Elusive, alluring, cryptic, unsettling, macabre, and mysterious: Hamlet is William Shakespeare’s drama par excellence (contrary to T.S. Eliot’s critique of the play). On the surface, Hamlet is a pre-modern revenge story that mirrors elements of tragic theatrical works from classical antiquity, as found in the works of Aeschylus or Sophocles. However, upon closer investigation, Hamlet draws upon uniquely modern sensibilities that are notably divergent from the works of either Aeschylus or Sophocles. In the play, almost as if awakening from a dream, Prince Hamlet is haunted by the ghost of his father, a war hero who is also named Hamlet. The elder Hamlet’s ghost is apparently trapped in Christian Purgatory yet he is also familiar classical markers of the underworld like the river Lethe (in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom offers the theory that the ghost of Hamlet’s father is actually intended to represent Shakespeare himself –a man who straddles the boundary between ancient and modern thinkers). The ghost further claims that he was poisoned while resting in his orchard and then usurped by his luxurious and incestuous brother Claudius. We in the audience are then dropped into the plot of Hamlet approximately two months later, after the death of the elder Hamlet. In that short timespan, Claudius (Prince Hamlet’s Uncle) has been crowned king of Denmark and he has wedded the widowed queen, Gertrude (Prince Hamlet’s mother). Prince Hamlet has also returned home from his education in Wittenberg (Northern, Germany) to find that he is now forbidden from returning to school. With the appearance of his father’s ghost, Hamlet learns of his righteous task: to avenge his father’s death and reclaim his rightful crown.
First, I offer an exploration of the context and the setting of the play. Geography serves an instructive purpose in Shakespeare’s Hamlet as it informs some of the play’s key themes. The 13th century world on display in the play is quickly shown to be a cosmopolitan hub linking Denmark with other nearby centers of commerce –France, Germany, Norway, Poland, and England. Denmark is hardly an “isolationist” kingdom. Hamlet’s homeland is rather a middle kingdom of sorts, a metaphorical borderland between opposing lands and values (similar to the metaphorical borderland of Scotland in Macbeth or Cyprus in Othello). North of Denmark lies Norway –a heroic nation where the late King Hamlet once won a decisive victory on the battlefield over the elder Fortinbras of Norway. In fact, the elder King Hamlet actually killed the elder King Fortinbras and now Norway is currently being ruled by the elder Fortinbras’s unnamed, enfeebled brother. In many respects, the situation facing the younger Fortinbras of Norway mirrors the situation facing Hamlet the younger of Denmark –both young men have lost their kingly fathers, but they have not inherited their respective crowns. However, Norway is an old world warrior kingdom whose presence looms large over the play, perhaps one that is even comparable to Homer’s Achaea. In this respect, Norway is distinct from Denmark. Meanwhile, south of Denmark on the Continent lie the cities of Paris, France and Wittenberg, Germany. Paris is a city of fashion –it is where Laertes desires to go before his father Polonius advises him, first, to be honest with himself: “to thine own self be true.” Paris is a city of fanciness and pleasure, where young men leisurely entertain themselves and learn the skill of fencing, rather than the art of wielding a battle-axe as in Norway. Why do all the young men of Denmark desire to visit Paris? Does Paris offer something that is lacking in Denmark? It is surely not education because all the young men of Denmark seem to attend school in Wittenberg, Germany, a city most strongly associated with Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Wittenberg is the embodiment of the modern world, a world of students and scholarship. It is also linked with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern –the sycophantic young scholars who are Hamlet’s friends. Thus, Paris and Wittenberg are very much distinct places. And in this world Denmark, which is caught between the warlike North and the modern South, represents a metaphorical borderland. Norway is the fringe, it is the past; while Paris and Wittenberg represent the future. Denmark remains trapped between these two polarities: the old world and the new. With