SOURCE: Hallett, Charles A., and Elaine S. Hallett. “Hamlet.” In The Revenger's Madness: A Study of Revenge Tragedy Motifs, pp. 181-222. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980.

[In the following essay, the Halletts offer a detailed appraisal of Hamlet in terms of Shakespeare's merger of the traditional revenge tragedy form with his broader vision of the tragic consequences of the search for truth. Emphasizing that the play and its protagonists represent unique expressions of this form, the critics demonstrate Shakespeare's refinements and alterations of a number of revenge conventions.]

'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 bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.

Shakespeare, Hamlet

To discuss Hamlet solely in terms of revenge is somewhat like attending to the trellis rather than the rosebush it supports. Shakespeare's Hamlet transcends the revenge theme, and any criticism of it from this point of view alone can hardly be exhaustive. Yet the revenge theme in Hamlet cannot be ignored, for it is the basis of the play's structure: an interpretation that neglected it would be inadequate in the opposite direction. Nor could any study of the revenge tragedy motifs themselves be complete without considering Hamlet, the keystone of the genre.

Up to this point we have been dealing with flawed plays. The Spanish Tragedy was mocked even in its own time for its exaggerated rhetoric, and Hieronimo, because of his constant attitudinizing, has become to us more a comic figure than a tragic one; we will sooner smile at his hysteria than weep over the poignancy of his situation. The value of Kyd's experiment, as drama, lies primarily in the impulse it gave to subsequent writers to venture into new channels. Antonio's Revenge, too, has a mechanical quality that puts us off. Since its characters lack both credibility and scope, they do not win our admiration, and the episodes, occasionally interesting in themselves, never really convey to us a sense that each scene follows inevitably from its predecessor. Antonio's Revenge remains of interest for scholars mainly as a result of plot similarities between it and Hamlet, which have led to speculations of their common origin in a Hamlet play by Kyd. Because of the aesthetic inferiority of these early works, the revenge play has gained, both in its own time and ours, the reputation for vulgarity.

In Hamlet, we find everything transmuted. A finer imagination is at work and its effects upon the material are evident at every level of the play, from dramaturgical invention to intellectual scope. The revenge experience is now linked to another, a wider experience, the experience of knowing. Shakespeare's protagonist, thrust into the dilemma of the revenger, focuses on his own mind's reactions to the experience as much as on the experience itself. Of necessity he must also probe the mind of Claudius, and in the process he inspects as well the minds of Gertrude, Polonius, and Ophelia. All of the other major characters desire to unlock and enter Hamlet's mind. The very structure of the scenes reflects this basic human drive to know. In one scene after another Shakespeare utilizes the “observation sequence,” wherein a concealed character spies on another in the attempt to creep unawares upon his thoughts and capture them. So strong is this idea that the play itself seems to ask, how much can one man see of another man's mind? How completely can he comprehend his own? And how far can he penetrate into that unseen realm beyond, the “undiscover'd country” to which the human mind is the only gate?¹ Again and again the revenge motifs are adapted to illuminate these, the central questions of human existence. It is a testimony to the basic rightness of Kyd's impulses that in expressing this personal vision through the revenge tragedy form, Shakespeare not only uses all of the motifs found in the prototype but respects their essential integrity as a configuration grounded in experience.

I

Our initial experience in Hamlet is of the ghost. And this is as good a place as any to begin an examination of the refinements Shakespeare made in the form. Earlier scholars, in writing about the evolution of the revenge-tragedy ghost, universally express a sense of relief when King Hamlet takes over from Andrea and Andrugio. J. A. Symonds's response is typical:

Shakspere, who omitted nothing in the tragic apparatus of his predecessors, but with inbreathed sense and swift imagination woke those dead things to inorganic life, employed the Ghost, all know with what effect, in “Hamlet” and “Macbeth” and “Julius Caesar.” It is not here the place to comment upon Shakspere's alchemy—the touch of nature by which he turned the coldest mechanisms of the stage to spiritual use. Enough to notice that, in his hands, the Ghost was no longer a phantom roaming in the cold, evoked from Erebus to hover round the actors in a tragedy, but a spirit of like intellectual substance with these actors, a parcel of the universe in which all live and move and have their being.²

Symonds's enthusiasm is matched by many in the generations that followed him. But often, as here, the improvements in the motifs are discussed almost exclusively in terms of dramaturgy. The skill with which the motifs are radically altered to fit Shakespeare's personal vision, and yet altered so carefully that they retain their integral relationships with the experience of revenge, is still rarely appreciated, even in Hamlet. In analyzing the ghost motif, therefore, we shall attempt to distinguish between those refinements stemming from Shakespeare's superior dramaturgical instincts and those occurring because of his deeper insights into life.

One of the dramaturgical functions of Kyd's ghost was to provide exposition; Andrea acts as a prologue. Not so in Marston, who preferred to emphasize the effects of the ghost upon the revenger. Marston let Piero acquaint the audience with his own villainy and delayed the ghost's entrance until the time came for Antonio to learn what Piero had already told the viewers. Shakespeare, by beginning his revenge action in the middle, creates a situation in which the ghost both apprises us of past events and informs Hamlet of Claudius's guilt. This magnificent bit of restructuring permits Shakespeare to come immediately to the crucial point in the revenge action, without spending two acts (as Marston does) on the static lamentations of grief. It also provides him with a compelling and suspenseful introduction to his play. This early introduction of the ghost focuses the drama squarely upon the question “what will Hamlet do with the information given him by the Ghost?” Shakespeare's use of the ghost as an expository device goes far beyond anything that his predecessors had done for dramaturgical brilliance. It makes the ghost an integral part of the action.

The skillful positioning of the ghost's revelation is not all that differentiates this ghost from earlier ones. Shakespeare's ghost, as many have noted, has been given a character. Earlier playwrights were satisfied if their ghosts communicated an aura of terror. It was enough that there was on stage “a voice mouthing vengeance.”³ The point was made. Shakespeare's ghost is humanized. It appears in a “fair and warlike form,” the customary “foul sheet” of the earlier ghost abandoned for martial armor. No ghost before King Hamlet had been particularized so vividly:

So frown'd he once when in an angry parle
He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.

[1.1.62-63]

It was about to speak, when the cock crew.
And then it started, like a guilty thing
Upon a fearful summons.

[1.1.147-49]

                                                  Look with what courteous action
It waves you to a more removed ground.

[1.4.60-61]

These details are quite aside from those that describe King Hamlet while he was alive; the details here vitalize the Ghost as ghost. On the bulwarks we see him move “with martial stalk,” we watch him appear and disappear at will, and we find him “as the air, invulnerable” to the sword thrusts of the baffled soldiers. Later we learn that the Ghost has a keen interest in the world he has been separated from and would influence its events; he desires to be revenged upon Claudius but—a humanizing detail much appreciated by critics—would protect Gertrude. We also discover something about the way the Ghost spends his time in the afterworld—Old Hamlet, having been “sent to my account / With all my imperfections on my head,” apparently has sins upon his soul which he must expiate and is therefore “doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, / And for the day confin'd to fast in fires.” The suffering which he undergoes in his “prison house,” he informs us, is as horrible to imagine as the crime which put him there. These details have a definite dramatic purpose; they endow the ghost of Denmark's former king with a vivid and memorable character. Where Marston's Ghost is plainly and simply an embodiment of the passion he symbolizes, Shakespeare's is that and a particular human soul as well.⁴

Yet Shakespeare has not sacrificed those supernatural qualities which give the ghost its significance in terms of the revenge tragedy form. He clearly links his ghost with the world beyond. Much theological discussion has been occasioned by the references to purgatory made by the Ghost, but Robert West is correct in warning that it is unnecessary to search for—is indeed impossible to pin down—the religious denomination of this wandering spirit. The same references to the afterworld which serve to humanize the Ghost also emphasize, as West asserts, “its tenuity, its frightfulness, its special knowledge, and the dubiety of its nature and purposes,” in other words, its mystery.⁵ The fear and awe with which its sudden appearances and unearthly manner inspire those who first detect it work in the same way. As the onlookers—Marcellus, Bernardo, and Horatio—are “harrowed with fear and wonder,” as they “tremble and look pale,” as they connect the appearance of the apparition with “some strange eruption to our state” and set it in the context of the times when “graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets,” we, too, experience their terror. No ghost is more humanly real than the Ghost in Hamlet, yet at the same time no ghost is less of this world.

Few people would challenge the supernatural reality of the Ghost, but not all understand clearly the reason for Shakespeare's insistence that the Ghost is not a figment of Hamlet's imagination.⁶ Many, for example, believe that the Ghost is issuing a command that has a divine origin—Hamlet is, for them, a hand-chosen agent of God, even though the Ghost's demands contradict the orthodox teachings of Holy Writ.⁷ Because Shakespeare has the Ghost call attention to the difference between its brand of justice, which is to be applied to Claudius, and a higher justice, that to which Gertrude is subject, one is probably correct in assuming that the playwright did not wish to identify the Ghost's justice with Heaven's. Moreover, the dramatic origins of the Ghost in an amalgamation of Kyd's Andrea and his allegorical companion Revenge, the presentation of this figure as something that loses its power under the influence of the Savior, and the Ghost's own emphasis upon Hamlet's being bound by a natural rather than a religious duty, all suggest that Shakespeare, like his predecessors, viewed the Ghost as an embodiment of the spirit of revenge. Yet like them he sees this spirit as something more than human instinct. It does exist within the individual—Hamlet's “O my prophetic soul” testifies to this—but, as a “force” of nature which all men recognize, it has at the same time an ontological reality, a universality, that is as mysterious and as difficult to comprehend as is the Ghost itself. Shakespeare has used every device in his power to assert both the reality and the compelling authority of this irrational external force which the Ghost embodies.

