Hamlet

Introduction

Hamlet the character and Hamlet the work of literature are the finest in the Western canon.  There is more open-endedness, interpretation and a proliferation of meaning and speculation on both the character and the play compared to any other figure or work.  For these reasons it stands as both the most famous character and literary work that we know, and the reason is because of the inexhaustible characteristic of this Prince of Denmark in this play about virtually everything.  It is certainly the most discussed and thoroughly analyzed work of world literature, perhaps along with the Bible.  Its insights into universal themes, Freudian psychology, politics, sex, theatre, madness, revenge, spirituality, etc is astounding. It is easily the most enigmatic of Shakespeare’s works or that of any other author.  It is like a black hole of deconstructions, paradoxes and contradictions.  Its very performance is something of a hallowed ritual for people everywhere and always.  You leave a production of Hamlet with more questions than you started with.  Was that ghost really his father?  Did Claudius actually murder Hamlet’s father?  How much madness did Hamlet feign and how much was real?  Why is Hamlet so struck by his inability to act?  There are superlatives a plenty in the experience of seeing or even reading Hamlet.  It is simply the most clever and entertaining tragedy ever composed.

Hamlet has an incomparable quicksilver wit and he thinks his way throughout the entire play, sharing with us his thoughts as he tries to lean in toward action while things only get worse.  This is a play about one man’s mind and character, revealed in both dialogue and soliloquy, as never before or since conceived.  Here is the tormented mind and soul of a renaissance thinker par excellence who considers too deeply some of the most profound truths, difficult to juggle and not able to be resolved.    Hamlet is a character of infinite complexity and often a mirror to ourselves.  He is an unsurpassed and imaginative charismatic, within whom knowledge and thinking kill action and inwardness is the only freedom he knows.  Hamlet seems a real person caught up in a play with his name on it.  He is self-consciously theatrical, with a mind that can hold the most contrary thoughts, attitudes, values and judgements.    He can be all things to all people, possessing a tremendous wit as a defence against the corruption and wickedness of the Danish court.  Hesitation and consciousness are synonymous in this drama of heightened identity and the world of the inner being always about to be, as thought and feeling constantly pulsate onward and outward.  Hamlet suffers from having no identifiable centre, being too intelligent for one role and impossible to accurately categorize.  He is a charismatic with a curse and a dialectic that embraces both life and death in a dance of contraries.  He simply thinks so much that he cannot make up his mind to act.  Yet he seems to alter with every utterance, constantly changing, while preserving a consistent enough identity that cannot be mistaken for anyone else in all of Shakespeare.  He has the finest mind in western literature, and is to other literary figures what Shakespeare himself is to other writers.  Neither has a rival.  Hamlet has become one and the same with consciousness itself.  It is the longest Shakespeare play because Hamlet speaks so much.  I only wish he could have said much more on every subject.  We can come to know Hamlet better than real people we might know because Shakespeare shows us the character’s innermost workings. In this sense Elsinore Castle is everywhere and timeless, since something is always rotten that we simply cannot tolerate.  

Why can Hamlet not act until Act V?  This is the focus question of the play, whose answer is dependent on his interpretation of the ghost.  Is he too sensitive or delicate?  Too reflective an intelligence? Does he simply live too much in his own head?  (“The native hue of resolution is sickled over with the pale cast of thought.”). Is he simply too melancholic?  A Freudian interpretation might suggest that he identifies too fully with his uncle Claudius, the lover of his mother and slayer of his father.  Perhaps he is too intensely self-conscious, with an over-abundance of antic disposition and a sardonic wit.  There is so much food for thought just in this single question alone.

Hamlet broods about everything, born to set right a world out of joint.  There is a plethora of both the private and the public dimension to Hamlet and it is the soliloquies that clearly reveal this struggle, exposing to centuries of audiences the inner world of a brilliant character’s mind.  We require a healthy balance between our inner and outer lives and Hamlet seems to live within a meditation and sinks beneath a burden he cannot bear.  Abraham Lincoln, a great fan of the Bard, felt that the most revelatory passage in the play to be “O, my offense is rank…”  The suggestion is that his genius is also his Achilles heel, as his melancholy, at the very centre of the play, inhibits action and requires him to put on an antic disposition of feigned madness, as his thoughts meander through eternity and encounter his own doomed fate.  Hamlet is the tragedy of a soul buzzing in a prison he cannot escape. The thought of parricide and incest together are too much to bear.  He simply thinks and takes on too much, misjudging dear Ophelia as a breeder of sinners, railing against his mother, contrary to the directive of his ghostly father and seeking to play God with the life of Claudius.  

Hamlet is a philosophically complex play, with profound dialectic insights into will vs reason, appearance vs reality, self vs the world, thought vs action, revenge vs remorse, and the real vs the imaginary and other worldly.  It is a play and a character with curious vibrations beneath various surfaces.  There is a heavy undercurrent of desires, passions and fears, long slumbering but eternally familiar.  

And yet, Hamlet is a much-loved character, even after he murders Polonius, badgers Ophelia to the point of madness and suicide and dispatches his less than loyal friends Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, before the great carnage that is Act V. There is certainly a case against him, but he remains the hero of Western consciousness.  Perhaps hero-villain would be most appropriate, as he is the agent of eight deaths, including his own.  He seemingly cares for no one, yet the world cares so much for him, as though we have all become Horatio, his loyal friend.

Curiously enough, a different Hamlet emerges after his escape from the pirates and the graveyard scene.  The ‘antic disposition’ seemingly ends in Act V, when he concludes that ‘there is a divinity that shapes our ends’.  Suddenly there is nothing left to be said.  Simply speaking, ‘let be’ is the lesson learned, and ‘the rest is silence’.  He is quite certain of these Act V utterances, compared to the torturous earlier soliloquies peppered throughout the play. He faces four acts of melancholy followed by an escape to a better place right before his death.  Apparently, ‘the readiness’ was indeed all.

Hamlet interacts with several expertly sketched characters in the story.  Claudius, his uncle, is trapped in the tragedy every bit as much as Hamlet and his speeches can be equally as profound and devastating.  Gertrude, his mother, is wracked with guilt over her quick marriage to her brother in law after her husband’s death and is gripped with fear over her son Hamlet’s spiralling flirtations with madness.  Polonius, the court advisor, is an intellectual meddler, who meddles his way into the grave.  His daughter, Ophelia, is all but ignored by everyone but falls into a madness and a suicide after her father’s death and Hamlet’s cruel rejection of her.  And Laertes, his son, departs for Paris in grand spirits early in the play, only to return like a man possessed after the murder of his father and his sister’s suicide, both for which he attributes to Hamlet.  There is a whole lot going on in this Danish tale.  But Hamlet remains the centrepiece from start to finish. 

This was Shakespeare’s most personal and perhaps most autobiographical based play.  His only son, Hamnet (a variation on the name Hamlet) died in 1596, likely a victim of the ever-present plague.  His own father died in 1601.  Hamlet was written in 1601-1602, a play in which Hamlet’s father is slain by Hamlet’s uncle / surrogate father prior to Hamlet murdering his uncle / surrogate father. Before the play begins we learn that the Norwegian Fontinbras’ father was slain by Hamlet’s father in defense of the very kingdom.  That is a whole lot of father-son activity just after the Bard lost both his father and only son.   Hamlet represents Shakespeare’s most profoundly expressed inwardness, first encountered in such earlier characters as Mercutio, Juliet, Bottom, Shylock, Brutus, Falstaff, Rosalind and Brutus.  Hamlet was the apex of Shakespeare’s career in many ways, but his greatest accomplishment and most radical originality was indeed Hamlet’s inwardness, which then inspires the same in Iago, King Lear, Macbeth, Cleopatra and Prospero.  Hamlet opened the gates to Shakespeare’s great tragedies, which followed very soon on its heels.  Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus were all written within eight years of Hamlet.  All of Shakespeare is in Hamlet.  There is comedy, satire, romance and, yes, tragedy.  Only Shakespeare or Hamlet could have written Hamlet.  There is a vivid sense that Hamlet got away from Shakespeare and essentially wrote his own lines.  He seems that autonomous.  He was the freest of Shakespeare’s creations.  He could have married Ophelia or become the king.  He might have killed the king or left for Wittenberg University.  He might have started a coup, become a soldier or a hermit.  He writes his ‘to be or not to be’, speech as his own meditation on death well in advance of ‘the moment’ in Act V.  Shakespeare found Hamlet deep within himself, so that what we are watching is both Hamlet and Shakespeare as creators of this finest of literary works.  It almost seems as though Hamlet has written his own play, being the most knowing figure of consciousness ever conceived.  Like Shakespeare himself, Hamlet is still way out ahead of us, four hundred years later.  We know that Shakespeare played the Ghost and likely doubled as the Player King in performances during his lifetime.  Therefore, he is appropriately both Hamlet’s father and the play’s great representative of the theatre. Hamlet seems at times Shakespeare’s ideal son, just as Hal is Falstaff’s in Henry IV.

The earliest version of the Hamlet story dates back to Saxo Grammaticus (1150-1206), who was a Danish historian.  A play appears in the English theatre in 1589. It may have been written by Thomas Kyd, famous for The Spanish Tragedy.  However, more likely it was Shakespeare’s early attempt at Hamlet.  It was later owned by The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s theatre company.  The suggestion is that he returned to it around 1600 and revised it considerably, as it appears in the First Quatro in 1603 and again in the Second Quatro in 1604.  It seems to have changed with each performance, growing more rich and profound over time.  By the time of the First Folio in 1623, seven years following Shakespeare’s death, we have the play we know today, likely representing the  constant editing and revising which he applied to Hamlet throughout most of his adult life.  Many curious productions followed.  In the 1750s it even had a happy ending.  Near the end of the nineteenth century, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, anticipating Tom Stoppard, were featured in a spin off of the Danish play.  Following World War II, there was GI Hamlet, with the prince as a soldier, suffering from postwar fatigue.  Hamlet films began with three silent versions and Kenneth Branagh’s recent four-hour masterpiece (1997) was the 82^nd film production that we know of.  Notable Hamlets include Kenneth Branagh, Mel Gibson, Derek Jacobi, Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, Richard Burton, David Tennant, Ethan Hawke, Christopher Plummer, Keanu Reeves, Jude Law, Christopher Walken, Ian McKellen, Daniel Day-Lewis, Ralph Fiennes, Kevin Kline, Michael Sheen, Sarah Bernhardt and Benedict Cumberbatch.  It is the penultimate stage performance for most actors.  It has been said that there are as many interpretations of Hamlet as there are actors and directors willing and able to portray him.

Act I

Hamlet is in the midst of three crises, all graphically exposed in Act I.  First, when the ghost appears to the soldiers on the battlements they realize it is a bad omen for the kingdom itself and they discuss the threat from the Norwegian ruler Fortinbras since the death of their king, Hamlet’s father.  In scene ii King Claudius discusses a diplomatic strategy to best manage the Norwegian threat.  So Hamlet lives in a kingdom facing peril, as Norway may likely test its mettle following the death of Hamlet’s father.  Secondly, Hamlet’s family is in crisis.  His father is dead and his mother just married his uncle, who has become the king.  A question never really addressed in the play is why the crown did not go to Hamlet, the adult son of the king.  Why does Claudius, the king’s brother, assume the crown?  Hamlet cannot make peace with his mother marrying his uncle, whom he does not approve of whatsoever, a mere two months following his father’s death.  Finally, Hamlet is experiencing a deep personal crisis, especially after he encounters what he believes to be his father’s ghost, who informs him that his dear father was murdered by his uncle Claudius, who then stole both the crown and the queen.  In Hamlet’s first soliloquy he ponders his own suicide (“O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt.”)

So the essential plot is laid out in Act I, as Hamlet ruminates every which way about the appropriate response to his ghostly encounter with his father.  The ghost demands revenge.  Now Hamlet must think that through for most of the play.  How decisive should he be?  Perhaps nature should simply take its course.  His predicament is so overwhelming that the more he thinks it through the less clear he is on an appropriate course of action.  This tortures him so that he contemplates his own suicide. (“To be or not to be… that is the question.”)  The principle conflict in the play is within Hamlet’s mind and soul.  All of the external action is a consequence of this internal struggle.  And although avenging his father’s death by killing his uncle, King Claudius, would serve all three of his dilemmas – removing a weak, immoral and usurping monarch from the throne of Denmark, saving his mother from a terrible marriage and making himself the King of Denmark – his own discombobulated psychological state inhibits action on his part. (“The time is out of joint.  O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.”)

Act I

Scene i

Elsinore Castle Battlements

Horatio: “Has this thing appeared again tonight?”

Bernardo: “I have seen nothing.”

Marcellus: “Horatio says ‘tis but our fantasy.  Therefore I have entreated him to watch the minutes of this night, that he may approve our eyes and speak to it.”

Horatio: “Tush, tush, ‘twill not appear.”

Enter the ghost

Marcellus: “Peace.  Look, it comes again.”

Bernardo: “In the same figure, like the king that’s dead.  Mark it, Horatio.”

Horatio: “Most like the king.  It harrows me with fear and wonder.”

