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Still more on Hamlet

Still more on Hamlet

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:00 am by Peter Leithart

Still more on Hamlet 2017-09-07T00:00:13+06:00 Peter Leithart

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SERPENT KING
Among other things, Hamlet is a dramatic reflection on philosophical anthropology: What is a man? and What are the conditions of human experience and existence? This is related to the theme we explored a few weeks ago under the heading of “action”: What are the rules and guidelines for human action? The two are related because the answer to the first – what sort of being is man? – will provide some insight into the second – how should the sort of creature that man is act?

The philosophical anthropology dramatized in Hamlet is not simplistically offered. Instead, as usual, Shakespeare presents the audience with a variety of options. What sort of being is man? receives one answer from Hamlet’s discourse on man in 2.2: “What a piece of work is a man?” That speech, spoken to the uncomprehending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (who can only think of it in sexual terms) begins with a Renaissance celebration of the glory of man, set in a wondrous world. But the speech moves eventually to conclude that man is no more than a “quintessence of dust.” Man is noble in reason, infinite in faculties, angelic and near divine, and yet to Hamlet he is nothing but dust. The bathetic conclusion to that speech is taken up further in Hamlet’s manic whirl of words after he kills Claudius (4.3.19ff). Death is there the great equalizer, and all creatures fat themselves to be fare for maggots; however infinite in faculties, however decorated in life with royalty, yet we will all eventually feed worms and may “go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (4.3.30). Hamlet began the play implacable in his disgust with a life that ends in death, but by the beginning of Act 5, he seems to be resigned to the fact of death, philosophically reflecting on how death sets more than temporal limits to life.

In certain respects, the conditions of Denmark are quite specific. Hamlet’s father is dead, his uncle the king a murderer, his mother perhaps an adulteress and certainly foolish in her speedy re-marriage. Something is rotten in the state of Denmark in particular. Yet, in several respects, the way that the condition of Denmark is described suggests that for Shakespeare this one country represents the human condition as a whole. “An unweeded garden,” Hamlet calls it, in a speech that is reflecting on the the uses of “this world” – not Denmark alone. And that fallen-Eden imagery is not at all isolated in the play. As Caroline Spurgeon pointed out, this is normally expressed in Hamlet by imagery of sickness, rot, and death. Denmark is a decapitated corpse, stinking as it festers and dissolves. Gertrude’s sin is a “blister” on the “fair forehead of an innocent love” (3.4). Claudius is a “mildew’d ear” (3.4), and Hamlet warns Gertrude not to dismiss the ghost’s appearance as an illusion, since that would “but skin and film the ulcerous place/while rank corruption, mining all within, infects unseen” (3.4). By his own estimate, Claudius’ sin is “rank” and “smells to heaven.” Man is the paragon of animals, but desire can lead humans to leave a celestial bed and “prey on garbage.” The king dies when his blood curdles and his body is turned lazar like; so too the king’s second body – his political body, which has become sickly.

Not only does Shakespeare’s imagery suggest a fallen, decaying world, but the source of this decay – the murder of the king – is described in overtly biblical terms. Marjorie Garber offers a profound discussion of the ghost’s account of his own death (1.5) She declares that the ghosts “fable” is “a kind of Eden myth, taking place in a medieval hortus conclusus, an enclosed garden. Old Hamlet, the innocent upholder of ancient values, sleeping in a garden, is set upon by the serpent, Claudius, whose world is motivated by the satanic basic appetites of lust, pride, envy, and the desire for power. This fable has a peculiar and far-reaching resonance. Positioned as it is near the beginning of the play, the story will come to mind again and again as the changes are rung on its basic values. In effect it is this play’s riddle, the center of its radiating imaginative energy, a scenario that could also be called its primal scene.”

