SOURCE: Cole, Susan Letzler. “‘Maimèd Rites’: Shakespeare's Hamlet.” In The Absent One: Mourning Ritual, Tragedy, and the Performance of Ambivalence, pp. 41-60. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1985.

[In the following essay, Cole compares Hamlet to Xerxes, the protagonist of Aeschylus's The Persians, arguing that because Hamlet has been denied the catharsis of traditional funeral rites, he becomes obsessed with replacing his father rather than forging his own, separate identity.]

All of the components which serve as links between funerary ritual and tragic drama are present in Shakespeare's Hamlet. There is not one deceased father but three (the elder Hamlet, the elder Fortinbras, and Polonius). A ghost appears outdoors, wearing armor, and indoors, apparently wearing a dressing gown. There is evidence of antithetical style (“With an auspicious and a dropping eye, / With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage”¹) and antiphonal exchange (Ophelia's “mad” songs of lament for her dead father). A permanent liminal status is associated with the protagonist, reflected in liminal space and journey, both physical (the place where Hamlet and the Ghost meet; the graveyard; the sea voyage) and psychic (the “antic disposition”; the soliloquies in acts I, II and III). Finally, there is ambivalence—expressed as intrapsychic conflict in the asides and soliloquies of both Hamlet and Claudius; implied or expressed in the relationships between deceased and mourner, between father and inheriting son, and between father-surrogates and son-surrogates (Claudius and Hamlet; Polonius and Hamlet; Claudius and Laertes; “old Norway” and his nephew, Fortinbras); and expressed by the governing structure of the whole play: a defeat of Danish corruption is a victory for Norwegian opportunism. While Aeschylus's The Persians is a tragic drama centered on, almost fused with, ritual mourning, Hamlet is the tragedy of a mourner in a world which provides no context for mourning.

Hamlet begins with reminders of the deaths of two father-kings. We are told by Horatio that young Fortinbras of Norway is preparing war against Denmark on behalf of his dead father; by the end of this act Hamlet has been stirred to thoughts of revenge by the ghost of his murdered father. Neither of these intended acts of retaliation, however, comes to fruition in any direct or immediate way. Fortinbras's revenge is transposed to fighting “for an eggshell” in Poland. Hamlet's long warfare with the very concept of revenge seems to end just before he exposes himself to the treachery of Claudius and Laertes: “The readiness is all. … Let be.” Even Laertes' revenge, seemingly a direct expression of his mourning for his dead father and sister, is co-opted by Claudius. The act we are continually led to expect—revenge as “a function of mourning”²—is continually aborted, deflected, or neutralized. The “action” of The Persians is mourning. The “action” of Hamlet is the foiled attempt to mourn. Claudius is the despoiler of all rituals, especially the ritual of mourning, as evidenced by the abbreviated and maimed funerary rituals for his brother, for Polonius, and for Ophelia. By the end of the play it has become increasingly clear that this is a court which cannot mourn and that the continually aborted mourning is a symptom of the impoverished life of the survivors. Only when the chorus of mourners-who-can't-mourn become public witnesses of Hamlet's final “passage,” and the ritual of mourning that will accompany it, can life be genuinely renewed.

In The Persians, Xerxes achieved final authority by accepting and enacting his liminal status as chief mourner of the deceased; in that role, he gained command of and directed the chorus of ritual mourners. Unlike Xerxes, Hamlet is not to inherit from, overreach, or even fully mourn his deceased father-king. Instead, he is invited by Claudius to be a ghastly parody of his father's killer: “Be as ourself in Denmark,” an inheritor of sterile ritual, false rhetoric, ingenuine feeling. Claudius never seems to feel the ambivalence toward his deceased brother that he talks about so well, but he senses that ambivalence in Hamlet and wants it neutralized. The liminal role Hamlet chooses instead—his “antic disposition”—brilliantly reflects and resolves his dilemma. Hamlet is not simply dispossessed of his role as chief mourner; he is dispossessed of all his expected rituals and roles. His role as son is made intolerable by the marriage of Claudius and Gertrude. The ritual of love and courtship of Ophelia is aborted by Laertes and Polonius, and the ritual of friendship tainted by Claudius, who uses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to “sift” Hamlet. His intended role as caretaker of his mother in his father's absence is removed rather imperiously by the Ghost himself. Hamlet's authority as prince is called into question by his public response to the Ghost's appearance, and permanently lost when he elects an antic disposition. Hamlet now appropriates the only role possible to him in a world which considers ritual mourning “a fault against the dead”: the “antic disposition” is a form of liminality that enables Hamlet to identify with the deceased whom he is not allowed to mourn.

It is through his incorporation of his father's spirit that Hamlet enacts his ambivalence toward the beloved dead. In the Chinese and African funerary rituals analyzed earlier, the eldest son does not impersonate the dead father; in the Edo rite, the eldest son is specifically forbidden to represent the deceased. Hamlet's “impersonation” of his deceased father has clear implications of tabooed aggressiveness. In the last act he repossesses the name with which he first addresses the Ghost; he engages in (mock) single combat with a rival, as his father did with Fortinbras; and, dying—like his father, poisoned by Claudius—he becomes in his final passage the military-royal presence prefigured by the Ghost. He even seems, to the dismay of certain critics and readers, to grow older when he enters the graveyard in act V.

