"I must be cruel only to be kind": love, duty, revenge in Shakespeare's Hamlet (ii)
Theatre, classic
On revenge, duty and love, and Hamlet’s relationships to other characters. Spoilers throughout. An introductory post to Hamlet can be found here.
“Doubt thou the stars are fire; / Doubt that the sun doth move; / Doubt truth to be a liar; / But never doubt I love.
[…] Thine evermore most dear lady, / whilst this machine1 is to him, Hamlet.”
HAMLET I will requite your loves. So, fare you well. […]
ALL Our duty to your honour.
HAMLET Your loves, as mine to you. Farewell.
The word “duty” is first mentioned in conjunction with the word “love” by Horatio (I.1), Hamlet’s friend—arguably his only true friend throughout the play (more on Horatio at the end), or rather the only one who never deceives him or spies on him—whose dialogues are more than once linguistically tied to Hamlet’s. For instance, the phrase “mind’s eye” is used only twice in the whole text, first by Horatio, then by Hamlet; Hamlet’s “‘Tis very strange” (I.2) seems to echo Horatio’s “‘Tis strange” (I.1), as does his “frowningly” (I.2) “frowned” (I.1). Hamlet again links these words in the above dialogue: asking Horatio, and the soldiers Marcellus and Barnardo for obedience, he seems to anticipate from them an expression of love that he reciprocates; they reply they’ll do their “duty,” and he requires their “loves” instead.
In conversation with King Claudius, too, are the concepts of love and duty (or obligation, or obeisance) tied together. To him, Hamlet’s grief is about “filial obligation,” and his sorrow “obsequious” (but also, his grief is “unmanly”) (I.2). Hamlet’s obedient reply to his mother is called “loving,” too. Love, duty, obeisance, grief: all are inextricable from one another. The play establishes this very early, so that when Hamlet, quite altered already, is speaking to his father’s ghost, the audience is even more striken by this moment:
GHOST If thou didst ever thy dear father love—
HAMLET O God!
GHOST Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder. (I.5; emphasis mine)
Hamlet loves his father; his father cries out for revenge; Hamlet is love/duty-bound to revenge. When Laertes learns of his father’s murder, he proclaims “That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard,” (IV.5); young Fortinbras of Norway is ready to fight and die with an army to reclaim a small, umprofitable piece of land that old Hamlet had taken from his father (also called Fortinbras) (IV.4); yet Hamlet’s own revenge is anything but swift. He spends his time pondering facts, “unpregnant of [his] cause” (II.2), berating himself for his inaction, asking “am I a coward?” (II.2), weighing the possible outcomes—“thus conscience does make cowards of us all / and thus the native hue of resolution / is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, / and enterprises of great pitch and moment / with this regard their currents turn awry / and lose the name of action” (III.1). He “[thinks] too precisely on th’ event” and resolves to be more like Fortinbras (“O, from this time forth, / my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!”) (IV.4) yet still does nothing—he is still focusing on thoughts, not action.
[…] in its moral complexity, psychological depth, and philosophical power, Hamlet seems to mark an epochal shift not only in Shakespeare’s own career but in Western drama; it is as if the play were giving birth to a whole new kind of literary subjectivity. This subjectivity—the sense of being inside a character’s psyche and following its twists and turns—is to a large degree and effect of language, the product of dramatic poetry and prose of unprecedented intensity.2
It is this very complexity which has allowed critics from every century to have their own varied and different interpretations of Hamlet’s character: he’s been called in turns “immoral” as well as “a man of exquisite sensibility and virtue;” “a man incapable of acting” by Coleridge and one who does not act because he understands action to be useless3 by Nietzsche, while to A.C. Bradley he is a “noble and generous youth” whose “true nature is blanketed by the melancholy ensuing from the death of his father and his mother's remarriage.”4 Love is in Hamlet’s nature; revenge is not. Perhaps, the real reason he keeps tarrying is that he fears he will lose the last part of himself in enacting this revenge.
Hamlet led a happy family life up until the moment of his father’s death, when his world shattered; but this might’ve been borne better, except his mother quickly, too quickly remarries—to her former brother-in-law. This is too much of a shock for Hamlet; again and again he returns to the idea that not even a man as great, as good, as loved as his father was remembered and mourned long, the idea that even the greats are forgotten. Bitterly, sarcastically, he remarks to Ophelia, “O heavens! die two months ago, and not forgotten yet? Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year” (III.2). The first effect of his mother’s “o’erhasty marriage” (II.2) to his uncle is that—with the exception of Horatio—Hamlet has difficulty grasping the concept of love, accepting it, or deeming it valuable. He either confounds it with sex, or rejects it entirely, like in the “Get thee to a nunnery” speech. This is most evident in a dialogue with Guildenstern.
