[In the following essay, Blits offers an overview of Hamlet, examines the play's characters, language, structure, and content, and argues that play provides a critique of the Renaissance.]

Hamlet takes place in the early sixteenth century—a time of intellectual rebirth and religious reformation in Denmark. As we see throughout the play, Hamlet's Denmark is marked by the ongoing rediscovery of classical or neoclassical antiquity on the one hand and the rising reformation of the Christian doctrine of salvation on the other. While the Middle Ages still cast a long shadow, the medieval world of constancy, chivalry, tradition, honor, and martial virtue has largely given way to a new age of mobility and change—of tradesmen, industry, wealth, diplomacy, and commerce (1.1.73-98).¹ The manly virtue of old Hamlet now seems to be merely a memory:

A was a man, take him for all in all,
I shall not look upon his like again.

(1.2.187-88)

Virtually all the characters in Hamlet still believe in purgatory, angels, saints, and ghosts, and take very seriously the rites of the Catholic church. Denmark is still a Catholic country.² Yet, Shakespeare not only has Hamlet conspicuously pun on the Diet of Worms (4.3.19-21), the imperial council that banned Martin Luther for refusing to repudiate his new doctrine. Shakespeare also mentions four times (within just fifty-five lines) near the start of the play that Hamlet and Horatio have been studying at Wittenberg (1.2.113, 119, 164, 168). Wittenberg, one of only two universities that Shakespeare ever refers to by name,³ was famous in the early sixteenth century for its teaching of both humanism (Marlowe's Dr. Faustus taught there) and Luther's new doctrine of salvation (Luther lectured there for some thirty years and posted his ninety-five theses in Wittenberg in 1517).⁴ Scholasticism, now largely replaced by humanism and the new Protestant theology, has been mostly reduced to a gravedigger's cant:

For here lies the point: if I drown myself wittingly, it argues an act, and an act hath three branches—it is to act, to do, to perform; argal, she drowned herself wittingly.

(5.1.9-13)

In more than the most obvious way, the Middle Ages, at once absent and present, take the form of a ghost in Hamlet.

Where the medieval world was rooted in a fixed hierarchical order based largely on birth and kinship, Danes now live, travel, and study abroad; follow foreign tastes and fashions (e.g., 1.3.70-74; 1.4.10; 2.2.426; 5.2.144-60); and know and care what other nations think of them (e.g., 1.1.88; 1.4.17-22). Even while nearly all the scenes occur within the royal castle in Elsinore and none occur more than a few miles away, throughout Hamlet we hear of international travel: Hamlet and Horatio have been studying in Germany (1.2.112-22, 164-68); Laertes twice returns from Paris (1.2.50-63; 4.5.96ff.; also 1.3.1-88), where other “Danskers” also live (2.1.7); Reynaldo goes there to spy on him (2.1.1-73); a foreign company of touring actors comes to Elsinore (2.2.314ff.); a Norman horseman travels to Denmark to show his skill (4.7.80-102); Hamlet is sent to England, accompanied by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and returns with the help of pirates (3.1.171-77; 3.3.4; 3.4.202-7; 4.3.40-60; 4.6.8-26; 4.7.42-45; 5.1.143-50; 5.2.1ff.); Danish ambassadors travel to Norway and back (1.2.33-40; 2.2.40-51, 58-80); English ambassadors arrive in Denmark (5.2.359, 373-77, 381-82); and a Norwegian army crosses Denmark to fight against a Polish outpost and returns (2.2.72-80; 4.4.1-30; 5.2.367-408). We also hear a polyglot of names—Latin, Greek, French, Italian, German, and other foreign names, and only a few Scandinavian or Norse. Indeed, while the king is named after a Roman emperor, one of his castle's sentries bears the name (in Spanish or Portuguese) of the only country the king is ever said to have served against (4.7.82), and his chief advisor is named (in Latin) for another foreign foe (1.1.65-67). The distinction between Dane and non-Dane has become greatly attenuated. Even as Horatio fears for the well-being of “our state,” he confounds the general region and the Danish kingdom (“our climatures and [our] countrymen” [1.1.72, 128]). And although a Dane by birth, he not only needs to be told a Danish custom known far and wide (1.4.7-22; cf. 1.2.175), but considers himself “more an antique Roman than a Dane” (5.2.346). Education, he seems to think, can supersede birth.

