Horatio’s long response (a 28-line monologue) is one of the oddest passages in the play, presenting so knotty a problem to actors that it is sometimes shortened or cut out entirely in performance. It chronicles the political background and military rivalry between Denmark and Norway from the last generation to this. Perhaps mindful of the many law students in his London audience, Shakespeare surely intended it as a parody of legal language—abstract, contorted, labyrinthine, and self-interrupting. Norway forfeited land through a compact pledging a personal combat to the death between the Norwegian and Danish kings. That episode, which ended in Denmark’s victory, is narrated in labored syntax and obscure locutions from which the current threat, young Fortinbras, son of the slain Norwegian king, bursts “hot and full” (I.i.96). Horatio’s tangled exposition of Fortinbras’ legal claim says in effect that it is meretricious but potent nonetheless. Thus in Hamlet law too distorts language, as it subordinates justice to glib verbal formulations.
“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” says Marcellus in one of the play’s signature lines (I.iv.90). The rot affects not only the state as a political and administrative entity but the state of the nation in spiritual and physical terms: the nation becomes a living organism in medical crisis. Throughout Shakespeare, kings embody or personify their nations and, like dukes, are addressed by the name of their lands. Hence in King Lear, the king of France is called “France” and the Duke of Burgundy “Burgundy.” In Hamlet, as in Oedipus Rex, disease at the top trickles downward to all the body’s parts. In Sophocles’ Thebes, the crops are dying, and women are miscarrying: the pollution upon the land comes from the fact that an incestuous patricide sits on the throne, though he is unaware of his crimes. In Hamlet, the king is again a murderer, this time a fratricide, but his crime was committed in cold blood, and his nephew must expose and avenge it. Much of the political turbulence in Hamlet ultimately comes from the quaking of the king’s uneasy conscience as well as the devious machinations by which he (unlike Oedipus) tries to stop the truth from outing.
Claudius’ weak grip on power is betrayed by his raucous, all-night drinking parties, marked by trumpet blasts and gunfire, about which the stoical Horatio questions Hamlet (echoing the sentinels’ earlier questioning of Horatio). Hamlet disapprovingly attributes the palace carousing to rowdy Danish tradition, but the audience is led to conclude that the king is drinking to numb himself and revive his flagging spirits. Certainly, Claudius is an awkward, imprudent, and self-absorbed ruler, as indicated at his first appearance by his nervous, distracted deference to a much younger inferior, Laertes. One of the political conundrums of the play is why, after only recently neutralizing Fortinbras’ military threat through direct appeal to his aged uncle, the present king of Norway, Claudius allows the Norwegian army to cross Danish territory on the way to Poland, to which the Norwegians have staked yet another questionable claim. This easily overlooked detail puts Fortinbras in Denmark at the play’s violent climax, where the entire Danish ruling class destroys itself, bringing Hamlet’s dynasty to an end and leaving Denmark under Norwegian occupation.
The structure of Denmark’s government, or rather the transmission of its power, is another unanswered question in Hamlet. The matter is left so tenuous that audiences and readers need help from program notes or scholarly explication. Whether Shakespeare intended this ambiguity remains arguable. Denmark’s monarchy, unlike England’s, is described as elective, but the mechanics of election, as well as the character of the electors, whether oligarchic or popular, are left vague. By murdering his brother, Claudius opened up space for his ambitions, but his election to the vacant throne was by no means certain, for Hamlet and other nobles would also presumably be candidates. Or is there a trace of matrilinearity in the ancient Hamlet tale, as some scholars have found in Oedipus Rex? Does Gertrude, like queen Jocasta, confer kingship through her marriage?
The question of succession was a major public anxiety during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Elizabeth I, who assumed the throne in 1558, six years before Shakespeare was born, never married, despite determined wooing by a long list of aristocratic and royal suitors in England and Europe. When Hamlet was first staged some time in the late 1590s, it was already clear that Elizabeth, then in her sixties, would die without issue. Hence the English foresaw the end of the House of Tudor, a cataclysm possibly paralleled in the extinction of the Danish royal family in Hamlet. A justifiable fear throughout the history of monarchies worldwide has been that ambiguity in succession can lead to civil war—a plague on English society during the 32-year War of the Roses of the fifteenth century.
