SOURCE: Charney, Maurice. “Asides, Soliloquies, and Offstage Speeches in Hamlet: Implications for Staging.” In Shakespeare and the Sense of Performance, edited by Marvin and Ruth Thompson, pp. 116-31. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989.

[In the following essay, Charney emphasizes the dramatic context and function in Hamlet of speeches that are distinctly different from regular dialogue. He calls attention to asides that are expository, or didactic, or expressions of guilt; to the range of tone and emotions in the soliloquies of Hamlet and Claudius; and to the dramatic significance of the several instances of voices heard from offstage or beneath it.]

The frozen, stream-of-consciousness soliloquies and asides in Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude (1928), conceived in the Elizabethan and Freudian mode, which always seemed such a stumbling block to performance, were beautifully integrated into the play in Keith Hack's recent revival in London (1984) and New York (1985). The principal characters, especially those played by Edward Petherbridge and Glenda Jackson, made no obvious distinction between public speech and private reflection, and the soliloquies and asides were spoken in the same voice as ordinary dialogue and made continuous with it, so that there was no way for the characters to hide, as O'Neill said, “behind the sounds called words.” Keith Hack's production went against O'Neill's symbolic division between the inner and outer play, public and private speech, yet he managed to make the Elizabethan conventions believable and fluid, whereas in O'Neill's conception they are heavy, static, rhetorical, and moralistic.¹

This continuity between the conventional speech of soliloquy and aside and ordinary dialogue throws light retrospectively on Shakespearean and Elizabethan practice. In order to be effective dramatically, soliloquy and aside cannot be either interruptive or segregated from the rest of the play. There can be no special soliloquy and aside voice that highlights these conventional utterances, nor do most soliloquies and asides provide a window into the souls of the characters. Critics have misguidedly used the soliloquies and asides of Hamlet to psychologize the play and to transform it from an exciting revenge action into a novel of inner revelation. There is a tendency to overstate the function of soliloquies and asides as if that were the core of the real, private play of consciousness while the external, public play swirled meaninglessly around us. Francis Berry has reminded us in The Shakespeare Inset² how much nondialogue there is in a typical play by Shakespeare, so that soliloquy and aside are not the only devices interrupting the dialogic flow. Shakespearean drama is posited on narrative and other discontinuities, and it is structured as a montage of significant pieces of action that serve as a synecdoche for an action that may be fully imagined but is never presented in its entirety.

If we consider soliloquies and asides in their dramatic context, they are usually well integrated into the action. I would like to look at some of the implications for staging of asides, soliloquies, and offstage speech in Hamlet in order to see how they function as a response to the stage situation. One example of the “privatization” of Hamlet, or the attempt to convert the public play into a psychological, inner drama of conscience, is the excessive number of asides claimed for the play. Most modern editions print Hamlet's first words, “A little more than kin, and less than kind!” (1.2.65),³ as an aside, following Theobald's second edition of 1740, but these are clearly intended as bitter, ironic, punning, public speech. The isolated Hamlet, still in mourning, is attacking the gaudy cheerfulness of Claudius's court. If his words were an aside, the satirical outrage would definitely be muted.

In the Play Scene, Hamlet's sardonic comment, “That's wormwood” (3.2.187) to the Player Queen's protestation, “In second husband let me be accurst! / None wed the second but who killed the first” (185-86), is hardly an aside, despite all the editors who have followed Capell (1768). Like “A little more than kin, and less than kind,” “That's wormwood” is an interruptive, public comment on the play like those of the onstage audiences to “Pyramus and Thisby” in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the play of the Nine Worthies in Love's Labor's Lost. Hamlet plays the all-knowing wise guy in this scene. His antic disposition, which no one fully believes in anymore, gives him license to make wisecracks and to act the part of what we would call a kibitzer. “That's wormwood” is spoken not to relieve the prince's private tensions but to taunt the audience and to express publicly his superiority to the tedious old “Mousetrap” play.

The most important asides in Hamlet are those that express guilty conscience: the King's, the Queen's, and Laertes's. These “solo” asides (in the terminology of Bernard Beckerman⁴) all function like brief soliloquies, but their purpose is so compact and so deliberate that they seem excessively expository. In other words, they serve the needs of the play at the expense of the immediate context of the character speaking and the development of the dramatic action. The most blatant in this regard is the aside of Claudius just before Hamlet's “To be, or not to be” soliloquy. Both Claudius and Polonius will be, in the King's words, “lawful espials” for Hamlet's soliloquy, and the King's aside answers Polonius's crass remarks to Ophelia as she is set up as a decoy for Hamlet:

                                                                                                              Read on this book,
That show of such an exercise may color
Your loneliness. We are oft to blame in this,
'Tis too much proved, that with devotion's visage
And pious action we do sugar o'er
The devil himself.