In particular, Claudius kills by poison: “Poison – the something rotten in the state of Denmark. The whole chain of disease-and-infection imagery that is the most evident of the play’s many verbal themes . . . . The contagion that spreads unwholesomely through the night. The ulcers beneath the skin, unhealthily cosmeticked over with lies. The poison, above all, of language – of deceit and unctuous pretense, the language of Claudius in his opening speech, the dangerous poison of words, words, words. THe words, often, of poisonous serpents – not only Claudius, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom Hamlet will trust, he says, ‘as I will adders fanged’ (3.4.185). Serpents, too, with erotic and sexual connotations, a fall from innocence of a special king. The imagined corruption even of Ophelia. The final engines of poison in the last scene, the poisoned cup and the poisoned rapier, time-honored sexual symbols, both fatal,and taken together . . . . The inevitably victorious serpent who is ‘my lady Word,’ the foce of bodily corruption and decay in the graveyard, who reduces to the same indifferent dust and the great and the simple, the wicked and the pure. The dust of Alexander stoppin a bunghole, of Julius Caesar turned to clay.” The world of Hamlet is a world poisoned by the serpent who wears the crown.

Claudius kills in a garden. Garber again: “An Edenic garden, a garden of attempted innocence. Adam was the first gardener, in the gravedigger’s mordant joke. Gertrude, whose act ‘takes off the rose/ from the fair forehead of an innocent love/ and sets a blister there’ (3.4.41-43), joining together the themes of infection and the garden . . . . And Ophelia, ‘rose of May’ (4.5.156), whose mad songs are all too apt in their scattering of flowers, and whose watery death . . . seems to bring to life the language of Hamlet’s first bitter soliloquy . . . . In the tragic action of the play Ophelia becomes a symbolic self-deflowerer, performing ceremonially in her madness what she has been proscribed from doing erotically in her love. All these patterns of intertwined language and action seem to flow from teh Ghost’s private myth of murder.”

So here we have it: The serpent kills the reigning king with poison, and seduces the bride, as Satan seduced Eve (2 Corinthians 11). As a result, the world has become a sterile promontory, a rank and gross garden, a rotting garbage heap. O cursed spite, indeed, that ever one was born to put it right.

POISON IN THE EAR
We have left out one key feature of the ghost’s story: He was killed in his garden by the serpent-king, who poured poison in his ear. As Garber says, “The ears are everywhere.” This is true in the sense that the play includes many scenes of overhearding, eavesdropping, and advice-giving. Garber says, “In the advices of fathers to sons that occupy much of the business of the first act; in the ear of Denmark, which is, in the Ghost’s phrase, ‘abused’; and in the whole process of eavesdropping: Polonius dispatching Reynaldo to spy on Laertes and uncover information on his reputation; Claudius sending for Rosencrantz and Guildenster to eavesdrop on Hamlet’s plans; Polonius again behind an arras, eavesdropping on Hamlet and Gertrude, stabbed to death this time for his pains. The words that enter like daggers into Gertrude’s ears. Hamlet’s question, ‘Will the King hear this piece of work?’ (3.2.41). &#8216

;List, Hamlet, list, O list!’ cries the Ghost – hear, O hear. And there is a sense in which he himself pours poison into the ear of Hamlet, infalming him to agony, soul-searching, and revenge.”

But it is also evident in the repeated literal references to the ear that are, as Grace Tiffany argued in a 2003 article in Christianity and Literature, scattered throughout th play. Barnardo plans to “assail Horatio’s ear” with the story of the ghost (1.1.31-32), and Horatio’s self-deprecation is violence to Hamlet’s “ear” (1.2.171). Laertes warns Ophelia not lend “too credent ear” to the prince (1.3.30), and the ghost claims that he could speak things in Hamlet’s ear that would freeze his blood (1.5.22, 16; as the ghost’s own blood has been curdled by Claudius’ poison). Denmark’s “whole ear” is abused by false reports of the death of Hamlet (1.5.36), Pyrrhus’ ear is imprisoned by the fall of Troy (2.2.477), Claudius is a mildewed ear (3.4.65), Hamlet’s words in Horatio’s ears would make him dumb (4.6.24-26). Alongside these (and more like them), the play regularly speaks of hearing (1.2.193, 195; 1.5.5.; 2.2.382. 2.2.253. 4.5.214-217). Ears in Hamlet are apt to be poisoned, with pleasing but deadly, most painted words.