Enactment of the ambivalence which characterizes the role of mourner-heir is more complicated, infinitely more complicated, for Hamlet than for Xerxes, or any other tragic protagonist. No longer son but nephew to his royal parents (“my uncle-father and aunt-mother”), his mourning defined as “impious” and “incorrect” by the despoiler-king who has usurped both his father's political and familial role and his own (“Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion, and the mold of form, / Th'observed of all observers, quite, quite down!”), Hamlet has been denied the conditions that would allow the performance of ambivalence directly, as mourning heir. Unable to perform his own role, he deflects his ambivalence onto the performance of others—Claudius as the new familial and royal father; Ophelia as obedient child (especially in III. i); Gertrude as obedient wife and Queen (especially in III. iv); Laertes and Fortinbras as obedient subjects and sons whose revengeful impulses are sanctioned directly or indirectly by their surrogate-fathers and kings; Polonius as parody of designing and manipulative paternal-political authority; Horatio as rational philosopher (“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”) Finally, and most strangely, Hamlet's ambivalence is directed toward the acting of the “tragedians of the city,” the only public performance of mourning welcome at Elsinore.

Hamlet's “antic disposition” has given trouble to audiences and critics alike. Analyzing this “disposition” from a perspective quite different from my own, Eleanor Prosser offers a valuable clue to its essential nature:

Hamlet's choice of words, “antic disposition,” is significant. In Shakespeare's day, “antic” did not mean “mad.” It was the usual epithet for Death and meant “grotesque,” “ludicrous.” The term is appropriate for the grinning skull and the tradition of Death laughing all to scorn, scoffing at the pretenses of puny man. May not this meaning be the operative one?³

(Italics mine)

It may, indeed. Hamlet takes on the “antic disposition” and becomes what he is haunted by. John Shakespeare, Shakespeare's father, was buried on September 8, 1601. Noting this, Alexander Welsh speculates that “the tradition that Shakespeare was the actor who played the ghost suits perfectly the identification with the deceased that is common in mourning.”⁴ One may or may not wish to acknowledge a possible reflection of the playwright-actor's own participation in mourning in his greatest tragedy. But the protagonist himself clearly identifies with the deceased father through his enactment of liminality in the form of the antic disposition.

We see this rather startlingly in Ophelia's speech to Polonius, describing Hamlet's visit to her:

OPHELIA.
O my lord, my lord, I have been so affrighted!
POLONIUS.
With what, i' th' name of God?
OPHELIA.
My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,
Lord Hamlet …
Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,
And with a look so piteous in purport,
As if he had been loosèd out of hell
To speak of horrors—he comes before me. …
He falls to such perusal of my face
As 'a would draw it. Long stayed he so.
At last, a little shaking of mine arm,
And thrice his head thus waving up and down,
He raised a sigh so piteous and profound
As it did seem to shatter all his bulk
And end his being.

(II. i. 75-78, 81-84, 90-97. Italics mine)

Compare Ophelia's account of Hamlet's appearance and behavior with Horatio's description of the ghost:

HORATIO.
                                                                                Thrice he walked
By their oppressed and fear-surprisèd eyes,
Within his truncheon's length, whilst they, distilled
Almost to jelly with the act of fear,
Stand dumb and speak not to him. …
But answer made it none. Yet once methought
It lifted up it head and did address
Itself to motion like as it would speak. …
HAMLET.
What, looked he frowningly?
HORATIO.
A countenance more in sorrow than in anger.
HAMLET.
Pale or red?
HORATIO.
Nay, very pale.
HAMLET.
And fixed his eyes upon you?
HORATIO.
Most constantly.

(I. ii. 202-6, 215-17, 231-34. Italics mine)

Some of the points of comparison italicized above may appear trivial, yet the cumulative effect is significant. Hamlet comes to Ophelia just as the Ghost came to the sentinels guarding the castle—pale, silent, sorrowful, lifting his head and fixing his “fear-surprisèd” audience with a constant look that seems to speak of hellish horrors. The Ghost comes to those who are on guard uselessly, protecting a political realm distrustful of the rituals and values that might save it. Hamlet, ghostlike, comes to one who is also on guard uselessly, having taken on the self-protective suspicions and defenses of her family and especially of her father, a parody of the new king.

Hamlet's physical as well as psychic transformation is observed closely by Claudius as well as by Ophelia. Speaking of his nephew to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he says: “Something have you heard / Of Hamlet's transformation: so call it, / Sith nor th'exterior nor the inward man / Resembles that it was. What it should be, / More than his father's death, that thus hath put him / So much from th'understanding of himself, / I cannot dream of.” Claudius's reference to Hamlet's outer as well as inner change focuses not on the condition itself but on the cause. Claudius's concern, characteristically, is with his own safety; yet, as usual, he intuits the truth of the situation. Hamlet's self-alienation is a reflection of ritual mourning aborted. He has begun the liminal journey without a governing context or a ritually sanctioned role. Claudius has inherited all but the spirit of Hamlet's father. This spirit Hamlet incorporates and enacts in increasingly assured ways.

