SOURCE: Rappaport, Gideon. “Hamlet: Revenge and Readiness.” Upstart Crow 7 (1987): 80-95.

[In the following essay, Rappaport focuses on Hamlet's “Now might I do it pat” soliloquy (III.iii) that immediately follows Claudius's own soliloquy before he kneels in prayer. The critic reads Hamlet's monologue as an expression of the prince's pride, arguing that he does not kill Claudius at this moment because he is guilty of the sin of taking on himself the divine authority of saving or condemning souls. Rappaport also discusses Hamlet's other soliloquies and contends that the reason there are none after the sea voyage is because during this time Hamlet has learned to submit to God's will.]

The intention of this paper is, among other things, to resolve the interpretive dilemma critics have faced in trying to determine whether Hamlet is predominantly a secular revenge tragedy or a redemptive Christian tragedy. The focus is on the complex dramatic moment, properly understood as the climax of the play, compounded of Hamlet's soliloquy in Act III, scene iii, and its remarkable relation to its context. And the method is, in part, simply to take Shakespeare at his word—that is, to accept as serious and fundamental axioms of life the commonplace professions of Renaissance thought that we in our own time tend to forget, to ignore, or to treat with condescension. Whether or not we believe that Shakespeare and his audience took seriously a phrase like “Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord” is of the utmost consequence in determining how, or even whether, we will understand a play like Hamlet, I am convinced both that Shakespeare did take such phrases seriously and recognizing that he did does not render the plays any the less complex, profound, or entertaining.

In the soliloquy of Claudius in Act III, scene iii, Shakespeare has dramatized, subtly but directly, the immobility of spirit that is despair. Through the revealing process of this soliloquy and the power of our empathic response to it, not only an understanding of despair but an experience and an actual fear of it have been conveyed to the audience. Now we seek relief. We want the villain returned to his place as villain, preferably by the hero, who should appear and relieve us of the momentary anguish by reminding us of the crime and the guilt of Claudius and by allowing us to reassume the posture of detached judgment of the evil king.

What follows instead is a twofold moral shock. Hamlet's soliloquy begins to paint Claudius's spiritual state brighter than we know it to be, and suddenly we find that we know more about the moral condition of Claudius's soul than Hamlet does. Thus, any relief we might have sought in a reiteration of the accusations against Claudius is prevented. At the same time we are made aware that Hamlet, so far from relieving us, is shocking us still further by giving voice to the single most evil attitude expressed in the play. Not only by the reversal of our expectations—both the immediate and the general ones—are we startled, but by the sheer depth of evil that Hamlet is uttering. If before we shuddered at feeling what the villain felt, now we are appalled by the degradation of our hero.

What exactly is Hamlet saying that is so degrading? Philip Thompson puts it thus:

At his one ready moment, in terms of the success or failure of his cause, Hamlet is (literally) damnably unready. In explicit renunciation of the readiness he later espouses, he declares himself unsatisfied by the mere hire and salary of killing the body and leaving the soul to God, demanding the eternal damnation of Claudius as the only possible means of relief for his personal shame and suffering (and thus setting out to write the ultimate revenge play). … A Christian audience would certainly have recognized that Hamlet's spiritual guilt is at this moment greater than that of Claudius, who, though he killed an unhouseled victim, did so only for his own advantage and pleasure and not for the sake of sending his brother's soul to Hell.¹

Hamlet, going beyond the distaste for imagining the salvation of his enemies implied earlier (“Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven / Or ever I had seen that day”—I. ii. 182,83),² has become guilty of supreme pride in assuming the divine prerogative of the final judgment of souls. In addition, he would consign Claudius to a fate worse even than the fate about which he himself and we have recently heard the dreaded specter cry, “Oh, horrible, O, horrible, most horrible!” (I. v. 80). The tale that the ghost refrained from telling lest Hamlet's blood freeze and he die of fright would presumably have been about purgatory; Hamlet now wants Claudius in hell. Claudius himself has reached no such depths of guilt. So gauged by both the audience's moral judgment and its emotional response, Hamlet here, to coin a vile phrase, out-Claudiuses Claudius.

