SOURCE: Taylor, Michael. “The Conflict in Hamlet.” Shakespeare Quarterly 22, no. 2 (spring 1971): 147-61.

[In the following essay, Taylor contends that the main conflict within Hamlet is between man as fate's victim and man as the master of his destiny. Taylor further argues that this conflict reflects the confusion in ethical and religious thinking that pervaded Shakespeare's time.]

In our over-riding concern, as literary critics, with the drama and the poetry of the early part of the seventeenth century, we often lose sight of the fact that neither the drama nor the poetry was the staple reading diet of the average “middle-class” Elizabethan. A glance at Louis B. Wright's Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England is revealing. We see that what, in particular, concerned such an individual were tracts devoted in some way or other to self-improvement. Such a concern involved the promulgation and dispensing of a host of essays dealing with the numerous ethical problems social mobility produces. Above all, religious writings dealt not so much with theological cruxes as with problems of everyday morality. In an article devoted to religious writings, Wright notes:

… we are more interested in Shakespeare's dramatic development than in the career and influence of his contemporary, the Reverend William Perkins: but for every Elizabethan who saw or read one of Shakespeare's plays, a hundred bought and read Perkins' sermons.

He adds:

One fact that cannot be emphasized too often is that the most popular sermons were the least controversial; hence many puritan preachers—and Perkins is a good example—who stuck to exhortations to godliness and discourses on practical ethics were read by all sects. The reading public was less interested in theology than in ethics.¹

It is the phrase “practical ethics” which is interesting. In a world where the possibilities for different and new kinds of social action seemed to be increasing daily, there was an awareness that traditional morality was not adequate to meet the new demands. At the same time, some problems, because of their very nature, remained unchanged (man's relationship with God, the meaning of death, etc.). Theologians, whatever their denomination, were at pains to emphasize that men may, in their pride, confuse their right to make decisions in secular matters with a right to debate questions concerning the faith. As Roland Frye points out, Luther, Calvin and Hooker were at one in emphasizing this distinction.² A new morality, then, would have to take cognizance of traditional problems while being sufficiently flexible to be able to deal with the growing realization of the almost unlimited power of man qua man. The most delicate aspect of such a synthesis was that of definition: how does one define, and hence limit, man's power, to avoid the accusation of an enroachment upon God's province? Any new ethic had to steer clear of the possible charge of blasphemy.

In the majority of the religious writings of this time there is, above all, the demonstration of an acute concern for this problem, and a patent failure to deal with it in a lucid or definitive manner. There is a blurring of focus, a casuistry which obfuscates. The problem is most clearly stated by a writer not primarily concerned with religion, Machiavelli. He notes:

I am not unaware that many have held and hold the opinion that events are controlled by fortune and by God in such a way that the prudence of men has no influence whatsoever. Because of this, they could conclude that there is no point in sweating over things, but that one should submit to the rulings of chance. … Nonetheless, because free choice cannot be ruled out, I believe that it is probably true that fortune is the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves.³

The Elizabethans were greatly interested in the power invested in such a phrase as the “prudence of men”. They thought of its enactment in terms of “policy”. For example, in “The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience”, one of Perkins' sub-sections is headed: “Whether a man may lawfully and with good conscience use Policie in the affairs of this life?”⁴ He goes on to assert that the use of “policy” is essential in the affairs of this world, particularly in order to defeat one's enemies or to determine truth. He even (in the best tradition of the ends justifying means) countenances the employment of “deceit”. He says that there is “a kinde of deceit called dolus bonus, that is, a good deceit, and of this kinde was the act of Josua.”⁵ Mosse adduces William Ames's support for the principle of dolus bonus: “acts that do Sonare in malum, have an evill sound … but by some circumstances comming to them they are sometimes made good. …”⁶ For both Ames and Perkins the test of the bonus in the deceit is the intention of its author. Ames notes: “a good intention with other conditions doth make very much to the constitution of a good action” (p. 209). We may say that Perkins and Ames are attempting to come to terms with the reality of their times, but we can see immediately, I think, how their position is fraught with all kinds of difficulties, not the least being the question: who determines and how is it determined that the intention is good? Perkins emphasises four caveats to his acceptance of the use of deceit:

Nothing whatever must be done against the honor of God; nothing must be done to prejudice the truth, especially the truth of the Gospel; nothing must be wrought or contrived against the justice that is due to men; and lastly, all actions of policy must be such as pertain to our calling.⁷

The first and second caveats (the second in particular) are, even now, open to extremes of application. Who is to decide (and how) that the policy is “against the honor of God”? Is the “truth of the Gospel” so self-evident that we know immediately when a particular policy is contravening it? In a sense, the impossibility of an easy answer to these fundamental questions at that time is indicated by the outbreak of civil war in 1642.