Marcellus: “Question it, Horatio.”

Horatio: “What art thou?  By heaven I charge thee, speak!”

Marcellus: “It is offended.”

Bernardo: “It stalks away.”

Horatio: “Stay! Speak, speak!  I charge thee!  Speak!”

Exit Ghost

Bernardo: “How now, Horatio!  You tremble and look pale.  Is not this something more than fantasy?  What think you?”

Horatio: “Before my God, I might not believe this without mine own eyes.”

Marcellus: “Is it not like the king?”

Horatio: “As thou art to thyself.  Such was the very armour he had on when he and the ambitious Norway combatted.  This bodes some strange eruption to our state.  Our last king, you know, by Fortinbras of Norway, was dared to combat, in which he did slay Fortinbras.  Now, sir, young Fortinbras, of unimproved mettle hot and full, dost well appear unto our state, to recover, by strong hand, lands lost by his father; and this, I take it, is the main source of this our watch.”

Bernardo: “I think it be no other.”

Horatio: “In Rome the mightiest Julius fell and graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets; the sun was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse…”

Ghost re-enters

Horatio: “But soft, behold!  It comes again!  Speak to me, if thou art privy to thy country’s fate.  O, speak!”

The cock crows

Bernardo: “It was about to speak when the cock crowed.”

Horatio: “Let us impart what we have seen tonight unto young Hamlet, for, upon my life, this spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him.”

Analysis

This opening scene terrified early audiences, who would have understood that such a sighting does not bode well for either Denmark or our play.  Clearly something about the old king’s death has upset the nature of things in a significant way.  In the year 1601 Shakespeare’s attendees would also have known the anxiety and turmoil that accompany a change of monarchs.  After all, Queen Elizabeth was aged and without issue and Shakespeare had frequently depicted in graphic detail the hazards of a succession crisis in Titus Andronicus, Henry VI, King John, Richard II, Henry IV, As You Like It and Julius Caesar, all before Hamlet. So Shakespeare got their attention immediately with the presence of the ghostly king of Denmark.  Shakespeare also introduces good Horatio, a man we can clearly trust and whose reasonable skepticism about the ghost is shattered by its actual vivid appearance.  If Horatio believes it, then we the audience may be won over as well.

Act I

Scene ii

Elsinore Castle   

King Claudius: “Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death the memory be green; and that it is us befitted to bear our hearts in grief; yet so far hath discretion fought with nature that we with wisest sorrow think on him.  Therefore, our sometime sister, now our queen, have we, with mirth in funeral  and with dirge in marriage, in equal scale weighing delight and dole, taken to wife.  You know, young Fontinbras, holding a weak supposed of our worth, or thinking by our late dear brother’s death our state to be disjoint and out of frame, he hath not failed to pester us with messages importing the surrender of those lands lost by his father to our most valiant brother.  And now, Laertes, what’s the news with you?  What wouldst thou have?”

Laertes: “Your leave and favour to return to France.; from whence though willingly I came to Denmark to show my duty in your coronation.”

King: “What says your father, Polonius?”

Polonius: “Upon his will I sealed my consent.  I do beseech you to give him leave to go.”

King: “But now, my cousin Hamlet, and my son.”

Hamlet: (aside) “A little more than kin, and less than kind.”

King: “How is it that the clouds still hang on you?”

Queen: “Good Hamlet, let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.  Do not forever seek for thy noble father in the dust.  Thou knowest ‘tis common – all that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity.”

Hamlet: “Ay, madam, it is common.”

Queen: “If it be, why seems it so particular with thee?”

Hamlet: “Seems, madam!  Nay, it is; I know not seems.”

King: “’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, to give these mourning duties to your father; but you must know that your father lost a father; That father lost his; but to persevere in obstinate condolement is a course of impious stubbornness; tis unmanly grief; it shows a will most incorrect to heaven, a heart unfortified, a mind impatient, an understanding simple and unschooled.  ‘Tis a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, a fault to nature, to reason most absurd; we pray you throw to earth this unprevailing woe, and think of us as of a father; for you are the most immediate to our throne.  Your intent on going back to school in Wittenberg is most retrograde to our desire; and we beseech you to remain here in the cheer and comfort of our eye.”

Queen: “I pray thee stay with us; go not to Wittenberg.”

Hamlet: “I shall in all my best, obey you, madam.”

King: “Why, ‘tis a loving and a fair reply.”

Exit all but Hamlet

Hamlet: “O, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!  Or that the Everlasting had not fixed his cannon against self-slaughter!  O God!  O God!  How, weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses of this world!  Fie on it!  Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature posses it merely.  That it should come to this!  But two months dead!  Nay, not so much, not two.  So excellent a king that was to this hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother.  Must I remember?  Why, she would hang on him as if increase in appetite had grown by what it fed on; and yet within a month – let me not think on it.  Frailty thy name is woman.  A little month.  O God!  A beast that wants discourse of reason would have mourned longer – married with my uncle, my father’s brother, but no more like my father than I to Hercules.  She married with such dexterity to incestuous sheets!  It is not, nor can it come to good.  But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.”

Enter Horatio, Bernardo and Marcellus

Horatio: “Hail to your lordship.”

Hamlet: “I am glad to see you well.  What make you from Wittenberg, Horatio?  What is your affair in Elsinore?  We’ll teach you to drink deep ere you depart.”

Horatio: “My lord, I came to see your father’s funeral.”

Hamlet: “I prithee do not mock me, fellow student.  I think it was to see my mother’s wedding.”  

Horatio: “Indeed, my lord, it followed hard upon.”

Hamlet: “Thrift, thrift, Horatio!  The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.  My father – methinks I see my father.”

Horatio: “Where, my lord?”

Hamlet: “In my mind’s eye, Horatio.  He was a man.  I shall not look upon his like again.”

Horatio: “My lord, I think I saw him yester-night.”

Hamlet: “Saw who?”

Horatio: The king, your father.”

Hamlet: “For God’s love, let me hear.”

Horatio: “Two nights together had Marcellus and Bernardo, on their watch, in the dead of the night, thus encountered a figure like your father.  It appeared before them, and I with them the third night.”

Hamlet: “Did you speak to it?”

Horatio: “My lord, I did, but answer made it none.”

Hamlet: “’Tis very strange.”

Horatio: “As I do love, my honoured lord, ‘tis true.  And we did think to let you know of it.”

“Hamlet: “Indeed, indeed, sirs, but this troubles me.  I would I had been there.”

Horatio: “It would have much amazed you.”

Hamlet: “I will watch tonight.  Upon the platform, ‘twixt eleven and twelve, I’ll visit you.”

Exit all but Hamlet

Hamlet: “My father’s spirit in arms!  All is not well.”

Analysis

Scene two builds upon scene one.  We met the ghost on the battlements and now Hamlet has been informed of its presence and will be part of the watch the next night to see if it is indeed his dead father in arms.  As well, we have our first encounter with Claudius and his court, as he tries to be very positive about having mourned his brother and married his brother’s wife.  He is clearly moving on and expecting everyone in court to join him.  Only Hamlet resists and hence the tension is exposed.  This scene bodes as badly as the first, as Hamlet listens while his uncle and mother try to convince him to move on past the grief for his father.  Only when he is alone does he reflect in his first soliloquy the very depths of his despair, which borders on suicidal.  “O, that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon against self-slaughter.”  By the end of Act I he will learn the most devastating indication of all regarding his uncle and his father’s death.  But we are well under way. 

Act I

Scene iii

Elsinore / The home of Polonius

Laertes: “Sister, farewell.  Let me hear from you.”

Ophelia: “Do you doubt that?”

Laertes: “For Hamlet and the trifling of his favour.  Hold it a fashion and a toy in blood.  Forward, not permanent, sweet not lasting. The perfume and suppliance of a minute; no more.  Perhaps he loves you now; but you must fear his greatness weighed.  His will is not his own.  For on his choice depends the sanity and health of this whole state.  Then weigh what loss your honour may sustain if your chaste treasure opens to his unmastered importunity.  Fear it, Ophelia; fear it, my dear sister; and keep you in the rear of your affection.”

Ophelia: “I shall the effect of this good lesson keep.  But, good my brother, do not, as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven while, like a puffed and reckless libertine, himself the primrose path of dalliance treads.”

Enter Polonius

Polonius: “Laertes, aboard, aboard.  The wind sits in your sail.  My blessings with thee, and these few precepts in thy memory: be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.  Beware of entrance into a quarrel; but, being in, bear that the opposed may beware of thee.  Give every man thy ear but few thy voice; take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.  Neither a borrower nor a lender be; for loan often loses both itself and friend and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.  This above all – to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.  Farewell.”

Laertes: “I take my leave, my lord.  Farewell, Ophelia, and remember well what I have said to you.”

Ophelia: “’Tis in my memory locked, and you yourself shall keep the key.”

Exit Laertes

Polonius: “What is it, Ophelia, he hath said to you?”

Ophelia: “Something touching the Lord Hamlet.”

Polonius: “What is between you?  Give me up the truth.”

Ophelia: “He hath, my lord, of late made many tenders of his affection to me.”

Polonius: “Affection? Pooh!  Do you believe his tenders, as you call them?”

Ophelia: “I do not know, my lord, what I should think.”

Polonius: “Marry, I will teach you.  Tender yourself more dearly or you’ll tender me a fool.”  

Ophelia: “He hath importuned me with love in honorable fashion.”

Polonius: “I do know when the blood burns, how prodigal the soul lends the tongues vows.  From this time be something scanter of your maiden presence; Set your entreatments at a higher rate.  For Lord Hamlet is young, Ophelia.  Do not believe his vows.  I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth, have you talk  with the Lord Hamlet.”

Ophelia: “I shall obey, my lord.”

Analysis

Scene three in Act I contrasts vividly with scene two, as we encounter, back to back, Hamlet’s and Laertes’ family life.  Laertes will be a foil to Hamlet throughout the play.  He is resolute and affectionate.  He loves his sister and father and will be decisive when confronted with the tragedy that will befall them both, unlike Hamlet, who will take four acts to ruminate over everything before he manages to finally take action.  Laertes family is solid.  Polonius gives sound paternal advice to both his children who clearly care deeply for one another.  Hamlet is furious at his mother for marrying his uncle upon his father’s death and has a seething disregard for his uncle.  The two families could not be different.  Polonius offers his famous advice to Laertes, which includes ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’ and ‘this above all – to thine own self be true’.  Both Laertes and Polonius warn Ophelia to withhold her affections from Hamlet, as he must one day marry well beyond her station in life.  These two families are about to interact tragically.  Not one of the six of them will survive the play.  

Act I

Scene iv

Elsinore Castle

The battlements

Horatio: “Look, my lord, it comes.”

Hamlet: “Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, be thy intents wicked or charitable?  I’ll call thee Hamlet, King, father, royal Dane, O, answer me.  Why hath the sepulchre opened his ponderous and marble jaws to cast thee up again?  Why is this?  What should we do?” 

Horatio: “It beckons you to go with it.”

Marcellus: “But do not go with it.”

Hamlet: “I will follow it.”

Horatio: “Do not my lord.  What if it tempt you toward the flood or to the dreadful summit of the cliff and there assume some other horrible form, which might deprive your soveieignty of reason and draw you into madness.  Think on it.”

Hamlet: “It waves me still.  Go on; I will follow thee.”

Marcellus: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.”

Analysis

We know from scene i that there is a ghost in the shape of Hamlet’s father.  We know from scene ii that Hamlet is desperately unhappy about his mother marrying his uncle following the death of his beloved father.  Now Hamlet is about to learn the meaning of this ghostly visitation from his father.  It will not endear him any further to his family.  Interesting questions are raised by Hamlet about the ghost: Is it a ‘spirit of health or a goblin damned?  Is it from heaven or hell?  Are its intents wicked or charitable?  How Hamlet answers these questions must determine his course of action throughout the play.  Is it an honest ghost or not?  That is the question and helps to explain Hamlet’s upcoming paralysis. 

Act I

Scene v

Elsinore Castle

The battlements

Ghost: “Mark me.  My hour is almost come when I to sulph’rous and tormenting flames must render up myself.”

Hamlet: “Alas, poor ghost!”

Ghost: “Pity me not, but lend thy serious hearing  to what I shall unfold.”

Hamlet: “Speak!  I am bound to hear.”

Ghost: “So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.”

Hamlet: “What?”

Ghost: “I am thy father’s spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night, and for the day confined to fires, until the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away.  But that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy souls, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes start from their spheres, thy knotted and combined locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end.  But this eternal blazon  must not be to the ears of flesh and blood.  Listen, listen, O, listen!  If thou didst ever thy dear father love…

Hamlet: “O God!”

Ghost: “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.”

Hamlet: “Murder!”

Ghost: “Murder most foul… most foul, strange and unnatural.”

Hamlet: “Haste me to know it, that I may sweep to my revenge.”

Ghost: “I find thee apt.  Now Hamlet hear:  Sleeping in my orchard a serpent stung me; but know, that the serpent that did sting thy father’s life now wears his crown.”

Hamlet: “O my prophetic soul, my uncle!”

