Who is There?: Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Hamlet

Shakespeare's Hamlet has not been out of production for over four centuries and its profound examination of the human condition continues to capture the hearts and minds of people the world over.  Join me in Elsinore as we think about what some have called the greatest drama in history -- perhaps even the greatest literary achievement of all time! 

Margaret Atwood's "Gertrude Talks Back" can be found here: https://lucylit.weebly.com/uploads/6/1/5/6/61560063/margaret_atwoods_gertrude_talks_back.pdf

Hamlet recording: Hamlet with Richard Burton and the Broadway Cast; Columbia Masterworks DOS 702 (1964).  Taken from the Internet Archive.  https://archive.org/details/lp_hamlet-richard-burton-and-the-broadway-c_richard-burton-hume-cronyn-alfred-drake-ei

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• 19:28 (Cont.) Who is There?: Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Hamlet

Transcript

BARNARDO 

Who’s there?

FRANCISCO

  Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.

ME Relax, fellas, it’s just me.

FRANCISCO

  Barnardo?

ME: No, McDonough, from the Classic English Literature Podcast.

FRANCISCO

  You come most carefully upon your hour.

ME: I’ve got a new episode about Hamlet.  Thought you’d like to hear it.

FRANCISCO

  For this relief much thanks. ’Tis bitter cold,

 And I am sick at heart.

ME: Well, tuck yourself up in bed with a nice cup of tea and have a listen.

Barnado:  Well, good night.

ME: Night.  Tell the other guards that there’s a new episode.

FRANCISCO

  I think I hear them.—Stand ho! Who is there?

HORATIO

Friends to this ground.

Me: It’s just the litterbug and some clubhousers.

FRANCISCO

  Give you good night.

Hello again, everyone, and welcome to my little piece of the cloud.  This is the Classic English Literature Podcast, the show that gives rhyme its reason.

Today’s episode is a big one, litterbugs, and one that I’ve been both excited and anxious about.  Yes, today we’re tackling that greatest of all plays, the pinnacle of English literary excellence, the plumbed depths of human experience.  Yes, that’s right: today, it’s Shakespeare’s magnificent octopus: The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

Now, pals for life, Hamlet is my absolute most favoritest book in the whole wide world ever and forever.  I love Hamlet the way I love buffalo wings: hot and messy.  But the play looms so large in our cultural imaginations, nearly everyone can quote a line from it, nearly everyone is familiar with the image of the young prince holding a skull, everyone has an opinion or theory or hypothesis.  I just feel really intimidated – it’s impossible to do it justice.

But we’ll have a go.  Before we do, please remember that the poddie’s email is classicenglishliterature@gmail.com.  Slip me a missive.  Alternatively, you can get hold of me at any of the social media platforms that do so much to shatter salutary social relations.  If you can spare a dime, click the support the show button and do take a moment to leave a positive review on your favorite podcatcher.  I am ever your most humble and obedient servant . . . 

pause

As we’ve noted before, Shakespeare’s great thematic obsessions seem to be kingship and parent/child relations.  This play covers both deeply.  In fact, you may know that Shakespeare’s own son, named Hamnet, died at the age of 11 in 1596, just a few years before this monumental play whose title character shares the lost child’s name (spelling was not so regularized in the early modern period and Warwickshire West Midlands accents can make the names basically identical).  A play that meditates so deeply on loss and death and estrangement and the mysteries of human relationships can have no more poignant name.

The textual history of this most famous of plays is rather complicated.  In the Stationer’s Register of 1602, we find an entry reading, “A book called the Revenge of Hamlet prince of Denmark as it was lately acted by the Lord Chamberlain his Servants,” so we know the play came about at the latest by 1601, but most scholars figure a 1599 starting date for composition and 1600 as the first performances.  

Whence came this play?  Well, we’re not sure, exactly.  Sometimes we hear about an earlier version, sometimes called the ur-Hamlet (the ur- being a German prefix meaning primitive or original).  But no copy survives and no one’s sure who wrote it.  Maybe it was Thomas Kyd, he of the Spanish Tragedy, that first blockbuster of a revenge play.  Maybe it was Shakespeare himself, an early draft lost in the mists of time.

The story of the play – the ghost of a slain father conjures his son to revenge, the son feigning madness to fool the suspects – seems to come originally from a Scandinavian folk story that circulated orally, though there are ancient analogues from Greece and Byzantium, as well as a tale of the Roman Brutus.  The Icelandic Saga of Hrolf Kraki probably influenced Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus who, in the early 12th century, placed the tale in his manuscript Historia Danica or Gesta Danorum (take your pick), which came out as a published volume in 1514.  Saxo gives us the murder of a Danish king by his brother Fengo, who then marries the widow Gerutha, the feigned madness of the avenging prince Amleth and his trip to England (note the similarity in names – just take the H off the end of Amleth, pop it round front, and you get Hamlet).