That authority, of course, and the nature of the offense which draws the specter back to earth to make his demands, distinguishes this revenge from those (like Ferdinand's in The Duchess of Malfi) involving perverse and diabolical fury far out of proportion to the cause. If the Ghost tells us anything, it tells us that the crimes of Claudius are so insupportable that Nature itself has broken form, thrusting itself “unnaturally” into the human order to insure that the crimes will not go unpunished. Shakespeare, it should be noted, presents the authority as having a binding effect upon the avenger; the action of Hamlet is far less concerned with the revenger's movement toward a decision to abandon the divine and embrace the natural (as in The Spanish Tragedy) than with his attempt to comprehend the relationship between the two conflicting imperatives. Shakespeare's Ghost has a near-absolute authority that makes it a forceful antagonist to the Everlasting whose canons Hamlet would also adhere to and thus places the prince in the classic tragic situation: either way that he moves will be right—and thus wrong.

While Shakespeare's Ghost retains the symbolic role it had held in The Spanish Tragedy and Antonio's Revenge, stirring Hamlet into a rage against Claudius and thus initiating the fatal impulse toward excess, it is also made the carrier for a new theme. This Ghost embodies, simultaneously, its creator's vision of human perfection. We are told that in his lifetime the elder Hamlet was a judicious king, a valiant warrior, a devoted husband, and a beloved father. But he is even more than this. Hamlet could envision man to be “noble in reason,” “infinite in faculties,” in action “like an angel,” in apprehension “like a god,” because he had such a model before him in the person of his father:

See what a grace was seated on this brow:
Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself,
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command,
A station like the herald Mercury
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill,
A combination and a form indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man.

[3.4.55-62]

The elder Hamlet shows us man raised to his highest potential. Still the former king is more. Constant comparisons are made between him and Claudius that indicate what Denmark has had to settle for in his place—one brother with an eye like Mars, the other but a mildewed ear; the former a fair mountain, the latter a barren moor; the first Hyperion, the second a foul satyr. Through the juxtaposition of the two characters and their respective reigns, Shakespeare associates the dead king with the noble past, the usurper with a “poisoned” present, so that King Hamlet emerges as a symbol of an irrecoverable Golden Age.

Many commentators speak as though Shakespeare's modifications of the ghost motif can be explained simply on the principle of good taste. Not so. The new symbolism assigned to the Ghost arises from the necessities of Shakespeare's own personal vision. In taking up the revenge form, Shakespeare uses it to explore in depth a concept that has been only latent in the earlier tragedies we have examined—the attempt of the revenger to come to terms with evil. Both Hieronimo and Antonio puzzle over the problem but in neither play is the theme so integrally related to both character and plot as in Hamlet.

Evil impinges itself upon Hamlet initially through his widowed mother's hasty acceptance of Claudius. Her callousness adds to his realization that a great man such as his father can die, the painful knowledge that greatness can be forgotten “within a month.” Already he begins to question the value of life. His later disovery, that Claudius had murdered his father, shatters him completely, and where before he only longed for death now he actively contemplates suicide. If this is what the world is like, concludes Hamlet, then no action is worthwhile. At the same time, the father whose very loss has led him to this conclusion enjoins Hamlet to undertake the ultimate act of murder on his behalf. This is the basis of Hamlet's dilemma and the conflict from which plot, character, and theme will develop. It becomes essential, therefore, because of the nature of Shakespeare's vision, not only that the Ghost embody the spirit of revenge but also that it epitomize human dignity, majesty, and worth.

It is a testimony to the genius of Shakespeare that these seemingly incompatible demands of the form and the vision have been reconciled. A labor of Hercules is required to yoke together a ghost conceived after Kyd as that vengeful unrelenting force which is released into the world to restore order when an imbalance is created and the ghost as Shakespeare's personal vision required it; that is, to superimpose upon the prototype that majestic demigod we see through the reminiscences of Hamlet and Horatio. The adaptation is as radical as the one made by Marston when he attempted to present the ghost as the agent of Heaven, and we have just noted how badly Marston failed in tampering with the motif. Yet Shakespeare has not failed.

Why do we not reject Shakespeare's Ghost? One reason is that to facilitate the merger Shakespeare has played down the Ghost's connection with excess, leaving this aspect to develop from the action of the play rather than from the will of the Ghost and instead associating the Ghost subtly, through its solicitude for Gertrude, with compassion. The events which convey the sense of excess, Polonius's death, for example, or Ophelia's madness, remain direct by-products of Hamlet's pursuit of vengeance, but they seem to occur accidentally. Neither Hamlet nor the Ghost is made responsible in the brutal way that their counterparts in Antonio's Revenge are responsible for the death of Julio and the subsequent cannibalistic defiling of that boy's body. Given Hamlet's character (and the playwrights invariably seem to make their ghosts reflect the characters of their revengers), it is more fitting that the excess, though inevitable, should arise as an accidental rather than a deliberate result of the revenge passion. This dramaturgical structuring which slightly divorces the excess from the original demands of the ghost helps us to accept the exalted role which the ghost now plays.

There is another technique used to render the adaptation in the ghost motif acceptable. The perfection associated with Old Hamlet has to do with his former life and, being a picture of the past, is somewhat detached from his present activities as a vindictive ghost; indeed, the fact that so magnificent a personage was less than immortal, and the human condition such that he could be reduced to the level at which we find him on the battlements, serves more to sharpen our sense of loss than to make us question Shakespeare's artistry. Thus, the very nobility of the Ghost's past tends to convince us that what it asks of Hamlet is far more reasonable than what Andrugio had asked of Antonio, even though in essence the request of both ghosts is the same. Shakespeare has so controlled our responses that the image of the old king as a paragon of men is never tainted by his demand for vengeance but, on the contrary, his demand seems the more justified, on the grounds that the corruption which set in upon his death must be reversed. An adaptation that in lesser hands might have come across as a gross contradiction appears in Shakespeare's no discrepancy.

It will do us no good to appreciate Shakespeare's artistry if we are not clear about exactly what this ghost does ask for, as the demand made upon the prince dictates the action of the entire play. Exactly what does this spirit of revenge demand? And is that demand just? The Ghost asks Hamlet to punish Claudius for a heinous deed, a deed for which the punishment of death is well deserved. It demands that Hamlet respond in terms of the law of nature—blood for blood—not in terms of courts and trials (a course which in any event is impossible because of Claudius's position as the highest authority in the realm). Hamlet must kill his uncle, mercilessly, in cold blood. There is a justice to the Ghost's demand for the king's death, and certainly this deed of Hamlet's will have beneficial results for the state, which Claudius is polluting. In fact, Shakespeare sets up the situation in such a way that Hamlet cannot refuse to comply, for Claudius must be punished and, the plot tells us, only Hamlet can do it. Yet though the end is good, the means to that justice involve irrational actions which will in their turn need to be punished. To do what the Ghost asks is to risk damnation, to avoid it seems like cowardice, and to escape the whole problem through suicide is only to arrive back at square one—daring damnation. Hamlet has two choices—dishonor or self-destruction—and recognizes early the ironic injustice in his own plight. A further danger in the situation, one Hamlet does not foresee, is that where the order of nature is involved what begins as a desire for justice can run amuck and end in inconceivable waste. Here again there is the potential for injustice. The Ghost's demand, while having a strong element of justice and even necessity about it, has also, in itself and its effects, a tendency to initiate further injustice. The situation is unavoidably tragic.

II

Let us now turn to the knotty problem of Hamlet's madness. It is hoped that the revenger's madness has been presented in this book in terms that will allow the reader to accept the word madness as a suitable name for the mental state which surfaces in young Hamlet after he meets with the Ghost. Nevertheless, Hamlet is the least maddened of all revengers. As we have defined it, the revenger's madness is a state of mind originating in a temporary fit of excessive passion but later magnified into an obsession by the subsequent refusal to expel the root cause of that passion from the mind. In avengers like Titus or Hieronimo, the fits increase in intensity and duration and occur with greater and greater frequency, while the periods of lucidity diminish concurrently. But all revengers are not equally distraught. The personal vision of the playwright, combined with the character traits he has given his hero, determine the extent to which the revenger lapses into insanity. In this play we find a revenger who has a surprisingly high degree of control. Thus, in insisting upon the madness of Hamlet, we are asserting only (1) that Shakespeare has drawn a mind in which the passion of revenge has gained a definite foothold and (2) that passion's effect upon the psyche is a primary subject of the drama. Hamlet never goes the full route into lunacy.

Definite refinements have been made upon the madness motif in Hamlet. An important step in appreciating what Shakespeare had done with this motif is to recognize that two separate conventions are involved. There is the “antic disposition,” which, technically, must be understood in terms of the disguise convention and compared to Hieronimo's third-act impersonation of the patient man, Antonio's transformation into a fool, and Vindice's appearance as Piato. Then there is Hamlet's “sore distraction,” which involves the actual state of his psyche as it attempts to deal with the injunction placed upon him by the Ghost. Strictly speaking, the madness motif pertains only to the sore distraction. Yet the disguise and the madness motifs in revenge tragedy are closely related, for, as we have seen, the disguise underscores the dislocations of identity taking place in the hero. It is thus in Hamlet: the disguise, that is, the antic disposition, indicates that “nor th' exterior nor the inward man / Resembles that it was.” Because of this, and also because the particular disguise Hamlet chooses is that of lunacy, the antic disposition must be considered in any discussion of the madness itself. “Antic disposition” and “sore distraction” then, or disguise and madness—to these two conventions Shakespeare has given intense life.