Margaret Alexiou claims that “an appeal to the dead by name … was frequently avoided, even in a direct address to the dead.”⁵ The Chorus in The Persians invokes Darius by name twice, hoping to cause the return of his spirit, yet shrinking in dread—unable to look or speak—when the Ghost first appears. Hamlet's direct address to the Ghost of his father in act I is a bold attempt not to raise the dead but to establish a certain kind of contact:

Angels and ministers of grace defend us!
Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned,
Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell,
Be thy intents wicked or charitable,
Thou com'st in such a questionable shape
That I will speak to thee. I'll call thee Hamlet,
King, father, royal Dane. O, answer me!

(I. iv. 39-45)

Hamlet addresses the Ghost not with the “If … then” logic of Horatio's earlier unsuccessful appeal, but in a vocabulary of ambivalence (“health … or … damned,” “heaven or … hell,” “wicked or charitable”); therefore he can be answered.

Hamlet's appealing to the Ghost by name may be an example of a “ritual of reversal,” like that moment during the Tallensi funeral when the son looks into his father's granary for the first time. There is clearly a hint of replacement in Hamlet's later appropriation of this way of addressing his dead father (I'll call thee Hamlet, / … royal Dane”) when he confronts Laertes at Ophelia's open grave: “This is I, / Hamlet the Dane.” Hamlet's announcing himself in the same terms he used to address the Ghost is an ironic form of homeopathic protection. For he defines himself as the kingly-paternal-military figure he will only become in death.

The Ghost's final command is “Remember me,” and Hamlet “remembers” his father by assuming an antic disposition. His immediate reaction to the Ghost's revelation of regicide, fratricide, and adultery has been thought puzzling, especially in its emphasis on memory rather than on revenge:

O all you host of heaven! O earth! What else?
And shall I couple hell? O fie! Hold, hold, my heart,
And you, my sinews, grow not instant old,
But bear me stiffly up. Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I'll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!
O most pernicious woman!
O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!
                                                                                          … Now to my word:
It is ‘Adieu, adieu, remember me.’
I have sworn't.

(I. iv. 92-104, 110-12. Italics mine)

Hamlet is to make his liminal journey in his mind. The act of recollection is the act of allowing himself to become haunted by what he wishes to recollect. Dying to his former self, “all forms, all pressures past,” Hamlet is taking on the disposition of the deceased with a vengeance. (Indeed, he is fearful that his very body will become impotent, will grow old too quickly.) In Claudius's court, memory is a kind of revenge. Hamlet's “antic disposition” will eventually turn the court into the mourners they refuse to be, will provoke the response that his father's dead body could not. In act II, scene ii, Polonius concludes his silly dissection of Hamlet's “madness” thus: “the madness wherein now he raves, / And all we mourn for” (Italics mine). Like Xerxes, but in a more complex and less direct way, Hamlet will achieve final authority as leader of the chorus of mourners through his surrogate, Horatio: “Absent thee from felicity awhile, / … To tell my story.”

Hamlet's perspective edges eerily closer to that of the “antic” Death in his famous definition of man. His dialogue with Polonius (II. ii) anticipates that speech:

POLONIUS.
Will you walk out of the air, my lord?
HAMLET.
Into my grave.
POLONIUS.
—My lord, I will take my leave of you.
HAMLET.
You cannot take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal—except my life, except my life, except my life.

(II. ii. 208-9, 215-19)

These lines express more than Hamlet's characteristic contempt for Polonius. The antic expresses his longing for identification with the deceased in a way fully suited to Polonius's limited understanding: a simple desire for physical extinction. When Hamlet tries to describe his “disposition” for his friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, now become Claudius's spies, he reveals how far he has come in the liminal journey of the mind: “[I]ndeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory. … What a piece of work is a man … and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” Hamlet's definition of man as the “quintessence of dust” is the quintessential expression of the “antic” disposition: “laughing all to scorn, scoffing at the pretenses of puny man.” Compare Hamlet's response to Rosencrantz after he has killed Polonius:

ROSENCRANTZ.
What have you done, my lord, with the dead body?
HAMLET.
Compounded it with dust, whereto 'tis kin.

(IV. ii. 4-6)

With the arrival of the “tragedians of the city,” Hamlet's situation finds itself depicted in that of the adult actors. The prince seems to compare the usurpation of the adult players' position in the city by the children's companies with Claudius's usurpation of his (presumably) older brother's position at Elsinore. In each case, we see a distortion and corruption of what is natural: that the younger inherit from, and eventually supplant, the older generation. The situation in the city is a cruel mirror-image of Hamlet's situation at Elsinore, his role as child-inheritor-mourner usurped by the consummate adult actor, Claudius. But the most suggestive analogy is perhaps this: forced to take to the road, the “tragedians of the city” have become a kind of liminal company. The tragic actors—displaced, like Hamlet, by “the late innovation”—will attempt to present the only performances of mourning for a dead king sanctioned in Claudius's court: Hecuba's mourning for Priam, and the Queen's “passionate action” of mourning for the dead King in the Dumb Show.

