SOURCE: Foakes, R. A. “Hamlet's Neglect of Revenge.” In Hamlet: New Critical Essays, edited by Arthur F. Kinney, pp. 85-99. New York: Routledge, 2002.

[In the following essay, Foakes argues that Hamlet is not a revenge tragedy but a play about whether or not violence is an acceptable choice in a world caught between the ancient heroic code of retaliation and the Christian commandments that reject it.]

Hamlet has commonly been regarded as a revenge tragedy, its early impact being marked by works that capitalized on its success, like John Marston's Antonio's Revenge and the anonymous Revenger's Tragedy, possibly written by Thomas Middleton. In the twentieth century, critics from A. C. Bradley, writing in 1904, to the editors of the three editions that appeared in the 1980s, all have had much to say about Hamlet's “task” or “duty” to carry out his revenge. Hamlet could be seen as having to deal with “the predicament, quite simply, of a man in mourning for his father, whose murder he is called on to avenge” (Jenkins 126). Hence a central concern for many critics has been the question of why Hamlet delays or avoids taking his revenge on Claudius. He might be seen as pathologically disabled by his speculative intellect and sensitivity in a world of action, handicapped by weakness of character (Dover Wilson), tainted by a “fatal aestheticism” (Nevo 162), or inhibited by the inescapable condition of man (Mack); in any case, and for whatever reason, he has been regarded as a failure in his “evasion of the task imposed on him” (Dodsworth 297). All such accounts of the play have taken for granted that the play's central concern is the need for Hamlet to carry out the Ghost's demand for revenge, and his inability to act has been related to the condition of “Hamletism,” a condition that seemed to define the disillusion, cynicism, or despair that marked a century in which two world wars were fought, and in which the new-media technologies of the film and television made all too familiar the horrors of Nazi gas chambers, of atomic bombs, and of the resurgence of genocide.

Yet, as John Kerrigan observes, “Hamlet never promises to revenge, only to remember” (126)¹—that is, to remember the Ghost, and to memorize his “commandment” (1.5.102). On reflection, Hamlet reasonably resists the demand for revenge by a questionable Ghost that appears strangely in armor, and that may come from the hell symbolized by his voice from the “cellarage” under the stage. Hamlet later identifies revenge with the figure of Pyrrhus taking vengeance for the death of Achilles by “mincing” the limbs of Priam—this is the horrid image that appalls Hamlet (2.2.513-14). Indeed, revenge is not the dominant concern in Hamlet, as comparison with The Revenger's Tragedy shows. This play adapts to new uses one of the property skulls thrown about in the gravedigger scene in Hamlet first by displaying it as an emblem of murder and of revenge to come, and then as a means of poisoning the Duke in a kiss. From the opening moment, the action is thus determined by Vindice's cry:

Vengeance, thou murder's quit-rent, and whereby
Thou show'st thyself tenant to Tragedy,
O, keep thy day, hour, minute, I beseech,
For those thou hast determined!

(1.1.39-42)

The play looks ahead to vengeance being “paid” as a requital for murder, not only for the rape and murder of Gloriana by the Duke, but for the rape and Lucretia-like suicide of Antonio's wife, a “religious lady” (1.1.111), by the Duchess's youngest son. Most of the male characters in the play are caught up in a desire for revenge of some kind, since the law, as administered by the Duke, is corrupt, and the first act ends with a group swearing on their swords to revenge the death of Antonio's wife if “Judgment speak all in gold” (1.4.61). Vindice claims a high moral ground in his missionary zeal to “blast this villainous dukedom vexed with sin” (5.2.6), but his long obsession with obtaining revenge contaminates him, so that he is shown taking increasing pleasure in torture and murder. He becomes morally indistinguishable from other revengers in the masque of four revengers followed by “the other masque of intended murderers” in act 5, where all look alike and could substitute for one another. The play closes on a Christian moral pattern in which all of the guilty, including Vindice and his brother Hippolito, meet with retribution finally, so that Antonio is left in charge at the end, and can cry “Just is the law above!” But the action throughout is also self-consciously theatrical, as Vindice contrives plots and stages his own scenarios and plays within the play.

