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Hamlet again

Hamlet again

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:43 pm by Peter Leithart

Hamlet again 2017-09-06T23:43:26+06:00 Peter Leithart

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INTRODUCTION
It is often said that fourth acts in Shakespeare plays are weak. Action slows down, the principal character is sometimes off stage, and the drama seems to dissipate before the final catastrophe. Act 4 of Macbeth begins with Macbeth’s renewed contact with the witches, but then trails off in a lengthy conversation between Malcolm and Macduff that appears to have little to do with the play. Act 4 of Julius Caesar includes another long conversation, this mainly between Brutus and Cassius, that shows the anti-Caesar coalition fracturing. Act 4 seems a patch of calm before the storm.

Act 4 of Hamlet has been seen in similar ways. Hamlet has created a stir with the murder of Polonius, and the opening scenes of this act dramatize the aftermath of that rash deed. Hamlet speaks whirling words once again, this time offending Claudius, but he is packed off to England in the middle of Act 4 and does not reappear on stage until he arrives at Ophelia’s funeral in 5.1. Hamlet dominates his play like no other Shakespearean protagonist, and his absence is noticeable.

Yet, from a thematic angle, if not a dramatic one, Act 4 of Hamlet moves a number of issues toward a climactic conclusion. Something has been rotten in Denmark since the play began twice two months before, but the rottenness has been carefully hidden away from view. Foul deeds have been done, but they have not yet begun to rise. What is has been expertly concealed by playacting. But the Mousetrap has sprung, and all that is beginning to change. For most of the play, Hamlet’s dress, demeanor, and behavior have been the only sign of the instability that lies just beneath the surface of Danish life. With the Mousetrap play and the murder of Polonius, the signs of disorder begin to multiply. Hamlet was mad in craft, and spoke the truth under cover of insanity. Ophelia is mad in reality, but she has become a Learlike wise fool, whose illusions about the way of the world have been dispelled forever. Like Nietzsche’s Dionysian man, she has looked into the abyss and is nauseated. Claudius sees sorrows coming on like battalions: Polonius slain, Hamlet exiled, “the people muddied/ thick and unwholesome in their thoughts and whispers for good Polonius’ death,” Ophelia “divided from herself and her fair judgment,” and Laertes heading toward Elsinore breathing threats. Hamlet’s distemper has infected the entire nation.

Not only does Act 4 show the world of Elsinore beginning to crumble, but it also reintroduces two crucial instruments that will bring the play to its resolution. Hamlet is leaving Denmark, but on his way out of the country, he passes by Fortinbras on his way to crush the eggshell of Poland. And Hamlet is no sooner out of the country than Laertes comes steaming in to take his place and threaten Claudius. By the end of the act, Claudius has prepared Laertes as a weapon to end the threat of Hamlet once and for all. We know from 4.6 that Hamlet has returned to Denmark, and everyone is ready to gather for the final scenes.

Dodsworth suggests that Act 4 depicts the breakdown or breakup of Hamlet, a shattering evident in the structure of the scene itself: “The third act has at its centre the play-within-the-play, Hamlet’s spurious attempt to solve the problem posed him by the Ghost. In the two scenes following the performance of ‘The Mousetrap’ he is brought face to face with his own failure. He is unable to kill the King; he is unable to exercise authority over his mother. Yet he refuses to admit the failure that confronts him, and in so doing is overtaken by his madness. He goes to pieces. The fourth act mirrors this process in its accelerated rhythm and fantastic content. It too ‘breaks up.’” After several lengthy scenes (2.2; 3.2; 3.4), the play moves into hyperspace with a series of short scenes, which, Dodsworth argues, “establishes a restless stage rhythm; the audience sees the stage emptied and filled five times in an interval not much longer than the closet scene itself. It is as thought Hamlet’s interview results in a general restlessness in Elsinore.” Thus, “The fourth act as a whole . . . reflects impatience, uncertainty and incoherence, and extravagance of mood stemming from Hamlet’s madness but going beyond it.” Again, the foul deed has arisen to public view, and the earth is quaking beneath Denmark. Peter Saccio points out a similar device in Antony and Cleopatra, where the stage dissolves and re-assembles frequently, a dramatic sign of the melting world in which the play takes place, a dramatization of Antony’s “Let Rome in Tiber melt.”