But are we not at least partly in favor of Hamlet's plan for Claudius's damnation? Would not even the most upright in an Elizabethan audience have participated somewhat in Hamlet's desire to consign Claudius to perdition? If the answer is yes, that too serves to intensify the experience of Hamlet's dilemma, the horror at its implications. For to be momentarily won over to Hamlet's attitude is not therefore to forget one's Christian upbringing. So far from justifying Hamlet in the minds of an Elizabethan audience, sharing his attitude brings them to share also in the pain of his predicament, to taste the temptations to pride, to feel revenge pulling them away from what they know to be right. Being tempted by evil does not necessarily prevent the recognition of it as evil. The audience has seen this sufficiently demonstrated in Claudius, who is aware of his sin of despair though he does not renounce it. So the shock at Hamlet's words remains. Insofar as the audience tends to share Hamlet's attitude at this moment, it experiences the contradiction between that attitude and its own values as dramatic tension, feeling at once sympathetic and appalled.

In addition, the shocking evil of this transformation is driven home to the audience by the dramatic irony in the last two lines of Claudius's soliloquy (III. iii. 97,98), in which at once both the inefficacy of Claudius's prayers and, hence, the mistaken nature of Hamlet's assumptions about those prayers are dramatized. But as ingenious and carefully wrought as this dramatic twist is, there is one greater dramatic reversal, unparalleled for simplicity and for power. Suppose that we the audience were suddenly struck deaf just as Polonius leaves the king and during the rest of the scene could only see the actors on stage and not hear them. We would see Claudius struggle with himself and finally fall to his knees in prayer. We would then see Hamlet enter, draw his sword as if to kill Claudius, but refrain from doing so and finally leave. Would we not judge these actions good? Here, through the conventions of the soliloquy, the play's central themes are given force. Here, in fact, is the dramatic climax of the play. In direct contrast to the appearances, we know, because he tells us in soliloquy, that Claudius's prayers are nothing, that his repentance is nonexistent. We know, because he tells us in soliloquy, that Hamlet hesitates to kill Claudius not out of virtue or fear or uncertainty or weakness or moral scruple but out of profound pride. And, by convention, while we hear both soliloquies, neither character hears that of the other. Thus, the contrast between what Hamlet sees and what we have heard is taken up and intensified in the contrast between what we see and what we hear, what we see and what we know.

In part this nexus of contrasts is a dramatization of Hamlet's sentence “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (II. ii. 249,50). And let us note what this phrase means. It is not a way of saying, “If you think something is good, then it is; if you think it is bad, then it is.” Such a meaning is only possible in an age that has ceased to believe in God. For all the doubts and questioning that characterize the philosophical, moral, and religious investigations of the Renaissance, such a meaning is still foreign to it. What is perhaps not foreign to it is the statement “If you think something bad is good, then for you it is good, but in thinking so you have become bad.” Hamlet's phrase must mean something like this: Good and bad are properties not of things but of relationships; they are not perceived except in relation to the state of the soul of the perceiver. Actions that would in themselves be good if the states of soul that produced them were good—praying, refraining from murder—are shown to be in fact bad when the evil thinking behind them is revealed. A smile is good if it is a smile revealing goodness. But “one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”

Moreover, this moment of contrast between what we see and what we know, in dramatizing the difference between what may seem and what is, dramatizes also the limits of our ability to perceive that difference. The audience experiences directly the limits of human knowledge, the inescapable ignorance in which all human action must take place. In observing Hamlet here using what only seems (Claudius' praying) as a justification for acting in a way that is, though seemingly good, in fact entirely evil, we the audience are momentarily privileged to approach the divine perspective—the perspective that is not distorted by any “shuffling,” the perspective from which all is seen as it is. We see Claudius defying Hamlet's augury (for Hamlet thinks Claudius is purging his soul in prayer) and Hamlet defying our own (for will we not have predicted that this would be the moment for Hamlet to kill Claudius?), each “To his own scandal.”³ In this scene, through the device of the soliloquy, with its conventional assumptions about the honesty and solitude of the speaker, and specifically in the remarkable juxtaposition of two soliloquies, the audience experiences as drama the truth of what Hamlet will himself learn invisibly in Act IV, that “There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.”