Crucially, levity is not absent from Hamlet. Jokes, puns, double meanings of different sorts add humour to otherwise dramatic moments, as in right after the encounter with the ghost, in I.5:
Ghost cries under the stage.
GHOST Swear.
HAMLET Ha, ha, boy, sayst thou so? Art thou there, truepenny? / Come on. You hear this fellow in the cellarage. / Consent to swear.
HORATIO Propose the oath, my lord.
HAMLET Never speak of this that you have seen, / swear by my sword.
The “truepenny” (meaning ‘honest old fellow’) and “fellow in the cellarage” are references to the ghost, off stage, who is played by an actor shouting from under the stage. Plainly, Hamlet is demanding an oath from the soldiers and Horatio; he is also laughing, either to assume a carefree attitude in front of the other men, or because of a natural human reaction of hilarity in front of things that overpower us. At the same time, the scene is simply funny, and might serve to relieve the audience after the heavy drama of the scene between Hamlet and the ghost. Of the various jokes and puns in the play, many are of a sexual nature.
Identification of sexual wordplay is often a complicated business. […] There are a great many other moments in Shakespeare’s poems and plays at which no one could deny that Shakespeare is inviting his hearers to recognize bawdy significance in lines or dialogue that could on the face of it be taken innocently.5
Among others, commonly accepted sexual references in Hamlet are the “Lady, shall I lie in your lap?” dialogue6 and “You are keen, my lord, you are keen” “It would cost you a groaning to take off mine edge” (III.2), where ‘keen’ means both ‘sharp’ and, as is evidenced by the following line, ‘aroused’. In both of these dialogues, Hamlet is at the very least behaving quite annoyingly towards Ophelia, his former lover7; he keeps harassing her, and Ophelia seems distressed by his suddenly hostile behaviour towards her, while trying to still keep the conversation pleasant and civil. Hamlet’s disillusionment with love is even clearer during this conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, former university friends who are now reporting Hamlet’s behaviour to the king (of which Hamlet is secretly aware):
GUILDENSTERN O my lord, if my duty be too bold, my love is too unmannerly.
HAMLET I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?
GUILDENSTERN My lord, I cannot. […]
HAMLET It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.
GUILDENSTERN But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I have not the skill.
HAMLET Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, you cannot play upon me. (III.2; emphasis mine)
The first, plain sense of this dialogue is clear: Hamlet knows that his friends are playing upon him, and although he is playing one, he does not want to be made a fool. But underneath that, there is a sexual pun (‘pipe’ is still in use today as slang for ‘penis’ and the insistence on mouth, fingers and thumb could surely be played to comical effect on stage, if desired) which leads to think of a reference to a past relationship, like with Ophelia—the 2007 Almeida Theatre production with Andrew Scott makes this more explicit by casting a woman as Guildenstern, turning the relationship into a heterosexual one. Hamlet’s reply that he “[does] not well understand that,” meaning love, or more accurately Guildenstern’s love, is in keeping with his attitude after his mother’s remarriage.
When Hamlet first sees Ophelia in the play, with murder on his mind and worried for his soul, he mutters under his breath, “The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons / be all my sins remember’d.” There seems to be a trace of the old love for her in his words. Yet, whether or not he perceives the hidden observers, his “I did love you once” turns to “I loved you not”; still he exhorts her to never become “a breeder of sinners” and says, “get thee to a nunnery” (III.1)—he does not “set [his] life at a pin’s fee” (I.4) and not anybody else’s, either. It is the soul he is concerned by now: although he doubts almost every thing else, he cannot doubt the existence of souls, and of something beyond death, now that he has seen the ghost.
The “closet scene” in III.4 between Hamlet and Gertrude has been, since Freud, interpreted in literature and in representations as Oedipal8; Edwards calls it “bizarre”9; yet is it not the most natural course of action, for Hamlet’s anger and resentment towards his mother for her remarriage to erupt in a confrontation? He begins the confrontation saying “Mother, you have my father much offended” and sets his purpose: he will not let Gertrude leave until he has made her confront her sins10. Once his initial—and sustained—anger abates, Hamlet counsels his mother. He is desperate to persuade her to change—desperate to save her soul. Although he does so extensively, he does not simply reproach her: he implores her, “Confess yourself to heaven, / repent what's past, avoid what is to come”. He, the scholar (as Ophelia calls him in III.1), turns to Aristotelian ethics, to the principle that “moral virtue comes about as a result of habit”11:
QUEEN O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.