Pretty close to the story we know, yeah?  But Shakespeeare probably didn’t read old Saxo.  Elizabethans got the tale third-hand by a French writer rejoicing in the name of Francois de Belleforest who brought out his Histoires Tragiques in 1570 and made a great smash.  In the lubricious Gallic tradition, he makes sure we know that the queen and her brother-in-law have been engaging in quite scandalous behavior all along.  Ooo la la! And that the prince is a melancholic: you know, black turtleneck, beret, insouciantly smoking a Gaulois:”etre ou ne pas etre . . .” OK, sorry for that.

Belleforest’s probably where Kyd or Shakespeare or whoever got the bones of ur-Hamlet.  The play we now call Hamlet – the one by Shakespeare noted in the Stationer’s Register – exists in three versions.  The earliest we call the first quarto, published in 1603, and it suffers from the sobriquet “the bad quarto.”  It diverges in significant ways from the second quarto of 1604 and the first folio of 1623, not least by the fact that it is about half as long (which may not be a bad thing given an oak bench’s tendency to produce a sore bottom). There are a number of line changes: "O what a rogue and peasant slave am I" from Q2 replaces “Why what a dunghill idiot slave am I" from Q1.   I mentioned this in the last Subcast episode on Shakespeare’s First Folio, but the “To be” soliloquy is completely altered, and the Queen is called Gertred, and Ophelia is an adept lutenist.  Classroom texts today are usually carefully edited hybrids of the authorized versions found in Q2 and the Folio.

So let’s dash out a quick and dirty for those three or four of you who don’t know the story.  I should also note, perhaps, that what follows in this episode makes frequent references to suicide.

We open on the turrets of Elsinore Castle in Denmark, where nervous guards speak of a ghostly vision of the recently deceased king.  They resolve to tell Prince Hamlet of his father’s spirit.  Meanwhile, the new king Claudius, brother to the previous, has married the widow Gertrude and celebrates his coronation.  He dispatches ambassadors to Norway in order to quell a threat from Fortinbras, a young prince bent on avenging his late father’s defeats at Demark’s hands.  He then allows his Chancellor’s son to return to Paris, but denies that his nephew, now stepson, Prince Hamlet, return to study in Wittenberg.

Hamlet is then told about the apparition on the battlements and he goes to see for himself.  When the ghost appears, it accuses Claudius of murdering old King Hamlet and charges young prince Hamlet with avenging the crime.  The prince decides that the best way to avenge fratricide is to pretend to be mad.

Hamlet’s moodiness becomes a concern for the King and Queen, who summon old school friends to find out what’s wrong: father dead, mother remarried, seeing ghosts – why so glum? Polonius, the Chancellor, believes it must be frustrated love for his daughter Ophelia that has turned the lad’s mind.  A company of travelling actors arrives and Hamlet has them put on a play that mirrors the circumstances of his father’s death.  When Claudius reacts poorly to the performance, Hamlet takes this as prima facie evidence of guilt and proceeds to go to his mother’s private rooms, harangue her for her lasciviousness, and kill Polonius accidentally while the old man creeps behind a curtain.

Well, that drives Ophelia mad and she drowns herself – probably.  Her brother Laertes returns from Paris at the head of a mob seeking to kill Claudius to avenge Polonius’ death.  Instead, Claudius convinces him to have a fencing match with Hamlet: they’ll poison Laertes' sword and a drink so that Hamlet is sure to snuff it.   

Hamlet, having conversed with the skull of a childhood friend, is now more zen about death and plays the match.  Swords get switched, poison gets drunk and everybody dies.  Only Horatio, Hamlet’s truest friend, remains to see young Fortinbras capture Elsinore and declare himself king.

pause

It’s an odd story when you boil it down, isn’t it?  I mean, the revengey stuff is pretty straightforward, intense, bit trashy.  Like The Spanish Tragedy.  But then there’s all the odd stuff: why is feigning madness a sound strategy here?  Is a play really an unimpeachable method of establishing criminal culpability?  What about the whole pirate interlude (yes, I forgot to mention that earlier – pirates are key to Hamlet’s denouement)?  Looking at the play like this, it’s hard to imagine why it has captured the hearts and minds of millions down the centuries.

Regular listeners will know that I try to organize my readings of a particular text around a single idea or theme or insight.  Never – I repeat, never – do I presume that such an explication exhausts the text under discussion, but I try to offer a general understanding of the work for readers unfamiliar with the readings as well as one of my own idiosyncratic thoughts for listeners who already know the text but are interested in another vantage point.

But I don’t know how to squeeze all the things I think are important or interesting about this play into a single thesis.  And I simply don’t have the time or space to go into all the things that make Hamlet probably the greatest literary creation in history.  Am I being hyperbolic?  Perhaps.  But I don’t think so.  