But this understanding of the soliloquies raises a difficult question. Philip Thompson implies above that if Hamlet were at this point truly ready, he would kill Claudius. He adds,

Completing [Hamlet's] failure of readiness, since the entire court had just seen Claudius betray himself (or at least raise serious questions), Hamlet's defense of the killing [of Claudius] would have had convincing force.⁴

Though on this point the play has little to say, the response of the king to the mousetrap play, together with what we learn from the soliloquies, tempts us to argue that at this moment Hamlet ought to kill Claudius, that he is now not only spiritually bound, by the ghost's charge, and politically bound, by the king's own self-incrimination, but morally bound to kill Claudius, for behold the evil of the reasons for which he chooses not to do so. In fact, however, the same Christian audience that would have seen a deadly sin in Hamlet's stated reasons for putting off the killing of Claudius would also know that killing for revenge was wrong.⁵ Though Hamlet's reasons for refraining from killing are evil, we are not therefore entitled to conclude that killing Claudius would necessarily be good. We are shown, however, that if Hamlet had killed Claudius at this point, order in the rotten state of Denmark, as in the invisible realm, might well have been restored. Perhaps Hamlet could have made a good case for his action. He had, after all, witnesses to the appearance of the ghost and to Claudius's response to the “Murder of Gonzago.” In any case, Claudius's death here (as we realize later) would have prevented that of Polonius, and therefore those of Laertes, Ophelia, and Gertrude, not to mention Rosencranz and Guildenstern, even if Hamlet himself did not escape death. And, in the other realm, Claudius would probably have been consigned to the very perdition Hamlet wishes for him, not (as it could never be) through Hamlet's own will, but only (and rightly?) through his agency, for, as we have been shown, Claudius' soul is just now in the very state of evil which Hamlet assumes he will be able to detect it in at some later time, though Claudius is not even yet at his worst. In short, insofar as we the audience perceive things as if from the divine perspective, it appears that the killing of Claudius by Hamlet at this moment would be entirely right.

We are thus presented with a dilemma no less difficult and dramatically no less pressing than Hamlet's own: So far as the facts of the political world and universal order are concerned, we know that Claudius ought to be killed by Hamlet at this precise moment. So far as morality and thus the final judgment of Hamlet's soul is concerned, we know that Hamlet is evil in refraining from the killing for those reasons for which he does refrain, and yet that, according to the Christian outlook shared by Shakespeare and his audience, there can be no moral justification for Hamlet's taking revenge upon Claudius. Thus, this nexus of soliloquies has become not only the climax of the play, the moment of Hamlet's falling off from his noble virtue, an experience of despair (the worst sin) and of pride (the fundamental sin) and of the limits of human knowledge in relation to action (as seen from the divine perspective), but also, in this question of what Hamlet ought to do instead of what he does, a study of the nature of morality itself, of the meaning of action in a morally complex universe: the specific test case in revenge. It is Shakespeare, we see, who is writing the ultimate revenge play, for he has put the revenge play conventions to work in order to put revenge itself on trial.

It is clear that Shakespeare never manipulates emotions thus powerfully or raises questions so serious for their own sake. There will be a verdict, not only on revenge, but on all human action. The verdict begins to make itself felt dramatically within Hamlet's soliloquy itself. This terrible evil into which Hamlet has fallen would not on the one hand so easily justify itself to the modern audience (less than familiar with the appropriate Christian response to such a speech), and would not on the other hand seem quite so perverse and frightful when seen aright, were it not for the curious fact that this evil attitude of Hamlet's is expressed not in a speech of passion and rage but in calm and apparently reasonable discourse with the self. In language and thought that pretend to be clear and utterly rational, Hamlet is descending into evil, talking himself into the prime sin. So rational does he appear to be that he admits into his thought the very truth that ought to turn the whole process around, namely, “how his audit stands who knows save heaven?” (III. iii. 82). Yet Hamlet ignores the implications of his own words, imagining that the state of Claudius's soul may be better than it appears to him and ignoring that equal possibility which we know to be the truth, that it is worse. Just as in the soliloquy that precedes this one Claudius' correct understanding of theological doctrine only emphasized his despair, so here we find Hamlet turning theology around to serve the purposes of his pride. The sin blinds each to the truth of what he speaks, and each is confirmed in his sin, Hamlet's now being the more egregious of the two.

