Part 5

"Poison, Play, and Duel"
Critic: Nigel Alexander
Source: Poison, Play, and Duel: A Study in Hamlet, pp. 1-29. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
Criticism about: Hamlet
[(essay date 1971) In the following essay, Alexander assesses three dominant symbols in Hamlet that define the drama's action--poisoning, theatrical performance, and the duel.]
Hamlet is a play of ideas. The problems of Hamlet exist for an audience as the result of the dramatic presentation of a number of complex intellectual and emotional questions. These moral and political problems are realized within the context of a murder story which involves three families, and an entire state, in a deeply disturbing conflict of love and hate. This discord is enacted in physical and psychological conditions which force an audience towards a definition of the terms of courage, honour, and revenge which the characters use as justification for their actions. The spectator's attention is particularly focused upon these problems through the character of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
In a remarkable series of speeches and soliloquies Hamlet, torn by conflicting emotions and divided against himself, asks the tormented and tormenting questions which create the special quality of the play. It is necessary, however, for the critic and the director to observe that the difficulties and doubts experienced by his protagonist are only one of the dramatic methods used by Shakespeare to draw the necessary questions of the play to the attention of his audience. There is a distinction between Hamlet's problems and the problem of Hamlet.
The actors who play any of the characters in Hamlet may bring a wide range of personal resources and experience to the interpretation of their roles. No such licence, however, can be permitted to the company which intends to present Hamlet. They must perform three difficult theatrical tasks supremely well. They must make the way in which the spirit of the dead King walks on to the stage strike the audience as both natural and unnatural. The Ghost must be theatrically acceptable and yet clearly outside normal experience. Their next task is to simulate their own profession and mimic the reception of a court performance as part of the dramatic action. The audience in the theatre must be made to grasp the distinction, and the relationship, between the play and inner-play; between the 'poison in jest' (3 ii 229:2102) played by the actors and the acts of poison performed by the characters. Finally, they must produce a difficult and exciting stage fight. This stage business must be managed in such a fashion that the exchange of rapiers, and the rapid succession of deaths by poison, seem a dramatic and logical conclusion to the Ghost's original revelation of murder by poison.
The dramatist has laboured to establish this connection for his actors. The Ghost gives Hamlet an account of a single death by poison. The inner-play presents the physical act of poisoning twice, once in dumb show and once accompanied by speech. In the final duel four of the main characters die by poison. Shakespeare deploys all the resources of his exceptional sense of theatre, and all the imaginative power of his language, to assist the players in this performance of poison, play, and duel. There are many ways of playing Hamlet, but no performance of Hamlet can succeed if it ignores the way in which the repetition of these powerful symbolic actions is designed to dominate and determine the language and the physical behaviour of all the characters on stage. It is this design which will catch the imagination of the audience.
When the play opens Claudius has obtained the crown of Denmark by secretly poisoning the King his brother. One month after the funeral and coronation he has married Gertrude, the wife of his dead brother and the mother of Hamlet. A Ghost, in the shape of the dead King, appears on the battlements of the castle of Elsinore. It discloses the crimes of Claudius, and commands Hamlet to revenge his father's murder. In the play Hamlet's problems develop from the fact that he does not immediately obey this command by killing the King his uncle.
Hamlet is unable to explain this delay and frequently reproaches himself in bitter terms for his failure to kill the King. At a crucial stage of the action, and in the seventh and last of his soliloquies, Hamlet can say (4 iv 43:2743 Q 37):
Hamlet
I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do',
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means,
To do't.
It is hardly surprising that the question of Hamlet's delay has assumed such critical importance. It is so evidently a problem for Hamlet.
It is here that Hamlet's problems differ in marked fashion from the problem of the play. To accept Hamlet's self-reproaches, and look for some reason, explained or unexplained, which prevented him from killing the King is to accept an important, although generally unstated, assumption. It accepts that the most natural, or the best, solution to the problem of murder and violence in Denmark should be a swift and, if necessary, violent retaliation or revenge. Hamlet never questions the necessity and duty of avenging his father's murder. The duty of revenge, however, is presented in more than one dramatic fashion during the course of the play. The play which Shakespeare wrote does ask its audience to examine and question the assumption made so readily by so many of Hamlet's critics--the assumption that Hamlet's only proper response to the news that his father has been murdered in secret is to become a secret murderer.
The play is not a series of random scenes but an ordered and highly controlled pattern. The metaphorical and symbolic language is used to expand, define, and interpret the physical actions of the characters. Within this poetic pattern of action and language the theme of violent death followed by equally violent revenge and retaliation is repeated in different circumstances by different players. As death answers to death in the play the audience are required to examine the nature of this act of violence. The play is more than a murder story: it is an examination of the kind of response provoked by murder.
Fortinbras, Hamlet, and Laertes all know that their fathers have been killed. All, in their own fashion, revenge their deaths. The desire for vengeance is seen as part of a continuing pattern of human conduct. The way in which that desire is fulfilled or frustrated in the play forces the audience to examine this fashion of human behaviour and the effect that it has upon the lives and fortunes of all of the characters. The varied ways in which individuals meet the challenge of their common humanity are compared and contrasted. The audience are entertained because they are being asked to see, and feel, and understand a little more about the hidden springs of action which are supposed to drive the characters. In being asked to look into the mirror of a stage play and define their own attitudes and sympathies to what they see, they are being given the opportunity to recognize, and perhaps comprehend, something about their own personalities. Hamlet is a masterpiece because it is designed to provide intense and unusual possibilities of self-recognition.
The play's pattern of violence is not confined to sons who have lost their fathers. The death of Polonius affects Ophelia as well as Laertes. She is unable to stand the strain imposed by her father's death. Her reaction is violent but it is violence which is turned against herself. Driven insane by the shock, she drowns in circumstances which lead some of the characters to suggest that she has committed the ultimate self-violence of suicide. Her death confirms Laertes in his desire for revenge. That desire, however, makes him a willing instrument of the King. Claudius, too, is engaged in retaliation. He is anxious to counter what he feels to be a threat to his life and throne from Hamlet. He therefore engages Laertes in a plot to murder Hamlet secretly and with the help of poison. Their joint attempt to revenge themselves upon Hamlet succeeds--but it also leads to the death of the Queen and to their own destruction.
As they move passionately but unwittingly to their deaths, Laertes and Ophelia appear to exemplify in conduct the alternative courses of action considered by Hamlet in his soliloquy, 'To be, or not to be' (3 i 56:1710). Ophelia chooses 'not to be' and finds refuge from 'the heart-ache' (3 i 62:1716) of human existence in madness and death. Laertes chooses 'to be' and takes up arms in order to end his troubles by killing his enemy. In this desperate endeavour he meets his own death--knowing that 'I am justly kill'd with mine own treachery' (5 ii 299:3785).
