[In the following essay, Jagendorf evaluates the motif of silence in Hamlet, arguing that it permeates the dramatic action and underscores the play's representation of truth as subjective and therefore open to different interpretations. In particular, he discusses the dumb show, the Ghost's initial speechlessness, and the ambiguity of silent gestures.]

Hamlet is the most brilliantly articulate of Shakespeare's tragedies. The sheer flow of speech is overwhelming in its quantity and surprising in its variety. Hamlet and Polonius are both garrulous in different ways; whatever either says about holding their tongue or giving thoughts no tongue, they are both determined, even obsessive, speakers, labouring points into absurdity and giving no quarter to their audience. The richness and variety of the play's verbal style are brought into relief by the characters' awareness (especially Hamlet's) of the way they and others speak or write. Polonius comments (unfavourably) on Hamlet's elegance as a composer of love letters, and (favourably) on an unusual word in the Player's speech. Hamlet's sharp and critical ear for the rhetoric of others is evident in his advice to the Players, his duel of words with Laertes in Ophelia's grave and his parody and teasing of Osric.

A closer look at this copiousness of speech in the play suggests that it is tied in a vital dialectical relationship to the negation of speech in dumbness and silence, and that a true understanding of the workings of language in the play is impossible without an awareness of the connection with silence.

A double burden of speech and silence is borne by the revenger who has a painful secret to hide and yet needs to seek some, perhaps oblique, verbal expression for his sense of outrage. These paradoxes are already embodied in the archetypal English revenge play, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. A consideration of the revenger Hieronimo, whose ‘grief no heart … thoughts no tongue can tell’ (III. ii. 67) suggests at least one possible starting point for Shakespeare's handling of the motif of silence in Hamlet, and at the same time illuminates its specifically Shakespearean quality. When in soliloquy he imagines the effect of his grief on the world, he sees the wind conspiring with his words to wreak havoc and break through ‘the brazen gates of hell’ (III. vii. 9). Yet alongside this fantasy of effective speech is its opposite, the image of an impregnable Heaven whose diamond walls ‘Resist my woes, and give my words no way’ (III. vii. 18). Hieronimo has a shocking accusation to make, yet he is reduced to dumbness because his own violent feelings and the cunning of his enemies deny him effective speech. At the crisis point of the play he overcomes the fear which would strike him mute and does speak out. ‘Justice, O justice, justice, gentle king! (III. xii. 63). But he fails to make himself understood. This defeat of speech results in a policy of silent preparation for revenge, ‘Dissembling quiet in unquietness’ (III. xiii. 30); and Hieronimo's revenge is exact indeed, ‘a tongue for a tongue,’ in that he inflicts upon his enemies his own fate of unintelligible speech. The cacophony of languages in the tragedy of Soliman, the play within the play, is the noisy equivalent of Hieronimo's failure to communicate yet at the same time provides him with his one apparent moment of effective speech. After his play it is up to him to interpret in clear words (‘in our vulgar tongue’) what has happened. He does this in a formal presenter's speech, displaying the body of his son and recounting the history of the crime and his revenge. The rigid pattern of failed speech repeats itself again, however, and for all his lucidity in sixty lines of exposition, Hieronimo is urged to ‘Speak, traitor: damned, bloody murderer, speak! (IV. iv. 163) as if he had said nothing. It is here that speech and silence are set most significantly in relation to each other. Speech would interpret the silent spectacle of death, but is inadequate. The audience does not understand, and the speaker has no more words. Hieronimo's last two acts brutally isolate his aggression against communication. He bites out his tongue and with a knife that he pretends will help him to write, he kills the Duke and himself. Both acts attack the tools of explanation in language, the tongue and the pen. The rest is indeed, deliberately, silence, for language has become one of the victims of revenge.