Hamlet openly discards his antic disposition only once in front of Polonius, in order to take on the role of tragic actor delivering “a passionate speech” describing Priam's murderer. The parallel between Hamlet as displaced mourner and the tragedian as displaced actor accounts, in part, for Hamlet's reaction to the Player's presentation of the Pyrrhus speech. Both Hamlet and Polonius are distressed by the tragedian's portrayal of Hecuba's mourning for her murdered husband-king, Priam. Polonius, characteristically, is not able to bear the verisimilitude of the tragic actor's performance: “Look, whe'r he has not turned color, and has tears in's eyes. Prithee no more.” Hamlet, on the other hand, characteristically cannot bear the disparity between the “forms, moods, shapes of grief … actions that a man might play,” and “that within which passes show”:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears …

(II. ii. 561-72)

Hamlet's reaction to tragedian-as-mourner is deeply ambivalent. The tragic actor is performing mourning before a dispossessed mourner unable to make his “whole function … [suit] / With forms to his conceit.” In this moment of performance, the tragedian is one more usurper of the protagonist's expected role. Here at last is a context—tragic performance—where mourning can be expressed, even in a world which denies its reality. And yet, to Hamlet, a “fiction” of mourning is monstrous because all mourning has become fictional. Except for the Dumb Show, there is no enactment of mourning in “The Mousetrap” as performed. The mourning which should properly follow the murder of Gonzago is aborted by Hamlet himself.

The play-within-the-play is the production par excellence of the antic disposition. Hamlet uses the “tragedians of the city” to recreate the moment of death and to provide a stimulus and context for response to that death. “The Mousetrap” is, above all, a performance of ambivalence for Hamlet; he too must watch a scene “something like” the murder of his father, but now he is free to respond. He has intended to “tent … [Claudius] to the quick,” but his attempted exposure of “guilty creatures sitting at a play” is an exposure of his own unresolved responses to the death/murder of his father. Thus, he seems to lose control, stopping the action at the moment of death by blurting out the sequel to Claudius who rises and calls for lights. Hamlet's aborting the play, by changing the mode from drama to narrative, is a troubling and ambiguous action, one which seems to parallel Claudius's attempt to cut off Hamlet's own process of mourning after his father's death. In order to understand why Hamlet does this, we must look more closely at what he aborts.

The staging of “The Mousetrap” is clearly too potent, too full of ambivalence, for Hamlet to control and bring to completion. “The Mousetrap” could just as easily close on him, for he is, in a sense, killing the king—but which king? The murderer is named Lucianus; Hamlet tells us Lucianus is “nephew to the King.” The victim is referred to, in stage directions and speech headings, as King and Player King, but Hamlet tells us that the victim is a Duke named Gonzago. Thus the identity of the victim is permanently veiled, ambiguous. Lucianus murders a man who is both his uncle-king and at the same time a lesser figure, Duke Gonzago. The identity of the victim is blurred so that two men seem murdered rather than one. At the same time, the motive for the murder is doubled, as if two murderers are fused in the figure of Lucianus. Hamlet's cry to the actor playing Lucianus, “Begin, murderer. Leave thy damnable faces and begin. Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge,” is odd, makes a claim that his later summary of the plot of “The Mousetrap” does not corroborate. Revenge is nowhere stated as Lucianus's motive: “This play is the image of a murder done in Vienna. … 'Tis a knavish piece of work. … 'A poisons him i' th' garden for his estate. His name's Gonzago. You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago's wife” (Italics mine). Revenge is Hamlet's cue for action, not Lucianus's. His giving the actor his cue confirms that Hamlet is staging, and watching, two murders, not one. The victim is both Hamlet's father and his uncle; the murderer is both Claudius and Hamlet. In producing “The Mousetrap,” Hamlet is simultaneously “murdering” his father and revenging his father's murder.

When Hamlet stops the action of the play at the moment of death, he prevents the enactment of its consequences: mourning, the cessation of mourning, replacement of the dead man by his murderer. The stage directions for the Dumb Show give the intended scenario: “The Queen returns, finds the King dead, makes passionate action. The poisoner, with some three or four, come [sic] in again, seem to condole with her. The dead body is carried away. The poisoner woos the Queen with gifts; she seems harsh awhile, but in the end accepts love.” It is possible to infer that Hamlet is overexcited, that again he cannot bear to see someone else perform his role as mourner of the beloved dead. (Compare not only his distress at the tragedian's portrayal of the mourning of Hecuba for the murdered Priam, but also his mockery of Laertes' hyperbolic grief at Ophelia's grave.) But it is also true that cutting off the performance of mourning is in some way to deny the reality of what he has staged, just as Claudius and Gertrude do in their refusal to mourn for the deceased king or to sanction any extended period of public mourning by others. To eliminate the performance of mourning is, for both Hamlet and Claudius, to refuse to be implicated in the consequences of one's aggressive and murderous desires. It is possible to claim that finally Hamlet cannot present on the tragic stage what has not been fully worked through in the theatre of his own mind.