Exactly how do the two motifs of disguise and madness interact in Hamlet? What Shakespeare has done with them exceeds what he has done with the ghost. It is obvious from Titus Andronicus that Shakespeare realized the purpose of madness in the revenge story—that a good man will commit the act of murder only in high passion. His problem was to make the madness credible without making it stagy or sensational. Given his personal vision of Hamlet as the courtier, soldier, scholar, it would not do to send him out to fire arrows at Jupiter. Some more subtle dramatic device was needed to convey to the audience the sense that Hamlet is “mad.”

Fortunately the source story already contained the perfect solution; in it, the revenger feigns madness. Shakespeare uses the madness of craft with double effectiveness. First, though the antic disposition does not replace the madness, it emphasizes Hamlet's distraction by making his mental state a matter of central concern to others (and thus to the audience) from the moment Hamlet returns from his interview with the Ghost uttering “wild and whirling words.” Second, while making the question of the madness more central, the antic disposition simultaneously distances us from Hamlet's real madness and consequently renders that madness more mysterious.

Let's take the last point first. Because Hamlet drops into his chosen role and out of it as occasion demands, the disguise creates an ambiguity that is reflected in the endless critical debate over Hamlet's madness—is he mad or is he not? And if he is mad, when is he mad? Certainly in many instances we are perfectly aware that Hamlet has switched into his antic disposition, and at such moments we are far more conscious of the operation of intelligence and a quick wit than of a warped imagination:

POLONIUS.
What do you read, my lord?
HAMLET.
Words, words, words.
POLONIUS.
What is the matter, my lord?
HAMLET.
Between who?
POLONIUS.
I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
HAMLET.
Slanders, sir; for the satirical rogue says here that old men have grey beards …

[2.2.191-97]

As Polonius says, there is method in such madness, and we delight in it, as Hamlet himself does. In this sense Hamlet's “playing” serves to unveil the hypocrisy in others. But there are moments when the distinction between reality and role is not so clear, moments when it seems that Hamlet has to grasp at the role to disguise emotions that are about to overwhelm him. Such is the case in the “nunnery scene” with Ophelia. Here the antic disposition blends with something that lies very deep in Hamlet's troubled consciousness. The scene is so written that it will never really give up its essential mystery and reveal to us where Hamlet's acting ends and his own agony begins. There are also moments when we are not sure whether Hamlet is feigning at all. The ambiguities constantly being generated by the antic disposition make it impossible to distinguish where sanity ends and madness begins. The uncertainty is deliberate. Through it, Shakespeare shows us that the revenge passion has thrown Hamlet off balance. He also makes us feel the limitations one man labors under when he would know another man's mind.

This brings us back to our initial point about the antic disposition. If Hamlet's own behavior as he endeavors to seem mad tends to make us wonder about his real state, so also does the constant reiteration by everyone else of the statement that Hamlet is mad. Hamlet's ruse gives the opposing forces at the court their primary motivation in the early acts of the play—their desire to discover the reason for his alteration. As a direct result of this disguise. Shakespeare is able to fill the play with references to Hamlet's madness. These come primarily from Claudius and Gertrude:

CLAUDIUS.
                                                  Something have you heard
Of Hamlet's transformation; so call it,
Sith nor th' exterior nor the inward man
Resembles that it was.

[2.2.4-7]

CLAUDIUS.
An' can you by no drift of conference
Get from him why he puts on this confusion,
Grating so harshly all his days of quiet
With turbulent and dangerous lunacy?

[3.1.1-4]

GERTRUDE.
And for your part, Ophelia, I do wish
That your good beauties be the happy cause
Of Hamlet's wildness.

[3.1.37-39]

CLAUDIUS.
I like him not, nor stands it safe with us
To let his madness range.

[3.3.1-2]

GERTRUDE.
                                                                                                    O gentle son,
Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper
Sprinkle cool patience.

[3.4.122-24]

CLAUDIUS.
                                                                                                    How does Hamlet?
GERTRUDE.
Mad as the sea and wind when both contend
Which is the mightier.

[4.1.6-8]

The king and the queen, who are continually discussing Hamlet's “lawless fit,” are echoed by enough members of the court to make us feel that everyone in the play is convinced of the truth of the charge:

HORATIO.
He waxes desperate with imagination.

[1.4.87]

POLONIUS.
                                                  I have found
The very cause of Hamlet's lunacy.

[2.2.48-49]

ROSENCRANTZ.
Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper?

[3.2.337]

Against this kind of subliminal persuasion that Hamlet is mad, we have the prince's own protestations (“I know a hawk from a hand-saw” and so on); however, these are undercut by his occasional admissions to the contrary. In actual fact, Ophelia's comment leaves the most lasting impression on us; it seems to express so much of what we feel:

O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!
The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword,
Th' expectation and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
Th' observ'd of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That suck'd the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason
Like sweet bells jangled out of time, and harsh;
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy. O, woe is me
T' have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

[3.1.150-61]

Ophelia has been misled in this scene by Hamlet's disguise. But such is the poetry of her speech, such her love of Hamlet (resembling ours), that her lament seems to catch the essence of Hamlet's character and situation.

In short, though we know intellectually that Hamlet feigns madness, we submit emotionally to the repeated suggestion that Hamlet is no longer himself. Thus, through this double use of the antic disposition to create ambiguity and to provide a barrage of witnesses who doubt Hamlet's sanity, Shakespeare gets the effect of a madness without debasing Hamlet. Nowhere else in revenge tragedy is the disguise used so inventively or so profoundly.⁸

By itself the dramaturgical manipulation of the audience described above is not sufficient to render fully the experience of madness which is so essential a part of the tragedy of revenge. Shakespeare is neither dishonest nor unwilling to confront the task of representing the madness on the stage as it really is. But here again, Shakespeare goes far beyond the commonplace.

Undoubtedly Shakespeare means us to see that the burden the Ghost has imposed upon Hamlet has altered the prince and that the alteration takes the form of a “distraction.” Hamlet himself chooses this term to express the effect of the Ghost's revelation upon his psyche:

                                                                                                                                            Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe.

[1.5.95-97]

Significantly he uses the term again in his apology to Laertes at the end of the play:

                                                            This presence knows,
And you must needs have heard, how I am punish'd
With a sore distraction. What I have done
That might your nature, honor, and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.
Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet!
If Hamlet from himself be ta'en away,
And when he's not himself does wrong Laertes,
Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it.
Who does it then? His madness. If 't be so,
Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged,
His madness is poor Hamlet's enemy.

[5.2.228-39]

This speech has puzzled critics. Prosser, as we have noted, finds it incomprehensible: “Samuel Johnson and others have wished, and with good warrant,” she says, “that Hamlet had not offered his nonexistent madness as a defense. The curious wording of the speech may, of course, be simply a lapse on Shakespeare's part.”⁹ Prosser rightly sees that for Hamlet to lie at this point would be an act of grotesque cowardliness and senses that, on the contrary, he means to be supremely honest. In truth, his admission to Laertes is both a polite acknowledgment that in his distraction he had indeed wronged his friend and a sincere request for forgiveness. It also records the deeper insight into himself which Hamlet has gained during the period of that distraction.

There could be no better example of the difficulties arising from the alteration in the meaning of the word madness over the centuries. Hamlet will always be misunderstood by those who do not associate inordinate passion with madness and who thus fail to realize that he is hardly claiming a clinical lunacy. The conceits of the speech are grounded in the Elizabethan concept that to act in passion is to be divided from reason and thus from oneself. Shakespeare has chosen a moment when it is impossible for the prince to play false to allow Hamlet to reveal an awareness that he has indeed been sorely distracted. Having this authority from Hamlet himself, let us look into the nature of the distraction.

Exactly what does the real alteration in Hamlet's character involve? How does this alteration differ from those which stem from his disguise? First, there is the change that gives Hamlet the dimensions of the tragic hero. Under the impact of the confrontation with evil, Hamlet is thrust off the level of appearances, turned away from the shadows of the cave, so to speak, toward the light. One aspect of his madness involves a descent into the self which is both painful and elevating. There is a potential for illumination in this suffering and, though Hamlet (unfortunately) dies before attaining full knowledge, his desperate attempts to comprehend the nature of the universe which could harbor so much evil raise him, even in his madness, far above the less sensitive creatures who surround him.

Nevertheless, the passion takes the usual toll. His initial efforts to come to terms with his situation are hampered by the disorientation of his psyche. For example, there is a marked narrowing of the vision in the altered Hamlet. Shakespeare follows his predecessors in pointing out this tendency of the disturbed imagination to limit its focus:

                                                                                                    Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandement all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix'd with baser matter.

[1.5.97-104]

This narrowing of the vision originates, of course, with Hamlet's grief. The shock of his father's death and the subsequent insensitivity of his mother to the loss changes Hamlet's attitude toward the world, which he begins to look upon in disillusion. The ghost, with its revelation that the old king's death was not a natural one but a murder “most foul, strange and unnatural,” gives his son further justification for disgust. Moreover, the betrayal of friendship which Hamlet detects soon afterward in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the seeming betrayal of love which occurs when Polonius makes Ophelia desert Hamlet push him still further into the belief—very real to him but actually only a partial truth—that evil has pervaded every aspect of existence. Hamlet discovers that the values he and the others have lived by constitute nothing more than a communal fantasy and that if he is to find justice he must seek for it within himself.

Being so narrowly focused upon evil, Hamlet's vision of it becomes supersensitive. Not only has he grasped the exact nature of Claudius's guilt. Better than anyone Hamlet analyzes as well the general frailties of mankind—recoiling from the ugliness of particular vices:

                                                  Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,
Stew'd in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty!