Revenge, madness, and possible self-destruction are all debated passionately in Hamlet's soliloquies. Hamlet's awareness of the possible paths before him, his intense consideration of the issues and their consequences, is only a part of the dramatist's larger awareness of the problem. Hamlet dramatizes a number of possible human responses to direct and indirect aggression. It is therefore concerned with the kind of internal psychological pressures which may destroy not only an individual or a society but the human species. The play does not solve this problem. In dramatizing his characters' response and reaction to this situation Shakespeare suggests a number of uncomfortable questions which are usually overlooked by those critics who feel that the problems of Hamlet exist only to provide Shakespeare with an excuse for his dramatic illusion.
The court of Denmark is bound together by the usual ties of kinship and hierarchic social order which can be traced in human society from the 'primitive' tribe to the 'advanced' industrial corporation. The structure of this particular society is influenced by the fact that its present King obtained the crown by murdering his brother. The play dramatizes the way in which Claudius attempts to conceal this fact. Although he is legally and socially accepted as King of Denmark he could hardly count upon the support of his society if the true facts were known. In the course of the play the 'natural' bonds of the society of Denmark are broken in almost every conceivable fashion. As the characters, both men and women, respond to the intolerable pressures created by violence and treachery they become themselves violent and treacherous.
As the play proceeds it becomes clear that Hamlet's problem is not only to combat the violence and treachery with which he is surrounded but to try to control the violence within himself--even when that violence seems 'natural' or even laudable in his situation. The exercise of this control is as necessary, and as difficult, in the twentieth century as it was at the beginning of the seventeenth. It is not surprising that audiences have seen mirrored in Shakespeare's play their own most fundamental problems and ineradicable fears.
It is also not surprising that the play has provoked an enormous moral and critical debate about the nature and fitness of Hamlet's own response to his situation. Critics continue to debate whether Hamlet's conduct is 'normal', 'moral', 'weak', 'selfish', or 'aggressive' because the play forces questions of motive and human responsibility upon the attention of its audience. The play does not solve the riddle of the universe. It does compel its critic to reveal, and sometimes to question, his own concealed assumptions and attitudes to the human predicament. The continuance of this debate is a natural consequence of the play's artistic design and a tribute to Shakespeare's own analysis of the problems. Hamlet's problems are not accidental. They have been created for him by the dramatist.
The moral and psychological questions which grip the attention of the spectator can only exist upon the stage because, in the version of Hamlet which was played between 1599 and 1601, Shakespeare had discovered new and brilliant solutions to old intractable dramatic problems. These new solutions made the performance of Hamlet as important an event for the Jacobean drama as Marlowe's Tamburlaine had been for the Elizabethan. The director, and the critic, of the play must distinguish carefully between the problems presented by the play, which are moral and psychological, and the dramatic and technical problems which Shakespeare solved in order to be able to present his play. The moral problems of Hamlet exist because Shakespeare discovered a way in which they could be dramatically expressed.
As a work of dramatic art Hamlet is created by five major technical triumphs. These may be listed simply as Shakespeare's use of the Ghost, the device of presenting The Murder of Gonzago before the court, the way in which the themes of love and death, involving both Gertrude and Ophelia, are united in the graveyard scene, the way in which the final duel unites the military imagery and the imagery of poison, and, finally, the entire creation of the mind and consciousness of Hamlet. By these methods Shakespeare dramatizes the past, provides dramatic conflict in the present, and prepares a satisfying, but unexpected, future resolution of that conflict.
These are not simple matters but artistic problems of great difficulty and complexity. Hamlet's soliloquies, for example, are one of the most interesting features of the play. Their recurrent themes are conscience, and a consciousness of the human condition which involves an awareness of oblivion and death. Yet Hamlet never steps forward to provide the spectators with a suitable synthesis of safe opinions on these subjects. The soliloquies conspicuously fail to solve the riddle of the universe because they contradict each other. They fail to provide any easily assimilable explanation of Hamlet's own motivation. They express, above all, an appalling awareness of frustration and failure. This uniquely observed dramatization of Hamlet's feelings of personal inadequacy has caused many commentators to assume that anything so strongly expressed must represent the real truth about the character.
The fact that Hamlet feels inadequate does not necessarily mean that he is inadequate. One of the questions raised by the play is precisely what response is adequate in the conditions of Elsinore. Critical attention is usually concentrated upon Hamlet's divided mind and the suggestion is sometimes made that it represents some deep division or sense of personal inadequacy within the dramatist. This fails to observe that the extended presentation of Hamlet's troubled consciousness allows Shakespeare to solve one of the most difficult of his artistic problems.
One of the most helpful critical accounts of this problem is given by Henry James in the preface written for the New York edition of The Spoils of Poynton--although the passage quoted actually refers to A London Life:
We may strike lights by opposing order to order, one sort to another sort; for in that case we get the correspondences and equivalents that make differences mean something; we get the interest and the tension of disparity where a certain parity may have been in question. Where it may not have been in question, where the dramatic encounter is but the poor concussion of positives on one side with negatives on the other, we get little beyond a consideration of the differences between fishes and fowls.1
It is evident that one order opposes another in the conflict between Hamlet and Claudius. Hamlet describes it as a duel between 'mighty opposites' (5 ii 62:3565). Under pressure, Claudius naturally resorts to the language of 'divine right' to defend his position as King of Denmark. The cry of 'treason' is still raised at the end of the play when Hamlet stabs the King.
This natural opposition between King and Prince is complicated by two further factors. The audience knows that Claudius obtained the crown by murdering the King of Denmark. In using the language of divine right to sanction his acts as King, Claudius is also implying the possibility of a divine retribution for the act which made him King. It is then possible to regard Hamlet as the agent of this divine retribution. It is equally possible to regard him as a man who has been betrayed by a demon in the shape of his father into an act of damnable impiety. It is clear that this encounter involves more than a poor concussion of positives with negatives.
The contrast between Hamlet and Claudius, however, is only an introduction to the play's major conflict. This takes place in Hamlet's mind. The progress of this mental battle can be traced clearly in the seven soliloquies. Their function in the pattern of the play is to make clear the exact nature of the division in Hamlet's mind. For this reason the soliloquies are not consistent. They vary according to Hamlet's contradictory moods and warring passions. They are not, therefore, a series of wholly positive statements in Hamlet's favour. They present, with an almost mathematical precision, a coherent and logical account of 'the correspondences and equivalents that make differences mean something' in Hamlet's consciousness.
This may be demonstrated briefly by a consideration of Hamlet's fifth and sixth soliloquies. Up to this point the soliloquies have been filled with Hamlet's memory of his father and with his attempt to understand the nature of his own position and role of avenger. He has questioned his own apparent inability to act. Now, on his way to his mother's closet (3 ii 378:2259), and standing behind the figure of the praying King (3 iii 73:2350), he presents a totally negative image. He no longer mentions conscience. His words provide a complete vocabulary and grammar of intent for an avenger of blood.
