FOLD EIGHT

8.1 (III. 2. 1–45)

At once we are back with Hamlet and three of the players, and into another of those speeches that all playgoers will feel sure they have heard before even if they have never seen the play, in which the very fame of the passage can easily stop us responding to it as, within the context of the play, it needs to be responded to.

Hamlet is giving the players instruction on how to perform, and theatre historians have had a field day with it, for it is one of the few places in the whole of Elizabethan literature in which such instruction is given. I have a DVD of John Barton taking a group of world-famous RSC actors in a Shakespeare workshop designed to shed light on Shakespeare as primarily a man of the theatre rather than a poet, and Barton begins by taking the actors through this speech as though it were Shakespeare’s very own word on the subject:

Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant. It out-Herods Herod. Pray you avoid it. (1–14)

What Hamlet says he wants here, is ‘temperance’, the middle way, and ‘smoothness’, both so beloved of the Italian Humanists. What he cannot stand is actors hamming it up for the sake of the groundlings, whom he clearly despises as wanting ‘inexplicable dumb-shows and noise’ (we recall his assertion that Polonius, like the groundlings, only cares ‘for a jig or a tale of bawdry, or [before] he sleeps’: II. 2. 496).

Are these Shakespeare’s views, and, more importantly, whatever Shakespeare’s views, is this what the play before us has actually been giving us? The answer has to be, no. The play we are watching has so far given us a terrifying ghost who is also mocked and tries to impress by creeping about under the stage and banging on its floor; a hero who is anything but balanced and who moves suddenly and violently rather than slowly and gracefully, and veers from silence to sharp and acid repartee, from protestations of love to gross insults aimed at an innocent young woman; an old man who keeps forgetting his lines; and an actor who appears out of nowhere to make an interminable speech written in a bombastic rhetoric which at times spills over into the ridiculous. We are nearer to Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna than to Castiglione’s The Courtier, and the groundlings will have had a field day (it is probably one of the main reasons why the play has been and goes on being so hugely successful). But there has also been much for the Humanists in the audience to appreciate: Hamlet’s quoting of Pico della Mirandola on the dignity of man; his long meditations on the meaning of life; Ophelia’s tribute to him as having once been the epitome of a Renaissance prince. What we have not had is temperance and smoothness. That much at least is unequivocal.

To take Hamlet’s prescription here as Shakespeare’s last word is like taking Gargantua’s letter to his son Pantagruel, a model of Humanist rhetoric and instruction, as the blueprint for Rabelais’s great work. This, of course is what critics of Rabelais, trained in Renaissance Humanism, used to do until, during the second half of the last century, a more accurate view of Rabelais’ work began to gain ground. ‘Most dear sonne,’ begins Gargantua,

amongst the gifts, graces and prerogatives, with which the sovereign Plasmater God Almighty, hath endowed and adorned humane Nature at the beginning, that seems to me most singular and excellent, by which we may in a mortal estate attain to a kind of immortality, and in the course of this transitory life perpetuate our name and seed, which is done by progeny issued from us in the lawful bonds of Matrimony: whereby that in some measure is restored unto us, which was taken from us by the sin of our first Parents, to whom it was said …

This is splendid if rather boring stuff, but it is not what we love and remember Rabelais for. Yet it is not exactly parody either. What it is – and we can see this in Swift’s admiration for his dull but admirable patron, Sir William Temple – is the expression of admiration for an ideal, but one which unfortunately is betrayed as soon as it is put into words, when it emerges as mere platitude. Writers as different as Rabelais, Shakespeare, Swift and Sterne seem to have sensed that the only true way to express this ideal, with much of which they agreed, was by indirection, and that to try and express it directly was immediately to betray it. By expressing in their writing everything that is anathema to the Humanist, yet forcing us to question the authority of what is being said, they feel that they can most accurately express the fate of the Humanist ideals in a world in which more has changed than the Humanists are willing to recognise. They feel too that the Humanists simply leave out too much, and too much that is vital, for the expression of their ideals ever to be wholly persuasive. Thus A Midsummer Night’s Dream may not be ironic at the expense of Duke Theseus and his court but it certainly does not endorse their judgement of the spectacle the ‘rude mechanicals’ put on for them. Not, of course, that Shakespeare’s play shies away from laughing at the antics of Bottom and the other mechanicals. But a full response to it has to recognise that there is more to the world than is ever dreamt of in Theseus’s philosophy, and that Bottom, recognising that the dream he has dreamed is bottomless, may be closer to the truth than the highly educated courtiers who laugh at him.

What Hamlet goes on to say to the players is, if anything, even more revered by theatre historians and directors (at least in didactic mode) than what has gone before:

Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure … And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them – for there be of them that will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators to laugh too … That’s villainous, and shows a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it. (17–45)

However, a number of scholars, such as Robert Weimann, Patricia Parker, Margreta de Grazia, David Wiles and Bart van Es, have begun to explore what is going on here in a more historically nuanced way than the neo-Humanists of the RSC. They recognise that what Hamlet (but not Hamlet) is advocating was, in the year 1600, a new form of theatre, what we might in shorthand call realist theatre; theatre, that is, where the events on the stage are entirely self-contained and where the actors are seemingly unaware of the audience. The defence of such plays is that they hold the mirror up to nature, and it is still the defence made of all modes of realism, both in drama and in fiction. It has become so much the standard view of theatre that we have difficulty in remembering that it is a fairly recent development, despite the questioning of this kind of theatre by Brecht, Beckett, Ionesco and almost every major playwright of the last hundred years. But this was not the way theatre worked in ancient Greece or in medieval England, and, as Weimann and others have shown, it was not a notion entrenched in the spectators’ consciousness until well into the seventeenth century. Before that, the audience never consisted of passive spectators who, having paid for their entry, waited to have a mirror held up to them. Rather, audience and performers were in dialogue, though that dialogue took many forms, from the quasi-religious theatre of ancient Athens through the Corpus Christi plays of the English Middle Ages to the comic interludes and other popular forms of the fifteenth and early sixteenth cent-uries. The figure of the Vice and then of the Clown in the theatre that preceded Shakespeare’s performed the role of mediating between play and spectators by commenting on the action, often comically, from a position midway between ‘the play’ and the audience. As Weimann has shown, this was clearly expressed by the stage position the Vice or Clown took up, on the floor with the spectators rather than on the stage with the other actors. Shakespeare’s clowns, in plays like The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Merchant of Venice, go on performing this role in changing circumstances, being to some extent integrated into the plot but never completely, always retaining something of their ‘in between’ role.