It is the rapidity of the action and speech, as much as anything specific about the speeches, that gives Act 4 the feel that it has. It is, as Dodsworth says, “an extravaganza,” a “hasty passage on thin ice.”

ACT 4, SCENES 1-3
Dodsworth to the contrary, Hamlet appears to have exercised some authority over his mother. Gertrude’s heart has been cleft in twain by the dagger-words of her son, and she seems to have begun to throw away the worser part of it. Act 4 opens in the immediate aftermath of the closet scene, perhaps taking place still within Gertrude’s rooms. Claudius wants to know the cause of her sighs and heaves, and Gertrude tells him what has happened. But she is not entirely forthcoming. She is not going to play the spy for Claudius against her own son, or at least she will do it no longer. “I am but mad in craft,” Hamlet had told her; but she tells Claudius that Hamlet is “Mad as the sea and wind when both contend/ which is the mightier.” She describes Hamlet’s murder of Polonius, but attributes it to a “lawless fit” and does not say anything about Hamlet’s wishful question, “Is it the king?” Hamlet said he was going to “lug the guts” of Polonius to another room, but Gertrude reports that Hamlet “weeps for what is done.” Gertrude is not turning against Claudius or rejecting him. But she just as surely is going to protect Hamlet in every way she can. Not that her unwillingness to side with Claudius is any help: She is going to die between the pass and fell of mighty opposites just like the sponges Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. At the same time, she is now sighing with “profound heaves,” as Hamlet was in the opening scenes, a sign that Hamlet’s words have penetrated to her heart.

Claudius for his part recognizes the challenging political circumstances that he is in, and sees that he must somehow both “countenance and excuse” Hamlet’s action. Ever the blame-shifter, he admits that Hamlet should have been kept on a shorter leash, but attributes his failure in this regard to “our love,” which was so much that “we would not understand what was most fit.” He has been trying to keep the disease that is Hamlet under wraps, instead of surgically removing it, and the result is murder. Whose love does he mean? In 4.7 he tells Laertes that he has hesitated to act because he didn’t want to hurt Gertrude, “who almost lives by his looks.” And his own love for Gertrude interfered with his normally shrewd political judgment: “She is so conjunctive to my life and soul/ that, as the star moves not but in his sphere,/ I could not but by her.” But Claudius is not, as Dodsworth notes, only thinking of Hamlet’s “bloody deed,” but of his own. “How shall this bloody deed be answer’d,” the one that was inspired by his love for Gertrude, the one that is like a foul disease festering under the skin of the body politic. Note the characteristic blame-shifting here: The audience knows that the rottenness of Denmark comes from Claudius, but he blames Hamlet for the sickness

of his kingdom. Claudius wishes to make Hamlet the scapegoat whose death will restore order.

Dodsworth offers this intriguing analysis of the double sidedness of Claudius’ speech: “Hamlet must at all times be to Claudius a visible reminder of the guilty means by which he gained the throne. This will be so whether or not the King believes Hamlet to have penetrated his secret. It would suit him better really to believe in Hamlet’s madness . . . because then the prince might stand not only for the King’s own guilty, but for a possible escape from that guilt . . . . If Claudius were diseased, all that he need seek now is a ‘cure’ for his disease instead of penitence and the forgiveness from heaven which were not forthcoming. The ‘cure’ is to be effected, he hopes, by Hamlet’s death in England.” Hamlet rages in Claudius’ blood “like the hectic,” and only England can “cure me.”

Claudius also suggests to Laertes that he was stymied by the “love the general gender bear” Hamlet. Hamlet is too popular for Claudius to take decisive action without damaging his own political fortunes, so he does nothing. Significantly, Claudius says that Hamlet, not himself, benefits from the world of seeming: “He’s loved of the distracted multitude,/ who like not in their judgment, but their eyes.” Dodsworth points out that “foul disease” may be dramatically linked with “our love,” which suggests that the solution to the disorder Claudius laments is going to be different from what he expects: “if Hamlet is in his blood, then Hamlet’s death will be joined with his, as indeed is the case at the end of the play.”