In so doing, Vindice often includes the audience in his denunciations of luxury, wealth, ambition, and lust, so that the unnamed court in the play may reflect the licentiousness and corruption perceived by spectators as present at the court of James I and in Jacobean London. The opening scene looks ahead to the completion of revenges, and the action presses forward, stressing the present tense. “Now” is the most frequently occurring adverb in the play, giving a sense of urgency as well as a sense of immediate relevance to the world of the audience (McMillin 282-3):

Now 'tis full sea abed over the world;
There's juggling of all sides. Some that were maids
E'en at sunset are now perhaps i' th' toll-book.
This woman in immodest thin apparel
Lets in her friend by water; here's a dame,
Cunning, nails leather hinges to a door
To avoid proclamation; now cuckolds are
A-coining, apace, apace, apace …

(2.2.136-43)

The play thus speaks home to a London audience through images such as that of the woman letting in her friend by water (the Thames?), and by various forms of direct address. The Italianate setting permits the audience to associate the depiction of intrigue, lust, and murder with a foreign country, but at the same time to enjoy the frisson of recognizing satirical relevances to their own city and court. As in Hamlet, the protagonist is something of a misogynist, for whom women may represent an ideal of virtue, as embodied in his sister, Castiza (signifying Chastity), but more commonly are seen as a source of corruption, of the wealth and sex that fascinated people then as now: “were't not for gold and women, there would be no damnation” (2.1.257).

The opening of this play, which has no ghost, is dominated by the displayed skull of a victim of murder, whereas in Hamlet, by contrast, the early scenes are dominated by the Ghost, and Yorick's skull, handled by Hamlet, is seen only in act 5, where it recalls the Ghost in serving as a reminder of the past, a remembrance of Hamlet's childhood. In The Revenger's Tragedy, most of the characters are engaged in a feverish pursuit of pleasure, sex and power,

Banquets abroad by torchlight, music, sports,
Bare-headed vassals that had ne'er the fortune
To keep their own hats on, but let horns wear 'em;
“Nine coaches waiting,—hurry, hurry, hurry!”

(2.1.203-6)

When Vindice broods on his world as he contemplates the skull of Gloriana again in act 3, he questions this pursuit of luxury and pleasure, seeing the court as absurdist and the people in it as mad:

Surely we are all mad people, and they
Whom we think are, are not …

(3.5.80-81)

He is right to include himself, and yet he speaks as the one rational character who is capable of reflecting on the conduct of others, and who is therefore able to manipulate them and control events. In Shakespeare's play the situation is reversed, as Hamlet himself feels estranged to the point of madness in a court that is going about its orderly business as usual. These differences relate to a more fundamental dissimilarity between the plays, for Hamlet is not in control, but rather is being watched and monitored in a court run with some efficiency by Claudius. Hamlet thinks of himself as subject to the whims of unstable Fortune, or assaulted by her “slings and arrows,” which tend to disable the “discourse of reason.”² As noted earlier, his neglect of revenge has troubled many interpreters of the play, who tend to see Hamlet as “a man with a deed to do who for the most part conspicuously fails to do it” (Jenkins 139-40, Foakes 35-40). Hence the long tradition of regarding Hamlet as irresolute, paralyzed in will, unhealthy, morbid, neurotic, a dreamer who appears a very disturbing figure in the context of Western ideologies that value men of decision and action who are ready to do their duty. It should not surprise that many actresses have taken on the role, and that Hamlet has been appropriated critically as “sensitive, intellectual, and feminine” (French 158, Foakes 24-6, Thompson and Taylor 42-50).

The idea that Hamlet fails to carry out an appointed task or duty is based on his encounter with the Ghost of his father in act 1, and our understanding of this encounter relates to the presentation of the Ghost in the opening scene. There the Ghost appears as a “warlike form,” in “the very armor he had on / When he the ambitious Norway combated,” according to Horatio, who speaks as if he had witnessed the battle with his own eyes. Not until near the end of the play does it emerge that the old King fought old Fortinbras thirty years previously, on the very day Hamlet was born (5.1.147), so that Horatio, his fellow-student, and presumably about the same age as Hamlet, cannot have seen old Hamlet at that time. This inconsistency is not noticed in performance, nor often in reading, and seems designed to establish an image of old Hamlet as a warrior king. Shakespeare had recently worked on Julius Caesar, which could have influenced his use of classical names in Hamlet, such as Horatio, Marcellus, Claudius, and Laertes, and also his references to Caesar and the classical deities, but this classical contextualization goes deeper. In the Quarto, Horatio recalls in this scene the apparitions that preceded the fall of Julius Caesar in “the most high and palmy state of Rome,” thereby associating old Hamlet directly with ancient Rome, but these lines were omitted from the Folio, possibly cut in performance because they do not advance the action, or alternatively because they mislead by suggesting the Ghost is merely a portent of disasters to come. However, the passage shows how Shakespeare's mind was working to create a complex idea of the Ghost. He is represented as not only a sort of epic figure, at once associated with ancient history, with old battles fought against Norway, and with heroic values, but also as someone known to Horatio, and connected to a present moment when it seems that history may repeat itself in an invasion of Denmark by young Fortinbras.