Hamlet's misguided rationality here is telling. Of his previous soliloquies, all but the “To be or not to be” soliloquy begin and continue in strong melancholy passion and end in the restoration of the government of reason. In the soliloquy at I. ii. 129ff. (beginning “O that this too too sallied flesh would melt”), though his passion over the meager mourning and the “o'erhasty marriage” is certainly justified, he is correct, given what he then knows, to end with “But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (l. 159). In response to the words of the ghost in Act I, scene v, Hamlet launches into a great passion, but before the scene ends, he is able to make careful resolutions: He swears his companions to secrecy and plans to adopt an “antic disposition.” In the soliloquy at II. ii. 550ff. (“O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I”), he begins in self-accusatory passion but in mid-speech suddenly observes his own extravagance, waxes reasonable, and reveals his sound plans for the mousetrap play. (So far as he can know, the ghost might be a devil, abusing him to damn him.) And even in the soliloquy at the end of the play scene, where his vengeful anger heralds the evil climax of the following scene (without, however, giving it away), Hamlet resolves to moderate his passion in speaking to his mother: “I will speak daggers to her, but use none” (III. ii. 396). Among much else, the soliloquies preceding the climax reveal a pattern according to which Hamlet's reason consistently supersedes his passion and thence prevails until the next occasion for an emotional outburst.

At the precise moment, Act III, scene iii, at which we expect a similar flood of emotion finally to overflow the banks of reason and spend itself in the killing of Claudius (for Hamlet now knows Claudius is guilty), we find instead no passion and no outburst but a kind of evil rationality, the more malevolent for seeming to be independent of feeling and passion. This is clearly not the freedom from slavery to passion that Hamlet loves in Horatio, neither the Christian temperance nor the Stoic detachment that Horatio may be said to embody. There is something else that has stepped between Hamlet and his characteristic melancholy passion, something that seeks to take the form of reason but is not reason, something that, in fact, uses reason falsely to justify the most bitter of business, a vengefulness and cruelty more profound than any to which Hamlet's passionate outbursts could possibly have led him. Even if we fail to recognize it in the soliloquy itself, we discover what this monster is in the scene that follows.

If the double-soliloquy climax has in fact the importance I suggest it does, then we are bound to read the immediately following closet scene in its light. And when we do so, everything in it is revealed to be not only a gloss on the previous scene of Hamlet's turning but a proof of its meaning and a fulfillment of its terrible promise. The first thing that happens is that Hamlet's passion now reasserts itself and does overflow into the action of killing. But it is Polonius that Hamlet kills by mistake. Hamlet is himself again, but too late. Suddenly what the previous scene demonstrated to be true of the inner lives of Hamlet and Claudius is shown to be equally true of the external world—namely, that Hamlet's failure to kill Claudius in the previous scene, whatever its implications for morality, was in terms of the universal order a terrible omission. For now when Hamlet acts in what would then have been the right way (again from the viewpoint of world order, leaving aside that of morality), it is at the wrong time and in the wrong place; the wrong man is the victim.

But this is only the beginning. Hamlet then turns to his mother and shows her “The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.” His speech, though passionate, is true in all it says. “What judgment / Would step from this to this” (III.iv.70,71)? But compare the drama Hamlet here plays out before his mother to that which has just been played out before the audience. Have we not just observed—in soliloquy rather than painting—the presentment (counterfeit in another sense to sight but true in the hearing) of two kings, one a king only by usurpation, one a king only in potentia? Have we not noted, as evil as the former is, the terrible villainy of the latter? Might not Hamlet just now, with equal truth, compare himself to Claudius, or at any rate to his father, as he compares Claudius to his father, and might we not conclude, with equal justice, “O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there”?

The moment we perceive this, everything Hamlet says reveals a reflexive application, for everything he asserts to be true of Gertrude is true of himself, perhaps of all sinners. Though the sins are different, the cozening at hoodman blind is the same. And all the passion and all the images that proclaim Hamlet to understand the nature of sin very well cry out at the same time that Hamlet is himself guilty.

Rebellious hell,
If thou canst mutine in a matron's bones,
To flaming youth let virtue be as wax
And melt in her own fire.

(III. iv. 82-85)

But what is he saying? Again his own mouth speaks his condemnation, for he is seeing the mote in another's eye and not the beam in his own. It is Hamlet's reason that has pandered Hamlet's will, and we have already seen, or rather heard, precisely when and precisely how. All this is confirmed by the reappearance of the ghost at this instant, as it is by his invisibility to Gertrude. The ghost in fact does come his “tardy son to chide,” as Hamlet says, but not for tardiness. The ghost comes “to whet thy almost blunted purpose.” And what has blunted it is willful pride. Hamlet has put his own desire for personal revenge above the ghost's charge, which is to avenge his father's murder. The difference in the act may be nothing; in the thinking it is everything. A scourge and minister is so not by his own but by divine will. The moment Hamlet's own will intervenes, his mission, to kill Claudius as an instrument of justice, is forgotten and a new one, to damn Claudius for personal revenge, is substituted for it. We have observed this happening in Hamlet's soliloquy. His reason has pandered his will, and his will, like that of all men, “such fellows as I … crawling between earth and heaven,” is corrupt.