If Hieronimo's self-inflicted maiming is meant to make all further questioning pointless, leaving the spectators on the stage and in the theatre with the fact of the heap of dead bodies to contemplate, the appearance in Hamlet of a silent Ghost has just the opposite effect. Both silences are close to death, the ultimate silence, but the Ghost's is creative of speech. It arouses in its observers the strong desire to question it, to find out what it wants and what its return to earth means. This is true of the silences in Hamlet in general. They provoke and test speech. They challenge words to explain and do justice to them. Even the most intractable of all, that of death, is at the end of the play still to be the subject of a speech of explanation and discrimination. The rest is not, entirely, silence.

Two kinds of silence may be said to infiltrate the noisy and whirling action of the play. One is the silence of death and the other is that of art (mime). Both are acted out on the stage. That is, they are present to the ear as well as to the mind, but they are linked to a pattern of silences which we perceive more abstractly and which appear in description and analogy.

The silence of death envelops the play; this may be seen as a comment on it. The beckoning Ghost appears at the start and the still dead share the close with the noise of cannon and drums. Between these two wordless sights the talk of the play creates the significances that distinguish the opening silence of ignorance from the closing silence of knowledge. The dumb show, on the other hand, is a silent play enveloped by talk. It is a wordless hiatus, damming momentarily a flow of words in order to present the crucial gestures without commentary. If the words of the play as a whole would characterize and give meaning to the enveloping silence of death, then the silent gestures of the dumb show objectify and isolate the fatal acts without characterizing them or giving them specific meaning. Here, then, is the critical tension between silence and language in the play. Silent gesture expresses those things that can never be fully known from the outside, or totally recaptured, namely, death and the action of another, or any action once it is past. Language assaults those gestures, demanding meaning and offering dialogue, explaining and interpreting. The Ghost does speak and describes his pain; the Player King and Queen talk of love, fortune and fidelity. But while words effectively communicate information and feelings to their audience, while they are more efficient than silence, they are also treacherous because necessarily subjective, and though they claim to ‘tell all’ can in fact only ‘tell some’. Thus, what is unsaid, or what can not be said, continues to influence us as we hear what is said. The Ghost breaks his silence but his words can grapple only with what happened to him in life. The rest is a secret. Similarly, the Players break their silence to give the King and Queen and murderer explicit utterance. Like the Ghost's, their silence is ‘questionable’, ‘What means this, my lord?’ (II. ii. 141). Like the Ghost's their words are an answer, an explanation. But for different reasons, also a partial one.

The absence of words in the mime, although it puzzles Ophelia, helps the spectators in the theatre to see clearly a sequence of actions which the emotional language of Hamlet and the Ghost had blurred with subjective colour. The wordless action is complete; it contains all the essential gestures that make up the known story. It is neutral because the Players do not take sides; they are loyal only to their story. It is as close as the play gets to capturing the past. The replay in words is not complete as it gets only as far as the murder. It is not neutral because it contains Hamlet's inserted speech. The addition of language pointed by Hamlet's inserted interjections, changes the emphasis from representation to interpretation, from past to present, from neutral silence to wounding language (‘That's wormwood’ III. ii. 167). The spoken play is a weapon, and we are interested in its effect. The silent show is a reminder that words are commentary on deeds and always somebody's version separated from acts by a gap of abstraction just as the mime is separated from The Murder of Gonzago by a gap of time.

Silence in the play is both chosen as an art or tactic and imposed. The Players, who ‘cannot keep counsel’ and will tell all, choose it as one of the modes conventionally available to them. As theatre, their silence is not a way of hiding something but a familiar form of expression, an art. It costs them no pain because it is no deprivation. They control it. On the other hand, the Ghost's initial silence is imposed and painful to break. Death takes away speech with life, and the reclaiming of speech, like the return to the world, is unnatural, hard, and limited by strict conditions. Not only can it not speak in its first three appearances, but it strikes the guards who encounter it with an answering dumbness. Yet, ‘it would be spoke to’; its silent gesture seems to invite speech, which it cannot return until confronted with the right partner. The first two scenes of the play contrast the dead king and the living king as a mute and a speaker. As in many other sequences the silence precedes speech as an act precedes its interpretation. But the Ghost's silent presence in fact undermines Claudius's elaborate words, which explain everything but what we have just seen.