The early part of the seventeenth century was a period of accelerated change causing confusion in ethical and religious thought. Such confusion is mirrored in the conflict in Hamlet, which, in turn, is reflected in the criticism of the play. For the quantity of commentary on Hamlet is a symptom (if nothing else) of a particular kind of baffled concern for the play's meaning. It might be argued that the confusion created by the perversity of this vast body of contradictory theory reveals the mode of ambiguity intended by Shakespeare. There is some justification, with regard, say, to Antony and Cleopatra, for us to be, to paraphrase Keats, negatively capable, and not to reach irritably after fact and reason. But with Antony and Cleopatra, the ambiguity is not a misleading one. We are reminded continually of the contradictoriness of the response of the protagonists to their dilemma, not simply by what they say and do about it, but by the play's dialectic. If at the close we are left undecided as to the reality, say, of Antony's and Cleopatra's love, such indecision is an integral part of the direction of the total meaning of the play. Stressing the difficulty of a simple judgment of Antony and Cleopatra seems to me to be one of Shakespeare's purposes. Even with Antony and Cleopatra, however, one is unsure of the extent to which deliberate ambivalence is intended. Cleopatra's dialogue with Dolabella in the last act, for example, seems to hint at a positive resolution of the play's essential ambiguity. Her definition of the “reality” of her conception of Antony is couched in a verse whose density reveals Shakespeare writing on a level significantly different in quality from that of the generally exclamatory nature of the exchanges between the protagonists. When she says

… Nature wants stuff
To vie strange forms with fancy; yet, t'imagine
An Antony were nature's piece 'gainst fancy,
Condemning shadows quite.

(V.ii.97-100)⁸

the verse has that familiar serious complexity of total involvement, and the theme is one which has obsessed Shakespeare from the writing of Venus and Adonis to The Winter's Tale. It is almost as though at this final point Shakespeare wishes us to erase the play's central paradox from our minds, hinting, it seems, at some kind of Platonic essence superior to the rough-and-tumble of the political conflict and the superficially treacherous nature of the love-affair.

Although this is provocative enough, it is not sufficient to shift the emphasis from the undecided to the decisive. Such a hint becomes a fragment in the kaleidoscopic structure of the play adding an essential qualification to any simplified description of Antony's nature. It is, of course, primarily intended to balance Antony's own condemnation of himself, where he sees himself in a condition of incessant and meaningless transmutation like the ‘vapour’ which is sometimes

… like a bear or lion,
A tower'd citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked mountain, or blue promontory
With trees upon't that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air.

(IV.xiv.3-7)

I would argue, then, that a hesitancy in judgment on our part indicating a complex moral world is one of the effects aimed at in Antony and Cleopatra. However, so various is that world that the attempt (if there is one) to give it some kind of transcendental stability is almost completely unconvincing. One could not deny that a similar moral complexity is to be found in Hamlet. If we merely followed Hamlet's self-questioning we should be made adequately aware of the difficulty of straightforward judgments. But the rest of the play stresses insistently the interrogative mood. Doubt, hesitancy, suspicion are complemented inevitably by erroneous conclusions and mistakes in action.⁹ Unlike Antony and Cleopatra, however, there is not simply a hint of resolution of the dilemma: the resolution is stated in emphatic terms. In other words, the resolution, because of the emphasis placed upon it, is not caught up in the dominant mood of doubt and confusion which seems to be characteristic of Hamlet, but is an attempt to break through it to some kind of transcendental sanity. Cleopatra's description of Antony, if we were to take it as Shakespeare's final word, would, I believe, invalidate his presentation in the previous four acts. Such a resolution, if it were apart from the general tenor of the play, might give rise to an ambiguity which could be unsatisfactory, inconsequential. This is, in fact, my thesis with regard to Hamlet. We can see, I think, how such a thesis may be related to the shifting Elizabethan attitude to the nature and extent of man's power to determine the pattern of his life. The essential conflict in Hamlet, I believe, is that between man as victim of fate and as controller of his own destiny.

Critics have noticed, of course, Hamlet's change of heart on his return from England in the fifth act. Jean Calhoun, for example, notes:

Far more perplexing, really, than the delay is the final transformation of Act V. It is as if, by his almost miraculous escape from the English voyage, Hamlet has worked through his earlier doubts in a single experience of successful action, yet that very miraculousness has suggested to him the fallibility of human plans. On his return, he does not exude confidence in his ability to repeat his success. Instead, he seems full of the terrible sadness of a man who sees human impotence, rather than human power, in the haphazard working out of his own life.¹⁰

Although Miss Calhoun sees the “transformation” as “perplexing” she does, in fact, explain it in terms of the reaction of a bruised psyche. If this explanation has the merit of simplicity it also suggests a too easy reliance on that kind of character criticism we associate with Bradley. More importantly, it must surely seem odd that Shakespeare should rely upon an off-stage, reported action as a satisfactory explanation for what seems to be a complete volte-face on the part of his hero. Miss Calhoun indicates that she regards Hamlet's change of heart as momentous, but can find it easy to relegate the cause of it to what, to all intents and purposes, does not exist in the body of the play at all.