more open possibilities in the wider world, the frustrated and restless youth of Denmark feel compelled to go elsewhere, particularly to mainland Europe, where it is cosmopolitan. And the cosmopolitanism of the Renaissance (Shakespeare’s epoch) stands in stark opposition to the classical notion of commitment to one single polis (i.e. patriotism). With this in mind, perhaps Denmark has a patriotism dilemma. At any rate, in addition to mainland Europe and the icy north, we also learn of one other key geographic region in Hamlet, namely the distant country of England –a place where Hamlet is eventually sent to die because apparently the unnamed King of England owes Claudius a favor (we later find out that Hamlet has escaped his death sentence after negotiating with pirates while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are apparently killed). Curiously, Claudius decides to consult with his “wisest friends” before sending Hamlet away. Recall that the reason Hamlet is initially sent to England is as punishment for the accidental murder of Polonius (followed by his subsequent strange behavior thereafter), however Hamlet never quite makes it to England because he negotiates with attacking pirates for a return transport home to Denmark (notably, Hamlet negotiates rather than battles his way to freedom), and since he does not ever actually arrive in England, the country remains a distant, faraway kingdom which Shakespeare ironically associates with death in the play. The King of England is notably beholden to Claudius after suffering recent war losses –perhaps Denmark, under the elder King Hamlet, had claimed victory over England (it is somewhat reminiscent of the historic Danegold tribute in medieval England). At any rate, in Hamlet Shakespeare’s native country of England is portrayed as something akin to a subordinate vassal kingdom which is no doubt ecstatic at the opportunity to fulfill an obligation to Denmark and assassinate the young Danish prince.
Why would Shakespeare choose Denmark, not England, as the primary setting of Hamlet? Is there something uniquely illustrative about the kingdom of Denmark? The Danes were once the fearsome raiders of medieval England. Their viking longboats were the terror of river towns along the Humber River. However, Denmark as featured in Hamlet is no longer the expansionist regime of bygone years. Now, it struggles to be sure of itself and its own kingship has been fairly easily usurped. The context of early 17th century England, the culture wherein Hamlet was written by Shakespeare, also informs the teaching of the play. Prior to the rule of King James I in England, Queen Elizabeth’s court was elderly and cautious, much like Denmark in the play. It was neither aggressive nor expansionist –England was not yet a great power like France, the Hapsburgs of Spain, or the Ottoman Empire. Its complacent elderly elite class was lacking in spiritedness, or thumos. This same tension between aging leadership and active young men is apparent throughout the play. The court of Denmark is elderly and there is considerable discussion about whether Denmark should pursue a policy of diplomacy, expansionism, or war –particularly as it pertains to Norway. The central problem of an indecisive and elderly ruling class is as follows: what to do with all the thumotic and rivalrous young men in Denmark? How should leaders focus the kingdom’s energetic youth outward toward enemies, and thereby honor the nation’s public good? The goal is to prevent young men from becoming destructive –to disrupt them from seeking private revenge and personal gain. This is a central problem explored throughout classical political philosophy. But returning to the historical challenges particular to 17th century England, at the time King James I’s mother (Mary Queen of Scots) was married to the murderer of her husband (he was murdered in his garden much like the elder Hamlet in the play), and also King James I’s wife was Anne of Denmark and Norway (Denmark and Norway were united as one single country at this time). James and Anne were married in Oslo and honeymooned at Elsinore Castle (the primary setting of Hamlet). With these connections close at hand, Shakespeare seems to be directing the English court’s attention to the central dilemma in Hamlet which echoes the same challenges facing 16th and 17th century England (while also speaking to universal questions of political philosophy).