The Ghost probably startled the first audience to see Hamlet staged by its appearance in armor—the only ghost in early modern English drama to be so costumed (Prosser 120, 255). With his “martial stalk” he seems to emerge from an ancient time when fighting was the normal way to conduct affairs, and this “portentous figure,” as he is called by Barnardo, is linked by Horatio with the portents and ghosts or “sheeted dead” that squeaked and gibbered in the streets of Rome before the assassination of Julius Caesar (1.1.113-25). Yet he is also old Hamlet to the life, so that Horatio reports to Hamlet, “I think I saw him yesternight” (1.2.189), his beard grizzled “as I have seen it in his life” (1.2.240). By this time, Hamlet has already, in his “O that this too too sullied flesh would melt” soliloquy, compared his father with Hyperion the sun-god and with Hercules (1.2.140, 153), so enhancing his association with the classical world. The Ghost who interviews Hamlet late in act 1 in effect becomes the living man again, gesturing, passionate, bearded, armed, and carrying his marshal's truncheon, an actor visibly turning into Hamlet's father when he begins to speak. He carries the authority not only of a “supernatural being, King and father” (Hibbard 185), but also of the martial heroes of the classical world. But Hamlet has responded to the appearance of the Ghost with his cry,

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou comest in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee.

(1.4.39-44)

All those forms of authority are thus put in question in relation to a Christian pattern of values, and the Ghost is “questionable” not only as inviting question, but also as doubtful, of uncertain origin.³ Furthermore, the Ghost's first words suggest he has come from Hell (“sulphurous and tormenting flames”) or Purgatory (where his “foul crimes” are to be “burnt and purged away”),⁴ and his intents appear to be wicked rather than charitable. When he addresses Hamlet directly, he speaks in the voice of a Senecan revenger, invoking classical values again in calling on Hamlet to “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (1.5.25).

HAMLET
Murder?
GHOST
Murder most foul, as in the best it is,
But this most foul, strange and unnatural.
HAMLET
Haste me to know't, that I, with wings
As swift as meditation or the thoughts of love
May sweep to my revenge.

(1.5.26-31)

Hamlet's immediate reaction to the Ghost's words is often taken as signifying an acceptance of a duty to revenge: “He now also has his directive, a commission that is also a mission. His reaction to the Ghost is like a religious conversion” (Edwards 39, 45). Hamlet's first response, however, is spoken in the context of the Ghost's Christian qualification of his Senecan call for revenge: in condemning murder as “most foul” at the best, he thus exhorts Hamlet to kill his murderer and at the same time denounces the idea of revenge killing (Alexander 45-46).

As the Ghost continues with his long account of Gertrude transferring her affections to Claudius, and of Claudius poisoning him, his emphasis is on the sinful nature of these events and on the horrible effects of the poison on his body. The Ghost is troubled with a moral disgust on the one hand, and a physical revulsion on the other, and the two meet in his sermonizing about Gertrude's behavior:

So lust, though to a radiant angel linked,
Will sate itself in a celestial bed
And prey on garbage

(1.5.55-57)

The moral and physical disgust associated with lust and garbage is seen also in the Ghost's horror both at the appearance of his body, covered by the poison with a “loathsome crust,” and at being denied the sacraments at his death. This talking Ghost becomes flesh, a living actor, in his anxiety about what happened to his body, and in his outrage at the idea that the “royal bed of Denmark” should become “[a] couch for luxury and damned incest” (1.5.83). The Ghost's moral outrage, expressed in Christian terms, echoes that expressed by Hamlet in his first soliloquy in 1.2, who, like his father, thinks of the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude as incestuous (1.2.157); the Ghost adds adultery as a further charge (1.5.41). Both also have a kind of voyeuristic horror in imagining what goes on in the “incestuous sheets” of the “royal bed.”

