Hamlet (2 page)

The play was registered in 1602 “as it was lately acted by the Lord Chamberlain his servants” (Shakespeare’s theater company), but a book published in 1596 refers to a ghost in a play crying “Hamlet, revenge!,” and as early as 1589 Thomas Nashe mentioned “whole
Hamlets
—I should say handfuls—of tragical speeches.” Scholars therefore suppose that Shakespeare’s play was written in about 1600, but that it was a reworking of an older, now lost play, just as
King Lear
was a reworking of the anonymous
History of King Leir
, which does survive. The old
Hamlet
is sometimes speculatively attributed to Thomas Kyd, whose
Spanish Tragedy
established the late-Elizabethan vogue for blood-and-guts revenge drama. A few scholars suppose that Shakespeare himself wrote the early version and a tiny minority that the poorly printed First Quarto text of 1603 may in some way derive from it. Though there is no firm evidence as to authorship or content, we may safely assume that the old Hamlet play (sometimes known as the
Ur-Hamlet
) was broadly similar to
The Spanish Tragedy
and Shakespeare’s early assay in this genre,
Titus Andronicus
, both of which achieved immense popularity with their plotting of revenge by means of feigned madness, their spectacular multiple murders, and the revenger’s elaborately rhetorical outbursts of tragic passion. Hamlet’s shortest soliloquy, after he has been fired up by the play-within-the-play, is very much in this style: “Now could I drink hot blood / And do such bitter business as the day / Would quake to look on.”

Hamlet is as capable of violent action as any other revenger—witness his cruel rejection of Ophelia and his casual lugging of Polonius’ guts into the neighboring room. Nor does he delay nearly so much as he tells us he is delaying: he has to establish the authenticity of the Ghost, to ensure that it is not a devil sent to tempt him into evil action, and as soon as he has done this by watching Claudius’ reaction to the play he goes off to kill him. He doesn’t kill him at prayer because that would be “hire and salary, not revenge,” would send him to heaven not to hell. He then thinks that he has killed him in Gertrude’s closet, though it turns out that he has killed Polonius instead and as a result he is packed off to England. As soon as he has tricked and dispatched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, effected his daring escape via the pirate ship and returned to Denmark, he is in a state of “readiness” and the revenge then takes place during the duel. Looked at this way, where is the delay?

But the style of the “hot blood” soliloquy is completely unlike that of the other solo speeches, which are all much longer and more introspective. It is from them that we derive our image of the character of Hamlet. In the first act, he is so disgusted by his mother’s hasty remarriage that he wishes he were dead. In the second, he is moved to self-disgust by the way in which the player can work himself into a frenzy for the fictional sorrows of Hecuba, while he himself has not yet done anything about his father’s murder. In the third, he meditates on the pros and cons of suicide and in the Quarto text of the fourth, he is still chiding himself when he compares his own inaction with the military activity of Fortinbras and his army (“How all occasions do inform against me / And spur my dull revenge!”). Hamlet’s self-analysis has led some commentators to wonder whether his failure to kill the praying usurper might be the result of procrastination, not calculation about whether he would be sending him to heaven or hell. The soliloquies present such a convincing picture of irresolution and inaction that even when it comes to the final scene it may occur to us that the killing of the king seems to be not so much the climax of Hamlet’s plans as an incidental consequence of Laertes’ quest for revenge for the deaths of his father and sister.

For the Romantics such as Goethe and Coleridge, Hamlet was the archetype of the sensitive man paralized into inaction by his sheer capacity for thought—which is to say an image of themselves as poets uneasily inhabiting the public sphere. Debatable as this reading is, there can be little doubt that Shakespeare’s innovation in
Hamlet
was to take the figure of the revenger from the old play and turn him into an intellectual, so making revenge into a moral dilemma as opposed to a practical task to be carried out through effective plotting. Hamlet’s problem is that his intelligence makes him see both sides of every question, whereas in the drama of revenge there is no place for debate and half measure. The lesson from both the Old Testament and Greek tragedy, which was mediated to Shakespeare via Seneca’s Latin plays, was that action requires reactions: a crime in one generation demands the meting out of punishment in the next, an eye for an eye. Requital must be exact and complete. The code of revenge requires Hamlet not to kill the king while he is praying because that would send him straight to heaven, which does not correspond to the fate of Old Hamlet, who was murdered “grossly, full of bread, / With all his crimes broad blown.” It is one of the play’s many ironies that, immediately on Hamlet’s departure, the king acknowledges that his prayer for forgiveness is not working—if Hamlet had struck, he would have damned his enemy.

One of the paradoxes of the play is that the Ghost of Old Hamlet comes from Purgatory, where he is confined in fire “Till the foul crimes done in [his] days of nature / Are burnt and purged away,” while Hamlet’s speech giving his reasons for not plunging his sword into his praying uncle implies that the act of penitence can instantly purge sin away and allow even a man who has committed the most terrible crime immediate access to heaven on his death. Purgatory is a Roman Catholic doctrine, the leap to grace supposed by Hamlet a Protestant one. At several points, the play engages with the great doctrinal disputes of the Reformation and counter-Reformation. There appear, for instance, to be passing allusions to the nature of the sacrament of Holy Communion, the question of whether the bread and wine at the altar is literally or only symbolically transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ.