After the performance of “The Mousetrap,” Hamlet's antic disposition seems to take the form of “a certain abnormal condition of the dead about which very definite ideas are everywhere held. … It is believed that under certain conditions a dead body is withheld from the normal process of corruption, is re-animated.”⁶ Hamlet images a setting for the emergence, and placation, of the buried dead and then places himself, ambiguously, in that scene: “'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. …” “When churchyards yawn” can only mean: when graves open. Despite the inconclusiveness implied by the use of the conditional verb, “Now could I drink hot blood” suddenly establishes a link between the speaker and the newly opened graves. Hamlet seems to be imagining himself into the scene and thereby into that abnormal condition of the dead which is ultimately a kind of vampirism. The rest of the soliloquy reflects the struggle to ensure that nourishing the dead by sacrificing the blood of the living will not be the “bitter business” of Hamlet's visit to his mother: “I will speak daggers to her, but use none.”

But Hamlet has gone too far. Not only is sacrificing warm blood his “business” (III. iv), but Hamlet succeeds, ironically, in setting up a context for the reemergence of the buried dead, whose role he has usurped and betrayed. We recall that Xerxes' hubris, forcing his route to take a shape against its nature, was a threat to the ghostly father in Aeschylus's The Persians; the son's symbolic sexual defilement of his mother in that play was a kind of “impious liminality.” In his dialogue with his mother, Hamlet's very use of stichomythia, the ancient mode of communication between the living and the dead, reveals the degree to which he has usurped the role of his deceased father. The content of the stichomythic dialogue (III. iv) shows clearly Hamlet's impious liminality. He is attempting verbally to harness, and physically to subdue, his mother:

QUEEN.
Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
HAMLET.
Mother, you have my father much offended.
QUEEN.
Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.
HAMLET.
Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.

.....

HAMLET.
Come, come, and sit you down. You shall not budge.

.....

QUEEN.
What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me? Help,
          ho!

(III. iv. 10-13, 19, 22)

We have already seen how Hamlet's incorporation of the spirit of his father contains hints of tabooed aggressiveness. The Ghost's last words to Hamlet in act I, scene iv, were “Remember me.” The first words of the Ghost's sole speech in act III, scene iv, will be “Do not forget.” But by this time Hamlet is not remembering his father: he is replacing him.

The reemergence of the buried dead—the intervention of the Ghost in this scene—has always been a source of great controversy and general dismay. Eleanor Prosser speaks for many when she says, “The final appearance of the Ghost presents an insoluble problem. Every theory about its purpose is faced with some contradiction.” To Prosser, the Ghost's appearance “has served only one purpose: not to lead Gertrude to Heaven but to leave her to Hell.”⁷ Prosser's view illustrates a general tendency to determine once and for all whether the Ghost is a good or an evil spirit and thus to fail to recognize the ambivalence that characterizes the roles, relationships, and structure of the tragedy. Contradictory theories about ghosts' purposes might better be used as pairs than rejected, or regarded as mutually exclusive. The view, for example, that the Ghost is merely a malign spirit can be fruitfully opposed without denying the presence of the destructive daimōn in this scene, or in the play as a whole.

At the moment the Ghost reenters the play, Hamlet seems to have forgotten the form his father's ambivalence took, its explicit splitting off of revenge (for Claudius) from compassion (for Gertrude). The Ghost had told Hamlet that he must “leave … [his mother] to heaven”; he would not enter now in order to leave her to Hell. Just after the Ghost exits, Hamlet tells his mother, “Confess yourself to Heaven,” and she responds, “O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.” The image of the heart divided in two (“the worser part” and “the purer”) is crucial. Whatever impulses towards repentance and reconciliation have been awakened in Gertrude are still available to her after the Ghost's brief appearance. What prevents her full repentence is her own ambivalence, emblematized by the Ghost.

The preceding scene (III. iii) provides an illuminating parallel to this one. There Hamlet maintains a kind of ghostlike presence on the peripheries of Claudius's unsuccessful attempt to repent. Hamlet's way of being in on his uncle's self-struggle is as an embodiment of the evil impulses Claudius is struggling against. Similarly, the silent “piteous action” of the Ghost is an enactment of those impulses Hamlet is struggling against. The Ghost's reasons for appearing to Hamlet (and not to Gertrude) have more to do with Hamlet's disposition than with Gertrude's:

                                                                                Look you, how pale he glares!
His form and cause conjoined, preaching to stones,
Would make them capable.—Do not look upon me,
Lest with this piteous action you convert
My stern effects. Then what I have to do
Will want true color; tears perchance for blood.

(III. iv. 126-31)

The major contradiction to the view that the Ghost is evil is the reference to “piteous action.” The Ghost had first appeared in armor and “with martial stalk” to armed sentinels guarding Elsinore. The Ghost of the first act, though “courteous,” manifested himself primarily as the daimōn of the royal house whose destructive power, once directed against the King of Norway, has veered, is now redirected against the new King of Denmark. The ambivalence of the daimōn who stalks this royal family is nonetheless made clear in the Ghost's command that Hamlet “revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” but not “contrive / Against thy mother aught.” When the Ghost appears to Hamlet in the Queen's “closet,” not in armor but “in his habit as he lived,” he again presents himself as the ambivalently perceived dead, but this time the good daimōn is dominant.