Yet, now that Hamlet has killed Polonius, he can’t stand by. And in fact Hamlet’s murder is an unexpected gift to Claudius. He now has cause to banish Hamlet, cause that was not well-established before. At the same time, he can present himself as a fair-minded and compassionate king, who would not punish Hamlet too severely, knowing him to be mad. Claudius can get rid of his problem without endangering his own popularity. And, to make sure that he has gotten rid of his problem for good, he instructs the English king to execute Hamlet. Claudius thinks of even the king of England, whose “free awe pays homage to us,” as an instrument for accomplishing his own purposes. As it turns out of course Claudius’ plot fails, as Hamlet escapes and returns to Denmark through an incredible series of accidents. Claudius is not bad at skulking and spying; but he is a failure at killing. Nobody he tries to kill will stay politely dead: King Hamlet comes back to haunt Denmark, and his son, like his father, will rise from the grave of exile to take vengeance.

Hamlet is still in the state of frenzy he has been in since the play scene. He said he was able to drink hot blood, and now he has spilled the warm blood of Polonius. After the play, he assaulted Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with words, letting them know that he was perfectly conscious of their desire to play him like a pipe, and then he furiously assaulted Gertrude. Before he comes to the king, he again insults R&G, calling Rosencrantz a “sponge.” By this, Hamlet means several things. As a sponge, Rosencrantz “soaks up the king’s countenance, his rewards, his authorities.” The two schoolfellows leach what they can from the king, his favor (countenance) and gifts, and are willing to do anything – including betraying Hamlet – to get more. But they are also soaking up things for the king: They attempt to pluck out the heart of Hamlet’s mystery, grow round by soaking up everything Hamlet says, and then go to Claudius, who squeezes them dry. They are playing a dangerous game, since the king will swallow them down when they are no longer useful.

Hamlet’s other comment to R&G is about the king and his body. This has often been seen, and it appears rightly, as an allusion to the medieval and Elizabethan political notion of the “king’s two bodies,” so brilliantly examined by Kantorowicz. As Dodsworth remarks: “‘The body is with the King’: at any point in time, the King exists in the body of an individual. ‘The King is not with the body’: when the individual dies, the kingly office does not die with him, but continues. One implication of Hamlet’s words is that the King has a body but that its mortality permits at any moment of his ceasing to be King and of someone else’s taking over.” The king’s body is a thing, of nothing: The personal body is a no-thing because it can at any time die, and go a progress through the guts of a beggar; the political body is a no-thing because it is pure concept.

This reference to the king’s bodies set us up for the dialogue between Hamlet and Claudius, where the king questions the prince about Polonius’ body, a body that might well have been the King’s. Even while he’s living, in fact, Claudius begins to stink because of the “foul offense,” just as the body of Polonius can be sniffed out in a dark corner of Elsinore. Dodsworth suggests that “His concern for Polonius’s body need not be seen exclusively as an attempt to anticipate and placate the wrath of Laertes but as something more, a concern to deal with the bad smell of his own life by acting in a Christian manner” – something he failed to do with the previous king. He will atone for his guilt in the regicide by showing proper respect for Polonius’ body. Thus, “the burial of Polonius is to be a burial of his ‘offence.’” The body of the counselor is also the “body of sin” that Claudius wants to bury. He’s not learned much: He has failed to see that foul deeds do rise, no matter how clever the attempts to conceal them from men’s eyes.

Hamlet has driven Polonius to distraction with his brash, mad, and methodical words. He has turned R&G in circles, and has afflicted his mother. But since the opening scenes of the play, he has not spoken directly to the king. Now the two mighty opposites meet for the last time until they are both dying. Hamlet is still talking madly but with method. He is like the smart-aleck in every class who is popular for making the teacher look foolish. Claudius can do nothing but play the straight man: “At supper? Where?” Hamlet has two designs in his words. On the one hand, Hamlet’s words on the equalizing effects of death continue an important thematic thread of the play, Hamlet’s various meditations on the meaning of death and of a human existence that ends in death. On the other hand, he is still implicitly threatening, warning, and insulting the king. We fat creatures to fat maggots, and this means that “a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” – a king like Claudius, for instance. Polonius may be in hell, in which case Claudius should seek him there. Hamlet calls Claudius his mother, with a bit of theological reasoning that reminds everyone of Gertrude’s second marriage.