The play’s emphasis on the ear, words, and hearing take shape against the background of a theme noted in a previous lecture – the frequency of “dumb shows” and the prominence of play-acting. On the one hand, the play is dramatizing the distinction of “is” and “seems,” and highlights the fact that things are not what they appear to be. Hamlet is suspicious of from the beginning of things a man might play, and when he instructs the players in their duty he insists that they should not make a spectacle of the Murder of Gonzago. This suspicion of visible reality might lead us to suspect that the aural is the pathway to truth. It appears that King Hamlet died in a garden bitten by a snake, but the words of the ghost reveal otherwise. Claudius appears to be a legitimate and upright king, but his confession after the Mousetrap play reveal the truth. The ghost’s appearance cannot tell Hamlet whether he is from Purgatory or Hell; but Claudius’ reaction to the play show that he is an honest ghost. The dumb show has no effect on Claudius; it’s not until he “hears” the play – common Elizabethan terminology – that he reacts with horror.

Yet, the situation of Denmark is more complex than this. The problem is not a simple contrast of the eye and the ear, for much of the sickness of Denmark is the result of poison in the ear. Everyone believes Hamlet died from snakebite because that is what is reported – it’s the whole “ear” not the whole “eye” of Denmark that is rankly abused by the false report. Claudius bolsters his political image with deceptive, Machiavellian words. Appearances are deceptive, of course; but Hamlet dramatizes a more complicated problem where words participate in the deceptiveness of appearance. This makes the question of proper action all the more challenging: How can one distinguish between orders that poison the soul and orders that will bring healing?

Grace Tiffany argues, in the aforementioned article, that the play not only presents the ear as the gateway for poisonous deceptions, but also as the “gateways for slander’s corrective.” Corrective words cause pain, to be sure, but that does not mean they are not healthful. Hamlet’s truth-telling to his mother leads her to a kind of contrition, and the truthful speech of the Mousetrap play leads immediately to the prayer scene, where Claudius mourns both his sin and is dismayed by his own inability to repent. Dover Wilson may be dramatically right that Claudius simply does not see the dumb show. Thematically, however, the dumb show cannot work because it is merely visible. Tiffany quotes Martin Luther to illumine the purpose of corrective speech in Hamlet: A preacher must “inflict the wound . . . to both mitigate and heal it,” and must “be so severe as not to forget to be kind.” Hence, Hamlet wants Claudius to “hear” a show in which he has inserted a speech that will catch the conscience of the king.

Placing this in Elizabethan context, Hamlet is dramatizing the conflict between visual (and theatrical) and aural in Elizabethan religion. For most Protestant critics, the Mass was a theatrical performance, pomp and ceremony, but offering no words that would heal the serpent’s poisonous lies. Protestant preaching, by contrast, aims at the damaged organ of hearing, the mildewed ear that is the source of the rottenness of the world, and turns it to health. “Popery is a religion for the eye; ours for the ear,” said one Protestant pastor. Yet, the criticism could go in the other direction as well. Thomas Nashe wrote in 1593 that Puritan preachers “sweat, they blunder, they bounce & plunge in the Pulpit, but all is voice and no substance: they deaf men’s ears, but not edify.” Hooker charges that since the Puritans denied that “the reading either of scriptures or homilies and sermons can ever by the ordinary grace of God save any soul,” it follows that “the vigor and vital efficacy of sermons doth grow from certain accidents which are not in them but in their maker; his virtue, his gesture, his countenance, his zeal, the motion of his body, and the inflection of his voice who first uttereth them as his own, is that which giveth them the form, the nature, the very essence of instruments available to eternal life.” Catholics, indeed, turned the charge of theatricality against the Protestants preachers who “guided with the wind of popular applause,” and Protestants sometimes acknowledged the problem: Thomas Cooper lamented in 1589 that Protestant churches had “become a Stage to the most vile and abject men at all times, and in all place, in the Streets, in Shops, at Tables, at Feasts, at Councils, even to the very playing scaffolds, which I speak with tears, and are scoffed at, even of the vile and contemptible players.”