Hamlet, killing his mother verbally (“These words like daggers enter in my ears”), has exchanged roles with the ghost in armor of act I but, at the same time, he has violated the Ghost's command, “Leave her to heaven.” Like Xerxes' symbolic violation of mother and nature, Hamlet's hubristic attempt to replace father, king, and God in his mother's life provokes the compassionate rebuke of the ghostly father-figure. Like Darius in Atossa's dream, the Ghost is both disappointed and pitying: “How pale he glares!” Hamlet is afraid that his father's very “look” will “convert” him, will force him perhaps to exchange “tears … for blood,” mourning for murder. And yet, Hamlet is being directed more and more toward his true role: that of mourner, ultimately mourner for the loss of his own kingly life.

After the Ghost's intrusion, Hamlet, far from convincing his mother he is mad, does just the opposite. He exposes, and seems to reject, the antic disposition he has put on since his first meeting with the Ghost. In its place, Hamlet takes on his new paradoxical role, that of “scourge and minister.” Here is the real embracing of the ambivalence of the mourning heir, translated into paired opposites: the scourge, a sinner who may be punished; the minister, an agent who may execute divine judgment. The role of “scourge and minister,” like the appearance of the Ghost, has vexed critics of the either-or school: “The two terms are so contradictory that they are irreconcilable. … [Hamlet] does not say that he has been Heaven's scourge but now will become its minister. He says he is both, which is impossible.”⁸ But being both is Hamlet's only possible role: destroying and healing, murdering and bestowing (“I will bestow him and will answer well / The death I gave him”); stern and pitying (“I must be cruel only to be kind”); embracing, and not choosing between, tears and blood. Nor are we allowed to choose for Hamlet. Gertrude's seemingly straightforward description of Hamlet (IV. i), “‘A weeps for what is done,” is especially ambiguous, since it is spoken to Claudius. It is impossible to know if Hamlet's weeping is an authentic action unseen by the audience (and thus symbolic of the absence of a context for mourning in the play) or if it is merely a useful deception.

Until the final moments of the play, grieving is distrusted in Claudius's court because it is too richly evocative, too revealing. Things must only be what they seem in Denmark, not what they paradoxically are. Grieving is sanctioned at court only in the form of Ophelia's mad songs of lament, Hamlet's antic disposition, and the tragedians' performance; mourning is, by implication, either mad or feigned. Hamlet, by his antic disposition, might have turned Claudius's court into a chorus of mourners, as suggested in Polonius's description of the Prince's transformation: “the madness wherein now he raves, / And all we mourn for.” Polonius's own death, “caused” by Hamlet's antic disposition, evokes the nearest thing to genuine grief we ever get from Claudius:

Hamlet, this deed, for thine especial safety,
Which we do tender as we dearly grieve
For that which thou hast done, must send thee hence
With fiery quickness.

(IV. iii. 40-43. Italics mine)

The political expediency, hypocrisy, and yoking of the genuine and the ingenuine (grief for Polonius's death, concern for Hamlet's “safety”) recall the long opening sentence of Claudius's first speech in the play, in which the memory of his “dear brother's death” is placed discretely in a subordinate clause while the main clause ends resoundingly on its true emphasis: “ourselves.” I have already quoted the ironic use of antithesis in that speech:

With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage.

(I. ii. 11-12)

The awkward visual image—one eye looking hopeful, one eye looking sad—is strained language working unsuccessfully to cover up a strained situation. The conventional expression of ambivalence (“mirth in funeral,” “dirge in marriage”) is mere rhetoric, not an attempt to record complex human truths. In the later speech quoted above, the implication that Claudius's emotions are equally balanced between holding dear Hamlet's life and dearly grieving for Polonius's death is as false as the semblance of a natural balance of emotions and events in his first speech as new king. If there is a note of genuineness in grief (perhaps largely reflecting self-interest) in Claudius's references to Polonius, there is still the “huggermugger” (secret haste) of his interment. Hamlet has forced Claudius to expose again his inability to provide or honor full rituals of mourning for the dead.

Ironically, the repression of grief's rituals only causes more grief. Ophelia's madness; Laertes' disaffection; the people's incipient rebelliousness—all of this, as Claudius says, “Like to a murd'ring piece, in many places / Gives me superfluous death.” The absence of adequate death rituals can only bring death; failure to respond genuinely and appropriately to death is itself a kind of death.

Claudius's violation of Polonius's right to full funerary ritual almost leads to his literal death at the hands of an enraged Laertes:

His means of death, his obscure funeral—
No trophy, sword, nor hatchment o'er his bones,
No noble rite nor formal ostentation—
Cry to be heard, as 'twere from heaven to earth,
That I must call't in question.

(IV. v. 211-14)

Laertes “stands for,” and would have performed, proper rites of mourning for the dead, but belatedly and impotently (compare his speeches at Ophelia's funeral). That Laertes seems to hear a cry “as 'twere from heaven to earth”—i.e., from the world of spirits—suggests that he might have become a surrogate for Hamlet in his outrage and frustration at the failure of the king to provide and sustain proper funerary ritual for his dead father. But only the removal of Claudius, abortively begun by Laertes' “riotous head,” can ensure the return of those death rituals necessary for life itself. Laertes' way of mourning is subsumed in revenge and co-opted by Claudius who has removed all other forms for the expression of genuine grieving:

Laertes, I must commune with your grief,
Or you deny me right. Go but apart,
Make choice of whom your wisest friends you will,
And they shall hear and judge 'twixt you and me.
If by direct or by collateral hand
They find us touched, we will our kingdom give,
Our crown, our life, and all that we call ours,
To you in satisfaction; but if not,
Be you content to lend your patience to us,
And we shall jointly labor with your soul
To give it due content.

