[In the following essay, Gottschalk examines Hamlet's character, contending that although he reveals his villainy and spiritual confusion in the prayer scene, he ultimately achieves redemption and spiritual regeneration at the play's end.]

One of the most perplexing moments in the perplexing play of Hamlet comes in the Prayer Scene when Hamlet, convinced of the King's guilt and ready “to drink hot blood,” happens upon Claudius at prayer, unsheathes his sword, is about to kill him—and then does not, giving as reason his unwillingness to send Claudius' soul to heaven and thus mar his own revenge:

Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent,
When he is drunk asleep; or in his rage;
Or in th' incestuous pleasure of his bed;
At gaming, swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't—
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damn'd and black
As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays.
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.

(III. iv. 88-96)¹

In a famous gloss, Dr. Johnson raised the dilemma for critics to come: “This speech, in which Hamlet, represented as a virtuous character, is not content with taking blood for blood, but contrives damnation for the man that he would punish, is too horrible to be read or to be uttered.”² In response to this dilemma, the critical trend from Coleridge onward has been to insist that, however horrible Hamlet's words, they do not reflect the true man; he does not really mean to contrive damnation for the man he would punish.³ Meanwhile, historically oriented critics have suggested that Hamlet's words, to one familiar with the ethics and conventions of Elizabethan revenge tragedy, are not too horrible to be read or to be uttered at all. Our injured sensibilities are merely anachronistic; Shakespeare's contemporaries felt no qualms at Hamlet's speech—at least, not in the theater.⁴

Most recently, Professor Eleanor Prosser has argued convincingly that neither view is acceptable. If the speech were mere rationalization for inaction, Hamlet would have invoked some more morally acceptable motive for delay, such as unwillingness to stab in the back a man at prayer.⁵ We may add that to dismiss Hamlet's speech a priori as somehow unrepresentative of his true character, as critics have traditionally done, is arbitrary. It is hard to see how a long and powerful speech, virtually a soliloquy and thus sincere by dramatic convention, can be anything but the product of the speaker's character. Otherwise, we are asked to disregard the literal import of twenty-four lines of impressive poetry which, it thus appears, Shakespeare threw in either to mislead us or, at most, to build up suspense. Either way seems rather cheap. The historical solution to Dr. Johnson's dilemma, Prosser has shown, is equally misleading. Not only, of course, was the vengeance that Hamlet proposes irreconcilable to Christian teaching, but those characters, in fiction or on the stage, who proposed to damn the souls of their victims were villains—among them, some of the worst in Elizabethan literature—Nashe's Cutwolfe, Tourneur's Vendice, Webster's Lodovico.⁶ Historical evidence, then, bears out what Johnson felt and subsequent critics have continually sought to excuse: that Hamlet utters words too horrible to be read or to be uttered.

Prosser's solution is to controvert Johnson's earliest premise: Hamlet, in fact, is not represented at this point as a virtuous character. The Ghost's commands are diabolic, and in heeding them Hamlet abandons the teaching of Christianity to follow a course to blood-revenge and villainy. No purgatorial spirit would enjoin revenge. Prosser argues, and no purely virtuous person would seek it; Hamlet has yielded to his human nature and forgotten his spiritual—but at a time in history when human nature was making increasing demands on traditional notions of piety: “Hamlet is trapped between two worlds. The moral code from which he cannot escape is basically medieval, but his instincts are with the Renaissance. … Can God have created man a thinking creature and yet have ordered him not to use the very faculty that raises him above the animals?”⁷

Prosser's study leaves several questions unanswered. First, why are our sympathies with Hamlet far more than they are with his villainous colleagues in other revenge plays? Second, why do we accept his final submission to the providence of God—a submission that would be ludicrously improbable in the case of Hoffman, say, or Vendice?⁸ And most important, how much difference does it make whether or not the Ghost is a devil? To identify the Ghost is not to identify Hamlet. Spirit of health or goblin damned, its behests are not so diabolic, I hope to show, as Hamlet's response to them. Just what manner of man, then, would follow a Ghost as if it were the devil—follow it, at that, in order to combat evil? For Hamlet's problem is not to be defined simply in terms of the precise doctrines between which he is torn—Christian patience versus the code of revenge, filial duty versus pneumatological caution—but also in terms of the dramatic presentation of a character thus torn. It is the sound of the rending fabric that arrests us, not the composition of the cloth. To answer these questions, I propose once more to examine the Prayer Scene as the low point in Hamlet's spiritual pilgrimage. More specifically, I propose to examine it as a prime example, among many in the play, of the perplexity with which Hamlet responds to events and arrives at decisions, and to show that Hamlet's puzzling speech reveals doubt and spiritual confusion that far transcend the ethical dilemma at hand.

The Romantic notion that Hamlet's words in the Prayer Scene do not reflect his true character lends itself, of course, to sentimentality, but it also suggests a possible answer to the question of why we remain sympathetic to Hamlet even at his worst: that in every action of Hamlet's we distinguish between what momentarily he is being and what potentially he is. This distinction Ernest Jones ignores in dismissing Hamlet's expressed motives for delay:

One moment he pretends he is too cowardly to perform the deed, at another he questions the truthfulness of the ghost, at another—when the opportunity presents itself in its naked form—he thinks the time is unsuited, it would be better to wait till the King was at some evil act and then to kill him, and so on. …

When a man gives at different times a different reason for his conduct it is safe to infer that, whether consciously or not, he is concealing the true reason.⁹

But men do not choose their pretenses at random (and, indeed, no psychoanalyst will ever dismiss the pretenses of his own patients as insignificant). What a man chooses to say about himself is a large part of what he is, and Hamlet chooses for a while to sound like a villain.