It appears to be the duty of exacting a complete and damnable revenge which prevents him from stabbing the King. Yet the seventh soliloquy (4 iv 32:2743 Q 26) returns to a consideration of the earlier problems of conscience and consciousness. Hamlet again debates the questions of honour and action. This soliloquy might be considered to modify the hymn of hate expressed in the fifth and sixth--except that it closes with the words (4 iv 65:2743 Q 59):
Hamlet
O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
The feeling of failure and frustration, which Hamlet himself recognizes, is created by this rapid alternation between the language of blood revenge and the language of conscience. These contradictory attitudes can only be reconciled or explained away if the critic chooses to ignore one or more of the soliloquies. Any attempt to resolve the dilemma in this way ignores the problem which has been deliberately created by Shakespeare.
Hamlet is at one moment the Prince who holds in his hand the skull of Yorick, the King's Jester, and uses it to remind himself and the audience of man's mortality. Conscious of his own intelligence, Hamlet naturally questions his place in a universe which may appear at one and the same time to be a 'majestical roof fretted with golden fire' (2 ii 298:1347) and 'a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours' (2 ii 301:1349). At another moment he is a man who hates the King with such determined and implacable loathing that he becomes an avenger who hopes to reach beyond the grave and damn his enemy's soul to eternal hell fire.
These attitudes are difficult to reconcile. They may easily coexist in the same mind. If they do, and it becomes necessary to act on one view or the other, they will create a profound mental disturbance and conflict which cannot be solved by the easy application of moral formulas. It is not possible to be a courtier who is a scholar from Wittenberg and at the same time a courtier who is totally consumed by the passion of blood revenge. Hamlet is a scholar from Wittenberg who is determined to become an avenger of blood. He is consequently judged, by critics of the play, as an over-zealous scholar who proves himself an inadequate avenger, or an inadequate scholar who, neglectful of the doctrines for which the University of Wittenberg was famous throughout Europe, proves himself to be an over-zealous and damnable avenger.
The conflicting accounts of Hamlet's character are themselves evidence that his mind presents a more subtle conflict than 'the poor concussion of positives on one side with negatives on the other'. There is a sense, and I believe it to be a powerful and deeply rooted sense, in which any audience of Hamlet longs for the Prince to act in final and decisive fashion against the King. There is also a sense in which an audience must recoil before the entire macabre masque of vengeance--especially when vengeance becomes associated with the techniques of eternal sadism.
Faced with the experience of these contradictory emotions on the part of the protagonist and the audience, it is perhaps natural to conclude that the dilemma is insoluble and that 'the experience of Hamlet, then, culminates in a set of questions to which there are no answers'.2 It would be a mistake, however, to imply that Shakespeare is content to solve his dramatic problem by representing Hamlet's divided mind and to leave his audience in the same confusion as his characters.
Hamlet's mind is at war with itself because he is aware that more than one single set of answers exists to the problems which face him. These problems, the necessary questions of the play, do not admit of any 'final' or 'ultimate' solution. They must, however, be solved to the extent that in order to act, men have inevitably to judge between particular beliefs and values. The other characters in the play do not hesitate to act because they are sure of their own values and beliefs. Fortinbras and Laertes act because they believe that certain actions are right or honourable. Claudius acts because, although he is aware that his conduct is neither right nor honourable, he intends to survive. Hamlet, as subject as they are to the instinctive pull of human passion, is dramatized as a man who is not only aware of problems which have escaped the notice of the other characters, but is engaged in a search for the right answers.
The dramatist is inevitably involved in moral problems. It is not his task to present his audience with instant recipes for the correct regulation of life or conduct. The kind of art which does present instant recipes is, as Bertolt Brecht and William Burroughs insist, a branch of the international narcotics traffic. The play asks its audience if they are entirely confident that they know that their own answers are right--or whether anyone can know what the right answers are. The play of Hamlet culminates in a series of questions to which the audience must find answers. The answers that each individual finds are an expression, a revelation, and a definition of his human personality. This play should also make the spectator wonder if the personality which he has revealed to himself is entirely adequate.
This is precisely Hamlet's own response to the problems of the play. Since Hamlet is unable to bring the inner debate of the soliloquies to a final and satisfactory conclusion, psychology has sought for a final answer to the problem in Hamlet's unconscious. In the Freudian interpretation of the play offered by Dr Ernest Jones3 Hamlet fails to act, and is unable to explain this failure, because he is suffering from an Oedipus complex. Since he has not resolved his unconscious infantile desires to kill his father and marry his mother he is constitutionally incapable of taking any action against the man who has in fact acted out these fantasy wishes.
This diagnosis is extended to cover the dramatist as well as his creation. This depends upon the critical assumption that Hamlet does not explain his delay because Shakespeare could not explain or understand it. I believe this assumption to be false. Hamlet's delay is a dramatic device which allows the dramatist to question the nature of the act of revenge. This has escaped the notice of many critics and psychologists because they are persuaded that they know the right answer to one of the play's most important and exacting questions. In their view Hamlet ought to kill the King.
It is now traditional for literary critics to decline the whole question by asserting that, however valuable psycho-analysis may be in treating patients, it is not a suitable tool for the analysis of dramatic characters whose existence is purely fictional. This seems to me mistaken. The basis of the dramatist's work is observation of human beings. In this case the observation appears to have been accurate enough to appeal to an audience several hundred years after the play can no longer depend upon local conditions or fashionable appeal. It seems reasonable and probable that this observation could be confirmed by the scientific study of the human mind. There should be no quarrel between literature and science. An unbridgeable difference of opinion exists only between those who think that no scientific explanation of literature is possible and those who imagine that it has already been provided.
Ernest Jones's analysis is inadequate because he has failed to examine one of the major psychological observations of the play. He thinks that Laertes exists in the drama as an example of how Hamlet should have behaved. The evidence of accumulated criticism indicates that this is a significant response to the events of the play. The audience is, as we have argued, bound to desire Hamlet to execute vengeance upon the King in the same aggressive spirit that Laertes exacts his revenge. The realization that what they desire is a person like Laertes ought to cause the audience more reflection. The reaction of Laertes is a 'normal' and 'human' reaction. It leads to those very normal and human activities of treachery and murder by poison. Jones has made exactly the kind of automatic ethical assumption that the play of Hamlet is designed to examine and question. Unthinking aggression is not always necessarily a sign of mental health.
It is possible to argue that Hamlet does display exactly these symptoms of unthinking aggression when he kills Polonius, believing that he has killed the King. This would suggest that he is not as inhibited in his reactions as the Oedipus complex requires, and Jones goes to elaborate lengths to explain away the plain language of the play. It is, however, clear that Hamlet's conduct, the violent reaction natural to his situation, is connected with fundamental instincts of jealousy and sexual affection. The psychology of Hamlet is more subtle than the simple observation that infantile relations with one's mother involve sexual feelings which may give rise to adult complications.
The existence of such instincts in the play does not explain Hamlet or help to differentiate Hamlet from other similar plays. The protagonist of Henry Chettle's The Tragedy of Hoffman, written at approximately the same time as Hamlet, spares one of his intended victims, Martha, Duchess of Lunanberg, because he has fallen in love with her. He has murdered her son, Otho, and is now impersonating the dead Prince. Once he has failed to strangle the Duchess in her sleep he has to confess to this impersonation, explain that Prince Otho was drowned in a shipwreck, and persuade her, for a variety of reasons, to permit him to continue his impersonation.
