Hamlet is often called Shakespeare’s supreme work, and the reason is clear: its protagonist is simply the best talker in the history of literature. Young Hamlet’s speeches are supreme not only in their overall grandeur, but in their intelligence, wit, speed, and perpetual gyration of phrase. Line by line, there’s more going on, more to wow you, and more to reward close scrutiny than any gab by anyone anywhere. In Paradise Lost, Satan and the host of rebel angels do some good jawing; Ishmael’s got a few stellar soliloquies while scanning the seas for Moby Dick; Ulysses Stephen Dedalus and Buck Mulligan do their fair share of intricate verbal fox-trotting, and the Judge in Blood Meridian can muster some rather impressive biblical orotundity; but still they lose out. None of them is Hamlet.
But the prince of parlance doesn’t just walk around monologuing; there’s actually a pretty good story too. To recap, Hamlet is told that the ghost of his dead father, former king of Denmark, is strolling about the castle walls at night, creeping everybody out. Hamlet goes to see, and the ghost tells him he was murdered by his brother, Claudius, who usurped his crown and wife to boot. Hamlet decides to play insane till he figures out what to do, and starts speaking innuendo-laden incomprehensibilities to his friends, family, and fair Ophelia, his sugar. Then a troupe of actors comes by whom Hamlet instructs to put on a play simulating the murder; they do so and Claudius storms out. Hamlet goes to speak to his mother, Gertrude, sees Claudius praying and considers killing him but decides to wait (killing the king mid-prayer might send his soul to heaven). Hamlet proceeds to browbeat his mother and accidentally kills the spying Polonius (Ophelia’s father) thinking him Claudius (even though the king was just on his knees in the other room). Claudius finds out and decides to send Hamlet to England, but Hamlet averts the trap. Polonius’ son, Laertes, hears of his father’s death and wants revenge. Claudius plots with him to kill Hamlet by envenomed foil (in fencing) and also poisons some wine as a backup plan. Ophelia loses her marbles and drowns—perhaps self-dunked. Hamlet and Laertes fight, Gertrude unknowingly drinks the poisoned wine, Laertes stabs Hamlet with the poisoned foil, they scuffle, switch foils, and Hamlet wounds him back. Laertes knows they’re both done for and confesses the treachery. Hamlet stabs and kills Claudius, and they all die. That’s why it’s called a tragedy.
Critics tend to say that Hamlet is the greatest of the Shakespeare plays because its protagonist is deeper than any other character in Shakespeare (though Falstaff, Prospero, Timon, and Troilus maybe give him a run for his money). But how much does that really mean? And if you’re looking for psychology, why aren’t you reading a Russian novel? Sure, our troubled hero oscillates between resolve and delay—to off my stepfather or not to off my stepfather, that is the question—but Shakespeare’s investigation of the flipflopping only skims his cerebellum. No, Hamlet is not like his counterpart, the action-man Fortinbras (meaning “strong in arm”—a bit obvious, no? Why not add Lance for good measure?) who’s off to conquer a worthless piece of Poland (a very forced bit of plot, by the way), but so what? Commentators always talk about Hamlet’s “procrastinating,” but he has to murder his uncle, after all. Wouldn’t it take any non-hothead a few tries to muster up the cojones? So, yes, there’s psychology in Hamlet (both character and play), but it’s not especially deep or surprising.
It isn’t Shakespeare’s fault. These are plays, after all; they’re not going to be able to compete with a well-made novel in terms of character development, motivations, or internal richness. Even if Shakespeare went as far as five acts will take you, Tolstoy could continue for fourteen hundred pages if he wanted—and did. Psychology is not the route for really appreciating Hamlet or Shakespeare as a whole (nor is the “invention” of “personality” or inwardness either, as has been asserted. One can easily find those in literature of all ages).
No, the way to find yourself loving Shakespeare, as I argued in the general introduction, is to meticulously unfold his origami sentences until their full wonder becomes visible. And nowhere is this more true than in Hamlet. There is enormous genius in the Bard’s formulations, and in Hamlet even more than any of the other plays, it comes packaged in some of the world’s finest poetry. I tried to show you the glory of Hamlet’s first speech in my general intro, but even simple lines like when he calls actors “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time” (II, ii) imbricate exquisite, nuanced shades of meaning. What, you want another walk-through? Well, since you asked so nicely …
The first meaning is twofold: As “chronicles of the time,” actors can portray periods in history (like Shakespeare’s plays about various kings of England), but they also incidentally represent their own era, all theater being a mirror of its own moment (we learn about Elizabethan England by studying Shakespeare’s works). But calling actors “abstract and brief” also suggests that they provide especially focused embodiments, and therefore perhaps the best access you can get either to their subject or their age. That in itself is pretty tidy, but this is Shakespeare, so there’s one more meaning as well: The actors’ lives are both abstract and brief, played out in roles, not truth, and then not for long. There is a quiet sadness here, similar to what we saw in the “passing show” lines I talked about above: a sense of both the glory and tragedy of being an actor but perhaps never being able to be yourself.
If you read Hamlet—and especially the prince’s lines—for this level of verbal subtlety, it’s both inexhaustibly rich and consistently dazzling. Shakespeare is doing his magic routine again, and never does he pull more out of his hat and faster. In the final act, Hamlet says, “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends” (V, ii)—perhaps even Shakespeare suspected, coming to the close of his finest play, that a higher hand was helping guide his. It certainly seems that way.
The Buzz: Apart from all the famous lines (a few of which I’ll quote shortly), the element of the play that tends to get most of the spilled conversational ink, as I mention above, is Hamlet’s internal conflict between thinking and doing. Hamlet is also rightfully famous for its extended meditations on death—the most in any Shakespeare play, and certainly a contributing element to its greatness.