ACT 3, SCENE 1
Act 3 is critical to the whole play. It stands, obviously enough, in the middle of the text, and the hinge of the action of the play. During the course of the act, Hamlet turns the tables on Claudius, becoming the director of his own play rather than the unwilling object of Claudius’ direction. By the end of the act, he has provoked remorse from Claudius and Gertrude both, through the words of his enacted speech and the dagger-words he speaks to Gertrude. Yet, this act also begins the process that will lead to Hamlet’s own doom, as he turns (as all revenge heroes must) from hunter into prey.

The act begins and ends with Hamlet’s encounters with women: beginning with Ophelia and ending with Gertrude. For Hamlet at least, the two are of a piece, both unfaithful, frail women who are seduced and poisoned by the serpent king. For both, the question of their complicity in the king’s plots is a live one. Both have lived by Hamlet’s looks but are now in his frown. The structure of this section of the play is roughly this:

Players arrive, and Hamlet hits on the idea of the Mousetrap, 2.2
Hamlet’s “rogue and peasant slave” soliloquy, 2.2
R&G report back, 3.1
Claudius and Polonius hide and observe, 3.1
Hamlet encounters Ophelia, 3.1
Claudius and Polonius plan Hamlet’s trip to England, 3.1: “Madness in great ones”
Mousetrap play, 3.2
Hamlet’s “drink hot blood” soliloquy, 3.2
Claudius and Polonius, with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, plan trip, 3.3
Polonius plans to hide and observe, 3.3
Hamlet encounters Gertrude, 3.4
Hamlet kills Polonius, 3.4

There is a very similar sequence at the beginning and end of the act: Playersà passionate soliloquyà encounter with (to Hamlet’s thinking, faithless) woman.

Ophelia’s position at the beginning of Act 3 is a complex one, and too often simplified on stage. Ludwig Tieck summarizes the various motivations and conflicts she is experiencing: “She suffers herself to be used that her mad lover may be overheard. An actress must employ all her skill to show how painful to Ophelia is her unworthy part; to know that, in this interview with her lover, her father and the king are listening to every word; that she is to see him no more when she had so much to say to him; and to feel herself forced to show herself to him in this strange, unnatural attitude, compelled to bear all his reproaches, his bitterness, bordering on brutality, and not daring to breathe a word in vindication of herself . . . . Instead, one commonly sees on stage a maiden taking everything very quietly.” At what point does Ophelia know that she is going to be watched? In some productions, this is not revealed until the end of scene 1, when Polonius assures her that he and the king heard all. Though this is probably not sustainable, it does seem reasonable to think that the use her father is making of her is only gradually dawning on her.

HOW TO CAPTURE THIS? WHAT KIND OF EXPRESSION ON FACE? TONE OF VOICE? PROPS??

SAME FOR HAMLET: HOW IS THIS GOING TO BE SPOKEN? MEDITATION? DREAMY? AGITATED? FEARFUL?

Hamlet comes on to the stage, having been sent for, speaking the most famous soliloquy in literature. The soliloquy is sometimes played as an abstracted and meditative exploration of suicide, death, and the afterlife, and it is frequently presented by a melancholy and distracted Hamlet. In the action of the play, however, Hamlet has just hit upon the idea of catching the king’s conscience through the Mousetrap play, and is in a state of great excitement. He has decided on a course of action, for the first time in the play, and he sticks with that decision, as is evident in the following scenes. The soliloquy is a meditation on action, appropriate to the fact that he has just decided to act (Alex Newell makes this point in his study of Hamlet’s soliloquies). Set in this context, the speech is not unlike Macbeth’s “If ‘twere done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly” speech. The question is: How to act in a world where the consequences of action are impossible to determine ahead of time. (Not for the first time, the shadow of Ecclesiastes hangs over Hamlet.)

Plus, he has been sent for, and is expecting to encounter someone. He is planning a trap for Claudius, and, having been sent for, is likely suspicious that he is being led into a trap. His soliloquy, in turn, discovers that life itself lays traps for the unwary, the trap of death and its dreams.