Here the theatre historians begin to differ among themselves. For obviously there is no clown (apart, as we will see, from a crucial intervention towards the end of the play) in Hamlet, and after that the role changes: what we get in Twelfth Night and, supremely, in King Lear is the introduction of the Fool, the licensed or court jester who both takes over the role of the Vice and the Clown and becomes a crucial part of the plot.

All theatre historians are agreed, however, that an important part of what happened was that the resident clown of Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Will Kemp, who was famous for his ad-libbing and his physical prowess, left the company and was replaced by Robert Armin, a very different sort of actor whose way of operating had to be catered for. But did Kemp leave of his own free will or was he pushed? Did he go because the kind of play Shakespeare wanted to write would no longer accommodate him, or did Shakespeare change his way of writing to suit the change in personnel? And was this really crucial?

For James Shapiro it clearly was. He entitles the first chapter of his deservedly popular book about one year in Shakespeare’s life, 1599, ‘A Battle of Wills’, and he writes:

The parting of ways between [Will] Shakespeare and [Will] Kemp – ironically, if unintentionally mirrored in Hal’s icy repudiation of Falstaff – was a rejection not only of a certain kind of comedy but also of a declaration that from here on in it was going to be a playwright’s and not an actor’s theatre, no matter how popular the actor.

Shapiro’s book is full of such absolute breaks, and while this may account for the book’s success with the public at large it achieves it at a cost. And the main loser is Hamlet.

Other scholars, such as Weimann and Wiles, have come closer to the mark, it seems to me, in recognising that what we have in Hamlet is the strange but extraordinarily powerful effect Shakespeare creates by having the tragic hero and the clown figure merge, but their emphasis on theatre history still seems to me to lead to blindness as to what is actually at stake here. They are content to point up Hamlet’s link with the tradition of the Vice and the Clown and to leave it at that. Yet if I am right in feeling that Hamlet’s suffering and behaviour stem from the fact that he cannot find a play to be part of, that he cannot find it in himself to enter wholeheartedly into the play either of the Ghost or of Claudius and the court, then his inhabiting an intermediary position, outside the play we are witnessing and in touch with the audience, becomes not merely a fact of theatrical history but one way in which Shakespeare dramatises the new kind of metaphysical anguish he is exploring here.

What holds Hamlet back? A suspicion about the validity of either of the plays on offer, a sense that if he were to enter either he would be play-acting, not fully himself. And the way he expresses this is through the kind of banter, the kind of wordplay, that raises questions about the language of others, and this, of course, is precisely the role traditionally occupied by the Vice and the Clown. It is a supreme irony of this play, then, that Hamlet, who comes alive through his quips and ad-libbing, should seek here to ban this from the repertoire of the players: ‘Let your clowns speak no more than is set down for them,’ he says, and keep them from making the spectators laugh, for it will detract from the seriousness of the play they are watching, and ‘That’s villainous, and shows a most plentiful ambition in the fool that uses it.’

Ironic, yes, but then of Hamlet too it might be said, as it is said of Lear, that he does ‘but slenderly know himself’. Why should that surprise us?

8.2 (III. 2. 46–90)

In Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream the play-within-the-play came at the end and was the burlesque climax to a comedy of love. Here it has a much more precise function than the release of tension and the generation of laughter. In fact, if ‘the play’s the thing wherein [to] catch the conscience of the King’, then it has a crucial position within the unfolding plot, and, not surprisingly, comes at the very centre of Shakespeare’s play.

There is the bustle of preparation, but soon Hamlet and Horatio find themselves briefly alone. Their closeness is at once evident from the way they address each other. ‘Here, sweet [not simply ‘my’ – though it’s true that the foppish Osric addresses him in similar style towards the end] lord, at your service,’ says Horatio, and Hamlet responds: ‘Horatio, thou art e’en as just a man/ As e’er my conversation cop’d withal’ (you are as true and as well-balanced a man is I ever encountered) (53–5). When Horatio protests, Hamlet goes on to develop what he means by ‘just’: you are no flatterer, one of those who ‘are not a pipe for Fortune’s finger/ To sound what stop she please’. In Othello Shakespeare will make the play hinge on Othello’s false impression of Iago as just such a man, but here we know Horatio is indeed the one solid rock in a totally unstable world.

Hamlet has just time to instruct Horatio to watch Claudius like a hawk and see how he reacts to the play, before trumpets are heard, heralding the arrival of the royal party. ‘They are coming to the play. I must be idle,’ mutters Hamlet, and that last word is nicely ironic: he must look unoccupied, he says – but all the way through it is his idleness he has not been able to bear, the sense that in this new world left by his father’s death and his mother’s remarriage there is nothing for him to do – until now, when, as we will see, far from being idle, or being still and watching a play, he will be almost pathologically active.

8.3 (III. 2. 91–132)

He begins right away. To Claudius’s bland: ‘How fares our cousin Hamlet?’ he responds with a mixture of aggression and fantasy. Taking, as is his habit, the words uttered in a sense other than they are meant, he pretends to understand ‘fares’ not as a present tense of a verb meaning ‘do, be’, but of a verb derived from ‘fare: to eat’, and so answers: ‘Excellent, i’faith, of the chameleon’s dish. I eat the air, promise-crammed. You cannot feed capons so.’ The chameleon was thought to feed on air, while capons were stuffed, and the sentence as a whole clearly implies that Hamlet feels that his uncle’s accession to the throne has robbed him of his rights. As we have seen, there is nothing in the constitution of Denmark as presented in the play which suggests that the son should inherit the throne from the father; on the contrary, it is an elected monarchy, though the reigning monarch can clearly, as Claudius has said he has done, voice a preference for who will succeed him, and this will no doubt be taken into account. But this is an element of the play that Shakespeare has deliberately left vague, so that Hamlet’s gripe, if it is that, that he has been passed over, is felt as both justified and unjustified, depending on the moment.

At the same time, like Hamlet’s ‘Words, words, words’, this reminds us that an actor must always ‘eat the air, promise-crammed’, for the food he feeds on is always fake food, never the real thing. Thus Shakespeare plays with us, revealing and then concealing the negative aspect of what it means to act on a stage and using that to develop our sense of Hamlet the person and his sense of himself.

Claudius certainly takes his answer as a rebuke and responds stiffly: ‘I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet.’ But Hamlet is off at a tangent again, suddenly addressing Polonius:

Ham.My lord, you played once i’th’ university, you say?

Pol.That did I, my lord, and was accounted a good actor.

Ham.What did you enact?

Pol.I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’th’ Capitol. Brutus killed me.