In the same way that Denmark represents a confluence of opposing worlds, Hamlet is also the locus for a variety of tensions: classical and modern, pagan and Christian, Orthodox and Reform. And as the focal point for all these tensions, Prince Hamlet sits squarely in the middle as a troubled hero. He represents an exploration into (and perhaps an inversion of) the classical heroic archetype since, in Hamlet, the outward battle has now turned inward. Hamlet is a prince who is called upon to exact vengeance on a usurper (his uncle Claudius) and claim the rightful throne of Denmark, but in a modern context he finds the classical idea of revenge deeply troubling. In a decidedly Christian world, where souls are immortal, what profit is it for Hamlet to kill Claudius if his soul will simply be sent to heaven or perhaps at least purgatory? Should Hamlet simply ‘turn the other cheek’ to his nemesis and forgo his father’s throne? Should he forgive Claudius of his transgressions? And on the flipside, can Denmark even be redeemed by violent upheaval? In Act III scene iii, Hamlet finds an opening wherein he can kill Claudius. He sneaks into Claudius’s room but just before committing the deed he stops himself because Claudius is in the midst of prayer. Claudius is on his knees asking for divine forgiveness of his sins, and thus by killing Claudius, Hamlet would merely send Claudius’s soul straight to heaven –and in this way Hamlet realizes the modern “conscience does make cowards of us all.” Instead, Hamlet must take into account vengeance on Claudius’s eternal soul. This is an entirely distinct concept from the vengeance that Achilles exacts on Hector in Homer’s Iliad where Hector’s body is all Achilles desires. The immortal soul, in Shakespeare, emerges as a troubling modern concept. The great difficulty, however, is in seeing the true intent of one’s soul without ‘shuffling off this mortal coil.’ Hence, why there is so much sneaking around, hiding, and scheming in Hamlet. There is a desire to reveal what is deeply hidden (i.e. “catch the conscience of the King” when characters like the aging counsellor, Polonius, hide behind a curtain not unlike Gyges in Herodotus’s Histories). Thus, Hamlet matches this secrecy and feigns madness throughout the play in order to truly conceal his own personal intentions.
Despite his inner quandary Hamlet is not a wimp (contrary to Goethe’s assertion). Indeed, Hamlet kills nearly half the characters in the play whether directly or indirectly. He has thumos –he is a fighter and a political man. Similar to the political situation in Macbeth, in Hamlet a group of leaders led by Claudius has plans to appoint Hamlet as the inheritor of the throne of Denmark from Claudius, but Hamlet is unsatisfied with this arrangement (“Sir, I lack advancement”). His standards of a political hero are classical, and thus he looks to Norway for courage because his home state of Denmark has lately become “rotten” and ruled by an aging gerontocracy (notice how many errors of judgment and false predictions the supposedly great strategist Polonius makes in the play).
But suffice it to say Hamlet is not a one-dimensional classical figure. He is a popular prince among the people of Denmark (hence why Claudius cannot simply have him executed). He is an unusually thoughtful hero, capable of examining things from multiple perspectives. He is not a single-minded avenger like Laertes (son of the old counsellor Polonius –note: Laertes was also the name of Odysseus’s father) and yet Hamlet is also distinct from his good friend, Horatio, who calls himself “more an antique Roman than a Dane” (his name is a combination of two Latin words ratio “reason” and orator or “speaker”). In many ways, Horatio is the most crucially important character in the play. He stands alongside Hamlet during the most critical moments in the play and he is also one of the few characters to survive the end of the play (he tries to commit suicide but Hamlet begs him not to). Hamlet’s character is somehow split between these two figures: Laertes and Horatio. Hamlet’s tragedy is that he cannot simply embrace one or the other. He is the tragedy of the modern or Renaissance man –a man who tries to be too many things all at once and becomes entrapped in paralysis. The crux of Hamlet is an interrogation of the possibility of a philosopher king in a Christian/modern context (i.e. a synthesis of a theoretical and practical kingship). Here, Shakespeare seems to offer an example of a modern heroic warrior king as in Henry V, yet even King Henry V faces the problem of the church –an established religion, which purports to be a religion of peace, but which nevertheless aggressively competes for authority against an expansionist state. Perhaps the impossibility of Plato’s modern philosopher king becomes a tragic impossibility in Shakespeare as Hamlet simply cannot become a king. Still, there is hope in the figure of Horatio, a man with Greco-Roman virtues living in the modern world and who doubts the fanciful claims of modern theology (“…there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”). However, Horatio is also not destined for kingship.