As we might now expect, Hamlet's only remaining soliloquy breaks the pattern of the earlier ones. Where before honest passion was superseded by right reason, here reason continues to pander will. He begins by asking the appropriate question,

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

(IV. iv. 33-39)

But where reason panders will, one may reason and reason and be a villain. In the remainder of the soliloquy, Hamlet seeks, through a seemingly rational process of thought, to turn himself precisely into a beast, concluding with a determination unworthy of even his most violent outbursts of passion. He might well know “Why yet I live to say, ‘This thing's to do’,” if only he were to turn the same scrutiny upon his own will that he has applied to his mother's sins. We know why the thing remains, for we have observed why the deed was not accomplished at the only moment when it would have been possible to accomplish it. And the example of Fortinbras's march to Poland is a smokescreen. We have already seen that when Fortinbras, “Of unimproved mettle hot and full, / Shark'd up a list of lawless resolutes,” his enterprise failed. His march to Poland is honorable not because Fortinbras is able “greatly to find quarrel in a straw,” but because now his is an undertaking imposed by a higher authority to which he has rightly submitted his will. And the excitements to Hamlet's reason and his blood will move him to act, but only when his will is purged and shaped into readiness as, politically speaking, that of Fortinbras has been already. Hamlet's interpretations of Fortinbras's action and of his own inaction are thus both incorrect, and this is revealed in his beast-like conclusion, “My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!”—a conclusion which the events of his sea voyage will force him to abandon.

If further support were required for the proposition that Hamlet is not a mere coward or a procrastinator or only a melancholic “thinking too precisely on th' event” or a pawn of fate, but is himself responsible and guilty, we need only recall the words of the ghost at I. v. 84-86, which may be taken as the theme of Hamlet's dilemma:

But howsomever thou pursues this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught.

He has heeded the latter stricture but failed the former. His mind has become tainted because between his charge and its accomplishment has intervened not time, not thought, not cowardice, not melancholy passion, but his own corrupt will—his pride.

All this being so, we are still left with our earlier question: How ought Hamlet to have behaved at the moment when for the wrong reasons he refrained from killing Claudius and when Claudius (according to what we know of the universal order) ought to have been killed by Hamlet? To arrive at the answer we must look for a moment to the remainder of the play. The climax at III. iii is clearly the point of Hamlet's turning toward evil, for which, because it results in his killing Polonius, he will eventually pay with his life. But there is a second turning point for Hamlet, namely the reversals of the sea voyage. The former turning takes place on stage, the latter, off. The former is a turning toward the self, the latter, away from the self. Both are turnings of the will; both are effected by providential circumstances. The switching of the letters that Rosencranz and Guildenstern carry and the adventure with the pirates constitute a demonstration for Hamlet of what we have ourselves seen demonstrated in the drama of the double-soliloquy scene, namely that “There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” (V. ii. 10,11). This is the first truth Hamlet must learn if his soul is to be purged. Notice that Hamlet is just now learning not that there is a divinity—that has never been in question—but what the relationship is between that divinity and men's lives. Whatever his choices may be, good or evil, wise or foolish, they are woven into the fabric of reality according to a will that is not his own. And this realization makes possible Hamlet's final comprehension, namely,

There is 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.

(V. ii. 219-22)

Once he has learned the relevant fact about reality, he is able to strike the right attitude toward it. And that attitude is not a matter, strictly speaking, of morality, though it includes morality, nor is it a doctrine of inaction. It is, simply put, the doctrine of submission to the divine will, another expression of Christ's “nevertheless not my will but Thy will be done.”

But, it will be argued, in the very next scene there is Hamlet finally killing Claudius in a vengeful passion. How can one assert that Hamlet has learned submission when the next thing we see him doing is engaging in the apparently immoral act of taking revenge? How does this answer the moral question surrounding the act of revenge? And what happens to the tragedy? Are we to say that the play has after all a happy ending?