Ham.It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there. (97–105)

This is where theatre historians can really contribute to drawing out the meaning of individual moments in Shakespeare. They now think it was highly likely that the roles of Caesar and Brutus in Shakespeare’s own Julius Caesar, which had only recently been performed in the new Globe theatre where Hamlet was being staged, were taken by the same actors as were now playing Polonius and Hamlet, so that, as Jenkins succinctly puts it, ‘“Hamlet” would already have killed “Polonius” in a previous play, and, ironically, is to perform the same “brute part” in this’ (p. 294). Jenkins is not a critic one would associate with the name of Borges, which lends all the more credence to this dizzying scenario, made even more poignant if the conjecture of some theatre historians is accepted that Shakespeare – who it seems was not particularly distinguished as an actor, specialised in playing old men and may have played both the Ghost and Polonius – is here conversing with the star of the company, Burbage, for whom, in all probability, the role of Hamlet was created.

There is more. Brutus was not just the hero of all republicans; his ancestor, an earlier Brutus, was one too, and figures as such in Shakespeare’s early foray into Roman history, his long poem, The Rape of Lucrece, where this Brutus brings the cruel tyrant and rapist Tarquin to justice and starts Rome on its republican path. Nor is it incidental that a Brutus or Brut was taken to be the legendary founder of Britain. A calf, later in the line, is a term for a fool, but again theatre historians point out that ‘to kill a calf’, whatever that means, appears to have been part of traditional mumming entertainment.

What this shows, if true, is that all Shakespeare’s audience – nobility, intellectuals and groundlings – would have had no difficulty taking in the dizzying play of mirrors opened up by this brief exchange, with its metatheatrical high jinks, only possible when playwright, company and audience are familiar with each another.

The play again swerves in a new direction. Gertrude asks Hamlet to sit by her and he responds: ‘No, good mother, here’s metal more attractive’ (punning on the magnetic power of iron), and turns to Ophelia. There follows a brief exchange in which Hamlet’s sexual aggression is again evident but Ophelia’s passivity seems, for once, to be a form less of acquiescence than of inner firmness, thus revealing her, if not as feisty a lady as the heroines of Shakespeare’s mature comedies, Rosalind and Viola, then certainly as a match for Hamlet:

Ham.Lady, shall I lie in your lap?

Oph.No, my lord.

Ham.I mean, my head upon your lap.

Oph.Ay, my lord.

Ham.Do you think I meant country matters?

Oph.I think nothing, my lord.

Ham.That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.

Oph.What is, my lord?

Ham.Nothing.

Oph.You are merry, my lord.

Ham.Who, I?

Oph.Ay, my lord.

Ham.O God, your only jig-maker. What should a man do but be merry? For look you how cheerfully my mother looks and my father died within’s two hours.

Oph.Nay, ’tis twice two months, my lord.

Ham.So long? Nay then, let the devil wear black, for I’ll have a suit of sables. O heavens, die two months ago and not forgotten yet! Then there’s hope a great man’s memory may outlive his life half a year. But by’r lady a must build churches then, or else shall a suffer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is, ‘For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot’. (110–32)

So much is going on here one grows dizzy with the effort of processing it. First, the obscenity. Hamlet does not hold back. In ‘country matters’, meaning physical love-making, it would be easy to stress the first syllable; while ‘nothing’ would play on a man’s ‘thing’ and on the figure nought, suggesting a woman’s sexual organ. But it would be wrong to leave it at that. One reason why Ophelia can keep up the banter is that Hamlet has, from the start, adopted the role of the clown. As David Wiles points out:

When Hamlet describes himself as Ophelia’s only jig-maker he is excusing his gross sexual obscenities … [But he] is signalling also that he has adopted the clown’s role, jesting and singing to introduce the play that is about to happen. He positions himself informally, lying at Ophelia’s feet, and studying Claudius’s face. Placed both verbally and visually half-way between play and audience, he is ‘as good as a chorus’. Mingled with puns and parody, his jests betray Tarlton’s penchant for jibes and Kemp’s for extempore alliteration.

What neither Wiles nor Jenkins comments on is the pain behind the exchange, evinced by Hamlet’s compulsive return to his mother’s over-hasty marriage. A.D. Nuttall pointed out in a famous lecture that Hamlet does not even construe Ophelia’s ‘’Tis twice two months my lord’ correctly: ‘Oh, heavens, die two months ago and not forgotten yet,’ he responds, whether because the quip is the important thing or because in his anguish at his father’s death and his mother’s subsequent remarriage four and two months both feel like yesterday. Nor do they say enough about the closing lines. Here Hamlet refers to the old, Catholic practice, now outlawed, of building chantry chapels for the rich departed, where priests would keep their memory alive by singing psalms and offering prayers for the dead in perpetuity (such, as we have seen, as Dante’s Belacqua hoped would be said for him to speed his way through Purgatory). Without such visible means of keeping memory alive, Hamlet is suggesting, it is all too easy for it to be quickly lost. And he ends by comparing this to the disappearance in his day of the mummers’ play, another, but this time pagan, relic of a medieval culture of communal festivity and remembrance.

Most fascinating of all, though, is the paradox embedded in the catchphrase with which he concludes. It appears to be the refrain of a popular song, and we find Shakespeare alluding to it in Love’s Labour’s Lost (III. 1. 25–6). Jenkins states that ‘we seem to have an instance of a catch-phrase continuing in popularity after the original point of it had been lost. What is certain’, he goes on, ‘is that the hobby-horse, while very much remembered, became a by-word for being forgotten and as such the occasion for numerous jokes in Elizabethan plays’ (p. 501). But this, as so often with Jenkins, while laying out the evidence with scrupulous clarity, fails to get to the heart of the matter. For here we have a perfect example of what is known as the paradox of the Cretan liar, after the ancient conundrum of the Cretan who said all Cretans were liars. Since he is a Cretan he must be a liar, but then what he has said is true and so not all Cretans are liars; on the other hand, since all Cretans are liars he cannot be telling the truth, so all Cretans are not liars, etc. In the passage before us we must imagine Hamlet growing into the part of the jig-maker or clown and perhaps even singing and dancing (obscenely?) as he utters the well-known refrain. The refrain asserts that the hobby-horse has been forgotten, but in saying and singing and jigging it we are more than reminded of the hobby-horse and all that went with it: we experience it in the theatre, our bodies respond. As we will see when we arrive at Hamlet’s memories of the old court jester, Yorick, such doubleness is not only amusing, it is the way Shakespeare approaches the paradoxes that lie at the heart of his play.