Although Hamlet is never noticeably silent in the course of the play, he reflects in oblique ways both the painful deprivation of speech we found in the Ghost and the chosen artful silence of the Players. Deprived of effective speech, he blames himself for his silence; not speaking out is as bad as not acting. But he, like Kyd's hero, also advocates silence cunningly as a weapon to protect his secret: ‘your fingers on your lips, I pray (I. v. 187) is his word to his friends. It is then an ambiguous silence that is so graphically described by Ophelia fleeing her closet. The Hamlet she has seen is like the Ghost of a hundred lines earlier, emerging from an unimaginable suffering to communicate what cannot be said:

Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other
And with a look so piteous in purport
As if he had been loosed out of hell
To speak of horrors—he comes before me.

(II. i. 81-4)

The language clearly links the two encounters, the crucial difference being that the Ghost broke his silence to an understanding listener. In answer to Polonius's natural question, ‘What said he?’ Ophelia decribes and partially mimics Hamlet's silent gestures. No words were exchanged during this elaborate pantomime, which occupies the middle ground between the chosen silence of the dumb show and the imposed silence of the stalking Ghost. ‘Break my heart for I must hold my tongue,’ would be a perfect motto for Hamlet's pantomime, especially in the context of the Ghost's recent example and of Ophelia's breaking communication with him. But silent gesture is also a show if it is performed before an audience, and as a show, the focus of our interest is not the feelings of the mimer but the effect of his mime on its audience. Polonius misinterprets it crudely, but reveals himself, as Hamlet later will reveal himself by misinterpreting Claudius's kneeling posture. For silent display probes the beholder's mind, tempting him to read in the gestures of another the message of his own thoughts. At its most primitive the relationship between silent gesture and its message is only too clear. That is the point of Hamlet's sexual innuendo to Ophelia after the dumb show:

OPHELIA:
Will ‘a’ tell us what this show meant?
HAMLET:
Ay, or any show that you will show him.
Be not you ashamed to show, he'll not shame to tell you what it means.

(III. ii. 148-51)

‘Show’ is any blatant sexual gesture whose meaning is as quickly understood as it is energetically acted upon. But this primitive case points the difference of all the complex instances in the play, especially of the dumb show, where the opposite happens. Silent gestures, outside Hamlet's erotic fantasies, are not understood by those who observe them. However graphic the gesture its beholder has no sure way of penetrating to the truth or lie in it.

Whether it is an artful silence (the dumb show) or an imposed silence (the Ghost), authentic (Claudius at prayer) or a pretence (Ophelia at prayer), they are all shows and intrinsically inexplicable in that their meaning cannot be known to their stage audience without explicit and authoritative interpretation. Thus Claudius is presumed to ‘misread’ the clarity of the dumb show as Hamlet more obviously and understandably ‘misreads’ the naked gesture of Claudius at prayer. Both acts need words to ‘tell’ what they mean. These examples would make us rephrase the relationship between silence and language as follows. The clarity of the silent gesture is an illusion created by the perspective of the all-knowing theatre audience; inside the play the wordless gesture is as much a puzzle as riddling language. The silent gesture may represent truth, but it is unknowable alone, and though words are subjective and tendentious, their interpretation of a deed is all that there is. That is why the Ghost is so desperate to speak, and why the silent corpses of the last scene await the discriminating though not necessarily objective interpretation of their story by Horatio.

Two silences perhaps best demonstrate the way the motif penetrates both the language and the stage action, linking what is physically present to what is present only to the mind in a common dialectic. Both Pyrrhus and Claudius are significantly silent at critical moments. The former's silence is narrated by the Player, who perhaps suggests its actual presence fleetingly by the pause after ‘Did nothing’ (II. ii. 483). The silence of the king is present to us physically as he kneels to pray after the dumb show. Revenger and revenger's victim, the silence of each is worth our attention.

