SOURCE: Charney, Maurice. “The ‘Now Could I Drink Hot Blood’ Soliloquy and the Middle of Hamlet.” Mosaic 10, no. 3 (spring 1977): 77-86.

[In the following essay, Charney calls attention to the cruel, even gruesome elements of Hamlet's soliloquy in Act III, scene ii. He argues that in this monologue Hamlet is chiefly concerned with dissuading himself from the impulse to kill his mother.]

As a matter of principle, some hardy critics never read a play before seeing it in order not to spoil the freshness of the effect. If a play doesn't make sense in its oral and presented form, then there is something radically wrong with it. Have things come to such a sorry pass that we need to read the play as a libretto, translating a foreign and incomprehensible tongue? And what about those theatrical spectators with their little flashlights aglow, turning the pages of the text during the performance, as if it were a musical score? O heresy of heresies! As McLuhan might remark, this is the evil fruit of the Gutenberg galaxy, and we are enslaved to the print culture.

Practically, of course, we cannot hope to recreate that splendid moment of Shakespeare “when new.” Not only have we all read the plays (and read all the plays), but the language has been absorbed into our discourse. Can you imagine the shock effect of hearing the word “heartache” used for the first time in the English language in the modern sense of spiritual perturbation: “and by a sleep to say we end / The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks / That flesh is heir to” (Hamlet 3.1.61-63)?¹ We need to mediate between our wide experience as readers of Shakespeare and our limited training as spectators. The basic question is: how can we restore vitality to the spoken and acted language of the plays?

In the shortened version of King Lear by the late Buzz Goodbody (and the Royal Shakespeare Company), presented in 1974 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I was suddenly struck by a line I hadn't paid any attention to before: Gloucester's “For many miles about / There's scarce a bush” (2.4.300-1). Goneril and Regan and Cornwall are determined that Gloucester must shut up his doors and that the willful Lear must be taught a lesson by this wild night. Until his blinding, Gloucester is an expert in the ineffectual protest, and his querulousness has been well understood by the theatrical tradition. But there is a special poignance in his glimmerings of insight: “For many miles about / There's scarce a bush.” This may have something special to do with Brooklyn, or with the bombed-out urban renewal area that surrounds the Brooklyn Academy, but “scarce a bush” suggests a nature so minimal that even a bush would contradict its barrenness. I know that the play depends upon our symbolic equation of the inner and outer nature—nature physical and moral—yet we still need to apprehend literally the sinking barrenness of “scarce a bush” before we can appreciate the moral desolation. And it is a large perspective: “For many miles about.” Nature is participating in Lear's divestiture.

I only mention this line from King Lear, which is not very remarkable in itself, to demonstrate a certain unpredictable vitality in the presented play that has nothing to do with the formal eloquence of set speeches.² The theatrical tide seems to be turning against the big speeches in Shakespeare, especially the long soliloquies, perhaps because they attempt large emotional effects that are difficult to bring off. I remember Joe Papp's parody Hamlet, an early offering at the Public Theater, in which the “To be or not to be” soliloquy was spoken with an elaborate Puerto Rican accent, while Hamlet, with his feet dangling from the upper stage, cracked peanuts and threw the shells at the audience. The embarrassment with eloquence probably derives from a feeling that the eloquent parts of Shakespeare are those that readers already know too well, and that it is up to a director to mount a production that is not merely another reading of an already well-read play. This is the revolt against classic, schoolboy Shakespeare, and it is sometimes carried to such absurd lengths that mere novelty replaces any interpretation at all, and the play we know and cherish disappears into some grotesque, directorial simulacrum.

The problem is that Shakespeare has become a cultural palimpsest, and we need to proceed layer by underlying layer to recover, as Schliemann did with Troy (or thought he did), the basic substratum. We return to the question, perhaps hopelessly naïve, of what a Shakespearean play must have seemed like to its first audiences. Or, to narrow the topic, can we speak, in Empson's terms, of Hamlet “when new”?³ I'm convinced that the play must have come across as an exciting and very original revenge play, and not at all a contemplative drama of a man who could not make up his mind (as in the Olivier movie). The revenge-play conventions were still fresh in people's understanding, conventions that could be invoked automatically and impulsively and without the fatal touch of deliberate artifice—the way we instinctively understand the rules of science fiction, spy movies, and TV Westerns.