8.4 (III. 2. 133–4)

And so we come to the play-within-the-play. Or at least to the dumb-show that precedes the play, and which is given in stage directions which are virtually identical in the Quarto and Folio. We see a King and Queen in an arbour, embracing. ‘He takes her up, and declines his head upon her neck.’ Then he lies down on a ‘bank of flowers’ and, seeing him asleep, she leaves him. Another man enters, takes the crown from off the sleeping King’s head, kisses it, pours poison in his ear, leaves. The Queen returns, finds the King dead, ‘makes passionate action’. The other man returns with three or four companions, seems to condole with her, and the dead body is carried away. ‘The Poisoner woos the Queen with gifts. She seems harsh awhile, but in the end accepts his love.’

Perhaps the most famous problem of the many problems associated with Hamlet attaches to this episode. It concerns Claudius’s reaction, or rather, lack of reaction. Why does he seem unmoved by the dumb-show? Is it that he does not see it, because he is too busy settling into his place and talking to those around him? Or that he does not recognise himself and his actions? Or does he see it and recognise his actions in it but maintain a mask of ignorance? All three views have had passionate advocates, but there are objections to all of them. First of all it is unlikely that Shakespeare would take the trouble to set all this up and then have Claudius ignore it. Then, since Claudius has more or less admitted his guilt in his asides, how could he not recognise himself? And, finally, why, if he manages to conceal his feelings here, does he give vent to them in the middle of the play proper which follows?

In answer to the objection to the third theory it has been argued that he manages to hold back for one dramatisation of the murder but not for two. Yet might it not be that it is not so much a question of his resistance being worn down as of his anger at what Hamlet has presented him with – with its blatant suggestion that he has murdered his brother – finally boiling over and his feeling that he can stand such insults no more, whether he is guilty or not?

The second theory is the most intriguing. It was first put forward by W. W. Greg as long ago as 1917, and has recently been revived by Stanley Cavell. Greg argues that Claudius does not react because Hamlet hallucinated the entire murder. Cavell feels that critics have been too quick to dismiss this as nonsense, and that their counter-arguments do not hold up in the face of the facts. He himself, however, wishes to argue that Claudius is clearly guilty, but does not recognise the murder enacted before him because it does not correspond to how he actually did it. He argues thus because he wants to propound a psychoanalytic explanation whereby the dumb-show – and the Ghost’s account on which it is based – gives form to Hamlet’s deep feelings about his father and mother, with Hamlet taking the place of the unnamed poisoner, who inseminates the Queen (psychoanalytically inclined critics seem quite happy to substitute Gertrude for Claudius here, for no good reason that I can see) ‘through the ear’.

I think Cavell is on the right track but he is far too Freudian for me. The first thing that should be said is that the Mime, which comes bang in the centre of the play, looks both backwards and forwards, both back to some primal scene which has taken place before the play began but has, in effect, provided the impetus for it to begin, and forward to the scene of carnage with which it ends. But it is a very imprecise mirror of both. Unlike the murder, what we have here is not the King’s brother but the King’s nephew murdering the sleeping King, as Hamlet would like to murder his uncle Claudius; and unlike the concluding bloodbath this is a murder carried out secretly in a peaceful orchard.

Yet the fact that it is a mime, that it is silent, makes it much more akin to dream than to theatre, which is where the psychoanalysts come in. Unlike them, though, I want to start from the contrast between the life embodied in Hamlet’s last singing of the little ditty, ‘For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot’, and the silence of the mime that follows. I think Shakespeare deliberately leaves it vague at this point whether Claudius does not see, masks his response, or is left bemused by what he sees, because what Shakespeare is interested in is Hamlet, not Claudius. Silence and vision stand over against the hearing of verse and the physicality of dance as psychosis stands over against health. And to add to this sense that we are inside a kind of traumatic dream re-enactment or imagined re-enactment of something forever out of reach is the unnatural way the crime is committed, by means of poison poured in the ear, not the mouth.

Scholars will complain that this was simply the way a well-known murder, to which Hamlet is soon to refer, took place a few decades earlier in Italy – but Shakespeare still chose to use this murder and not the many more obvious ones as his point of reference, so again the question is: why?

There is of course no definite answer. My sense is that the effect on us first of the Ghost’s account and now of Hamlet’s reconstruction of it is to elide a wide range of things. Let us first think of it from Hamlet’s point of view. A nightmare vision is presented of murder and adultery, of a father’s murder and a mother’s implication in it, and, grotesquely, the murder is committed by poison entering through the ear. Does this not at some level represent Hamlet’s sense of what his father’s ghost is doing to him – poisoning his life by pouring poison into his ear? Even more eerie is the showing of this in a scene without sound. This is the stuff of nightmare, and it stands as one pole in this play, the opposite pole to Ophelia’s tribute to Hamlet as the paragon of courtly virtues.

From Shakespeare’s perspective, this is also one pole in a play which has, almost from the start, been exploring the limits of the audience’s powers of imagination, moving in and out of the world of Elsinore and the world of the Globe in at times dizzying fashion. At this moment, though, everything stops and even sound is cut off. It is the equivalent of Dante’s circle of ice, the very lowest circle of hell, in which even the tears are frozen on the cheeks of the damned.

8.5 (III. 2. 134–49)

‘What means this, my lord?’ asks Ophelia, breaking the silence. And Hamlet, taking the role of Clown or Chorus, explains – to her and of course to us, but with his usual ironical ellipsis: ‘Marry, this is miching malicho. It means mischief.’ No one has been able fully to explain the phrase ‘miching malicho’, but it is clear it means something bad and something sneaky; ‘stealthy iniquity’ is how Jenkins takes it (p. 296), but we need not worry, for Hamlet himself clarifies: ‘It means mischief’.

The Prologue to the spoken play now appears and Hamlet has fun at his expense and at that of the theatre in general: ‘We shall know by this fellow. The players cannot keep counsel: they’ll tell all.’ But what else are plays, we ask, if not the spectacle of actors ‘telling all’? The larger question is what does this ‘all’ consist of? Does it not smell of the ‘soundings’ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern would take, of the belief Claudius and Polonius have that Hamlet has a ‘secret’ that can be brought into the open? The players will mouth the lines written for them and thus reveal the plot as the play advances – but is that really all life is? Do they ‘tell all’ about the larger questions of what it means to be alive and the child of parents, what we are to do with our lives, what happens to us after death? It may be that the very ease with which they tell all that the playwright has given them to tell actually helps occlude the real questions – which is certainly the view of Samuel Beckett. And it is, it seems, Shakespeare’s as well.