But if Shakespeare's Danes seem to feel quite at home in foreign times and places, their new cosmopolitan worldly outwardness is matched by a new moral inwardness. Some commentators say that Hamlet's tragedy lies in the conflict between pagan and Christian virtue—the one emphasizing pride, anger, ambition, and action; the other, humility, forgiveness, lowliness, and patience. According to this view, while Hamlet tries to combine these two moralities, Shakespeare shows how they are in a fundamental tension with each other and that their attempted combination, by making conflicting demands upon Hamlet, ultimately paralyzes him.⁵ In fact, however, the pagan virtue rediscovered by the Renaissance and pursued by Hamlet is not the political virtue of Greece or republican Rome, let alone the heroic virtue of Hercules or Achilles,⁶ but the Stoic virtue of imperial Rome. It is the virtue of Seneca, not of Scipio, of Epictetus, not of Camillus. Rather than encouraging action, it emphasizes the radical inwardness of the soul. Stoicism places happiness in virtue and virtue in what a man himself can control. While no one can control the vicissitudes of fortune, a man can control his disposition toward their effects. So long as nothing external breaks into his will or affects his judgment, no misfortune can touch his soul and disturb his happiness. As Hamlet says in high praise of Horatio:

                                                                                                                                  [T]hou hast been
As one, in suff'ring all, that suffers nothing,
A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards
Hast ta'en with equal thanks.

(3.2.65-68)

Protected behind the secure barrier of his inner life, a Stoic depends entirely on his inward state for his virtue and happiness.⁷ Similarly, notwithstanding its fundamental difference from Stoicism in other key respects (including teachings regarding the hereafter, the necessity of grace, and the morality of pride),⁸ Luther's new doctrine of salvation emphasizes virtue's radical inwardness while denigrating action. In opposition to the scholastics, who granted the necessity of God's grace but also held that man can contribute something to salvation by his own efforts, Luther argues that whatever good man does is wholly the work of grace. Since no action can contribute at all to salvation, man can be saved by faith alone. “[F]aith alone, without works, justifies, frees, and saves.”⁹ True religion thus becomes wholly inward. “The inner man cannot be justified, freed, or saved by any outer work or action at all,” for “faith can rule only in the inner man.”¹⁰ Only the inwardness of faith, not any “external thing,”¹¹ can justify man before God. Thus, far from pulling Hamlet in opposite directions, both Christian and pagan virtue pull him away from action, the one by placing virtue in the inner world of faith, the other by placing it in the inner world of the mind.

In his famous encomium on man, Hamlet describes the world as a splendidly ordered cosmos with man, “the beauty of the world” (2.2.307), at its center. In both man and the cosmos, there is a fundamental harmony between the visible exterior and the invisible interior. In both, outward beauty reflects inner goodness, motion follows order, and change takes place within the permanence of a rational, ordered whole. No gulf separates the best in man from the natural world (2.2.295-309).¹² Hamlet mentions this view, however, only to say that he no longer holds it. Instead of reason governing the world, he now sees only fortune and inconstancy—only chance and change. In his view, everything is mutable, nothing in the world abides. Rather than reason guiding and sustaining men's actions, purpose follows memory, memory follows passion, and passion follows fortune (2.2.235-36; 3.2.336-63). Men are forgotten as soon as they die, if not sooner; and “reason panders will” (1.2.137-57; 3.1.103-48; 3.2.123-33, 147-49; 3.4.40-103). And just as neither their loves, their memories, nor their vows are constant, so, too, men's appearances and actions are not to be trusted.

Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems.”
.....                                                                                          These indeed seem
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passes show.

(1.2.76, 83-85)

Only “that within” “can denote [a man] truly” (1.2.83).

In place of action, Hamlet chooses acting. If outward action disappears into inward virtue, it also both disappears into and reappears out of stage-acting. Hamlet turns stage-acting into action (“The play's the thing / Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King” [2.2.600-1]) and action into stage-acting (“You that look pale and tremble at this chance, / That are but mutes or audience to this act” [5.2.339-40]). The two senses of “act”—to do and to simulate—are exchanged. Paradoxically, as Hamlet's moral life becomes radically internalized, it also becomes thoroughly externalized. As Hamlet turns away from what merely seems, he turns to what is entirely seeming. The middle realm—the realm of action—vanishes into the opposite extremes. While he rejects the actions that a man might play, Hamlet plays the actions that a moral life might contain. His moral life becomes a self-dramatization. This inversion goes to the heart of the play.

Hamlet retreats both into his soul and onto the stage to escape “the drossy age” (5.2.186). The golden age, for him, is the chivalrous age of his manly father. In contrast to that time, there are now few opportunities for noble action in Denmark. Instead of duels of single combat (1.1.83-98; 5.1.139-40), we find battles of competing theatrical tastes (2.2.328-58), gentlemanly contests of horsemanship (4.7.70-101), fencing matches in which the winner need only beat the odds (5.2.105-80), and endless battles of wit and words.¹³ Notwithstanding Horatio's apparently firsthand description of old Hamlet's armor and face in battle (1.1.63-66), Ophelia's calling Hamlet a “soldier” (3.1.153), and Claudius's saying that he “serv'd against” the French (4.7.82), it is not clear that any living Danish noble has ever actually fought in battle for Denmark. Despite the threat of war at the start of the play (1.1.73-110; 1.2.17-39), Laertes seeks to return to Paris and Hamlet to Wittenberg, neither giving a moment's thought to the kingdom's military needs. Nor does Claudius seem to notice or to care. As he is protected by foreign mercenaries (“Switzers” [4.5.97]), so, too, he depends on “foreign marts for implements of war” (1.1.77). In contrast to old Hamlet (1.1.87; 1.2.25; also 1.2.187; 3.4.53-63), no living Dane is ever called valiant, courageous, manly, or brave (cf. 2.2.578; also 1.3.65). “Bravery” now means mere bravado (5.2.79). Accordingly, while many young nobles or aspiring nobles simply affect the outward form of fashion (5.2.184-91), wealth by itself, without virtue or distinguished birth, may now earn a man a place at the king's table (5.2.86-89).