Hamlet “when new” must have seemed like The Spanish Tragedy, so that it is logical to assume that Shakespeare was basing his play on an earlier version of the Hamlet story by Thomas Kyd. We don't know anything directly about this earlier version, called without much attempt at verisimilitude the Ur-Hamlet, but its Ghost seems to have made a strong impression. In Thomas Lodge's remark, the Ghost “cried so miserably at the Theater, like an oyster wife, ‘Hamlet, revenge.’”⁴ The allusion in the Induction of A Warning for Fair Women (c.1599) may or may not refer to the Ur-Hamlet, but it is worth quoting for its own strong passions:

                                                            … a filthy whining ghost,
Lapped in some foul sheet, or a leather pilch,
Come screaming like a pig half-stickt,
And cries, “Vindicta, revenge, revenge. …”(5)

“Like a pig half-stickt” is a vivid reminder of the bloodiness expected from a revenge action.

The bloodiness of Shakespeare's Hamlet? This is an aspect of the play we prefer to ignore, as if it were necessary for Shakespeare to kosher the bleeding carcass of the Ur-Hamlet before he could present it at our more civilized table. I'm not going to proceed any further with this speculative comparison with the mythical Ur-Hamlet (usually asterisked by older and more exact critics to indicate its hypothetical status). If Hamlet is a cultural palimpsest, we are still deeply buried in Romantic strata of the play. We don't want our hero to be cruel, bloody, and unnatural, even when Shakespeare is at great pains to tell us that he is. We ignore an aspect of the play that seems obvious to me and to other readers of Elizabethan revenge tragedy: namely that Hamlet is a revenger, who, in actively pursuing his revenge, becomes tainted (and therefore tragically doomed) by his involvement in the processes of revenge.

Actually, this not very novel idea was brought home to me by puzzling over Hamlet's short soliloquy at the end of Act III, Scene ii, the Play Scene. Although Hamlet's soliloquies have received a critical attention wildly out of proportion to their function in the play, this particular soliloquy has been almost entirely neglected. It is therefore worth quoting in full, if only to remind readers of its unfamiliarity and to show how different its style is from the better-known soliloquies of the play. Polonius exits after arranging for the interview between Hamlet and his mother (at which the old counselor will be fatally concealed), and the menacing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern follow him off-stage. In his soliloquy Hamlet has a quiet moment in which to prepare himself for the scene with his mother:

'Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood
And do such business as the bitter day(6)
Would quake to look on. Soft, now to my mother.
O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom.
Let me be cruel, not unnatural;
I will speak daggers to her, but use none.
My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites:
How in my words somever she be shent,
To give them seals never, my soul, consent!

(3.2.396-407)

It is one of the ironies of the theatrical tradition that “To be or not to be” has become Hamlet's most characteristic line rather than the more vigorous and heroic “Now could I drink hot blood,” which plunges us right into the Hamlet world of Saxo Grammaticus and Norse saga, where the timely epic boast is needed to establish the protagonist's manly claims. Hamlet is setting out to do doughty deeds, or perhaps he is just steeling himself rhetorically for his new role as revenger. This new mood represents the practical consequences of Hamlet's triumph with The Mousetrap: he has indeed caught the conscience of the king, and he is now preparing himself to do battle with his enemies, as revealed by the Ghost and confirmed in the Play Scene. The soliloquy at the end of Act III, Scene ii thus marks a new movement in the action of the play, a movement that develops and intensifies in the Prayer Scene (III,iii) and the Closet Scene (III,iv) and is not completed until Hamlet's departure for England at the end of Act IV, Scene iv. The “How all occasions do inform against me” soliloquy that closes this scene has a direct relation to the soliloquy in Act III, Scene ii, and this sequence of scenes, from the end of III,ii to the end of IV,iv, marks a sharply defined second or middle movement of the play.