So, what I’m going to do is offer a series of thoughts and observations about various aspects of the play.  They will not be comprehensive, and they’ll probably not come to any tidy conclusion, but I offer them for your amusement and edification.  But this’ll be a long episode, folks, so you’re gonna want to have a pee first.  I’ll wait.

(toilet flush)

Allow me to begin at the beginning.  The first line of Hamlet is one of the drama's great openings: “Who’s there?”  So simple, yet so pregnant with possibility.  Of course, it establishes that sense of dread and suspense, casts a pall over the coronation scene which follows – makes us doubtful.  

And we should also note the sense of claustrophobic surveillance that looms over the entire play.  A sense that one is never really alone, that one is trapped in the panoptic gaze of the Danish court.  Everyone watches everyone else.  Polonius and Claudius spy on Hamlet and Ophelia in the lobby, Polonius hides behind the arras while Hamlet and Gertrude speak.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two of the prince’s schoolmates who have been summoned by the king and queen, lurk in every room.  Gertrude follows Ophelia, Hamlet eavesdrops on Claudius, and Claudius follows the prince’s every move.  Everyone watches the players and Horatio, Hamlet’s best friend, has a keen eye on the king.  The Ghost lowers over all.

And what about that Ghost?  Is it really Hamlet’s father?  Is it, as Hamlet asks, a “spirit of health or goblin damned”?  Who’s there?

Further, that brief question immediately points us to the primary concern of the play: the self.  The “I.”  Who is there?  Who am I? What do we mean by “the self”?  Can we fully know it?  Can we fully know others?  These profound questions of psychology and identity undergird the entire play, inflect every facet of plot, character, and theme.  Harold Bloom, the late scholar at Yale, has asserted that with Hamlet, Shakespeare invents what it is to be human – what it means to be human, and what anxieties accompany that realization.  It’s often noted that Prince Hamlet expresses the entire range of human emotions: he is mournful, fearful, loving, bitter, enraged, depressed, playful, and on and on.  To what extent do various emotional states complicate our notion of a single, unitary self?  Who’s there?  When you think about it this way, the oft-quoted but seldom contextualized bit of advice by Polonius – “To thine own self be true” – is troublingly ironic.

Shakespeare weaves a number of motifs throughout the text to probe this idea.  For instance, clothing images and metaphors pop up frequently.  When mother Gertrude asks why he seems so melancholy, Hamlet replies that it’s not his ”inky cloak . . . Nor customary suits of solemn black” that make him look sad.  He actually is sad.  And when Laertes readies to return to Paris, father Polonius advises, “Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,/ But not expressed in fancy (rich, not gaudy),/ For the apparel oft proclaims the man.”  We get two rather different notions here.  Hamlet says that his clothing cannot “denote him truly,” while Polonius seems to say that how you appear is how people will understand your character.

Along with the clothing motif, the play abounds with references to make-up, cosmetics, and usually, it must be admitted, in rather misogynistic ways.  Accusing a bewildered Ophelia of duplicity, Hamlet shouts: “I have heard of your paintings ⟨too,⟩ well enough. God hath given you one face, and you  make yourselves another.”  In the famous graveyard scene, as he stares at a skull, Hamlet mocks: "Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come.” In his soliloquy, Claudius refers to his own treachery with an ugly metaphor, a prostitute who uses makeup to hide her syphilis scars: “The harlot's cheek, beautied with plast'ring art, Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it than is my deed to my most painted word.”

But perhaps the most persistent and complex trope Shakespeare employs is that of the theater itself – the idea of performance and pretense, acting and playing.  Repeatedly, the play hammers this conceit.  Hamlet refers to false grief as mere pantomime:

Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,

 No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,

 Nor the dejected havior 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.

But then he is powerfully moved when the Player recites the speech of Aeneas’ tale to Dido:

Is it not monstrous that this player here,

 But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,

 Could force his soul so to his own conceit

 That from her working all ⟨his⟩ visage wanned,

 Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,

 A broken voice, and his whole function suiting

 With forms to his conceit—and all for nothing!

 For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to ⟨Hecuba,⟩

 That he should weep for her? 

How could a man, Hamlet asks, summon such genuine emotion for a figment of the imagination?  How could this not be real?  And how much more real, he thinks, is his own situation, the destruction of his family, and he can summon no action at all.

And then, of course, there are the obvious metadramatic moments: Hamlet lecturing the players on the proper way to act, the strange divergence into complaining about child actors (perhaps a timely complaint of the Bard himself, there having been at the turn of the 17th century a vogue for what were called “boys companies,” acting troupes consisting exclusively of children who were cutting in to ticket sales at the proper theatres).  We also get Hamlet’s complaint about comic actors stealing the scene, going off script and improvising when “some necessary

 question of the play be then to be considered.”  Shakespeare having a go at his own rambunctious clowns? Perhaps Will Kempe, notorious for hogging the stage?  