Most important—and evidently the cause of all the rest—there is neither a feudal system nor a public realm in Denmark. Unlike in a feudal system, although the nobles elect the king, they are entirely dependent on him for their positions. Only members of the royal family have noble titles. Polonius is not a duke or a baron, but an “assistant for a state.” As his position is an official function, not a hereditary power, his title is conferred by the king (the “state”) and held only during the king's pleasure (2.2.164-67). Moreover, the king's power, in general, appears absolute. Men depend on his will and act on his command. Laertes may not return to France without his leave (1.2.50-63), and the king and queen may command their subjects' service:

                                                                                                              Both your Majesties
Might, by the sovereign power you have of us,
Put your dread pleasures more into command
Than to entreaty.

(2.2.26-29)¹⁴

And, unlike in a republic, there is no political discussion or debate in Denmark. Although Hamlet contains a great deal of oratory, the only example of political oratory is Claudius's opening speech. In it, the new King simply announces his decisions rather than trying to persuade the court of anything (1.2.1-39). The only other time he publicly justifies his action, the nobles, again, listen in silence (4.3.1-11; cf. 4.1.38-40). Of the three sorts of young Danish noblemen we see, one group (Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Osric) seeks to advance by favor of the king; another (Laertes) is interested only in purely private goods (pleasure, personal freedom, and his own family); and the third (Hamlet and Horatio) seeks refuge by retreating from the world. It surely is no accident that Hamlet begins just before and ends just after the reign of a man with the name of the Roman emperor Claudius. In precluding noble action, the drossy age of Denmark closely mirrors the drossy age of Rome.

The Renaissance, as Shakespeare shows, is a rediscovery or imitation of neoclassical Rome, which is itself an imitation of classical Greece. Having conquered Greece militarily, Rome was itself conquered culturally. “Greece, the captive, made her savage victor captive, and brought the arts into rustic Latium” (Horace, Letters, 2.1.156-57). The Renaissance is thus an imitation of an imitation—a modern imitation of a Roman imitation of Greece. Pedantic Polonius, who often echoes Greek and Latin authors and whose own name means “Poland” in Latin, gives his children Greek names. The sequence of his family's names mimics the historical sequence, read backwards. More specifically, the Renaissance's rediscovery of antiquity is a rediscovery or imitation of the ancients' rhetoric and poetry, but not of their political or military deeds. The only republican Roman Hamlet ever mentions is Roscius, an actor (2.2.386; cf. 3.2.239, 385; 5.1.206).¹⁵ And the only nonmythical Greek is Alexander the Great, the destroyer of the classical polis, whom he mentions in conjunction with Julius Caesar (5.1.191-210), the destroyer of the Roman republic and the only Roman Horatio ever names (“the mightiest Julius” [1.1.117]). Appropriately enough, Horatio's name, in Latin, means “orator.” Machiavelli, writing at the same time as the dramatic setting of Hamlet, criticizes Renaissance humanists for rather admiring than imitating ancient deeds. They imitate works of ancient art, but not deeds of ancient virtue (Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, I pref.). Machiavelli's criticism holds true of the humanists in Hamlet. Instead of imitating ancient deeds by doing others like them, they imitate ancient deeds by portraying them on the stage. Characteristically at a remove from action, they enact rather than act; they simulate rather than emulate.¹⁶ “I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed in the Capitol. Brutus killed me” (3.2.102-3). In Hamlet, the word “deed” never refers to a noble action. With just one exception, it always refers to a “foul,” “ugly,” “rash,” “bloody,” “bad,” “vile,” or “wicked” misdeed, namely, murder or incest.¹⁷ On the other hand, theatrical tropes—terms like “stage,” “audience,” “act,” “actor,” “mutes,” “cue,” “applaud,” “play,” “player,” “plot,” “part,” “argument,” “prologue,” “scene,” “show,” “shape,” “rant,” “perform, “put on”—suffuse the play,¹⁸ and are especially frequent on Hamlet's lips.¹⁹ Hamlet, Shakespeare's most theatrical character, is at various times a playwright, actor, chorus, director, manager, audience, critic, patron, and would-be partner in a theater company.²⁰ The only man he in fact ever emulates is the First Player (2.2.531-36, 584-601).

Hamlet dies asking that his story be told. Referring specifically to the emotional effect of ancient tragedy (“You that look pale and tremble at this chance”)²¹ and obscuring the distinction between actors and spectators on the one hand and actors and what they imitate on the other (“That are but mutes or audience to this act”), he says that, but for death, he would tell his own story:

Had I but time—as this fell sergeant, Death,
Is strict in his arrest—O, I could tell you—
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead,
Thou livest. Report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.