Ghost: “Ay, that incestuous, adulterous beast won to his shameful lust the will of my most seemingly virtuous queen.  O Hamlet, what a falling off there was, from me. But soft!  Methinks I sense the morning air.  Brief let me be.  Sleeping within my orchard, my custom always of the afternoon, upon my secure hour thy uncle stole, with juice of cursed hebona in a vial, and  in my ears did pour the leperous distilment; swift as quicksilver  it courses through the natural gates and alleys of the body.  Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatched, but sent to my account with all my imperfections on my head.  O horrible!  O horrible! Most horrible!  If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not; Let not the royal bed of Denmark be a couch for luxury and damned incest.  But, howsoever thou pursuest this act, taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive against thy mother; leave her to heaven and to those thorns that in her bosom lodge to prick and sting her.  Fare thee well.  Adieu, adieu, adieu!  Remember me.

Exit ghost

Hamlet: “O all you host of heaven! O earth!  And shall I couple hell? O fie!  Hold, hold my heart; and you, my sinews, grow not instant old, but bear me stiffly up.  Remember thee!  Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial records. Thy commandment all alone shall live within the book and volume of my brain, unmixed with baser matter.  O most pernicious woman!  O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!  One may smile and smile and be a villain; at least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.  So uncle, there you are.  Now to my word.”

Horatio: “My lord, my lord!  What news, my lord?

Hamlet: “O wonderful!”

Horatio: “Good, my lord, tell it.”

Hamlet: “No; you will reveal it.”

Horatio: “Not I, my lord, by heaven.”

Marcellus: “Nor I, my lord.”

Hamlet: “You’ll be secret?  It is an honest ghost, that let me tell you.  Never make known what you have seen tonight.”

Both: “My lord, we will not.”

Hamlet: “Nay, but swear it upon my sword.”

Ghost: “Swear by his sword!”

Hamlet: “Well said, old mole.”

Horatio: “This is wondrous strange!”

Hamlet: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy.  Hereafter shall I put on an antic disposition.  The time is out of joint, O cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right.”

Analysis

Hamlet’s worst fears about his uncle are confirmed in scene v, as the ghost informs him that the very serpent that did sting his father’s life now wears his crown.  Furthermore, his father’s spirit demands that Hamlet exact revenge for this foul crime, making this a most pivotal scene in the play and leading him toward the idea of feigning madness, which will both define his character for us as well as establish the nature of his relationships with most of the other principle characters in the play over the next three acts.  It also introduces the idea of retribution.  His uncle has committed a crime which Hamlet must revenge in order to set right this time out of joint.  Because Hamlet is contemplative to the point of obsession and doubts the authenticity of the ghost, his feigning of madness will direct him to the verge of madness itself.  Does he even feign madness?  Or is he merely mad?  Act I has laid it all out there.  We have encountered all of the principles.  We know Hamlet’s motivation.  But do we know Hamlet?

Act II

Polonius sends a set of eyes to report to him on how Laertes is doing in France and then Ophelia describes a horrific and frightening encounter she has had with Hamlet, whose feigned madness is a bit too real for Ophelia.  The king invites Hamlet’s old friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to Elsinore in order to spy on Hamlet and to ascertain more about his most unpredictable state of mind.  Polonius tells the royal couple that he has learned what the cause of Hamlet’s lunacy is and that it is his love for Ophelia.  Polonius meddles more and more into these affairs and will eventually pay with his life, as a result,  in Act III.  Every encounter he has with Hamlet goes poorly for him.  Hamlet accuses his two friends of having been sent for by the king.  They finally admit it and lose his trust entirely.   But just then the players arrive and Hamlet stages a plot to catch the conscience of the king.

Act II

Scene i

Elsinore castle

The House of Polonius

Polonius: “Give him this money and these notes, Reynaldo.”

Reynaldo: “I will, my lord.”

Polonius: “Make inquiry of his behaviour.”

Reynaldo: “My lord, I did intend it.”

Polonius: “Enquire me first what Danksters are in Paris; and how, and who, what means, and where they keep, what company do know my son.  Do you mark this, Reynaldo?”

Reynaldo: “Ay, very well, my lord.”

Polonius: “And thus do we of wisdom, by indirections find directions out.  You have me, have you not?”

Reynaldo: “My lord, I have.”

Exit Reynaldo / Enter Ophelia

Polonius: “How now, Ophelia.  What’s the matter?”

Ophelia: “O my lord, I have been so affrighted!”

Polonius: “With what, in the name of God?”

Ophelia: “Lord Hamlet, pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, and with a look so piteous, as if he had been loosed out of hell to speak of horrors – he comes before me.”

Polonius: “Mad for thy love?”

Ophelia: “Truly, I do fear it.”

Polonius: “What said he?”

Ophelia: “He took me by the wrist and held me hard; and fell to such perusal of my face, as he would draw it.  Long stayed he so.  And thrice he raised a sigh so piteous and profound as it did seem to shatter all his bulk and end his being.  That done, he let me go and seemed to find his way out without his eyes, to the last bending their light on me.”

Polonius: “Come, I will go seek the king.  This is the very ecstasy of love, and leads the will to desperate undertakings that does afflict our natures.  I am sorry.  Have you given him any words of late?”

Ophelia: “No, my good lord; but, as you did command, I did repel his letters, and denied his access to me.”

Polonius: “That hath made him mad.  Come, we go to the king.  This must be known.”

Analysis

In this single scene does Polonius meddle into the lives of both his son and daughter.  That is his role and he is generally depicted as an old fool and a very cunning manipulator.  He instructs Reynaldo in the art of meddling and snooping in his role as a spy on Laertes, Polonius’ son.  He loves to hear his own voice, as we shall see again and again.  Consider that Claudius killed King Hamlet by pouring poison in his ear.  Shakespeare suggests to us through the many words of meddling advice offered by Polonius throughout his time in the play, that words, too, have the power to act as poison to the ear as well.  Words can manipulate truth and control the message they seek to convey.  

Polonius next uses his words to paint the picture of Hamlet as ‘madly’ in love with Ophelia.  Clearly, from Ophelia’s renderings we learn that Hamlet has made good on his intention to behave as a madman.  Or is he, in fact, genuinely mad from Ophelia’s spurn of him, as Polonius so directed her?  That is a central question throughout the play.  Is Hamlet mad or not?  Has his mother’s sudden marriage to Claudius poisoned Hamlet’s sense of womanhood?  Certainly Polonius’ conclusion that Hamlet’s madness is a result of his lovesick disposition toward Ophelia will have striking ramifications for the plot development in the scenes to come.

Act II

Scene ii

Elsinore Castle

King: “Welcome, dear Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!  The need we have to use you did provoke our hasty sending.  Something have you heard of Hamlet’s transformation?  Nor the exterior nor the inward man resembles what it was.  What it should be, more than his father’s death, that thus has put him so much from the understanding of himself, I cannot deem.  I entreat you both that, being of such young days brought up with him, to draw him on to pleasures, and to gather, whether aught to us unknown afflicts him thus that, opened, lies within our remedy.

Queen: “Good gentlemen, he hath much talked of you and sure I am two men there are not living to whom he more adheres.  Your visitation shall receive such thanks as fits a king’s remembrance.”

Guildenstern: “We both obey and lay our service freely at your feet to be commanded.”

Queen: “I beseech you instantly to visit my too much changed son.”

Guildenstern: ”Heavens make our presence helpful to him!”

Queen “Ay, amen!”

Exit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern / Enter Polonius

Polonius: “I do think that I have found the very cause of Hamlet’s lunacy.”

King: “O, speak of that; that do I long to hear… He tells me, dear Gertrude, he hath found the head and source of all your son’s distemper.”

Queen: “I doubt that is no other than the main, his father’s death and our over-hasty marriage.”

Enter Voltemand and Cornelius (Danish Ambassadors)

Voltemand: “Most fair return of greetings.  Upon our first he (The Norwegian King) sent out to supress his nephew (Fortinbras), which appeared to be a preparation against the Polack; but, better looked into, he truly found it was against your highness.  Whereat grieved, he sends out arrests on Fortinbras, who makes vow before his uncle never more to give the assay of arms against your majesty.  Whereupon the King commissions to employ these soldiers against the Polack, with an entreaty, that it might please you to give quiet pass through your dominion for this enterprise.”

King: “It like us well.”

Polonius: “Since brevity is the soul of wit I shall be brief.  Your noble son is mad.  Mad call I it; for, to define true madness, what is it but to be nothing else but mad.”

Queen: “More matter with less art.”

Polonius: “Madam, I swear I use no art at all.  That he’s mad, tis true: tis true tis pity; and pity tis tis true.  A foolish figure.  But farewell it, for I will use no art.  Mad let us grant him, then; and now remains that we find out the cause of this effect; or rather say the cause of this defect, for this effect defective comes by cause.  I have a daughter, who, in her duty and obedience, hath given me this: (he reads) ‘To the celestial, and my soul’s idol, the most beautiful Ophelia, in her excellent white bosom, these, etc…. Doubt thou the stars are fire, doubt that the sun doth move, doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt I love.  O dear Ophelia, I love thee best, O most best, believe it.  Adieu.  Thine evermore, most dear lady, HAMLET.’

King: “But how hath she received his love?”

Polonius: “What do you think of me?”

King: “As a man faithful and honourable.”

Polonius: “I would fain prove so.  I went to work, and my young mistress thus I did bespeak: ‘Lord Hamlet is a prince out of thy star; This must not be.’  And then I prescripts gave her, that she should lock herself from his resort, admit no messengers, and receive no tokens, which done, he fell into a sadness, then into a fast, thence to a watch, thence into a weakness, thence to a lightness, and, by this declension, into the madness wherein now he raves and all we mourn for.” 

King: “Do you think tis this?”

Queen: “It may be, very like.”

Polonius: “Hath there been such a time that I have positively said ‘Tis so’, when it proved otherwise?”

King: “Not that I know.”

Polonius: “If this be otherwise I will find where truth be hid, though it were hid indeed.”

King: “How may we try it further?”

Polonius: “Sometimes he walks here in the lobby.  I’ll loose my daughter to him.  Be you and I behind an arras then; mark the encounter.”

King: “We will try it.”

Enter Hamlet, reading a book

Queen: “But look where sadly the poor wretch comes reading.”

Polonius: “Away, I do beseech you, both away; I’ll board him presently.”

Exit king and queen

Polonius: “How does my good lord Hamlet?”

Hamlet: “Well”

Polonius: “Do you know me, my lord?”

Hamlet: “Excellent well: you are a fish-monger.”

Polonius: “Not I, my lord.”

Hamlet: “Then I would you were so honest a man.”

Polonius: “Honest, my lord!”

Hamlet: “Ay, sir; to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.  Have you a daughter?”

Polonius: “I have, my lord.”

Hamlet: “Let her not walk in the sun.  Conception is a blessing.  But as your daughter my conceive, look to it.”

Polonius: “How say you by that?” (aside) “Still harping on my daughter.  Yet he knew me not at first.  He said I was a fish-monger.  He is far gone, far gone.  I’ll speak to him again.”  “What do you read, my lord?”

Hamlet: “Words, words, words.”

Polonius: “What is the matter that you read, my lord?”

Hamlet: “Slanders, sir.  For the satirical rogue says that old men have grey beards, that their eyes are wrinkled, and that they have a plentiful lack of wit. All of which, sir, I most powerfully and potently believe.”

Polonius: (aside) “Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.  How pregnant sometimes his replies are! A happiness that madness often hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.”  “My lord, I will take my leave of you.”

Hamlet: “You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal – except my life, except my life, except my life.”

Enter Rosencrantz and Guildenstern / Exit Polonius

Hamlet: “My good, excellent friends.  How do you both?  What news?”

Rosencrantz: “None, my lord, but that the world’s grown honest.”

Hamlet: “Then is doomsday near.  But your news is not true.  Let me question more in particular.  What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?

Guildenstern: “ Prison, my lord?”

Hamlet: “Denmark’s a prison.”

Rosencrantz: “Then is the world one.”

Hamlet: “A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards and dungeons, Denmark being one of the worst.”

Rosencrantz: “We think not so, my lord.”

Hamlet: “Why, then, tis none to you: for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.  To me it is a prison.”

Rosencrantz: “Why then, your ambition makes it one; tis too narrow for your mind.”

Hamlet: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.  What make you at Elsinore?”

Rosencrantz: “ To visit you, my lord: no other occasion.”

Hamlet: “Hamlet: “I thank you, dear friends.  Were you not sent for? Is it a free visitation? Come, come, deal justly with me.”

Guildenstern: “What should we say, my lord?”

Hamlet: “But to the purpose: you were sent for; there is a kind of confession in your looks, which your modesties have not craft enough to colour.  I know the good king and queen have sent for you.  Be direct with me, whether you were sent for or not.”

Guildenstern: “My lord, we were sent for.”

Hamlet: “I will tell you why.  I have of late lost all my mirth; and indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy the air appeareth no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.  What a piece of work is a man!  How noble in reason!  How infinite in faculties!  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 me not… Why did you laugh when I said ‘man delights me not.’”