(3.1.44-49)

Ophelia and her prayer book echo the emblematic representation of Richard, duke of Gloucester, according to Buckingham's instructions: “And look you get a prayer book in your hand / And stand between two churchmen” (Richard III, 3.7.46-47). It is the essence of hypocrisy.

The King's aside continues the moral platitudes and pat style of Polonius's speech:

                              O, 'tis too true.
How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!
The harlot's cheek, beautied with plast'ring art,
Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it
Than is my deed to my most painted word.
O heavy burden!

(3.1.49-54)

This anticipates Claudius's soliloquy in the Prayer Scene (“O, my offense is rank” 3.3.36-72), and it is the first confirmation of his guilt for the audience. It corroborates the Ghost's narration in act 1, scene 5. We can understand why this aside would be important, structurally, as a context for Hamlet's “To be, or not to be” soliloquy, yet the aside itself is painfully obvious. It is inserted into the play in a schematic form that would be more appropriate for Polonius than for the King. It is not until the Prayer Scene (3.3) that we come to understand the King's confessional but not fully repentant frame of mind.

The King's aside does its expository work at the expense of dramatic vividness and full characterization. The Queen's couplet aside in 4.5 is similarly frigid and didactic:

To my sick soul (as sin's true nature is)
Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss;
So full of artless jealousy is guilt
It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.

(4.5.17-20)

The Queen, who had at first refused to speak with the mad Ophelia, is finally persuaded by Horatio and a nameless Gentleman to “Let her come in” (4.5.16). Gertrude's expresson of guilt recalls the Closet Scene (3.4), but the brevity and epigrammatic form of the couplets tend to work against the characterization of Gertrude, who sounds more like the Player Queen of “The Mousetrap” than the grieving and heartsick mother and recent widow of the Closet Scene. The jingle of “So full of artless jealousy is guilt / It spills itself in fearing to be spilt” echoes the formulaic sentiments of the Player Queen: “Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife, / If, once a widow, ever I be wife!” (3.2.236). The aside is unworthy of Gertrude at this point; we had expected something more acute and more revealing.

It is curious that the most important asides in Hamlet are so thoroughly didactic, as if they served a moral function different from dialogue. In the final scene of the play, the strenuous effort to rehabilitate Laertes and to reconcile him with Hamlet is partly accomplished by Laertes's aside: “And yet it is almost against my conscience” (5.2.297). In the immediate context, the Queen has already drunk from the poisoned chalice prepared for Hamlet, and the King registers his stoic shock in a factual aside: “It is the poisoned cup; it is too late” (293). Laertes is now determined to score in the fencing match by fair means or foul—“My lord, I'll hit him now”—but the King is not convinced: “I do not think't” (296). It is at this point, before the foul play that will kill Hamlet is unleashed, that Laertes expresses his moral regret: “And yet it is almost against my conscience.”

How typical of Laertes is the sentimental, moral equivocation in “almost against my conscience,” as if there were some way to excuse or palliate his dirty deed. This reservation recalls Laertes's cagey answer to Hamlet's openhearted desire for forgiveness. Laertes stands “aloof” in his “terms of honor” until “some elder masters of known honor” will provide a “precedent of peace” to keep his “name ungored” (247-51). The legalism of these bogus formulas is still touched on in “almost.” Laertes's aside is not fully frank and candid, and it seems peculiarly unrelated to the dramatic context. It is, in essence, a moral declaration rather than a thought or feeling that impinges on the immediate action. The asides of Laertes, Gertrude, and Claudius may be grouped together by their artificiality, their deliberateness, and their attempt to make large moral points that are not necessarily those of the dramatic context.

The more conventional asides of Hamlet tend to be brief comments that establish a point for the audience, usually an expository point about “some necessary question of the play” (3.2.44-45). We have already noticed the King's aside—“It is the poisoned cup; it is too late” (5.2.293)—by which we know that Claudius will tough it out to the end and make no unnecessary compassionate gestures. This example makes a clear distinction between public and private discourse; the King cannot afford to make any public declarations or to intervene to save the Queen. The aside is a convenient acknowledgment of “purposes mistook / Fall'n on th' inventors' heads” (5.2.385-86).