Hamlet's change of heart is indeed momentous. The first four acts of the play have stressed, with qualifications which I shall deal with later, the need for the play of human intellect on certain problems. Almost all the characters, Hamlet notably included, are frenetically involved in schemes of discovery. The first four acts are a complex of plot and counter-plot: a bewildering maze of spying and counter-spying where the general method is that of a complicated, and sometimes fiendish, intrigue. The method is pertinently described by Polonius in his advice to Reynaldo:

                                                                                                                        … See you now,
Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth,
And thus do we of wisdom, and of reach,
With windlasses, and with assays of bias,
By indirections find directions out.

(II.i.59-63)

The end (“the carp of truth”) justifies the means (“the bait of falsehood”). We might argue that Perkins' dolus bonus is here given its fundamental expression in the play. Polonius' description of himself as one of those who are “of wisdom, and of reach” is, of course, finely ironic. Nevertheless, we would say, with certain reservations, that such a description applies to the protagonist. Similarly, we can apply another statement of Polonius' credo to him. How much more appropriate would the following be from Hamlet:

If circumstances lead me, I will find
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed
Within the Centre.

(II.ii.157-9)

Much depends on what is meant by “truth”. For Polonius, as for Claudius, it consists of discovering the reason for Hamlet's behavior. For Hamlet the “truth” of the circumstances of his father's death is only a part of the search for some kind of all-containing “truth” which could explain the human predicament. The question, “To be or not to be”, with its brooding metaphysicality, is not one that could be asked by Polonius.

There seem, then, to be at least two kinds of “truth”—one local and contingent, the other essential and absolute—stated for us in Polonius' abstract formulation. The major qualitative difference between these truths may be a clue to Hamlet's abrupt change of heart in the fifth act, from an absorbed, frantic involvement in the pursuit of knowledge, to a stoic resignation in the inevitability of event. That is, Hamlet may be expressing the only possible stance to be taken when he realizes that, in pursuing the circumstances of his father's murder, he is moving towards some kind of fundamental questioning of inevitable Law, the danger of which Calvin, Luther and Hooker so constantly stress. James Feibleman has noticed an ethical duality in Hamlet which, he says, is dramatized in the self-questionings of the hero. On the one hand, there is the world of absolute, immutable values of which only Hamlet is really aware, and on the other, there is the world as it actually is with all its “imperfection and conflict” with which Hamlet has to contend. Feibleman goes on to say:

Let us suppose that he comprehends or, still better, that he feels the relationship between the two orders in terms of what-is and what-ought-to-be. The realm of being is the realm of what-ought-to-be; the realm of actuality or existence is the realm of what-is. Now, assuredly, what-is is not altogether what-ought-to-be.¹¹

Perhaps Hamlet's change of heart is meant to convey an irrevocable limitation to man's capacity, unaided by the supernatural, to synthesize the two worlds. If this were the case, one would expect the first four acts of the play to prepare us adequately, in some way or other, for Hamlet's recognition of this incapacity expressed in his famous stoical remarks: “The readiness is all” and “There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow”. Where, in effect, does the emphasis lie?

The first four acts are pervaded by a sense of man as agent of his own destiny.¹² The stress is on the reality of man's capacity to find out truth even if it is hidden “Within the Centre”. Consequently, Elsinore is a-bustle with feverish activity, the only still center being the self-communings of Hamlet. The imagery of the play reflects the nature of this activity—its essential method. When Claudius employs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy on Hamlet (“lawful espials”), Hamlet confronts them: “Why do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you would drive me into a toil?” The metaphor from hunting reminds us of Polonius' “windlasses” and “assays of bias”. Similarly, this emphasis on the policy of “indirection” is reflected in Hamlet's response to Claudius' device of sending him to England (“For the demand of our neglected tribute”) in the care of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to have him killed:

… let it work,
For 'tis the sport to have the enginer
Hoist with his own petar, and't shall go hard
But I will delve one yard below their mines,
And blow them at the moon: …

(III.iv.205-209)

We have, of course, to be aware of the note of hysteria in Hamlet's description of his activity as “the sport”—his energy is more frenzied than sporting—but the lines do reveal a certain delight in the pitting of his intellect against the wiles of his enemies. The complications of the devices to probe the heart of Hamlet's mystery reach a climax, after the failure of using Ophelia as bait and the pathetic death of the eavesdropping Polonius, in Claudius' plan to have Hamlet murdered by Laertes while ostensibly taking part in a fencing-match.