Denmark’s elective monarchy in Hamlet might seem to avoid the succession problem inherent in royal dynasties, but Shakespeare shows it as equally susceptible to chaos because of its dependence on group thought or mass will. Throughout his plays, Shakespeare is often suspicious and even disdainful of the fickleness of popular emotion. Democracy for him means mob rule—a blind force tending toward anarchy. This is glimpsed in Hamlet when Laertes, protesting his father’s killing and undignified, perfunctory funeral, leads a mob (the “rabble”) who break through the palace gates and shout, “Laertes shall be king!” (IV.v.98–108.) In appeasing and defusing Laertes, Claudius hatches his second scheme against his nephew’s life—the fencing match where Laertes’ rapier will be poisoned. Earlier, Claudius explicitly acknowledges his fear of popular rebellion in conspiring for Hamlet to be murdered in England rather than at home in Denmark.
Does Hamlet have ambitions to be king? Although he sardonically jokes that he is gloomy because “I lack advancement,” political ambition does not seem to figure large in his temperament (III.ii.347). As suggested by his delays and hesitations, he prefers the calm, contemplative life. Does he possess the qualities to be a good king? Or is he too impatient for the dull routine of practical affairs? Brooding or mercurial temperaments aren’t the best fit for public life—a point occasionally raised in Great Britain over the past quarter century about Charles, Prince of Wales, an amateur painter and botanist. Hamlet is not a playboy prince, like Shakespeare’s Prince Hal, who when he assumes the throne must exile his rollicking, fellow fun-lover, Falstaff. But Hamlet does suffer from chronic inhibitions and indecisiveness. Though he can act on impulse—as when he leaps aboard the pirate ship or into Ophelia’s open grave—he spends most of the play buffeted or stymied by excess thought.
As a revenge play, a popular, sensationalistic genre in Elizabethan theater, Hamlet is also a mystery story or crime drama, paralleled by modern police and detective fiction descending from Edgar Allan Poe. A murder has occurred in Elsinore but been covered up, and Hamlet is the unwilling civilian drafted into service: he snoops around, follows clues, and conducts surveillance and entrapment (the play-within-the-play). Other legal issues in Hamlet include the miscarriage of justice when the king, who represents and enforces the law, is a murderer. There is also the vexed question of the disposition of Ophelia’s remains: if she is judged to have committed suicide (she falls into a brook when a bough breaks while she is hanging garlands), then according to church law, she cannot be buried in sacred ground. The matter is ambiguous: a Doctor of Divinity sternly calls her death “doubtful” (V.i.229). In a compromise dictated by the king for his own political protection, her grave is dug in the churchyard, but she is given a truncated service—a harshness bitterly protested by her brother. Another ambiguity, played for farce, is the location of Polonius’ body, which Hamlet has unceremoniously dragged offstage: can there be a crime if there is no corpse? The frantic courtiers are turned by the king into detectives who find the body only when Hamlet, sarcastically urging them to follow their noses and snuff the air, tips them off that he has stashed it under the palace stairs.
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I group the psychological ambiguities in Hamlet into three areas. First is the question of identity. Is there an essential self, a fixed personality, or are human beings si
mply a collection of masks, exchanged at whim? Hamlet is afflicted and tormented by his own metamorphoses. He has an actor’s facility to try on poses, toss verbal darts, and play with mood and tone—which is why he has such infectious rapport with the troupe of traveling players, whom he tutors in stagecraft. But acting for Hamlet can dangerously overlap deceit: he enjoys duping others and shows contempt for their gullibility (as in his weary exchanges with the gossipy, senile Polonius and the slavish Osric). Impersonation comes too easily to Hamlet, leaving him with feelings of disgust and misanthropy.