The question, then, is not what is “really” on Hamlet's mind during the Prayer Scene but, rather, what is the effect of his words on our understanding of his character. Whether the threat to the kneeling Claudius is mere fantasy or concrete plan we cannot be certain, but in any case it represents for the moment Hamlet's view of himself. To assume otherwise is to assume, with critics from Richardson to Bradley to Jones, an underlying germ of personality, simple and constant, that gives greater relevance to some of Hamlet's utterances than to others. But what happens if we do not assume that the Prince has so univocal a character? “The world of Hamlet,” C. S. Lewis observed in a famous passage, “is a world where one has lost one's way. The Prince also has no doubt lost his. …”¹⁰ What if he has also lost himself?

In fact, the play revolves around the Prince's trying on of identities. Shakespeare's other heroes sometimes may but slenderly know themselves, but they almost always seem sure of what their selves are. Each in his own way, Lear, Othello, Macbeth, Antony, and Coriolanus, sets himself up as the measure of all things. They may change, but we are aware of the change before they are; it is a change which they may scarcely examine and do not question at all but which simply happens to them. Lear goes mad; later, he wakes up sane, saner than at the beginning of the play. Throughout, he retains some sort of clear identity, and his voice, whether banishing Cordelia, holding a maddened mock trial of his false daughters, or joyfully accepting imprisonment and love, is never unsure of itself, however much Lear questions his past actions and present circumstances. Shakespeare's heroes are generally preoccupied with their deeds, and their moments of crisis occur when they discover that they have done the wrong deed, acted on a misapprehension or misjudgment. It is thus that the order of their own moral universes crumbles so that they must build a new one. They rarely ask, “Who am I?” but rather, “What have I done?” and, “What shall I do now?” If they do ask, “Who am I?” it is only to discover immediately that they are not who they thought they were. Their circumstances have led them to the question, and in asking the question, they reach their personal crises. “To be once in doubt / Is once to be resolved”: Othello's boast might be a motto for almost every tragic hero in Shakespeare. How quickly are even Macbeth's doubts about regicide resolved into terrifying action. To be in doubt is to be resolved; none of Shakespeare's heroes accepts doubt about himself as a modus vivendi: none except Hamlet.¹¹

Hamlet perpetually asks, “Who am I?” and receives no answer:

                                                                                                                                  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 th' nose? gives me the lie i' th' throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this, ha?

(II.ii.598-602)

This is not simply pretense, as Jones suggests, but a working at a problem:

'Swounds, I should take it! for it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should have fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal.

(II.ii.603-7)

Hamlet accepts cowardice merely as a hypothesis confirmed in some degree by fact: “it cannot be but I am pigeon-livered.” There is no assurance here, not even the assurance of self-delusion: cowards know they are cowards, they do not have to reason out the fact. If for the moment Hamlet accepts being a coward, he does so provisionally, doubtfully. And over and over again, a speech of Hamlet's, a line, a turn of phrase will reflect back upon himself, upon his dubiety in the face of his universe and of his own personality. He is prompted to his revenge by heaven and hell; he did love Ophelia once, and yet he loved her not; he is at once indifferent honest and yet proud, revengeful, ambitious. No one else in Shakespeare seeks so much for identity in opposites, sees himself so much as the subject of contradiction.

                                                                                                              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.

(IV.iv.43-46)

Is it bestial oblivion that makes him delay, or some craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event? Critics have often taken the latter as an explanation of Hamlet's inaction. But Hamlet is raising these questions to try them on and, finally, to reject them: he does not know.

Even his inner thoughts are in part beyond his control. Again and again, some event, some object before him will intrude on his awareness and force him to accommodate it to his own mental life, to draw lessons for himself from what chance strews in his way: the sound of trumpets and cannon at the King's carousal, the sight of a player moved to tears by his own speech or of the Norwegian army moving across the stage, a skull thrown up from a freshly opened grave, or a king kneeling in prayer. Yet often the conclusion is reached only to be sidetracked or overthrown altogether by some new encounter with fact. Moralization on the Danes' drunkenness breaks off as the Ghost appears, revealing to Hamlet a Denmark where drunkenness is the least of sins. The meditation of “To be or not to be” yields to the frenzy of the encounter with Ophelia. In the graveyard, the ironical memento mori theme and variations give way to shock and grief when the actual body of Ophelia is brought on stage. For Hamlet, far more deeply than for the Player King, our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.

Francis Fergusson has pointed out that Hamlet is the “chief reflector” of the many-faceted action of the play: from his viewpoint more than from any other do we perceive the shifting and elusive universe of Elsinore.¹² In his eyes, for instance, Polonius becomes a fishmonger, a moralist's senex, and an actor playing Julius Caesar ripe for slaughter. But more than that, Hamlet is many reflectors, not only because of the elusiveness and inconsistency of the world as he sees it, but also because the shifting gaze he turns on others he also turns inward upon himself, shaping and reshaping in his mind's eye both his situation and his own character. Now he sees himself as the villain in a third-rate revenge play (“Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge” [III.ii.264-65]); now as a recorder that unskillful hands are seeking to play upon; now as chief player in a children's game (“Hide fox, and all after” [IV.ii.31]).