Claudius' intrigues fail. If these were the only ones, their failure would, in itself, point up the justice of abandoning a faith in the designs of existential man. But Hamlet, using the same deviousness as his antagonists, is eminently successful. Indeed, it is possible to see the unavailing plots of Claudius et al. as a means of underlining the success that Hamlet enjoys. The parallelism between the methods employed by Hamlet and his opponents is striking, and has been commented on by W. V. Shepard:

That pattern is as follows: He lets his adversary attack first. Then, using the weapon of his adversary, he strikes swiftly home.

This happens not once, nor twice, but time and time again. We have noted above how Hamlet employed this device in his use of the words ‘son’, ‘common’, and ‘seems’. As he uses words, so he uses players; as he uses players, so he uses sailing craft; as he uses sailing craft, so he uses documents; as he uses fencing foils, so he uses poison.¹³

But the similarity between the instruments to hand is outweighed by that of the general method—of “indirection”. The oblique approach is common to both camps. The machinations of “policie” are seen to be essential to the “affaires of this life”. Hamlet's two most important devices are his feigned madness and his use of the play “The Murder of Gonzago”, which he calls “The Mouse-trap”. Despite the storm of controversy over Hamlet's state of mind, we are never really allowed to forget the purpose his madness serves to camouflage. Even Polonius sees some “method” there, while Guildenstern describes it as a “crafty madness”. Claudius, himself, is profoundly troubled:

Love! his affections do not that way tend;
Nor what he spake, though it lack'd form a little,
Was not like madness. There's something in his soul
O'er which his melancholy sits on brood,
And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose
Will be some danger

(III.i.170-175)

Hamlet is occupied by his intrigue until his return from England.¹⁴ Even in the fifth act his account to Horatio of his outwitting of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern has a residual element of “the sport”. He describes the contents of the letter he forges from Claudius to the King of England:

An earnest conjuration from the King,
As England was his faithful tributary,
As love between them as the palm should flourish,
As Peace should still her wheaten garland wear
And stand a comma 'tween their amities,
And many such-like as-es of great charge,
That, on the view and know of these contents,
Without debatement further, more or less,
He should the bearers put to sudden death,
Not shriving time allow'd.

(V.ii.38-47)

The contrast between the polite flourishes of diplomacy with which the letter begins and the mercilessness of the final demand is contemptuous. Hamlet can still take a delight in this kind of manipulation.

The first four acts reveal, then, the major characters' concern (with the exception of Ophelia and Horatio) for an intrigue designed to increase their control over their own destiny. Only Hamlet, because he is in possession of information which places him in a superior position, has any real degree of success. We are, I think, made aware that even in the grubby world of the court of Elsinore it is possible, provided that the right method is used, for human ingenuity to tease out at least some of the truth of a situation however deceptive and misleading its appearance may be. Up to this point in Hamlet, Shakespeare's “preoccupation with man's subjection to illusion”¹⁵ seems to be stressing the potential in man as a rational creature to make a significant contribution to the direction of his fate, in a way which would have been understood by a writer like Perkins. The oblique, indirect method of discovery, with its important implications, is reflected in the play's language. In no other of Shakespeare's plays, it seems to me, is language used so self-consciously to disguise and reveal meaning at one and the same time. As one might expect, it is Hamlet, himself, who manipulates language in this manner most consistently. His situation forces him to make language a tool in his various schemes for probing, under cover of apparent irrelevance, the stances of his enemies. They are both mystified and made uncomfortable by his use of pun, oxymoron, nonsense, paradox. Hence, Hamlet's “wild and whirling words”, in particular, reflect both the problem (in their disguising meaning) and the pervasive method of solving the problem (by covert “indirection”). The obscurity of the language is portentous. One or two examples should make this clear. Consider, for example, his opening remark: “A little more than kin, and less than kind” (I.ii.65), or his baiting of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw” (II.ii.396-8), or his pert reply to their enquiry after Polonius: “The body is with the King, but the King is not with the body” (IV.ii.29-30). The obscurity of these apophthegms conceals for a time their ominous sense, although even in the theatre we are aware, to adapt a phrase of Knights's, of ‘a particular vibration in the saying’.

One might argue, however, that this particular mode of employing language is thrust upon Hamlet. The madness he feigns is indicated by the madness of his speech. We know that he is really sane; so we should not be surprised by the sense we find in the nonsense. But this use of language is not confined to the hero. It crops up time and again in situations which are sometimes comic, as with Polonius or the Gravediggers, and sometimes tragic, as with the madness of Ophelia. For example, Polonius makes nonsense of his definition of “wit” in the process of defining it, but at the same time, in his digression, touches on some of Hamlet's and the play's central concerns:

My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time;
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief.