[3.4.91-94]

recoiling also from the innate sinfulness of the species:

Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves. …

[3.1.120-28]

But, alas, generalizing from his own experiences, Hamlet unfortunately sees evil even where it is not, making Gertrude's frailty the failing of all women and condemning the honest Ophelia along with the rest. His new outlook makes him reject all that is good in himself and in the world. As a result, Hamlet takes up a position at the opposite pole from the one he held in his days of innocence. His grand vision of the universe and man's exalted place in it is replaced by a feeling that he is surrounded by a “foul and pestilent congregation of vapors.” Man is reduced to a “quintessence of dust.” Hamlet sees all of the world in terms of his own problem and is blinded to other areas of life. Remarkable though his insights may be, they generate an excess which is unhealthy. His limited view of existence is a misleading and dangerous one.

Another result of this concentration upon evil is that Hamlet becomes excessively self-righteous. Just as he is extreme in his searching out and labeling evil, so also he is excessive in his demands for perfection. He tends to set himself up as a god (a very stern god), passing judgments not only on Claudius, Gertrude, Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern but on human frailty in general. Yet he fails to deal equally sternly with his own shortcomings, except to note them in passing. He does recognize that he has faults; he throws that bone to us. But once he has stated them, they are to be dismissed. There is no deep remorse, only the conviction that he himself, as heaven's scourge and minister, must singlehandedly chastise, punish, and reform errant humanity. There is a real heroism in Hamlet in his attempt to carry out the mission which the Ghost has assigned him, yet, ironically, his good qualities and his valid insights into the grubbiness of the world backlash on him into a form of pride, a callousness toward human life that is a further indication of his alteration.

Shakespeare, like Kyd, presents the distraction not as a given state but as a state that one passes into and out of. The critic is most nearly correct if he writes that Hamlet has moments of madness. Of those moments, two stand out as distinctly belonging to the distraction rather than the antic disposition. During and just after the interview with the Ghost Hamlet may definitely be described as mad, and he enters this distracted state again at the end of the play-within-the-play. In this latter moment his madness reaches its greatest intensity. But the degree of madness even at this point falls far short of that found in any other revenger.

Were Hamlet less intelligent than he is, the perception that the time is out of joint, combined with the overwhelming desire to set it right which is a distinguishing characteristic of the Kydian revenger, would drive Hamlet into a lunacy rivaling that of Hieronimo or Titus. Certainly Hamlet never questions the necessity of the act of revenge. When he hesitates to kill Claudius, he does so either because he is not sure that the Ghost's word regarding Claudius's guilt can be trusted or because he believes Claudius's soul stands on better terms with Heaven than he would have it. The question he does ask, however, is “Is it worth it?” Granted that there is a need to act, the very fact that the world is so sordid that the action is required raises the question for Hamlet of whether that action is worthwhile. Rather than rushing headlong into passion, Hamlet is constantly intellectualizing the problem, with the consequence that the madness is greatly attenuated.

A primary point about Hamlet's madness is that Hamlet continually brings it under control. Shakespeare has envisioned a revenger whose comprehension of his situation is far greater than that of his predecessors and who therefore cannot help subjecting his own situation to the scrutiny of reason. Consequently, though in Hamlet there is the usual war for supremacy between the reasonable soul and the sensitive soul, here the scales tilt on the side of reason, with the result that the intensity of the madness is much reduced. This creates a problem for Hamlet, for as long as he insists upon handling on an intellectual level a matter which is best dealt with in a high rage, he is unable to accomplish his end. This is the uniqueness of Shakespeare's revenger: Hamlet's mind is one which is compelled to reason things out, and though he tries hard to work himself into a passion, the very act of thinking so precisely on the event turns his mind back to the intellectual aspects of his situation. Where Hieronimo, Titus, and Antonio push themselves further and further into madness, Hamlet, though his desire is the same as theirs, paradoxically keeps pulling himself out of it.

This tendency to nail down his passion with the hammer of logic is best illustrated by the soliloquy at the end of act 2. Meditating upon the ability of the player to muster up passion “all for nothing, / For Hecuba!” Hamlet condemns himself as a “dull and muddy-mettled rascal” and, deploring his “delay,” works himself up into the passion he has envied. However, when anger overtakes him and he begins to rage at Claudius (“Bloody, bawdy villain! / Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!”), Hamlet immediately draws himself up—the conduct that necessarily accompanies the revenge action he rejects as unbecoming. To be in the passion is to behave “like a very drab, a scullion.” The result is a return to logic. The mental processes of the soliloquy are halted and their direction reversed with “About, my brains!” and for the remainder of the speech Hamlet proceeds not through passion but through logic. (Guilty creatures sitting at a play have proclaimed their malefactions. The guilty Claudius will see a play; he will confess his guilt.) The irascible anger of the revenge passion is brought under control.

Still, the attempt to proceed logically toward his end is constantly being frustrated because the end itself is an irrational one. The immediate purpose of the play-within-the-play—to determine whether Claudius is guilty or innocent—seems sane enough, but its ultimate aim is that implied by Hamlet's “If 'a do blench, I know my course.” No matter how salutary it may be in its public effects, as it relates to Hamlet personally this intention involves the prince in an act of murder. Because the mission which the Ghost has thrust upon him commits him to an end directly counter to reason, his efforts to think his way out of this dilemma remain unsuccessful. The commitment itself (as it affects him psychologically) betrays the predilection toward madness.

Certainly Shakespeare's treatment of the madness motif is far more complex than any we have seen so far. The various strands that go into its design are so intricately woven together that it becomes impossible to isolate and meticulously label any one. The antic disposition, technically belonging to the disguise convention, contributes skillfully to the madness motif and therefore creates more than one paradox. It conceals Hamlet's intentions from Claudius but also warns the latter that Hamlet must be watched. It allays our suspicions that the lunacy is anything but feigned, yet subtly arouses in us the feeling that Hamlet is indeed distracted. The sore distraction is also mysterious. Hamlet's flights into passion and his steady commitment to pursue revenge to its inevitable end inform us that Hamlet has embarked upon a course linked with madness in all of the orthodox treatises of the period. Yet his remarkable intelligence, his unquestionable virtue, and his supersensitive insights into the nature of his predicament make us hesitate to doubt his inherent sanity. The result is that while the madness is there, it never intrudes hysterically upon us, diverting our attention from the truly dramatic to the merely theatrical. Shakespeare has seen the essential relationship of the motif to the archetypal experience and has utilized it as it was designed to be used, but his personal vision has deepened and extended its original significance. In the process the “madness” itself is transformed. Ironically, the “mad” Hamlet becomes, in the words of C. S. Lewis, an image of “man—haunted man—with his mind on the frontier of two worlds, man unable either quite to reject or quite to admit the supernatural, man struggling to get something done as man has struggled from the beginning, yet incapable of achievement because of his inability to understand either himself or his fellows or the real quality of the universe which has produced him.”¹⁰

III

Just as Shakespeare's Ghost, depicted as the spirit of a great and noble man, seems at first divorced from its vengeful forebearers and as Hamlet's madness, projecting as an antic disposition, is only gradually perceived to cloak the traditional distraction, so the play-within-the-play in Hamlet appears to have little in common with the conventional fifth-act massacre in which the protagonist takes revenge upon the offender.

In a majority of the revenge tragedies, the play-within-the-play occurs in the concluding moments of the action. Shakespeare has moved the play-within-the-play forward from act 5 to act 3; it no longer belongs to the denouement but becomes, as Righter points out,

the strategic center of the plot, the turning-point of the action [as well as] the centre of the tragedy in a more symbolic sense, the focal point from which a preoccupation with appearance and reality, truth and falsehood, expressed in theatrical terms, radiates both backward and forward in time.¹¹

In other revenge tragedies, the play-within-the-play becomes a trap, designed to isolate the murderer physically in a locked room, thus rendering him vulnerable to attack. Although Hamlet calls his play “The Mousetrap,” his primary intention in planning it is not so much to trap Claudius in body as to trap him in mind. Claudius's conscience is what Hamlet wishes to prick; he means only to make the king reveal his guilt. Hamlet's play-within-the-play seems more a test of the Ghost's honesty than an attempt to maneuver Claudius into a sealed-off world where his power no longer protects him.

In other revenge plays, the protagonist kills his enemies within the mock play—one murder, if not several, gives evidence of the horrors to which the madness of revenge can lead. Hamlet commits no murder in the Gonzago play. Significantly, where Hieronimo, Titus, Antonio, and Vindice made themselves the heroes of their own productions and played the roles of murderers, Hamlet remains outside of his play, as in fact, does his victim.¹² This arrangement clearly distinguishes Hamlet from the other revengers. He sits in judgment of the play; he does not participate in it. He is trying to understand the real world, not to create a subjective one. The play-within-the-play motif, too, has been civilized by Shakespeare's pen.

All of these changes are dictated by the requirements of Shakespeare's personal vision as regards the character of his revenger. The revenger is an unusual kind of tragic hero, and Hamlet is unique even among these. In tragedies such as Macbeth or King Lear or Oedipus Rex, the protagonist is a person who sets up a counterground to the ground of being at the very outset of the play. These heroes try immediately to establish a world defined in terms that they find compatible with their own desires, one which denies or ignores reality. The action of the drama concerns their attempt to assert the validity of this counterground and their consequent failure to do so. In revenge tragedy the situation is slightly different. The protagonist starts out in touch with the ground of being and is later called upon to commit an action which requires him to establish that counterground. This is accomplished only at the end of the drama in the play-within-the-play, at which point we see the illusory world established by the hero and find it a world describable in terms of madness. Once the playwright postulates a revenger who exercises a high degree of control over his madness, as Shakespeare does in Hamlet, he is bound to give the play-within-the-play a link with reason that previous revenge plays, with their insistence upon the hero's subjection to the passion, could not have had. Hamlet is unique among revengers in that while he does try to manipulate events in his world, he is at the same time constantly trying to discover how his own thoughts and actions fit into the universe established in the symbolic constructions of his society. Any world that he creates, therefore, must exhibit that innate rationality which is as much a part of him as is the irrational goal that rationality must serve.

