"One may smile, and smile, and be a villain:" Hamlet, or the Prince of Denmark (1603) by William Shakespeare (i)
Theatre
Hamlet has been played and read for centuries, and read and interpreted in ways sometimes opposite to each other; some have gone so far as calling the text incoherent1. While some inconsistencies are inevitable—given that we do not possess a definitive text, but rather read the result of a collation of texts, from different sources and years—there is coherence. What has been taken for inconsistency is rather young Hamlet’s “traumatised mind straining to articulate perceptions of a shattered world”2 after his father’s sudden and untimely death, while every person around him seems to carry on living. What is more, they insist on him abandoning his grief, discarding it like he might his black cloak. Death is “common,” the queen his mother says, “All that lives must die,” (I.2) so why does he hang on to grief? Of course, we know that queen Gertrude is already remarried, only two months after having been made a widow, and to her late husband’s brother—she is anxious for her son to stop reminding her that all is not well. But Hamlet’s grief is no adopted garb, he says, his black clothes, sighs and tears are not the “trappings […] of woe” but a small reflection of his real, unseen feelings: “Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’ […] These indeed seem, / for they are actions that a man might play, / but I have that within which passeth show” (I.2). This scene introduces the theme of duplicity, of appearing in one way while being another, that is only resolved in the final moments of the fifth act.
When the audience encounters Hamlet here, he has already been transformed, before the beginning of the play, by the loss of the father he idolises, comparing him in turn to Hyperion, Hercules, Jove, Mars. There are, in the smallest moments, only glimpses of the carefree youth (and perhaps, depending on interpretation, with Ophelia careless) he once was. As soon as he is left alone, his first soliloquy reveals the abyss of his thoughts to us: he can think of nothing but death, and the whole world disgusts him, repels him (“Oh God, God, / how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / seem to me all the uses of this world! / Fie on’t, ah, fie, ‘tis an unweeded garden / that grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature / possess it merely.” I.2). He is desperate, calling out to God, jumping from one sentence to another; “Heaven and earth, / must I remember?” he pleads, but then is forced to hide again the true extent of his feelings as his friend Horatio approaches with two guards: the act of hiding once more is both necessary and violent, for he tells himself, “But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue.” (I.2).
Hamlet’s second transformation is caused by the meeting with a ghostly apparition, taken to be the former King Hamlet, his father: there is doubt, especially in young Hamlet, whether this is truly his father’s ghost, stuck in torment until he is avenged, or if he may be a “goblin damned” (I.4) or even the devil himself (II.2). Hamlet cannot in the moment bring himself to care—the shape of the ghost is his father, so he is “bound to hear;” to which the ghost replies, “So art thou to revenge” (I.5). The ghost tells the tale of his murder, and urges Hamlet to the duty of revenge for the love of his father—duty and love are words inextricably bound in this play—then adds, “But howsomever thou pursues this act, / taint not thy mind” and leaves with the words “Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me.” (I.5). Alone, Hamlet is distraught. “Remember thee? / Yea, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat / in this distracted globe. Remember thee? / […] Yes, by heaven!” (I.5). He is once more tormented by memories of his father, but no longer simply the memories of the man he was—the ghost he is now must be remembered. This here is the moment of his true transformation, which makes him then enact the role of the madman. It’s that madness, much discussed at court, which prompts the king to call Hamlet’s friends from university, Rosencratz and Guildenstern, to Elsinore, saying “Something you have heard / of Hamlet’s transformation” (II.2). There is some irony in the fact that this is what Claudius—and everyone—deems a ‘transformation’, when it is only a farce, the appearance of madness.
Rosencratz and Guildenstern must watch Hamlet, and spy on him for the king, to get him to confess the true cause of the madness—love for Ophelia? Polonius thinks so; grief seems unlikely to the king; the queen says “I doubt it is no other but the main, / His father’s death and our o’erhasty marriage” (II.2). This of watching and spying is another theme in the play: everyone is watching someone, but especially parents watch their children. Polonius goes so far as sending a man to spy on his son Laertes, in France, to make sure he is behaving morally, according to his precepts, while so far from home—far from his watchful eye. Hamlet is constantly watched—at first, he is urged to remain “in the cheer, and comfort of our eye” by the king (I.2), and then he is spied on by his former friends, and by the king and queen watching hidden behind tapestries, and watched by Polonius, too, during a confrontation with his mother Gertrude. Always, constantly, are children watched by their parents or by agents of their parents—even the ghost of Hamlet’s father comes back to reproach him for his tardiness in avenging him, and to the last possible moment he is spied on—the king once more orders, “Good Gertrude, set some watch over your son” in the closing of act V, scene 2. The effect is compounded by the idea of the prison, first the prison mentioned by the Ghost in act I scene 5 (he too is watched, and bound to return to his prison), then once more by Hamlet in II.2 (First Folio):
HAMLET […] What’s the news?