Hoffman's own intentions, as he informs the audience, are unquestionably sexual (H 4 v:1909):
Hoffman
But, new-made mother, there's another fire
Burns in this liver; lust and hot desire
Which you must quench. Must? ay and shall; I know
Women will like however they say no.
And since my heart is knit unto her eyes
If she, being sanctimonious, hate my suit,
In love this course I'll take, if she deny
Force her: true, so, si non blanditus: vi.
He meets his death in attempting to carry out this plan. He decoys the Duchess to a deserted cave by the sea shore where the skeletons of his dead father and her son hang in chains. She, however, is decoying him and he is surprised by his enemies. He is killed by having an iron crown, heated white-hot, placed upon his head and dies cursing love for betraying his revenge.
It could be argued that Hoffman's failure to complete his revenge is due to the paralysis of his will caused by desire for his 'mother'. Within the analogies of the Freudian system, Hoffman's unresolved desire for his own mother could easily be displaced on to the Duchess. The tragedy of Hoffman is clearly an Oedipus complex. If Hoffman's delay fails to move an audience in the same way as Hamlet's, it is because Hamlet's motives, which he finds inexplicable, have been subjected to a conscious and searching analysis, closely similar to the process of psycho-analysis, on the part of the dramatist. The deliberate creation of Hamlet's 'unconscious' is a technical triumph of Shakespeare's art. It has not yet received the close psychological attention that it deserves.
Hamlet's argument with himself, conducted in soliloquy, is deliberately inconclusive because the dramatist needed to create an unconscious as well as a conscious side of Hamlet's mind. This part of Hamlet's mind, as will be demonstrated, makes a vital contribution to the argument of Hamlet. This argument is conducted in the terms of the actions of poison, play, and duel which the actors must perform if they are to present the play. A dramatic argument, however, is a series of more or less accurate observations which have been arranged in a systematic pattern in order to convey the maximum amount of information with the greatest possible clarity to an audience. A dramatic argument is not a divine revelation. It is essential to be as aware of the limitations of the theatre as of its possibilities.
At the end of the play Fortinbras orders Hamlet's body to be borne 'like a soldier to the stage' (5 ii 388:3896) while Horatio prepares, as he had promised, to relate Hamlet's cause 'aright' to the 'unsatisfied' (5 ii 331-2:3823-4). This true and authoritative account of the events of the play ought to resolve all critical doubts about questions of intention and motive. As the actors leave the stage in order to listen to this account they have performed their last exit and the play of Hamlet is over. The audience, therefore, must be content to judge the question themselves from what they have seen, and heard, and more or less understood.
Shakespeare declines to be the ultimate judge of his characters. Horatio's last words to Hamlet (5 ii 351:3849):
Horatio
Good night, sweet prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest
are, among other things, a reminder that those who seek an ultimate judgment will have to apply to a higher tribunal than the actors on the stage or the audience in the theatre.
The end of the play does not bring its argument to an end. Hamlet is a disturbing play because it is about a man who made up his mind. The appalling nature of the decisions in this play, and their equally terrible consequences, leave the spectators on and off the stage--those whom Hamlet calls 'but mutes or audience to this act' (5 ii 327:3819)--still arguing towards a conclusion.
The play, therefore, continually tempts the critic into the confident delivery of the final or ultimate judgments which the author has declined to supply. In this respect it is a notably successful illustration of Hamlet's own critical views on the theatre whose purpose (3 ii 22:1869):
Hamlet
both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.
In Hamlet the art of the theatre continually provokes its audience into self-revelation.
Hamlet is so deeply affected by a theatrical performance, the recitation by the First Player of Aeneas' tale to Dido, that he resolves to present The Murder of Gonzago before the court. The King is very violently affected by this play. As a result of what he has seen Claudius arranges another court entertainment--the 'play' with foils between Hamlet and Laertes. In each case the 'mirror' of the stage reveals to the spectator his own most fundamental problem in a new and unexpected light. The play asks its audience, as Hamlet asks Gertrude, to 'Look here upon this picture and on this' (3 iv 53:2437) and then turn their eyes upon themselves.
The relevance of the questions asked in the play extends outside the theatre. The answers determine the part that the individual must himself play in the world. The spectators do not share all of Hamlet's problems but their world is also the world of poison, play, and duel. As Hamlet looks into the empty eyes of death in the graveyard that is Elsinore he speaks to their condition across the gulf of time and circumstance.
Since Shakespeare himself insists on the metaphor of the theatre throughout this play, it is legitimate to say that Hamlet is an actor who has been offered a choice of roles. He is unable to determine which part he ought to play. He has been accused of self-dramatization in the soliloquies. The charge is just. Self-dramatization, however, is an extremely important and valuable human activity.
In his third soliloquy Hamlet compares his own conduct with that of the actor who weeps as he recites the story of Hecuba. In the play scene Hamlet has to become an actor and take part in a play which turns into an unrehearsed happening. The results are spectacular. In the seventh soliloquy Hamlet contrasts his conduct with that of the soldiers of the army of Fortinbras. He is himself called upon to exhibit some of the qualities of a soldier in the duel with Laertes.
In the self-dramatization of the soliloquies Hamlet judges his own conduct to be inadequate because he has so far failed to play the role he feels most essential to him--the role of an avenger of blood. The audience comes to understand the nature of these various roles because Hamlet rehearses them all in the theatre of his own mind. The audience are invited to compare these players' speeches with the actual parts played in action by Hamlet and the other characters of the play. The difference between Hamlet's estimate of himself in soliloquy rehearsal and his actual capabilities in action is one of the methods by which Shakespeare creates the unconscious mind of Hamlet.
In the soliloquies Hamlet blames himself because thought hinders action. Hamlet's thoughts are, however, an examination by the dramatist of the avenger's role that Hamlet desires to play. The competing languages of the soliloquies, the language of thought and conscience and the language of blood and action, define the nature of the incompatible parts that Hamlet feels compelled to play. The soliloquies reveal more than a division and uncertainty in Hamlet's mind. They examine the possibilities of some of the parts open to humanity. Hamlet's divided mind is the best, most economical, dramatic device available for making the power and attraction, and the importance, of these parts clear to an audience in the theatre.
The suggestion that the whole world was a stage for human actors would have been familiar to an Elizabethan audience. When, in As You Like It, Shakespeare makes Jaques instruct the Duke and his followers that (2 vii 139:1118):
Jaques
All the world's a stage
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages
he is making use of a figure of thought and speech that had long been familiar in philosophy, art, and literature.