The greater objectivity of the world Hamlet creates in The Murder of Gonzago is best appreciated when set against the subjective world put together by Hieronimo in Soliman and Perseda. The contrast makes the specific functions of each playlet clearer. Righter (and subsequent critics) stress that in Soliman and Perseda “everything that seems illusory is in fact real,” meaning that the greater truth is to be found in Hieronimo's version of events.¹³ The judgment of the event made by his audience, however—that Hieronimo has acted against reason and human law—reflects another valid level of truth. Hieronimo himself, far from being an exponent of reality, is guilty of several kinds of deception. He undertakes actions in the play which violate the very nature of art by usurping its illusion as a cloak for reality: he deliberately deceives the spectators. The actors are also cheated; they are asked to take on roles and find that other actors, who were to murder them in play, are playing in earnest. Moreover, the revenger is deceived about the role he himself is playing. Hieronimo casts himself as God's agent of justice but is in reality a murderer. The illusory nature of Hieronimo's world is further emphasized by the chaos resulting from the old man's decision to instruct each of his players to speak in a different foreign language. Under these conditions the action could only come across to the theater audience as babble, and the resulting confusion serves to underscore the chaos in Hieronimo's mind. This is all set in perspective when the illusion ends and Hieronimo is forced to step back into reality, where his actions are looked upon as heinous. In Soliman and Perseda, art is used to deceive; the revenger has reached that stage of madness which tries to make illusion into reality.

This is not the case in Hamlet. In turning to art for assistance, Hamlet shows himself to be a learned and judicious critic. He clearly understands “the purpose of playing, whose end,” he says, “is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3.2.20-24). It is significant that Hamlet does not enter the play himself; for him there is no illusory world in which the normal laws of society are inapplicable. He has not set up an antiworld where his own will reigns supreme. In preparing The Murder of Gonzago for its courtly audience, Hamlet creates an objective world, one which reproduces fairly accurately a reality that those outside of it—Claudius, in particular—can recognize and respond to meaningfully. So accurately does this play-world copy nature that Claudius, discerning his own deeds in the vile actions of Luciano, is nearly brought to repentance. Thus, there is a great difference in the degree of objectivity between the world created by Hamlet and that created by Hieronimo. In watching The Murder of Gonzago one never has the feeling that the play was created by a madman. Hamlet's drama seems to do exactly what Hamlet says drama should do—hold a mirror up to nature.¹⁴

Obviously the play motif has been adapted to fit the dramatist's personal vision. Still, the changes are all instituted in ways that retain the relationship of the motif to the experience which underlies it. If the script was drawn from the player's repertory, it is nonetheless viewed as a creation of the revenger. Hamlet, like his predecessors, still plans the production, selects the script, and authors key lines in it. In addition, though the world Hamlet creates has a greater degree of objectivity, it remains limited in scope, centering strictly upon the poisoning of a king. It gives us evidence that Hamlet's vision of life has been noticeably narrowed. Again, the play-within-the-play may come earlier in the text, but only because Shakespeare has compressed the whole of the Kydian form into three acts. As rational as Hamlet's stated purpose of catching the conscience of the king may be, the prince is taking this honorable course only because he ultimately has a more sinister goal to which the first is a necessary bridge. Hamlet has told us that if the king “do blench, I know my course.” The irrational purpose which lies latent in Hamlet's heart and comes to the surface after Claudius interrupts the play will bring Hamlet to the point of murder before the third act ends.

The actions characteristic of the revenger's madness which are omitted from the play-within-the-play, instead of being contained within it, follow immediately after. Ultimately we find that the experience previously connected with the play motif is not violated at all, for under the spell of the play Hamlet does meet his victim in a closed room—Gertrude's closet—and he does kill. The connection between Hamlet's play and the murder has gone unnoticed because Polonius dies in the place of the king. This innovation—allowing the hero to stab the wrong man—artistically disguises the strictness with which the configuration is adhered to; nevertheless, the death of Polonius is far more significant in the structure of the play than has generally been noticed.

Most scholars will agree that on his own Hamlet was unable to push his psyche into a madness sufficiently violent to allow him to bring the revenge to its obvious conclusion. The play-within-the-play, however, works Hamlet up into a state of excitement having every symptom of the required madness. Hamlet watches the play, sees the offense reenacted, and obtains certain proof of Claudius's guilt. The spirit of revenge, awakened in him by the experience, kindles an exhilarated anger in Hamlet's psyche. Though he wills to be only “cruel, not unnatural,” yet in truth he loses control. During the remainder of the act his passion increases as his mind becomes more and more absorbed in the emotions aroused by the performance.

Hamlet's motive for presenting the play was logical, but his reaction to it is not. In the scenes growing out of “The Mousetrap,” Shakespeare engages Hamlet in three actions which display his madness. All three take place within the framework of a journey to his mother's chamber, where he has been summoned to answer for the offense given by his play. Shakespeare sets the tone of this section by bringing in thoughts and images that explain at once why the eternal abode of Revenge was figured by poets of his era as adjacent to Hell. Hamlet goes into the scene feeling the same kinship with the irrational elements of the universe that Antonio and Hieronimo had voiced:

'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 bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.

[3.2.388-92]

This speech of Hamlet's, better than any other, suggests the state of mind the play-within-the-play has left him in.¹⁵

In the first of the three actions displaying the passion of revenge at work within Hamlet's psyche, Shakespeare gives his protagonist the opportunity to complete his revenge: Hamlet comes upon Claudius praying. As the paths of these two antagonists cross, we no longer see any objectivity about Hamlet's attitude toward Claudius. The prince is ready to murder his uncle:

Now might I do it pat, now 'a is a-praying;
And now I'll do 't.

[3.3.73-74]

Here again, the old logic which is so characteristic of Hamlet pulls the young man back from his outburst of passion, but this time it is a diseased logic—macabre, sinister, unhealthy. It is the logic of the committed revenger:

                                                                                                              That would be scann'd:
A villain kills my father, and for that
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
'A took my father grossly, full of bread,
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May,
And how his audit stands who knows save heaven?
But in our circumstance and course of thought
'Tis heavy with him. And am I then revenged,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season'd for his passage?
No!
Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in th' incestious pleasure of his bed,
At game a-swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't—
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.

[3.3.75-95]

Hamlet, finally, does not kill the king. But his hesitation has no root in pity, piety, or remorse. It is a perverse delay, stemming directly from an excessive passion—a madness—that can never be adequately explained in terms of his “antic disposition.” And that madness was aroused by the play-within-the-play.

In this first episode Hamlet's own thoughts give testimony to the disturbed state of his psyche. In the second, the same extremity in Hamlet's behavior is conveyed to us through Gertrude's fear. So distraught is Hamlet as he rushes in upon his mother hurling charges of guilt that Gertrude is concerned for her life (“What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murther me? Help ho!” [3.4.21-22]). The actor playing Hamlet must take his cue from the queen's response; he must behave with a ferocity that will inspire terror. Once more we see that Hamlet is at last possessed by that passion which the Ghost had wished to stir in him and which he had chided himself for lacking.

The second episode leads into the third. While in this passion, Hamlet lunges with his sword at a voice behind the arras, suspecting that the king is hidden there, and kills old Polonius. His impulsiveness here and the callousness which follows the deed strike us as strange and unnatural. This, too, is something Hamlet would not have done in a saner moment. It, too, testifies to the strong effect the play-within-the-play has had upon him.

These three episodes culminate in the climactic confrontation between Hamlet and the queen. About this scene Hamlet might well lament, “How all occasions do inform against me.” Chance would have it that when Hamlet finally does reach an emotional state that leaves him ready to “drink hot blood,” he happens to be summoned by his mother rather than his uncle and, thus involved, expends all his energies against her. With the time so ripe, Hamlet occupies himself with a matter that is only secondary, much to the chagrin of the Ghost, who reappears to remind him of the more important goal:

                                                  Do not forget! This visitation
Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.

[3.4.110-11]

By the time Hamlet finishes with the queen, his passion is exhausted; the opportunity for action has again slipped away.

Throughout this dialogue with Gertrude, Hamlet remains highly overwrought, and, intriguingly, the action growing out of the play-within-the-play ends with a discussion of whether or not Hamlet is mad:

HAMLET.
Look where he goes, even now, out at the portal.
                                                                                                                                                      Exit Ghost
QUEEN.
This is the very coinage of your brain,
This bodiless creation ecstasy
Is very cunning in.
HAMLET.
                                                                                                                                                      Ecstasy?
My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time,
And makes as healthful music. It is not madness
That I have utt'red. Bring me to the test,
And I the matter will reword, which madness
Would gambol from. Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that flattering unction to your soul,
That not your trespass but my madness speaks.

[3.4.136-46]

The treatment of insanity in this concluding scene puts before us once again those mysterious questions always being raised in Hamlet: How far can one human mind be entered by another? What can Hamlet know of Gertrude's soul? What can she know of his, or of her own? Which of them is really right about the Ghost? These mysteries are pondered when Gertrude, amazed by the responses of Hamlet to the sudden appearance of the Ghost (which she herself cannot see), calls her son mad. The queen is wrong, first because the Ghost is quite real and second, as Hamlet points out, because she would rather clutch at the notion that Hamlet is demented than admit the accuracy of the pictures he has drawn of her. But her errors do not make her statement untrue. Gertrude is right enough about the emotional turmoil going on in Hamlet's mind. Hamlet, on the other hand, claims perfect sanity. “It is not madness / That I have utt'red,” says he. “My pulse as yours doth temperately keep time, / And makes as healthful music.” Hamlet, too, is wrong, though more nearly correct than Gertrude. He is correct in that no “ecstasy” of his brain had produced the Ghost, as his mother supposes. He is also correct in asserting that his accusations concerning Gertrude's behavior contain much truth. If his mind can still make these logical connections, he is no lunatic. Still, Hamlet is mistaken when he claims absolute sanity. This is a play in which the audience usually knows more than the characters do, more even, than the tragic hero himself knows. The audience, having heard Hamlet's satanic logic in the scene with Claudius, having viewed demeanor so wild upon his entrance into Gertrude's chamber that the queen was moved to scream for help, and having had the dead body of Polonius on the stage before them through the remainder of the scene to testify to the extent to which Hamlet was overwrought and distracted—this audience would hardly acquiesce to the statement that Hamlet was “temperate” or that no hint of madness was evident. The three episodes following Hamlet's “Mousetrap” are deliberately designed to depict the kind of excessive passion that the Elizabethans would have classified as a madness.

