Hamlet

Summary:

Prince Hamlet is the son of recently deceased King Hamlet of Denmark. His Uncle, Claudius, has taken the throne and hastily married Prince Hamlet’s mother Queen Gertrude. Hamlet continues to mourn his father despite the rest of the kingdom moving on and celebrating the new royal family. One night, he is visited by a spirit appearing to be his father’s ghost, who claims the late king was murdered by Claudius to usurp the throne. Hamlet vows revenge, and pretends to be mad in order to disguise his plot against his Uncle. The King and Queen attempt to uncover the cause of Hamlet’s apparent madness while the Prince seeks to prove the ghost’s claims and confirm his uncle is guilty. Hamlet’s mental state continues to deteriorate, and eventually he accidentally murders Polonius, one of his Uncle’s counselors and father to Ophelia, a young woman Hamlet had been courting but whom he rejected and drove to apparent suicide. Claudius exiles Hamlet and attempts to have him killed, but Hamlet returns to confront the King. During a climactic duel against Laertes, Ophelia’s brother and Polonius’ son, Queen Gertrude, Laertes and Hamlet are all poisoned. In his last moments, Hamlet murders his Uncle Claudius.

What It’s About:

To be or not to be?

This is the big one. Hamlet is not only Shakespeare’s longest play, but by most measures his most popular. It enjoyed enormous success within his lifetime, and since then has remained one of the most powerful and re-told stories in English literature. The play has been subject to countless adaptations, revivals and parodies, and, along with Romeo & Juliet, is responsible for everyone’s understanding of what Shakespeare is. It is also by far and away Shakespeare’s most written-about play, with literally hundreds of years of critical opinions having accumulated on what the play actually means - there are probably as many theories on Hamlet as there are adaptations, and there’s been a lot of adaptations.

In a sense, there are really two stories in this play, most basically categorized as the political Hamlet and the introspective Hamlet. The basic plotline - the dispossessed son of the Danish King seeks revenge for the death of his father against his usurping Uncle, and to recapture the throne that is rightfully his - was a well known story during Shakespeare’s day. It’s likely that he lifted the bones of it almost entirely from another play, often called the Ur-Hamlet, based on the story Prince Amleth in the twelfth century Danish History by Saxo the Grammarian. Using this historical tale as a baseline allows us to get a better grasp of the basic beats of the play. Hamlet’s apparent madness in the middle acts, his erratic behavior and strange speech, is nothing more than a calculated ruse to deflect suspicion while he moves against his Uncle. Meanwhile, the King and the forces of the court are conspiring to discredit the prince and create a cause to remove him from power as a pretender to the Danish throne. This interpretation also makes more sense in light of the original ending - in the Danish History, Prince Amleth slaughters his Uncle and is crowned the rightful King of Denmark. There is no moral deliberation or guilt - it’s simply a pure revenge story.

But of course, this isn’t that story - it’s Shakespeare’s Hamlet, and that means there’s an incredible depth of introspection and reflection within the character of Hamlet that has allowed the play to stand the test of time. And make no mistake, this is Hamlet’s play - he is not only the emotional center of the action, but also one of Shakespeare’s most rich and complicated creations. For someone who spends a great deal of the story delivering soliloquies to the audience and laying his soul bare, he remains incredibly complex and at times difficult to understand. We see his emotions, thoughts, and feelings, but his motivations still elude us. Take for instance the device of Hamlet feigning madness, mentioned above as a tactic to avoid suspicion while he plots against the King. His behavior in the middle acts grows increasingly erratic, and it’s never quite explained how much of this is a ruse and how much is Hamlet’s actual sanity slipping away from him. Different plays will take different approaches, but it’s generally accepted that despite his protestations to the contrary, Hamlet does begin to lose his grasp on reality a little, and succumb to the grief and depression that characterizes so many of his speeches.

Because on a fundamental level, that is what this play is about - depression, grief, and ultimately death. Hamlet as a character is obsessed with mortality - his own and that of those around him. In his very first scene, the King and Queen ask him to move on from mourning, to take off the black clothing that has become a hallmark of the character and celebrate their recent nuptials with the rest of the court. Hamlet replies that his grief permeates on a much deeper level than they can fathom, and later in a soliloquy contemplates suicide for the first of many times throughout the play. His inaction and his madness all seem to stem from this fundamental depression and dissatisfaction with life itself - “How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world (1.2.33-34).” For my money, this is the enduring strength of the play - why it has withstood the test of time, and was and is one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s works. It paints an incredible picture of a mind in turmoil, but does not seek to explain it. Rather it simply holds a mirror up to the grief and depression, and through the image of Hamlet reflects a universal pain that has echoed across 400 years.

If This Were A Movie:

Hamlet was an unrestrained success in its day, as evidenced by the various printings we have available to us from shortly after its firsts staging. In terms of a modern allegory, you’d want to consider a Stephen Spielberg or Martin Scorsese at the height of their prowess - Schindler’s List or The Departed immediately come to mind as films that were big both at the box office and the awards circuit. Hamlet was both a critical and commercial darling, and features a lead role that is magnetic, challenging, and demanding of attention - the kind of thing an actor dreams of. All this is to say that if the Oscars had existed in 1600, Hamlet likely would have swept in all categories. This is ironic considering the fact that despite the numerous filmic adaptations of the play, only one has ever taken home gold from the Academy - Laurence Olivier’s 1948 version.