The structural unity of this middle sequence is almost too explicit for Shakespeare. Perhaps he felt uncomfortable about putting such a powerful emphasis on Hamlet's homicidal mood—in making him so much like Pyrrhus and Laertes and the standard revenger type—especially when this unsympathetic image of the hero is only temporary, a passing phase. When Hamlet returns from his sea voyage, he has placed himself and his revenge in the hands of Providence. In this third and final movement of the play,⁷ Hamlet understands that “our deep plots do pall” (5.2.9) and that “There's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” (5.2.10-11).

These are radically different sentiments from the gruesome and diabolic promptings of the soliloquy in Act III, Scene ii. The hot blood Hamlet is speaking about is presumably the blood of a newly killed enemy, whom you humiliate beyond death by ritually partaking of his life-blood, still warm and bubbling—an outrage he is powerless to prevent. This is the primitive Hamlet of the sagas, preparing himself for the kill. The soliloquy is permeated with talk of hell, Judgment Day (“the bitter day” of the Quarto 2 reading), bloody murder, and cruelty. The scene ends with Hamlet, sword drawn,⁸ proceeding to his mother's room.

As Samuel Johnson so well understood, Hamlet's hesitations about killing Claudius are even more diabolical than his original, spontaneous impulse to take his revenge. Hamlet's “more horrid hent” (3.3.88) comes from the damnable desire not only to kill the king physically, but also to destroy his soul, and, according to Johnson, these sentiments are “too horrible to be read or to be uttered.”⁹ Hamlet's soliloquy in the Prayer Scene continues directly from the soliloquy in Act III, Scene ii—there are, in fact, no intervening speeches by Hamlet. “Now might I do it pat” (3.3.73) seems to echo, in a lower and more colloquial tone, the menacing style of “Now could I drink hot blood” (3.2.398), and “Dead for a ducat, dead!” (3.4.25) at the murder of Polonius fits right in with these swaggering exclamations. In the Prayer Scene with Claudius, Hamlet is already practicing the cruelty he has resolved on for his mother: “Let me be cruel, not unnatural” (3.2.403), and Hamlet, in fact, thinks himself awfully clever to pass up this imperfect revenge for much better opportunities that will soon present themselves, ones that have “no relish of salvation” (3.3.92) in them. Hamlet's exit line in the Prayer Scene—“This physic but prolongs thy sickly days” (3.3.96)—expresses a certain sadistic delight in toying with his uncle-victim. The delay in revenge is a false medicine (or “physic”), which doesn't cure the patient, but only prolongs his incurable illness and therefore makes his life a torment to him.

It is in this fearsome mood that we soon hear Hamlet in the Closet Scene calling wildly from off-stage: “Mother, Mother, Mother!” (3.4.6). These are memorable lines for an actor to deliver, and they could (if spoken with the right mixture of bitter accusation, thwarted love, and inexpressible anguish) sum up all that has been troubling Hamlet. It is quite wrong to think that Gertrude overreacts to her passionate son in this scene, and that the meddlesome but extremely shrewd Polonius is killed merely because the Queen overestimates the gravity of the situation. This is to disregard the soliloquy in Act III, Scene ii as a kind of expository prologue to the Closet Scene. The soliloquy bears directly on the scene with Gertrude, and, as psychoanalysts have pointed out, Hamlet characteristically displaces the expected plot interest from the king, who is a father surrogate, to his mother the queen.

The chief function of the soliloquy seems to be to allow Hamlet to master his overpowering impulse to matricide. Like Polonius in his moral injunctions to the departing Laertes, Hamlet presents himself with a series of imperatives: “O heart, lose not thy nature” (3.2.401), which is to be compassionate to one's mother; “let not ever / The soul of Nero¹⁰ enter this firm bosom” (401-2). It doesn't require any subtle psychoanalytic assumptions to understand that Hamlet is expressing his forbidden wishes in order to master his own anxieties. He is directing his conduct—even rehearsing it—in a way that is very unusual in the play. “Let me be cruel, not unnatural” (403) presents false alternatives, in which both parts of the proposition are equally reprehensible. “Unnatural” refers, of course, to Nero and matricide, but why must Hamlet commit himself in advance to being cruel? That is one of the puzzles of the Closet Scene, which is designed more to relieve Hamlet's aggression and sexual nausea than to purge Gertrude's “fighting soul” (3.4.114).