First I’ll give you a few of the shorter oft-quoted lines, then the two most famous soliloquies (try, though, to read them in context sometime; they’re all a lot better set within the play as a whole):
“How weary stale, flat and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of the world” (I, ii).
Polonius’ fatherly advice: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be … to thine own self be true,” etc. (I, iii). Rather ironic since Polonius turns out to be true to nothing but his own machinations.
“Brevity is the soul of wit” (II, ii).
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so” (II, ii).
“What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” (II, ii).
“To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause” [III, i]
What People Don’t Know (But Should): Hamlet is the most celebrated work of Western civilization (apart from the Bible), but, like King Lear and many of Shakespeare’s other plays, there’s no definitive text. Hamlet has come down to us from three different documents (one probably an actor’s notes), but none of them is authoritative, and only two hundred lines are identical in all three. It doesn’t seem that Shakespeare authorized any of the printings, so editors are forced to hypothesize on what he wanted many of the lines and scenes to be and then cobble from the three options a “proper” Hamlet. But how the author actually wanted it or how it was performed on-stage, we’ll probably never know.
Best Line: Apart from the famous ones listed above, I love this reference to the speed with which Gertrude married her brother-in-law after her husband’s death: “to post with such dexterity to incestuous sheets … the funeral bak’d meats / did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables”—ouch. Also implies that Gertrude herself was leftovers; damn!
Some of my other favorites are from Laertes. First, when Claudius asks him, “What would you undertake, / To show yourself your father’s son in deed / More than in words?” to revenge himself on Hamlet (who killed his father), Laertes responds: “To cut his throat i’ the church” (IV, vii). Studly! Then when the priest refuses to give Ophelia all the rites at her funeral since she’s a suspected suicide, Laertes says, “I tell thee, churlish priest, / A ministering angel shall my sister be, / When thou liest howling” (V, i). Sorry, Hamlet, “to be or not to be” is nice, but telling off priests, that I love.
What’s Sexy: At Ophelia’s funeral, the priest suggests that she was a virgin, but can we be sure? While watching “The Mousetrap” (the play within the play), she and Hamlet have this saucy dialogue:
Hamlet: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Lying down at Ophelia’s feet
Ophelia: No, my lord.
Hamlet: I mean, my head upon your lap? Ophelia: Ay, my lord.
Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?
Ophelia: I think nothing, my lord.
Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs. [III, ii]
Psychoanalytic critics have gone bananas over the idea that Shakespeare was afraid of the “nothing” between women’s legs—i.e., the Freudian lack (which I never understood. Call me crazy, but as far as I can tell, there’s actually always something there). I’m not saying that Shakespeare had an unproblematic relationship to sex; Hamlet does describe Gertrude and Claudius’s as “the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, / Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love / Over the nasty sty” (III, iv)—eeks. Pretty grim, but it is his mom and uncle sleeping together, after all.
Anyway, even if the Bard is often misogynistic and perhaps terrified of women or sex or their genitals, he’s nonetheless a naughty boy. Still at the play (who knew theater then was like the back row of movies now?), Hamlet prompts Ophelia, “Any show that you’ll show him: be not you ashamed to show.” Then when she chides him, he retorts, “It would cost you a groaning to take off my edge.” Pretty saucy, but the “would” suggests he hasn’t yet made it to the “forfended place” (cf. Lear).
After Ophelia goes insane, however, there might be a little evidence in one of her crazed ditties:
“By Gis and by Saint Charity,
Alack, and fie for shame!
Young men will do ’t, if they come to ’t;
By cock, they are to blame.
Quoth she, before you tumbled me,
You promised me to wed.
So would I ha’ done, by yonder sun,
An thou hadst not come to my bed.” [IV, v]
Couldn’t this (and her later comment that “it is the false steward, that stole his master’s daughter”) be referring to a secret liaison between herself and Hamlet (or someone?). I’m not sure when Hamlet could have fit it in (bad puns are contagious)—he had a pretty tight schedule between saying it would cost her a groaning and her going batty—but you never know.
Finally, just so you know I was paying attention, there’s this flower mystery: we are told that there’s a bloom, the “long purples,” that maids call “dead men’s fingers” but that “liberal shepherds give a grosser name” (IV, vii). And what, pray tell, might that be?
Quirky Fact: I always found it odd that Claudius kills King Hamlet by pouring poison in the ear. His ear? Wouldn’t that have woken him up and given him time to swimmer-tap it out?
Then, when young Hamlet is trying to get his friends Marcellus and Horatio to take a pact of secrecy, there’s a very kooky slapstick moment. As they’re speaking, the ghost of the king calls up from under the stage, “Swear!” and the prince says, “Come on, you hear this fellow in the cellarage, consent to swear” (I, v). Not only would the king’s phantom, chthonic voice sound ludicrous coming from underneath, but referring to the ghost of your murdered father the king as “this fellow in the cellarage”—that’s pretty flip.
I also have to point out the oddity in IV, vii: an unnamed messenger arrives with letters from Hamlet. Claudio asks, “Who brought them?” and the messenger responds, “Sailors, my lord, they say, I saw them not. They were given me by Claudio. He receiv’d them of him that brought them.” But who’s Claudio? We never heard of him before, he’s not in the dramatis personae, nor does he reappear. Why is the speaking messenger unnamed but this guy is? Why mention this gratuitous middleman at all? And why does he have the same name (in the vernacular version) as the king? My theory is that Shakespeare’s having fun, putting extra levels of mediation and twists in just to let you know that there will be such twists elsewhere. Or maybe he just screwed up.
What to Skip: One can easily skip Hamlet’s early interaction with the actors (II, ii, 325–521). You can also skim much of his crazy talk in Act II, as well as Ophelia’s in Act IV. The end is also skippable (V, ii), unless you want the details of the slaughter.