In the Ghost's long narrative the idea of revenge becomes diluted, and almost lost, especially as he ends by telling Hamlet to leave his mother to her conscience and to heaven. His final imperative is “Remember me,” and this is what catches Hamlet's attention:

                                                            Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter

(1.5.95-104)

Hamlet indeed dwells above all on remembering the Ghost, and wiping away all other records he has kept in the notebook of his memory. But what does he mean by the “commandment” he wants to register there? The Ghost's imperatives have shifted from “Revenge” (25) through “bear it not” (81) and “Taint not thy mind” (85) to “Remember me” (91). The word “commandment” incorporates “command,” appropriate to a figure appearing as a great warrior and wielding a marshal's truncheon, and this is how Hamlet recalls this moment later in 3.4, when he expects the Ghost, appearing for the third time, to chide him for neglecting to carry out his “dread command.” In 1.5, however, “commandment” had a much more immediate sense for Shakespeare and his audience, one derived from its use in the Bible, specifically in relation to the ten commandments given by God to Moses, which were by law inscribed or hung on the walls of parish churches in England. Prominent among them is the injunction, “Thou shalt not kill,”⁵ so that the term in itself contains the contradictory impulses that characterize both the Ghost and Hamlet, namely a quasi-Senecan desire for revenge, and a Christian inhibition against taking life.

In his study Pagan Virtue, John Casey argues that “we inherit a confused system of values; that when we think most rigorously and realistically we are ‘pagans’ in ethics, but that our Christian inheritance only allows a fitful sincerity about this” (Casey 225-6). He observes that our society admires qualities derived from the ancient Greeks and Romans, what he calls the “irascible” virtues, “pride and shame, a sense of the noble, a certain valuing of courage and ambition,” as against compassion, meekness, pity, and love, qualities that we associate with Christ. He thinks King Lear shows that Shakespeare was confused, that the play “uncomfortably combines, without reconciling, ‘pagan’ and Christian elements” (Casey 212, 225). I think what Hamlet demonstrates is that Shakespeare was fully aware of the differences between these inherited sets of values and used them in establishing the character and dilemma of his protagonist. Hamlet sees his father in ideal terms, associating him with classical deities and heroes, Hyperion, Jupiter, Mercury, and Hercules. Old Hamlet is established for us in the opening scene by Horatio as a warrior who challenged old Fortinbras to single combat and killed him, and Hamlet's remarks about his father confirm this image of a hero from the past, possessing “An eye like Mars to threaten and command” (3.4.57). Old Hamlet represents martial honor, is associated with the irascible virtues, and is distanced into something of a mythical figure—doubly distanced in the past history of Denmark, and by association with the classical world.

Hamlet is represented as a student, whose training in the classics is reflected in his language, in his image of his father, and in other ways, as when he invites the players to rehearse a speech describing the death of Priam based on the Aeneid. For Hamlet, his father is measured against the heroes of the Trojan war. In challenging old Fortinbras, old Hamlet behaved like the heroes of the Iliad, making courage a prime virtue, and courting death in war: “[I]n heroic societies life is the standard of value. If someone kills you, my friend or brother, I owe you their death and when I have paid my debt to you their friend or brother owes them my death” (MacIntyre 117). In that simpler world of masculine values, revenge could be seen as a virtuous act, but this is not the world invoked in the Player's speech narrating the revenge taken for the death of his father Achilles by Pyrrhus, whose “roused vengeance” drives him to butcher the old king, “mincing” his limbs in full view of Queen Hecuba. The speech brings out the full horror of what Pyrrhus does, insuring that, in spite of the classical imagery, and the attribution of blame to Fortune, as though it is Priam's bad luck to suffer thus, the “hellish” (2.2.463) deed of the black and bloody murderer is condemned.