I shall seem to digress to make one more point and then try to answer these questions. There is one further change to be observed in the play: Hamlet's soliloquies cease in the fourth act. Up until his sea voyage, we have come to know Hamlet's mind most deeply in his soliloquies. Suddenly they are no more, though the deepest things Hamlet utters remain to be spoken. After the sea voyage there is only dialogue and action, no soliloquy. Hamlet's first turning, toward evil, is revealed in and attended by a shift in the pattern of his soliloquies, from those in which reason supplants passion to those in which reason panders will. Hamlet's second turning marks the abandonment of the soliloquy altogether. Even at the most mechanical level of significance, this fact suggests that the soliloquy was a device suited for a particular purpose. Shakespeare uses the soliloquies to reveal something about Hamlet. When he ceases to use them, the thing is either sufficiently revealed or is no longer there to be revealed. In short, there has all along been some conflict, some contest, being waged within Hamlet, one that has been resolved after his sea voyage. This conflict is not between reason and passion, for both are still very much part of Hamlet's character at the end of the play and succeed one another in ruling him as often as ever.

We can get at this question of the disappearance of the soliloquy best, perhaps, by beginning with the one soliloquy we have left out of the discussion because it did not conform to the pattern we discerned in the rest, namely the “To be or not to be” soliloquy. Let me start by quoting Philip Thompson once more:

In the “To be or not to be” soliloquy Hamlet … elegantly phrases a conventional (Renaissance graduate student) explanation of the general human preference for quotidian misery over death, leaving Christianity completely out of the matter as the assignment dictated (impersonal, selfless). The speech is sweet-tempered and without personal urgency. … Compare this music of generalities—the mind, outrageous fortune, this mortal coil, the will, resolution, thought, great enterprises, etc.—with the several blood-and-guts outbursts and “the readiness is all” (personal, selfless).⁶

What this soliloquy shares with the others lies not in its similarity to them but in their common difference from what follows. To extend Thompson's language, what all the personal and self-filled soliloquies share with this impersonal and selfless soliloquy is a common distance from the personal and selfless statement of Hamlet's enlightenment. When filled with himself, Hamlet is passionate and proud. When engaging in a logical exercise, a traditional medieval quaestio,⁷ he is reasonable and unmoved. Nor are these two states of mind quite so far apart as they seem, for, as I have suggested, Hamlet's rationality, the very habit of mind that enables him here to engage in this exercise, prevails in each of the other soliloquies up until Act III, scene iii. Because of this, he is incapable of being carried away by passion to the degree that Laertes is; for example, he makes no such statement as

To hell, allegiance! vows, to the blackest devil!
Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!
I dare damnation. To this point I stand,
That both the worlds I give to negligence,
Let come what comes, only I'll be reveng'd
Most throughly for my father.

(IV. v. 132-37)

In saying this Laertes becomes a foil both for Hamlet's passionate desire for revenge and for his rationality. For Hamlet, and not for Laertes, death and its consequences are always present. He thinks and speaks about death and damnation throughout the play, attempting to come to terms with their implications for living, in particular for living under the charge of revenging his father's murder and under the emotional burden of his mother's o'erhasty and incestuous marriage.

But to the extent that Hamlet fears death's implications, to the extent that he would discover what death is in order to be sure of it and bring all the consequences of action under his control, to that extent is his reason, no less than Laertes' passion, tainted with pride. If his climactic error is wanting to damn Claudius's soul, has not his characteristic error been desiring to be the savior of his own? In any case, in refraining from killing Claudius for the reasons he expresses, he is guilty not only of seeking to act as the judge of souls but also of presuming to know the mysteries of heaven and hell, to be the master of death. For all his Renaissance doubt and correct observation of the facts of human existence in “To be or not to be,” when it comes to the test, he forgets. He pretends to himself to know what death is when knowing it would serve the purposes of his revenge:

Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damn'd and black
As hell, whereto it goes.

(III. iii. 93-95)

But for all the ghost says, and for all the contemplation and investigation of the question, death remains a mystery. To choose to know what death is before acting, to fear being dead, to pretend to know what it means to send another or oneself to death, all these are sins of pride, for they all imply that man can know “what dreams may come, / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil” when, in fact, he cannot. The fact of death, like the nature a man is given or the historical context into which he is placed, needs to be responded to, but not with any of the forms of pride.⁸

And now we can see why the soliloquies end at Hamlet's second turning. The conflict embodied in them is the conflict between the self and the world, between the personal will-nature-conscience and the nature of things, between a man's free will and providence, between fallen man and judgment, between the difficulty and infinity of the choices a man must make and his ignorance about the context of those choices, i.e. “the undiscovered country.” The question for Hamlet has been, all along, given his particular self, how is a man to live in harmony with the general principles of the universe? Given the answer to the logical quaestio “To be or not to be,” namely that man will choose “quotidian misery over death,” the implied life-question is “How?”