The elements that we expect to find associated with the play-within-the-play—a madness and a murder—are present, if not in the play, then directly following it. Hamlet's play, like the other motifs in this tragedy, reflects a harmonious merger of the old form and the new vision. In at once affirming Hamlet's sanity and giving rise to his most extended bout with madness, the play-within displays the complexities of the human mind, which can pursue the most irrational of ends in a seemingly sane and reasonable manner and can appear the most serene when the volcanic passions lurking in its depths are closest to erupting.

IV

Emrys Jones has argued that Shakespeare's plays should be seen in terms of a two-part structure, and this certainly appears to be true of Hamlet.¹⁶ The play breaks down into two parts—that leading up to an outbreak of madness during which Polonius is killed and that falling away from it. In the first half, Hamlet is attempting to manipulate events (and, as he laments, finds that nothing he does works out as he intends it to). He wants to organize the world in terms of revenge. In the second half, Hamlet lets the world take its own course, confident that “there's a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will” (5.2.10-11). Significantly, though Shakespeare makes no fuss about it, once Hamlet resigns himself to the will of Providence, the Ghost, so potent an influence on Hamlet when he was teetering on the brink of madness, is not heard from again.

Although Hamlet has come in slow stages to see more about the ground of being itself, he never has time to reach a full awareness. Unfortunately, the forces he had already set in motion by entering into commerce with the Ghost cannot be laid to rest. What we find in the denouement of the play is a study of the way the destructive forces initiated by the Ghost work to restore the balance in nature only through tremendous waste and ruined potential. The motifs through which this final aspect of the experience is worked out include the excess (or multiple murders) and the death of the revenger.

Earlier in this chapter we stated that the excess was embodied in the action of the play rather than in the behavior of the Ghost. Let's now examine Shakespeare's adaptation of this excess motif in more detail. Directors often think of the Polonius / Ophelia / Laertes episodes as extraneous to the main action, as one of several subplots included only to provide contrast to the major plot, and thus feel free to cut such scenes drastically. But this accusation of structural superfluity is invalid. Many scenes that may appear tacked on are logically inevitable to the action itself.

The murder of Polonius is the most important act of excess growing out of the catalytic play-within-the-play. Surely this is excess. The follies of Polonius were hardly mammoth enough to merit so terrible a fate. Nor did Hamlet wish to harm him. Yet his death is directly attributable to the revenge desire. In the attempt to restore justice, the revenger inadvertently commits a gross injustice: here is excess.

This event, the climax of Hamlet's sore distraction, is pivotal in the structure of Shakespeare's drama.¹⁷ It, in a sense, completes the action in which Hamlet is the revenger, just as it initiates the revenge action of Laertes. Hamlet has committed the deed, ironically missing his target but nevertheless setting in motion the same inevitable consequences as surely as if he had killed the real villain. Shakespeare creates an interesting variation on a theme (but a variation perfectly in line with experience because it even more clearly defines the nature of excess) by having most of the waste in the story of Hamlet's revenge follow from a murder that Hamlet never intended to commit.

Polonius's death has consequences almost immediately in the madness and death of Ophelia, another example of the chaos wrought when passion is let loose. She, too, falls prey to excess. Hamlet speaks of the way the base nature, coming between the “fell incensed points / Of mighty opposites,” is cut down. The innocent nature, suffers a similar fate. Ophelia's death corresponds in significance to the deaths of Marston's Julio and Kyd's Duke of Castile, but the dramaturgy is far superior. In keeping with his general tendency to avoid hysteria, Shakespeare stresses the victim's innocence instead of the revenger's fury and arranges matters so that her death occurs through natural causes rather than intolerable violence. With the motif so manipulated, the audience is able to feel the loss more directly, while being conscious at the same time that the characteristic excess which flows out of the passion of revenge brings that loss about.

Another wasteful death, that of Laertes, also follows from Hamlet's stabbing of Polonius. Much has been made of the contrasts between Laertes and Hamlet, which are well enough known to need no repeating here, but the experiential relationship of the episode to the motif of excess is often ignored. The plot structure suggests a theme that is strangely Aeschylean: one revenge action inevitably begets another. Once Hamlet has killed Polonius, Laertes, his son, is bound to seek the life of Hamlet. It is a remarkable twist (and a precedent Tourneur will follow) that Shakespeare actually concludes Hamlet's revenge action and begins a new one in the middle of the play. Yet the “new” revenge action is a natural—indeed, an inevitable—development from Hamlet's own flubbed attempt to kill the king. It exposes still another aspect of excess.

In Laertes' revenge action, all of the relationships are changed. Hamlet is now the villain. Claudius, stepping out of that role, plays a very dishonest “ghost” to Laertes' avenger, spurring this young man to excesses far less fortuitous than Hamlet's are and revealing in that role why poison is so frequently associated with him. Assisted by Claudius, Laertes traps Hamlet in a kind of play-within-the-play with rapiers, and the excess stemming from Laertes' attempt against Hamlet's life leads to the unplanned deaths of Claudius and Gertrude, as well as to the death of the avenger, Laertes himself. The whole sequence of revenge is played over again in little, and the effect is to reinforce the lessons offered earlier about the uncontrollable nature of revenge.

Through this step-by-step destruction of the Polonius family, excess is embodied in the action of the play. Accidental though this waste may be, Hamlet wreaks as much havoc merely by harboring the desire to kill Claudius as other revengers do in actually committing the deed. Once again we find that Shakespeare, in pressing into service a revenge tragedy convention, disguises it skillfully, refines it aesthetically, and nonetheless uses it perceptively to illuminate the archetypal experience which gave it birth.

V

It is always a mistake to assume, especially with Shakespeare, that a playwright is doing only one thing at a time. This is particularly true in Hamlet and nowhere more so than in the fourth and fifth acts of the play. On one hand, we can speak of Polonius's death as the murder we normally associate with the end of the play-within-the-play, of its giving rise to the multiple deaths so characteristic of the revenge action, and of its being the direct cause of Hamlet's demise. On the other hand, we can still speak in act 4 of Hamlet's delay, for Claudius is still alive, Hamlet's motive is still to slay him, and the major dramatic action of the plot is still building to that moment when Hamlet will force the poisoned wine down the villain's throat. And we should speak of it, for the primary conflict, the most interesting conflict, is the cat-and-mouse game between Hamlet and his villainous uncle. For the first time, the protagonist and antagonist of the revenge tragedy form no longer merely coexist in lines of action that run parallel, as in Antonio's Revenge, but are mighty opposites, men of indominable energies and piercing minds truly pitted one against the other.

Hamlet is the first revenge play in which the delay lingers on as a theme after the curtain has fallen on the play-within-a-play. It is also the one play in which the full value of the delay motif is realized. On the simplest level, the delay is caused by the need to test the validity of the ghost's message and to determine Claudius's guilt. But the delay continues on beyond that point, and the very causes that extend it had existed even before the test was conceived. There is unquestionably something deep in Hamlet, something on which he himself, for all his self-analysis, cannot put his finger, that is responsible for his procrastination.

Some authorities have argued that there is no delay. Those who take this stand have Hamlet's constant musings to refute them:

                                                                                                              Yet I
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing … it cannot be
But I am pigeon-liver'd, and lack gall
To make oppression bitter, or ere this
I should 'a' fatted all the region kites
With this slave's offal.

[2.2.566-80]

                                                                                                              Now whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th' event …

[4.4.39-41]

Do you not come your tardy son to chide,
That, laps'd in time and passion, lets go by
Th' important acting of your dread command?

[3.4.106-8]

Since Hamlet can thus chide himself for procrastination, it becomes folly to ignore the motif of delay. One may feel, with Robert Nelson, that “Hamlet upbraids himself too much” or that “these are the reproaches of an impatient man” rather than a slothful one, yet one must admit that Hamlet does make an issue of the delay.¹⁸ And well that he does.

In these speeches the prince speaks of a condition in which there is a will to action and a simultaneous inability to act. Many critics therefore locate a flaw in Hamlet. Hamlet himself has spoken of persons whose characters are marred by “some vicious mole of nature,” and such critics assume that Shakespeare means us to apply this circumstance to Hamlet himself. Since Hamlet attributes his procrastination to his “thinking too precisely on th' event,” his intellectualization of the revenge problem is linked to the tragic-flaw theory and taken to be the flaw.

The drawback is that Hamlet is not a tragedy of character in the same sense as is Macbeth or Othello or King Lear: in those plays there would be no tragedy if the protagonist were not ambitious or jealous or rash. Macbeth, Othello, and Lear are each faced with a right choice and a wrong choice and were they constitutionally able to make the right choice the problem which caused their suffering would have solved itself. The tragedy in Hamlet is a tragedy of situation, as in Oedipus Rex or Antigone, one in which the protagonist must make a choice between two right actions, so that either choice will be wrong. Hamlet must kill Claudius; no one but Hamlet can bring him to justice. Yet killing is an unnatural act, repulsive to the human mind. Moreover, in doing the deed Hamlet will doom himself; he no more than Claudius can commit murder and live. The tragedy lies in the situation and Hamlet's awareness of it; therefore, the tragic flaw theory is unnecessary.