There’s a lovely in-joke before the play within a play when Hamlet asks about Polonius’ own acting experience.  The Chancellor says that “I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’ th’

 Capitol. Brutus killed me.”  Litterbugs who listened to the last episode will know all about that play, but here’s an interesting bit of trivia.  Julius Caesar is generally reckoned to be the play Shakespeare’s company put on the season before Hamlet, and the actor who played Caesar was also the actor who played Polonius.  Symmetrically, the actor who played Brutus is the same as he who played Hamlet, so regular theatre-goers at the time would have recognized Shakespeare’s knowing nod to their experience.  And that, of course, is another metadramatic point: all of this is, of course, a real performance played out before a real audience.

That audience, as we ourselves, could also not fail to notice the prismatic structure of the drama, too, its sense of mirror images in the various plot strands.  Of course, we have the main line in which Hamlet must avenge the death of his father.  We’ve already heard that Young Fortinbras has raised an army to reconquer the territories lost by his father to Old Hamlet, and while he acts with decision, Hamlet hesitates and reflects.  Laertes, too, becomes the avenging son when he storms Elsinore at the head of a mob, demanding justice for his father’s death.  And we can also see, in some way, Ophelia as a foil for the protagonist as well: more on that later. 

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I’d like to spend the rest of the show looking at some of the characters.  Seems obvious to begin with the title character, and so I will.  His is the role that is every actor’s Everest, a must-conquer if you take your craft seriously, and undoubtedly a difficult climb given that the emotional dimensions of Prince Hamlet are so multifarious.  Some famous actor – can’t remember who – said something like the best way to prepare for Hamlet is to simplify – just pick one thing, one state of mind, one motivation, upon which to focus.  Let everything else go because it’s a role too massive for any single performer.

A short introduction, as this episode is, will certainly not exhaust Hamlet’s immense complexity.  But I’d like to point out a few things that I find interesting.

The young prince is like a man standing over a tectonic fault line – the plates are shifting, the earth quakes, and he doesn’t know if it’s better to jump right or left.  He’s a modern young man stuck in a medieval world.  Remember that he is a scholar, studies at the University of Wittenberg – Shakespeare wants us to know this as both Claudius and Gertrude specify the institution in rapid succession.  Now, we’ve mentioned this German city a couple of times in previous episodes because it was the site of one of the greatest tectonic shifts in Western civilization.  Remember?  Here, in 1517, Martin Luther challenged the institutional Roman Catholic Church on 95 different points – a startling provocation of a thorough-going hegemony.  The site stands, in Hamlet (as it does relatedly in Marlowe’s Faustus), as a metonym for progressive thinking, humanism, individualism, new ways of knowing.  Throughout the play, we get glimpses of Hamlet’s immersion in the emerging Renaissance culture.  Not only his thorough familiarity with classical drama and rhetoric (as evidenced by his interaction with the Players), but his allusion to Copernican understandings of the cosmos in his quizzical love poem to Ophelia, his references to infinity, and his quite material interest in the human body.

This humanist scholar is thrust back into the world, basically, of Beowulf (or soon thereafter – we reckon the events of the source material to the early 11th century, so perhaps a century after Beowulf’s transcription).  Hamlet is back in a world of comitatus and the revenge ethic, an early medieval world in which nuance resolves into traditional certainties – all the great questions have been settled by heritage and custom.  The Prince in this world is a warrior, a martial figure – he is Fortinbras – not a philosopher-poet.  Hamlet is decidedly not a chip off the old block.

Attendant to this, he is also, effectively, a Protestant man in a Catholic world.  While the revenge-ethic is a feature of the pagan Germanic belief system, the prompt to it – the Ghost of Old Hamlet – has some very Old Faith vibes.  On the battlements, he tells the bewildered prince: 

I am thy father’s spirit,

Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,

And for the day confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away.

Sure seems like he’s referring to Purgatory, that stop before Heaven wherein the departed soul suffers tortures to reconcile it to God.  This is a peculiarly Catholic notion – the Protestants have no time for this.  In fact, at the time of Shakespeare’s writing, an endorsement of such doctrines could be dangerous.  Here, Shakespeare seems to be hiding behind the ghostly convention of Senecan tragedy.  Protestant theology holds that the departed soul moves to Heaven or Hell immediately, that God has predestined one’s post-mortem address or that the faith of the believer has guaranteed it.  Catholic teaching on ghosts is generally on the skeptical side, but in the early modern period people generally were more disposed to believe. Whether or not souls could return from Purgatory in Catholic theology is somewhat unclear to me.  I don’t believe they can (which complicates our little father-son reunion even more) but there are some traditions that allow for a bit of a furlough if there’s a special mission to accomplish.  Hard to believe, though, that personal revenge qualifies, given the whole “turn the other cheek” outlook of Christ’s teaching. 