Hearing this speech prompts Hamlet to a tirade against himself, first for not having spoken out, like the player, and then for doing nothing but unpacking his heart with words. He does not threaten direct action against Claudius,⁶ and slides from cursing into reflection; though “prompted” to revenge, as for the moment he claims, “by heaven and hell” (2.2.584), he goes on to question whether the Ghost may be “a devil” tempting him to damnation. So he shifts from a heroic stance applauding the idea of revenge to a Christian anxiety about the nature of the Ghost, and ends by deciding to try to “catch the conscience of the king,” using the New Testament term that specifically signifies a consciousness of sin, and might suggest that Hamlet relates Claudius to those sinners who condemned the woman taken in adultery and were “convicted by their own conscience” (John, 8.9).

Hamlet's shift from Thyestean revenge to Christian conscience parallels the Ghost's turn away from his demand for revenge to his call to Hamlet to leave Gertrude to her conscience. The Ghost does not represent the simple heroic warrior Hamlet imagines, but a more complex figure who defines virtue not in terms of a heroic code but in relation to lust. In the Iliad, women are taken by the victors in battle as spoils of war, but the Christian morality that the Ghost preaches is focused on sexual relations, and he is especially outraged by thoughts of incest and adultery, as if he has in mind Christ's sermon on the mount, “whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5.28). The Ghost's concern here in 1.5 in turn echoes Hamlet's thought in his first soliloquy, where he, too, is already tainted in his mind by his disgust with sullied flesh, and by his mother's marriage to Claudius. Indeed, he begins by rejecting suicide because “the Everlasting” has “fixed / His canon 'gainst self-slaughter” (1.2.131-2), apparently recalling the sixth of the ten commandments, “Thou shalt not kill.” When Hamlet modulates in his “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I” soliloquy from cursing and shouting for vengeance into worrying that the Ghost may be a devil, he again seems trapped in the conflict between the heroic ethos exemplified for him by the image he has of his father, and the Christian values the Ghost and he also share, and which are assumed as a common frame of reference by the other characters.

Hamlet takes the performance of The Mousetrap as causing Claudius, “frighted with false fire,” to reveal his guilt when he suddenly calls for lights and leaves the stage, though it may well be, as Guildenstern reports, that Claudius is angered and frightened by something else: He has heard Hamlet identify the murderer in the play as “nephew to the king” (3.2.244),—pointing threateningly to himself as a potential murderer of his uncle. However that may be, Hamlet seems prepared to act in “the witching time of night” (3.2.358) as he goes to “speak daggers” (3.2.365) to his mother and encounters Claudius at prayer. Claudius has just admitted to the audience his offense in a reference to the first murderer, Cain:

It hath the primal eldest curse upon ‘t,
A brother's murder.

(3.3.37-38)

Inevitably, it seems, Hamlet is inhibited from carrying out a murder that would be analogous, the killing of a blood relative, now that he has the perfect opportunity. It is, of course, ironic that his chance comes when Claudius is kneeling, as if he were a silent embodiment of contrition, so that Hamlet is stymied by the thought that his uncle might go to heaven rather than to hell if he is killed while praying. Whenever Hamlet reflects upon revenge, he cannot carry it out because the very idea clashes with his awareness of biblical injunctions against taking life.

What happens when Hamlet comes into the presence of his mother in 3.4 is therefore crucial in the action of the play. He forces her to sit down, physically handling her in a way that makes her cry out, fearing he may murder her, and in response to her shout, “Help, ho!,” a voice is heard from behind an arras or curtain, “What ho! Help!” Hamlet does not identify the voice, but draws his sword and stabs it through the curtain.

It is the first time he has not paused to reflect, and his act seems spontaneous. When Gertrude asks what he has done, he replies, “Nay, I know not. Is it the King?” Hamlet has worked himself up in preparation for the “bitter business” of his verbal attack on his mother, and, concentrating with all his force on the harsh things he has to say to her, he cannot bear to be interrupted. His reaction to the discovery that he has killed Polonius is callous, since all his attention is concentrated on forcing Gertrude to share his disgust with her marriage to Claudius, and persuading her to forego

                    the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty.