Rosencrantz: “To think, my lord, if you delight not in man, what Lenten entertainment the players shall receive from you.  Hither are they coming.”

Hamlet: “He that plays the king shall be welcome.  What players are they?”

Rosencrantz: “The tragedians of the city.”

Guildenstern: “There are the players.”

Hamlet: “Gentlemen, you are welcome to Elsinore.  But my uncle-father and aunt-mother are deceived”

Guildenstern: “In what, my dear lord?”

Hamlet: “I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw.”

Enter Polonius

Polonius: “My lord, I have news to tell you.  The actors have come hither.  The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable or poem unlimited.”

Hamlet: “You are welcome, masters.  I am glad to see thee.  We’ll have a speech straight.  Come, give us a taste of your quality; come, a passionate speech.”

1 Player: “What speech, my good lord?”

Hamlet: “I heard thee speak me a speech once, where you speak of Priam’s slaughter.  If it live in your memory proceed you.”

1 Player: “Anon he finds him striking too short for Greeks; his antique sword, rebellious to his arm, lies where it falls.  Unequal matched , Pyrrhus at Priam drives, in rage strikes wide; the unnerved father falls.  Pyrrhus’ bleeding sword now falls on Priam.”

Hamlet: “Come to Hecuba.”

1 Player: “When she saw Pyrrhus make malicious sport in mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs.  The instant burst of clamour that she made would have made milch the burning eyes of heaven.”

Polonius: “Look, he has tears in his eyes.”

Hamlet: “Tis well; I’ll have thee speak out the rest of this soon.  We’ll hear a play tomorrow.  Can you play ‘The Murder of Gonzago.”

1 Player: “Ay, my lord.”

Hamlet: “You could, for a need,  study a speech of some dozen or sixteen lines which I would set down and insert in it, could you not?”

1 Player: “I, my lord.”

Hamlet: “My good friends.  You are welcome to Elsinore.”

Exit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Hamlet: “No I am alone.  O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!  Is it not monstrous that this player here but in a fiction, in a dream of passion, could force tears in his eyes, a broken voice… and all for nothing!  For Hecuba!  What is Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba, that he should weep for her?  What would he do, if he had the motive  and the cue for passion that I have?  He would drown the stage with tears, and cleave the general ear with horrid speech; make mad the guilty, and appal the free, confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed the very faculties of eyes and ears.  Yet I, a dull and muddy mettled rascal, can say nothing; no, not for a king whose most dear life a damned defeat was made.  Am I a coward?  It cannot be but I am pigeon-livered and lack gall to make oppression bitter.  Bloody, baudy villain!  Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!  O, vengeance!  Why, what an ass am I!  This is most brave, that I, the son of a dear father murdered, prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, a scullion!  Fie upon it.  Hum – I have heard that guilty creatures, sitting at a play, have by the very cunning of the scene been struck so to the soul that presently they have proclaimed  their malefactions; for murder, although it have no tongue, will speak with most miraculous organ.  I’ll have these players play something like the murder of my father before mine uncle.  I’ll observe his looks;  The spirit that I have seen may be a devil; and the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape; The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”

Analysis

Scene ii is a chunky 600 lines long.  It is the longest scene in the play and includes significant thematic revelations.  The arrival of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern suggests the growing concern over Hamlet’s malaise and discontent, as they were sent for by the king.  The Danish Ambassadors return with news from Norway.  The aged Norwegian King has ensured that Fortinbras will not invade Norway but rather requests from Claudius that his army be permitted to cross Denmark on way to making war against Poland.  This is significant, as Fortinbras’ father was murdered by Hamlet’s father, the King.  Fortinbras is yet another example, as we shall see in Laertes soon, of a son who seeks active revenge for the demise of his father, in contrast to Hamlet, who only finds words, as action eludes him.  Polonius thinks that the problem with Hamlet is his  love of Ophelia, as she has been ordered by Polonius not to speak with him.  He concocts a plan that he and the king will hide behind a curtain and permit Hamlet access to Ophelia so that they can listen to him and see that his madness is a product of this withheld love.  When Hamlet approaches them while reading a book Polonius speaks to him, and he does indeed seem insane, mistaking Polonius for a fish-monger.  But his apparent lunacy is barbed with meaning and Polonius concludes that there is method in his madness. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern meet Hamlet and he soon determines that they have been sent for by the king.  The players arrive and Hamlet has them perform a scene with Priam being slaughtered in the Trojan War and he is deeply moved by the actor tearing up over Priam’s wife Hecuba witnessing her husband’s dismemberment.  He tortures himself watching the actor get that excited by a pure fiction, when he, in reality, is reduced to merely using words.  He further arranges for them to perform an excerpt from a play called The Murder of Gonzago, within which he will re-enact the murder of his father by his uncle and thereby trap his uncle into revealing his guilt by his reaction.  The real question in this scene is whether Hamlet is truly mad or merely acting so, as he claims.  He is clearly and deeply disturbed, to be sure, and, upon seeing his supposed father’s ghost, he is either doing an excellent job of feigning madness or else he is, indeed, mad.  Yet he is intelligent enough in his words to suggest that perhaps he is simply acting mad.  He may be riding the very edge of madness, dropping in and out as we observe him.  When the players arrival the notion of acting develops further.  Hamlet may be acting throughout much of the play and he will use the actors to catch the conscience of the king.  Acting and the stage were obviously near and dear to Will Shakespeare.  Hamlet, the actor, will instruct the players on the finest techniques of their very own acting profession in an attempt to, as realistically as possible, trap his uncle as a part of the performance.  All the world’s a stage, indeed.  

Act III

The King sends for two old school chums of Hamlet’s in order to determine the nature of his distraction.  The King and Polonius conceal themselves in order to overhear Hamlet speak with Ophelia.  However, before Ophelia arrives Hamlet delivers the most famous solilique ever delivered in the annals of world literature, about whether ‘tis best to live or to take one’s own life.  Only then does Hamlet encounter Ophelia and he is overbearingly harsh with her.  Theatrical Players arrive and Hamlet is extremely animated about his idea to have them present a certain piece before the court, which he hopes will ‘catch the conscience of the King’.  In fact, the King responds as Hamlet hopes and now appears as guilty as the ghost had declared.  Hamlet approaches the King’s room intending to kill him but does not follow through because the King is praying and Hamlet does not want to send his soul to heaven.  Finally, Hamlet visits his mother’s room and is hard on her, condemning her relationship with his murderous uncle and insisting she not remain intimately connected to him.  He thinks he hears the King behind an arras in his mother’s room but instead kills the meddling Polonius.  

Scene i

Elsinore Castle

King: “And can you by no drift of conference get from him why he puts on this confusion, grating so harshly all his days of quiet with turbulent and dangerous lunacy.”

Rosencrantz: “He does confess that he feels himself distracted, but from what cause he will by no means speak.”

Guildenstern: “With a crafty madness he keeps aloof.”

Exit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

King: “Sweet Gertrude, we have sent for Hamlet, that he may here affront Ophelia.  Her father and myself will so bestow ourselves that, seeing unseen, we may of their encounter frankly judge if it be the affliction of his love or no that thus he suffers for.”

Queen: “For your part, Ophelia, I do wish that your good beauties be the happy cause of Hamlet’s wildness.”

Polonius: “Ophelia, walk you here.  We will bestow ourselves.”

                 “I hear him coming; let’s withdraw, my lord.”

Hamlet: “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.  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.  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 despised love , the law’s delay, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, when he himself might his quietus make with a bare bodkin?  Who would these 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 to 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 over 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, the fair Ophelia – Nymph.”

Ophelia: “My lord, I have some remembrances of yours that I have longed to re-deliver.  I pray you now receive them.”

Hamlet: “No, not I; I never gave you aught.”

Ophelia: “My honoured lord, you know right well you did, and with them words of so sweet breath composed as made the things more rich; take these again; for to the noble mind rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.  There, my lord.”

Hamlet: “Ha, Ha!  Are you honest?”

Ophelia: “My lord?”

Hamlet: “Are you fair?”

Ophelia: “What means your lordship?”

Hamlet: “Ay, truly the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness.  I did love you once.”

Ophelia: “Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.”

Hamlet: “You should not have believed me.  I loved you not.”

Ophelia: “I was the more deceived.”

Hamlet: “Get thee to a nunnery.  Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?  I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not bourne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in.  We are arrant knaves, all; believe none of us.  Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where’s your father?”

Ophelia: “At home, my lord.”

Hamlet: “Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in his own house.  Farewell.”

Ophelia: “O, help him, you sweet heavens!”

Hamlet: “If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow.  Get thee to a nunnery, go, farewell.  Or if thou wilt needs marry, marry a foul; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.  To a nunnery, go; and quickly too.  Farewell.”

Ophelia: “O, heavenly powers, rescue him!”

Hamlet: “I say we will have no more marriage: those that are married already, all but one, shall live; the rest shall keep as they are.  To a nunnery go.

Exit Hamlet

Ophelia: “O, what a noble mind is here overthrown.  And I now see that noble and most sovereign reason out of time and harsh.  O, woe is me to have seen what I have seen, to see what I see.”

Enter King and Polonius

King: “Love!  His affections do not that way tend; nor what he spoke was not like madness.  There is something in his soul over which his melancholy sits on brood.  I have in quick determination thus set it down: he shall with speed to England for the demand of our neglected tribute.  .  Happily the sea and countries different shall expel this something settled matter in his heart.  What think you on it?”

Polonius: “It shall do well.  But yet I do believe his grief sprung from neglected love.  After the play let his queen mother all alone entreat him to show his grief, and I’ll be placed in the ear of their conference.”

King: “It shall be so: madness in great ones must not unwatched go.”

Analysis

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have no real answers for the king and queen, except to say that ‘with a crafty madness, does he keep aloof.’  However, they do inform the royal couple of Hamlet’s enthusiasm over the arrival of the players and the king replies that he will certainly attend the evening’s production.  The king then announces to the queen the plot that he and Polonius have concocted to so bestow themselves unseen in order to spy on Hamlet and thus determine if Polonius is right about his affliction being related to his love of Ophelia.  Several times throughout the play Polonius attempts his devious hiding and spying as a means for ascertaining Hamlet’s state of mind.  He and the king will overhear the ‘To Be Or Not To Be’ solilique.

This is the most famous passage, spoken by the most famous character in the most famous play that was ever written by the most famous author of all time.  It starts with four different words used in a sentence of six words in length.  All four words are single syllables.  Three of them have only two letter each.  The fourth has three letters.  A child knows all four words by the time they are two years old.  The language could not possibly be simpler.  Yet the expression is as profound as any ever uttered.  To be or not to be.  Indeed, that is the question.  This is a solilique about life or death and which is the better option.  The entire issue is peeled open in these four different simple little words: To be or not to be.  We must first consider the several shocks that have led Hamlet to this speech.  First there was the death of his dear father.  Second was the hasty marriage of his mother to his uncle.  Next, his father’s ghost has appeared to him.  Then, as if that were not all enough, he learns from said ghost of father that his death was the result of having been murdered by the same uncle who has married his mother.  We also know that, according to her father’s dictate, Ophelia has suddenly withheld herself and her love entirely from Hamlet.   We would also be wise to consider that Hamlet, Fortinbras and Shakespeare himself all lost their fathers just before this play commences.  Shakespeare also recently lost his only son.