(5.2.339-45)

After Hamlet dies, Horatio, postponing his own death in order “[t]o tell [Hamlet's] story” (5.2.354), asks that Hamlet's body be placed “[h]igh on a stage” (5.2.383) and, after summarizing what he will tell, vows, “All this can I / Truly deliver” (5.2.390-91). Horatio will be Hamlet's midwife (cf. 2.2.208-11). Hamlet's only offspring will be his “story.” Petrarch says that ancient authors and modern humanists are like fathers and sons; while differing in every detail, they share something that painters call an air.²² Using a phrase sometimes said to epitomize the early Renaissance humanists' principle of production, Petrarch writes, “[I]ncited by texts, [the humanists] gave birth for themselves.”²³ The humanists in Hamlet seem to take Petrarch's pregnant phrase literally. In the end, they beget only words and generate them out of ancient texts. Speech supersedes birth completely. Significantly enough, in a play in which families are so important, Horatio's family is never mentioned. A man who thinks that education can supplant birth, Horatio, who never exchanges a word with Hamlet about Ophelia, speaks but two lines either to or about a woman (4.1.14-15).²⁴ Only the “earth,” he seems to think, contains a “womb” (1.1.140).

Laertes is Horatio's opposite number. Named after the famous father of Odysseus, Laertes is the chief spokesman in Hamlet for the duties and privileges of birth. Notwithstanding his father's role in Claudius's election as king, he speaks as though Denmark were a hereditary, not an elective, monarchy (1.3.16-28). To Laertes, the family means everything. Vowing not to let anything in either this world or the next—not “allegiance, … [c]onscience, … grace … [or] damnation”—keep him from being “reveng'd / Most thoroughly for [his] father” (4.5.131-33, 135-36), Laertes pledges to do whatever is necessary—even “To cut [the killer's] throat i'th' church” (4.7.125)—“to show [him]self indeed [his] father's son” (4.7.124). To have but a single calm drop of blood, he thinks, would dishonor his birth and bloodline:

That drop of blood that's calm proclaims me bastard,
Cries cuckold to my father, brands the harlot
Even here between the chaste unsmirched brow
Of my true mother.

(4.5.117-20)

Where Horatio thinks reason and choice can replace birth, Laertes thinks that “choice [must be] circumscrib'd” by “birth” (1.3.22, 18). If “the womb of earth” (1.1.140) could be Horatio's motto, “subject to his birth” (1.3.18) could be Laertes'.

Since the time of Descartes, philosophers have often separated mind and body, thinking and life. Life—the power to move and to grow—is said to be “entirely different in kind from the mind” and “nothing but a certain arrangement of the parts of the body” (Descartes, Letter to Regius, May, 1641). According to the premodern tradition extending from Socrates to the scholastics, however, the soul is responsible both for thinking and for life. It is the cause of thinking and hence of human cognition in all of its forms. And it is the cause of life and hence of animal motion of every kind. The cause of motion is the essence of awareness.²⁵ “Sense sure you have, / Else you could not have motion,” Hamlet tells his mother (3.4.71-72). And Gertrude herself alludes to the soul's double aspect when she assures Hamlet, in turn:

                                                            [I]f words be made of breath,
And breath of life, I have no life to breathe
What thou hast said to me.

(3.4.199-201)²⁶

Speech is not only inseparable from, but indeed made up of, life. A young maid's mind (“wits”) can be as “mortal” as an old man's “life” (4.5.159-60).

Because it is the single source of thinking and of life, the soul makes man a rational animal. By giving him life, it makes him similar to all other animals (4.3.16-31; 4.4.33-39), and by giving him reason, it distinguishes him from them (1.2.150; 2.2.303-7; 4.5.84-86). The soul is thus responsible for man's great latitude. It allows man to be “either a beast or a god” (Aristotle, Politics, 1253a29). By using his “godlike reason” (4.4.38), man can rise above his nature (“in apprehension how like a god” [2.2.306]), but in failing to use his reason, he can sink to the level of a beast (“Divided from … her fair judgment, / Without the which we are … mere beasts” [4.5.85-86]). Hence, two men—even two brothers—may be to each other as “Hyperion to a satyr” (1.2.140; also 3.4.54-67).

But even while it gives man his essentially equivocal nature, the soul's double aspect also makes him a natural unity or a whole. Because thinking and life have a single cause, man's composite nature as a rational animal has a single source. Man is a whole because his nature, though composite, is one. The single source of his doubleness makes him one. Further, man's wholeness is seen in his action. By providing a common source for thinking and motion, the soul's double aspect permits man's reason to guide his motion (1.2.150-51; 3.4.71-76). In his last soliloquy, Hamlet asks himself what it means to be a man:

                                                                                          What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed?

And he answers:

                                                                                          A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus'd.

(4.4.33-39)

To be a man means not only to be alive, but to have “such large discourse” as to be able to look backward and forward both in time and in thought, and to use that capability to act.