The soliloquies cease when Hamlet learns the answer. It lies in realizing that whatever a man does is taken up and made to serve the divine purpose; it lies in submitting to the divine will. It lies in readiness. And in the end all other readiness is included in the readiness to die, death being the final surrender of the will. What we know about death is akin to what we know about life—it is limited yet tempting knowledge. What we know about death is summed up in the “To be or not to be” soliloquy and in the graveyard scene. Those are the limits of our knowledge. Beyond this, death is “nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” for, depending on who is speaking and when, death is “damnation” and “most horrible,” or it is “felicity,” or it is “silence.” The readiness to die when death is what is willed by providence is all because it is the source of all other readiness to act in consonance with the divine will. This “personal, selfless” insight is as different from the personal, self-filled soliloquies as it is from the “impersonal, selfless” one. The Hamlet of the former soliloquies speaks the truth of the self while he is deaf to the divine will. The Hamlet of the latter speaks the truth of the world but has set aside the self “as the assignment dictated.” The events of the sea voyage are an emblem of the meeting of the actual Hamlet with the actual world, after which the soliloquies are no longer to the purpose. Hamlet is now no longer a self apart from the world but a self engaged, a particular in right and harmonious relation with the general. It is in dialogue (and in dialogue with the friend he wears in his “heart of heart”) that Hamlet speaks the deepest truth of the play, as it is only in dialogue with the world that he can have learned it.

At last we may return to the moral question raised by the double-soliloquy scene, and I believe we are now competent to answer it. How ought Hamlet to behave in Act III, scene iii, when it is for the wrong reasons that he refrains from killing Claudius? The answer seems to be that had Hamlet's will not gotten in the way at that moment, his passionate nature would have driven him to action. In other words, Hamlet is not responsible for what is God-given—either nature's livery (his birth, his wit, his melancholy “complexion”) or fortune's star (his father's death, his mother's remarriage). What he is responsible for is the choices he makes once those things are given. It is not then melancholy passion that taints his mind but pride and self-will. If the divine purpose includes bestowing not only the melancholy nature but the cue for passion upon Hamlet, it may well also include the use of both to effect its revenge. Hamlet's passion is as much the minister of providence as Hamlet himself, and this is shown at the end of the play when Hamlet kills Claudius not out of self-will but in a passion, the same sort of passion that has been characteristic of him all along. What this means is that there may be no moral way in which Hamlet might choose to kill Claudius in III. iii, but there is a way in which providence might provide that Claudius be killed by Hamlet by putting Hamlet's passionate nature to work to kill Claudius in an outburst of emotion unhindered by moral scruple. (Notice my shift to the passive voice, the connection between “passive” and “passion.”) In telling Horatio about his rash decision to read the grand commission given to Rosencranz and Guildenstern, Hamlet says, “let us know / Our indiscretion sometime serves us well / When our deep plots do pall” (V. ii. 7-9). Hamlet's very rashness and his passionate nature are tools of divinity.

What prevents Hamlet's called-for outburst of passion from leading to the death of Claudius in Act III, what prevents his rashness from becoming a tool of divinity, is simply his personal desire for ultimate revenge, the deepest plot of all. Had he renounced his own will in favor of that of providence, revenge would have been effected. It is this getting one's own will out of the way of providence that Hamlet means by “let be” at V. ii. 224. Thus the soliloquies cease not because Hamlet is no longer a melancholy or a passionate man but because he has learned that a man's melancholy is itself provided and provided for, that one may cease to be passion's slave only by becoming the servant of providence, and that the “vicious mole of nature” may threaten to damn a man, “His virtues else, be they as pure as grace, / As infinite as man may undergo” (I. iv. 33,34), but that the process is not inevitable, depending as it does upon the divine shaping and the will's own readiness to be shaped. All of Hamlet is redeemed, his melancholy passion as well as his virtue and nobility, when his will is submitted to that of providence. The conflict that the soliloquies are meant to expose is resolved neither in the transformation of a personal nature nor in death, but in the right relation to the divine.