Polonius has a series of explanatory asides in the Fishmonger Scene with Hamlet by which he asserts both his platitudinous wisdom and his patronizing superiority to the “mad” Hamlet. One key point is that Polonius is impervious to wordplay. In his asides he appeals to the lowest common denominator of the audience to help him make out what Hamlet might be saying. To Hamlet's “Conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive, friend, look to't” (2.2.185-87), Polonius can only reply by missing the point of the pun:

How say you by that? Still harping on my daughter. Yet he knew me not at first. 'A said I was a fishmonger. 'A is far gone, far gone. And truly in my youth I suffered much extremity for love, very near this. I'll speak to him again.

(2.2.188-92)

Notice how deliberately markers are put in to separate the aside from the dialogue that follows. Polonius makes a point of telling us, “I'll speak to him again.” It is as if the old counselor in his asides needs to be in cahoots with the audience to whom the asides are directed. He speaks only with their implied permission and complicity because he assumes that they too are having trouble understanding Hamlet's wild and whirling words.

As the dialogue proceeds, however, Polonius becomes more and more convinced of the truth of his next aside: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in't” (2.2.207-8). In other words, Hamlet is more calculating than he previously appeared to be, less spontaneous and more artful—in fact, more like Polonius himself. This is the conclusion of Polonius's final aside in this sequence:

How pregnant sometimes his replies are! A happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of. I will leave him and suddenly contrive the means of meeting between him and my daughter.

(2.2.210-15)

“Pregnant” means “loaded, charged” in the sense that Polonius is aware of satirical connotations he cannot explicitly identify, but the double entendre fits very nicely with the sexual fears of Polonius and Laertes that Ophelia will open her “chaste treasure” to Hamlet's “unmastered importunity” (1.3.31-32). In a similar exchange after “The Mousetrap” play, Hamlet twits Polonius with the cloud shapes—camel, weasel, whale—yet it is Hamlet himself who feels put upon and toyed with, as he exclaims in an irritable aside: “They fool me to the top of my bent” (3.2.392). Presumably he means that Polonius and other officious attendants of the King force him to play the uncongenial role of fool in order to protect himself.

Hamlet's asides with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern illustrate the mingling of what Beckerman calls solo and conversational asides, which are here analogous in function. Hamlet begins his dialogue with them in a friendly enough fashion, but his confidence is gradually eroded as his old friends begin to probe like spies. Hamlet wants to know if they “were sent for or no” (2.2.296). At this point Rosencrantz turns to Guildenstern for a classic conversational aside: “What say you?” (297). By the workings of dramatic convention, Hamlet cannot overhear this question, but he can observe the gesture that accompanies it: “Nay then, I have an eye of you” (298). We are just on the edge of the aside convention here, and Hamlet's remark to the audience is not much different in function from Rosencrantz's question to Guildenstern. Both assume that the audience is the ultimate repository and arbiter of the asides spoken on stage. Another conversational aside occurs in the scene between Osric and Hamlet and Horatio. Hamlet objects to Osric's affected word “carriages” for “hangers,” so that Horatio's aside to Hamlet underscores the foppish diction: “I knew you must be edified by the margent ere you had done” (5.2.156-57). The margin (“margent”) of a printed text explains difficult words and allusions. Osric, of course, cannot overhear the insulting badinage contained in the aside.

The conversational asides in Hamlet tend to occur in longer sequences in which one group of characters is set against another. These extended asides are sometimes labeled “apart,” since the stage is divided into speakers and commentators. There are two long examples in act 5, scene 1, where Hamlet and Horatio observe the gravediggers, then join them in dialogue, then stand apart to comment on the funeral of Ophelia until Hamlet can no longer bear to listen to the public discourse without breaking in. The asides serve to insulate Hamlet and Horatio from the onstage action, so that they can function as observers before they become participants. Perhaps the aside convention also suggests a new role for Hamlet as a contemplative onlooker. These asides in 5.1 are remarkably explicit, especially in their indications of when Hamlet and Horatio move out of the apart position and join the general conversation.

Hamlet and Horatio enter “afar off” (5.1.56 s.d.) at the end of the Clown-gravedigger's conversation with his assistant, who exits at line 61. The gravedigger then sings various ballads and tosses up skulls, while Hamlet and Horatio comment on the “easiness” (69) of his employment. The gravedigger is an acknowledged straight man for Hamlet's meditations on mortality. Hamlet then comes forward with a specific comment to cover his action: “I will speak to this fellow” (119). This is followed by a wit combat with the Clown-gravedigger like that of the earlier match between the gravedigger and his assistant.