Hamlet continues in his soliloquy to lay before himself the moral directives that must govern the scene with his mother: “I will speak daggers to her, but use none” (3.2.404). Again, we are at the magical and preoccupying idea of murder, which terrifies and fascinates Hamlet the revenger. Remember that at this point Hamlet fully believes in his mother's complicity in the murder of his father (and her husband), and it is not until the Closet Scene is well underway that Hamlet seems deflected from this certainty. Gertrude's incredulous question “As kill a king?” (3.4.31) seems to satisfy Hamlet's curiosity on that issue, and the swiftness with which the matter is settled clearly indicates that the technical guilt or innocence of Gertrude is not meant to be sounded.

In her spiritual torment, she echoes (and confirms) Hamlet's dagger image: “O, speak to me no more. / These words like daggers enter in my ears” (3.4.95-96). Hamlet's speaking daggers have been so successful that the Ghost has to intervene to protect his tormented widow. Hamlet ends his soliloquy in III,ii with solemn instructions to his soul never to allow his deliberate verbal assault on his mother to be translated into physical action: “How in my words somever she be shent, / To give them seals never, my soul, consent!” (3.2.406-7). “To be shent” is a strong expression for a rebuke verging on direct insult, a damaging reproach that might injure a person's standing or reputation. This ringing couplet makes it plain that Hamlet intends to “shend” his mother in the Closet Scene, even though he vows never to let his soul consent to kill her. In this context of persistent denial, the matricidal theme is given special emphasis.

I have been at pains to show the relation of the “Now could I drink hot blood” soliloquy in III,ii to Hamlet's behavior in the Closet Scene. It is not Shakespeare's practice to lay out a scene so explicitly in advance, but it is entirely characteristic of his art that, once having sounded this chorus-like overture, he doesn't move directly to the anticipated scene between son and mother, but rather to a displaced but analogous scene between son and uncle-father. The crucial Prayer Scene with Hamlet and Claudius occurs, as it were, in passing, while Hamlet, sword drawn, is on his way to his mother's room. Both the Prayer Scene and the Closet Scene are remarkable in showing us the king and queen in spiritual crisis, and they are both strikingly sympathetic in their torments of conscience at the very moment that Hamlet the revenger almost forfeits our sympathy by his relentless and remorseless cruelty.

In the Closet Scene, the Ghost seems to answer Gertrude's painful appeal to her son: “O Hamlet, speak no more” (3.4.89), “O, speak to me no more” (95), “No more” (102). “No more” is the Ghost's cue to enter, and he manages to divert Hamlet's lurid and oedipal preoccupation with “honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty” (94-95). The Ghost is concerned about the shattering physical effect Hamlet's assault has had on his mother, since “conceit”—conception, imagination—“in weakest bodies strongest works” (115). This is certainly the tenderest-hearted and most domestic Ghost in all of English literature, and his final words are a plea to Hamlet to change his approach: “Speak to her, Hamlet” (116). Hamlet has been speaking “words like daggers” (96); he is now required to speak words of spiritual comfort and in this, of course, he completely fails.

With all these preliminaries safely stowed, I want to return to the beginning of the Closet Scene and say something about the mood in which the scene opens. I have already remarked on Hamlet's hysterical and anguished cries from off-stage—“Mother, Mother, Mother!” (3.4.6)—which continue, with seven intervening lines for the King and Polonius, the tone and spirit of Hamlet's soliloquy in the Prayer Scene: “And that his soul may be as damned and black / As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays. / This physic but prolongs thy sickly days” (3.3.94-96). “Mother, Mother, Mother!” (3.4.6) follows almost immediately. The division into scenes in the printed text tends to break the alarming continuity of these speeches in the presented play. If the distinction between written and oral discourse means anything at all, the speeches are juxtaposed both chronologically and audibly.