(IV. v. 211-14)

The language is appropriate (“commune with your grief,” “jointly labor with your soul”) but the action is not. The offer of “kingdom,” “crown,” “life,” and “all that we call ours” would be more appropriately made to Hamlet, for it is he, not Laertes, who has been denied the role of son-as-heir to the deceased. Perhaps most revealing of all, Claudius's offer of communion in grief amounts to a rather legalistic “court” of judgment to determine if Claudius is implicated in Polonius's death (and, presumably, “if not,” who is). The offer of “due content” is the joint labor of revenge. Claudius's later questioning, “Laertes, was your father dear to you? / Or are you like the painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart?” is ironic and self-reflective. It is Claudius whose denial of full funerary rituals limits the expression of feeling at Elsinore.

Laertes' aggressive responses to the death of his father become quickly organized into an elaborate revenge plot. His way of “mourning” his father is like that of Fortinbras: both enact their tabooed aggressiveness in murderous acts sanctioned by their respective kings (Laertes' duel-to-the-death with Hamlet; Fortinbras's senseless war against the Poles). Only Hamlet questions, and requestions, the automatic acceptance of murderous and revengeful impulses as “due content.”

Unlike Hamlet, Laertes and Ophelia are would-be mourners who finally perform their mourning: Laertes, in the mode of treachery; Ophelia, in the mode of madness. Laertes' enactment of revenge as a way of mourning the paired losses of “a young maid's wits” and “an old man's life” contrasts with Ophelia's “mad” lamenting. Ophelia's mad songs are the only explicit examples of ritual lamentation in the play:

He is dead and gone, lady,                    (Song)
                    He is dead and gone;
At his head a grass-green turf,
                    At his heels a stone.
(Sings.) White his shroud as the mountain snow—
                    Larded all with sweet flowers                    (Song)
Which bewept to the grave did not go
                    With truelove showers.
They bore him barefaced on the bier                    (Song)
                    Hey non nony, nony, hey nony
And in his grave rained many a tear—
And will 'a not come again?                    (Song)
And will 'a not come again?
                    No, no, he is dead,
                    Go to thy deathbed,
He never will come again.
His beard was as white as snow,
All flaxen was his poll [head].
                    He is gone, he is gone,
                    And we cast away moan.
God ‘a’ mercy on his soul!
And of all Christian souls, I pray God. God bye you. (Exit.)

(IV. v. 29-32, 36, 38-40, 164-66, 188-98)

Here is the antiphonal singing of the ritual lament for the dead: “And will 'a not come again? / No, no, he is dead, / … And we cast away moan.” Only Ophelia, in the archaic recesses of her “madness,” can provide a context and a text for the ritual mourning of the beloved dead. There is some ambiguity in these songs of lament, expressed, for example, in the juxtaposition of references to her (sexual) lover and references to her white-haired father. It is not immediately clear whether she is lamenting the loss of her father or the loss of the lover he forbade her. It is also possible that she incorporates here a lament for the death of the elder Hamlet, as well as that of Polonius.

Ophelia partly narrates and partly participates in a funerary rite which seems to be both a literal and an imaginative experience. Her responses are simple, full of understanding and genuine feeling. Nowhere in the sane world of Elsinore is such an experience possible. These songs, which are among the most poignant moments in the play, are, as it were, put in quotation marks: mourning is merely madness in the deadened world of Hamlet.

Even the very attempt to make explicit the problem of the mourner in a world which refuses to ritualize mourning is rejected. Thus, Hamlet's questioning of Laertes at Ophelia's grave, “What wilt thou do for her?” is immediately characterized as “mad” by Claudius. Amid the “maimèd rites” of Ophelia's burial, Laertes' cries reiterate a theme of all the mourning children (Fortinbras, Hamlet, Ophelia, Laertes) in this play: “What ceremony else?” “What ceremony else?” “Must there no more be done?” (Italics mine.) Hamlet's full challenge to Laertes is madly to the point:

'Swounds, show me what thou't do.
Woo't weep? Woo't fight? Woo't fast? Woo't tear thyself?
Woo't drink up eisel? Eat a crocodile?
I'll do't. Dost thou come here to whine?
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried quick with her, and so will I.