When the King, the Queen, Laertes, and others enter with Ophelia's coffin, Hamlet and Horatio again assume the apart position at one side of the stage: “Couch we awhile, and mark” (224). Hamlet instructs Horatio about the participants in the scene: “That is Laertes, / A very noble youth. Mark” (225-26). “Mark” indicates the act of attention demanded from observers apart. It takes Hamlet a remarkably long time to figure out that this is a funeral procession for the dead Ophelia, but once he does so he can no longer remain apart. There is an element of real danger for the newly returned Hamlet to discover himself, but he cannot tolerate Laertés's inflated rhetoric: “What is he whose grief / Bears such an emphasis. … This is I, / Hamlet the Dane” (256-57, 259-60). They are soon grappling in Ophelia's coffin, if we follow the stage direction of the First Quarto: “Hamlet leapes in after Leartes.” This grotesque stage business is confirmed in an elegy on the death of Richard Burbage on 13 March 1618:

Oft haue I seene him, leap into the Graue
Suiting the person, which he seem'd to haue
Of a sadd Louer, with soe true an Eye
That theer I would haue sworne, he meant to dye. …(5)

Horatio speaks only one line, a wise one, in this part of the scene: “Good my lord, be quiet” (267).

Once they have revealed themselves, Hamlet and Horatio can no longer return to the apart position, and one wonders how the scene was staged to render them invisible to the Clown-gravedigger and his assistant and, later, to the funeral party. There must have been well-understood conventions about the privileged status of observers apart so that their actions and movements would not seem awkward or intrusive. It adds a significant dimension to have an onstage commentator to mediate between the play and the audience. The observer apart in his asides suggests how we should react to what we see before us.

The stage situation of the asides in Hamlet is generally more noteworthy than that of the soliloquies, although there is a strong continuity between the two types of discourse. Some of the longer asides, such as those of the King (“How smart a lash” 3.1.49-54) and the Queen (“To my sick soul” (4.5.17-20), are analogous to soliloquies in which characters make important revelations. The distinction is based on whether the speaker is alone on stage, although in some soliloquies the speaker may think he is alone but actually isn't. For all practical purposes, soliloquy and aside have the same dramatic function in relation to the audience. We are speaking, of course, of solo asides; conversational asides work differently. It is remarkable how many soliloquies end with couplets, especially scene-ending couplets, which would tend to emphasize the speech's rhetorical purpose. There are also many markers to set the soliloquy off from ordinary dialogue, like Hamlet's “Now I am alone” (2.2.559) that prefaces the “O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I” soliloquy. Throughout the play we are made distinctly aware of the soliloquy situation, which is often self-consciously prepared.

In Hamlet's first soliloquy, “O that this too too sullied flesh would melt” (1.2.129), he is suddenly alone after a “Flourish” during which Claudius and his entire court exit. There is an enormous contrast between the King's boastful account of his “rouse”—the drinking of healths accompanied by the firing of cannon, which “the heaven shall bruit again, / Respeaking earthly thunder” (127-28)—and Hamlet's mournful contemplation of nonbeing. When Hamlet sees Horatio, Marcellus, and Barnardo entering, he knows that his soliloquy is over and that he must once more return to public dialogue: “But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (159). The soliloquy is identified as a freer and more expressive medium. Hamlet must hold his tongue not in the sense that he must be mute, but only that he must return to social discourse in which he cannot speak his heart. Hamlet has another brief soliloquy at the end of this scene that acknowledges the appearance of the Ghost. This ends with a ringing couplet of high resolution:

Till then sit still, my soul. Foul deeds will rise,
Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes.

(1.2.257-58)

This four-line soliloquy is not meditative in any way but expresses with great vigor Hamlet's anticipation of the Ghost's report of “Foul deeds.” This echoes the proverbial “murder will out.”

“O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I” (2.2.560) is Hamlet's longest soliloquy—58 lines—and it goes through at least three distinct movements: his reaction to the Player's weeping for Hecuba, his revulsion against his own inflated rhetoric—“Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave” (594)—and his plan to “catch the conscience of the King” (617) with a play. According to popular psychology confirmed by various miraculous examples from real life, “guilty creatures sitting at a play” could be trapped to confess “by the very cunning of the scene” (601-2). The soliloquy projects a strong feeling of sequence and narrative movement. It is the greatest showpiece of all the soliloquies in the play, and it too ends with a memorable, ringing couplet:

                                        The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King.