After a further exchange full of sexual innuendo on Hamlet’s part and a quiet put-down by Ophelia, the Prologue begins to speak. Hamlet is scathing about this too: ‘Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring?’ (Some pretty conceit such as those commonly engraved on the inside of rings.) ‘’Tis brief, my lord,’ responds the enigmatic Ophelia. ‘As woman’s love,’ Hamlet shoots back, but there is no time for her to respond as the Player King and Queen have entered and the King launches into his first speech.

8.6 (III. 2. 150–264)

As Jenkins notes, ‘The play within the play is at once marked off from the surrounding dialogue by the rhyming couplets and by an artificial elaboration of style characteristic of an older period’ (p. 506). As with the Player’s speech earlier, the problem remains: is this parody, and if so, why? And if not, what is it exactly?

The whole set-up is strikingly reminiscent of the play put on by the ‘mechanicals’ at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: poor performers perform a poor play and are ridiculed by those watching – except that the place and function of the play in Hamlet – in the middle, not at the end, and, in Hamlet’s eyes at least, in the verification of the Ghost’s words and the flushing out of the murderer – give the whole thing a fraught and nightmarish quality which is the opposite of the laughter generated by the equivalent scene in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Indeed, the worse the writing and the acting, the less we know how to deal with it:

P. King.

Full thirty times hath Phoebus’ cart gone round

Neptune’s salt wash and Tellus’ orbed ground,

And thirty dozen moons with borrow’d sheen

About the world have times twelve thirties been

Since love our hearts and Hymen did our hands

Unite commutual in most sacred bands.

P. Queen.

So many journeys may the sun and moon

Make us again count o’er ere love be done.

But woe is me, you are so sick of late,

So far from cheer and from your former state,

That I distrust [feel anxiety for] you. Yet though I  distrust,

Discomfort you, my lord, it nothing must;

For women’s fear and love hold quantity,

In neither aught, or in extremity.

Now what my love is, proof hath made you know,

And as my love is siz’d, my fear is so … (150–65)

What the King says, simply, is that thirty years have passed since they got married, and the Queen responds with the hope that their marriage will last as long again. However, she says, you have recently seemed unwell and this makes me afraid, though my anxiety should in no way upset you, for that is the way of women. Is the style in which this is said merely archaic? Or does the Player Queen in particular remind us uncomfortably of Polonius as she struggles to articulate her anxiety in leaden couplets and the more she struggles the less she seems able to do so? To my ear, it is, though the effect is less of bumbling pretentiousness (it is more natural to speak at length in a play than in ‘real life’), than of a rather touching earnestness mingled with naivety, precisely what one finds when reading the poetry of the first half of the sixteenth century, and what Pound, for one, found deeply moving in Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

The play now takes on a darker tone as the King announces that he is soon to die and hopes that after his death the Queen will find a husband worthy of her. But she interrupts this with a vehement protestation:

            In second husband let me be accurst;

None wed the second but who kill’d the first. (174–5)

It is in response to this that Hamlet makes his first choric interruption: ‘That’s wormwood,’ he says. Wormwood, a late Middle English word for the plant that produces absinthe (cf. vermouth), was proverbial for its bitterness. Does he take her to be saying that only a wife who kills a first husband ever marries a second? Surely not. She is merely protesting that only one who was so monstrous as to kill a first would wed a second husband – i.e. that no wife would ever marry again. And she repeats this in a different form:

A second time I kill my husband dead,

When second husband kisses me in bed. (179–80)

Yet it has to be said that her choice of words does at least allow the possibility to float over the scene that she will kill her first husband and, in a sense, kill him again and again each time she embraces the second. That is how Hamlet works – at almost every stage a set of alternative possibilities hovers over it, lending it its peculiar quality of nightmare and impenetrability.

The King, in the play, unlike Hamlet, does not seem to notice these alternatives. He responds with a long and rambling speech, Polonius-like again (‘… But orderly to end where I begun …’), whose gist is that no one knows what will happen and it is folly to say now that we will never do something later: ‘Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own.’ The Queen, however, is adamant:

Both here and hence pursue me lasting strife,

If, once a widow, ever I be a wife. (217–18)

Hamlet interrupts once more: ‘If she should break it now.’ But the King in the play merely says: ‘’Tis deeply sworn.’ Leave me, he goes on, I am weary and need to sleep. ‘Sleep rock thy brain,’ she responds, ‘And never come mischance between us twain.’ So she goes, says the stage direction, and he sleeps.

The scenario is a common one in ballads and poems of the late Middle Ages, usually given the generic title ‘The Sleeper Betrayed’: while the man sleeps his lover steals away to rejoin another. Skelton, in the early sixteenth century, wrote a beautiful version, which has the refrain: ‘With “Lullay! Lullay!’ like a childe/ Thou slepest too long, thou art begilde.’ The first two stanzas run:

‘My darling dere, my daisy floure,

Let me,’ quod he, ‘ly in your lap.’

‘Ly still,’ quod she, ‘my paramoure,

Ly still, hardely, and take a nap.’

His hed was hevy, such was his hap [luck]!

All drowsy, dreming, drownd in slepe,

That of his love he toke no kepe.

With ‘Ba! Ba! Ba!’ and ‘Bas! Bas! Bas!’

She cherished him both cheke and chin,

That he wist never where he was,

He had forgotten all deadly sin.

He wanted wit her love to win!

He trusted her payment and lost all his pray,

She left him sleping and stale away.

Clearly this corresponds to a male anxiety that the wife will not, like the mother, always be there to sing him lullabies, and that perpetual vigilance is both necessary and impossible to maintain.

Hamlet now turns to his mother:

Ham.Madam, how like you this play?

Queen.The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Ham.O, but she’ll keep her word.

King.Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in’t?

Ham.No, no, they do but jest – poison in jest. (224–30)

Unlike Polonius, who took exception to the Player’s speech on stylistic grounds, here Gertrude is concerned, like many modern playgoers, with the psychology of the characters. She raises a question about the Queen’s sincerity, though the phrase, another of the myriad ‘quotes’ to be found in this play, is usually quoted without the qualifying ‘methinks’. This is brilliant on Shakespeare’s part, because it tells us nothing about Gertrude except that she is wholly taken up by the play – the remark could be a sign either of her actual or of her pretended innocence, we cannot tell. And Claudius’s ensuing remark is likewise neutral – is he concerned with the fact that the play might contain scenes unfit for women’s eyes and ears, or that it might somehow be casting a slur upon him? Until it unfolds, of course, and we learn that the King will be poisoned by his nephew, there is nothing obviously subversive about it.