HAMLET O, throw away the worser part of it, / and live the purer with the other half. / Good night – but go not to my uncle’s bed. / Assume a virtue, if you have it not. […] Refrain tonight, / and that shall lend a kind of easiness / to the next abstinence; the next more easy; for use almost can change the stamp of nature, / and either [lodge] the devil, or throw him out / with wondrous potency.
It is not that Hamlet is disgusted by his mother’s sexuality; in fact, he had a very healthy view of marriage through his own parents, and his mother’s “appetite” (I.2) did not disgust him, when it was an appetite for his own father; it seemed to him instead to be most natural, then. If he wants her pure, it’s not merely for his own sake: he believes she is sinning, which would condemn her soul. He is wringing his mother’s heart, holding up a mirror to her sin, only to save her. In parting, he says,
HAMLET So again, good night. / I must be cruel only to be kind.12
The only positive love relationship Hamlet has left is with Horatio. He says as much in III.2, when he confesses,
HAMLET Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice / and could of men distinguish her election, / s’hath sealed thee for herself, […] give me that man / that is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him / in my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart, / as I do thee.
Hamlet, who spends his time in doubt, does not ever doubt Horatio: he says he knows him (I.2), and he only ever claims to know that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were sent for (II.2), and that his father is dead; he writes to Horatio signing himself “He that thou knowest thine, HAMLET” (IV.6).
Once Hamlet is fatally wounded, he stabs the king to death, sarcastically demanding he follow Gertrude in death, since they were married. Very few lines later, he is dying: and like Hamlet would have a spouse do, Horatio wants to follow Hamlet in death, drinking the poisoned wine meant for the prince (“I am more an antique Roman than a Dane. / Here’s some liquor left.”), in an echo of Juliet’s death scene in Romeo and Juliet V.3 (“Poison, I see, hath been his timeless end: / o churl! drunk all, and left no friendly drop / to help me after?”). But he has to live, to tell Hamlet’s story and restore his name: for Hamlet, “the rest is silence” (V.2).
Very interesting choice of words to indicate his body, given that Hamlet will, out of loving duty, later become a tool of revenge—a machine, in a way.
Greenblatt, Stephen, et al. “Hamlet.” The Norton Shakespeare, W.W. Norton, New York, 1997, p. 1661.
“In this sense the Dionysian man has similarities to Hamlet. Both have had a real glimpse into the essence of things. They have understood, and it now disgusts them to act, for their actions can change nothing in the eternal nature of things. They perceive as ridiculous or humiliating the fact that it is expected of them that they should set right a world turned upside down. The knowledge kills action, for action requires a state of being in which we are covered with the veil of illusion. That is what Hamlet has to teach us, not that really venal wisdom about John-a-Dreams, who cannot move himself to act because of too much reflection, too many possibilities, so to speak. It's not a case of reflection. No! The true knowledge, the glimpse into the cruel truth overcomes the driving motive to act, both in Hamlet as well as in the Dionysian man.”
Source: Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy, 1870-71; trans. by prof. Ian C. Johnston (2000). https://archive.org/details/BirthOfTragedy
Edwards, Philip. “Introduction”, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, The New Cambridge Shakespeare, 2003.
Wells, Stanley. Looking for Sex in Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
“HAMLET Lady, shall I lie in your lap? / OPHELIA No, my lord. / HAMLET I mean, my head upon your lap? / OPHELIA Ay, my lord. / HAMLET Do you think I meant country matters? / OPHELIA I think nothing, my lord. / HAMLET That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs. / OPHELIA What is, my lord? / HAMLET Nothing. / OPHELIA You are merry, my lord.” (III.2)
The “lie in” and “upon” Ophelia’s “lap” innuendoes are immediately clear; “country” is meant to be pronounced emphasising the first syllable, resulting in “cunt-try”; and “nothing” was Elizabethan slang for vagina—a heap of puns in just a few words.
That Hamlet has formerly taken her maidenhead is evident in IV.5, when Ophelia, mad, sings.
“Ernest Jones's studies of Hamlet, published between 1910 and 1949, influenced both literary and theatrical interpretation with their diagnosis that Hamlet suffers from an Oedipus complex; the closet scene (3.4) seems first to have featured a bed, and a nightgowned Gertrude, in a Prague production of 1927.” Wells (2004)
Edwards (2003)
“Come, come, and sit you down. You shall not budge. / You go not till I set you up a glass / where you may see the inmost part of you.” […] “Let me wring your heart”
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W.D. Ross.
Absolutely wonderful! I love how you write, I must, I need to reread his work this year, this month jaja