Hamlet longs to be back at Wittenberg, the university of Martin Luther, architect of the Reformation. Wittenberg was the intellectual home of the Protestant revolution, in which the individual’s relationship with God matters more than the intercession of priests, saints, and the Church. In Protestantism, authenticity of feeling is paramount and a key term is “conscience.” As Hamlet says at the end of “To be, or not to be”:

In Elizabethan English “conscience” meant not only moral scruple but also “consciousness.” A polyglot dictionary of the period glossed the word as “witness of one’s own mind, knowledge, remorse.” It is Hamlet’s extreme self-consciousness that sets him apart from the traditional revenger. When alone on stage, reflecting on his own situation, he seems to embody the very nature of human
being
. It is “conscience” in its multiple senses that forms his self-image, his “character,” and in so doing makes it agonizingly difficult for him to perform the action that is demanded of him. Yet when he does come to act, he is decisive and ruthless. He reaches the point of “readiness” when he accepts—never easy for an intellectual—that what will be will be. Thereafter, he considers it “perfect conscience” to kill the king and has no compunction about his treatment of the former schoolfellows who have betrayed not only him but the precious virtue of friendship: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he says, “are not near my conscience.”

1.
“Rapier and dagger”: on-guard position, as illustrated in Vincentio Saviolo’s English fencing treatise of 1595. There were strong links between the actors and Saviolo’s fencing school in Ludgate.

It is sometimes said that chance, not Hamlet, brings the plot to a resolution. Hamlet certainly believes that Providence is operating on his behalf, as witnessed by the good fortune of his having the means to seal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s fate. But the exchange of rapiers during the fencing match with Laertes is not a matter of chance, as is sometimes suggested. Many modern productions use the épée that had not been invented in Shakespeare’s time—a flexible foil that may be knocked from the hand, leading to the possibility of an accidental exchange of weapons. But Hamlet and Laertes would originally have dueled with “rapier and dagger,” the commonest weapons for such an encounter, as illustrated in Vincentio Saviolo’s treatise on fencing skills,
The Art of Practice
(1595).

2.
They change rapiers:
disarm and exchange by left-hand seizure, as illustrated in Henri de Saint-Didier’s French fencing treatise of 1573.

The grip used for the rapier meant that it was very hard to remove it from the opponent’s hand save by an advanced maneuver known as the “left-hand seizure.” Hamlet would have dropped his dagger to the ground and grabbed the hilt of Laertes’ rapier with his left hand, twisting it out of his grip. Laertes would have responded with the same action, resulting in the switch of weapons.

The move, which is illustrated in continental fencing handbooks of the period, is so skillful that Hamlet’s action must have been purposeful. He would not initially have seen that Laertes’ rapier was “unbated” (not blunted in the way that was customary to prevent the injury of gentlemen participating in sporting fights), but on receiving a “hit” his skin would have been pierced by the point. Realizing that Laertes is in earnest, not play, he instantly responds with the maneuver that makes the switch. Now he is in deadly earnest himself. Deeds take over from words, revenge is performed without further compunctious visitings of nature, and “the rest is silence.”

Shakespeare couldn’t decide what to do with his most famous speech. The earliest surviving text of
Hamlet
^*
is highly inaccurate in many of its particulars, but there is little doubt that its shape reflects that of the play as performed early in its stage history. In that text (known as the “First Quarto”), Hamlet enters “reading on a book” and launches into his soliloquy “To be or not to be there, ay, there’s the point.” His famous question is asked as if in response to something in the book he is reading. The soliloquy is followed by the “get thee to a nunnery” dialogue with Ophelia and then the “Fishmonger” sequence with her father.

But in the Second Quarto and First Folio texts—published later, but considerably longer and more accurately printed than the First Quarto—Hamlet’s entrance with the book leads straight to the “Fishmonger” dialogue (
this page
–
this page
). “To be or not to be, that is the question” and the “nunnery” scene are held back until after the arrival of the players (
this page–
this page
). This is only the most striking of the many textual variants between the early versions of
Hamlet
. Is the flesh that Hamlet wishes would melt too “sullied” or too “solid”? Did Old Hamlet smite a leaded or a steeled poleaxe on the ice or did he smite the Polack from a sledge on the ice? So much depends on whether you favor Quarto or Folio.

Scholars traditionally prefer the Second Quarto because it is the fullest text and apparently the one closest to Shakespeare’s original manuscript. But it may represent a “reading text” as opposed to a “performance” one. Coming in at around four thousand lines, Second Quarto
Hamlet
could never have been played in full within the 160 or so minutes that was the legal maximum for an Elizabethan play (shows began at 2 p.m., there was always a closing comedy and dance routine known as a jig, and then the theater had to be cleared by 5 p.m.). The full flow of Shakespeare’s tragic vein must be reined in and cut for performance, and with a play as long as
Hamlet
he must have known that this would be the case.