Hamlet, however, in answer to Claudius’s enquiry, explains that the play is called The Mousetrap, and ‘is the image of a murder done in Vienna’, that it is ‘a knavish piece of work’, but that guiltless spirits should think nothing of it – ‘we that have free souls, it touches us not’. And he ends with a typically compacted and riddling phrase, though it seems to have been proverbial, ‘Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung’, meaning let the horse flinch which is rubbed sore, by a saddle or spurs perhaps, but for those without any such sore spots it should cause no trouble.

The scholars tell us that there was a play in circulation called The Murder of Gonzago, about a murder committed in Urbino, not Vienna (though some think the latter might be simply a misreading of the former), in the very manner in which the play (and Shakespeare’s play) presents it, but, as I suggested earlier, that does not in itself explain why Shakespeare should have chosen this precise form of murder for his play. But we are not there yet (this time round). For what we have now is the entry of a new character, who is explained by Hamlet to be ‘one Lucianus, nephew to the King’.

This character, who ‘plays the part’ of Claudius in the murder reported to Hamlet by the Ghost, could surely have been given as the King’s brother. By choosing to make him the nephew Shakespeare carries out one of those subversions which help to trap and confuse us. For the play-within-the-play, as it is enacted here in the very centre of the play proper, in effect echoes both the primal scene of the play proper and its closing scene, while not being precisely like either. Like the primal scene, it entails the murder of a king by poisoning in an orchard by the lover of his wife; like the final scene, it entails the murder of a king by poisoning by his nephew. Thus a manifestly ‘playlike’ play in the middle of the play proper half-mirrors the extraordinary story that is said to form the backdrop to the play proper and the equally extraordinary story that will unfold before our eyes at the end. Hamlet truly is a remarkable construction, quite as full of echoes and mirrorings as Velázquez’s Las Meninas, with its central conceit of the ostensible subjects of the work only dimly present in a mirror at the back of the enormous room, a mirror which hangs on the wall next to an open door in which a figure is seen in silhouette entering the room. But if that is the case they must be standing next to us, outside the actual canvas, while the painter, so visible to us, is presumably absent from the picture on which he is at work.

Ophelia, at this point, names the role Hamlet has been adopting throughout this performance: ‘You are as good as a chorus, my lord.’ Hamlet, as we know, never merely responds, he always uses the remarks of another as a springboard for his own invention, so here he comes back: ‘I could interpret between you and your love if I could see the puppets dallying.’ In other words, I would certainly be able to supply the dialogue if I were to see you and your lover performing, as in a puppet-play. The man who ‘interprets’ at a puppet-play supplies a running commentary on the action, and is often the puppeteer himself. It is suggestive, coming after his reference to himself as a machine in his letter to her, that Hamlet should now think of Ophelia and her lover (whether himself or another) as having no more freedom than puppets, whose every movement is manipulated by another. But she chooses to pick up not on this but on the ‘dallying’: ‘You are keen, my lord, you are keen.’ You are (too) sharp-tongued, she says, but he chooses to understand ‘keen’ as sharp, and applying it to both the edge of a blade and to sexual desire he replies, obscenely, ‘It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.’ But, as in earlier scenes, she is ever a match for him: ‘Still better, and worse’ – that is, you are always able to cap a remark with a better one, but it is always in worse taste. And, of course, he cannot resist capping that: ‘So you mis-take your husbands’ – so you ‘take’ your husbands in marriage (‘for better for worse,’ runs the marriage service); or, so you take them for a ride (mis-take); or, so you fail to see what I am trying to say to you beneath my sarcastic words (mistake).

But he has had enough, and seems now not so much to pre-empt the speech Lucianus is about to deliver (do we imagine him, all this time, poised to speak his lines as the rugged Pyrrhus was poised for too long to strike down the aged Priam?) as to coax it into being, rather as Electra and the Chorus coax Orestes into the killing of their mother in Aeschylus’s Choephoroe. ‘Begin, murderer,’ he says. ‘Leave thy damnable faces [horrid grimaces] and begin.’ Returning to the Senecan rhetoric of the Player’s speech he prompts: ‘Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.’

But before we look at that it is worth recapitulating what we have seen and heard so far: a husband so tired he only wants to sleep and talk of his impending death; a wife who protests that she will never remarry; and sexual banter between Hamlet and Ophelia. It is striking that in all this there has been no talk of murder, except metaphorically as second marriage, and a harping on the sexual appetites of women, with Ophelia and the Queen eliding and separating in a dream-like way. This has been at the centre of Hamlet’s thoughts and feelings from the time we first see him to the present moment. It is almost as if the murder is an afterthought, and, here, something that must be come to, eventually, and almost reluctantly. Hamlet, we feel, has to gear himself up, drag the rhetoric of ravens and revenge out of himself, before it can come into being before us.

The stage murderer does not need much prompting: ‘Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing,’ he begins, and proceeds to pour poison into the sleeper’s ear. Hamlet explains: ‘A poisons him i’th’ garden for his estate. [No mention of lust here, the murder is purely for gain.] His name’s Gonzago. The story is extant, and written in very choice Italian [‘choice’ is good, as Polonius might say, another deflection from content and into form]. You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago’s wife’ (255–8).

But Claudius has had enough. He gets up. ‘What,’ quips Hamlet, ‘frighted with false fire?’ Just as a gun may make a noise but if it is a blank that is discharged nothing will happen, so a play, he suggests, is only make-believe. ‘How fares my lord?’ asks Gertrude, alarmed, while Polonius cries out for the play to stop. But all Claudius says is ‘Give me some light. Away.’ ‘Lights, lights, lights,’ all cry (though the Quarto gives the line to Polonius alone). This reminds us that we have been watching a play supposed to be performed indoors, unlike the performance of Hamlet taking place under the skies in the Globe, but also that the King feels the need to see more clearly in the murk and confusion of his guilty thoughts.

There is a rush for the exit, and soon only Hamlet and Horatio are left on stage.

8.7 (III. 2. 265–88)

We would expect a quick consultation as to the success or otherwise of their plan. Instead, Hamlet bursts into song:

Why, let the stricken deer go weep,

      The hart ungalled play;

For some must watch while some must sleep,

      Thus runs the world away. (265–8)

Again, a darting glance at what has happened swept up into popular ballad. The first couplet is easy enough: Claudius has been struck by the arrow of the performance, Hamlet suggests; had he not he would have been happy to ‘play’. The second couplet is harder: Why ‘must’? And why ‘runs the world away’ rather than ‘so goes the world’? Wiles suggests that the phrase refers to the Globe playhouse, like Kemp’s jest in his book about his dancing from London to Norwich that ‘I have … danced myself out of the world’, signalling his parting of the ways with the Globe and its company in 1599. But that seems to be straining things and still does not explain ‘away’. It is better perhaps to let it float as a hint of Doomsday, all the more eerie for being couched in so light a tone. But it is a further example of the almost Picassoesque way Shakespeare uses collage in this play to make his points and create the mood he wants.