(II.ii.86-92)

Hamlet has, indeed, wasted “night, day, and time” wondering “What majesty should be, what duty is”. Polonius' amusing elaboration delays the conveyance of his information, and confuses and exasperates his hearers; in the process of the elaboration, however, Shakespeare has reminded us of matters even more germane than the point Polonius is trying to make. If the absurdities of Polonius are an example of the comic use of the language of indirection, Ophelia's language in her madness is an example of the tragic. We note that in her mad scene (Act IV, Scene v), her apparently inconsequential speeches are, in fact, emphasizing the themes of deception in love, the rankness of sexuality, the problem of identity, and the problem of knowing: all of which have been important elements in the meaning of the play as a whole. We would agree with Laertes, though perhaps with different considerations in mind, when he says of Ophelia's talk: “This nothing's more than matter” (IV.v.174). The Gentleman best sums up the effect of Ophelia's madness:

… Her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection. They aim at it
And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts;
Which, as her winks and nods and gestures yield them,
Indeed would make one think there would be thought,
Though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.

(IV.v.7-13)

The language of the play, then, as well as the activities of the major characters, stresses the method of solution open to human agency. That is, the verse itself, in its play with meaning, is “acting out”, on a metaphorical level, the major characters' involvement with the twists and turns of their intrigues. Intrigue and language fuse to underline the thesis that, in the “affaires of this life”, it is necessary to employ the “indirection” of “policy”. If it were not for the protagonist, these first four acts would be almost purely in the spirit of Marlowe with his absorption with willed purpose. The shift to a dependence on God's providence which characterizes the fifth act would seem utterly out of place. There are, however, indications in these four acts of something beyond the boundaries of mere rationalism. Indeed, it is a consideration of these which informs the tension of Hamlet's debates with himself. He sees himself, unlike the other characters, as an actor in a great universal drama as well as the chief figure in the specific drama of Revenge. Everything he does or does not do has the Universal as its framework of reference. He is, above all, aware of the limitations of human action when it has only the human intellect as its source of power. He is consistently dubious as to the correctness of what he is doing. He longs for death, but cannot kill himself, as he sees his death within the traditional context of the Christian conception of sin and punishment which causes him to wish that “the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon 'gainst self-slaughter” (I.ii.131-132). Despite his involvement with his intrigues for establishing the truth and despite his success with them, he sees himself as the victim of a malicious Fortune, particularly in its calling him to perform the onerous duty of revenge:

The time is out of joint, O cursed spite,
That ever I was born to set it right!

(I.v.189-190)

This attitude is reiterated after his murder of Polonius:

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

(III.iv.173-175)

This is not the place for an extended analysis of Hamlet's character, but we should bear in mind that his presentation is many-sided. There is much to condemn as well as to admire in what Shakespeare reveals of his hero. We might argue that one of his characteristic stances is that of self-doubt. He contrasts himself unfavorably with Horatio, the actor in the murder of Priam by Pyrrhus, and Fortinbras; but in all of these, even the one involving Horatio, there is some degree of self-deception involved. Much of his self-condemnation concerns his inability to take action, but we are made to see that this inability is Hamlet's strength, that, in the face of the naivete or Machiavellianism of an action taken by a Laertes or a Fortinbras, his determination to know the truth before he does anything makes him the ethical center of the play. It is possible, then, that Hamlet's despair is a result of that personal melancholy which Shakespeare is at pains to emphasize, that he is one of those “particular men” who “for some vicious mole of nature in them” are in a state of perpetual self-disgust. If this is so, then his resignation to the benevolent drift of events which is what he holds as his final attitude could, perhaps, be explained as merely another indication of his basic weakness.

But (as we are often reminded) Hamlet is more than Hamlet. We are, by now, aware of the general implications of Shakespeare's plays, of his concern with certain themes. It seems unlikely that Hamlet was intended purely as a psychological study of an individual, whatever his degree of fascination. It seems even more unlikely that Shakespeare intended Hamlet's “regeneration” as solely the concern of the protagonist, and not intimately linked with the meaning of the play as a whole. We cannot, I think, explain Hamlet's conversion in the way that we might explain the aberrational conduct of an Antony or a Cleopatra, where, anyway, such conduct is, as I have pointed out, part of the larger meaning of the play. I feel sure that we are meant to see Hamlet's adjustment as the only workable compromise. Are there, then, other indications in these first four acts of the inevitability of Hamlet's compromise? Do we get a sense, despite the placing of the emphasis that I have outlined above, of the rightness, say, of the following?

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

(V.ii.7-11)

There is, I think, some general opposition (which we might call conservative) in the first four acts to the idea of man pitting himself against forces beyond his control. Hamlet's continued distraction at his father's death is criticized by Claudius and, although it is ironic that Claudius is the speaker, one can imagine an Elizabethan audience responding to his commonsense stand:

For what we know must be and is as common
As any the most vulgar thing to sense,
Why should we in our peevish opposition
Take it to heart?

(I.ii.98-101)

Such a position is backed by Gertrude:

Thou know'st 'tis common, all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.

(I.ii.72-3)

To them, there is something almost blasphemous in Hamlet's continuing to question the workings of destiny. His “opposition” is “peevish” because he is apparently questioning the nature of things as they have been divinely ordained by God for the benefit of man. In his search for truth, Hamlet seems to be going “against the honor of God”. The Elizabethans would, presumably, react in a similar fashion to Polonius' solipsism:

This above all—to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not be false to any man.