(3.4.92-94)

She has risen to see what Hamlet has done, as he presumably draws the arras and reveals the body, and, bidding a quick farewell to Polonius as a “wretched, rash, intruding fool,” he turns back to her, once again making her sit down and listen to him. What has he done? It is not premeditated murder, or a crime passionel, since his passion is directed against his mother in the scene, and he does not know whom he has stabbed. It is not an accident, though there is an accidental aspect to the deed in that stabbing blindly through an arras might merely wound rather than kill. Hamlet hopes he may have killed the King, but really has no idea who is hiding. One might argue that he transfers his anger with his mother momentarily to the figure behind the arras, or that his frustration in passing up the chance to kill Claudius at prayer causes this sudden act of violence, but there is no adequate explanation for why Hamlet behaves as he does. His killing of Polonius is best thought of as a lashing out, a spontaneous act that may in some way release pent-up feelings and frustrations associated with his uncle, his mother, Ophelia, and the general state of affairs in Denmark, but it remains in the end inexplicable. It is a primal act of violence.⁷

Hamlet continues for about 150 lines to excoriate his mother in his anxiety to persuade her not to sleep with her present husband, Claudius, and ends by pleading,

                              Forgive me this my virtue;
For in the fatness of these pursy times
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg …

(3.4.152-54)

His words, with their generalizing stress on gross physicality in the overtones of “fatness” and “pursy” or flabby recall the Ghost's confidence in generalizing about his “virtue”:

                    But virtue, as it never will be moved,
Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,
So lust, though to a radiant angel linked,
Will sate itself in a celestial bed,
And prey on garbage.

(1.5.53-57)

Like his father's, Hamlet's “virtue” is focused in his horror at her sexual behavior, and, as if to pull him back from his obsession with sex, the Ghost returns, seen only by Hamlet, to whet his “blunted purpose,” and remind him of more important matters. In the first Quarto the stage direction calls for the Ghost to enter “in his night gown,” not in the armor he wore in act 1, as if the actor who played in this shortened version adapted his costume to a bedchamber, and there may have been deliberate irony in so clothing the Ghost when his words are more appropriate to a warlike figure, since they serve to remind Hamlet about revenge. Since the Queen does not see the Ghost, the audience may think it is a hallucination perceived only by Hamlet, confirming his eccentric behavior, which Gertrude regards as madness and so reports to Claudius in the next scene (4.1.7). The ironies are compounded in Hamlet's speeches, which are rational except for their obsessive concern with sex, which is morally disgusting to him in a way that the killing of Polonius is not. Polonius is dismissed and then forgotten for 120 lines, after which Hamlet rewrites what he has done by appointing himself as heaven's agent of punishment:

                                                                                                    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.

(3.4.172-75)

Here Hamlet abandons all of his earlier wrestlings with conscience and with the biblical injunction against killing. He casually pushes responsibility away from himself with no remorse, treating the corpse with a mocking detachment as he makes his exit, lugging “the guts into the neighbor room.” Has the body of Polonius, bloodied from the sword-thrust, been visible on stage throughout the scene? If so, it would serve as a reminder of the disparity between Hamlet's fixation on sex and his lack of concern about a man he has killed.

Hamlet has accused his mother of making “sweet religion” into a “rhapsody of words,” or meaningless medley, which is, ironically, what he now does himself by claiming to be the instrument of providence. Gertrude tells Claudius that Hamlet weeps for what he has done (4.1.27), but the Hamlet we see again in the following scenes seems unconcerned, as he puts on his antic disposition in mockingly talking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and then to the King about what he has done with the body of Polonius.

After his sudden act of violence his attitude to the idea of killing and death changes rapidly, the biblical commandments are forgotten, and he openly promises that Claudius will soon follow Polonius on his way to heaven or hell (4.3.35-37). At this point Hamlet is dispatched to England, and is offstage for about five hundred lines, while the action focuses on Ophelia and Laertes. When we see him again, in the graveyard scene, he is brooding over skulls on the leveling that death brings. He links the first skull thrown up by the Gravedigger to Cain: “How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if 'twere Cain's jawbone, that did the first murder” (5.1.76-77). Whereas Claudius sees himself as Cain committing a “brother's murder,” Hamlet refers only to the primal act of murder, something he repeated in killing Polonius. The scene points up his casual attitude to death since he stabbed through the arras, while also marking his acceptance of the idea of his own death and its insignificance in relation to that of Caesar or Alexander the Great. But then comes the great shock of discovering that Ophelia is dead, and he realizes that the gravediggers have been preparing for the burial of her body. This is the only death that moves him, not to a recognition that he might be to blame for her suicide, but rather to anger at the ostentatious grieving of Laertes: “the bravery of his grief did put me / Into a towering passion” (5.2.79-80).