The exceptional importance of this vision of the theatre of the world has been pointed out by Frances Yates:
Heywood's defence of the theatre is important for the understanding of the real public theatres of the Elizabethan and Jacobean age. The ancient theatre, in the abstract, had gathered a strong emotional and moral appeal, and the theatre of the world as an emblem of the life of man was a topos widespread in the Renaissance, whether in the form of memory theatres, or of emblems, or of rhetorical discourses. These associations cannot be entirely separated from the appearance of the real ancient theatres, the public theatres of London.4
The morality and mystery plays had shown mankind as a minor but significant actor in the God-created universal drama of heaven and hell, death and judgment. The very name of the Globe theatre was an indication that the actors had not abandoned the claim of their art to have universal applications. Hamlet is a play which is peculiarly suited to production in such a theatre of the world. The continual references to plays and playing are direct references to the physical details of the structure of the Globe theatre. They are also a reference to man's continuing performance in the theatre of the greater globe. The idea that life is a performance is naturally associated with the reflection that death provides all of the characters with one undignified universal exit.
The images used by Hamlet in the graveyard to symbolize the triumph of time and fortune are part of this great European tradition. When Hamlet's imagination traces 'the noble dust of Alexander till 'a find it stopping a bung-hole' (5 i 198:3391) it is moving along familiar paths. In a corridor of the Palazzo Trinci at Foligno there are a number of frescoes painted about 1420. One wall shows the great heroes of western tradition, including both Alexander and Julius Caesar, mixing classical and biblical figures. The other wall depicts the seven ages of man, apparently based upon the descriptions of a French poem of the fourteenth century. In the Camera delle Stelle of the same palace the figures of the seven ages of man are repeated. This time they are associated with the hours of the day and the planetary divinities--the Greek and Roman gods whose names had been given to the planets, who ruled the signs of the zodiac and thus determined the fortunes of men.5
Shakespeare was familiar with this common association of Time, Fortune, and the Seven Ages of Man. In the same scene in which he delivers his speech upon the theatre of the world Jaques describes his meeting with Touchstone in the forest (As You Like It, 2 vii 20:993):
Jaques
And then he drew a dial from his poke,
And, looking on it with lack-lustre eye,
Says very wisely, 'It is ten o'clock;
Thus we may see', quoth he, 'how the world wags;
'Tis but an hour ago since it was nine;
And after one hour more 'twill be eleven;
And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale.'
Shakespeare allows his audience to laugh at Touchstone's heavily moralized view of Fortune and the hours of the day before he makes Jaques remind them that such folly is another expression of an inescapable reality. Even the road through the Forest of Arden leads to old age and death.
Shakespeare uses this familiar comparison for new and unexpected dramatic purposes in Hamlet. The theatre is not now an image of an orderly progression through the seven ages of man. The players have to choose their parts without time to reflect or enough information to allow them to order the anarchy of their own imaginations. In choosing their parts they are also choosing the manner of their own deaths. All the available parts end in the grim dumb show of the graveyard where the politician, the courtier, the lawyer, and Yorick, the King's Jester, all wear the anonymous mask of a death's-head.
The parts of the theatre of the world seem interchangeable. The pride of possession and the lust for power, even the heroic triumphs of Alexander and Julius Caesar, make little sense when compared to the overwhelming fact of man's mortality. Yet in another moment Hamlet will be grappling with Laertes over Ophelia's grave asserting his love for that most useless of all inanimate objects, a human corpse. The play is a dance of death in which it can still matter how the individual parts are played.
The metaphor of the theatre of the world in Hamlet is more than a literary commonplace. It is a symbol which provides a convenient and essentially theatrical method of referring to more than one series of fairly complex ideas. The metaphor of 'playing a part' can have more than one connotation. Claudius, for example, plays the part of King of Denmark in two ways. He appears as the legitimate elected ruler but he has also, in murdering his brother, managed to assume a role to which he is not entitled. During the play the crazed face of the murderer slowly becomes clearer behind the mask of the King.
The first time that Hamlet appears on stage he defends himself against the charge that he is playing a part in continuing to mourn for his father's death (1 ii 76:257):
Hamlet
Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not 'seems'.
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These, indeed, seem;
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passes show--
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.
'Playing' and 'seeming' are both key terms in the argument of Hamlet.
In the sense used by Hamlet 'seem' has the implication of deceit or 'false-seeming'. Duke Vincentio uses it in this sense in Measure for Measure when he comments upon Angelo's assumption of power (1 iii 53:345):
Duke
Hence shall we see,
If power change purpose, what our seemers be.
'Play' can mean more than the art of acting. It is associated with children's play and it can also mean sexual play. All three meanings are vividly present in Leontes's speech in The Winter's Tale (1 ii 187:269):
Leontes
Go, play, boy, play; thy mother plays, and I
Play too; but so disgrac'd a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave. Contempt and clamour
Will be my knell. Go, play, boy, play.
These meanings of false-seeming and playing are an essential part of the theatrical metaphor in Hamlet.
The King agrees to the presentation of the play entitled The Murder of Gonzago before the court as the kind of 'child's play' which may divert Hamlet from his melancholy. The actual performance, however, is a play about false-seeming in which sexual play is preceded by the act of murder. Hamlet is 'playing' with the King--as a cat plays with a mouse or an angler plays a fish. He also 'plays' upon words in his conversation with Ophelia. The double meanings have clear overtones of sexual 'play'.
The inner-play is the most extended and important use of the theatrical metaphor in Hamlet. As Maynard Mack has described it:
On the stage before us is a play of false appearances in which an actor called the player-king is playing. But there is also on the stage, Claudius, another player-king who is a spectator of this player. And there is on the stage, besides, a prince who is a spectator of both these player-kings and who plays with great intensity a player's role himself. And around these kings and that prince is a group of courtly spectators--Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Polonius, and the rest--and they, as we have come to know, are players too. And lastly there are ourselves, an audience watching all these audiences who are also players. Where, it may suddenly occur to us to ask, does the playing end? Which are the guilty creatures sitting at a play? When is an act not an 'act'?6
This use of The Murder of Gonzago is a brilliant solution to a technical problem. It presents, in concrete terms, the dramatic and logical argument of Hamlet to the audience.
The inner-play is, in the first instance, an instrument of Hamlet's will. It satisfies him that the Ghost is an 'honest' Ghost. It convinces him that Claudius is indeed a murderer and that his own task of vengeance is justified. These are in themselves sufficient reasons for its dramatic existence. Its real function is, however, to solve some of Shakespeare's dramatic problems. This inner-play allows the dramatist to exercise complete control over the past, the present, and the future in the time scheme of his play.
The inner-play is a representation of the past whose present performance has an instant psychological effect so powerful that it determines future action. After the play, the killing begins. The deaths which occur after The Murder of Gonzago are, however, a direct consequence of the deaths that are dramatized within it. Up to this point the audience have only heard of the murder of Hamlet's father. Now they have seen it. The inner-play dramatizes events which occurred before the beginning of the action of Hamlet. This presentation of the past is one of the most difficult problems facing any dramatist.
The past represented in the inner-play is an act of poisoning. This act is performed twice before the watching King and court. The audience are bound to remember, since this scene is designed to remind them of that specific fact, that King Hamlet was murdered by having poison poured into his ear. They may also remember the earlier words of the Ghost (1 v 35:722):
Ghost
'Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,
A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark
Is by a forged process of my death
Rankly abus'd; but know, thou noble youth,
The serpent that did sting thy father's life
Now wears his crown.