ROSENCRANTZ None, my lord, but that the world’s grown honest.
HAMLET Then is doomsday near. But your news is not true. Let me question more in particular. What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?
GUILDENSTERN Prison, my lord?
HAMLET Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ Then is the world one.
HAMLET A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ th’ worst.
ROSENCRANTZ We think not so, my lord.
HAMLET Why, then, ‘tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ Why then, your ambition makes it one. ‘Tis too narrow for your mind.
HAMLET O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.
The theme of roleplay, appearances and deceit is explored again in the play-within-the-play which Hamlet has the travelling company perform at court, so that he may watch king Claudius’ reaction when the actors re-enact his murder of the former king: “For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak / with most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players / play something like the murder of my father / before mine uncle: I’ll observe his looks; / I’ll tent him to the quick: if he but blench, / I know my course. / […] The play’s the thing / wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (II.2).
The other great theme—the overarching theme of the play is that of death. As we saw above, Hamlet is traumatised by his father’s loss, and his mind is fixated on the idea of death. The famous soliloquy, “To be or not to be” (III.1), is about his troubled thoughts of the afterlife (“for in that sleep of death what dreams may come / when we have shuffled off this mortal coil / must give us pause. […] / Who would […] bear / […] a weary life, / but that the dread of something after death, / the undiscovered country, from whose bourn / no traveler returns […]”), but in other instances, and especially after he has committed murder himself, he seems even more obsessed by the physicality of death, the abject, the corpse: “At supper […] not where he eats, but where a is eaten. […] We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service – two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.” in IV.3, and at the cemetery in V.1 he picks up a skull, going “That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once.” To the gravedigger he asks, “How long will a man lie i’ th’ earth ere he rot?” and being pointed out the skull of the king’s jester, he says “Alas poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times. And now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.”
All these themes are echoed and foiled in the character of Ophelia, the daughter of Polonius and a gentlewoman who used to be Hamlet’s lover in the time before the beginning of the play. When Hamlet kills Polonius—who becomes yet another dead father in this play—Ophelia goes mad. Her madness, unlike Hamlet’s, is not feigned: but just like Hamlet, the sense of her words is the truth. She wanders around, and singing speaks of her father’s death, like Hamlet suddenly obsessed with the idea, speaking of flowers, tombstones, shrouds, saying “Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be” (IV.5). Then, she sings of the reason of her madness: her love of Hamlet. Ophelia sings of a woman seduced with the promise of being wed; no longer a virgin; and then told by the young man that he would’ve married her, if she had not come to his bed. She turns again to the theme of death, with the image of her father being laid in the “cold ground,” and when her brother comes, to the theme of memory and thought, remembrance and regret: in her madness, she distributes flowers to the king, the queen, and her brother, giving fennel (symbol of deceit), then columbines (infidelity), then rue (regret). For herself she has rosemary, which she says is “for remembrance,” and pansies “for thoughts,” and rue as well, for regret, “with a difference:” perhaps because her brother’s regrets and hers differ much—hers are linked to having given herself to Hamlet. She oscillates between love (“For bonny sweet Robin is all my joy!”) and mourning (“And will a not come again? / And will a not come again? / No, no, he is dead: / Go to thy deathbed; / he never will come again.”) through her last scene (IV.5). But then, as Hamlet whiles away his days in constant doubt and thought and doubt, Ophelia does die, offstage, drowned—it’s clear to everyone that she did so intentionally. She chose not to be.
For an analysis of Hamlet on love, duty and revenge in the play and in Hamlet’s relationships, read here:
Stephen Dillane, who played Hamlet in 1994.
Greenblatt, Stephen, et al. “Hamlet.” The Norton Shakespeare, W.W. Norton, New York, 1997, p. 1661.