So let’s proceed through the solilique logically, line by line.  Having established at the outset that ‘TO BE OR NOT TO BE’ is essentially THE QUESTION, Hamlet enquires further: ‘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’.  That is merely a lengthier way of asking ‘to be or not to be’.  Do we simply suffer our way through the ‘SLINGS AND ARROWS OF OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE’ this life presents us with or do we TAKE UP ARMS and kill ourselves?  That remains the question.  Next, Hamlet begins to examine what the consequence of killing ourselves might be: ‘TO DIE.  TO SLEEP’.  And with such sleep we might just be done with ‘THE HEART-ACHE AND THE THOUSAND NATURAL SHOCKS THAT FLESH IS HEIR TO’.  Sounds pretty promising.  In fact ‘TIS A CONSUMMATION DEVOUTLY TO BE WISHED.  TO DIE, TO SLEEP’.  Who does not love a good sleep?  If that is all death is then we might indeed devoutly wish for it.  ‘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.  A good sleep is great… but what if we dream?  Who can say what dreams might come!  That is surely enough to give us pause.  We certainly cannot control our dreams.  Earlier in the play Hamlet said that he ‘could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself a king of infinite space, where it not that he has bad dreams.”  The afterlife could well be a sleep full of horrible dreams.  We just don’t know.  But it certainly must give us pause before acting.  ‘THERE’S THE RESPECT THAT MAKES CALAMITY OF SO LONG A LIFE’.  What a calamitous life we must continue to endure with respect to those bad dreams we might experience if we killed ourselves.  ‘FOR WHO WOULD BEAR THE WHIPS AND SCORNS OF TIME, THE OPPRESSOR’S WRONG, THE PROUD MAN’S CONTUMELY (contemptuous language), THE PANGS OF DESPISED LOVE, THE LAW’S DELAY, THE INSOLENCE OF OFFICE, AND THE SPURNS THAT PATIENT MERIT OF THE UNWORTHY TAKES, WHEN HE HIMSELF MIGHT HIS QUIETUS (end) MAKE WITH A BARE BODKIN (an unsheathed dagger)?  WHO WOULD THESE FARDELS (burdens) BEAR, TO GRUNT AND SWEAT UNDER A WEARY LIFE, BUT THAT THE DREAD OF SOMETHING AFTER DEATH – THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY, FROM WHOSE BOURNE NO TRAVELLOR RETURNS – IT PUZZLES THE WILL, AND MAKES US RATHER BEAR THOSE ILLS WE HAVE THAN TO FLY TO OTHERS THAT WE KNOW NOT OF?’  That seems a mouthful but merely suggests that considering all of the trials and tribulations of this world, who would bear it but for the fear of what might be worse after death, a place we know nothing about.  This fear of the unknown, beyond our death, makes us bear the trauma of this life rather than fly to something we know nothing about.  We lack the courage to face the unknown and therefore we endure the troubles of this life.  ‘THUS CONSCIENCE DOES MAKE COWARDS OF US ALL.’  By conscience Shakespeare is referring to our thinking.  In Act II Hamlet states that ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’.  We cannot easily act in this life because we think upon things so much that our thoughts frighten us into a state of indecision and paralysis.  Our premature death requires action on our part, the act of killing ourselves, but our thinking prevents action and thus makes cowards of us all.  To get there (death) requires action, which thinking makes impossible, so the proposition becomes circular and hopeless.  We have a lack of power in this life, subjected as we are to a whole slew of endless injustices and indignities.  Our suicide would be an empowering act, desirable as an escape from the slings and arrows, the whips and scorns, the natural shocks, the scorn, the despised love etc., but for the thinking, which creates a fear of what might be worse, awaiting us in death.  No one has ever returned from death to tell us what we might expect.  ‘THUS THE NATIVE HUE OF RESOLUTION IS SICKLIED OVER WITH THE PALE CAST OF THOUGHT, AND ENTERPRIZES OF GREAT PITCH  AND MOMENT, WITH THIS REGARD, THEIR CURRENTS TURN AWRY AND LOSE THE NAME OF ACTION’.  So our resolution is destroyed by our frightful thoughts and any action we may have considered in the face of those thoughts lose the name of action.  We think our way into an inability to act.  Hamlet, the great Renaissance philosopher-thinker, is exactly in this state of conscience inspired inactivity.  He is trapped in his own mind and can no more kill himself than he can kill his uncle and avenge his father’s death.  His inability to take action leaves him moody, melancholic and bordering on madness.  His life has become repugnant to him, as he has sworn to the ghost that he would revenge his father’s murder.  Failure to act becomes Hamlet’s fatal flaw.  Yet Hamlet never uses the words I or me in this famous passage.  It is an understanding for all of us to consider, audience and players alike.  In Act I Hamlet mourns the fact ‘that the Everlasting (God) had not fixed his canon against self-slaughter.’  In other words, too bad that God has made it a sin to commit suicide, as Hamlet is prevented from killing himself both religiously and philosophically.  

Immediately after this solilique, Hamlet encounters Ophelia.  The king and Polonius are secretly watching and listening in.  She wishes to return certain ‘remembrances’ of his but he insists he never gave her anything.  He asks her if she is fair and honest and wanes philosophical about honesty and beauty.  Then he admits that he did love her once but then claims in the next breath that he never did.  Finally he launches into an impassioned  suggestion that she get herself to a nunnery, rather than be a breeder of sinners, indicating that he himself is the most errant of knaves. A significant turning point is when he asks where her father is, the implication being that he knows darn well that the meddler is right there listening to them.  When she says that her father is at home he explodes with a vengeance.  He may have just learned that Ophelia is in league with her father and his uncle.  Between this and his mother’s marriage to his uncle, he has lost his faith in women: “Marry a fool, for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them!  To a nunnery, go, and quickly!”  Ophelia believes that he is mad: “O, what a noble mind is here overthrown… woe is me to have seen  what I have seen, to see what I see.”  The king is convinced that his condition has nothing to do with Ophelia and determines to have him sent to England.  Polonius is not convinced and plans his next opportunity to once again hide behind an arras, this time in Hamlet’s mother’s room. It will be his final scene.

Act III

Scene ii

Elsinore Castle

Hamlet: “Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue; nor, do not saw the air too much with your hands thus. 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.  I would have such a fellow whipped.  Pray you avoid it.”

1 Player: “I warrant your honour.”

Hamlet: “Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor.  Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you over-step not the modesty of nature; hold, as it were, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature.  O there be players who imitate humanity abominably.”

1 Player: “I hope we have reformed that, sir.”

Hamlet: “O, reform it altogether.  And let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them.  Go, make you ready.”

Enter Polonius

Hamlet: “How now, my lord!  Will the king hear this piece of work?”

Polonius: “And the queen too, and presently.”

Hamlet: “Bid the players make haste.  Ho, Horatio!”

Exit Polonius

Horatio: “Here, sweet lord, at your service.”

Hamlet: “Horatio, thou art as just a man as ever my conversation coped withal.”

Horatio: “O, my dear lord.”

Hamlet: “Nay, do no think I flatter… Give me that man who is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him in my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of hearts, as I do thee.  There is a play tonight before the king; One scene of it comes near the circumstance which I have told thee of my father’s death.  I pray thee, when thou seest that act afoot, observe my uncle.  If his occulted guilt does not itself unkennel in one speech, it is a damned ghost  that we have seen, and my imaginations are foul.  Give him heedful note; For I mine eyes will rivet to his face; after, we will both our judgements join in censure of his seeming.”

Horatio: “Well, my lord.”

Enter King, Queen, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and others

King: “How fares our cousin Hamlet?”

Hamlet: “Excellent.”

               (to Polonius) “My lord, you played once in the university, you say?”

Polonius: “That did I, my lord, and was accounted a good actor.”

Hamlet: “What did you enact?”

Polonius: “I did enact Julius Caesar; I was killed in the capitol; Brutus killed me.”

Hamlet: “It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there.  Be the players ready?”

Rosencrantz: “Ay, my lord.”

Queen: “Come hither, my dear Hamlet, sit by me.”

Hamlet: “No, good mother, here is metal more attractive.” (sits by Ophelia)

               “Lady, shall I lay in your lap?” (to Ophelia)

Ophelia: “No, my lord.”

Hamlet: “I mean, my head upon your lap. Did you think I meant country matters?”

Ophelia: “I think nothing, my lord.”

Hamlet: “That’s a fair thought to lie between maid’s legs.”

Ophelia: “You are merry, my lord.”

Hamlet: “O God, what should a man do but be merry?  Look you how cheerfully my mother looks, and my father died within two hours.”

Ophelia: “Nay, tis twice two months, my lord.”

Hamlet: “So long? Nay then, let the devil wear black.  O heavens!  Died Two months ago and not forgotten yet.”

Trumpets sound.  The dumb show begins

Enter a king and a queen, very lovingly; the queen embraces him and he her.  He lies down on a bank of flowers; she, seeing him asleep, leaves him.  Anon comes in a fellow, takes off his crown, kisses it, pours poison in the sleeper’s ears, and leaves him.  The queen returns and finds the king dead.  The poisoner comes in again, seeming to console with her.  The poisoner woos the queen; she in the end accepts his love.

Ophelia: “What means this, my lord?”

Hamlet: “It means mischief.”

Enter the player king and queen

Player King: “Faith, I must leave thee, love, and shortly too.”

Player queen: “O, confound the rest!  Such love must needs be treason in my breast.  In second husband let me be accursed!  None wed the second but who killed the first.  The instances  that second marriage move are base respects of thrift, but none of love.  A second time I kill my husband dead, when second husband kisses me in bed.”

Hamlet: “Madam, how like you this play?”

Queen: “The lady doth protest too much, me thinks.”

King: “Have you heard the argument?  Is there no offence in it?”

Hamlet: “No, no; they do but jest.”

King: “What do you call the play?”

Hamlet: “The Mousetrap.”

               “Begin murderer.  Come; the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.”

Lucianus: “Thoughts black, hands apt, drugs fit, and time agreeing; confederate season, else no creature seeing; thou mixture rank, of midnight weeds collected, thrice blasted, thrice infected, wholesome life usurps immediately.” (pours the poison in his ear)

Hamlet: “He poisons him in the garden.  His name is Gonzago.  You shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzago’s wife.”

Ophelia: “The king rises.”

Queen: “How fares my lord?”

King: “Give me light!  Away!”

Polonius: “Lights, lights, lights.”

Exit all but Hamlet and Horatio

Hamlet: “O good Horatio, I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound.  Didst perceive?”

Horatio: “Very well, my lord.”

Hamlet: “Upon the talking of the poisoning.”

Horatio: “I did very well note him.”

Hamlet: “Ah ha!  Come, some music.”

Enter Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Guildenstern: “Good my lord, vouchsafe me a word with you.  The king, sir.”

Hamlet: “Ay, sir, what of him?”

Guildenstern: “He is in his retirement, marvellous distempered with choler.  The queen, your mother, is in most great affliction of spirit, hath sent me to you.”

Rosencrantz: “She desires to speak with you.  My lord, what is your cause of distemper?”

Hamlet: “O, the recorder.  Let me see one.  Will you play upon this pipe?  Why do you go about to recover the wind of me?” 

Guidenstern: “O my lord, if my duty be too bold, my love is too unmannerly.”

Hamlet: “Will you play upon this pipe?”

Guildenstern: “My lord, I cannot.”

Hamlet: “I do beseech you.”

Guildenstern: “I know no touch of it, my lord.”

Hamlet: “It is as easy as lying.”

Guildenstern: “But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony.  I have not the skill.”

Hamlet: “Why look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me!  You would play upon me; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery.  Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?

Enter Polonius

Polonius: “My lord, the queen wold speak with you, and presently.”

Hamlet: “I will come by and by.”

Polonius: “I will say so.”

Hamlet: “’By and by’ is easily said.”

Exit all but Hamlet

Hamlet: “Tis now the very witching hour 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.  Soft!  Now to my mother.  Oh heart, lose not thy nature; Let me be cruel, not unnatural; I will speak daggers to her, but use none.  My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites.”

Analysis

From throughout all of the Shakespeare plays here is the scene where we see the Bard himself speaking most unabashedly.  He assumes the role of Hamlet, which is likely the character most associated with who we know William Shakespeare to be: intelligent, philosophical and profoundly witty.  Hamlet is addressing the players on the subject of acting, of all things, as though he is a playwright or actor himself.  We have already seen the lead player demonstrate his considerable ability earlier in the scene with Priam’s death before Hecuba.  And yet here, the lead actor listens to Hamlet as an actor would a playwright or director.  Shakespeare, as Hamlet, implores the lead actor to ‘speak the speech as I pronounced it to you… trippingly on the tongue… do not saw the air too much with your hands…beget a temperance that may give it smoothness… be not too tame… suit the action to the word and the word to the action… overstep not the modesty of nature… hold the mirror up to nature….”  Further, he claims to “be offended to the soul” by actors who might “tear a passion to tatters”, claiming that he would have such a fellow whipped!  Great stuff from the Bard on the profession he knew best.  Along with Prospero releasing his muse in the final play attributed to him alone, The Tempest, this is Shakespeare’s most obvious voice being unleashed in his own written work, at least beyond the sonnets.  Hamlet seems something of an expert on acting.  What we know is that he is acting throughout much of this play.  Interesting that Shakespeare has him lecture the actors on their very own profession.  This certainly speaks volumes on Hamlet the actor and Shakespeare the playwright, brought together in this scene of the play within the play.  There is a focus on Hamlet as actor in both senses of the word.  He is very clearly familiar with the theatricality of the acting profession in both his delivery of advice to the players and his assuming to be mad to members of the court and he is doing his very best to be a man of action, with somewhat less success. 

Hamlet has utter respect and admiration for his dear friend, Horatio.  He is clear headed and rational when speaking to Horatio, with no signs whatsoever of madness.  It is only after the king arrives to see the play that Hamlet feigns madness once again.  When his uncle asks him how he is Hamlet’s response is “Excellent, in faith; of the chameleon’s dish.  I eat the air, promised crammed; you cannot feed capons so.”  The king’s only response is “I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet.  He continues his persona of madness with his crude remarks to Ophelia throughout the scene.  

Hamlet is very excited to trap the king into demonstrating his guilt upon watching the scene play out of the murder of a king by a relative who pours poison into the king’s ear.  He and Horatio are watching King Claudius closely for his reaction, so they can confirm the validity of the ghost.  In the previous scene it was Claudius who attempted to trap Hamlet by hiding and spying on Hamlet to ascertain the reason for his apparent madness.  In fact, Claudius’ response to the play within a play is quite dramatic indeed, except, that it is the nephew who kills his uncle.  So is Claudius unnerved because of the suggestion that his nephew, Hamlet, is plotting his death or is he, in fact guilty for murdering Hamlet’s father?  Hamlet is very excited after the king leaves the performance, believing that his reaction is proof enough of his guilt. “O good Horatio, I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound.”