Hamlet has no compunction about sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths in England (“They are not near my conscience,” 5.2.58, F only), and now accepts (also in lines found only in F) the idea of killing Claudius, “is't not perfect conscience, / To quit him with this arm?” (5.2.67-68). This passage from “To quit him …”(5.2.68-81) may have been omitted by accident or cut in performance because it makes Hamlet's intentions too explicit, but it is revealing, especially in the use of the word “conscience” in a sense that conflicts with biblical usage, as in 1 Timothy 1.5 (Geneva text): “the end of the commandment is love out of a pure heart, and of a good conscience, and of faith unfeigned”—in biblical terms, it is not possible to kill with a good conscience.⁸ After he stabs Polonius, Hamlet increasingly displays a sardonic acceptance of the idea of death, and learns to distance himself from what he has done by claiming he is an agent of providence, and that his conscience is untroubled. By openly showing his hostility to Claudius, he has insured that sooner or later they will clash as “mighty opposites” (5.2.62), and he resigns himself to providence in the knowledge that death awaits him: “If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now” (5.2.220-22). What he has done has made him ready to accept his own death (“The readiness is all.”), but still not dedicated to revenge. It is only after he has his own death wound that he turns the poisoned weapon on Claudius, not in a plotted revenge, but in a spontaneous act of retaliation.

In neglecting his revenge, Hamlet is not “stifled by remembrance” (Kerrigan 186) so much as by his inheritance of conflicting classical and Christian values. The heroic code he associates with his father urges him to action, while the Christian code that is given lip-service in Claudius's Denmark condemns revenge and inhibits him from murder most foul. A ruler, however bad, may be God's “minister” in punishing the evil subjects do, according to St. Paul, as “a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Romans 13.4), and the people must accept this, “for conscience sake.”⁹ Hamlet is not the king, but he claims the prerogative of a ruler in the role of “scourge and minister” after killing Polonius. From this point on, he likes to associate his actions with Providence, whereas earlier he had seen himself as subject to Fortune, contrasting himself with Horatio, the embodiment of Senecan stoicism. As long as he contemplates the idea of revenge, Hamlet cannot sustain resolution, finding “conscience does make cowards of us all” (3.1.82), and it is his exploration of this issue that makes the “To be or not to be” soliloquy so central in the play.

Only in his last soliloquy, omitted from the Folio text, does he find in Fortinbras an inspiring warrior image resembling that of his father, marching off to fight a war merely for honor, who might prevent Hamlet from “thinking too precisely on the event” (4.4.41) if it were not that this encounter occurs as he is on his way to England; furthermore, this soliloquy is present only in Q2, not in the Folio or Q1, and was probably omitted in performance not only because it duplicates Hamlet's self-denunciation in his earlier soliloquy, “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I,” without advancing the action, but also because the momentum of that action has already shifted toward a final showdown with Claudius consequent upon the killing of Polonius and the open hostility to the King shown by Hamlet. Another self-questioning soliloquy is unnecessary (Foakes 92-94). Fortinbras resembles old Hamlet as a warrior prince, but now he is not, as Horatio supposed in the opening scene, aiming to attack Denmark to recover lands old Hamlet fought to win, but setting off for Poland to fight for a worthless patch of ground in the name of honor.

Thus, insofar as Hamlet is a revenge tragedy, Laertes is the revenger figure, who, in Senecan fashion, is willing, unlike Hamlet, to reject “conscience” and “dare damnation” (4.5.133-34) to get his revenge for the death of his father, and cut Hamlet's throat in the church (4.7.126). He returns from France equipped with a deadly poison he can apply to a rapier (4.7.141), and proceeds to plot with Claudius a scenario that will insure the death of Hamlet. Laertes, of course, only finds out in 4.5 that his father has been killed, so the subplot of revenge is worked out swiftly, but in most respects Laertes from this point becomes a revenger like Vindice or Pyrrhus, and in his difference from Hamlet reveals something about the limitations of the revenge play. Revenge is a frequent motif in drama, but there are, in truth, few major revenge plays, since the basic plot offers limited possibilities of diversity. Revenge is always reactive, secondary, a response to some previous deed, and the most powerful tragedies develop from some primal act of violence.