Meanwhile, he has a task to perform. But to get done, an assigned task must reflect the doer. Ceaselessly, Hamlet tries to align himself with his situation, to find an identity in it—for, at the beginning of the play, he has none—he is neither student-prince nor king; as his first words in the play suggest, he is no longer even his father's son. At first, he can find himself only in the past, at Wittenberg or in memories of his father, whom he seeks with veiled lids in the dust (I.ii.70-71) or sees in his mind's eye (I.ii.185). But somehow he must make his unhappy truce with the intractable facts at hand, and he tries to do so at the end of the first soliloquy: “It is not, nor it cannot come to good. / But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue!” (I.ii.158-59). The action proper of the play has not yet begun, and this is the last time that Hamlet will be able utterly to hold back. Soon he will meet his father, not in his mind's eye, but face to face. The facts of his situation will take on a new aspect as he learns of the murder, and thereafter he will evoke more threatening models: Pyrrhus, Fortinbras (“Examples gross as earth exhort me” [IV.iv.46]), and Laertes (“For by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his” [V.ii.77-78]). While subplots commonly reflect the main plot in Elizabethan drama, it is not so common for the protagonist to be as aware of this reflection as Hamlet is, constantly seeking in the examples of others how to be true at once to his cause and to himself.

We are used to the notion of a Hamlet looking before and after, pondering what he has done and must do; but more than that, not only does thought modify action for Hamlet, but action thought. All occasions do inform against him in the sense of appearing to him, accusing him, and forcing him to reformulate his own stance in the drama. In the face of unremitting doubt, cursing his very existence for yielding him up to the task of setting the time right, Hamlet must now seek, at every turn, to align his own existence with the existence of Denmark, to find a role that will both express himself and lead to the fulfillment of his task.

The Prayer Scene shows such an attempt. Since in Hamlet we are interested not merely in the outcome of a scene in overt action but also in the shape it will assume in Hamlet's imagination, the Prayer Scene really has two endings: Hamlet's failure to kill the King, and Hamlet's leaving the stage self-cast in the role of revenge villain. Character does not simply motivate this scene, nor does this scene simply reveal character: it shapes it—shapes it tentatively, as we shall see, not finally, for underlying the Hamlet who, for the worst of reasons, refuses to kill the King is the Hamlet to whom this choice and all choices are merely provisional.

What, then, does the assumption of this role reveal about Hamlet at this moment? One indication of Hamlet's attitude toward himself, as Professor Fredson Bowers has shown,¹³ is what he utters minutes after the Prayer Scene, when he stands over the dead body of Polonius:

                                                                                For this same lord,
I do repent; but heaven hath pleas'd it so,
To punish me with this, and this with me,
That I must be their scourge and minister.

(III.iv.172-75)

“Scourge and minister”: the phrase is another example of Hamlet's vision of inner self-contradiction, for the terms are mutually exclusive. Both refer to agents of God's vengeance, but the minister is righteous and in overthrowing evil directly establishes good in its place, while the scourge is evil: although he may destroy the sinful, he is already irretrievably caught up in sin himself and damned in the very act of vengeance. His vengeance takes the form of a common crime, in which he makes his own opportunities, while heaven will provide the minister with an opportunity to act in fulfillment of public justice.¹⁴ The protagonist as scourge held the stage in the revenge tragedies of the early seventeenth century. Tourneur's Vendice, Webster's Bosola, and a host of others marshaled their own way to knavery even as they cleansed the stage of even greater villains than themselves. And the Hamlet of the Prayer Scene is their spiritual forebear, as the Hamlet who has just killed Polonius recognizes.

Indeed, Bowers finds that Hamlet's self-reproaches and the delay itself stem from his uncertainty about whether he is to act as a minister or a scourge (pp. 745-46). This is certainly a far-reaching interpretation to be derived largely from a few lines that occur rather late in the play. Although Bowers argues that the Elizabethan audience would have found Hamlet's dilemma implicit in the situation into which the Ghost thrust him,¹⁵ it is risky to assume that the complexity of Hamlet can be resolved by positing the simplicity of the age in which it was written. Yet the fact remains that toward the end of the third act, Hamlet alludes to the doctrines of minister and scourge, and that these terms imply a deep ambivalence on Hamlet's part toward his task. And, whether or not this ambivalence is implicit in the task itself all along, it lies in Hamlet's own soul.

Now, it is practically a truism of modern Hamlet interpretation that the Prince's dejection (and, to many critics, his inaction) stems from an overwhelming, unassimilable vision of evil. And the doubt and contradiction we have already noticed in his words show that he sometimes feels himself allied with the evil that it is his duty to destroy. This double alliance is schematized in the distinction between scourge and minister and in the phrase, “To punish me with this, and this with me,” but signs abound far earlier in the play as well. Hamlet obliquely associates himself with Claudius when he laments that his mother “married with my uncle; / My father's brother, but no more like my father / Than I to Hercules” (I.ii.151-53). His flesh, according to many editors, is as sullied as that of those whom he condemns, and later on in the play, confronted with a frail woman whom he will shortly attack in some of his bitterest language, he casts himself, too, into the role of sinner:

I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. … What should such fellows as I do, crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us.