When Rosencrantz asks Hamlet directly what the cause of his distemper is, Hamlet lets Guildenstern have it, asking him to play the recorder, and, when Guildenstern claims he cannot play the recorder, Hamlet asks if he thinks he is as easily played as a recorder.  He has had it with these former friends in the service of the king and queen.  They have sealed their own fate.  

Hamlet ends this scene in a final solilique about being called to see his mother.  “Let me be cruel but not unnatural. I will speak daggers to her, but use none.”  The ghost has earlier declared to him that he should “taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive against thy mother.  Leave her to heaven.”  So Hamlet may plan to kill his uncle, the king, but he must leave the fate of his mother to God.  He must be cruel to be kind.

Act III

Scene iii

Elsinore Castle

Enter King, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

King: “I like him not; nor stands it safe with us to let his madness range.  He to England shall along with you.”

Rosencrantz: “Never alone did the king sigh, but with a general groan.”

King: “Arm you, I pray you, to this speedy voyage.”

Rosencrantz: “We will haste.”

Exit Rosencrantz and Guildenstern

Polonius: “My lord, he is going to his mother’s closet.  Behind the arras I will convey myself to hear the process.  I will call upon you ere you go to bed and tell you what I know.” 

King: “Thanks, dear my lord.”

Exit Polonius

King: “O my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon it – a brother’s murder!  Pray can I not though inclination be as sharp as will.  My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent.  Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens to wash it white as snow?  What sort of prayer can serve my turn?  ‘Forgive me my foul murder!’  That cannot be since I am still possessed of those effects for which I did the murder – my crown, mine own ambition and my queen.  May one be pardoned and retain the offence?  O wretched state!  O bosom black as death!  Help angels.  Bow, stubborn knees; and heart, with strings of steel.”

He kneels

Enter Hamlet

Hamlet: “Now might I do it pat, now he is praying; and now I’ll do it – and so he goes to heaven, and so am I revenged.  A villain kills my father, and for that, I, his sole son, do this same villain send to heaven.  To take him in the purging of his soul, when he is fit and seasoned for his passage?  No.  Up, sword. When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage; or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed; at game, a swearing, or about some act that has no relish of salvation in it – then trip him, that his heals may kick at heaven, and that his soul may be as damned and black as hell, whereto it goes.”

King: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.  Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

Analysis

After the play within the play King Claudius has decided that Hamlet is simply too dangerous and unpredictable to have around the castle, so he determines that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern should accompany him to England.

Hamlet has resolved, since the play, that Claudius is, in fact, guilty of the crime of murdering his father.  So while the king is praying Hamlet comes up behind him but decides he cannot kill him while he prays, or his soul will ascend to heaven.  This would be, to Hamlet, an inadequate revenge and so it seems that Hamlet is suddenly not satisfied to rid his uncle of this temporal realm but also wants to ensure his whereabouts in the next world as well.  He won’t just kill his body but wants to destroy his soul.  His father was killed by Claudius without the opportunity to amend his soul and hence wanders in an agonizing afterlife.  The idea of sending Claudius to heaven is not acceptable to Hamlet.  He will wait for what he considers a better opportunity to damn both body and soul.  His philosophical quandary just plunged deeper.  He now has one more reason why he simply cannot act.  Or perhaps he simply cannot kill another soul.

Meanwhile Claudius wants desperately to cleanse himself of the crime he admits privately to having committed: “My offence is rank, it smells to heaven… a brother’s murder.”  He cannot reasonably pray for forgiveness while he possesses his crown, his ambition and his queen.  He asks the angels for help and instructs his knees to bow just as Hamlet arrives, unable to act.

Act III

Scene iv

The Queen’s Room

Enter the Queen and Polonius

Polonius: “I’ll silence me here.”

Hamlet: “Mother, mother, mother!”

Queen: “Withdraw, I hear him coming.”

Enter Hamlet

Hamlet: “Now mother, what’s the matter?”

Queen: “Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.”

Hamlet: “Mother, you have my father much offended.”

Queen: “Why, how now, Hamlet.  Have you forgotten me?”

Hamlet: “No, not so.  You are the Queen, your husband’s brother’s wife; and – would it were not so! – you are my mother.  Come, come, and sit you down; you shall not budge.  You go not until I set you up a glass where you may see the inmost part of you.”

Queen: “What wilt thou do?  Thou wilt not murder me?  Help!  Help!  Ho!”

Polonius: (from behind the arras) “What! Ho, help, help, help!”

Hamlet: (drawing his sword) “How now!  A rat?”

               (kills Polonius through the curtain)

Polonius: “O, I am slain!”

Queen: “O me, what hast thou done?”

Hamlet: “Nay, I know not; Is it the King?”

Queen: “O, what a rash and bloody deed is this!”

Hamlet: “A bloody deed! – almost as bad, good mother, as to kill a king and marry with his brother.”

Queen: “As kill a king?”

Hamlet: Ay, lady, it was my word.”

Hamlet parts the arras and sees Polonius dead.

Hamlet: “Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!  I took thee for thy better. Peace, mother, sit you down, and let me wring your heart; for so I shall, if it be made of penetrable stuff.”

Queen: “What have I done that thou dar’st wag thy tongue in noise so rude against me?”

Hamlet: “Such an act that blurs the grace and blush of modesty; calls virtue hypocrite; takes off the rose from the fair forehead of an innocent love, and sets a blister there; makes marriage-vows as false as dicers’ oaths.”

Queen: “Ay me, what act?”

Hamlet: “Look here upon this picture and upon this, two brothers.  See what a grace was seated on this brow; Hyperion’s curls the front of Jove himself; an eye like Mars, a station like the herald Mercury.  This was your husband.  Look you now what follows: Here is your husband, like a mildew’d ear.  Have you eyes?  You cannot call it love; for at your age the heyday in the blood is tame and waits upon the judgment; and what judgment would step from this to this?  Sense, sure, you have, but sure that sense is apoplex’d; for madness would not err, to serve in such a difference.  O shame!  Where is thy blush?”

Queen: “O Hamlet, speak no more!  Thou turn’st my eye into my very soul; and there I see such black and grained spots as will not leave their tinct.”

Hamlet: Nay, but to live in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, making love over the nasty sty!”

Queen: “O, speak to me no more!  These words like daggers enter in my ears; no more, sweet Hamlet.”

Hamlet: “A murderer and a villain!  A slave that is not twentieth part the tithe of your precedent lord; a vice of kings.”

Queen: “No more.”

Enter the ghost

Hamlet: “What would your gracious figure?”

Queen: “Alas, he’s mad!”

Hamlet: “Do you not come to your tardy son to chide, that, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by the important acting of your dread command?  O, say!”

Ghost: “Do not forget; this visitation is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.  But look, amazement on thy mother sits.  O, step between her and her fighting soul!  Speak to her, Hamlet.”

Hamlet: “How is it with you, lady?”

Queen: “Alas, how is it with you; that you do bend your eye on vacancy; and with the incorporal air do hold discourse?  O, gentle son, upon the heat and flame of thy distemper sprinkle cool patience!  Whereon do you look?”

Hamlet: “On him, on him!  Do you see nothing there?”

Queen: “Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.”

Hamlet: “Nor did you nothing hear?”

Queen: “No, nothing but ourselves.”

Hamlet: “Why, look you there.  Look how it steals away, my father, in the habit as he lived.”

Queen: “This is the very coinage of your brain.”

Hamlet: “It is not madness that I uttered.  Mother, for love of grace, lay not that flattering unction to your soul, that not your trespass but my madness speaks. Confess yourself to heaven: repent what’s past; avoid what is to come; and do not spread the compost on the weeds, to make them ranker.”

Queen: “O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.”

Hamlet: “O, throw away the worser part of it, and live the purer with the other half.  Goodnight – but go not to my uncle’s bed; assume a virtue, if you have it not.  Refrain tonight; and that shall lend a kind of easiness to the next abstinence; the next more easy.  Good night.  I must be cruel only to be kind.  One more word, good lady.”

Queen: “What shall I do?”

Hamlet: “By no means let the bloated king tempt you again to bed; pinch wanton on your cheek: call you his mouse; make you to ravel all this matter out, that I essentially am not in madness, but mad in craft.”

Queen: “Be thou assured , if words be made of breath and breath of life, I have no life to breathe what thou hast said to me.”

Hamlet: “I must to England; do you know that?”

Queen: “Tis so concluded on.”

Hamlet: “There’s letters sealed; and my two school fellows, whom I will trust as I will adders fang’d – they bear the mandate; they must marshal me to knavery.  O, tis most sweet when in one line two crafts directly meet.  This man shall set me packing.  I’ll lug the guts into the neighbouring room.  Mother, good night.  Indeed, this counsellor is now most still, most secret, and most grave, who was in life a foolish prating knave.  Come, sir, to draw toward an end with you.  Good night, mother.”

Hamlet tugs Polonius’ body away

Analysis

What is Hamlet hoping to accomplish in this encounter with his mother?  Is he seeking additional confirmation of his uncle’s guilt?  Does he want to establish his mother’s level of complicity is his uncle’s crime?  Or would he merely like to win his mother over to his side once he has attained the revenge he seeks?  What he actually does is encourage his mother to repent her union with his uncle and insist that she forego future intimacy with him.  This scene has led many to connect Hamlet to Freud’s Oedipus Complex, a full 300 years prior to its conception in 1899.  Freud himself referred to Hamlet in the section of ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ that directly introduces the very idea of the Oedipus Complex, in which a young man so unconsciously desires his mother that he slays his father in order to sexually enjoy his mother.  Hamlet does not sleep with his mother but may be the first modern literary character to demonstrate the unconscious desire to remove his mother’s husband from her carnal desires.  Freud claimed Hamlet was the first quintessential fictional  persona complete with a repressed sexual desire for his mother.  The Queen herself is at first defensive and accusatory, next afraid for her very life, and then shocked at Hamlet’s murder of Polonius, disbelieving of Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost, and finally she is contrite and even willing to help him.  He weakens her further and further into a state of acceptance and compliance.  This says much about the character and nature of the Queen, who turned to Claudius so soon after her husband’s death and adapts quickly to Hamlet’s point of view in this scene, although she may merely be placating Hamlet, which explains why she immediately reports his behaviour to Claudius after promising not to do so.  The queen has a propensity to be dominated by powerful men, who seem to direct her actions and instruct her on what to think and how to feel.   This would certainly link her thematically to Ophelia, who died in submission to Hamlet’s cruelty.   ‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ indeed.  Is it possible that the Queen was complicit in Claudius’ murder of King Hamlet?  Not likely, given her degree of shock at Hamlet’s suggestions of murder afoot and the ghosts suggestion that he leave her be for heaven to render judgement.

Act IV

Following the play within a play the King decides that Hamlet has to go and arranges to send him, along with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to England and his death.  Before he departs Hamlet finally informs the King of Polonius’ rotting whereabouts.  On his way to his ship Hamlet is deeply moved by a battle to be fought between Norway and Poland over a useless plot of land over which twenty thousand men are poised to lose their lives.  Ophelia is found to have been rendered thoroughly mad and Laertes returns home furious and intent on revenge for his father’s murder.   We learn that Hamlet has survived a pirate attack and will return to Elsinore.  Meanwhile, the King and Laertes are plotting their revenge against Hamlet.  Act V will be full, indeed!

Act IV

Scene i

Elsinore Castle

King: “There’s matter in these sighs, these profound heaves.  You must translate; ‘tis fit we understand them.  Where is your son?”

Queen: “Ah, my own lord, what I have seen tonight!”

King: “What, Gertrude?  How does Hamlet?”

Queen: “Mad as the sea and wind, when both contend which is the mightier.  In his lawless fit, behind the arras hearing something stir, whips out his rapier, cries ‘a rat, a rat!’ and in this brainish apprehension kills the unseen good old man.”

King: “O heavy deed!  It had been so with us had we been there.  His liberty is full of threats to all – to you yourself, to us, to everyone.  Alas, how shall this bloody deed be answered?  It will be laid to us, whose providence should have kept short, restrained,  and out of haunt, this mad young man.  But so much was our love, we would not understand what was most fit.  Where is he gone?”

Queen: “To draw apart the body he hath killed; over whom his very madness shows himself pure: he weeps for what is done.”

King: “O Gertrude, come away!  The sun no sooner shall the mountains touch but we will ship him hence.  Ho, Guildenstern!  Friends, Hamlet in madness hath Polonius slain, and from his mother’s closet hath he dragged him.  Go seek him out, and bring the body into the chapel.  I pray you haste in this.  Come, Gertrude. We’ll call up our wisest friends and let them know both what we mean to do and what’s untimely done.  O, come away!  My soul is full of discord and dismay.”

Analysis

Immediately following her encounter with Hamlet, the Queen divulges the troubling confrontation to the King.  She did promise Hamlet that she would not report that he is not really crazy and to this alone she remains true, exclaiming to Claudius that he is as ‘mad as the sea and the wind, when both contend which is the mightier.’  Her account of their meeting and Hamlet’s rash killing of Polonius deeply troubles the king, who imagines that it might well could have been him behind that arras.  He decides right there that Hamlet will be shipped off to England.  When all is said and done, the Queen turns Hamlet in to the designs of the King.  She has made her bed.

