Hamlet theme
Death
Death has been considered the
primary theme of Hamlet by many eminent critics through the years. G.
Wilson Knight, for instance, writes at length about death in the play:
"Death is over the whole play. Polonius and Ophelia die during the action,
and Ophelia is buried before our eyes. Hamlet arranges the deaths of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The plot is set in motion by the murder of
Hamlet's father, and the play opens with the apparition of the Ghost." And
so on and so forth. The play is really death-obsessed, as is Hamlet himself. As
as A.C. Bradley has pointed out, in his very first long speech of the play,
"Oh that this too solid flesh," Hamlet seems on the verge of total
despair, kept from suicide by the simple fact of spiritual awe. He is in the
strange position of both wishing for death and fearing it intensely, and this
double pressure gives the play much of its drama.
One of the aspects of death which
Hamlet finds most fascinating is its bodily facticity. We are, in the end, so
much meat and bone. This strange intellectual being, which Hamlet values so
highly and possesses so mightily, is but tenuously connected to an unruly and
decomposing machine. In the graveyard scene, especially, we can see Hamlet's
fascination with dead bodies. How can Yorick's skull be Yorick's skull? Does a
piece of dead earth, a skull, really have a connection to a person, a
personality?
Hamlet is unprecedented for the depth and variety of its
meditations on death. Mortality is the shadow that darkens every scene of the
play. Not that the play resolves anything, or settles any of our species-old
doubts and anxieties. As with most things, we can expect to find very difficult
and stimulating questions in Hamlet, but very few satisfying answers.
Intrigue
Elsinore is full of political
intrigue. The murder of Old Hamlet, of course, is the primary instance of such
sinister workings, but it is hardly the only one. Polonius, especially, spends
nearly every waking moment (it seems) spying on this or that person, checking
up on his son in Paris, instructing Ophelia in every detail of her behavior,
hiding behind tapestries to eavesdrop. He is the parody of a politician,
convinced that the truth can only be known through the most roundabout and
sneaking ways. This is never clearer than in his appearances in Act Two. First,
he instructs Reynaldo in the most incredibly convoluted espionage methods;
second, he hatches and pursues his misguided theory that Hamlet is mad because
his heart has been broken by Ophelia.
Claudius, too, is quite the inept
Machiavellian. He naively invites Fortinbras to march across his country with a
full army; he stupidly enlists Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as his chief spies;
his attempt to poison Hamlet ends in total tragedy. He is little better than
Polonius. This political ineptitude goes a long way toward revealing how weak
Denmark has become under Claudius' rule. He is not a natural king, to be sure;
he is more interested in drinking and sex than in war, reconnaissance, or
political plotting. This is partly why his one successful political move, the
murder of his brother, is so ironic and foul. He has somehow done away with
much the better ruler, the Hyperion to his satyr (as Hamlet puts it).
It's worth noting that there is one
extremely capable politician in the play -- Hamlet himself. He is always on top
of everyone's motives, everyone's doings and goings. He plays Polonius like a
pipe and evades every effort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to do the same to
him. He sniffs out Claudius' plot to have him killed in England and sends his
erstwhile friends off to die instead. Hamlet is a true Machiavellian when he
wants to be. He certainly wouldn't have been as warlike as his father, but had
he gotten the chance he might have been his father's equal as a ruler, simply
due to his penetration and acumen.
Language
In Act Two scene two Polonius asks
Hamlet, "What do you read, my lord?" Hamlet replies, "Words,
words, words." Of course every book is made of words, every play is a
world of words, so to speak, and Hamlet is no different. Hamlet
is distinguished, however, in its attentiveness to language within the play.
Not only does it contain extremely rich language, not only did the play greatly
expand the English vocabulary, Hamlet also contains several characters
who show an interest in language and meaning in themselves.
Polonius, for instance, is often
distracted by his manner of expressing himself. In Act Two scene two, for
example, he says, "Madam, I swear I use no art at all. / That he is mad,
'tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity, / And pity 'tis 'tis true. A foolish figure, /
But farewell to it, for I will use no art." Of course this is typical
Polonius -- absurdly hypocritical, self-enamored, dull-witted. Just as he is
extremely windy in recommending brevity, here he is fussy and
"artful" (or affectedly artificial) in declaring that he is neither
of those things. Polonius' grasp of language, like his political instinct, is
quite shallow -- he gestures toward the mastery of rhetoric that seems like a
statesman's primary craft, but he is too distracted by surfaces to achieve any
real depth.