Pyrrhus's silence is the most primitive form of silence in the play. It is an absence of movement first, and only by inference and analogy also an absence of speech (‘still’ is the word which ties the two together). The breaking of stillness/silence is signalled by acts and not by words, for Pyrrhus remains dumb during the whole incident. Unlike all the other silences in the play, this silence does not need interpretation. It is itself an analogy (the calm before the storm), a translation into the language of nature of a man's stillness. As a natural analogy it indeed defies interpretation because the silence of nature is devoid of content. It is merely part of a material process. As the man's stillness follows the hideous crash of falling Troy, so the thunderstorm follows the silence and the murder follows the pause. The sequence is not ‘questionable’ because matter rather than consciousness determines it, and neither the silence nor the arrested action will yield any insight into a human feeling which they represent or hide.

If Pyrrhus's stillness is the neutral stillness of the imagined murderer, Claudius's silence at prayer is the pregnant silence of the human victim. They are opposites in every way. Consciousness pervades Claudius's silence, which is a continuation of the war of his soliloquy by other means. This makes us, the privileged observers, and Hamlet, the ignorant spy, desperately curious to know what the gesture of kneeling means or hides. Hamlet's horrible and wordy interpretation of the act is thrown into cruel relief by the simultaneous presence of the king's silence, and effective variation of the usual order in the play, where silence precedes the interpretation. Not only does this silence have a meaning, on its meaning depends the king's spiritual fate and Hamlet's plan of revenge. Yet this meaning can be guessed neither by the audience, who overhear the soliloquy, nor by Hamlet, who reads the gesture alone. Only the suppliant himself can tell his meaning, defining the kneeling gesture as both authentic (a genuine attempt to pray) and a pretence (there was no prayer).

Here again, the twin poles of silence in the play are set in contrast. Pyrrhus's, defying discrimination, empty of consciousness, and inhuman, is like the silence of death; Claudius's, questionable, both hiding and showing, deceptive and full of purpose is in fact like the silence of art.

Death strikes Hamlet dumb when, unlike Hieronimo, he still has a lot to say. The fell sergeant puts his finger on Hamlet's lips at a moment when fatal acts need to be interpreted and justified. Indeed, this deathlike, undiscriminating silence envelops the innocent bystanders (mutes and audience) and would swallow Horatio if he took the cup. At the end of the play silence is Hamlet's only surviving enemy, just as the bustle of normal affairs was the Ghost's enemy at the beginning. Both hide the truth and have to be combated. The Ghost sends Hamlet into the world with a secret and a sword. Hamlet sends Horatio into the world with a story and Hamlet's voice. Nowhere in the play is Hamlet more heroic and responsible than in this last struggle against silence. He sends his ‘dying voice’ beyond the grave to support the claim of Fortinbras, and this voice, though stilled, will draw on more. The human voice through Horatio will, after the action ends, combat ignorance and confusion. It will explain the silent spectacle of death like the presenter of a final dumb show:

                                                            … give order that these bodies
High on a stage be placed to the view,
And let me speak …

(V. ii. 378-80)

But another voice also speaks for Hamlet after his death:

The soldiers' music and the rite of war
Speak loudly for him.

(V. ii. 400-1)

The noise of cannon, which earlier in the play marked Claudius's drunken revelry, closes it as a signal of royal mourning and newly assumed power (‘Go, bid the soldiers shoot’). The shooting would drown the silence and effect a positive ending, at least from the point of view of Fortinbras. But so much knowledge is stored up in the silence of the victims that the logic of the play makes us see the limited nature of Fortinbras's noisy speech. Once again the stage picture sets sound and silence against each other. Once again the sound would say what the silence means, speak for it, but crudely and without penetration.

Finally then, two voices compete against the unknowable silence; the human voice of Horatio and the metallic voice of the cannon. The latter speaks of the continuity of authority and power in the face of catastrophe; the former would interpret and recapture an elusive past. But the silence of which they speak has changed its place. It is no longer on the stage alone, for the art of the play has transferred the burden of the characters' knowledge to us, the mute audience. It is in our minds that a new battle between silent death and its interpretation now begins. The rest is criticism.