The soliloquies show Hamlet’s search for identity as well as his despair at not finding it: ideas spiral out of control, and his mood darkens, as certain themes keep recurring, obsessively and compulsively. General reflections on existence and the cosmos always seem to circle back and be overwhelmed by Hamlet’s family psychodramas. The persistence of these negative thoughts must be weighed in judging Hamlet’s mental competence. Early on, he warns Horatio that he will “put an antic disposition on”—and we do recognize such moments, when Hamlet allows us to laugh with him at his naïve victims (I.v.172). But Shakespeare leaves other scenes ambiguous: when Hamlet, as described by Ophelia, appears with clothing disarrayed and looks her up and down with tragic sighs, is this another game, or has he temporarily lost his wits? His tumultuous confrontation with his mother in her bed chamber can be played several ways, but the text indicates a rising level of passion and recrimination peaking in hysteria and near-violence. The ghost who materializes is seen only by him and not his mother—as opposed to its two visits to the battlements, when there is a total of three witnesses aside from Hamlet. Gertrude is in little doubt: “Alas, he’s mad,” she says to herself, as if her son can no longer hear external voices (III.iv.106).
A second area of psychological ambiguity is generational relationships. To the original Hamlet story Shakespeare has added the imposing parallelism of fathers and sons: there are Hamlet Senior and Hamlet Junior; Fortinbras Senior and Fortinbras Junior; and Polonius and Laertes. The elder Hamlet and elder Fortinbras were blood rivals, just as the younger Hamlet suffers the rivalry (real or imagined) of the younger Fortinbras and Laertes. What relevance this theme might have had to Shakespeare’s interaction with his own father has been discussed by scholars, but biographical evidence is slight. The play asks us to consider the charged issue of fatherhood and its legacy, particularly in families where the father has power and fame as well as a daunting record of achievement.
Hamlet admires his heroic father but feels overshadowed by him. (He was born on the very day that the king slew Fortinbras.) He is unable or unwilling to match that mythic and archaic level of dominant masculinity, devoted to the service of a competitive nationalism. Hamlet occupies the more sophisticated, cosmopolitan world of humanistic Europe. From the birth of psychoanalytic criticism in the early twentieth century, Hamlet’s fervid, divinizing praise of his dead father was defined as ambivalent “over-estimation,” concealing contrary impulses of hostility or even repressed homicidal wishes. The matching term in the Oedipus complex—incestuous desire for the mother—has also been detected in Hamlet’s indecorous over-involvement with Gertrude’s sex life, which he pictures with startlingly pornographic exactitude. Modern productions, beginning with John Barrymore, regularly give Oedipal inflections to the play. In strict Freudian terms, Hamlet’s delay in exacting vengeance comes from his paralyzed recognition that his uncle has fulfilled the forbidden fantasies of his own unconscious—that is, killing his father and marrying his mother.
But Hamlet had a magnetic effect on audiences and readers alike for 300 years before Freudian theory, with all its insights. The ghost is an oppressive paternal presence. His aggressive demand for revenge is an energy-sapping burden that usurps Hamlet’s life and identity. The son at first accepts his mission with enthusiasm because of his hatred for his uncle, but the duty soon becomes a tedious and demeaning irritation. The ghost makes him a prisoner of the past, a servant of the king’s now canceled life.
Fortinbras, in contrast, seems to relish his role as his father’s avenger. Hamlet sourly contrasts himself with Fortinbras and lacerates himself with debased female imagery: he, the prince of Denmark, is a “whore,” a “drab,” a “scullion” (a kitchen maid) (II.ii.597–99). What we see of Fortinbras is limited: his first entrance is in the last minute of the play, when the stage is strewn with corpses. If Fortinbras has self-doubts, we don’t know them, though his manic militancy (like Shakespeare’s Hotspur elsewhere) might be interpreted as an attempt to surpass his father by dramatizing the latter’s failures.