Whatever.  We’ve got these pagan and Catholic ingredients: a purgatorial soul enforcing the comitatus bond.  Is Hamlet a Protestant, though?  Well, I admit that’s difficult to ascertain – despite the Prince’s general loquaciousness, he is peculiarly mum about any personal religious convictions.  To be sure, he makes reference to heaven and hell, but his conceptions of them are inconsistent, and he seems to endorse a sort of Christian morality and conception of the world.  But a Bible-thumper he is not.  He strikes me as more Christian by culture than by conviction.  Any putative Protestantism in his character is more the result of a humanist education in a Christian country.  His last words – “The rest is silence” – are characteristically ambiguous.  This young man who, at 1500 lines is Shakespeare’s most voluble, has finally stopped talking.  He’s nothing else to say.  But perhaps he also means rest, not simply as “remainder” but as respite, repose.  That is silent: there is nothing after this life.

And that relief works with the anxiety about the afterlife, and perhaps punching his own ticket to it, evident in the soliloquies.  His very first: “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!”  Here, he recognizes the divine proscription against suicide, but in this speech, Hamlet is quite clearly emotionally distraught, almost babbling – he jumps from subject to subject.  Interestingly, the Folio gives us “solid” flesh – a material body melting, changing states of matter.  The quartos give us “sallied” or “sullied” flesh – that is, a body that has been corrupted and so must be destroyed.

The second soliloquy – “What a rogue and peasant slave am I” – I mentioned earlier: here is where he wonders at the Player’s ability to summon emotion for a fiction.  But at the end of this speech, Hamlet directly addresses us, the audience, and ask us a direct question: “Am I a coward?”  Is his failure to sweep to his revenge the result of a lack of Beowulfian fortitude?  His answer is bitter self-loathing.

Which brings us neatly to the great third soliloquy: “To be or not to be.”  Hamlet rationally asks what Albert Camus (the 20th century author and philosopher) called the only essential philosophical question: Should I kill myself?  Camus says in The Myth of Sisyphus: 

There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.

Hamlet goes to the root here, and the first line of the soliloquy, too, is ambiguous, depending on how one chooses to read the pentameter rhythm.  If we read the line straight, with a regular iambic rhythm, we get: To be or not to be; that is the question.  In the second half of the line, the beat falls on the verb “is”, so we get an indicative statement, sort of a philosophical predicate upon which he can base the rest of his inquiry.  But if we allow a little syncopation, shall we say, and like a swinging jazz drummer pop a trochee in as the fourth foot, the emphasis falls on that.  Here, Hamlet has just realized the truth of Camus’ assertion.  THAT is the question! Oh!

And the fact that in this speech, he is not emotionally overwrought, not ranting, (though there is a mixed metaphor – pretty careless, must subtract points, Bill) but is very rationally considering the issue of self-slaughter, would have deeply unsettled the early modern audience, which saw suicide as absolutely traumatic (not that we don’t today, obviously, but for that world there is a theological dimension that we largely have abandoned).  

But this does, to return to my earlier analogy, make Hamlet a man out of place, sort even out of time.  He says, “The time is out of joint—O cursèd spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”  Some characteristic solipsism there, perhaps, but a keen awareness of his incompatibility with the world as he finds it. 

As a way of attempting to reconcile these competing values and perspectives, Hamlet’s characteristic forms of speech are the question and the pun. This is not to say that he only speaks in these forms, but they do mark his dialogue conspicuously.  In fact, his first two lines in the play are puns: “A little more than kin and less than kind” and “Not so, my lord, I am too much i' the sun.”  Both speeches pun on Hamlet’s now uncomfortably close relationship to uncle-father Claudius.  His conversation with Polonius about Ophelia – "Let her not walk i' the sun: conception is a blessing: but not as your daughter may conceive" – puns on conception as both formulation and fertilization.  “Do you think I meant country matters” to Ophelia at the play puns on the pudendum. And so on and so on.  

The pun may be, as many have noted, the lowest form of wit, but those folks are usually grumbling because they didn’t think of it first.  In Hamlet’s case, I think the use of puns – exploiting a word’s multiplicity of meanings – is part and parcel of his attempt to sort out the meaning of things.  The meaning of meaning, actually.  When Polonius asks him what he reads, he responds quite literally, “Words, words, words.”  There’s a notion that, as he says to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, that there is “nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.”  A very relativistic and subjective position to take – that things have no essential meanings or properties except what we take them to be.  And usually that taking manifests in language and the problem is that language has no fixed meanings itself, so how can it be the arbiter of meaning to other things?

His use of question seems to the same purpose – indeed, that’s what questions are for, aren’t they – to probe the meanings of things.  An astounding number of his lines are interrogative, always skeptical, doubtful, curious, frightened,yearning.  What strikes many readers and audience-members as indecision may actually be a matter of genuine nescience.

pause

Contrasting this is the cocksure confidence of King Claudius.  Honestly, I didn’t intend that annoying alliteration.   Or that assonance.