Claudius has poisoned the ear of Denmark with false reports, just as he poisoned the ear of Denmark's King with 'juice of cursed hebona in a vial' (1 v 62:747).
It has often been pointed out, perhaps most notably by Caroline Spurgeon, that 'in Hamlet there hovers all through the play in both words and word pictures the conception of disease, especially of a hidden corruption infecting and destroying a wholesome body'.7 There is, however, some disagreement among the characters about the source of the infection which they recognize is spreading through the body-politic of Denmark.
The Ghost and Hamlet believe that Claudius is the source of this poison. Polonius and Laertes, on the other hand, see Hamlet as a possible origin of the 'canker' (1 iii 39:502) or 'contagious blastments' (1 iii 42:505) which they fear threaten Ophelia. Claudius describes Hamlet as a disease raging in his blood which can only be cured by the King of England. The cure is the execution of Hamlet (4 iii 65:2730):
King
Do it, England:
For like the hectic in my blood he rages,
And thou must cure me. Till I know 'tis done,
Howe'er my haps, my joys were ne'er begun.
On the other hand, if Claudius is the source of the infection, then the inner-play may be regarded as the beginning of a cure.
This is, perhaps, lightly suggested in the 'medical' imagery which follows upon the success of Hamlet's stratagem (3 ii 290:2168):
Guildenstern
Good my lord, vouchsafe me a word with you.
Hamlet
Sir, a whole history.
Guildenstern
The King, sir--
Hamlet
Ay, sir, what of him?
Guildenstern
Is, in his retirement, marvellous distemp'red.
Hamlet
With drink, sir?
Guildenstern
No, my lord, rather with choler.
Hamlet
Your wisdom should show itself more richer to signify this to his doctor; for, for me to put him to his purgation would perhaps plunge him into far more choler.
The presentation of The Murder of Gonzago convinces Claudius that he is diseased. He diagnoses this disease as Hamlet and attempts to cure himself by sending the Prince to execution in England. When that scheme fails he arranges the fencing match in which a poisoned cup and a poisoned rapier are used. This attempt is both successful and fatal. Hamlet is killed but the King dies of his own poison. Curing oneself of disease by the use of poison is a risky occupation. The image of the past in the inner-play is an image of poison. Its performance causes further poisoning.
The 'mirror up to nature' (3 ii 23:1870) which reflects this image of poison brings Claudius literally face to face with his own past. The use of the term 'mirror' for a stage play or other work of literature has a long history in art and philosophy. One of the implications of the term is that the mirror does not simply reflect: it reflects the truth even when that truth may be unwelcome. Mirrors may be magical. As Otto Rank writes:
It is a man's reflection in a mirror (originally water) which provides a more life-like image of the self than the dark featureless shadow.
In Greek mythology, we find traditions bearing out this creative significance of the mirrored image for artistic inspiration. One of the most primitive deities in prehistoric Greece, Dionysos, known through his mysterious cults, was said to have been conceived by his mother Persephone as she admired herself in a mirror. He himself, according to Procules' account, created the world of things after his miraculous re-birth in the following manner: one day Dionysos gazed at himself in a mirror, the work of the mythical artisan Hephaistos, and, seduced by the reflection, created the external world in his own image.8
In the mirror which Hamlet has placed before him Claudius can see the way in which he created the present world of the court. Claudius as he is now, the King, is faced by Claudius as he was then, a murderer. He realizes that both are images of the same person. The play does not reveal this truth about the past to the other spectators--apart from Hamlet and Horatio who already know it. Art provides an opportunity for recognition rather than revelation. The most important effect of the inner-play is to force Claudius to recognize a crime whose full horror he had succeeded in concealing from his own consciousness. The inner-play performs the exact function predicted for it by Hamlet: it catches the conscience of the King.
In the privacy of his chamber Claudius falls upon his knees in prayer. He is attempting to wipe away from his mind the hideous reflection of the murderer. He believes that the murder of his brother is recorded in heaven. There he will be called upon to give a true account of his actions before the bar of a court which cannot be deceived by false-seeming but will compel him to give evidence for the prosecution. He also believes that it is possible to obtain pardon; that the grace of God can offer mercy even to those who have committed the crime of Cain and murdered their brothers.
In order to obtain forgiveness, however, he knows that he must repent. He must admit, not only to himself but to the world, that the image presented by the play was true. He must give up (3 iii 54:2330):
King
those effects for which I did the murder--
My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.
This, as he recognizes, he is unable to do. As he is in the very act of acknowledging that, for him, repentance is impossible the image of retribution--an avenger of blood with drawn sword--comes and stands behind him.
The King cannot alter the past but he could obtain forgiveness if he were prepared to abandon playing his present part as King. Unwilling to change roles, he now finds that his future actions are conditioned by his former role as a murderer. If he is to remain King he must continue to be a false-seemer and play a part. It is evident, however, that Hamlet intends to interfere with the King's acting. He appears, somehow, to have obtained information which has allowed him to catch a glimpse of the murderer beneath the King. There is some danger that he may spoil the performance by unmasking the King.
Having gained the crown by poisoning the King, his brother Hamlet, Claudius must now attempt to keep it by murdering the Prince, his nephew Hamlet. The representation of his crime before him on the stage thus compels him to attempt to repeat his previous success in the role of murderer. The mirror image of the play has shown Claudius a true and exact reflection of his own nature. He now proceeds to prove that he is, as Hamlet says, 'a murderer and a villain' (3 iv 96: 2475).
The inner-play forces the audience on stage to reveal the parts that they have chosen for themselves in the theatre of the world, both in the past and for the future. It acts as a mirror for Hamlet as well as the King. The Murder of Gonzago is first performed by the actors in a dumb show and followed by a spoken play. Both dumb show and play present the same argument--the poisoning of a king.
On his first appearance the poisoner is necessarily an unknown and anonymous figure, a 'fellow'. In the spoken play he is carefully identified. He is named by Hamlet, rather than by the actors, as (3 ii 238: 2112) 'one Lucianus, nephew to the King'. Hamlet even speaks some of the actor's lines for him--or invents the kind of speech he ought to use, since the lines quoted by Hamlet are not spoken by the player. Hamlet may intend his line 'the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge' (3 ii 247:2122) as a parody of the high revenge style. The language he uses in his own fifth and sixth soliloquies bears a more than striking resemblance to the melodramatic language spoken by the actor who plays the part of Lucianus.
The act of poisoning is repeated during The Murder of Gonzago because Shakespeare is using the inner-play to represent two separate occasions on which poison is used. The inner-play mirrors the murder that is past, the murder of a king by his brother, and the murder that is yet to come, the killing of a king by his nephew. This is the event which the audience have been anticipating ever since they heard the command of the Ghost. The image which they now see enacted in the mirror of the play is rather unexpected. The different roles of murderer and avenger appear to be played by the same actor. The two functions seem to coexist in one part.