Another angle from which to consider
language in the play -- Hamlet explores the traditional dichotomy
between words and deeds. In Act Four, when talking to Laertes, Claudius makes
this distinction explicit: "what would you undertake, / To show yourself
your father's son in deed / More than in words?" Here deeds are associated
with noble acts, specifically the fulfillment of revenge, and words with empty
bluffing. The passage resonates well beyond its immediate context. Hamlet himself
is a master of language, an explorer of its possibilities; he is also a man who
has trouble performing actual deeds. For him, reality seems to exist more in
thoughts and sentences than in acts. Thus his trouble fulfilling revenge seems
to stem from his overemphasis on reasoning and formulating -- a fault of
over-precision that he acknowledges himself in the speech beginning, "How
all occasions do inform against me."
Hamlet is the man of language, of
words, of the magic of thought. He is not fit for a play that so emphasizes the
value of action, and he knows it. But then, the action itself is contained
within words, formed and contained by Shakespeare's pen. The action of the play
is much more an illusion than the words are. Hamlet invites us to
consider whether this isn't the case more often than we might think, whether
the world of words doesn't enjoy a great deal of power in framing and
describing the world of actions, on stage or not.
Madness
By the time Hamlet was
written, madness was already a well-established element in many revenge
tragedies. The most popular revenge tragedy of the Elizabethan period, The
Spanish Tragedy, also features a main character, Hieronymo, who goes mad in
the build-up to his revenge, as does the title character in Shakespeare's first
revenge tragedy, Titus Andronicus. But Hamlet is unique among
revenge tragedies in its treatment of madness because Hamlet's madness is
deeply ambiguous. Whereas previous revenge tragedy protagonists are
unambiguously insane, Hamlet plays with the idea of insanity, putting on
"an antic disposition," as he says, for some not-perfectly-clear
reason.
Of course, there is a practical
advantage to appearing mad. In Shakespeare's source for the plot of Hamlet,
"Amneth" (as the legendary hero is known) feigns madness in order to
avoid the suspicion of the fratricidal king as he plots his revenge. But
Hamlet's feigned madness is not so simple as this. His performance of madness,
rather than aiding his revenge, almost distracts him from it, as he spends the
great majority of the play exhibiting very little interest in pursuing the
ghost's mission even after he has proven, via "The Mouse Trap," that
Claudius is indeed guilty as sin.
No wonder, then, that Hamlet's
madness has been a resilient point of critical controversy since the
seventeenth century. The traditional question is perhaps the least interesting
one to ask of his madness -- is he really insane or is he faking it? It seems
clear from the text that he is, indeed, playing the role of the madman (he says
he will do just that) and using his veneer of lunacy to have a great deal of
fun with the many fools who populate Elsinore, especially Polonius, Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern. Perhaps this feigned madness does at times edge into actual
madness, in the same way that all acted emotions come very close to their
genuine models, but, as he says, he is but mad north-nothwest, and knows a hawk
from a handsaw. When he is alone, or with Horatio, and free from the need to
act the lunatic, Hamlet is incredibly lucid and self-aware, perhaps a bit manic
but hardly insane.
So what should we make of his
feigned insanity? Hamlet, in keeping with the play in general, seems almost to
act the madman because he knows in some bizarre way that he is playing a role
in a revenge tragedy. He knows that he is expected to act mad, because he
thinks that that is what one does when seeking revenge -- perhaps because he
has seen The Spanish Tragedy. I'm joking, of course, on one level, but
he does exhibit self-aware theatricality throughout the play, and if he hasn't
seen The Spanish Tragedy, he has certainly seen The Death of Gonzago,
and many more plays besides. He knows his role, or what his role should be,
even as he is unable to play it satisfactorily. Hamlet is beautifully miscast
as the revenger -- he is constitutionally unfitted for so vulgar and
unintelligent a fate -- and likewise his attempt to play the madman, while a
valiant effort, is forced, insincere, anxious, ambiguous, and full of doubts.
Perhaps Hamlet himself, if we could ask him, would not know why he chooses to
feign madness any more than we do.
Needless to say, Hamlet is not the
only person who goes insane in the play. Ophelia's madness serves as a clear
foil to his own strange antics. She is truly, unambiguously, innocently, simply
mad. Whereas Hamlet's madness seems to increase his self-awareness, Ophelia
loses every vestige of composure and self-knowledge, just as the truly insane
tend to do.
Subjectivity
Harold Bloom, speaking about Hamlet
at the Library of Congress, said, "The play's subject massively is neither
mourning for the dead or revenge on the living. ... All that matters is
Hamlet's consciousness of his own consciousness, infinite, unlimited, and at
war with itself." He added, "Hamlet discovers that his life has been
a quest with no object except his own endlessly burgeoning subjectivity."