(III.i.123-33)

Although Hamlet is making himself into an Everyman here, the effect is not to exculpate himself personally but to link him to the damned universe of Denmark: “We are arrant knaves all.”

Not only does Hamlet continually seek in experience the true image of his cause, but twice he tries to force Claudius and Gertrude to respond to images he himself draws of Denmark. Yet these attempts, too, are marred by his own sense of guilt. The occasions of these attempts are the Play Scene, where Hamlet and the actors hold the mirror up to nature, and the Closet Scene, where, showing Gertrude pictures of his father and of Claudius, he sets up a glass before her where she may see the inmost part of herself (III.iv.19-20). The image of the mirror links the two scenes, which, to Hamlet, have the same purpose: to catch the conscience of the royal pair. And both images even imply a certain pedagogical confidence that Hamlet never shows when dealing with himself. Indeed, the speech to the players as well as his recollection

That guilty creatures, sitting at a play,
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been struck so to the soul that presently
They have proclaim'd their malefactions

(II.ii.617-20)

hearken back to traditional defenses of the theater as didactic.

But what about the conscience of the Prince? Just before the mousetrap is to be staged, Hamlet explains to Horatio his plan to entrap the King:

                                                                                If his occulted guilt
Do not itself unkennel in one speech,
It is a damned ghost that we have seen,
And my imaginations are as foul
As Vulcan's stithy.

(III.ii.85-89)

The speech strikes a strange note. If Claudius were innocent, then the idea that he is guilty would indeed be foul; but Hamlet does not blame the “damned ghost” for this idea: it is his own imagination that would be as foul as Vulcan's stithy, his own “prophetic soul.” Whether or not Claudius is guilty, Hamlet has created this guilt in his own mind, and it bothers him. In the Play Scene, Hamlet is trying to establish not only the honesty of the Ghost, but his own as well. It is for that reason, I think, that when the play is over he is first of all elated at his theatrical success—and why not?—“Why, let the strucken deer go weep, / The hart ungalled play” (III.ii.282-83) Hamlet hurls by way of epilogue after the retreating Claudius. The words echo his blandly ironic reply to the King's worried inquiries about the play: “Your Majesty, and we that have free souls, it touches us not. Let the gall'd jade winch; our withers are unwrung” (III.ii.251-53). The piece of doggerel is Hamlet's triumphant declaration that he is not like Claudius—this is what the play has shown him.

Some of Hamlet's improvisational interpolations during the play, however, show something else. “This is one Lucianus, nephew to the King,” he says, as the player-murderer comes on stage. He himself is nephew to the King, he has cast himself in an equally guilty role, and he nails down the association by a thoroughly inappropriate allusion to an old play: “Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge”—though Lucianus is not a revenger.¹⁶ The play holds the mirror of nature up to the King so that he may feel and proclaim his guilt; Hamlet's commentary holds the mirror up to Hamlet: he is threatening Claudius, and he is threatening him in the mode of the revenge-villain. The threat cuts two ways.

Indeed, the soliloquy “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” (II.ii.576 ff.), with its juxtaposition of bitter attacks on Claudius and himself, makes it seem inevitable that Hamlet cannot reveal Claudius's guilt without accusing himself as well. The sequence of Hamlet's thought is significant. Having compared himself with the actor who weeps for Hecuba, Hamlet then turns to an imaginary opponent who challenges him with insults to a duel (“Who calls me villain? … gives me the lie i' th' throat / As deep as to the lungs?”). But instead of accepting the challenge, Hamlet accepts the insults (“'Swounds, I should take it!”) and continues them himself, in his own person. Then the challenge lashes out again—but this time at Claudius (“Bloody, bawdy villain! / Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!”). And again the challenge suddenly lapses into self-reproach (“O, vengeance! / Why, what an ass am I!”). Professor Harold Jenkins, observing that the cry, “O, vengeance!” occurs in the First Folio but not in the Second Quarto, argues for its inauthenticity, suggesting the inappropriateness of Hamlet's “call for vengeance while he is still absorbed in self-reproaches. …”¹⁷ But it is precisely in this apparent inappropriateness that we see once more the movement of Hamlet's mind from action to reaction, as rage turns upon itself, as his thoughts leap from self-disgust to vindictive fury and back again. Then comes the plan for the mouse-trap. The Player forced Hamlet to admit his guilt; now Hamlet will try the same thing on his uncle, and the guilt-aggression cycle of the soliloquy thus expands outward into the play.¹⁸

That Hamlet's vengeance is not of the purely creative sort that characterizes God's minister appears again in the Closet Scene, when he details to his mother her sins until she can stand it no longer and begs him to stop:

                                                                      O Hamlet, speak no more!
Thou turn'st mine eyes into my very soul,
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.

(III.iv.88-91)

And Hamlet should indeed be content to stop here if his purpose in “speaking daggers” is the laudable one he announced earlier: “You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you” (ll. 19-20). Nosce te ipsum—here, Hamlet echoes one of the worthiest commonplaces of Renaissance didacticism: “Therefore,” Erasmus wrote,

“seynge that thou hast taken upon thee, war aganyst thy selfe, and the chiefe hope and comfort of victory, is yf thou knowe thy selfe to the uttermost: I will paynt a certayne ymage of thy selfe, as it were in a table, and set it before thyne eyne: that thou mayst perfitly knowe, what thou art inwarde, and within thy skynne.”¹⁹

Gertrude's words repeat Hamlet's very own; his didactic mission is accomplished, and he might well obey the Ghost's original command to leave his mother to those thorns that in her bosom lodge to prick and sting her. But instead he goes on:

                                                                                                    Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty!