(I.iii.78-80)

Frye comments:

In Christian terms, the fault with such integrity as Polonius recommends is that it places man's reliance entirely upon himself, without reference to God. …

(P. 189)

There is, also, some support for Hamlet's heavy-hearted awareness of himself as a victim of a malicious fortune. A prevalent attitude towards the caprices of fortune in the play is condemnatory. She is twice referred to as a “strumpet”, at II.ii.228-247 (the conversation between Hamlet, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), and at II.ii.515 (the First Player's speech recounting the death of Priam). The Player King, following the sentiments of Hamlet's soliloquies, succinctly states the problem:

This world is not for aye, nor 'tis not strange
That even our loves should with our fortunes change,
For 'tis a question left us yet to prove,
Whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.

(III.ii.210-213)

Such a concern with the power of fortune is humorously debated by the Gravediggers, when they are considering, apropos of Ophelia, the distinctions between suicide and death by misadventure. The First Clown says:

Give me leave. Here lies the water; good. Here stands the man; good. If the man go to this water and drown himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes,—mark you that? But if the water come to him and drown him, he drowns not himself; argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life.

(V.i.16-22)

The feeling that events are beyond the control of man is, I suppose, also suggested by the presence of the Ghost itself, although the dramatic convention of the Ghost and Hamlet's unwillingness to accept it on face-value alone, help to dissipate its power as controller of Hamlet's destiny. There are, too, other indications of something taking place beyond the ken of man's intellect. The first scene of the play, for example, with its emphasis on portent and mysterious sickness suggests, in a manner similar to the opening scene of Macbeth, that an evil exists of a force incomprehensible to mere mortals. Nevertheless, none of this is sufficient to dispel the impression of vitality that we get in man's capacity to overcome “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”.

Perhaps the most important qualification of this impression, is the continual presence, in some shape or form, of death. Wilson Knight's essays on Hamlet in The Wheel of Fire are devoted to its “theme of death”, and Adrien Bonjour believes that death is the unifying “factor” in a “various” play.¹⁶ The orgy of deaths that closes the play seems to bear witness to the fruitlessness of man's endeavor to control fate. But there is paradox here too. It could be argued that Hamlet's submission to the inevitability of events is as much the cause of the final catastrophe as are the bungling plots of Laertes and Claudius. Hamlet repudiates the ominous “augury” he feels about the outcome of the fencingmatch:

Not a whit; we defy augury. There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes?

(V.ii.230-235)

Such indifference to his suspicions would have made him the easy victim of the “indirections” of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the third act. (It is interesting, incidentally, to note the way in which the structure of the speech seems to work against the assertion of serenity it is apparently making. The logical play of “If it be now,” etc., is more in keeping with a mind still analytically probing, than with one at peace with itself. We should contrast, perhaps, the plainness of Lear's acquiescence: “I am a very foolish, fond old man”, King Lear IV.vii.60-67).

Nevertheless, in these first four acts death and the concept of death are an essential part of the reality of Hamlet's world. One can see how such an emphasis could lead to the stoic attitude. We might be made to accept the proposition that an intrigue devoted to the discovery of truth would have to stop at the bourne from which no traveller returns. The truth could simply be that, beyond a certain point, there can only be mystery. Human ingenuity is irrelevant and pernicious in the world of the spirit. In effect, the concept of death is presented as essentially mysterious, and the locus classicus for this is Hamlet's soliloquy “To be or not to be”. It could be argued also that the actual visitation of death in these first four acts (i.e. the pathetic madness and death of Ophelia, and the death of Polonius) is a direct result of an involvement on Hamlet's part in his attempt to control matters. Here again, however, we are aware that both of these deaths are a result of Hamlet departing from his normal ethical scrupulousness and care in action. In the case of Ophelia, Hamlet's rejection of her is based on the fallacy of arguing from the particular to the general. Gertrude's “rankness” becomes, for Hamlet, the rankness of all women and as Ophelia is a woman she too must be condemned. In the case of Polonius, we see Hamlet taking action in the manner of Laertes. His surrender to impetuosity is in vivid contrast to that delicacy of judgment which prevents him from killing Claudius when the latter is apparently at prayer and in a state of grace. These two tragic deaths, then, seem to underline the necessity of an elaborate, careful analysis of circumstances and situation. Far from destroying the value of Hamlet's ethical hesitancy, they serve to show that he is not hesitant, not scrupulous, enough. In the last analysis, they are very much part of the emphasis of these first four acts which I have discussed above.