What, then, are we to make of Hamlet's excuse for procrastination—of such remarks as Hamlet's “thinking too precisely on th' event,” “conscience does make cowards of us all,” and so on? What is the “craven scruple” that Hamlet suspects exists within him? We submit that in the delay Shakespeare has embodied an instinct which is as deeply seated in the human psyche as the instinct for justice—the innate awareness that it is wrong to kill. Hamlet tries with all his will to suppress it but it keeps coming back to him, not in the form of such moral platitudes as might flow from a George Barnwell but in the form of an irrepressible fear of damnation. The point is nicely made by C. S. Lewis, who would trace Hamlet's hesitation “not to a physical fear of dying, but to a fear of being dead” because, he supposed, “any serious attention to the state of being dead, unless it is limited by some definite religious or anti-religious doctrine, must paralyze the will by introducing infinite uncertainties and rendering all motives inadequate.”¹⁹

There is much truth in Lewis's speculation. Because of the mysterious nature of the Ghost and the magnitude of the demand it makes, Hamlet can never be completely confident that his act against Claudius will be a justifiable one. He finds it difficult to align himself wholeheartedly with the forces that the Ghost represents; he goes beyond the Ghost and questions the authority itself. One of his major purposes in introducing The Murder of Gonzago, it will be remembered, is to determine whether the Ghost is an evil spirit sent to play upon his hatred for Claudius and to encourage him to damn himself. The well-being of his soul after death is a question of primary concern to Hamlet throughout the play. Even in act 5 when he asserts the rightness of the deed he has undertaken Hamlet puts the matter in such a way that he could as well be expressing doubt as certainty:

                                                  Is't not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is't not to be damn'd,
To let this canker of our nature come
In further evil?

[5.2.67-70]

Because he chooses the interrogative rather than the imperative form in addressing Horatio, Hamlet appears almost to be asking for reassurance. Is it a damnable act? Is it not? Horatio gives no answer. Nor can Hamlet. The only thing of which he seems to be certain is that he will have to pay with his own life for killing Claudius (“A man's life's no more than to say ‘one’”; “since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is't to leave betimes?”). Thus, it is likely that the fear of the undiscovered country which first made him hesitate over suicide and later holds him back from taking revenge stems from his own sense that the act, necessary as it might be, is a damnable one. No man can take the life of another with impunity.

For most of the play, Hamlet tries to crush his own awareness of this fact. In a way it shames him. He sees the recognition of any authority beyond that of the ghost as cowardice. To be truly brave, to live in accordance with the dictates of honor, is to dare damnation, as Laertes does, to throw conscience and grace to the profoundest pit of hell, and to be willing to cut one's enemy's throat in church. Hamlet is not so reckless. But he views his scruples again and again as “craven.”

Shakespeare's profound treatment of the delay, adapted to serve his personal vision by giving us still another glimpse of the mysteries of the human condition, illuminates the revenge experience in two ways. First, more clearly than any other dramatist, Shakespeare uses the delay to render the full significance of the act of revenge to the revenger. It is a damnable act, and for the first time we are shown how this knowledge affects the psyche of the hero. Just as Hamlet is the only revenger to question the authority of the ghost and to dedicate a good portion of his energies to testing its honesty, so he is the only one to be fully conscious of the possible effects of the deed of revenge upon his eternal life and to specifically articulate his fears. In other revengers—Hieronimo, Titus, Antonio, and Vindice—the intellectual process is so thoroughly anesthetized by the madness that they fail to perceive their continually devolving spiritual state and end blinded by illusion. Hamlet, at least, perceives all the ironies and complexities, the paradoxes and the tragedies of the situation. Second, Shakespeare's handling of the delay throws a fuller light upon the importance of the madness convention as symbolic of a state of mind which is essential to the revenge act. What Shakespeare is saying about the relationship between the delay and the madness confirms what we have been attempting to stress throughout this book—that given Elizabethan patterns of thought, the revenger must go mad in order to commit the deed, for what man in full possession of his reason would willingly choose damnation? Revenge is, in the end, a crime of passion. The “craven scruple,” whether one part wisdom and three parts cowardice or one part cowardice and three parts wisdom, is only overcome by a rage so close to insanity that it has no perception of reality. How Hamlet yearns in his will to be so steeped in passion! Yet because his intellect resists the madness he must remain, in his own eyes at least, a procrastinator.

What is the solution to Hamlet's dilemma? There comes a point in the play when Hamlet overcomes his fear. At this point he undergoes a second transformation, this marked by a change in the direction of his will. Where formerly he had seen himself as a scourge and minister, acting on behalf of Heaven, had in his pride and his impatience with evil developed a stern intolerance of the failings of others, and ironically had found chance and accident consistently frustrating the ends he had willed, he comes, after his journey abroad, to view events in a wider frame of reference. His vision remains limited; it is still a relatively pessimistic one, still very much more aware of the world's evils than of its goods. Yet the self is less at the center of Hamlet's thoughts. His attitude toward death in the graveyard scenes has dimensions that were completely lacking in his first soliloquy, where Hamlet feels death in an immediate and personal way. His perspective seems to have been expanded, and part of that new perspective includes a change in attitude toward the human will. Hamlet moves toward a solution to his dilemma by resigning his own will to that of Providence. He still feels compelled to kill the king, but he has progressed to a point where he can abandon active plotting.

Having discovered through his experiences a higher authority than the Ghost, Hamlet will be guided by that authority. Here again we find Shakespeare altering the conventional motif. This transformation in the hero entails a new cause for delay—Hamlet must wait for Heaven to provide the proper moment for Claudius's death. Other revengers have “waited” for Heaven to act, of course, but they waited complainingly, with impatience and rage and doubt. There is none of this now in Hamlet. In this second part of the play delay has been transformed into “readiness.” Where the delay in attaining the necessary state of madness in the first half of the play had been a reproach which required the Ghost to reappear to “whet thy almost blunted purpose,” the delay, under Providence, brings a sense of quietude and acceptance of the world as it is, in place of the earlier desire to organize and manipulate the world.

This handling of the delay, too, is a reflection of Shakespeare's personal vision. Hamlet's dilemma is the dilemma of man, and the only solution, as Shakespeare poses it, is to accept it as part of the inevitable condition of being human, to admit the fact that man is caught in a situation which allows for heroism and allows for illumination but exacts its return for these glories in suffering. To live life at the level of full awareness is to discover that the human condition is necessarily a tragic one. This alteration does not distort the motif; rather, it relates the delay more solidly and meaningfully to those motifs which surround it—the madness, over which for the first time the delay has won out, and the death of the avenger, which Hamlet is now spiritually prepared to accept with dignity.

VI

There is nothing really unexpected about Shakespeare's use of the death-of-the-avenger motif. That Hamlet die is every bit as morally and aesthetically essential to the play as that Claudius be disposed of. Were Claudius to live, we would have to believe that the world is absurd, as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do when they venture onto Tom Stoppard's stage. Were Hamlet to live, the world would seem immoral. As it is, the play tells us that the universe, though incomprehensible, is nonetheless ultimately just. This is the burden that the final motif must carry, and Shakespeare brings it off magnificently.

One of the remarkable things about Shakespeare's handling of the death of Hamlet is the careful way the playwright controls the emotional responses of the audience so that the ending of the play conveys the desired tragic effect. What Marston had failed to do, Shakespeare succeeds at: he retains our sympathies for the hero and makes us believe in his suffering.

As in Antonio's Revenge, there is the suggestion in the last act that events are being watched by an eternal eye. Not that Heaven applauds the revenger's excess—far from it. Shakespeare simply has Hamlet introduce the notion that Providence has been acting in his life all along:

Our indiscretion sometime serves us well
When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will—

[5.2.8-11]

And he indicates, in Hamlet's meditations on death, that things are continuing thus:

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. …

[5.2.219-22]

More important, Hamlet (as we have seen) has put himself in divine hands. The action in the final scenes—that is, the competition between Hamlet and Laertes—is to be taken as the expression of the will he has chosen to obey. With very skillful dramatic planning, Shakespeare obtains a delicate balance that allows us to see that Providence is at work while at the same time maintaining that the ways of Providence are mysterious. If the effect of this introduction of Providence upon Hamlet is to free him from the pressures that worked upon his psyche under the influence of the Ghost, the effect upon us is to direct our attention to a center of responsibility other than the order of nature, so that we no longer hold Hamlet totally culpable for the ensuing carnage, though, in actual fact, it stems from his earlier commitment to revenge.

To further enable us to sympathize with Hamlet, Shakespeare shifts a great deal of the responsibility for the deaths that follow to Claudius. In the earlier acts Claudius had maintained appearances. He had looked reasonable; in rejecting him Hamlet seemed peevish and ungrateful. So long as Hamlet remained in control of the plot, Claudius was distanced from us. Hamlet's abdication of control put Claudius in command of the action. This dramaturgical strategy has the happy result of letting the king's own intrigues become the means through which he is brought down. But at the same time it draws the usurper-king closer to the footlights, displays his infinite resourcefulness in exploiting others, and at last exposes his wickedness. With Claudius emerging as the villain and Hamlet taking on more and more the aspect of victim, our emotions fall in line with the planned ending. So appalled are we by the actions of Claudius, as he makes both young men his dupes, that we give our sympathies entirely to Hamlet.

The machinery involved in Hamlet's death is skillfully disguised in the rush of events at the close of the drama. It is Laertes who gives Hamlet his death wound, thus providing Hamlet with the distinction of being the first revenger to suffer from this retribution before he has actually taken revenge—the villain, Claudius, is still very much alive. This inverted order of events is rendered feasible by the filial relationship of Laertes to Polonius. Despite the injustice of Laertes' methods, the wound which he gives Hamlet is deserved, for Hamlet must answer for the murder of Laertes' father. With his time on earth now at a premium, Hamlet hastes to finish off Claudius, not in cold blood but in a burst of passion which comes naturally from him when Laertes informs him of the king's vile role in the duel. The wounded Hamlet lives to die after Claudius, and thus also appears to die as a result of killing Claudius, and the demands of the convention are thus at once preserved and refreshed.