(II. 91-94)

Three times in all Gertrude begs him to stop, and each time he continues remorselessly, attacking her and attacking Claudius, until the entrance of the Ghost forces him to break off. Here, if anywhere, T. S. Eliot's claim is justified that Hamlet's emotions are in excess of the facts as they appear. Unless Hamlet is just being sadistic, he is himself fascinated by the image of the very sins he is attacking, so fascinated that he cannot turn his own eyes from them.

When Hamlet refers to himself as a scourge as well as a minister, he is simply making explicit what has been implicit all along in his attitude toward himself: that he, too, is caught up in the rottenness of Denmark, that although he is the slayer of Winter, as Gilbert Murray observes in his anthropological study, he nevertheless “has the notes of the Winter about him.²⁰ The psychoanalytical interpretations of Freud and Ernest Jones, too, are based upon the assumption that Hamlet secretly harbors the same incestuous desires that Claudius has acted upon. But what the psychoanalysts adduce a priori is already implicit in the text: Hamlet sees himself as a sinner among sinners.

In the context of Hamlet's sense of his own guilt, the Prayer Scene becomes clear. Hamlet speaks lines belonging conventionally to the Italianate villain (or the scourge) because that is what he has become in his own eyes. The sense of moral superiority evident at his first appearance—“Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’” (I. ii. 76)—has long since died away, and now he is prompted to his revenge by hell alone. In assuming the role of villain and planning Claudius' eternal damnation, Hamlet is tacitly condemning himself as well. And this is what he has been doing all along. Only now, the play-within-the-play over and some sort of action inevitable, this reciprocal condemnation comes out most strongly, and Hamlet utters the words that have perplexed his admirers ever since.

Critics who find in these words the mere orthodoxy of revenge tragedy also see in them no more than a dutiful response to the Ghost's original command. E. E. Stoll in particular points out that Hamlet is echoing the Ghost's own lamentation on the manner of his death:

Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhous'led, disappointed, unanel'd. …

(I.v.76-77)

He took my father grossly, full of bread,
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May. …

(III.iii.80-81)

And, Stoll continues, the prevailing principle of revenge tragedy, classical or Elizabethan, is an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.²¹

But the Ghost's idea of revenge, seen in itself, transcends the old and bloody lex talionis:

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
But, howsoever thou pursuest this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her.

(I.v.82-88)

The Ghost is concerned with the spiritual health of his nation, his son, and his queen; he shows no private thirst to see Claudius suffer what Claudius has made him suffer. He is concerned with restoration, not with retaliation. To understand how Shakespeare altered tradition, one need only turn to Marston's Senecan tragedy Antonio's Revenge—a play that may have influenced Hamlet—in which the ghost of the murdered Andrugio, like the elder Hamlet, lays the burden of vengeance on his son's shoulders:

Thou vigor of my youth, juice of my love,
Seize in revenge, grasp the stern-bended front
Of frowning vengeance with impeised clutch.
Alarum Nemesis, rouse up thy blood,
Invent some stratagem of vengeance
Which, but to think on, may like lightning glide
With horror through thy breast. Remember this:
Scelera non ulciseris, nisi vincis.(22)

“A wrong not exceeded is not revenged”: if that is the mode in which Shakespeare chose to write Hamlet, then turning from Marston—and from Seneca and Kyd—we must find the Ghost in Hamlet pretty poor stuff indeed. Otherwise, I think, we must assume that the moderation of the elder Hamlet, hypocritical or sincere, clearly sets off the ferocity of the speech in the Prayer Scene—a ferocity that far exceeds the demands of the Ghost and is Hamlet's alone²³—and that Hamlet delays revenge not because he is less bloodthirsty than the Ghost, as many critics would have it, but, paradoxically, because he is more so.

“'Tis a knavish piece of work,” Hamlet remarks to Claudius during the Play Scene, “but what o' that? Your Majesty, and we that have free souls, it touches us not” (III.ii.250-53). Of course, the King's soul is not free, but neither is Hamlet's. If it were, he would renounce his task in the name of Christian patience, like Tourneur's Charlemont, or he would kill Claudius the quickest way and have done with it, just as Shaw's Rufio in Caesar and Cleopatra kills the dangerous servant Ftatateeta open-heartedly and without malice, lest she kill Caesar first. That would involve an entirely different play, of course: a Macbeth rewritten with Malcolm the protagonist, or Richard III with Richmond.²⁴ Instead, Shakespeare shows us Hamlet at the very witching time of night, when hell itself breathes out contagion to this world and he could drink hot blood. Under the pressure of his unfinished task and his sense of personal corruption, he commits himself to villainy. That is his answer to what the Play Scene has told him.

Yet even this commitment is qualified by the means with which Hamlet reaches it. Prepared to speak daggers to his mother but use none, Hamlet is not prepared for what he actually next encounters: Claudius on his knees, praying (III.iii.73 ff.). The new fact immediately evokes new possibilities (“Now might I do it pat”), new decisions (“And now I'll do't”), and then new and unforeseen results (“and so he goes to heaven”). That would be scanned. The carefully balanced antithetical construction that follows brings out once more the conflict of specific fact (the praying Claudius) with paradigm of action (the manner of the elder Hamlet's death):

He took my father grossly, full of bread,
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
.....                                                                                and am I then reveng'd,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season'd for his passage?