The point is that Hamlet's homicidal mood, announced in the soliloquy of Act III, Scene ii and demonstrated in the Prayer Scene, reaches its climax at the beginning of the Closet Scene, where there is an active possibility that Hamlet may murder his mother. Both Gertrude and Polonius seem to think so, and this gives the scene an urgency often missing from productions of the play. Gertrude is genuinely frightened when Hamlet says, “Come, come, and sit you down. You shall not budge” (3.4.19). In the stage action, Hamlet forces his mother to sit down, and he holds her there and prevents her from moving. This is what prompts Gertrude's completely natural and highly motivated fear of matricide: “What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me? Help, ho!” (22). Polonius, who has been eavesdropping from behind an arras, is convinced that Gertrude is in danger, and he echoes her cry for help: “What, ho! Help!” (24). This, of course, leads to his immediate and unthinking murder by Hamlet: “How now? A rat? Dead for a ducat, dead!” (25).

In its swaggering, colloquial style, the line seems to answer “Now might I do it pat” (3.3.73) from the Prayer Scene. Hamlet does do it “pat”—opportunely, aptly, just in the nick of time—and Polonius is “Dead for a ducat, dead,” as one might say for a sure bet, in which you can't help winning the ducat wager, or when your victim is so worthless that you will run him through for one single ducat only. This gambler's boast of Hamlet answers, but also undercuts and trivializes, the heroic vaunt of his soliloquy in III,ii: “Now could I drink hot blood / And do such business as the bitter day / Would quake to look on” (398-400). At this point in the Closet Scene, the murder of Polonius seems a meaningless and insignificant act, and it mocks the heroic pretensions of Hamlet's role as revenger.

The murder of Polonius also gives Hamlet's enemies a pretext for moving directly against him, and Hamlet loses the bold initiative he had suddenly seized after the triumph of the Play Scene (III,ii). No longer is Hamlet under the vague surveillance of the earlier part of the play; he is now under guard, and Claudius is free to ship him off as a prisoner to England. This constrained situation of Hamlet gives his long soliloquy at the end of Act IV, Scene iv a curiously ironic ring, since Hamlet speaks as if he had complete freedom of movement and action. The “How all occasions do inform against me” (4.4.32) soliloquy is the logical conclusion of the “Now could I drink hot blood” soliloquy in III,ii and it marks both the culmination—the verbal culmination, at least—and the end of Hamlet's concerted attempt to play the revenger. He tries manfully in this soliloquy to spur his “dull revenge” (33) with arguments about dueler's honor. Like Troilus, Hamlet locates honor in the eye of the beholder rather than in the cause, so that “When honor's at the stake,” the true swordsman can find matter for quarrel “in a straw” (55-56). The army of Fortinbras, marching against Poland “to gain a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name” (18-19), exhorts Hamlet to this very chivalric but distorted notion of personal honor. It is not surprising to hear him end his soliloquy with a renewed commitment to a bloody revenge: “O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” (65-66). Of course, it is surprising to hear a prisoner being sent on a forced voyage speak with such resolute disregard of his physical circumstances.

Perhaps Shakespeare recognized the problem here, since the whole “How all occasions do inform against us” soliloquy has been cut from the Folio text of Hamlet, and Hamlet doesn't appear in this scene at all in the Folio version, which ends at about line 8 of the Quarto 2 version from which I have been quoting.¹¹ Despite his strong rhetoric, Hamlet has reached an impasse in his role as revenger. His thoughts may be “bloody,” but they are indeed “nothing worth” without the capacity for putting them into execution. But the revenge actions Hamlet has already taken—passing up the chance to kill Claudius at prayer to wait for a more damnable occasion, berating his mother with lurid images of sexual guilt, running Polonius through with heedless bravado—all seem particularly pointless and self-defeating, and Hamlet is now a prisoner waiting to be shipped to his death in England.

I have been trying to argue that there is a distinct middle movement in Hamlet, beginning with the soliloquy at the end of Act III, Scene ii, and ending with the soliloquy at the end of Act IV, Scene iv. The purpose of this sequence is to show Hamlet as a revenger, like the “rugged Pyrrhus” (2.2.461) butchering old Priam in the Player's Speech, and also like the vaunting Laertes in the scenes that immediately follow Hamlet's departure for England. Laertes' thoughts are certainly bloody enough, as he vows to cut his enemy's throat “i' th' church” (4.7.126), and Claudius puffs him up to believe that “Revenge should have no bounds” (128). But for Hamlet there is no possible resolution in the role of swordsman, dueler, and drinker of hot blood. That is why, when he returns from his sea voyage, the question of his revenge is set in an entirely different perspective. “When our deep plots do pall” (5.2.9), the workings of Providence replace any merely personal and homicidal initiative. The final sequence, therefore, from Hamlet's return to England until his death, marks a third and distinctive movement in the tragedy, very different from the turbulent middle.