Notwithstanding his own answer, however, Hamlet is unable to keep the soul's two functions together. He thinks without acting (“[T]he native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought” [3.1.84-85]) and acts without thinking (“O what a rash and bloody deed is this!” [3.4.27]). But even while he thus sets motion and thinking apart, Hamlet tends to collapse the former into the latter. As it turns action into theater and theater into action, Hamlet's self-dramatization of his moral life, more fundamentally, converts life into thought, soul into mind. The soul's double aspects become one. The power to think and hence to imitate subsumes the power to move and hence to act. Seeking refuge from the flux of fortune, Hamlet rejects action in the name of what lies within and truly is, on the one hand, and in the name of what is shown on the stage and simulates the world, on the other. Both refuges lie in the mind. For Hamlet, both man's inner life and the theater have a claim to truth. But, as we will see, the one has no resemblance to the external world, while the resemblance of the other distorts the world that it imitates. Not unlike Swift's Laputans, Hamlet has one of his eyes turned inward and the other directly up upon the stage. He misses the moral life that lies between.

Hamlet himself seems to trace his moral disgust at the world to his mother's hasty, incestuous remarriage (1.2.129-59). Life naturally involves doubling—the doubling of father and mother (“Father and mother is man and wife, and man and wife is one flesh” [4.3.54-55]) and the doubling of parent and child (“[T]hat day that our last King Hamlet o'ercame Fortinbras … was that very day that young Hamlet was born” [5.1.139-43]). But Gertrude's remarriage destroys the natural doubleness. Claudius, having killed his brother, has married his “sometime sister” (1.2.8), his brother's widow, making his nephew also his son (“my cousin, Hamlet, and my son” [1.2.64]) and hence Claudius himself Hamlet's “uncle-father” and Gertrude his “aunt-mother” (2.2.372). A marriage within prohibited degrees, the incestuous “union” (5.2.331), based, moreover, on fratricide, destroys natural distinctions within the family by improperly doubling them.

Hamlet does the same with stage imitation. Like life and the soul itself, thinking involves doubleness. As Hamlet and Horatio both suggest when, using a rich classical metaphor, they speak of “the mind's eye” (1.1.115; 1.2.185),²⁷ human beings naturally see double. We see what is before us, and we see what it means. With our eyes we see what is present; with our minds we can understand what it means. The human ability to separate the significance of a sight from the sight itself allows us to see or imagine what is absent, and thus to generalize, to speak in metaphors and images, to play on words, to express pithy aphorisms, and, indeed, to have poetry or theater at all: “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature” (3.2.22). Hamlet, however, collapses the distinction between “the mirror” and “nature,” the imitation and what it imitates. As his mother and uncle destroy natural distinctions within the family by doubling them, he destroys both action and imitation by doubling them. Turning stage-acting into action and, then, action into stage-acting, he makes action an imitation of an imitation, and imitation itself indistinguishable from the thing that it imitates. In short, he turns his own moral life—and life itself—into a play within a play. It is no small irony that Hamlet's self-dramatization of life mirrors his mother's incest.

Shakespeare, we will see, understands the Renaissance, in general, and its characteristic intellectualism, in particular, as undermining the natural doubleness of the soul. Within the full range of the soul's activities, things that should remain double either collapse into one or redouble into more than two, or, quite typically, do both at once. The tension implicit in doubleness itself—at once one and two, a whole containing two parts—is broken.

HAM.:
What is his weapon?
OSR.:
Rapier and dagger.
HAM.:
That's two of his weapons. But well.

(5.2.141-43)

Thus, throughout Hamlet, Shakespeare emphasizes doubleness—particularly unstable, imperfect, or defective doubleness. We see it in the characters, speech, and structure of the play, as well as in its content. Both Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Cornelius and Voltemand, seem to be redundant pairs: there are two where one would seem to do. There are also two Hamlets, two Fortinbrases, and even two Claudii—a middleman (never seen) named Claudio (4.7.39) as well as the king—and, of course, two brothers, one of whom murders the other, and both of whom marry the same woman. Conversely, virtually all the characters are internally divided or doubled. Hamlet has “cause, and will, and strength, and means,” and yet does not act (4.4.45); Claudius is “like a man to double business bound” (3.3.41); “Poor Ophelia [is] / Divided from herself” (4.5.84-85); Gertrude's heart is “cleft … in twain” (3.4.158); only “a piece” of Horatio is present (1.1.22); and Laertes acts “almost against [his] conscience” (5.2.300).²⁸ There are also characters who double as both actors and audience or as both actors and what they imitate (“You are as good as a chorus, my lord” [3.2.240]; “You that look pale and tremble at this chance, / That are but mutes or audience to this act” [5.2.339-40]). Further, nearly everyone feigns, impersonates, or dissembles—or is suspected of doing so. Some feign madness, friendship, kindness, knowledge, ignorance, virtue, or breeding;²⁹ some impersonate others in drama, song, or recitation, and perhaps even in “form” or “person”;³⁰ and some dissemble or disguise their intentions and actions.³¹ And there are corpses and a ghost—bodies without souls and a soul without a body. Not surprisingly, Hamlet opens with the question “Who's there?” (1.1.1), which, despite its obvious urgency, is never properly answered.