In Shakespeare’s day, the great hope of the Renaissance was to synthesize two antithetical value systems: Christian and Classical. To examine this tension, Shakespeare offers us Hamlet –a very modern European, who is dropped into a Norse feudal saga with a twist: Hamlet is tasked with a supernatural quest for vengeance and requital, yet vengeance is an old world value that conflicts with the highest virtues of modern Denmark –meekness, humility, forgiveness and so on. Hamlet admires the classical virtues of his father, yet he is also restrained by what he has learned in Wittenberg (not least of which concerns the Protestant Reformation). He is constrained and haunted by notions of an eternal soul and life after death. Meanwhile, Denmark has seemingly embraced a secular court. There are no bishops or archbishops like the kind found in Shakespeare’s History plays wherein the church emerges as a troublesome political force working against the warrior kings of England. While in Hamlet the state of Denmark is not beholden to the church, Hamlet explicitly agrees with the Christian theological doctrine that the world is fallen and sinful. This causes him to have a problem with politics. Everywhere he looks he sees corruption. He believes women are inherently corrupt –the product of ‘original sin’– and he calls Ophelia a harlot and commands her to “get thee to a nunnery!” According to Hamlet, women are either chaste nuns or licentious whores. In this way, virtue for Hamlet is akin to absolute sexual purity. Indeed, Hamlet possesses a certain type of absolutism that is not present in Shakespeare’s Roman plays. Hamlet’s more modern view of virtue also causes him to despise everything around him, including his own country, because Hamlet is a modern thinking man, and one who longs for the monastic or ascetic ideal (i.e. he embraces a Christian interpretation of a Roman appropriation of Greek things). The irony of Hamlet is that he is a modern Christian man but he is also aware of the tension between ancients and moderns while still embracing certain Homeric virtues. In fact, Homeric epithets are found throughout Hamlet (around the time of Hamlet’s first performance, George Chapman had just completed the first English translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey circa the 1590s). At any rate, Hamlet finds it disgraceful that this monumental task of restoring order to his chaotic and fallen world has been left to him (in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche likens Hamlet to the Dionysian man). Hamlet’s disposition is somewhat philosophical –he resents the customs of his own people (particularly Claudius’s heavy drinking) and he despises the whole of humanity itself:
“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? Man
delights not me: no nor woman neither…” (Act II scene ii -Hamlet speaking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern)
In his Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud links Shakespeare’s Hamlet with Sophocles’s Oedipus cycle, however in many ways the better contrast is likely between Shakespeare and Aeschylus. Whereas Sophocles’s Oedipus becomes tragically aware of his horrifying circumstance at the end of Oedipus Tyrannus, Hamlet becomes aware of his own situation at the beginning of the play. In a certain light, Hamlet is better understood as Shakespeare’s response to Aeschylus’s Oresteia. Recall in Aeschylus, we encounter a tale about the tragic cycle of revenge as Orestes returns home from exile to avenge his father Agamemnon, who has been murdered and usurped by his conniving wife Clytemnestra (Orestes’s mother) and her lover Aegisthus. Whereas in Aeschylus’s Oresteia we are offered a deus ex machina in the form of Athena delivering a trial to release Orestes from his guilt, in Hamlet no such divine justice arrives to save the hero.
In the play, Hamlet spends a great deal of time contemplating his future actions, even though his actions will depend on a veiled illusion whether it be supernatural or not (Samuel Taylor Coleridge dismisses Hamlet as a flawed man who simply thinks too much, however this is far too simplistic an assessment). Hamlet is a man of thought who deeply contemplates his actions (i.e. he embodies the conflict between thought and action), but the difficulty in the play is that his troubled disposition incorporates a vision of classical heroism (i.e. a man of action) coupled with a Christian critique of that heroism (a man of thought). His inner dilemma leads to a kind of stasis and eventually nihilism –it becomes an ontological question: ‘to be or not to be.’ Is it better to be and simply suffer at the hands of enemies? Or else take up arms against a sea of troubles and surely die? But what is death if an afterlife merely continues on and on into the future ad infinitum? Whatever he chooses, Hamlet will end up in heaven, purgatory, or hell, and therefore vengeance seems of little consequence. In a particularly memorable scene, while contemplating the macabre, Hamlet notes that all men must die and disintegrate into mere “dust” –even the skull of Sir Yorick, the late court jester, has been fed to the worms and is now mostly forgotten. Despite being a man of “infinite jest” Yorick’s finitude is likened to the meaningless sophistic trappings of Osric, a Danish courtier. With this in mind, all of life becomes tragic for Hamlet (he notes the beauty of something anatomical like a skull). For Hamlet, beauty becomes ugliness and life becomes empty.