This context is essential to understand the feel of the soliloquy. Though he does consider the possibility of death, his own death, he is initially not (as Samuel Johnson pointed out long ago) contemplating suicide. (Nor is he, as Dover Wilson and others suggest, falling back into the reflective melancholy of the opening soliloquy.) Johnson wrote: “Hamlet, knowing himself injured in the most enormous and atrocious degree, and seeing no means of redress, but such as must expose him to the extremity of hazard, meditates on his situation in this manner: Before I can form any rational scheme of action under this pressure of distress, it is necessary to decide, whether, after our present state, we are to be or not to be. That is the question, which, as it shall be answered, will determine, whether ‘tis nobler, and more suitable to the dignity of reason, to suffer the outrages of fortune patiently, or to take arms against them, and by opposing end them, though perhaps with the loss of life. If to die, were to sleep, no more, and by a sleep to end the miseries of our nature, such a sleep were devoutly to be wished; but if to sleep in death be to dream, to retain our powers of sensibility, we must pause to consider, in that sleep of death what dreams may come. This consideration makes calamity so long endured; for who would bear the vexations of life, which might be ended by a bare bodkin, but that he is afraid of something in unknown futurity? This fear it is that gives efficacy to conscience, which, by turning the mind upon this regard, chills the ardour of resolution, checks the vigour of enterprise, and makes the current of desire stagnate in inactivity.”

He is instead considering an action that might lead to his death. The choice between “being” and “not being” is the same as the choice between “suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” and “taking up arms against a sea of troubles,” between acting and not acting. He might, Stoic-like, simply accept the unweeded garden, simply try to survive in times that are out of joint. Or, he might try to put it right, recognizing that in the process he might end up dead. It is this possibility that gives pause – the possibility that bold action might lead to an unknown world. By the end of the soliloquy, he is contemplating suicide – ending all the pain with a “bare bodkin” – but I think Derek Jacobi hits the right note by turning the meditation on suicide into an intellectual meditation rather than an earnest one. Hamlet’s thoughts move rapidly, and once the thought of death as a consequence of action comes to mind it moves to a thought of avoiding the action altogether.

Alex Newell offers this helpful summary of the course of Hamlet’s thought: The opening line is “governed most immediately by the ‘Whether ‘tis nobler’ consideration and the ‘To die’ ramification.” Further: “the connections in Hamlet’s mind are determined by all the implications of his expression in the ‘Whether ‘tis nobler’ consideration, implications that complicate the central issue confronting him: to act (‘take arms’) or not to act (‘suffer’). In his present experience of life he is not sure which course is ‘nobler.’ He sees life fatalistically exposed to the outrages of hostile [strumpet] fortune, and within this tragic view of life he entertains the idea of the nobility of suffering. If to ‘take arms’ against them would end the troubles bestowed by fortune, it would unquestionably be nobler to eliminate evil than to endure it. But Hamlet feels that he has a ‘sea of troubles,’ a figure that expresses his sense of the multitude and overwhelming magnitude of his problems. Who can hope to be victorious against the sea? Hence ‘by opposing end them’ is clarified by ‘To die’ and expresses Hamlet’s sense of the futility of effective opposition and the probability of death as a result of taking arms. ‘To die’ is the grim implication of acting, but his troubles feel so oppressive to him that he associates ‘to die’ with ‘to sleep’ and would welcome such a tranquil release from the afflictions of life . . . .But because his death, which seems almost inevitable to him if he acts, would be another triumph for outrageous fortune, and because his death would not end the present evils, it may be nobler to suffer passively in defiance of outrageous fortune than to die in active but futile defiance. Moreover, death may bring even greater woes . . . . As his thoughts progress in the soliloquy, the idea of the nobility of dying in action is compromise (as, indeed, the idea of the nobility of dying in action is also compromised) by his discovery that thought – the very process of thought he is engaged in – may be a symptom of fear.” Thus, again Hamlet becomes his own audience and dramatic critic.