(V. i. 276-81)

Laertes' hyperbole as he leaps into the grave of his sister is being mocked by a protagonist who knows well the absurdity of the mourner without a sanctioned context for mourning. But Hamlet's seemingly irrational resolution, the identification with the dead (“be buried quick with her”), is a serious taunt. Hamlet has, in a sense, been “buried quick.” Through his antic disposition, he has made the imaginative journey into the liminal realm, giving up the role of antic only to make a literal and symbolic journey out of Denmark, across water, returning to a graveyard where he finds a potential surrogate for himself as frustrated mourner. Later, repenting his outburst at Ophelia's grave, Hamlet explicitly links his dilemma with Laertes': “For by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his. I'll court his favors. / But sure the bravery of his grief did put me / Into a tow'ring passion.” But Laertes is always an ironic surrogate for Hamlet. He is continually offered what Hamlet is denied: first, the opportunity to leave Denmark; then, on his return, the royal inheritance, if Claudius can be found to be implicated in his father's death; finally, the sanctioning of revenge as a form of mourning by a new, unambivalent father-figure whose values and needs at this moment of crisis match his own. Only in his dying moments does Laertes “acquire and beget a temperance” “in the very torrent, tempest, and … whirlwind of … passion” that makes him a fitting “image” of Hamlet's “cause.”

Hamlet's post-graveyard perspective suggests a new attitude toward dying. He no longer feels that puzzling “dread of something after death, / The undiscovered country, from whose bourn / No traveler returns.” When he delivered those lines, Hamlet had already witnessed the “return” of the spirit of his deceased father. He was imagining, and dreading, a “bourn” from which there was no return, an end to the liminality of the Ghost and thus to his own role as a liminal figure able to cross boundaries at will. Implicit in Hamlet's “To be or not to be” soliloquy (III. i) and in his final soliloquy of act IV—there are no soliloquies in the last act—is a fear of death. Compare “while to my shame I see / The imminent death of twenty thousand men / That for a fantasy and trick of fame / Go to their graves like beds.” If not a fear, then at least a shared avoidance of death is reflected in Hamlet's letter to Horatio: “Repair thou to me with as much speed as thou wouldst fly death.” In sharp contrast, we hear Hamlet tell Horatio, “Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is't to leave [die] betimes? Let be.” His new attitude becomes more explicit in his dying speech to Horatio:

If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.

(V. ii. 347-50)

“Felicity” is death, and though this simple definition may not capture Hamlet's complex attitude toward all that is to come, it does capture his sense of the present moment. His final speech, which begins, “O, I die, Horatio! / The potent poison quite o'ercrows my spirit,” contains a quiet allusion to the cock's crow that marked the departure of his father's spirit, as reported by Horatio:

But even then the morning cock crew loud,
And at the sound it shrunk in haste away
And vanished from our sight.

(I. ii. 218-20)

The allusion to the cock's crow in the fifth act comes at the moment when Hamlet's father's spirit is vanishing from our sight: Hamlet's appropriation of the spirit of the deceased has become his own reality.

At the end, Hamlet has not willed his acceptance of death any more than he has willed his killing of Claudius. After aborting the literal performance of ambivalence—“The Mousetrap”—in act III and aborting the literal journey across the sea in act IV, he has unexpectedly come to rest in a graveyard in act V. There, beside the open grave of one he loved and indirectly killed, Hamlet has announced himself: “This is I, / Hamlet the Dane.” Symbolically and in public view he has supplanted his father. At the grave he finally expresses his ambivalence toward the beloved dead in the twin acts: his fervent confession of love (for Ophelia) and his physical and verbal attack (on Laertes as surrogate mourner). The “Let be” of the next scene is an acknowledgment that the performance of ambivalence of the displaced mourner is at last over.

This is Hamlet's legacy: he removes the despoiler of ritual, especially the paradigmatic ritual of mourning, and in his death provides an occasion for the state to renew itself through the catharsis of ritual mourning. In contrast to the deaths of Hamlet's father, Polonius, and Ophelia, at the moment of passage someone is there to give an epitaph and to initiate public and private mourning with complete exposure of the dead “high on a stage … placèd to the view.” In this line, for a moment, tragic drama and funerary ritual touch, complete each other. Horatio will tell Hamlet's story, becoming, like the tragedians of the city, an “abstract and brief” chronicle of the time. But Fortinbras delivers the final speech of the play:

                                                                                Let four captains
Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage,
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royal; and for his passage
The soldiers' music and the rite of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies. …
Go, bid the soldiers shoot.

(V. ii. 396-402, 404)

The funerary ritual which clears the stage of bodies will be conducted by the foreigner-inheritor, Fortinbras. Thus, at the last, we have, as with The Persians, a performance of ambivalence as the governing context of the play: a defeat (Persian, Danish) which is also a victory (Greek, Norwegian). The final passage is celebrated with the only rite Fortinbras knows, “the rite of war,” but this is an appropriate emblem for that conflict, internal and external, which characterizes the performance of ambivalence so long resisted by Hamlet and now divided between Horatio and Fortinbras, different kinds of inheritors. In their responses to the Prince's death, they represent Hamlet's own response to the death of his father-king: Horatio, wishing to carry his mourning to its ultimate expression, self-slaughter; Fortinbras, wishing to take charge of that “passage” which also marks his own emergence as successor to paternal-royal authority.

Notes

1. All citations of Shakespeare are taken from The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, ed. Sylvan Barnet (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963).

2. See Alexander Welsh, “The Task of Hamlet,” Yale Review 69, no. 4 (1980): 481-502.

3. Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), 149.

4. Welsh, 501.

5. Margaret Alexiou, The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 136.

6. John Cuthbert Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, A Study in Survivals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 485, 363.

7. Prosser, 195, 198.

8. Prosser, 199, 201.