The inner-play thus gives the questions of the soliloquies a new direction. Instead of the question that Hamlet asked himself, why does he hesitate to kill the King, the play substitutes a different question, 'Is Hamlet going to play the part of Lucianus?' It is evident, from the evidence of critical commentary, that many spectators of the play feel that Hamlet ought to play his chosen role of avenger. Others feel that he ought not to play it but that he does, in fact, come to accept it. It is because he thinks that he has accepted it that Hamlet postpones the execution of vengeance on the praying Claudius. He intends to wait until the King is engaged in an act 'That has no relish of salvation in't' (3 iii 92:2367). The fifth and sixth soliloquies, and the action of the prayer scene, at least make clear to the audience that the role of avenger is also the role of the secret murderer Lucianus.
After the prayer scene Hamlet is no longer free to choose his own role. The exact nature of the parts that remain available to the characters is determined by the King's casting of parts in his own court entertainment. This is the 'play' with foils which Claudius has devised as an answer to the threat contained in the inner-play.
The duel scene which ends the play is thus the logical consequence and counterpart of the play scene. The immediate consequence of the inner-play had been, not the murder of the King, but the death of Polonius. This death abruptly reverses the apparent roles of Hamlet and Claudius. Hamlet may still be an avenger, but he is also the object of a son's vengeance. The King, knowing that Hamlet represents a threat to his life, is quick to turn this situation to his own advantage.
After the death of Polonius, Hamlet is sent to England in the custody of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. This first attempt on Hamlet's life is a disastrous failure. Hamlet substitutes his own forged commission for the royal death warrant. After the engagement with the pirate ship Hamlet is landed again in Denmark while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sail on to their execution in England.
Claudius now uses Laertes and his natural desire for vengeance as the instrument of his own deadly intent. The actual act of fencing is correctly described as 'play'. It is also a 'play' in the theatrical sense since Claudius and Laertes are acting elaborate parts in a masque of their own devising. Only they can know how the action of this masque is supposed to develop since only they (apart from the theatre audience) know that certain of the properties employed, like the poisoned sword and poisoned drink, are genuinely deadly.
In using an unbated rapier which he has also anointed with poison during what purports to be a friendly wager on a contest of skill, Laertes breaks the honourable code of conduct which was supposed to govern the art of fencing. He becomes a false-seemer in search of a complete, bloody, and satisfying revenge. This point about the ethics of revenge is made clearly and deliberately by Shakespeare. It is Claudius who believes that 'Revenge should have no bounds' (4 vii 128:3118) and Laertes who is prepared to violate sanctuary or break his own code of honour to achieve it.
This counterstroke of the King follows upon Hamlet's success in the play, prayer, and closet scenes. Claudius bases the plan for his court entertainment upon his estimate of the characters of Laertes and Hamlet. He imagines that he can safely predict their reactions. He is right in his assessment of the considerations which would affect Laertes. The total success of the plan depends upon two other factors. Hamlet must fail to notice that one of the rapiers is sharp, and Laertes must be able to hit him with its point. The King has decided to allow for a certain margin of error and has prepared a poisoned cup as well.
The plan fails because Claudius has made a serious mistake in his casting of parts. Hamlet ought to behave in an honourable but inefficient fashion. It turns out that he is a more accomplished actor and a far more dangerous opponent than Claudius imagined. Hamlet's unexpected performance cannot save him from death but it does expose 'the foul practice' (5 ii 309:3798) of his opponents.
The double part of Lucianus, as poisoner and avenger, predicted in The Murder of Gonzago has now been filled and the role has been played out to the end. Claudius and Laertes, the original murderer and the new avenger, are seen as partners and allies in guilt and death. The role of Lucianus is now seen to be self-defeating and self-destructive--like the foul disease which constantly appears in the imagery of the play. The poisoned pearl or 'union' used by Claudius to rid himself of Hamlet also concludes the poisoned union of his own incestuous marriage by killing the Queen. The story of Hamlet ends, as it had begun, in death by poison.
The violent action of the fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes provides an obviously exciting and theatrical end to the play. It expresses in physical action the violence which has long been present in the language and which has been constantly predicted by the dramatist and expected by the audience. The idea of the duel is one of the great images which dominate the action of the play.
The first information that the audience receives from Horatio after the appearance of the Ghost is an account of the famous duel fought between King Hamlet and King Fortinbras of Norway. This was a combat of champions 'well ratified by law and heraldry' (1 i 87:104) and its result should have been legally binding upon both states. Instead, Denmark is now being forced to make hasty preparations to defend itself against an army of irregular mercenaries led by young Fortinbras.
This attack is diverted by prompt diplomatic manouvre and Fortinbras leads his army against Poland instead of Denmark. Every time that the attention of the audience is directed to Norway--as when the Danish ambassadors leave the stage or return bringing peace with honour, or when Hamlet encounters the army of Fortinbras--they are reminded of the original heroic combat fought by Hamlet's father.
Images of war and rumours of war are continually present in the language of the play. Like the images of poison and disease the images of war have a structural as well as a decorative function. Hamlet once refers to the struggle between himself and his uncle as a duel of 'mighty opposites' (5 ii 62:3565). The military imagery exists, as Kenneth Muir has suggested, 'to emphasise that Claudius and Hamlet are engaged in a duel to the death, a duel which does lead ultimately to both their deaths'.9
The nature of the duel between Hamlet and Claudius is complicated by the way in which it has to be conducted. From the beginning of the play Claudius, suspicious of Hamlet's manner and language, has interposed other people between the Prince and himself. He has summoned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern home to act as his agents. He allows Polonius to use Ophelia as a bait for information. When that fails he agrees to use Gertrude in a similar role.
At this point The Murder of Gonzago is performed, the mouse-trap snaps shut, and Polonius is killed behind the arras. Claudius now uses Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who may be unaware of their true function, as the instruments of murder. When they perish in the execution of what they conceive to be their duty, the King, knowing only that they have failed, turns to Laertes as a man who does not scruple to contemplate secret murder. Only when Laertes falls mortally wounded is the King completely exposed and even then his last words are a call for further help. The action of the play can be seen in terms of a long duel of wits which eventually becomes a physical duel with weapons.
The inner-play is obviously a crucial moment in the conduct of this duel. The play has a special moral reference for both Hamlet and Claudius. It provokes them both into violent and self-revelatory action. It is perhaps the most double-edged and deadly weapon in Hamlet. At the moment of its performance the past is an act of murder by poison, the present a play about poison, and the future a duel in which the combatants, and some of the spectators, will die by poison.
Poison, play, and duel are not only the dominant symbols of the action of Hamlet. They recur at every stage of the plot and are used to structure the entire language of the play. It is not possible to discuss the acts of poisoning, the performance of the inner-play, and the duel between Hamlet and Laertes as entirely distinct actions. Each act of poisoning is part of the 'play' of the court and the duel between Hamlet and Claudius. Each act of playing is part of the search for an advantage in the duel of wits and is a search for information about poison or a disguise for the actual administration of it. Each stroke in the duel of wits between Claudius and Hamlet is a 'play' upon words concerned with poison until the words themselves become barbed, poisonous, and turn into the poisoned weapons of the duel scene.