(2.2.616-17)

Hamlet is riding high in this soliloquy. There is no sense in its vigorous exhortation that Hamlet is in any way inadequate for revenge.

Hamlet's “To be, or not to be” (3.1.56) soliloquy is unusual in its stage situation because he is not alone on stage. We are aware of the fact that Polonius and the King, “lawful espials,” “withdraw” at line 55 and remain behind the arras. When they come on stage again at the end of the scene (164), it is quite clear that they know all. As Polonius says to his daughter, “You need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said; / We heard it all” (182-83). Nothing explicit is said about Hamlet's soliloquy, and there is no verbal indication that they have overheard it, yet we are still conscious of the fact that they are concealed behind the arras. The King and Polonius are clearly observers of the Nunnery Scene with Ophelia that follows immediately after the soliloquy.

We tend to forget that Ophelia, too, is on stage for the entire time of Hamlet's soliloquy, making it one of the most crowded soliloquies in all of Shakespeare. Ophelia has been staged by her clever father with a prayer book, to “color,” or give a pretext for, her “loneliness” (45-46) or aloneness waiting on stage to encounter Hamlet. What is she doing during the time of his soliloquy? Presumably she is so preoccupied with her devotions that she doesn't notice the very person she is looking for, and Hamlet is so eager to unburden himself that he isn't aware of his old girl friend stuck away in one corner of the stage. The very attempt to give naturalistic explanations for highly conventional stage situations reveals the absurdity of setting two kinds of theatrical reasoning against each other.

Ophelia is very much there, and we should certainly not be allowed to forget that Claudius and Polonius are behind the arras—perhaps the arras is made to stir lightly from time to time to remind us—while Hamlet delivers what he earnestly believes to be, confirmed by the judgment of posterity, his most important soliloquy in the play. At the end of the speech, he suddenly notices Ophelia: “Soft you now, / The fair Ophelia!” (88-89). “Soft” is an all-purpose Elizabethan exclamation to indicate mild surprise, and it means something like “what have we here?” Anticipating the Prayer Scene with Claudius (3.3), Hamlet also believes that Ophelia is really praying, making “orisons” (89), or formal devotions, in which Hamlet hopes that all of his sins will be “remembered” (90). Despite the ingenious theories of John Dover Wilson,⁶ Hamlet seems to have no inkling that Ophelia's orisons have been staged and that her father and Claudius are just behind the arras. The staging ironies of this scene are strictly dramatic ironies for the benefit of the audience.

It is also worth noting that Hamlet's “To be, or not to be” soliloquy is set back to back with Claudius's confessional aside, “O, 'tis too true. / How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!” (3.1.49-50). It seems important for Shakespeare to juxtapose these two expressions of conscience—and the distinction between aside and soliloquy here is more one of length and formal staging than of context. The King's aside is the immediate context for Hamlet's matching soliloquy, as if one needed the other to complete its meaning.

Ophelia's soliloquy after Hamlet's violent diatribe against women in the Nunnery Scene is elegiac in tone. It makes no answer at all to Hamlet's demands—“To a nunnery, go, and quickly too” (3.1.141-42)—but mourns the loss of Hamlet as he used to be, “Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion, and the mold of form, / Th' observed of all observers” (155-57). It is a tragic lamentation for the disappearance of all that was once so beautiful, and Ophelia herself, like Desdemona in the scene of willow, can only grieve for what has happened: “O, woe is me / T' have seen what I have seen, see what I see!” (163-64). These must be among the most moving lines of the play, especially in the way that Ophelia sets herself up as a spectator and audience of the tragedy. We can only sympathize with her experience of loss, disintegration, and deliquescence. Nothing remains fixed. The highly formal, poetic language of this soliloquy is unusual in its attempt to establish personal loss. Through their common sorrow, Ophelia is made to sound like Hecuba and the Player Queen.

Hamlet's odd soliloquy at the end of the Play Scene, “'Tis now the very witching time of night” (3.2.396), also called the “Now could I drink hot blood” (398) soliloquy, is very different from the other soliloquies in its vaunting resolve to be cruel but not to commit matricide. Hamlet is closest to the heroic mode of Norse mythology in this soliloquy, which also ends with a resounding couplet declaration of purpose:

How in my words somever she [his mother] be shent,
To give them seals never, my soul, consent!