Shakespeare also explores the problem of suicide in Hamlet, an act which seems to plague many characters in Denmark. For example, does Ophelia commit suicide? In Act V scene i the two gravediggers debate the merits of a Christian burial for Ophelia precisely for this very reason. They agree that if she had intentionally ended her own life, then she does not deserve a Christian burial (the key question is whether she knowingly drowned herself –this comes even as the possession of knowledge remains a fluid problem throughout the play). In the classical world suicide was sometimes considered the honorable thing to do (i.e. the suicide of Ajax; for reference see Sophocles’s Ajax). However in the modern Christian world, suicide is assuredly a sin. Honor is now no longer the greatest virtue. And since there is no virtue in suicide, Hamlet must find another way out of his problems. The beginning of his “to be or not to be” soliloquy is a praise of the easiness and simplicity of the Pagan world. It begins with the idea of death in the ancient world, with echoes of Socrates and Cicero. The end of life in the ancient world meant the end of everything: ‘the end of heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks the Flesh is heir to’ –but things changed in the modern world. According to modern theology, life only truly begins after death –perchance to dream in “the undiscovered country.” Yet the Christian notion of an afterlife is described as a ‘calamity’ by Hamlet because if life never truly ends, what is the point of a politics of revenge?
“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 heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That Flesh is heir to? ‘Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; aye, 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. There’s the respect
That makes Calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time,
The Oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s Contumely,
The pangs of dispised Love, the Law’s delay,
The insolence of Office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th’unworthy takes,
When he himself might his Quietus make
With a bare Bodkin? Who would Fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of Resolution
Is sicklied o’er, with the pale cast of Thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment,
With this regard their Currents turn awry,
And lose the name of Action. Soft you now,
The fair Ophelia? Nymph, in thy Orisons
Be all my sins remember’d” (Act III scene i)
In this way, Hamlet is a play about the distinctly modern reformulations of heroism. The politics of Hamlet are guided by supernatural revelation coupled with a particular concept of the afterlife. Everything in Hamlet’s world is haunted by a vision of the next world. It makes this corporeal world appear to be irredeemably corrupt and fallen. And after much fatalistic deliberation, Hamlet ultimately chooses to “take up arms against a sea of troubles” in an effort to end them, knowing that he marches onward toward his own death –and there is not even redemption through art for Hamlet. His play “The MouseTrap,” which is a version of The Murder of Gonzaga, is not the dramatic conclusion of the play. It merely reveals Claudius’s guilt. Instead, Hamlet must still end his troubles by fighting to the death in a farcical parody of a duel (fencing is more of a delicate way to settle disputes than, say, a proper sword-fight). No characters die by means of violence at the conclusion. Instead, they die by trickery (i.e. poisoning). It is not exactly a hero’s death in the end and Denmark is not redeemed –perhaps Hamlet foresaw this fatal end coming all along.
At the conclusion, as Hamlet fences with poison-tipped blades against Laertes and Claudius, Hamlet’s Denmark is contrasted with Fortinbras’s Norway. Both young men have uncles who have usurped the kingship of their respective countries. But for Hamlet, the battle has turned inward on his own country, whereas Fortinbras has decided to extend his war outward, conquering the worthless lands of Poland (against his enfeebled uncle’s demands). Fortinbras is perhaps a better example of a classical hero in the modern world. His Norwegian army has been granted full rights to march across Danish lands toward Poland and the army of Fortinbras suddenly arrives at Elsinore just as Hamlet dies. With his dying breath Hamlet offers his “vote” for Fortinbras, his rival, to take the throne of Denmark (the message is conveyed by Horatio to Fortinbras). As is often the case in Shakespeare, the final speech in the play is delivered by the highest ranking person: in this case it is Fortinbras –a foreign man who will now be the future king of Denmark (hopefully his accession will resolve Denmark’s ‘rottenness’). Has Denmark actually been redeemed? Hamlet is given a hero’s burial by the Norwegian army, though few readers of Shakespeare will suggest that Hamlet is truly a noble hero –he is simply the tragedy of modern man, paralyzed while “crawling between earth and heaven.”
For this reading I used the impressive Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Hamlet along with Paul Cantor’s excellent lectures.