I suppose one of the problems with our reading or watching of Hamlet nowadays is that the story is so well known.  As I said earlier, most folks know something about it and so many of us go in knowing that Claudius is the bad guy and that both he and Hamlet die in the heat of vengeance.  And, yeah, probably, original audiences knew that too.  But what if you didn’t?  Some of you, I’m sure, came to this play for the first time.  If you didn’t know the story, would you necessarily think that Claudius was the antagonist?  At least for the first half?

When we first meet Claudius, he is addressing his court, very probably for the first time.  He laments the passing of his brother, announces his marriage to Gertrude, then smoothly transitions to the business of monarchy.  He dispatches ambassadors to the King of Norway seeking a diplomatic resolution to that king’s nephew Fortinbras’ planned invasion of Denmark.  The embassy returns victorious.  Voltemand reports that Norway:

sent out to suppress

 His nephew’s levies, which to him appeared

 To be a preparation ’gainst the Polack,

 But, better looked into, he truly found

 It was against your Highness. Whereat, grieved

 That so his sickness, age, and impotence

 Was falsely borne in hand, sends out arrests

 On Fortinbras, which he, in brief, obeys,

 Receives rebuke from Norway, and, in fine,

 Makes vow before his uncle never more

 To give th’ assay of arms against your Majesty. 

A quite deft bit of statecraft, wouldn’t you agree?  An invasion deterred by skilful negotiation and diplomacy.  Claudius seems quite an effective and, indeed, progressive leader – he secures a peaceful resolution to a problem that his medieval, martial, conquest king brother started.

And when we do hear that Claudius murdered that older brother, we have every right to be skeptical.  The Ghost reveals to the prince:

 ’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard,

 A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark

 Is by a forgèd process of my death

 Rankly abused. But know, thou noble youth,

 The serpent that did sting thy father’s life

 Now wears his crown.

To which Hamlet replies: “O, my prophetic soul! My uncle!”  Hmmm . . . OK, Hamlet doesn’t like Claudius – kind of grossed out by the thought of him and Mom doing the dirty and seems sometimes resentful about not being king himself – but taking the word of a ghost that he can’t identify and whose motives he suspects does not convince me – at this moment, anyway – that we should jump along with him to that conclusion.  It is not unreasonable to withhold our assent from the Ghost’s charge.  Besides, don’t you feel the Garden of Eden allusion a bit bang on for comfort?

Of course, we would be wrong, as it turns out.  Claudius is indeed the murderous usurper the Ghost claims as we hear in his soliloquy after the play within a play:

O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;

 It hath the primal eldest curse upon ’t,

 A brother’s murder.

The Cain and Abel allusion nicely completes the Eden reference I just disparaged.  Right, so we know that Claudius is the villain, but I always find this soliloquy remarkably humanizing.  He knows that he has committed grave evil and would like to be repentant, but he can’t be, because he’s unwilling to make restitution, unwilling to sacrifice 

those effects for which I did the murder:

 My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen.

 May one be pardoned and retain th’ offense?

Have we not all felt this?  That we’ve gained some prize we’ve coveted by less than honorable means, and feel awful about it, but yet still can’t shed the desire that motivated us in the first place.  I don’t imagine many of us have killed our brother, married his widow, and usurped a throne, but I’m sure we’ve all got things that nibble at our conscience.  A speech like this, as I said, humanizes Claudius.  Shakespeare doesn’t portray some mustache-twirling villain, not some inhuman monster.  He shows us a man: capable and fallible.

There’s an interesting little line, by the by, from this speech that I want to bring up later, so just remember it now.  The distraught king tries to comfort himself and says: “All may be well.”  Remember that, ok?

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So, we really don’t get a clear read on Claudius until about halfway through the play and that makes me wonder about Claudius’ new wife, Gertrude, the widow Hamlet.  What does she know about him actually?  She’s a character that doesn’t say much (most of her speeches, indeed, are one line) but yet she’s often onstage, in our view, and that kind of silent presence just makes me wonder what she’s thinking this whole time.  What’s she up to?  Y’know, who’s there?

She has been portrayed in myriad ways onstage and on screen.  Often, for some reason, as a dissipated woman, drunken and licentious.  It often works if done well and without relying on misogynistic cliches, but actually I’m not totally convinced it’s supported by the text.  Then again, she has so little text that there is a wide latitude for portrayals.  I’ve seen scheming, Machiavellian Gertrudes and disdainful Gertrudes and weepy Gertrudes and earnest Gertrudes.  As an aside, when you’ve the time, check out a short story by Margaret Atwood called “Gertrude Talks Back.”  A very interesting angle, that.  I’ll put a link in the show notes.