Parental love as an ambiguous form of power and control is shown in Polonius’ bullying behavior toward his son. The scene of Laertes’ farewell before his return to university in Paris is usually played for humor: the greybeard Polonius taxes his smirking children with hoary old saws and bromides, whose lessons he himself fails to heed. Parental instruction is shown as boring but harmless. Far more disturbing is the scene where Polonius instructs his servant Reynaldo to spy on Laertes in Paris. In his ruthless thirst for information, Polonius tells Reynaldo to slander Laertes’ character and then read the response of his auditors. Even the low-born servant is appalled by such wanton degradation of Laertes’ public image and honor. This is another example of poisoned language operating in the play: Polonius spreads it like an epidemic to another country to taint his own son. Overbearing fatherly concern commits murder—this time of Laertes’ reputation.
The third area of psychological ambiguity is love and sex, about which Hamlet is tortured throughout the play. Love is an illusion in which he cannot place faith, and he gratuitously savages both his mother and Ophelia for what he perceives as their betrayals—Gertrude for falling under Claudius’ erotic spell, and Ophelia for behaving like a proper Renaissance girl and following her father’s orders rather than the call of her own heart. Hamlet ends up denouncing all women as false—their thick “paintings” of makeup the false faces and fakery of actress-whores (III.i.144). (This was at a time when no women performed on the English stage: respectable ladies did not put themselves on public display.) The theme of women’s crafty self-beautification belongs to the play’s constant contrast between shadow and substance: woman traffics in illusion, and what she offers is a lie.
Sexual desire itself is delusive for Hamlet, who feels it entrammels the free mind in animality. The language of disgust spewed in his explosive rages is so extreme that commentators cannot agree on its meaning. As the only son of a royal house, it is Hamlet’s obligation to procreate, but the play repeatedly obstructs and frustrates his natural relationship with Ophelia, which his mother blesses (as we learn after Ophelia’s death) even while her father and brother hootingly proclaim their union impossible on political grounds. Hamlet himself is unable to sustain romantic love. His attachment to Ophelia cannot withstand his own self-involvement and self-hatred: the death force, in other words, conquers the life force in the play. But why? Is Denmark under a curse that blights the future?
The play systematically undermines Hamlet’s hold on his own identity. All of his personal relationships, except with the steady, impassive Horatio, founder. Even his early friendships are corrupted by politics: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, summoned by the king and queen to spy on Hamlet, make themselves tools to royal command. Hamlet jovially questions the pair about their sudden visit to court, but his attitude hardens when they refuse to admit the obvious truth. The interrogation is nearly an inquisition, with Hamlet taking the roles of detective and prosecutor, microscopically studying Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s ambiguities of response and body language and forcing them along a track of self-exposure until they are helpless. Hamlet learns to distrust emotions and social bonds, which the play shows as painfully fallible.
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In Hamlet, illusions rule. As a landmark of Western literature, the play symbolizes the cultural shift from the orderly abso
lutes of the scholastic Middle Ages to the flux of the modern era, in which beliefs, disciplines, and institutions are continually remade, with the individual left to a vertigo of free choice. Major works of art whose appeal endures over centuries usually have some elusiveness or indeterminacy of form or content: the ambiguous qualities of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, for example, can also be seen in Hamlet, which seems to take place in Leonardo’s sfumato or smoky shadows and where sex and emotion, as in the Mona Lisa, are cryptic.
Hamlet is a truth-seeker who wants to be and not seem—that is, to live without illusions. But in order to defeat illusions, he vainly tries to make them stay or stop. In that instant, their insubstantiality envelops him and his view of the material world. The play unfurls in a swirl of ambiguities, destabilizing person, thing, place, time, and action—which is why, like Heracleitus’ river, Hamlet seems to change with each of our encounters with it. The play too is an illusion that, to our dismay and pleasure, will never stay.
1. All quotations from Hamlet are from The Signet Classic Shakespeare, general editor, Sylvan Barnet (New York, 1963).
* [Lecture in a series on ambiguity in Western culture, Intellectual Heritage Program, Temple University, October 18, 2003. Published in Ambiguity in the Western Mind (2005), ed. Craig J. N. de Paulo et al.]
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