(3.2.406-7)

The Prayer Scene with Claudius (3.3) intervenes between Hamlet's determination to test and punish his mother and his arrival at her “closet.” On the way, he passes through the King's “closet,” or private withdrawing room, and finds him at prayer. Hamlet's presence here is both accidental and incidental, so that his encounter with Claudius at prayer can hardly be the “great opportunity” that he either misses or refuses. Like the earlier juxtaposition in 3.1 of Claudius's aside and Hamlet's soliloquy, the Prayer Scene sets the soliloquies of Claudius and Hamlet against each other. It looks, formally, as if Hamlet's soliloquy is inserted into Claudius's soliloquy, which concludes with a neat couplet after Hamlet's exit:

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

(3.3.97-98)

These soliloquies turn on misperceptions and dramatic ironies. Although he is standing right there, Hamlet by convention cannot overhear what Claudius is saying. Shakespeare avoids any awkwardness by having Hamlet enter at line 72 when the King is kneeling and trying to pray. Claudius is conveniently unaware of Hamlet's presence. There is an air of magic and mystification in the scene, since we in the audience are well aware of everything that is going on. Hamlet honestly believes that Claudius is praying, just as he believed that Ophelia was busy with her orisons in 3.1. The characters are required to trust the visual indicators of prayer unless they prove to be suspect. There are certain fixed rules in highly conventional stage situations, so there is no way for Hamlet to break into the audience's awareness.

Hamlet is remarkably jaunty and colloquial in his soliloquy, as he enters on his way to his mother's closet with sword in hand. He feels that now, after the triumph of “The Mousetrap” play, the initiative is his and he can afford to be on the offensive. All of this bravado, of course, ends with the slaying of Polonius, but for the moment Hamlet can indulge himself in a swaggering style: “Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent” (3.3.88). He can luxuriate in perfect scenarios for revenge:

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in th' incestuous pleasures of his bed,
At game a-swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't.

(3.3.89-92)

Claudius's final couplet soliloquy completely dashes all of Hamlet's fantasies: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. / Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (97-98). Hamlet's assumptions have been totally wrong: Claudius has not been praying at all, just as Ophelia's prayer is only a “color.” And Claudius, too, has been spared the sight of the demonic avenger with sword in hand hovering over him. Nothing can shake the King's complacency and self-satisfaction, especially not the truth that the audience knows through dramatic irony. Claudius is already sufficiently aware that his attempt at prayer is merely “shuffling” (61), but he cannot muster any real penitence or contrition.

The King's soliloquy at the end of act 4, scene 3 presents us with another expository bombshell when we learn that he is sending Hamlet to instant death in England. We need to know more about Claudius the murderer and how he operates, something we have only heard about in the Ghost's narration in act 1, scene 5. We will be further enlightened by the triple plot the King concocts with Laertes against Hamlet in act 4, scene 7. The Claudius of this soliloquy is a terrifying figure, racked with anxiety and impatience, and the soliloquy itself has an impetuousness and desperation we see nowhere else in the play:

                                                                                                    Do it, England,
For like the hectic in my blood he rages,
And thou must cure me.

(4.3.65-67)

The soliloquy demonstrates the “sickly days” (3.3.96) Hamlet predicted for his uncle at the end of the Prayer Scene. In his final couplet, Claudius anticipates Macbeth's urgency to kill Banquo and Macduff:

                                                            Till I know 'tis done,
Howe'er my haps, my joys were ne'er begun.

(4.3.67-68)

The King cannot rest easy and enjoy the fruits of his first murder until Hamlet is disposed of. Soliloquy allows Claudius full scope for his breathless malice. There is no need to equivocate or palliate his homicidal intent as there would be in the social, public dialogue form. It is important to think of this soliloquy in relation to the more sympathetic soliloquy of the Prayer Scene. In both there is a deadly clarity of purpose and style.

Hamlet's final soliloquy, “How all occasions do inform against me” (4.4.32), is very precisely prepared when Fortinbras's Captain exits and Hamlet gets Rosencrantz out of the way: “I'll be with you straight. Go a little before” (31). The speech itself is in some ways remarkably unrelated to the immediate context of Hamlet the prisoner being shipped to certain death in England. This soliloquy is the most markedly thematic and sermonic speech in the play, very close to a prepared oration on the nature of revenge and the dangers of delay. Its fortissimo couplet ending makes Hamlet's long exit from the play at this point seem like a grand finale:

                                        O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

(4.4.65-66)

So saying, Hamlet the Exhorter disappears, and the homicidal mood of the middle of the play fades away without any lasting effects.