Shakespeare, likewise, emphasizes doubling in the characters' speech. We frequently hear oxymorons, antitheses, doubles, privatives, puns, echoes, conjunctions, disjunctions, contradictions, comparisons, and hendiadyses. Hendiadyses (literally, “one through two”), which abound in Hamlet,³² are especially fitting. Containing grammatical units which are parallel in structure but not in meaning, they are false conjunctions, deceptive paris. They unite what they appear to pair.

As for structure, Hamlet begins at midnight (1.1.7), with a change of guard. “[T]wice before, and jump at this dead hour,” (1.1.68) the ghost has appeared and will do so twice again in the opening scene. Old Hamlet has been dead “two months” (1.2.138; 3.2.128), or “two hours” (3.2.125), or “twice two months” (3.2.126). It has been “[t]wo months” since Lamord came to Denmark (4.7.80), and Hamlet is at sea “two days” when the pirates attack (4.6.14). Laertes has a double departure (“a second leave” [1.3.54]) for Paris, as well as two returns (1.2.51-53; 4.5.88). Hamlet twice decides to have the players perform The Murder of Gonzago (2.2.530-37, 584-601); Polonius, “seeing unseen” (3.1.33), twice spies on Hamlet (3.1.32-37; 3.4.4-5); Ophelia makes two mad appearances (4.5.21-73, 154-97); Claudius twice uses poison to murder, first old Hamlet, then young Hamlet (1.5.59-75; 4.7.155-61); and Hamlet twice asks Horatio to tell his story (5.2.343-45, 351-54). Moreover, as Polonius is killed in place of Claudius (3.4.31-32), Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are killed as substitutes for Hamlet (5.2.12-53).

In addition, much of Hamlet displays self-mirroring. The play ends with a fatal duel that answers the single combat we hear of at the start of the play, with Hamlet undoing what his father had done and young Fortinbras recovering what his father had lost (1.1.83-107; 5.2.355ff.). More generally, later scenes are often mirror images of correspondingly placed earlier ones. In the third scene from the beginning, for example, we first see Ophelia. In the third scene from the end, we learn of her death. The fifth from the beginning starts with Polonius seeking information about his son and ends with Polonius describing Hamlet as having been driven mad for Ophelia's love. The fifth scene from the end starts with mad Ophelia singing of love and ends with Laertes furiously seeking information about his father's death.³³ Further, almost all the scenes contain a ring structure, with later parts, similarly, answering correspondingly placed earlier ones.³⁴ And just as the scenes thus tend to be symmetrically arranged both externally and internally, so, throughout the play, deeds are returned upon those who do them. “[P]urposes mistook / Fall … on th'inventors' heads” (5.2.389-90). Laertes and Claudius are killed by Hamlet with the sword and poison with which they had meant to kill him (“I am justly kill'd with mine own treachery” [5.2.313]). Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are killed by order of the commission that they were carrying to lead Hamlet to his death. Polonius, who pledges his life for the accuracy of his report (“Take this from this if this be otherwise” [2.2.156]), is killed while trying to prove the mistaken report true. And Gertrude, defying Claudius for the first time, drinks to Hamlet's health, only to be killed by the poison her husband had meant for her son. Moreover, Hamlet, who relishes the prospect of having “the enginer / Hoist with his own petard” (3.4.208-9), not only kills Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with what was meant to produce his death. He characteristically seizes upon someone else's words and turns them back upon the speaker, rebuking or taunting the speaker with the speaker's own words.³⁵ There is also, of course, a play within the play—a play that on the one hand is foreshadowed by a dumb-show and on the other is itself both “something like the murder of [Hamlet's] father” (2.2.591) and “the image of a murder done in Vienna” (3.2.233). And there are subplots analogous to the main plot. Fortinbras and Laertes (and Pyrrhus) lose fathers, like Hamlet. Ophelia goes mad, while Hamlet pretends to.

Finally, Hamlet itself is a duplication or an imitation. The play is based on Saxo Grammaticus's twelfth-century legend of Amleth, Prince of Jutland, which, in turn, is based on Livy's story of Junius Brutus. Polonius, who seldom gets things right, speaks more wisely than he knows when, asked by Hamlet about his having acted at the university, he boasts, “I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i'th' Capitol. Brutus killed me” (3.2.102-3). While Hamlet's name derives from (and is an anagram of) Amleth's, the name “Amleth” is the Danish equivalent of the Latin “Brutus” (meaning “imbecile” or “fool”).³⁶ And Hamlet will, of course, kill Polonius. What Brutus acted in Rome and Polonius enacted in school, Hamlet—Brutus's latter-day namesake—will act in Denmark. In this, as in so much else in Hamlet, life will imitate theater imitating life.