In handling the death-of-the-avenger motif Shakespeare avoids the trap that Marston fell into of being too explicit about the relationship between the various orders of justice, of reducing them to coherence and thus making the mysterious into the ridiculous. What Shakespeare does not tell us is whether Hamlet's final passionate stabbing of Claudius is a reversion to the self that was under the control of the Ghost—for it is an act of passion—or whether at this moment Hamlet is being guided by Providence. If the former is true, presumably the act is a damnable one. Is Hamlet damned? No answer is provided. Often as the question has been raised during the course of the play, we are not invited to ask it now. Horatio, in saying may “flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,” hints at salvation, but he is no seer, has no authority to predict, and so must be understood to mean only that Hamlet is at peace; his words are best taken as a tribute to the greatness that is gone.

A question that can be asked, however, is, what has Hamlet learned? The death of the avenger motif, here, does not include within it tragic knowledge, not in the sense that Oedipus or even Lear attain that knowledge.

The tone of the play, established by the complex blending of the form, the action, and the language, tells us that we are witnessing a tragedy. And tragedy implies a knowledge achieved through suffering. The play raises this expectation of tragic awareness only to dash it. By continually pointing to unrealized potential, particularly through metaphor, the play suggests the level that could be achieved, making the audience painfully aware that there is no transcendance in the killing of Claudius. As the reunion between Lear and Cordelia suggests the possibility of universal reconciliation, a reconciliation never realized, so Hamlet's dazzling flashes of insight suggest a higher order of justice than is ever attained.

The tragedy in the Elizabethan-Jacobean plays is experienced through the tragic form of the play itself and is not identical with the knowledge gained by the hero. Hamlet is an excellent example of a play that knows more than the hero does. Prince Hamlet has unique potential. He could have become an ideal king. He is honorable, sensitive to the needs of others, mindful of his duties, a keen observer of other men. Nor is his intelligence merely witty; there is wisdom in the wit. This depth of intellect, absent in the Marlovian heroes, who were supreme in power but not wise, makes Hamlet seem a fine prospect for gaining the tragic insight that they were denied. Indeed, he has insights that flick at a higher order of justice: witness his “use every man after his own desert, and who shall scape whipping?” At these moments he is at a level which could have led to a tragic insight, had it been sustained. But though Hamlet knows more at the end of the play than he did at the beginning, he is also more deceived both about the world and about himself.

His failure to achieve insight into the universal order is echoed in the order that is finally reasserted. Here, as within Hamlet, there is a gap between the potential level of order and the order actually established. This is not that magnificent order that grows out of the reconciliation of the opposing deities, as in The Oresteia. It is an order much like the order achieved at the end of Shakespeare's other major tragedies. We witness dull, decent, blunt, earnest men initiate a new order. It will be an order superior to the one it must replace in that it will partake of justice. However, as these men never achieved the level of insight implied in Hamlet's “use every man after his own desert, and who shall scape whipping?” it will not be an order that opens to the ground of being. Thus, though the play ends with order reasserted, another higher order is suggested to the audience, with no one on the stage being conscious of it, and the character most likely to have attained knowledge of it having died before acquiring it.

Once again, then, the revenge tragedy motifs fit into the configuration—they are closely interlocked, one with another, dramaturgically inseparable, their positions dictated by the experience of revenge and their meanings enhanced by Shakespeare's personal vision of the human condition. The Ghost initiates the revenge action by demanding that the imbalance created by his death be righted. The demand upon Hamlet works through the passions and therefore pushes the psyche toward madness, a state which is resisted by the rational and intellectual powers of the mind, causing hesitation and delay, and one which requires a disguise for the revenger to continue to operate in the world. Once the passions are engaged, they are not easily subdued; thus, the combined impetus of the ghost and the madness now manifest themselves as excess, that wasteful process through which nature attempts to right the balance and return itself to harmony. Pushed to the extreme, the revenger will slay the villain, committing a deed which restores the balance but creates a new upset, the latter being quieted only by his own death. Individual motifs are radically altered in Hamlet, but their integrity is always maintained.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, Hamlet 3.1.78 (all subsequent citations to Hamlet in this chapter are to this edition).

2. John Addington Symonds, Shakspere's Predecessors in the English Drama, pp. 192-93. Cf. also Percy Simpson, “The Theme of Revenge in Elizabethan Tragedy,” Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 21 (1935), p. 14.

3. The phrase is F. W. Moorman's. See “Shakespeare's Ghosts,” Modern Language Review 1 (1906):192.

4. These eschatological details obviously also have a thematic function, in that what we see of the Ghost's attitude toward the afterlife (“I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood” [1.5.15-16]) is designed to condition our responses to the thoughts Hamlet expresses when he contemplates suicide. The horrors described by the Ghost give validity to Hamlet's fear of the nightmare-land of life after death. This is not to suggest that Hamlet obtains a glimpse through the Ghost's eyes and is therefore afraid; only that the audience is provided in advance with a picture which sets up a referent and reinforcement for something Hamlet will later be thinking about.

5. Robert H. West, “King Hamlet's Ambiguous Ghost,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association], 70 (1955): 1115. West is responding to the arguments of Dover Wilson and Roy Battenhouse (see chap. 1, n. 12).

6. W. W. Greg's argument that the Ghost is “Hamlet's Hallucination” (Modern Language Review 12 [1917]:393-421) is, of course, untenable, for Shakespeare assures us in the reversal sequence in which Bernardo and Marcellus convince the skeptical Horatio of the Ghost's reality that this is no projection of Hamlet's own mind.

7. Moorman, “Shakespeare's Ghosts,” p. 192; Sister Miriam Joseph, “Discerning the Ghost in Hamlet,” PMLA 76 (1961): 192; Lily Campbell, Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes, p. 147 n. 1.

8. For an important aspect of the antic disposition not discussed here, see Charles R. Forker, “Shakespeare's Theatrical Symbolism and Its Function in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 14 (1963): 215-29.

9. Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge, p. 234.

10. C. S. Lewis, “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 28 (1942), p. 16.

11. Anne Righter, Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play, p. 160.

12. The play element is understated in Titus Andronicus, yet there is a ritualistic aspect to the banquet, primarily achieved by Titus's desire to stage and arrange events in preparation for his reception and murder of Tamora. The suggestion of a staged action is increased by the fact that various characters arrive in costume—Tamora appears as Revenge and Titus “plays the cook.”

13. Righter, Shakespeare and the Play, p. 81.

14. Note the similar conclusion reached from a comparison of these two playlets by Robert J. Nelson in Play within a Play, pp. 29-30: “Leave it to Hieronimo of Kyd's Spanish Tragedie to merge the real and the unreal and so leave us totally without perspective in a world of chaos. Hamlet is a subtler esthetician and a better metaphysician. He realizes that his action must be more circumscribed. … The free manipulation of reality is the essence of comedy and for it we must not look to the Prince of Denmark.” Hamlet, says Nelson, “cannot create reality, he can work only on the given.”

15. See the excellent analysis of this speech by Maurice Charney in “The ‘Now Could I Drink Hot Blood’ Soliloquy and the Middle of Hamlet,” Mosaic 10 (1977): 77-86.

16. Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare, pp. 66-88.

17. This point is well argued by Fredson Bowers in “Dramatic Structure and Criticism: Plot in Hamlet,” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 207-18.

18. Nelson, Play within a Play, p. 27.

19. Lewis, “The Prince or the Poem?” p. 13.

Works Cited

Battenhouse, Roy W. “The Ghost in Hamlet: A Catholic ‘Linchpin’?” Studies in Philology 48 (1951): 161-92.

Bowers, Fredson. “Dramatic Structure and Criticism: Plot in Hamlet.” Shakespeare Quarterly 15 (1964): 207-18.

Campbell, Lily. Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion. 1930. Reprint edition. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970.

Charney, Maurice. “The ‘Now Could I Drink Hot Blood’ Soliloquy and the Middle of Hamlet.” Mosaic 10 (1977): 77-86.

Forker, Charles R. “Shakespeare's Theatrical Symbolism and Its Function in Hamlet.” Shakespeare Quarterly 14 (1963): 215-29.

Greg, W. W. “Hamlet's Hallucination.” Modern Language Review 12 (1917): 393-421.

Jones, Emrys. Scenic Form in Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.

Joseph, Sister Miriam. “Discerning the Ghost in Hamlet.” PMLA 76 (1961): 493-502.

Lewis, C. S. “Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?” Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 28. London: Humphrey Milford, 1942.

Moorman, F. W. “Shakespeare's Ghosts.” Modern Language Review 1 (1906): 192-201.

Nelson, Robert J. Play within a Play: The Dramatist's Conception of His Art, Shakespeare to Anouilh. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958.

Prosser, Eleanor. Hamlet and Revenge. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967.

Righter, Anne. Shakespeare and the Idea of the Play. London: Chatto & Windus, 1962.

Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. Edited by G. Blakemore Evans. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974.

Simpson, Percy. “The Theme of Revenge in Elizabethan Tragedy.” In Proceedings of the British Academy, vol. 21. London: Humphrey Milford, 1935.

Symonds, John Addington. Shakespere's Predecessors in the English Drama. 1884. New edition. London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1900.

West, Robert H. “King Hamlet's Ambiguous Ghost.” PMLA 70 (1955): 1107-17.

Wilson, J. Dover. What Happens in “Hamlet.” 1935. 3rd edition. Cambridge: At the University Press, 1967.