Offstage speech in Hamlet is related to asides and soliloquies in the sense that it stands apart from regular dialogue. The stage situation makes us aware of dimensions of reality beyond, behind, above, and below the stage itself, as if there were a world elsewhere pressing for recognition. The Ghost of Hamlet's father crying in the cellarage beneath the stage is certainly a portentous effect that, in other plays, is rendered by music. In the symbolic scene of the soldiers in Antony and Cleopatra, “Music of the hautboys is under the stage” (4.3.11 s.d.), and in Macbeth we hear “Hautboys” from offstage—most probably from under the stage—as the Witches' cauldron sinks (4.1.106 s.d.). In Hamlet the Ghost is a semicomic “old mole,” “A worthy pioner,” who is praised for being able to “work i' th' earth so fast” (1.5.162-63). The “Ghost cries under the stage” (148 s.d.) with great portentousness, “Swear” (149). This injunction from beyond the grave is repeated three more times: “Swear” (155), “Swear by his sword” (161), “Swear” (181). The Ghost's insistence is attributed to a “perturbèd spirit” (182) to whom the ceremony is extremely important and who cannot rest quiet without it. In this climactic scene of revelations, we are forced to listen to voices beyond and beneath the stage, as if the stage itself were inadequate to circumscribe all of reality.

In the Closet Scene, we hear Hamlet crying from offstage before he enters, “Mother, Mother, Mother!” (3.4.6). These lines are from the Folio and First Quarto (only two “mothers” there); they do not appear in the Second Quarto. Harold Jenkins omits them from the Arden edition as “a fairly obvious stage accretion,”⁷ which he had previously inveighed against in “Playhouse Interpolations in the Folio Text of Hamlet.” The reasoning is so violently antitheatrical that it is worth quoting at length:

I infer that Q omits it because it was not in Shakespeare's manuscript and that the actors put it in. Indeed this is the sort of literalism in production from which we sometimes suffer in the modern theatre, as though we are not capable of imagining that the characters in their world of the play may see or hear things that are not made visible or audible to us. Such things are at best superfluous and at worst merely crude. What sort of prince is this who cannot come to his mother's chamber without announcing his arrival by calling “Mother” three times in the corridor? It is a small thing, but it degrades the play for a moment. …⁸

Another small thing that degrades the play is to call Gertrude's “closet” her “chamber,” a distinctively different room. The next step after playhouse interpolations is to postulate that the actors and the physical production degrade a play that could be better read in the study.

Hamlet's offstage exclamations, with all of their slangy overtones in contemporary American speech, prepare us wonderfully well for the mood and tone of the Closet Scene. They are in the spirit of the soliloquy at the end of 3.2: “Let me be cruel, not unnatural; / I will speak daggers to her, but use none” (403-4). Speaking daggers sounds like a stage direction for intoning “Mother, Mother, Mother,” with pain, anger, and sorrow. It is passionate and wrenching and hardly dispensable as a “stage accretion,” whatever that may be. We don't know how these lines got into the Folio text, which shows signs of revision from the earlier Second Quarto text. If they are an actor's interpolation, we are fortunate that so effective a detail has been preserved in the Folio. Presumably someone must have thought it a valuable addition to the Second Quarto version.

“Mother, Mother, Mother” is analogous in function to two other offstage exclamations in the Folio text, both of which have been more or less omitted from the Arden edition. In act 1, scene 5, Horatio and Marcellus, who have been avidly seeking Hamlet, call him from offstage (or “within”): “My lord, my lord!” (1.5.113). They then appear and find Hamlet, who is still reeling with excitement at the Ghost's revelations. Calling a character from offstage is hardly a portentous matter, but it serves to extend the limits of the stage action and suggest a larger dimension. In 4.2, several anonymous Gentlemen call Hamlet from offstage (“within”): “Hamlet! Lord Hamlet!” (2). Their shouting immediately precedes the entry of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who, at this point in the action, have abandoned all pretense of friendship and politeness. They are now strictly police officers of the King. This deterioration of Hamlet's status after the murder of Polonius is obviously reflected in the tone in which the anonymous Gentlemen address Hamlet. Like “Mother, Mother, Mother,” “Hamlet! Lord Hamlet!” is an acted line with its own spoken intensity.