Hamlet presents Shakespeare's critique of the Renaissance—and of the modern age that it begins. The Renaissance, we see in the play, is characterized chiefly by intellectualism and the absence of noble deeds. As we see most especially with Hamlet himself, theory and practice, art and life, become exchanged or confused. Hamlet not only consciously turns stage-acting into action and action into stage-acting. He also finally comes to believe that things happen in life as they do in a play. A play is not only an imitation of life, but a direct duplication of life. As art imitates life, so, too, life imitates art. Theater and life mirror each other. But Shakespeare shows in Hamlet that art can imitate life only by distorting it. In a play, but not in life, whatever happens is fated by the end or the plot; actions have a unity that they lack in life. And to believe that life imitates art is to fail to recognize art's distortion of what it imitates. It is to fail to appreciate, in particular, the role of chance—the role of unreason—in life. Hamlet's trust in fate proves, literally, fatal. Setting aside a premonition and surrendering himself to fate, Hamlet walks passively into Claudius's deadly trap (5.2.208-20). In a deeper and far more general sense as well, however, Shakespeare shows, Hamlet's intellectualism is deadly. It is deadly in principle as well as in practice. Substituting speech for action, it reduces soul to mind—life to theater. Life itself becomes self-imitation; and imitation replaces generation. At once a sign and a further cause of the disappearance of noble actions, Hamlet's—or the Renaissance's—intellectualism sets the two functions of the soul apart, leaving man a divided and diminished animal.

Notes

1. All references to Hamlet are to the Arden edition, ed. Harold Jenkins (1982; reprint, London: Routledge, 1995). I have occasionally revised quotations, based on the New Variorum Edition, Horace Howard Furness Jr., ed., 2 vols. (1877; reprint, New York: Dover, 1963).

2. E.g., 1.1.133-35; 1.3.255; 1.4.39-44; 1.5.2-104, 142-44, 173-75; 2.2.314-16; 3.2.121-22, 130, 138-39; 3.3.69; 3.4.164; 5.1.1-22, 41-49, 213-35; 5.2.47, 365. Historically, Denmark became a Protestant kingdom in 1537, following the conclusion of the Count's War. See T. K. Derry, A History of Scandinavia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 86ff.

3. The other is Oxford, which he mentions just once (2 Henry IV, 3.2.9).

4. See, e.g., Samuel Lewkenor, A Discourse of Forraine Cities Wherein … Universities (London: 1600; reprint, Amsterdam: De Capo, 1969), 15-16.

5. See, e.g., Paul Cantor, Hamlet (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 56.

6. Cf. Cantor, 4-5.

7. See, e.g., Cicero, De Finibus, 3.16ff., Tusculan Disputations, 5.42-43, Stoic Paradoxes, 16-19; Seneca, Letters, 9.2-22, 85.37, 92.3-7, On Providence, 5.7-6.9, On the Happy Life; Epictetus, Discourses, 1.1, Manual, 8, Frag., 8; Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4.7; Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers, 7.89ff.

8. See, e.g., Augustine, City of God, 9.4, 19.4.

9. Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian, in Harold J. Grimm, ed., Luther's Works, 55 vols. (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1957), 31:348.

10. Luther, Freedom, 31:347.

11. Luther, Freedom, 31:344.

12. Cf. Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (orig. pub. 1528), book 4 (London: David Nutt, 1900), 349-50.

13. E.g., 1.2.65-86; 2.2.173-217, 225-65; 3.2.92-148, 227-47; 3.4.8-11; 4.2.4-29; 4.3.16-37, 50-55; 5.1.115-33.

14. See, also, 3.3.7-23.

15. As if to underscore the point, Hamlet puns on Brutus's name, without mentioning it, and does so in the context of Polonius's having acted on the stage while a student (3.2.104-5).

16. On the natural ambiguity of “imitation” (mimêsis), see Aristotle, Poetics, 1448b4-19.

17. 1.2.257; 3.1.53; 3.4.27, 28, 45; 4.1.12, 16, 30; 4.3.40; 5.1.241. The exception refers to Hamlet's marrying Ophelia (1.3.27). Similarly, while the emphasizing adverb “indeed” puns on the noun “deed” three times, the first and last times it has pejorative connotations (1.2.83-86, where it suggests that actions merely seem; and 4.7.124-26, where it refers to murder). The only time the pun is free from such connotations occurs in the context of the ghost and refers to swearing by a sword instead of “in faith” (1.5.151-69).

18. Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1962), 160; Charles R. Forker, “Shakespeare's Theatrical Symbolism and Its Function in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 3 (1965), 215-29; Maurice Charney, Style in “Hamlet” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 141-50.

19. Particularly the word “play.” Hamlet mentions the word and its cognates 42 times (of the 58 occurrences in Hamlet). Apart from auxiliary verbs, the only verbs or nouns that he mentions more often are “come” (53 times), “made” (58 times), and “do” (118 times). “Act” (etc.) is said by, to, or in reference to Hamlet 11 of the 18 times it is mentioned; “put on,” 7 of the 11 times; “show” (etc.) 22 of the 31 times; “prologue” 2 of the 4 times; “actor(s)” and “audience” all 5 times, each; “scene” all 4 times; “stage” all 3; “enact” both times; and “cue,” “rant,” and “hypocrites,” the Greek word for stage-actors, the only times.