I know I have not offered a pleasant picture of Hamlet, ready to “drink hot blood / And do such business as the bitter day / Would quake to look on.” This is Hamlet the Dane of the popular dramatic tradition. Yet the middle Hamlet I have sketched is also a vigorous, manly figure like other revengers in Elizabethan drama. If Hamlet is cruel at this point, he is also honest with himself, and he explores and works through the revenger's role in a way not possible to Pyrrhus and Laertes, whose towering passions seem a parody of something they can never understand. Hamlet ends with the ability to accept his fate with quiet resolve and New Testament lucidity: “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” (5.2.221-24). Hamlet is now ready to die, which is very different from being ready to kill, although the two readinesses may depend on each other. It is at this moment that Christianity and Roman Stoicism intersect, and the tragic protagonist puts himself in tune with metaphysical forces. Revenge becomes a matter of readiness.

To return to the propositions with which I began this essay, I still believe that a Shakespearian play, especially Hamlet, has strong and simple meanings to express; that it is divided into distinct and clearly defined sequences of action; and that it is not, above all, an intellectual puzzle, whose meaning is dark and ambiguous and whose solution eludes the grasping reason. Using the example of the middle, revenge sequence of Hamlet, I have tried to insist on a cruder and more primitive sense of the play. But the middle movement is by no means the final meaning of the play, which attempts to work out the implications of the revenge theme as few other contemporary revenge plays do. In pursuing this “more primitive sense of the play,” I realize that I have been reconstructing a boldly hypothetical Hamlet “when new.” I can only justify my endeavors by the freshness they may bring to a play that has been overinterpreted and overwrought.

Notes

1. Hamlet is quoted from the Signet edition, edited by Edward Hubler (New York, 1963), which relies heavily on the Quarto 2 text of the play. Other plays of Shakespeare are quoted from individual volumes in the Signet edition. These have been collected in The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York, 1972), which makes corrections, mostly of a typographical nature.

2. For further examples, see my essay, “Shakespeare's Unpoetic Poetry,” Studies in English Literature, XIII (1973), pp. 199-207.

3. See William Empson's two articles in Sewanee Review, LXI (1953), pp. 15-42, 185-205.

4. Quoted (and modernized) from E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford, 1930), I, p. 411.

5. Quoted (and modernized) from J. S. Farmer, Old English Plays, Student's Facsimile Edition (London, 1909-14), Vol. 163.

6. This is the reading of Quarto 2; Folio reads: “And do such bitter business as the day. …” See the discussion of this point in my Style in “Hamlet” (Princeton, 1969), p. 10, n. 6.

7. See S. F. Johnson, “The Regeneration of Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly, III (1952), pp. 187-207.

8. There is, of course, no definite indication that Hamlet enters the Prayer Scene with his sword drawn. I assume that “Up, sword” (3.3.88) clearly implies that Hamlet must have had his sword out of its scabbard before he can sheathe it.

9. Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo (New Haven, 1968), II, p. 990 (Vol. VIII of the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson).

10. Nero as a classical exemplar of moral anarchy and matricide is a Renaissance commonplace. The Interlude of Vice (Horestes) of 1567 has significant Nero references at lines 965 and 1072 (in the Malone Society reprint, ed. Daniel Seltzer, 1962), and the Orestes story is generally analogous to that of Hamlet. See Robert S. Knapp, “Horestes: The Uses of Revenge,” ELH, XL (1973), pp. 205-20.

11. For those critics who put great emphasis on the theme of delay in Hamlet, it is curious that the central passage on delay should be considered expendable in the Folio text. Someone must have thought that the entire soliloquy could be cut without doing significant harm to the play.