Newell sugges
ts that the opening line “stratifies” into various levels of meaning: “Is the play to be or not to be? – to act or not to act. Is Claudius to be or not to be? – can evil, which fortune apparently favors, possibly be conquered? Am I to be or not to be? – shall I choose to live and suffer or shall I choose probable death by going ahead with this business?” What is not included, Newell argues, is the thought of suicide. By the time he gets to the end of the soliloquy, Hamlet has answered the question posed at the beginning – which is nobler? To act. Newell again: “He started out in the opening section to determine what the ‘nobler’ mode of conduct would be, but during the course of his considerations a compelling new factor entered his awareness and recast the central question. That new factor was the perception by Hamlet of the kind of significance that thought itself might have – the very thought in which he was engaged. In the closing section this new factor enables Hamlet to arrive at an answer to the most immediate dramatic issue of action troubling him: whether or not to proceed with the dangerous dramatization of Claudius’s crime. The answer he arrives at is clear: not to act is cowardly,” and hence ignoble. Newell notes the complexity of Hamlet’s personality revealed in the soliloquy: He thinks and thinks and can’t help thinking, and yet he simultaneously denigrates thinking and exalts acting. This relates to what Newell sees as a recurrent pagan strain in Hamlet: “his unqualified conclusion that not to act is cowardly – implying that Christian patience and suffering are ignoble – is a symptom of the pagan revenger’s attitude to which his mind may have become subservient, even in its finest moments.”

Hamlet comes on stage, summoned by Claudius, and finds . . . Ophelia. He smells a fishmonger nearby, and knows from his earlier encounter with R&G that no one is “sent for” without reason. Throughout the scene, or at least at some point during the scene, Hamlet is aware of being watched, and his invective against Ophelia is intended not only for her but for the hidden king. Hamlet’s rage at Ophelia is of course rage at the world; beauty’s seduction of honesty is of a piece of the absorption of “is” into “seems.” Hamlet has been telling the truth about things since he put on his antic disposition, but the truth has been veiled in nonsense. It is no longer: He expresses his bitter opinion about the nature of things openly and viciously, and drives Ophelia mad.

ACT 3, SCENE 2
A few comments only. First, the instructions that Hamlet gives the players are not detached from their dramatic context. The players are to hold a mirror up to nature, the unweeded garden that is both Denmark and the world. Hamlet himself has been pursuing this purpose of playing in his antic disposition, holding up a mirror of madness to the mad, mad, mad world.

Second, Hamlet had said that he would insert a speech into the play. Where is it? The only possible answer is that it is the Player King’s speech between lines 182 and 211. Perhaps we are to understand all of this as Hamlet’s insertion, or perhaps only a portion. Importantly, they focus on the brevity of joys and grieves, and the brevity of love. The key line is “whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.” Is love powerful enough to overcome the turnings of Strumpet Fortune? Or does love vary with circumstance? Hamlet thinks he has every reason to believe that the latter is the case – Gertrude and Ophelia (whom he treats as a strumpet in this scene) being Exhibits A and B. The fact that Hamlet insults Gertrude in the play gives Claudius a public excuse for his anger and indignation: He is indignant at the son who so publicly insults his mother. Secretly, he is fearful of the “nephew” who appears to know exactly how he killed his brother.

ACT 3, SCENE 4
Again, a few comments only. First, it is worth asking why Polonius is still insisting on skulking around behind the curtains? He apparently still believes he can find some information about the cause of Hamlet’s lunacy. Claudius is way past that by now: He simply wants to dispose of a dangerous madman.

Second, Gertrude shows that she has virtually expunged her first husband from her mind. “Thou hast thy father much offended,” is her first line to Hamlet, a line not calculated to win him over. When the ghost appears, she cannot see him. By the end of the scene, Hamlet has been able to cleave her heart in two, and has pushed her to remembrance. “Remember me” is Hamlet’s byword, and he tries to make Gertrude remember as wel.

Third, Polonius is the first of the baser natures who falls between the two mighty opposites.

Fourth, as in 3.1, Hamlet lets loose his rage against Gertrude without subterfuge or disguise.

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