My argument, then, is that the first four acts of Hamlet, in their emphasis upon “policie”, upon Hamlet's adroit use of the “prudence of men”, upon the bitter vitality in his taking up arms against his troubles, have only hinted at the possibility of his final stoicism. There is thus an abrupt, and to my mind disturbing, anagnorisis in Act V when Hamlet recognizes that the designs of “policie” are of no avail. Essentially, the problem is an aesthetic one, for we have not been made to feel the justification of Hamlet's final belief that there is an irrevocable limitation to a man's capacity to influence his destiny. Asserting that this in fact is the case is much less satisfying than convincing us through the play's dialectic that it must be the case. The consequent ambiguity, then, unlike that of Antony and Cleopatra, is not one that the play's structure persuades us is (unambiguously) inevitable.

As we have seen, this is not to say that Shakespeare was unaware of the problem. The opening scene of the fifth act, for example, serves to link that omnipresent concern with the finality of death demonstrated in the first four acts with Hamlet's acquiescence to the shaping divinity in the Play's final scene. The greater part of V.i, from the Gravediggers' emphasis on the “strength” of their “building” to Laertes' despair over Ophelia, underscores Hamlet's own awareness of the absoluteness of death, whose inevitability makes life's “quiddities” and “quillets” seem merely trivial. Fool, politician (i.e. schemer), lawyer, courtier, the matchless leader of men, the proud and beautiful woman all succumb to “Lady Worm” whose sovereignty is climactically rendered as Ophelia's cortege moves across the stage. If this, then, is the favor to which we all must come, Hamlet's impatience with Laertes' graveside protestations (for words are shadows of events which are themselves only shadows when compared with death's reality) is readily understandable.¹⁷

It seems likely, however, that no single explanation of Hamlet's change of heart will suffice. What may be of importance to notice is that this central dilemma in Hamlet is a version of the classic dilemma of the Revenge dramatist.¹⁸ Revenge drama, from The Spanish Tragedy to Middleton's and Rowley's The Changeling or Ford's The Broken Heart, reveals at best an equivocal attitude on the part of the playwright to revenge and revenger, for, although the revenger in his pursuit of revenge occupies an heroic position on the English stage at this time, he never enjoys unqualified approval however noble his cause. This reluctance to accept him accounts for a shift of emphasis from the presentation of the revenger as equivocal hero to that of him as unequivocal villain: a movement away from the Kydian formula for revenge to that first indicated in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta where Barabas stands as the prototype of the criminal avenger. Bowers notes:

This question outlines in sharp relief the fundamental problem facing every writer of revenge tragedy whose protagonist is a hero. The audience is sympathetic to his revenger so long as he does not become an Italienate intriguer, and so long as he does not revenge.

At the conclusion the audience admits its sentimental satisfaction with the act of personal justice but its ethical sense demands the penalty for the infraction of divine command.

(P. 95)

Beaumont's and Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy (c. 1611) brings into prominence a solution adopted by later writers like Ford and Massinger, where the doctrine “vengeance appertaineth unto God only”¹⁹ is followed, and revenge left to Heaven. Such a shift in treatment is intimated, not only in Hamlet itself, but in the difference between the two main sources for Shakespeare's play, the narratives of Saxo Grammaticus and Belleforest. Again, Bowers notes:

The difference in spirit between the two narratives, however, is distinct. Saxo, telling his primitive tale, is never in doubt about the justness of the revenge, or, indeed, of any other revenge in his history. Belleforest, not at all influenced by the pagan Scandinavian tradition, is divided between his Renaissance French appreciation of a bella vendetta and the Christian doctrine that all revenge must be left to God.

(P. 87)

Shakespeare, then, may, in Hamlet, be reflecting a conventional ethical duality common to significant revenge plays. For the full tragic effect, Hamlet must die in innocence, uncharacteristic of him though this state may be. If he does not do so, his death, like Ophelia's, may be marred by an unsympathetic reservation of judgment on the part of his audience—hardly an appropriate response for a tragedy. Whether or not Ophelia committed suicide is of no great importance. What is important is Shakespeare's concern for the effect of the suspicious circumstances of her death. The Clown asks: “Is she to be buried in Christian burial that wilfully seeks her own salvation?” (V.i.1-2). We ourselves witness her Christian burial, but one without the full solemnity and rich ceremony that a Christian of her rank would normally enjoy. Such a “churlish” attitude by the church is not dissimilar to the Elizabethan audience's ambivalent response to the position of the avenger in Revenge Drama: grudging, wary acceptance. Such an audience would, one imagines, believe that Hamlet dies into “felicity” and that flights of angels will sing him to his rest but only if he, like some of his fellow avengers, abjures his personal vendetta. Only then, it seems, can Fortinbras be justified in treating Hamlet as the noble warrior:

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

(V.ii.406-411)

“Sweets to the sweet” for Ophelia and “Soldiers' music and the rites of war” for Hamlet: we would agree that they deserve no less. But in Hamlet's case, the dignified simplicity of his final exit is in ironic contrast with our previous experience of his living, and in our awareness of this irony in the play's dying moments is contained that bewilderment with Hamlet which this paper has attempted to explore. Fortinbras remains however—and perhaps this is the greatest irony of all.