Her son, however, certainly sees her as the lascivious lush.  The abuse he heaps upon her makes one cringe, and that he does so with such a smug sense of self-righteousness galls.  “Frailty, thy name is woman!” he hisses in his first soliloquy.  In the closet scene, after he disowns her, he rampages that she lives “In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed, Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty!”

Yet her reactions to all his accusations are tantalizingly ambiguous.  She says, “O Hamlet, speak no more! Thou turn’st my eyes into my ⟨very⟩ soul,  And there I see such black and ⟨grainèd⟩ spots  As will ⟨not⟩ leave their tinct.”  Is she just putting two and two together now?  Or has she always been in on the plot?  Was her marriage to Old Hamlet happy?  Were she and Claudius lovers before the murder or was she merely a pawn in a vicious case of sibling rivalry?  Had she any choice at all in marrying Claudius?

Ah, so many questions.  And the relationship between her and Ophelia, the only other woman in the play, is similarly unclear.  Their first appearance together feels formal and somewhat distant.  After Polonius’ murder, Gertrude puts off their meeting: “I will not speak with her.”  And then, curiously, it is Gertrude who reports – in what some see as rather suspicious detail – Ophelia’s death by drowning.

There is a willow grows askant the brook . . . 

 There on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds

 Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke,

 When down her weedy trophies and herself

 Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide,

 And mermaid-like awhile they bore her up,

 Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds,

 As one incapable of her own distress

 Or like a creature native and endued

 Unto that element. But long it could not be

 Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,

 Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay

 To muddy death. 

Run to her? Call to her?  Maybe get some help? Tell her how much she has to live for?  No? Just watch her fall, float about a bit, then sink?  Well, a lovely speech, all the same.

Then, at the poor girl’s funeral, Gertrude offers a parting lament that has, as far as I can tell, no logical precedent in their relationship: “I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet’s wife; I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid,  And not have strewed thy grave.”  What, really?  When?  Bit late for any show of sisterhood, Gert.

But my favorite bit with Gertrude comes just at the very end.  Hamlet and Laertes are fencing and Claudius has poisoned Hamlet’s Gatorade.  During a break, Gertrude takes up the cup: “The Queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet.”  Claudius makes the world’s feeblest attempt to stop her: “Gertrude, do not drink.”  And for the first time in the whole play, maybe even her whole life, Gertrude defies a man’s orders and does what she wants to: “ I will, my lord; I pray you pardon me.”  OOOOHHHH!!! And she dies.  But it’s such an open scene, so full of dramatic possibilities.  Is she just a lush who drinks the poison in ignorance?  Does she know the wine is poisonous and decides that suicide is her best option?  Or does she realize what Claudius intends and, in perhaps a long-delayed act of motherhood, drinks to save her son?   You can play it any way, and probably more, because the lines are so elastic and so pregnant.

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Let’s have a look at Ophelia, since we’ve just been talking about her.  She’s another character with comparatively few lines but a constant presence.

So we’ve talked about her suicide, or death, I guess technically.   We don’t know for sure that she took her own life, though both the gravedigger and the funeral priest seem to think so.  At any rate, we clearly see that the death of her father at the hand of her beloved has been . . . disturbing.  Reports reach the Queen of Ophelia’s mental breakdown.  She enters Gertrude’s presence, singing songs that seem to be for her dead father, insisting that Gertrude listen attentively.  Then she begins to speak what seems gibberish, but includes a cutting observation: “Lord, we know what we are but know not what we may be.”  That question of identity and selfhood and agency again.  

Anyway, then she starts singing another song, this time a bawdy tavern number about a young man who broke his promise to a willing young woman: “Let in the maid, that out a maid never departed more.”  Hmm.  Is this a hint?  The song continues:

 Quoth she “Before you tumbled me,

 You promised me to wed.”

 He answers:

 “So would I ’a done, by yonder sun,

  An thou hadst not come to my bed.”

Traditional scholars aver that Ophelia is virginal throughout the play, and they’ve excellent reasons.  But this song, even in her madness, seems a bit on the nose, especially in light of her brother Laertes’ advice back in Act 1.  And if Ophelia had consented to sleep with Hamlet, that would explain her apparent complete mental collapse, much more so than the death of a father to whom she never seemed very close.  I’m not saying she wouldn’t have mourned at all, but that Hamlet was the murderer and that she perhaps sacrificed her virginity to him, well, that is catastrophic.  

Not only because she would be unmarriageable in the Danish court and a pariah in its society, but . . . look, hardly ever does Ophelia think or act for herself.  So many of her speeches are submissions to men: “So please you,” and “I do not know, my lord, what I should think,” and “I shall obey, my lord.”  She has always been defined in terms of her relationship to the men in her life: her brother’s sister, her father’s daughter, her lover’s lover.  When these are gone, she lacks definition – she becomes nothing.  Hence this traumatic psychological collapse.