Wiles is on more solid ground when he points out that the feathers and shoes Hamlet goes on to describe are the attributes of morris men and fools, and that his ‘this’ in ‘Would not this, sir … get me a fellowship in a cry of players’ refers not only to the play he has just written (and directed), but to the little song and dance he has just performed – would this not be my passport to the profession of actor? he asks. Horatio, like Ophelia, is prepared to play the game: half a share, he quips, but Hamlet is adamant: ‘A whole one, I.’

But by now we too as audience are prepared to play these word games. Hamlet may have earned himself a place in a professional company, but he is living, speaking, sighing, singing, dancing proof that no human being is ‘whole’, and that ‘I’ is a small word that covers a big lie.

But he is off into another little ditty:

For thou dost know, O Damon dear,

              This realm dismantled was

Of Jove himself, and now reigns here

              A very, very – pajock. (275–8)

Jenkins’s note on ‘Damon’ could not be bettered: ‘A traditional shepherd name from pastoral poetry, appropriately addressed to one who has the ancient virtues of the golden age before the realm was “dismantled”’ (p. 305). Hamlet is clearly referring to Claudius, who, in his eyes, has ‘dismantled’ the realm of Jove, his father, and now rules as a patched or motley fool, a more threatening and ambiguous figure than the ‘ass’ the rhyme requires. (Jenkins glosses ‘pajock’ as: ‘probably a form of “patchcock”, a base contemptible fellow, a savage’.)

Wiles is surely right too when he points out that serious plays had been in the habit of being rounded off with a jig, a merry song and dance, usually bawdy, in which the Clown performed, and that the Elizabethan audience, faced with this little episode after the melodramatic play, would have instinctively seen Hamlet at this moment as the Clown and jig-maker.

Horatio, a little slower, comes back with: ‘You might have rhymed.’ But Hamlet has moved on again: ‘O good Horatio, I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pounds. Dids’t perceive?’ (280–1) ‘Very well, my lord,’ responds Horatio. But the fact is that we are no wiser now than we were at the start about Claudius’s guilt, and were of course always unlikely to be, given the nature of the test. As I have already argued, Claudius’s abrupt exit could just as well be due to his anger at Hamlet’s continual imputation of his guilt as a sign of the guilt itself. Hamlet’s remark that he would be prepared to bet a thousand pounds now that the Ghost was telling the truth may strike us as rash.

‘Come,’ Hamlet says, reprising his role as jig-maker, ‘some music; come, the recorders.’ But at this moment who should re-enter but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern? The jig is over and the reality that is the play of the court takes over.

8.8 (III. 2. 289–378)

The King, says Guildenstern, ‘is in his retirement marvellous distempered’. That is, the King, having withdrawn, is furious. But Hamlet, in his usual fool’s way, chooses to take the word in its alternative meaning of unwell. ‘With drink?’ he asks disingenuously. ‘No, my lord,’ responds Guildenstern, ‘with choler’, that is, with anger. But again Hamlet chooses to take it in its alternative sense of sickness, an excess of bile, and innocently suggests it might be better to consult the doctor than himself. Guildenstern reprimands him: ‘Good my lord, put your discourse into some frame, and start not so wildly from my affair’ (300–1). But the question is – and remains throughout this play – what frame should we put things in? And is it even possible to put frames round discourse? For as a result of the melancholy into which he has fallen Hamlet has become aware of the fact that there is no single frame that governs all discourse but that each group brings a different ‘frame’ to its view of the world, his father providing one, Claudius another, the players a third. This Nietzschean insight, as Cavell rightly calls Hamlet’s initial ‘I know not seems’, is what holds him back from wholehearted participation in any action, whether his pursuit of Ophelia or his taking of revenge.

There are two further points to be made about this brief exchange, which are pertinent to our response to the play as a whole. First, something we touched on in our discussion of Hamlet’s first appearance in I.2. By always choosing to understand the discourse of his interlocutors in ways other than they mean it he not only helps us see that everything, including language, is ‘framed’; he also puts a spanner in the smooth-running machine that is conversation within a frame tacitly accepted by all. At every moment the forward thrust of the dialogue, which in most plays is transparent, yielding information that will drive the plot, is stopped in its tracks, or briefly re-routed on to a different track. (Shakespeare’s language, of course, is never simply transparent, but the point here is that Hamlet keeps shoving our noses into the materiality of ‘words, words, words’.) This functions, whenever Hamlet is in conversation with a member of the court, rather like Brecht’s notion of interruption, about which Benjamin has written so well. By breaking up the stream of continuity, Benjamin explains, Brechtian theatre allows us to see that events could be other than they are. Benjamin himself, when he comes to write his aphorisms on the philosophy of history, points out that ‘Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogenous, empty time. Materialistic historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructive principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.’ One of the reasons we warm to Hamlet, as to the Marx Brothers, is that by constantly arresting the normal flow of thoughts they set us both laughing and thinking.

The second point is less obvious but equally important. Because of Hamlet’s position as the King’s nephew and the Queen’s son he is always addressed as ‘my lord’, and this both establishes a rhythm and adds a further disturbing element. For if Hamlet spoke as he is expected to, that ‘my lord’ would simply merge into the discourse. If it was the court fool who spoke Hamlet’s lines, as happens with such lines in Lear, Hamlet would not be addressed as ‘my lord’. But Hamlet is both lord and fool, and that is the problem both for him and for his interlocutors.

That repeated ‘my lord’ on the part of those who address him also balances Hamlet’s own fondness for phrases such as ‘soft now’, which punctuate his speeches, even to himself. We feel the different registers pulling us in different directions.

The two courtiers have now come to summon Hamlet to his mother’s chamber, where she wishes to speak to him. Fine, Hamlet says, and is there anything else? Rosencrantz tries to seize the initiative: ‘My lord, you once did love me.’ ‘And do still,’ Hamlet answers, ‘by these pickers and stealers.’ He is at it again: Jenkins points out that by ‘pickers and stealers’ Hamlet simply means ‘hands’ (p. 308) – but this is deeply twisted and ironic, because the meaning derives from the phrase in the Catechism, ‘to keep these hands from picking and stealing’. Ironic, then, but also reinforcing the idea of the body as a machine which can easily get out of control, as the hands, in those who do not make a conscious effort to hold them back, will reach out and pick and steal.