Hamlet remains central in European and American culture as a work that continually challenges interpretation. Although commonly characterized as a revenge tragedy, a concern with the idea of revenge rarely figures in the way Hamlet has been characterized:

The Romantics freed Hamlet the character from the play into an independent existence as a figure embodying nobility, or at least good intentions, but disabled from action by a sense of inadequacy, or a diseased consciousness capable of seeing the world as possessed by things rank and gross in nature, and hence a failure. Hamletism gained currency as a term to describe not only individuals, but the failings of intellectuals, political parties, or nations, and so Hamlet was restored to the public arena to characterize the condition of Germany, or Europe, or the world, or the decline of aristocracy in the face of democracy. As the idea of Hamletism prospered, so it came to affect the way the play was seen, and the most widely accepted critical readings of it have for a long time presented us with a version of Shakespeare's play reinfected, so to speak, with the virus of Hamletism, and seen in its totality as a vision of failure in modern men or even in Man himself.

(Foakes 44)

Hamlet has often been extrapolated from the play as someone who reflects, hesitates, is inhibited from acting, or as one who is oppressed by a corrupt world in which action is useless. Such versions of the Prince ignore much that is in the play, but in focusing on action or inaction they are responding in some sense to a central issue in the play, which is not the matter of revenge, but rather the control or release of instinctual drives to violence. If the “How all occasions” lines are omitted, Hamlet's last major soliloquy is “To be or not to be,” a question that has immediately to do not with suicide, but with action:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them.

(3.1.56-59)

To “take arms,” like his father, would mean to kill, which was accepted as part of a heroic code, but is rejected by Christian commandments. Hamlet is trapped in the contradictions between the two codes, which make him a great exponent of the problem of violence. There is no solution; having passed up a chance to revenge himself on Claudius and worked himself into a passionate state on his way to confront his mother, he spontaneously stabs through the arras to kill Polonius. This act is a rite of passage, and makes it easy for him to send Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, and to resign himself to his own. His initial act of violence changes his nature, so that he reconstructs himself as the agent of providence in punishing others. He needs to do so in order to live with what he has done. In exploring Hamlet's dilemma, the play probes deeply into the basic problem of human violence and the moral limits of action, and it is a misnomer to call it simply a revenge play.

Notes

1. Neill, 251-61, finely analyzes the emotional and moral ambivalence of remembrance in the play in his treatment of Hamlet as a conventional revenger whose “dream of re-membering the violated past and destroying a tainted order is fulfilled only at the cost of repeating the violation and spreading the taint.”

2. Frye, 113-21, shows how Fortune was opposed to prudence and wisdom in Shakespeare's age.

3. The first use of the word in this latter sense recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1607, but Shakespeare surely had both meanings in mind here.

4. The Ghost refers to purgatory and says he was denied the last rites (1.5.77), but these Catholic associations conflict with those of the Senecan revenger, and with the suggestions of hell when the Ghost is heard like a pioneer or miner beneath the stage. Hamlet is understandably confused, but his first reaction is arguably Protestant, as limited to earth, heaven, and hell: “O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else? / And shall I couple hell?” (1.5.92-93). Hamlet has returned from Wittenberg, the most famous Protestant university, so that once he shakes off the overwhelming sense of his father's presence, he suspects the apparition may be a devil (2.2.595). The religious affiliations of the Ghost and of Hamlet have been much debated, as by Frye 14-24, by Jenkins 453-54, 457-59, by Prosser 118-42, and by McGee 13-54. I think Shakespeare chose to provide mixed signals about a Ghost that remains questionable still; the significant polarity in the play I believe is between Christian and classical, not between Catholic and Protestant attitudes and beliefs.

5. The Geneva Bible has a marginal gloss here: “But love and preserve thy brother's life.”

6. The cry “Oh Vengeance!” (after 2.2.581) found only in the Folio text is thought by many to be an actor's addition, a rhetorical flourish that runs counter to the flow of the soliloquy; it is omitted from many editions, such as the Arden and the Riverside.

7. In his interesting study of the play Gurr also argued, 76-79, that the killing of Polonius is a turning point in the action.

8. The Geneva text has a marginal gloss here: “Paul sheweth that the end of God's Law is love, which cannot be without a good conscience. …”

9. In the Geneva text a marginal note adds: “For he is the minister of God to take vengeance on him that doth evil.”

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