(II. 80-81, 84-86)

This part of the speech is not so much bloodthirsty as questioning. There is even a characteristic bit of Hamlet's intellectual thoroughness that contrasts strangely and significantly with the brutality to follow:

And how his audit stands, who knows save heaven?
But in our circumstance and course of thought,
'Tis heavy with him. …

(II. 82-84)

All the worse, one might argue, to damn Claudius on the basis of a mere hypothesis about the Divine Account Books. True enough, but Hamlet is going on the best information he has—that is precisely the point: this middle part of the speech shows Hamlet the “sole son” (l. 77) trying to determine his proper role in confrontation with Claudius' apparent and unexpected repentance. The rest of the speech, Hamlet's conclusion, is couched in the conventional terms of the blood revenger—the role he has been narrowly skirting throughout the Play Scene and which he makes a conscious effort to avoid in the soliloquy “Now is the very witching time of night” (III.iii.406 ff.).

It is a bad role, and Hamlet reaches it through morally questionable postulates, but in seeing him reach it, as opposed to seeing him identified with it from the start, we recognize that he might have chosen otherwise. Tourneur's Vendice gradually becomes as evil as his enemies, but it is clear even in his opening soliloquy that he has already made a decision to avenge that will inevitably entail his total corruption. Because his decision is never dramatized, it is seen as complete and irrevocable. For this reason, we never wholly sympathize with him: there is almost nothing to sympathize with. But Hamlet's decisions are always dramatized, and thus Shakespeare can continually imply the possibility, however remote, of their opposite. The Romantic notion, however sentimental and exaggerated, that Hamlet's speech in the Prayer Scene does not reflect the true Hamlet does show insight into Shakespeare's method of portrayal. However, instead of saying with the Romantics that the speech does not reflect Hamlet at all, we should say that it does not encompass him entirely.

I have dwelt so long and so one-sidedly on Hamlet's villainy because I think that it is central to the play and that critics who seek in one way or another to explain it away do violence to the text. The fact remains that Hamlet is the hero of the play, and if he moves as far toward sin as I have suggested, then we must expect Shakespeare to take strong steps to redeem him at the last. And since Hamlet is portrayed as a decision-maker, his redemption is plausible and acceptable. Hamlet's spiritual regeneration, especially as revealed in the famous utterances on providence, has often been discussed. It is not only in these speeches, however, that we see Hamlet's new alignment with heaven, or else we might reasonably complain with Bradley that they express no more than fatalism, or with L. C. Knights that they present a truth glimpsed in defeat.²⁵ Instead, the entire end of the play is constructed to bear out what the providence speeches indicate about Hamlet's new-found identity.

This construction becomes especially clear when we read the catastrophe in the light of the Prayer Scene and see how Hamlet's conduct differs so greatly from what it was when he found the frightened and tormented Claudius making his vain plea to heaven. To begin with, in the Prayer Scene Hamlet is on the offensive. He has caught the conscience of the King: he has delivered a blow that has sent Claudius literally to his knees. He is in control of the situation: the King kneels in guilt-stricken but hopeless prayer while, unknown to him, Hamlet stands behind with drawn sword. Claudius is the passive one, and a passive man does not appear villainous on the stage. In the final scene the situation is reversed. Claudius has regained his composure, the plotting is now all his, and where Hamlet had attacked with The Murther of Gonzago, Claudius now thrusts with the poisoned sword of Laertes.

But this shift in initiative corresponds to a shift in Hamlet's character itself. Earlier, planning the fencing match with Laertes, Claudius predicts the success of their ruse:

                                                                                He, being remiss,
Most generous, and free from all contriving,
Will not peruse the foils. …

(IV.vii.135-37)

This seems very far from describing the man who immediately sensed the dishonesty of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and later hoisted them with their own petard; who contrived the mousetrap and, shortly thereafter, the damnation of the King. Claudius is describing the Hamlet who was once the expectancy and rose of the fair state, the Hamlet who knows not seems, but certainly not the Hamlet of the middle three acts. And yet the King's prediction comes perfectly true. “These foils have all a length?” the Prince asks carelessly, choosing one at random. And when the Queen faints, poisoned from the cup intended for him, his momentary bewilderment is equally inexplicable if he is the same Hamlet of the Prayer Scene: “O villainy! Ho! let the door be lock'd. / Treachery! Seek it out” (V.ii.322-23). Just as curious is his earlier expression of regret at his treatment of Laertes at Ophelia's grave: “For by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his” (V.ii.77-78). But if so, he might well suspect that Laertes' intentions in the fencing match are as bad as his own were in the Prayer Scene. How he can so blandly trust Laertes is hard to explain (it deeply bothered Bradley) unless we assume that at last he has returned to judging people by his own innocence, that once more he knows not seems—or, at last, does not care to seek it out. I am stating blatantly what Shakespeare only hinted at, but the hints are there, and they subtly shape the final scene.