Many have pointed out that Ophelia – like Laertes and Fortinbras – is something of a foil for Hamlet.  Whereas he feigns madness (does he?), she actually loses her sanity.  Where he contemplates suicide, she actually commits it.  She reifies his abstractions – what for him is intellectual becomes for her actual.

Unless . . . unless . . . she’s more cunning than we give her credit for.  Look, I know I’m going out on a long, wobbly limb here, and I’m not a skinny fella, but . . . all that applies only if she’s actually mad.  What if Ophelia, too, thought it meet to put on the old antic disposition?

Pace Polonius, if this be madness, there is method in it.  Ophelia appears singing songs that easily could refer to her affair with the prince.  Then, when Claudius comes to investigate, she murmurs: “I hope all will be well.”  Boy, that sounds to me an awful lot like what the King said at the end of his soliloquy and I just love the idea – one without any textual support whatsoever, I grant you – that Ophelia heard him, too!  She was there, she knows!  

Then, she distributes flowers:

There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.

 Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies,

 that’s for thoughts.

There’s fennel for you, and columbines.

 There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me; we

 may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays. You ⟨must⟩ wear

 your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy. I would

 give you some violets, but they withered all when

 my father died.

Their symbolic meanings have never been satisfactorily settled, and we’ve no idea to whom each flower is given, but surely there is a symmetry.  Rue, for example, may symbolize bitterness and, incidentally, was sometimes used at the time to end pregnancies.  Hmm . . . curiouser and curiouser.  She seems deeply aware of the people and events around her.

I wonder if Ophelia is not merely Hamlet’s foil, but his doppelganger.

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Oh, there are so many more characters I could talk about: Polonius.  What kind of parent is he?  He’s often portrayed as a doddering old fool, but he manages to pull off some pretty sophisticated political moves.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – well, I think Tom Stoppard did a hell of a stroke exploring them – but are they mere fools?  Mindless pawns?  Did they deserve to die really?  Oh, and the Gravedigger – as so often in Shakespeare’s plays, it’s the clown character who speaks the greatest truths.

Is Yorick a character? The jester in old Hamlet’s court whose skull the prince addresses with perhaps the most vulnerable affection he has shown: 

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.

 Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your

 songs? your flashes of merriment that were wont to

 set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your

 own grinning?

I sometimes think that Old Hamlet was Hamlet’s father, but Yorick was Hamlet’s “Dad.”  Puts a weird spin on the whole revenge plot.

And what about Horatio?  Hamlet’s best, perhaps only (if we don’t count the skull), friend?  The fella he calls “as just a man As e’er my conversation coped withal.”  Horatio is the play’s Renaissance humanist scholar par excellence.  In the play’s opening scene, he is skeptical about the guards’ reports of the ghostly apparition, he regularly urges caution and measured action.  Hamlet chides him with one of my favorite lines of all time: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,/Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  And, of course, he’s the only major character who survives the play’s climactic bloodbath.  Hamlet dies in his lap, after urging him:

O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,

 Things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind me!

 If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,

 Absent thee from felicity awhile

 And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain

 To tell my story.

Which Horatio does when Fortinbras arrives to claim the throne.  But further, Horatio’s charge stands as the final metadramatic moment in the play.  Whenever we watch Hamlet on stage or on screen, whenever we read the text – is Horatio in some way fulfilling his friend’s dying request?  I really like to think so.

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I mentioned at the top of this episode that the late Professor Bloom declared that with Hamlet Shakespeare invented the human.  If this hyperbole is rooted in truth, then Shakespeare’s invention makes great use of the tools and materials provided by 16th century inventor of the essay, Michel de Montaigne, who wrote in one: “Every one of us is a hodge-podge, so shapeless and diverse in structure that each piece, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others.”  19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche asserted that Shakespeare was Montaigne’s best reader and I’m hard pressed to think of a more elegant precis of The Tragedy of Hamlet than Montaigne’s pithy observation.  Well, maybe this one: “Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.”  But that’s Montaigne again.

Hamlet has hardly been out of production in the 4-plus centuries since its debut.  Somewhere, someone right now is telling the prince’s story – or all of his stories.  But not only his: Ophelia’s, too.  And Claudius’s and Gertrude’s.  And, of course, our own.

Whew!  That was a long one, eh?  And I’m sure that as soon as I post this, I’ll think of a dozen other things I could have talked about.  Drop me a line if there’s anything about Hamlet you’d like to hear about.

 Thanks for listening, everyone.  And thank you to all who have left reviews on their platforms – that really helps attract new listeners.  And thank you to all who’ve told others about the show – that’s a great help as well.  I really appreciate all your support.  Subscribe to the show and follow it on TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube to get announcements and notifications.

All right, folks.  The rest is silence.