The audience first sees the Ghost of the King who had fought a famous duel and been murdered by poison. The revelation of the Ghost leads to the performance of the inner-play with its double presentation of poison. His defeat in this duel of wits leaves Claudius with the alternatives of repenting or continuing his course of poison. He chooses to repeat his crime in the shape of the duel. Against this basic action Shakespeare counterpoints the intricate pattern of his verse which repeats the pattern in every scene, sometimes in almost every line, to achieve the final ironic and deadly harmony of Hamlet. The complex structure of the language, and the evident interaction of these dominant images, express the essential distinctions of character and motive which form the intellectual and emotional basis of the drama. Upon these distinctions rests its psychological power as a play.
The duel dramatized by Shakespeare is not simply an actors' fencing match. It is a duel in the mind of Hamlet, and in the mind of the audience, between fundamental human instincts, impulses, and affections. These instincts and affections cannot all be satisfied since they often demand different and contradictory courses of action. The choice between them may have tragic consequences. Shakespeare's play investigates the exact nature of that choice, and the human limitations which circumscribe the characters' freedom of action.
The problem of Hamlet exists because Hamlet does not step forward to speak a divinely-inspired soliloquy destined to put an end to war and human misery and to man's tyranny over his fellow-men. The problem of Hamlet will be solved when that soliloquy has been written. A large part of the commentary on this extraordinary play has been an attempt by its critics, ironically encouraged by the dramatist, to write such a soliloquy. What alienates Hamlet from us is his humanity.
This humanity is expressed in Hamlet's unusual awareness of the possible paths before him, in his intense consideration of the issues, and his acceptance of the necessity of following his chosen course to what can only be a bitter end. Like Oedipus, Hamlet relies upon the weapons of the human intellect and the power of human thought. Like Oedipus, he finds that they are not strong enough to protect him from the operation of time and fortune, or the dark pull of instinctive human passions over which the intellect has only a tenuous control. Yet in Hamlet, as in the Oedipus Tyrannus of Sophocles, the power of the human mind, the union of understanding and love which the Elizabethans called conscience, is not entirely defeated.
The Murder of Gonzago caught the conscience of the King. It also makes clear that the role which Hamlet desires to play, the role which he reproaches himself for not playing, is both barbarous and disgusting. The success of the inner-play appears, in the fifth and sixth soliloquies, to have reduced Hamlet to the level of Claudius. Yet the fact that it makes Hamlet determined to play the part of a secret murderer also removes from him for ever the opportunity of playing that role. When the King rises from prayer it will be to deliver a deadly series of counter-strokes which will cost Hamlet his life. The scenes in which Hamlet instructs the players in their art are the last scenes in which Hamlet is in command of his destiny.
Yet this moment is sufficient. The fact that the play does catch the King's conscience makes it Hamlet's successful act of revenge against the King. Once the limed soul of the King has failed to struggle free, once he has no hope of freeing himself from his guilt, once he is determined never to give up his throne, or his ambition, or his Queen, Claudius can do nothing else except attempt to repeat his original crime. This time he fails. It is not possible for him to repeat his success in the role of Lucianus.
The prayer scene marks the end of the opportunity for secret revenge in Hamlet. If the King had repented then Hamlet would never have been given the opportunity to damn his soul as well as his body. The grace of God would have frustrated the code of vengeance. Since, however, the King has had the opportunity to repent he can never again be an unsuspecting victim. It is one of the great ironies of the play that he destroys himself in his effort to achieve security.
In wrestling with his own conscience Hamlet blames himself for substituting words for action (2 ii 578:1623):
Hamlet
Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,
That I, the son of a dear father murder'd,
Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,
Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words,
And fall a-cursing like a very drab,
A scullion.
Criticism and psychology have often agreed with this condemnation. In Art and Artist Otto Rank comments on Hamlet's preoccupation with words:
Taking Hamlet as the type of the passive, inactive hero, whose indecisiveness has led to so many discussions and commentaries, what he really expresses is just this characteristic word-magic of the hero. Though he does occasionally despise himself for venting himself only in words, the whole play is substantially built up on a faith in words which are imagined capable of improving men and altering circumstances.10
In presenting The Murder of Gonzago, however, Hamlet is neither passive nor inactive. The words are not a substitute for an attack upon the King. They are an attack. Hamlet's choice of weapons is correct. Words are a weapon against which the policy and poison of Claudius is ineffective. Sitting at a play the King is poisoned by a mortal self-knowledge. He plunges through the mirror to self-destruction.
Hamlet despises his own words and thoughts because he recognizes that it is the power of consciousness or conscience which makes him too 'cowardly' to act instantly as a secret and bloody avenger. The action of the play, and the conduct of the other characters, suggest that to hesitate before committing the act of murder, or to avoid the kind of blind passion which exacts instant retribution for every real or imagined wrong, may not be as cowardly or as despicable as Hamlet imagines. Claudius may not be hindered by the cowardice of conscience but it is still his conscience, or his lack of it, which kills Claudius. In Hamlet, as in the theatre of the world, words are capable of altering circumstances. Ideas are also weapons of war.
Notes
1. Henry James, The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces by Henry James, ed. R. P. Blackmur, [New York: Scribner's] 1934, 132.
2. Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding, [New York: The Free Press (Macmillan),] 1967, 9.
3. Ernest Jones, Hamlet and Oedipus, [New York: W. W. Norton,] 1949.
4. Frances A. Yates, Theatre of the World, [Routledge & Kegan Paul,] 1969, 165.
5. J. Seznec, The Survival of the Pagan Gods, Harper Torchbooks, 1961, 130-2; Mario Salmi, 'Gli affreschi del Palazzo Trinci a Foligno', Bollettino d'Arte, xiii (1919), 139-80; E. Mâle, L'Art Religieux de la fin du Moyen Age en France, [Paris: Collin,] 1908, 324 ff.
6. Maynard Mack, 'The World of Hamlet', The Yale Review, xli (1952), 502-23.
7. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare's Imagery [and What it Tells Us, Cambridge University Press], 1935, 213.
8. Otto Rank, Beyond Psychology, [New York:] Dover Books, 1958, 97.
9. Kenneth Muir, 'Imagery and Symbolism in Hamlet', Études Anglaises, xvii (1964), 352-63. R. B. Heilman, in 'To Know Himself: An Aspect of Tragic Structure', Review of English Literature, v (1964), 36-57, makes the same point: 'It is a world of war: the duel writ large.'
10. Otto Rank, Art and Artist, tr. Charles Francis Atkinson, [New York: A. A. Knopf,] 1943, 284.
Source: Nigel Alexander, "Poison, Play, and Duel." In Poison, Play, and Duel: A Study in Hamlet, pp. 1-29. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1971.
Source Database: Literature Resource Center