Rosencrantz presses on: ‘Good my lord, what is your cause of distemper? You do surely bar the door upon your own liberty if you deny your griefs to your friend.’ And Hamlet, in one of those sudden bursts of apparent clarity which are so disconcerting, says: ‘Sir, I lack advancement.’ How can that be, responds the other, ‘when you have the voice of the King himself for your succession in Denmark?’ ‘Ay sir,’ returns the prince, ‘but while the grass grows – the proverb is something musty’ (326–35).

The proverb runs: ‘While the grass grows the horse starves.’ This, then, appears to be a clear indication that what is troubling Hamlet is nothing other than the issue of the succession. Denmark, as Rosencrantz’s remark makes clear, was not a hereditary monarchy, the incumbent only having the power to give his ‘voice’ to one candidate or another. Yet Shakespeare, as we have repeatedly seen, leaves us in deliberate confusion as to whether this is in fact the case. Hamlet certainly does not seem to think so. He feels his rightful ‘advancement’ has been taken from him and that to have the ‘voice’ of a middle-aged and healthy king is no comfort at all. This is the line taken by those, like Margreta de Grazia, who are keen to free Hamlet of the taint of indecision through excessive soul-searching foisted upon him by Romantic critics. But while the motive is surely laudable the case they make is not entirely convincing. For, compared to Hamlet’s outbursts against his uncle’s lechery and his mother’s compliance, these remarks seem a little too pat. Is Hamlet merely saying this to divert attention from the real cause of his ‘distemper’ (the very word used earlier of Claudius)? We can never know, but in the theatre the effect on the audience is not that of a long-awaited revelation bursting forth but of yet more verbal sparring, with neither side letting down their guard.

Hamlet, before the two courtiers entered, had called for recorders, and now they arrive, just in time for Hamlet, who, we have seen in his dealings with the players, likes to hold forth quite as much as Polonius, though to better effect, to use them not to play on but to give Rosencrantz and Guildenstern a little lesson on the nature of man. Why, he asks them, using a hunting image, ‘do you go about to recover the wind of me, as if you would drive me into a toil [a net]?’ ‘O my lord,’ responds Guildenstern, forgive me if I have seemed intrusive, it’s only my love for you that makes me seem rude. Hamlet affects puzzlement:

Ham.I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?

Guild.My lord, I cannot.

Ham.I pray you.

Guild.Believe me, I cannot.

Ham.I do beseech you.

Guild.I know no touch of it, my lord.

Ham.It is as easy as lying. Govern these ventages with your fingers and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most eloquent music. Look you, these are the stops.

Guild.But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I have not the skill.

Ham.Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me, you cannot play upon me.

(341–63)

Earlier we saw Rosencrantz and Guildenstern reporting to the King that Hamlet was difficult to ‘sound’, and saw how such metaphors fit in with the ethos of the King and court, which holds that people are hollow vessels into which we can, with ingenuity and cunning, reach in and pluck out their ‘mystery’. Now Hamlet is outlining a different view of man: man is not a machine but more like a musical instrument, which cannot be played upon by those who are alien to it and ignorant of how it works. Like a recorder, says Hamlet, but of course much more complex. Even Hamlet himself, we have sensed, does not really know how to play his own instrument; how much less likely that another would be able to do so.

The conclusion to this splendid Humanist disquisition returns us to Hamlet the deployer of barbed wit. Switching from the image of man as a wind instrument to man as a stringed instrument, he says: though you equip me with frets (the ridges on some stringed instruments which mark the placement of the fingers) you cannot play me; but also, though you irritate me (make me fret) you still will not be able to play me. There is no time for the other to respond, for at this moment, and prolonging this enormous scene even further, Polonius enters to say that the Queen needs to speak to Hamlet at once. But the prince is in full flight and will not be brought down to earth so easily. He now proceeds to give Polonius and the rest (including ourselves) a practical lesson in Nietzschean framing:

Ham.Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?

Pol.By th’ mass and ’tis – like a camel indeed.

Ham.Methinks it is like a weasel.

Pol.It is backed like a weasel.

Ham.Or like a whale.

Pol.Very like a whale.

Ham.Then I will come to my mother by and by. (367–74)

Of course Polonius is, in a sense, humouring him as a respectful courtier would humour a prince. Hamlet recognises this when, in an aside, he mutters that ‘They will fool me to the top of my bent’. But the exchange also demonstrates, as the disquisition on human beings and musical instruments just has, that we read the world through the glasses we have on. If you tell me this cloud looks like a camel I am likely to pick out its camel-like features and really see a camel; if you tell me it looks like a whale I will pick out its whale-like features and really see a whale. Wittgenstein famously explored this issue by means of the silhouette that can equally well be seen as a duck and as a rabbit, but never as both at once. Most practitioners of narrative choose not to raise the issue, so that a novelist will write, ‘Her hands were small and delicate’ and feel he has sufficiently described one aspect of one of his characters and given us a sense of the kind of person she is (though that need not stop the lady in question turning out to be the murderer, say, or a vindictive bitch), but a few, like Kafka, will want to make us see how subjective these types of description are by writing: ‘Her hands were certainly small and delicate, but they could quite as well have been called weak and characterless.’ Shakespeare is in Hamlet at the Kafka/Wittgenstein end of the literary spectrum. Discourse has to be put in some frame – but, asks this play, who decides which is the right frame?

8.9 (III. 2. 379–90)

Once again, at the end of a fold, all exit, leaving Hamlet on his own to turn things over in his mind. And how we see him at this point is, to begin with, as the Avenger. This, it seems, is the frame he has now chosen, and it comes with the appropriate Senecan language:

’Tis now the very witching time of night,

When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out

Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,

And do such bitter business as the day

Would quake to look on.

But he cannot keep it up.

                    Soft, now to my mother.

O heart, lose not thy nature …

Let me be cruel, not unnatural.

I will speak daggers to her, but use none. (379–87)

‘Soft now’, the Hamlet signature tune, heralds a coming down to earth, as he prepares for the fateful meeting. It is followed by an expression of his need to stick to his new determination to act the part of the Avenger, but the very fact that he needs to say this suggests that he is less than comfortable in the role.

And so he goes in to her. It is the first meeting between mother and son alone that we will have been witness to. Except, of course, that they are not alone. Polonius, hidden, watches.