Hamlet is something less the hero following his murder of Polonius.  He and King Claudius now share a significant characteristic: They have each committed a murder and now Laertes and Ophelia have lost a father at Hamlet’s hands, just as Hamlet has lost his by Claudius’ account.

Act IV

Scene ii

Elsinore Castle

Rosencrantz: “What have you done, my lord, with the dead body?”

Hamlet: “Compounded it with dust, whereto ‘tis kin.”

Rosencrantz: “Tell us where ‘tis, that we may take it hence and bear it to the chapel.”

Hamlet: “Do not believe it.”

Rosencrantz: “Believe what?”

Hamlet: “That I can keep your counsel and be demanded of a sponge.”

Rosencrantz: “Take you me for a sponge?”

Hamlet: “Ay, sir: that soaks up the King’s countenance, his rewards, his authorities.  It is but squeezing you and, sponge, you shall be dry again.”

Rosencrantz: “I understand you not, my lord.”

Hamlet: “I am glad of it; a knavish speech sleeps in a foolish ear.”

Analysis

Hamlet makes it clear in this scene that his two school friends are no longer to be trusted.

Act IV

Scene iii

Elsinore Castle

Enter King and attendees

King: “I have sent to seek him, and to find the body.  How dangerous is it that this man goes loose!  Diseases desperate grown by desperate appliance are relieved, or not at all.”

Enter Rosencrantz

Rosencrantz: “Where the dead body is bestowed, my lord, we cannot get from him.”

King: “Bring him before us.”

Enter Hamlet and Guildenstern

King: “Now, Hamlet, where is Polonius?”

Hamlet: “At supper.”

King: “At supper!  Where?”

Hamlet: “Not where he eats, but where he is eaten; a certain convocation of politic worms are even at him.”

King: “Where is Polonius?”

Hamlet: “In heaven; send thither to see; if your messenger find him not there, seek him in the other place yourself.  But, if, indeed, you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.”

King (to attendants): “Go seek him there.”  “Hamlet, this deed, must send thee hence with fiery quickness.  Therefore, prepare thyself; everything is bent for England.”

Hamlet: “For England!”

King: “Ay, Hamlet.”

Hamlet: “Good!”

King: “So it is, if thou knew’st our purposes.”

Hamlet: “Come, for England!  Farewell, dear mother.”

King: “Thy loving father, Hamlet.”

Hamlet: “My mother: father and mother is man and wife; man and wife is one flesh; and so, my mother.  Come, for England.”

Exit all but the king

(aside) “Our sovereign letters congruing to that effect the present death of Hamlet.  Do it, England: for like the hectic in my blood he rages.  Till I know ‘tis done, my joys were never begun.” 

Analysis

The king has reached a whole new level of discomfort around Hamlet since ‘the play within the play’ scene: “How dangerous it is that this man goes loose.”  Hamlet toys with his uncle here by being cheeky about where he has stored the body of Polonius.  It makes him seem as mad as his more hostile behaviours.  He also gets a good shot in to Claudius about how if the king’s messengers cannot find Polonius in heaven then the king himself should seek him out in the ‘other place’.  The king tells Hamlet that he is about to be shipped off to England.  Hamlet responds with unbated enthusiasm, whether or not it is genuine or whether or not he understands that he is being sent to his death.  Interestingly, the king must send Hamlet abroad to his death.  What we have learned is that Hamlet is very popular with Danes and Claudius cannot risk arousing the wrath of the masses.  Hamlet’s father was a famous warrior.  Claudius is clearly a rather calculating politician type, more interested in his own personal agenda than anything else.  Regarding the death of Hamlet, the king says: “Do it, England.  Till I know its done, my joys were never begun.”  Alrighty then…

Act IV

Scene iv

A plain in Denmark

Enter Hamlet and a Norwegian Captain

Hamlet: “Good sir, whose powers are these?”

Captain: “They are of Norway, sir.”

Hamlet: “How purposed sir, I pray you?”

Captain: “Against some part of Poland.”

Hamlet: “Who commands them, sir?”

Captain: “The nephew of old Norway, Fortinbras.”

Hamlet: “Goes it against the main of Poland, sir, or for some frontier?”

Captain: “Truly to speak, we go to gain a little patch of ground that hath in it no profit but the name.  I would not farm it; nor will it yield.”  

Hamlet: “Why, then the Polack never will defend it.”

Captain: “Yes, it is already garrisoned.”

Exit Captain

Hamlet: “What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed?  A beast, no more!  I do not know why yet I live to say ‘this thing’s to do’, since I have cause and will and strength and means to do it.  Examples gross as earth exhort me; witness this army, of such mass and charge, exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death, and danger dare.  How stand I, then, that have a father killed, a mother stained, excitements of my reason and my blood, and let all sleep, while to my shame I see the imminent death of twenty thousand men, that, for a fantasy and trick of fame, go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot which is not tomb enough to hide the slain?  O, from this time forth my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!”

Analysis

As Hamlet is being accompanied to England he encounters a Norwegian army crossing Denmark on the way to fight the Poles.  He is informed by a captain that two large armies will clash over a small piece of land so useless it can’t even be farmed.  Twenty thousand men may likely die in this futile endeavor.  This leads Hamlet to ponder his own inactivity in the face of his father’s demand for revenge when all of these men are willing to die for next to nothing.  This scene harkens back to when the player actually cried while re-enacting Hecuba witnessing the slaughter of her dear Priam by Pyrrhus, during the Trojan Wars.  He is inspired to say that ‘from this time forth, my thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth.’  Curious that he does not state that his actions be bloody, but rather merely his thoughts.

Act IV

Scene v

Elsinore Castle

Queen: “I will not speak with her.”

Gentleman: “She is importunate, indeed distract.  Her mood will needs be pitied.”

Queen: “What would she have?”

Gentleman: “She speaks much of her father, spurns enviously at straws, speaks things in doubt, that carry but half sense.  Her speech is nothing, yet the unshaped use of it doth move the hearers to collection.  Her winks and nods and gestures make one think there might be thought, though nothing sure, yet much unhappily.”

Horatio: “Twere good she were spoken with; for she may strew dangerous conjectures in ill-breeding minds.”

Queen: “Let her come in.”  (aside) “To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is, each toy seems prologue to some great amiss.  So full of artless jealousy is guilt, it spills itself in fearing to be spilt.”

Enter Ophelia, distracted

Ophelia: “Where is the beauteous majesty of Denmark?”

Queen: How now, Ophelia!”

Ophelia: (sings) “He is dead and gone, lady, he is dead and gone; at his head a grass green-turf, at his heels a stone.”

Queen: “Nay, but Ophelia –“

Ophelia: “Pray you mark” (sings) “White his shroud as the mountain snow –“

Enter King

Queen: “Alas, look here, my lord.”

King: “How do you, pretty lady?”

Ophelia: “Well.  Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.”

King: “Pretty Ophelia!”

Ophelia: “I hope all will be well.  We must be patient; but I cannot choose but weep to think they would lay him in the cold ground.  My brother shall know of it.”

King: “Follow her close; give her good watch, I pray you.”

Exit all but King and Queen

King: “O, this is the poison of deep grief; it springs all from her father’s death.  And now behold – O Gertrude, Gertude!  When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions; first her father slain; next, your son gone, and he most violent author of his own just remove.  Poor Ophelia, divided from herself and her fair judgment, without the which we are mere beasts.  Her brother is in secret come from France, with pestilent speeches of his father’s death; O my dear Gertrude, this, like to a murdering piece, in many places gives me superfluous death.”

A noise within

Queen: “Alack, what noise is this?”

King: “Attend!”

Enter gentleman

King: “Let them guard the door.  What is the matter?”

Gentleman: “Save yourself, my lord.  Young Laertes, in a riotous head, overbears your officers.  The rabble call him lord.  They cry ‘Laertes shall be king.”

King: “The doors are broke.”

Enter Laertes, with others, in arms

Laertes: “Where is this king?  O thou vile king, give me my father.”

Queen: “Calmly, good Laertes.”

Laertes: “That drop of blood that’s calm proclaims me bastard.”

King: “What is the cause, Laertes, that thy rebellion looks so giant-like?  Let him go, Gertrude; do not fear our person.  Laertes, why thou art thus incens’d.  Speak, man.”

Laertes: “Where is my father?”

King: “Dead.”

Queen: “But not by him.”

Laertes: “How came he dead?  I’ll not be juggled with.  To hell, allegiance!  Vows, to the blackest devil!  Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit!  I dare damnation.  I’ll be revenged, most thoroughly for my father.”

King: “I am guiltless of your father’s death, and am most sensibly in grief for it.”

A noise within

King: “Let her come in.”

Laertes: “How now!  What noise is that?”  

Enter Ophelia

Laertes: O, heat dry up my brains!  Tears seven times salt burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye!  By heavens, thy madness shall be paid with weight!  Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!  O heavens!  Is it possible a young maid’s wits should be as mortal as an old man’s life?”

Ophelia: (sings) “They bore him barefaced, and in his grave rained many a tear”

                “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance; pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.”

Laertes: “A document in madness – thoughts and remembrances fitted.”

Ophelia: “There’s fennel for you, and columbines.  There’s rue for you; and here’s some for me.  We may call it herb of grace a Sundays.  There’s a daisy.  I would give you some violets, but they’re withered all when my father died.”

Laertes: “Thought and affliction, passion, hell itself, she turns to prettiness.  Do you see this, O God?”

King: “Laertes, I must commune with your grief, or you deny me right.  Make choice of whom your wisest friends you will, and thy shall hear and judge twixt you and me.  If by direct or by collateral hand they find us touched, we will our kingdom give, our crown, our life, and all that we call ours, to you in satisfaction; but if not, be you content to lend your patience to us, and we shall jointly labour with your soul to give it due content.”

Laertes: “Let this be so.”

King: “And where the offence is, let the great axe fall.”

Analysis

The Queen and Horatio observe Ophelia’s madness and we hear news that her brother, Laertes, is arriving incensed.  Polonius’ family has disintegrated.  He is dead, his daughter is mad and his son will seek the revenge for both.  None of them will survive the play.  Laertes arrives and the royal couple attempt to soothe his rage.  Just then, Ophelia arrives, clearly insane and Laertes’ condition plummets further.  The king convinces Laertes that he too grieves for Polonius and that together they will seek justice, and ‘where the offence is, let the great axe fall.’  As Marcellus declared earlier, something is indeed rotten in the state of Denmark.  We know for certain that Claudius has killed the king and then has married Hamlet’s mother, Hamlet has been sent to his apparent death, Polonius has been murdered, Ophelia is insane, the people are murmuring of rebellion and Laertes, with a rabble, has returned, bursting for revenge.  The Kingdom seems to be on the verge of collapse.  Laertes appears in stark contrast to Hamlet.  He is immediately bent on immediate rebellion and revenge for the death of his dear father.  Hamlet has been philosophizing about his dead father for much of the play, despite his father’s demand for revenge on his murderous and incestuous uncle.  Ophelia’s madness is also contrasted to Hamlet’s, one being feigned for effect, the other genuine and stemming from circumstances beyond her control.  Madness is more and more out in the open by Act IV.  We are one short scene away from unearthing the plot between the King and Laertes, which will settle the score and litter a stage with the entirety of Laertes’ and Hamlet’s families, justice be damned.

Act IV

Scene vi

Elsinore Castle

Horatio: “What are they that would speak with me?”

Attendant: “Sea-faring men, sir; they say they have letters for you.”

Horatio: “Let them come in.  I do not know from what part of the world I should be greeted, if not from Lord Hamlet.”

Sailor: “There’s a letter for you, sir; it came from the ambassador that was bound for England.”

Horatio: (reads) “Horatio, when thou shalt have overlooked this, give these fellows some means to the king: they have letters for him.  Ere we were two days old at sea, a pirate of very warlike appointment gave us chase.  Finding ourselves too slow a sail, we put on a compelled valor; and in the grapple I boarded them.  On the instant they got clear of our ship; so I alone became their prisoner.  They have dealt with me like thieves of mercy; but they knew what they did: I am to do a good turn for them.  Let the king have the letters I have sent; and repair thou to me with as much speed as thou wouldest fly death.  I have words to speak in thine ear will make thee dumb.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern  hold their course for England; of them I have much to tell thee.  Farewell!  He that thou knowest thine, Hamlet. 

Analysis

Horatio learns, in a letter from Hamlet, that he has escaped his fateful rendezvous with England by being taken benevolent prisoner by pirates, who he plans to do right by.  Now we know that Hamlet will be returning to an extremely volatile Denmark.  Next comes the plot and its reckoning.  That’s all that remains.

Act IV

Scene vii

Elsinore Castle

King: “Now must your conscience my acquaintance seal, and you must put me in your heart for friend, that he which hath your noble father slain pursued my life.”

Laertes: “It well appears.  But tell me why you proceeded not against these feats so crimeful and so capital in nature, as by your safety, wisdom, all things else, you mainly were stirred up.”