20. E.g., 2.2.318-58, 417-61, 517-22, 530-36; 3.1.16-23; 3.2.1-45, 134-42, 232-40, 246-48, 255-58, 269-74.

21. Aristotle, Poetics, 1449b27-28; see also 1.1.47.

22. Petrarch, Epistolares Familiares, 33.19.

23. Quoted by Eva T. H. Brann, Paradoxes of Education in a Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 74.

24. In addition, what could be called Horatio's only action leads, by his neglect, to the death of the woman he was ordered to protect (4.5.74; 4.6.21-22).

25. Richard Kennington, “The ‘Teaching of Nature’ in Descartes' Soul Doctrine,” The Review of Metaphysics 26 (1972): 86. See, e.g., Plato, Republic, 353d3-10; Aristotle, On the Soul, 403b25-27, 432a15-18; Diogenes Laertius, 7.156-57; Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 3.136-37; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1,q.75,a.1.

26. For the identification of breath and life, on the one hand, see, also, 5.2.258; cf. 5.2.171; for the identification of breath and speech, on the other, see, also, 1.3.130; 2.1.31, 45; 3.1.98; 4.7. 65; 5.2.123, 353; cf. 3.2.348-50.

27. See, e.g., Plato, Republic, 533b2; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1144a30; Manilius, Astronomica, 4.195; Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods, 1.19; De Oratore, 3.163; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 15.62-64; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 8.3.62.

28. Also Polonius (2.1.115), the Grave-digger (5.2.73), Lamord (4.7.86), the Player Queen (3.2.162-67), the Player King (3.2.159; cf. 3.2.182-210), and the child actors (2.2.343-49).

29. E.g., 1.2.87-117; 1.5.46, 176-88; 2.1.3-66; 2.2.85-151, 222ff., 3.2.336-63; 5.2.184-91.

30. E.g., 1.1.49-50; 1.2.244; 2.2.318-24, 420-25, 446-514, 545-54; 3.2.22-35, 102-3, s.d. 133, 150-223, 232-34, 246-58; 4.5.23-73; 4.6.12-28; 4.7.42-46.

31. E.g., 1.5.35-40, 106, 108; 2.1.62-66; 2.2.10-18, 278-80, 584-601; 3.1.8-10, 29-31, 43-54, 144-47; 3.2.60-62, 388-90; 4.7.106-8, 127-61.

32. “[Shakespeare] uses it most in Hamlet, sixty-six times, more than twice as often as in any other play.” George T. Wright, “Hendiadys and Hamlet,” PMLA 96 (1981): 173. R. A. Foakes counts 247 pairings of adjectives, nouns, and verbs (e.g., “steep and thorny,” “slings and arrows,” “dead and gone”). R. A. Foakes, “Hamlet and the Court of Elsinore,” Shakespeare Survey 9 (1956), 43n5. The word “and” appears more than nine hundred times in the play's four thousand lines, including more than once in forty-one lines and thrice in three lines. There are also approximately seven dozen different privatives in the play. As for the play's famous puns and wordplay, M. M. Mahood notes, “Hamlet … has more quibbles than any other of Shakespeare's tragedies.” M. M. Mahood, Shakespeare's Wordplay (London: Methuen, 1957), 112.

33. Keith Brown, “‘Form and Cause Conjoin'd’: Hamlet and Shakespeare's Workshop,” Shakespeare Survey 26 (1973): 11-12.

34. There are only three exceptions. Act 2, scene 1, contains two clearly separated parts, each concerning Polonius and one of his children. Act 3, scene 3, has three closely connected parts, of roughly equal length, all dealing with regicide and God's justice. And act 4, scene 7, a defective double, has four parts, the first three of which directly parallel those of act 1, scene 3, the symmetrically placed, first scene dealing with Polonius's family, but a final part, reporting Ophelia's death, which has no parallel in the parallel scene.

35. E.g., 1.2.65-86; 2.2.173-216, 225-65, 385-91, 407-16, 3.1.109-19; 3.2.92-97, 102-5, 293-321, 353-63; 3.4.8-15, 27-29, 158-60; 4.2.21-39; 4.3.16-39; 5.1.115-23. Also, see 1.5.141-43, 173; 3.2.115-33, 139-49, 227-46.

36. Saxo Grammaticus, The Nine Books of Danish History, 2 vols., trans. Oliver Elton, book 3 (London: Norroena Society, 1905), 1:219; Livy, History of Rome, 1.56.7-9; also Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities, 4.67.4-68.2. It might be worth noting that the name “Hamnet,” which Shakespeare gave his son (after one of his godfathers), is etymologically unrelated to the name “Hamlet”; see E. G. Withycombe, The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 145.