Finally, lest this argument indeed appear to make of Hamlet a play with a happy ending, I shall call to mind that we need not demand the spiritual crushing of our hero, or for that matter of any of the characters, in order to retain the term “tragedy.” Morton Bloomfield cautions that the joy of the world implied in Christian tragedy differs significantly from the joy of the happy ending in this world in comedy.⁹ And J.V. Cunningham has shown that tragedy in the Renaissance consists not in the damnation of souls but in the ending of lives.¹⁰ The ending of Hamlet, as he demonstrates, is precisely tragic; it inspires woe and wonder in full measure, and does not do so the less for our conviction about Hamlet's spiritual regeneration. We would not out-Claudius Hamlet. Let us remember that it is wonderful, in both senses of the word, that he who would gain his life must lose it. Shakespeare has crafted a play that both depicts the tragic end of a great man and reveals its divine shaping. And his audience experiences as one both the pity and fear evoked by the former and the awe evoked by the latter. The unity Hamlet presents as theme is thus incarnated in the audience as experience, and we are brought to perceive the invisible, necessary, and redemptive union of the personal and the selfless, to live imaginatively the awesome and wondrous truth that life is both tragic and providential.

Notes

1. Philip Thompson, in a letter to the author dated Nov. 18, 1976.

2. All line references are to G. Blakemore Evans, ed., The Riverside Shakespeare (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974).

3. I take “scandal” at I. iv. 38 to suggest more than damage to reputation. J.V. Cunningham has argued persuasively (in a lecture at Brandeis University, Spring 1975) that in the context of ghostly visitations, allusions to purgatory, and words like “vicious,” “guilty,” “virtue,” “grace,” “corruption,” “evil,” “o'er-leaven,” and “general censure” must imply a final judgment and that “scandal” thus implies damnation. The sense of the passage is that as one dishonorable custom can ruin an otherwise honorable nation in men's judgment, so one small evil can ruin an otherwise virtuous soul in God's—a fear that is later put to rest by Hamlet's recognition of the mercy behind the divine shaping of our ends (the “special providence in the fall of a sparrow”). Cf. the OED under “scandal” (sb. 1a, 1b, and 3 and v. 3) and Matthew 13:41 (Rheims). See also 1 Corinthians 5:4-8 for the image of leavening used in the context of references to sin and judgment, and Hilton Landry, “The Leaven of Wickedness: Hamlet, I. iv. 1-38,” in Pacific Coast Studies in Shakespeare, ed. Waldo F. McNeir and Thelma N. Greenfield (Eugene, Oregon: Univ. of Oregon Books, 1966), 122-33, for an extensive (though in several respects questionable) discussion of the whole passage and its biblical allusions.

4. Thompson, loc. cit.

5. Expressing the desire for revenge is almost always in Shakespeare a sign of error: e.g., Kate's shrewishness (Taming of the Shrew, II. i. 29, 36), Malvolio's wounded vanity (Twelfth Night, V. i. 378), Shylock's villainy and misvaluation (Merchant of Venice, III. i. 54, 66-73), Iago's “motiveless malignity” (Othello, II. i. 294), etc.

6. Philip Thompson, in a letter to the author received December, 1976.

7. As J. V. Cunningham has called the “To be or not to be” soliloquy in a lecture at Brandeis University, Spring 1975.

8. Philip Thompson comments (in a letter to the author posted May 17, 1985):

   It is not that “he pretends to know what death is when such knowledge serves his purpose”—he “knows” as much about death as Dante and Claudius do, as much as any Christian does, knows that it sends the soul to Judgment and if to an undiscovered country yet to one whose laws are published. His bad purpose depends on revealed truth; he has not invented Hell.

   As a legitimate ruler in “This World,” he should have felt that his duty was better fulfilled in executing a repentant murderer than it would have been in killing one rejoicing in his crime. On one level, his sin lies in breaking the law made especially for kings; on another, it lies in his truly damnable desire for a soul's damnation, in the identification of his hatred (not his mission) with the divine justice.

   And I do not read the truth about death in “To be or not to be.” What this passage does present is the truth about the fear of death in men for whom death is a closed book and suicide itself no sin (as the assignment specified).

9. Morton Bloomfield, in a lecture series entitled “Medieval and Renaissance Tragedy and Notions of Tragedy,” delivered at Brandeis University, Spring 1978.

10. J. V. Cunningham, Woe or Wonder: The Emotional Effect of Shakespearean Tragedy (Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1969), pp. 52, 56-59.