Elizabethan revenge tragedy commonly ends with a ceremony of some sort by means of which the revenger entraps his victim. In The Spanish Tragedy Hieronimo's play of Soliman and Perseda, which ostensibly celebrates peace and marriage, instead disguises death for the unwary villains. Shakespeare followed the pattern in Titus Andronicus, where Titus' formal offers of hospitality disarm his enemies and lead to their slaughter. Finally the masque of revengers became a cliché of the Jacobean stage. An apparent yielding to the order of the corrupt court (and, with the masque, a celebration of that very order) conceals the forces that bring about revolution. An analogous scene occurs in Hamlet, in which the Prince, seemingly distracted for the moment from his discontent, casually drops a bombshell in Claudius' lap. It is the Play Scene, and it occurs not at the end but in the exact middle of the drama. At the end there is another ceremony, with the opposing sides again apparently reconciled in full view of the assembled court, and yet which disguises a death-plot. But in Hamlet the conventional situation is reversed: the revenger enters the final scene with no set plan, and it is the antagonist who has worked out the ceremony of death; the roles of duper and duped are reversed. Of this Stoll approves; setting traps baited with flattery and deceit is no work for a hero.²⁶ But there is more to the reversal than that. For Hieronimo and Titus are crazed with hate, and many later revengers are frankly villains: after the Prayer Scene, that is not the road we would want Hamlet to travel. Thus, in reversing the conventional arrangement of the catastrophe, Shakespeare again indicates a change in Hamlet himself—the role in which Claudius casts him is the role he himself has at last chosen.

And so not merely in his faith in providence, but also in the ceremony of the fencing match that he accepts at the King's hands and in the guilelessness of his conduct, we see that Hamlet has at last settled into the role of the minister whose ends a divinity will shape, who has sensed about his heart the impending tragedy—but this time without scanning it. He was indeed “punished with sore distraction,” as he tells Laertes a few moments before their deaths, but now it is over. The complaint of Bradley that such insouciance implies a dereliction of duty holds true only if we assume that human acts are things unto themselves and that Hamlet is the measure of all things in the play. But when we realize how nearly Hamlet was prompted to his revenge by hell alone, we may be relieved that now he submits his will to heaven.

In The Spanish Tragedy Kyd leaves it unclear whether his protagonist is hero or villain. At one point Hieronimo renounces the biblical injunction that vengeance is the Lord's and embarks on a mission of Italianate revenge; yet at the end of the play his ghost is assigned to Elysium. Probably Kyd was more interested in exciting stage effects than in ethics and was not much concerned with the incompatibility of Senecan tragedy and Christian doctrine. In Hamlet Shakespeare deals with a similar situation, in which the hero courts villainy and yet is saved at the end (and which, likely enough, Shakespeare got from Kyd's Ur-Hamlet). But what was confusion in his predecessor Shakespeare turns into genuine dramatic tension; what was inconsistency in Kyd becomes the uncertainty, the ambivalence that disrupts Hamlet's very being, the tension that reaches its peak in the Prayer Scene and is not resolved until the final catastrophe. “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” Marcellus announces at the end of the fourth scene. “Heaven will direct it,” Horatio responds, almost automatically. But what comes easily to Horatio comes hard to Hamlet; awareness of it costs him his life, but struggling in the other direction he nearly lost his soul—not in the afterlife by espousing the wrong doctrine, but on the stage and before our eyes.

Notes

1. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. George Lyman Kittredge (Boston, 1939). Line references correspond to the Globe text.

2. The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson (London, 1765), VII, 236.

3. “I will venture to affirm, that these are not his real sentiments,” said William Richardson as early as 1785. “There is nothing in the whole character of Hamlet that justifies such savage enormity” (Essays on Shakespeare's Dramatic Characters [London, 1785], p. 159). Coleridge himself saw in the speech merely “the marks of reluctance and procrastination” (Shakespearean Criticism, ed. Thomas Middleton Raysor, 2d. ed. [London, 1960], I, 29-30), while Hazlitt found there “a refinement of malice, which is in truth only an excuse for his own want of resolution …” (Characters of Shakespeare's Plays [London, 1930], p. 82). And A. C. Bradley, though adding that the hatred Hamlet expresses is real enough, nevertheless stated “That this again is an unconscious excuse for delay is now pretty generally agreed”; Hamlet knows “in his heart” that he is delaying (Shakespearean Tragedy, 2d ed. [London, 1906], pp. 134-35).

4. “To put it in a word,” A. J. A. Waldock says, “the theology of the speech impresses us as incredibly primitive. That it is primitive is readily granted. But it can make no difference: Hamlet is by no means the only Elizabethan character who is made to utter sentiments of this kind. Their primitiveness is merely to be accepted” (Hamlet, A Study in Critical Method [Cambridge, Eng., 1931], p. 42). See also Elmer Edgar Stoll, Hamlet: An Historical and Comparative Study, Research Publication of the University of Minnesota, Vol. VIII, No. 5 (Minneapolis, 1919), pp. 51-54; Edward Wagenknecht, “The Perfect Revenge—Hamlet's Delay; A Reconsideration,” CE, X (1949), 188-95; and Bertram Joseph, Conscience and the King (London, 1953), pp. 118-19, 122-23.

5. Eleanor Alice Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford, 1967), p. 187.

6. Prosser, pp. 261-75. In an earlier study, Donald Joseph McGinn also detected disapproval among Shakespeare's contemporaries of Hamlet's vindictiveness (Shakespeare's Influence on the Drama of His Age, Studied in “Hamlet” [New Brunswick, 1938], chaps. 2-3.)