Bloom is not the only reader of Hamlet to see such an emphasis on the
self.
Hamlet's soliloquies, to take only
the most obvious feature, are strong and sustained investigations of the self
-- not only as a thinking being, but as emotional, bodily, and paradoxically
multiple. Hamlet, fascinated by his own character, his turmoil, his
inconsistency, spends line after line wondering at himself. Why can't I carry
out revenge? Why can't I carry out suicide? He questions himself, and in so
doing questions the nature of the self.
Aside from these massive speeches,
Hamlet shows a sustained interest in philosophical problems of the subject.
Among these problems is the mediating role of thought in all human life.
"For there is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so," he
says. We can never know the truth, he suggests, nor the good, nor the evil of
the world, except through the means of our thoughts. Certainty is not an option.
And the great realm of uncertainty, the realm of dreams, fears, thoughts, is
the realm of subjectivity.
Suicide
Like madness, suicide is a theme
that links Hamlet and Ophelia and shapes the concerns of the play more
generally. Hamlet thinks deeply about it, and perhaps "contemplates"
it in the more popular sense; Ophelia perhaps commits it. In both cases, the
major upshot of suicide is religious. In his two "suicide
soliloquies," Hamlet segues into meditations on religious laws and mysteries
-- "that the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon 'gainst
self-slaughter"; "For in that sleep of death what dreams may
come." And Ophelia's burial is greatly limited by the clergy's suspicions
that she might have taken her own life. In short, Hamlet appears to
suggest that were it not for, first, the social stigma attached to suicide by
religious authorities, and second, the legitimately "unknown" nature
of whatever happens after death, there would be a lot more self-slaughter in
this difficult and bitter world. In a play so obsessed with the self, and the
nature of the self, it's only natural to see this emphasis on self-murder.
It's worth mentioning one of the
major interpretive issues of Hamlet: was Ophelia's death accidental or a
suicide? According to Gertrude's narration of the event, Ophelia's drowning was
entirely accidental. However, some have suggested that Gertrude's long story
may be a fabrication invented to protect the young woman from the social stigma
of suicide. Indeed, in Act Five the priest and the gravediggers are fairly
certain that Ophelia took her own life. One might ask oneself -- why does it
make such a difference to us whether she died by her own hand or not?
Shakespeare seems, in fact, to inspire this very sort of self-interrogation.
Are we, like the characters in the play, so invested in protecting Ophelia from
the stigma of suicide?
Theater
Which is the star of this play,
Hamlet or Hamlet? T.S. Eliot, for one, unequivocally endorses the
latter: "Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the
primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary." In effect, Hamlet
is a play about plays, about theater. Most obviously, it contains a play within
a play, detailed instructions on acting technique, an extended conversation
about London theater companies and their fondness for boy troupes, several
references to other theater (including to Christian mystery plays, and to
Shakespeare's own Julius Caesar), and still more references to the stage
on which it is being performed, in the globe theater with its ghost "in
the cellarage."
But what is the point of this
constant metatheatrical winking? Hamlet, among other things, is an
extended meditation on the nature of acting and the relationship between acting
and "genuine" life. It refuses to obey the conventional restrictions
of theater and constantly spills out into the audience, as it were, pointing
out the "real" surroundings of the "fictional" play, and
thus incorporating them into the larger theatrical experience.
Most specifically, Hamlet is
an exploration of a specific genre and its specific generic conventions. It is
the revenge tragedy to end all revenge tragedies, both containing and
commenting on the elements that define the genre. Modern audiences are quite
comfortable with this sort of "meta-generic" approach. Think of
modern westerns, heist movies, or martial arts movies. All of these genres have
become almost obligatorily self-aware; they contain references to past
milestones in their respective genres, they gleefully and ironically embrace
(or alternatively reject) the conventions that past films treated with
sincerity. Hamlet, in its relationship to revenge tragedy and to theater
more generally, is one of the first dramas of this kind and perhaps still the
most profound example of such post-modern concerns.
To put it cutely, Hamlet
itself is the main character of the play, and Hamlet merely the means by which
it explores its own place in the history of theater. To make things yet
dizzier, Hamlet seems, deep down, to know that he is in a play, to know that he
is miscast, to understand the theatrical nature of his being. And who's to say
that we aren't all merely actors in our own lives? Surely, from a philosophical
perspective, this is one of the basic truths of modern human life
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