Notes

1. “The Significance of Religious Writings in the English Renaissance”, Journal of the History of Ideas [JHI], I (1940), 59-68; p. 59 and 66.

2. Shakespeare and Christian Doctrine (Princeton, 1963), pp. 157-164.

3. “XXV. How far human affairs are governed by fortune, and how far fortune can be opposed”, The Prince, translated by George Bull (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1961).

4. The Works of M. William Perkins (London, 1631), II, 116. Quoted in George L. Mosse's article “The Assimilation of Machiavelli in English Thought: The Casuistry of William Perkins and William Ames”, Huntington Library Quarterly, XVII (1953-54), 315-326.

5. Ibid., “A Commentary or Exposition upon … Galatians”, Works, II, 183.

6. Ibid., “The Marrow of Sacred Divinity” (London, [1638?]), p. 210.

7. Ibid., p. 317. Cf. Martin Luther's “Means are not to be neglected, but we are to employ those means which it is possible for us to use”. Exp. Gen. xxxii: 6-8, in What Luther Says: An Anthology, 3 vols., ed. Ewald M. Plass (St. Louis, 1959), II, 2437, and also cf. John Eliot, Discourses of Warre and Single Combat, by B. de Loque (1591), p. 52: “That vengence appertaineth unto God only. … Therefore it followeth, that whosoeuer do the reuenge himselfe, committeth sacrilege. … That seeing the wrong that our neighbour doth, happeneth not without the prudence of god, it is not lawful for vs to resist and withstand it by oblique and sinister meanes, and such as displease God.”

8. All quotations from Shakespeare are from the New Cambridge Edition edited by W. A. Neilson and C. J. Hill.

9. For a good analysis of the play along these lines, see Harry Levin's The Question of “Hamlet” (Compass Books Edition, New York, 1961).

10. “Hamlet and the Circumference of Action”, Renaissance News, XV (1962), 281-298; pp. 296-297. Cf. S. F. Johnson's “The Regeneration of Hamlet” in Shakespeare Quarterly [SQ], III (1952), 187-207, where he defends Hamlet's belief in providence in the following terms:

    Briefly, Hamlet felt, before he left Denmark, that all occasions informed against him (IV.iv.32, ommitted from Folio); while at sea, on the contrary, all occasions informed in his favour.

    (P. 199)

    Johnson feels that any uneasiness as to the regeneration is an unnecessary creation of the critics:

    The desperation ascribed to Hamlet is the existentialist despair of critics who must at all costs believe in their own free will. Hamlet is their scape-goat.

    (P. 194)

11. ‘The Theory of Hamlet’, JHI, VII (April, 1946), 131-150; p. 148.

12. For this terminology, cf. John Lawlor's chapter on Hamlet, “Agent or Patient”, in his book The Tragic Sense in Shakespeare (London, 1960).

13. “Hoisting the Enginer with his own Petar”, SQ, VII (1956), 281-285; p. 282.

14. If this analysis is acceptable, then there is no delay in Hamlet, unless we wish to describe Hamlet's grave concern for the truth as constituting such. It seems to me, however, that any necessary condition for an action cannot constitute a delayal of that action. Indeed, there has been much unenlightened discussion of this problem, and it is with a sense of relief that one turns to Philip Edwards' sensible description of the problem of delay in The Spanish Tragedy which, mutatis mutandis, can be as well applied to Hamlet:

    That Hieronimo's conscience should accuse him for being tardy (III.xiii.135) is a measure only of the stress he is under and the difficulties he faces, and of the depth of his obligation; that Bel-imperia and Isabella should speak of delay (III.iv and IV.ii.30) is a measure only of their understandable impatience and does not mean that Hieronimo could have acted more quickly. It is the sense of delay which is real, and not delay itself. Hieronimo does everything possible as quickly as possible. “Introduction”, The Revels Plays

    (London, 1959), p. lvi.

15. This phrase is taken from L. C. Knights's book An Approach to ‘Hamlet’ (Stanford, 1961), p. 12.

16. “On Artistic Unity in Hamlet”, English Studies, XXI (1939), 193-202.

17. It is interesting that the verbal dexterity espoused by Hamlet in the first four acts is abjured by him in this final act. At first, Hamlet is jocular, as with the Gravedigger: “How absolute the knave is: We must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us” (V.i.148-9). His comment on Osric (despite his own satirical indulgence in Osric's language) is more pointed:

    Thus had he … only got the tune of the time and outward habit of encounter; a kind of yeasty collection, which carries them through and through the most fond and winnowed opinions; and so but blow them to their trials, the bubbles are out

    (V.ii.196-202).

18. I am indebted for what follows to F. T. Bowers' Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy 1587-1642 (Princeton, 1940), passim.

19. See Note 7.