial than the body, and the fragments of their bodies mock their pretension by outliving them. Gertrude may have forgotten her husband after only two months, but a tanner's flesh is still keeping out water after eight years. As Hamlet persists (despite Horatio's objection) in his courageously reductive meditations on human vanity, he approaches the brash humility of the Gravedigger, who happily shovels aside pieces of bodies as he sings a ditty of age having “shipped me into the land, / As if I had never been such” (V.i.71-74). The rustic's “absolute” use of the terms “man” and “woman” comically relieves the anxiety generated since the beginning of the play by Hamlet's effort to distinguish mankind from corporeality:

HAM.
What man dost thou dig it for?
CLOWN.
For no man, sir.
HAM.
For what woman then?
CLOWN.
For none neither.
HAM.
Who is to be buried in't?
CLOWN.
One that was a woman, sir; but, rest her soul, she's dead.
HAM.
How absolute the knave is!

(ll. 130-36)

Hamlet's taking solace in the provisional “absolute” that men and women are more than their bodies, but not different from them, suggests that he accepts as well the fact that man's strength consists in acceding to corporeal accidents, rather than in trying to transcend them.

While it is clear that Hamlet adopts a new kind of understanding in Act V, and that he undergoes some beneficial change as a result, criticism has long been notoriously vague about precisely what this saving knowledge consists in. Hamlet does not learn simply to accept death; indeed, he seems always to have desired it. Nor are his words about the “divinity that shapes our ends” and the “special providence in the fall of a sparrow” sufficient foundation on which to base a religious ethic or cosmology. What seems to be on his mind more essentially than either death or God is a preoccupation with the possibilities and conditions of purposeful human action. But even here the understanding seems to be more negative than positive. Hamlet begins to embrace accidental occasions—seeing them under the aspect of Providence rather than Fortune—and to renounce his earlier need to understand and control every aspect of his revenge. Discussing the importance of chance occurrence in the final action, William Warner has recently observed how reluctant the critics of various schools have been to accept limitations on Hamlet's importance, and how they have been driven to ingenious or vague arguments in attempts to rescue his purposeful intentionality.¹⁰ What Hamlet learns, Warner suggests, is precisely the insufficiency of his own attempts to make final and coherent constructions of reality: he learns, in effect, by unlearning what he has thought earlier in the play.

One thing that Hamlet unlearns is his contempt for his physical nature, which has persistently reduced this spirited and capable exemplar of active virtue to acting not at all, or in spurts of blind rage. Hamlet's identity throughout the play has depended upon his wish to exceed the conditions of vulnerability and incompleteness that inhere in an animal body. But reality has repeatedly contradicted this assumed identity, insisting that the body must be central to his being, not something inessential that can be thought into irrelevance and violently discarded. All of Hamlet's efforts to transcend corporeality have only implicated him amorally in its ruinous violence. Finally he abandons the fruitless attempt. He sees in the graveyard not simply the bodily “nothingness” that has so distressed him before, but an inescapable connection between that nothingness and his own being. As James Calderwood has put it, “For Hamlet fully ‘To Be,’ it seems, he must experience in the graveyard, under the tutelage of the Gravemaker, what it is ‘Not To Be.’ For his own identity to crystallize, he must come to the place where all identities dissolve.”¹¹ The Hamlet who kills the king is a man who has accepted radical limitations on his being, leaving the orchestration of his revenge to Claudius (“I am constant to my purposes; they follow the King's pleasure”), the understanding of his death to God (“Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is't to leave betimes?”), the telling of his tale to Horatio (“Horatio, I am dead; / Thou livest; report me and my cause aright”), and the continuation of his life to Fortinbras (“He has my dying voice”). In asking forgiveness of Laertes for the imprudent violence that took Polonius's life, he detaches himself—with diplomatic mendacity, but also with evident sincerity—from the arrogant and tormented self that he has been:

If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,
And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it then? His madness.

(V.ii.236-39)

Hamlet has not in fact killed Polonius in a fit of “madness,” but the word may be taken as a tactful way of referring to an assumed self that has been all but insane. Calderwood calls it a metaphor: “As a metaphor for Hamlet's bond to his father—for that sense in which Hamlet as revenger is ‘possessed’ by the ghost of his father—Hamlet's madness is truly no part of himself, and is in fact ‘poor Hamlet's enemy.’”¹²

Secure in the less ambitious and less anxious self that remains when he has cast out the demon of transcendent power, Hamlet comes into his own as an actor on the national stage, easily and confidently submitting himself to the “pass” of swordplay. He accepts Claudius's invitation to let Laertes's poisonous hand pass into his own: “Come, Hamlet, come, and take this hand from me” (V.ii.227). His body informs him with sick misgiving that Claudius is arranging his exit from this life, but it assures him at the same moment that he has the physical means to act as he purposes:

HOR.
You will lose this wager, my lord.
HAM.
I do not think so. Since he went into France I have been in continual practice. I shall win at the odds. But thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart. But it is no matter.

(V.ii.211-15)

Hamlet suggests that, in order to act, human beings must accept the fact that their achievements go hand in hand with failure, and find their integrity in the welcoming of fragmentation. Accepting that he will himself sooner or later be “no matter,” Hamlet consents to make up one frangible part in a larger body, as an actor performs one role in a play. In his final words before the cushions and courtiers and daggers and drinks appear—“Let be”—he overcomes the distinction between spiritual fixity and corporeal flux that has plagued him throughout the play. Things will be as they become, his death will come when it arrives, and he can at last leave off his effort to define himself in opposition to what Maynard Mack has called his “imaginative environment.”¹³

Most of Shakespeare's tragedies tell the story of an arrogant man who mistakes his grandiose constructions of reality for reality itself. From Richard II to Coriolanus, his heroes attempt forcefully to impose a deluded conception of reality on the world, and reality brings them down. Hamlet differs from these vain and power-mad men in being adolescent, uncertain, victimized, self-hating. But he shares with them the presumptuousness of believing that he can transcend the laws by which other men and women think and behave. The futility of his attempting to be something other than a body is comically asserted by the madcap ramblings of the Gravedigger; it assumes tragic grandeur in the final catastrophe, as newly ruined bodies litter the stage, awaiting the Gravedigger's services. Having finally consented to act the modest part of the duellist, a disciplined corporeal agent who confines his thoughts to the play of physical circumstances, Hamlet submits with grace and dignity to the limitations of his kind.

Notes

1. All quotations are from the Signet text edited by Edward Hubler (1963; rpt. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1972).

2. Francis Barker, The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection (London and New York: Methuen, 1984), pp. 23, 31.

3. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), p. 26.

4. The OED identifies the anus as a contemporary figurative sense of “bung-hole,” citing an entry in Cotgrave's Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611) for the cul de cheval or sea anemone: “a small and ouglie fish, or excrescence of the Sea, resembling a mans bung-hole, and called the red Nettle.”

5. Donald Frame, trans., The Complete Works of Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1957), p. 457.

6. Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980).

7. Wolfgang H. Clemen, The Development of Shakespeare's Imagery (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1951).

8. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays: 1917-1932 (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), pp. 144-45.

9. Mark Rose, “Hamlet and the Shape of Revenge,” English Literary Renaissance, 1 (1971), 132-43, esp. pp. 132-34.

10. William Beatty Warner, Chance and the Text of Experience: Freud, Nietzsche, and Shakespeare's Hamlet (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1986), pp. 268-75.

11. James L. Calderwood, To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), p. 103.

12. Calderwood, p. 44.

13. Maynard Mack, “The World of Hamlet,” The Yale Review, 41 (1952), 502-23, esp. p. 502.