7. Prosser, p. 164. Since the present article was written, Prof. Harold Skulsky has also discussed this dilemma, in “Revenge, Honor, and Conscience in Hamlet,” PMLA, LXXXV (1970), 78-87. Some of the observations in the present essay parallel his, though the basic approach is substantially different.

8. See Prosser, p. 216:

   In defiance of every probability established thus far in the play, he has apparently checked his own descent into Hell. It is not a barbaric young revenger, consumed by rage and confirmed in murderous thoughts, who appears in the graveyard, but a mature man of poise and serenity. This sudden reversal of direction in a tragedy is curious: it is as if Macbeth were to repent in the fifth act.

   This sudden reversal, as thus described, is more than curious: it is the height of improbability. Macbeth could never be allowed to repent; what makes Hamlet different?

9. Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus (London and New York, 1949; quoted from the Anchor Books ed.; Garden City, 1954), pp. 60-61.

10. C. S. Lewis, Hamlet, the Prince or the Poem? British Academy Annual Shakespeare Lecture (1942); quoted from Studies in Shakespeare; British Academy Lectures, ed. Peter Alexander (London, 1964), p. 212.

11. “Etymologically, the word [doubt] stems from dubitare, which means precisely to hesitate in the face of two possibilities,” Harry Levin observes. “The structure of Hamlet seems, at every level, to have been determined by this duality” (The Question of “Hamlet” [New York, 1959], p. 48). This doubt extends even to the question of Hamlet's identity.

12. Francis Fergusson, The Idea of a Theater (Princeton, 1949; quoted from the Anchor Books ed.; Garden City, 1953), pp. 121, 125.

13. Fredson Bowers, “Hamlet as Minister and Scourge,” PMLA, LXX (1955), 740-49.

14. See Bowers, pp. 743-44, and Prosser, pp. 199-201. Prosser argues that Hamlet is by now a scourge exclusively, and indeed he would seem so even in comparison with Othello, who kills Desdemona out of a sense of justice (“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul”) and, in addition, is scrupulously careful not to endanger her immortal soul.

15. See Bowers, pp. 744-45. Prosser makes much the same argument, couched in the parallel terms of Christian patience versus the Renaissance doctrine of action. For further discussion of Bowers, see my The Meanings of Hamlet (Albuquerque, 1972), p. 56 and n. 9.

16. John Dover Wilson considered the “croaking raven” speech a parodic comment on the Player, who, perhaps, is out-Heroding Herod (What Happens in Hamlet [Cambridge, Eng., 1935], pp. 161-62), but the audience—stage and actual—would probably have picked up the incongruity of the word “revenge” sooner than the allusion to the bombastic old True Tragedy of Richard the Third—to a speech, incidentally, of a villain who expects revenge to be performed on him.

17. Harold Jenkins, “Playhouse Interpolations in the Folio Text of Hamlet,” Studies in Bibliography, XIII (1960), 37.

18. Again, the movement of the soliloquy derives from its very context: the events leading immediately to it begin when Hamlet associates himself with Pyrrhus and actually quotes lines of bloody revenge, but as the speech continues, taken over now by the Player, it brings about the reproach of the opening lines of the soliloquy.

19. Erasmus, Enchiridion militis Christiani (London, 1576) sigs. Gii^v-Giii^r.

20. Gilbert Murray, Hamlet and Orestes, British Academy Annual Shakespeare Lecture (New York, 1914), p. 24.

21. Stoll, pp. 51-52.

22. John Marston, Antonio's Revenge, ed. G. K. Hunter, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln, 1965), III. i. 44-51. The tag line is from Seneca's Thyestes.

23. The Ghost's strongest reproach to Claudius is to call him “that incestuous, that adulterate beast” (I. v. 41); compare this with Hamlet's frenzied anger: “O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!” (I. v. 106), or “Bloody, bawdy villain! / Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!” (II. ii. 607-8). And in the Closet Scene the Ghost's entrance cuts short another violent tirade against Claudius. Whether the Ghost's moderation is genuine or, as Prosser thinks, hypocritical, the reflection on Hamlet remains the same.

24. To the extent that the avenger is acting not only in public but for the public is his revenge justified; the political revenge in a good cause often seems to transcend the strict antinomy of Christianity and vengeance; cf. the challenge of Henry V to the powers of France (Henry V, I. ii. 289-93). See also Hardin Craig, “A Cutpurse of the Empire,” A Tribute to George Coffin Taylor, ed. Arnold Williams (Chapel Hill, 1952), p. 14, and the Bond of Association of 1584, in which Burghley and thousands of others swore to avenge any attempted assassination of the Queen. At the end of the play, I think this political necessity joins with honor and self-defense to seal Claudius' doom:

    Does it not, think'st thee, stand me now upon—
    He that hath kill'd my king, and whor'd my mother;
    Popp'd in between th'election and my hopes;
    Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
    And with such coz'nage—is't not perfect conscience
    To quit him with this arm? And is't not to be damn'd
    To let this canker of our nature come
    In further evil?

    (V. ii. 63-70)

    “This canker of our nature”: Hamlet has assumed the royal plural: he speaks for the collective. And, tacitly, Horatio approves (see Bowers, p. 748).

25. Bradley, p. 145; L. C. Knights, An Approach to Hamlet (Stanford, 1961), p. 89.

26. Stoll, pp. 41-42.