In the Closet Scene, we have to remember that Polonius speaks from behind the arras where he is concealed, which functions as another offstage area. Like any offstage speech, Polonius's cries from behind the arras would necessarily be muffled or otherwise distorted by distance and physical obstacles. Polonius responds gallantly to the Queen's terror at Hamlet's forcing her to “sit down. You shall not budge” (3.4.19). The Queen feels helpless and genuinely threatened: “What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me? / Help, ho!” (22-23). It is at this point that the hapless Polonius cries from behind, “What, ho! Help!” (24), and Hamlet runs him through immediately. His last comment, helpful for the exposition, is “O, I am slain!” (26). Both Polonius and the Queen correctly interpret the homicidal mood of Hamlet, who has already been steeling himself against matricide: “let not ever / The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom” (3.2.401-2). Gertrude, unfortunately, never heard these soliloquy resolutions.

There is one further example of offstage speech, the stage direction in both the Second Quarto and Folio for the entrance of the mad Ophelia: “A noise within: ‘Let her come in’” (4.5.152 s.d.). The “noise within” that preludes Ophelia's entrance may include some generalized offstage shouting, but it obviously also focuses on the imperative demand: “Let her come in.” This is like the various imperatives shouted by the mob in Julius Caesar. The mob in Hamlet is associated almost exclusively with Laertes and his successful rebellion against the throne of Denmark. In that scene, too, there is “A noise within” (4.5.108 s.d.) that announces Laertes's disorderly rabble breaking into the very presence chamber of the King and Queen.

The implications for staging of the asides, soliloquies, and offstage speech in Hamlet are rich and various. We cannot simply attribute what happens to staging conventions; we must also study these nondialogic resources in their immediate context and stage situation. I have already written about that highly expressive play we may call “Hamlet Without Words,”⁹ which represents a substratum of nonverbal theatrical expression. But the verbal-nonverbal distinction is artificial and does not do justice to our experience in the theatre, when we are hardly conscious whether points are made in language, gesture, stage business, or spectacle. The fact that we can postulate a Hamlet without words suggests that a good deal of the spoken play lies outside the confines of dramatic dialogue. There are other ways for the language to move. The asides, soliloquies, and offstage speech seem to constitute an internal play, but this is also the wrong image, since even in Hamlet's “To be, or not to be” soliloquy, Ophelia is clearly visible on stage and Polonius and Claudius are not very far away behind the arras. This is hardly private, and there is no reason to consider the privatization of the play a theatrical virtue.

Shakespeare has gone to a lot of trouble to intertwine Claudius's confessional soliloquy in the Prayer Scene with Hamlet's incestuous and murderous fantasies of revenge. The two are counterpointed against each other and cannot be interpreted independently. The stage situation of asides, soliloquies, and offstage speech establishes a context within which interpretation must function. None of the great speeches can be disembodied or thought of as private meditations. They all serve the needs of the play, which are sometimes surprising. In the confessional asides of Claudius, Gertrude, and Laertes, there is an expository intent that seems to speak for the play and to override the immediate expressive requirements of the characters. We have no pure examples of asides, soliloquies, and offstage speech in Hamlet. The fact that even these well-worn dramatic devices and conventions can surprise us is a tribute to the resilience of the play.

Notes

1. See the reviews of Strange Interlude by Frank Rich and Walter Kerr in The New York Times, 17 July 1984 (the London production), 22 February 1985 (the New York production), and 3 March 1985, a Sunday retrospective by Kerr.

2. Francis Berry, The Shakespeare Inset: Word and Picture (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).

3. Hamlet is quoted from the Signet edition, ed. Edward Hubler (New York: New American Library, 1963), which relies heavily on Quarto 2. Other plays of Shakespeare are quoted from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, gen. ed. Sylvan Barnett (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).

4. See Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe 1599-1609 (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 186.

5. Quoted from Edwin Nungezer, A Dictionary of Actors (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1929), 74.

6. See J. Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959).

7. Harold Jenkins, ed., Hamlet, The Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1982), 318.

8. Harold Jenkins, “Playhouse Interpolations in the Folio Text of Hamlet,” Studies in Bibliography 13 (1960): 35.

9. See Maurice Charney, “Hamlet without Words,” ELH 32 (1965): 457-77.

This essay is a revised and expanded version of a seminar paper presented at the International Shakespeare Conference in West Berlin on 2 April 1986 and published in Shakespeare Bulletin 4 (1986): 5-8.