Nothing stays still in scenes 1-3: The cast is constantly disappearing and reassembling; characters begin to take on the features of one another – Gertrude sighs like her son, Claudius’ blood is full of his hectic nephew, Polonius’ body may well have been Claudius’. The too, too sullied/solid flesh of Denmark is melting, thawing, resolving to a dew. What turns the world vaporous is the stark reality of death. Dodsworth says that there is in Hamlet’s words to the king “an attempt at contemptus mundi of a vaguely Stoic kind, an erratic and impassioned burst for the dispassionate wisdom to which Hamlet has no real claim.” Everything is exposed as vanity by the fact of death, all distinction of rank are ex
posed as “seemings” rather than “beings,” and even the distinction of eating and feeding – of supporting life and expending it – is inverted. Death ensures that things rank and gross possess the unweeded garden of the world.

Dodsworth suggests that Claudius’ motives and state of mind can be explored in terms of Romans 6: “immediately prior to the death of Polonius the King is seen attempting to pray to heaven for forgiveness, so that we not only look at his ‘disease’ as a spiritual sickness but also have in mind the proper method to deal with it. His desperation has all the marks of a spiritual crisis too – it could be the despair integral to Puritan ‘conversion’; what happens is that instead of turning his back on his sin and praying towards God, the King puts off the burden of his sin partly on to Hamlet and partly on to Polonius. He hopes to achieve by this sleight ‘newnesse of life,’ thinking that once Hamlet, the second of his two sin-carriers, is dead, his ‘joys’ will begin.” There is a neat Girardian point here again, which I will attempt to develop in my discussion of Act 5 next week.

ACT 4, SCENE 4
Fortinbras, a looming presence in the first act of the play, appears in person for the first time, on his way to Poland. The scene provides continuity of plot, setting things up for Fortinbras’ arrival at Elsinore at the end of the play. But the scene is noteworthy mainly for Hamlet’s soliloquy, one of the least known of the several soliloquies in the play.

In terms of the play’s themes, this is another meditation on the causes and reasons for human action. Hamlet is just as divided as ever. As in the “Rogue and peasant slave” speech, he is castigating himself for his inaction, struck in conscience by the behavior of another man (the First Player and Fortinbras, respectively). He begins with a distinction between the beasts, whose only good and market is “to sleep and feed,” and men who are endowed with godlike reason, which is not given to go unused. As in the “To be” speech, he recognizes that thought may be a cover for cowardice, and he expresses his admiration for a man like Fortinbras who will risk all for a “trick of fame” and will invade Poland puffed with divine ambition. Honor and fame, Hamlet seems to think, are appropriate motivators, and particularly will be sufficient to motivate him to revenge. Yet, at the same time, his overt endorsement of Fortinbras is subverted by his recognition that Poland is an eggshell that is not worth the time, resources, and energies expended to conquer it. His sense of the value of honor is like that of Achilles in Hades; but he tries to provoke himself to a sense of honor more like that of the living Achilles.

This final soliloquy, included in the Second Quarto but not in the First Folio, gives an important glimpse into the mind of the avenger. In his book on the soliloquies of Hamlet, Alex Newell argues that this soliloquy displays the final triumph of the obsession with revenge over reason, and adds important features to Shakespeare’s treatment of honor in the play. Two contextual features of the soliloquy are important for starters. First, Hamlet exchanges words with the Norwegian captain about the purpose of Fortinbras’ foray into Poland. Hamlet himself recognizes that Fortinbras is throwing two thousand souls and twenty thousand ducats at a “straw” (ll. 25-26). Yet, in his speech, he has transformed this critical position into awe for Fortinbras’ honor. The Norwegian captain mentions nothing about honor, and we know in the audience that Fortinbras has been directed at Poland so that he can let off some of the steam he built up preparing to invade Denmark. The theme of honor is the very coinage of Hamlet’s brain, not something evident in Fortinbras’ behavior or from the words of his captain.