The Line From The Play That You Know:

To be or not to be: that is the question. - 3.1.55

Nothing has had the staying power of this line. In the soliloquy that follows, Hamlet contemplates the philosophical question of suicide - whether it is better to endure the pain and suffering of life, or to end it in a moment. He reflects on the uncertainty of an afterlife, and how, without knowing what follows this world, it is only natural to hesitate in accelerating to an end - ‘thus conscience does make cowards of us all.’ Beyond directly speaking to the running themes of death and mortality that form the backbone of Hamlet, this speech also further establishes the complexity of our prince as character, and paints an incredible picture of a mind in the deep turmoil of grief and depression. 

The Line You Should Know:

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 my compass, and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet you cannot make it speak. ‘Sblood, do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? - 3.2.336-343

When Hamlet first begins to feign madness after meeting the Ghost his erratic behavior scares the King and Queen and, seeking some reason as to why he’s acting this way, they call Hamlet’s friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to court, ostensibly to keep him company but in reality to spy on him. Hamlet, being the smartest character in the play by leaps and bounds, immediately catches on to this and spends the majority of the play dancing rhetorical circles around the pair. Eventually he snaps and delivers the above line, calling his friends out for trying to manipulate him into spilling his secrets. This scene can vary a great deal from staging to staging, and is at times even cut, but in the recent adaptations I’ve seen it’s been a highlight of the play, with Hamlet’s palpable anger and betrayal bursting through in his accusations against his so-called friends.

Notable Adaptation:

There have been more Hamlet stagings than I can count, and the role is so rich and incredible that the list of who’s played the Danish prince goes on and on. Not only that, but given the play’s place in the public consciousness, the story is ripe for adaptation, transformation, and parody. Even if it’s not a direct riff on the text, it’s all too easy to have a pretentious character in a doublet and hose hold a skull and put on an old timey accent for the line “to be or not to be.” Of recent note would be Robert Egger’s The Northman, which is not exactly a Hamlet adaptation as much as it’s an adaptation of the original story of Prince Amleth of Denmark. 

All this, however, pales in comparison to my personal favorite adaptation of the play, and for my money the version that most captures the emotional core of the story - of loss, guilt, and feeling adrift in a world that seems not to matter to you.

General Notes:

As I said above, Hamlet is the big one, and given the sheer volume of critical thought that's gone into the play, it would be impossible to do justice to all the various ideas and concepts that have been unearthed here over the last 400 years. It’s also, to my thinking, the best of Shakespeare’s works, and the single thing I’ve read the most over the last decade and a half of my life. The point is I could write at least a dozen blogs about this play alone, digging into the themes developed, and trying to cram all my thoughts into one section here is proving to be quite the challenge. So we’re going to do this lightning-round style - a few rapid fire discussions of some of the major themes that are worth covering. 

The Players: Midway through the play, a group of traveling players come to visit the Danish court, providing a welcome distraction for Hamlet as well as an underhanded method for him to attempt to prove his Uncle’s guilt. This leads to a play within a play, The Mousetrap, as well as giving Shakespeare the opportunity to offer some delightfully metafictional commentary on his trade - criticizing painful overacting and certain theater companies that relied on cheap gimmicks to fill their seats. This is also where we get the famous line that art’s purpose is “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature.”

Hamnet: This one is pure speculation, but it’s something that critics, and especially other writers, have significantly latched onto. We know from historical records that shortly before Shakespeare wrote this play his son Hamnet passed away. Now this could be a coincidence, and by all the evidence we have Shakespeare was hardly an incredible father, spending most of his time away from his family in London. Nonetheless the fact that he wrote one of his plays most obsessed with death and grief shortly after the loss of his son, whose name was basically identical to the lead character, who also is mourning the loss of a close family member, all seems to be too perfect to ignore. Certainly, it at least suggests that Shaespeare was writing the pain and depression that come with loss from a place of intimate understanding.

Ophelia: As I’ve mentioned, Hamlet is one of my favorite works of all time, but it’s unquestionable that it does poorly by its female characters. There’s plenty of excuses that can be made for this, but it doesn’t change the fact that textually Hamlet’s madness primarily manifests as a powerfully misogynistic mistreatment of Ophelia that ultimately drives her to suicide. Numerous adaptations have attempted to resolve this, giving the character more agency and, frankly, more to do, but on a purely textual level she can be unfortunately flat. Depending on how a director chooses to play Hamlet’s scenes with Ophelia, they can seriously undercut an audience’s sympathy for him, and cast the prince in a very different and antagonistic light.

The Oedipal Complex: So this interpretation isn’t quite as popular as it used to be, but especially in the early 1900s following the work of one Dr. Sigmund Freud, one of the prevailing lenses used to look at Hamlet was that of the Oedipal complex: that part of Hamlet’s grief and depression stems from an unresolved love for his mother. Certainly, there’s textual evidence for this - Hamlet continually harps on his mother’s hasty marriage to his Uncle, and rips her to shreds on multiple occasions for this perceived lack of moral standing. For whatever reason, this interpretation tends to get a lot of play in filmic adaptations - notably, the 1948 version with Olivier and the 1990 version with Mel Gibson.

A Monologue For the Road

Oh that this too sallied flesh would melt,

Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter. O God, God,

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of the world.

Fie on’t, ah, fie, ‘tis an unweeded garden

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely.  - 1.2.129-137