Second, Hamlet’s soliloquy begins with self-reproach and ends with a commitment to have nothing but bloody thoughts. Yet, Hamlet has only just killed a man in cold blood, played a macabre game of seek-the-corpse, and has been ranting furiously at everyone. Yet, so long as he lives to say “this thing’s to do” he believes he has been inactive. Critics and viewers who take him at his word are missing the point: He only considers himself inactive because the only action he will recognize is revenge.

Newell suggests that one of the purposes of this soliloquy is to re-focus the play on the tragedy of Hamlet’s obsession with revenge. His soliloquy in the prayer scene leaves us with a truly bloodthirsty Hamlet, staying his hand unless he can be sure that he will damn Claudius eternally. But the soliloquy in 4.4 shows a Hamlet whose reason has been truly overthrown by meditation on blood. Hamlet expresses the belief that “godlike reason” is what distinguishes humans from animals that are content to sleep and feed. Yet, at the same time, he treats reason as a cover for cowardice, and implies that the truly honorable will eschew reason in favor of action. Dodsworth says that “there is no urgency any more in his interior debate,” and points out that Hamlet can only stir himself up to bloody thoughts, not bloody deeds. True enough: but in context, thought is what makes man different from the animals. At the end of the soliloquy, his very thoughts have turned bestial.

ACT 4, SCENE 5
The head of the Polonius household has been killed, and, as with the royal household, the loss of the father produces madness and murderous vengeance in a child. For the Polonius household, the madness and murder are divided among two children, but for the royal household the avenger is mad the madman is the avenger. Yet, both Hamlet’s madness and his vengefulness is highly qualified and uncertain: He is mad in jest (or mostly) and is an unwilling avenger. With his departure, space is opened up in Elsinore for more extreme form of madness and more intense vengefulness.

The parallel of Hamlet and Ophelia suggests that her words, like Hamlet’s, provide insightful commentary on the circumstances of Elsinore. The crucial difference is that Hamlet knows well what he is doing, and Ophelia’s clarity of vision is less conscious. There is often a double context, sometimes a triple context, for her songs. “He is dead and gone, lady,/ he is dead and gone” could refer to Polonius, as Gertrude no doubt believes, but the song is equally applicable to the late king. Her second song is far more applicable to Hamlet: Polonius was dispatched, by Claudius’ own admission, in a “hugger-mugger” fashion (4.5.77ff), without a white shroud and certainly un-larded by sweet flowers. At another level, Ophelia is mourning the loss of her lover: “And will a not come again?” At the same time, Ophelia has generalized, like Hamlet, to conclude that the world itself is out of joint. Human existence is constrained by death; men promise to marry the maids they tumble, but only to get them agree to a tumble; the maid who visits a man’s chamber will never be a maid again. Ophelia sees the world as Hamlet has seen it: A world of things rank and gross, a world of death and decay, a world of treachery and betrayal.

Yet, Dodsworth is probably right that “it is more important that we register the wide terms of reference for her words than that we define them clearly.” Referring to her allusion to the story of the baker’s daughter turned to an owl when she was ungenerous to Jesus, he suggests that Ophelia is talking only about transformation. The final lines “Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be. God be at your table,” refer not to “some existing potential in ourselves to be realized by our own efforts.” Rather, she refers to the radical mutability
of the world, in which everything can become anything, and a king may make a progress through the guts of a beggar. Ophelia finds as Hamlet has, we will all ultimately be at a table “not where we eat but where we are eaten.”

Laertes comes in triumph, surrounded by palm branches and shout of Hosanna. It is the kind of moment in which Claudius shines. Gertrude is frightened, and seeks to mollify, but Claudius speaks with calm assurance and straightforward truthfulness. Surprisingly, Claudius indicates that his assurance comes form the “divinity” that “doth hedge a king,” but Claudius is surely enough of a Machiavellian to recognize in Laertes’ passion that he can turn to his own purposes.

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