King: “O, for two special reasons, which may to you, perhaps, seem much unsinewed, but yet to me they are strong.  The Queen, his mother, lives almost by his looks.  She is so conjunctive to my life and soul, that, as the star moves not but in his sphere, I could not but by her.  The other motive, why to a public count I might not go, is the great love the general gender bear him.”

Laertes: “And so have I a noble father lost, a sister driven into desperate terms, whose worth, stood challenger on mount of all the age for her perfections.  But my revenge will come.”

King: “Break not your sleeps for that.  You must not think that we are made of stuff so flat and dull that we can let our beard be shook with danger and think it pastime.  I loved your father.”

Enter a messenger with letters

King: “How now.  What news?”

Messenger: “Letters, my lord, from Hamlet.  These to your majesty; this to the queen.”

King: “From Hamlet!  Who brought them?”

Messenger: “Sailors, my lord.”

King: “Laertes, you shall hear them.”

Exit messenger

King: “High and mighty.  You shall know I am set naked on your kingdom.  Tomorrow I shall beg leave to see your kingly eyes.  Hamlet.”

Laertes: “Let him come; It warms the very sickness in my heart that I shall live and tell him to his teeth ‘thus didest thou’.”

King: “If it be so, Laertes, will you be ruled by me?”

Laertes: “Ay, my lord; You will not overrule me to a peace.”

King: “To thine own peace.  I will work him to an exploit now ripe in my device, under the which he shall not choose but fall; and for his death, even his mother shall call it accident.”

Laertes: “My lord, if you could devise it so that I might be the organ.”

King: “Two months since, here was a gentleman of Normandy.  He made confession of you; and for your rapier most especial that he cried out ‘twould be a sight indeed if one could match you.  Sir, this report of his did Hamlet so envenom with his envy that he could nothing do but wish and beg your sudden coming over , to play with you.  Now, out of this –

Laertes: “What out of this, my lord?”

King: “Laertes, was your father dear to you?”

Laertes: “Why ask you this?”

King: “Hamlet comes back; what would you undertake to show yourself indeed your father’s son more than in words?”

Laertes: “To cut his throat in the church.”

King: “Revenge should have no bounds.  But, good Laertes, will you do this?  Keep close within your chamber.  Hamlet returned shall know you are come home.  We’ll put on those shall praise your excellence, and wager on your head.  He, being remiss, will not peruse the foils, so that you with ease may choose a sword unbated, and, in a pass of practice, requite him for your father.”

Laertes: “I will do it; and for that purpose I’ll anoint my sword.  I bought an unction, so mortal that where it draws blood no cataplasm can save the thing from death that is but scratched withal.  I’ll touch my point with this contagion, that, if I gall him slightly, it may be death.”

King: “Let’s further think of this.  If this should fail, this project should have a back or second.  We’ll make a solemn wager on your cunnings, that, when in your motion you are hot and dry, and that he calls for drink, I’ll have preferred him a chalice whereon but sipping, if he by chance escape your venom’d stuck, our purpose may hold there.  But stay; what noise?”

Enter Queen

Queen: “One woe doth tread upon another’s heel, so fast they follow.  Your sister’s drown’d, Laertes.”

Laertes: “Drown’d! Where?”

Queen: “Fantastic garlands did she make, when down her weedy trophies and herself fell in the weeping brook.  Her clothes spread wide and, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up; but long it could not be till that her garments, heavy with their drink, pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay to muddy death.”

Laertes: “Too much of water hath thou, poor Ophelia, and therefore I forbid my tears.  Adieu, my lord.  I have a speech of fire that fain would blaze but that this folly doubts it.  

Exit Laertes

King: “Let’s follow, Gertrude.  How much I had to do to calm his rage!  Now fear I this will give it start again; therefore let’s follow.”

Analysis

The King must justify to an enraged Laertes why he did not hold Hamlet more accountable for the murder of Polonius.  He explains that both the queen and the general populace held him in such high regard that he was concerned about the reaction if he was harsh with Hamlet.  The king learns that Hamlet returns tomorrow and Laertes is thrilled that his revenge can be swift.  They both want Hamlet dead and the conniving king realizes that he can satisfy himself and Laertes by a devising a plot to have Hamlet and Laertes stage a duel in which Laertes’ sword will be unbated, a poison tip will be spread over the tip in the event of even a scratch and a poisonous drink will be prepared for Hamlet when the duelists request a drink.  When the queen arrives with news of Ophelia’s suicidal drowning, Laertes flees in anguish and the king insists they follow him.  Hamlet is returning to a far less stable home than the one he left and to a king more diabolical and scheming than ever before.  The tables are set for a masterful Act V.

Act V

This is likely Shakespeare’s quintessential resolution act.  By the end of this most famous of tragedies, only Horatio, Hamlet’s one true friend, will remain to tell the tale to Fortinbras of the events from Elsinore Castle.  Polonius and Ophelia have already departed for that undiscovered country and Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern will soon follow.  The stage is literally littered with bodies as the curtain comes down.  Appropriately enough, the final act begins in a graveyard, with two irreverent gravediggers preparing Ophelia’s grave.  Laertes and Hamlet end this scene wrestling each other in the grave itself, a precursor to their combat to come, in scene ii.  Hamlet explains to Horatio how he escaped the King’s plot to have him killed in England.  Hamlet is informed of the fencing match arranged between himself and Laertes and he looks forward to healing the wound between them.  In fact, just before they duel, Hamlet asks Laertes for his forgiveness and blames his bad behaviours on his madness, which is a tad curious since he himself suggested earlier in the play that said madness was feigned.   Hamlet achieves two hits upon Laertes and the play rapidly accelerates toward its inevitable conclusion.  Both Hamlet and Laertes wound each other with the poisonous tip of the blade, the queen sips from the tainted chalice and Hamlet and Laertes reconcile just in time for Hamlet to kill the King before his own death.   In the end, Horatio is present to ‘tell Hamlet’s story’ and to receive the Norwegian Fortinbras, who will seemingly inherit the Danish kingdom.

Act V

Scene i

Elsinore / a churchyard

Gravedigger 1: “Is she to be buried in Christian burial when she willfully seeks her own salvation?”

Gravedigger 2: “I tell thee, she is; therefore make her grave straight.”

Gravedigger 1: “How can that be, unless she drowned herself in her own defence.”

Gravedigger 2: “If this had not been a gentlewoman, she should have been buried out a Christian burial.”

Gravedigger 1: “What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright or the carpenter?”

Gravedigger 2: “The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.”

Gravedigger 1: “I like thy wit well.  In good faith, the gallows does well.  But how does it well?  It does well to those that do ill.  Now thou dost ill to say the gallows is built stronger than the church.  The gallows may do well to thee… When you are asked this question next, say ‘a gravedigger’: the houses he makes last till doomsday.”

The gravediggers sing and dig

Exit gravedigger 1 and enter Hamlet and Horatio

Hamlet: “Has this fellow no feeling of his business, that he sings in grave-making?”

Gravedigger tosses up a skull

Hamlet: “That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once.  This might be the pate of a politician, one that would circumvent God, might it not?”

Horatio: “It might, my lord.”

Hamlet: “Or of a courtier, which could say ‘Good morrow, sweet lord.  How dost thou, sweet lord’.”

Horatio: “Ay, my lord.”

Gravedigger throws up another skull

Hamlet: “There’s another.  Why may that not be the skull of a lawyer?  Where be his quiddities now, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks?  Why does he suffer this rude knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel?  I will speak to this fellow.  Whose grave is this, sirrah?”

Gravedigger: “Mine, sir.”

Hamlet: “I think it be thine indeed, for thou liest in it.”

Gravedigger: “You lie out on it, sir, and therefore tis not yours.  I do not lie in it, yet it is mine.”

Hamlet: “Thou dost lie in it, to be in it and say it is thine; tis for the dead; therefore thou liest.  What man dost thou dig it for?”

Gravedigger: “For no man, sir.”

Hamlet: “What woman, then?”

Gravedigger: “For none neither.”

Hamlet: “Who is to be buried in it?”

Gravedigger: “One that was a woman, sir, but, rest her soul, she’s dead.”

Hamlet: “How absolute the knave is!  How long hast thou been a grave-maker?”

Gravedigger: “I came to it that day that our last King Hamlet overcame Fortinbras, that very day that young Hamlet was born – he that is mad, and sent into England.”

Hamlet: “Ay, marry, why was he sent into England?”

Gravedigger: “Why, because he was mad and shall recover his wits there; or, if he does not, tis no great matter there.”

Hamlet: “Why?”

Gravedigger: “Twill not be seen in him there: there the men are as mad as he.”

Hamlet: “How came he mad?”

Gravedigger: “Very strangely, they say.”

Hamlet: “How strangely?”

Gravedigger: “Faith, even with losing his wits.”

Hamlet: “Upon what ground?”

Gravedigger: “Why, here in Denmark.  I have been sexton here, man and boy, thirty years.”

Hamlet: “How long will a man lie in the earth ere he rot?”

Gravedigger: “Faith, if he be not rotten before he die – he will last you some eight or nine year.  A tanner will last you nine year.”

Hamlet: “Why he more than another?”

Gravedigger: “Why, sir, his hide is so tanned with his trade that he will keep out water a great while; and your water is a sore decayer of your whoreson dead body.  Here’s a skull now: this skull has lien you in the earth three and twenty years.”

Hamlet: “Whose was it?”

Gravedigger: “A whoreson mad fellow it was.  Whose do you think it was?”

Hamlet: “Nay, I know not.”

Gravedigger: “A pestilence on him for a mad rogue!  He poured a flagon of Rhenish on my head once.  This same skull, sir, was, sir, Yorick’s skull, the King’s jester.”

Hamlet: “This?”

Gravedigger: “Even that.”

Hamlet: “Let me see. (takes the skull). Alas, poor Yorick!  I knew him, Horatio: a fine fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times.  And now how abhorred in my imagination it is!  My gorge rises at it.  Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.  Where be your gibes now, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?  Prithee, Horatio, tell me one thing.”

Horatio: “What’s that, my lord?”

Hamlet: Dost thou think Alexander looked he this fashion in the earth?”

Horatio: “Even so.”

Hamlet: “And smelled so? Pah!” (throws down the skull)

Horatio: “Even so, my lord.”

Hamlet: “To what base uses we may return, Horatio!  Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

Horatio: “Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.”

Hamlet: “But soft! But soft! Awhile.  Here comes the King.  

Enter King, Queen, Laertes, in funeral procession, after the casket, with priest and lords.

Hamlet: “The queen, the coutiers.  Who is this they follow?  And with such maimed rites?  This doth betoken the course they follow did with desperate hand fordo its own life.  Couch we awhile and mark.  (retiring with Horatio)

Laertes: “What ceremony else?”

Hamlet: “This is Laertes; a very noble youth.  Mark.”

Priest: “Her death was doubtful; and, but, that great command oversways the order, she should in ground unsanctified have lodged till the last trumpet.”

Laertes: “Must there no more be done?”  

Priest: “No more be done.”

Laertes: “I tell thee, churlish priest, a ministering angel shall my sister be when thou liest howling.”

Hamlet: “What, the fair Ophelia!”

Queen: “Sweets to the sweet; farewell!” (scattering flowers)  “I hoped thou should’st been my Hamlet’s wife; I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid, and not have strewed thy grave.”

Laertes: “O, treble woe fall ten times treble on that cursed head whose wicked deed thy most ingenious sense deprived thee of!  Hold off the earth awhile, till I have caught her once more in mine arms.” (he leaps into the grave)

Hamlet: (advancing) What is he whose grief bears such an emphasis.  This is I, Hamlet the Dane.” (he leaps into the grave) 

Laertes: “The devil take thy soul!” (grapples with Hamlet)

Hamlet: “I prithee take thy fingers from my throat; for, though I am not splentitive and rash, yet have I in me something dangerous, which let thy wiseness fear.  Hold off thy hand.”

King: “Pluck them asunder.”

Queen: :” Hamlet!  Hamlet!”

All: “Gentlemen!”  (the attendants part them)

Hamlet: “I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum.”

King: “O, he is mad, Laertes.”

Queen: “For love of God, forebear him.”

Hamlet: “Dost come here to whine?  To outface me with leaping in her grave?  I’ll rant as well as thou.”

Queen: This is mere madness.”

Hamlet: “Hear you, sir: What is the reason that you use me thus?  I loved you ever.  But it is no matter.”  

Hamlet exits

King: “I pray thee, good Horatio, wait upon him.”

Exit Horatio

King: (to Laertes) “Strengthen your patience in our last night’s speech; We’ll put the matter to the present push.  Good Gertrude, set some watch over your son.”

Analysis

This graveyard scene is a memorable one.  The gravediggers have outstanding wit, the issue of Ophelia’s burial restrictions are addressed, due to her suicide, Hamlet’s banter with the gravedigger features the skull of ‘alas, poor Yorick’, and Hamlet and Laertes confront each other for the first time since Laertes returned home to find his father dead and his sister mad and then dead, all essentially due to the actions of Hamlet.   This scene also deals directly and light heartedly with the topic of death and makes something of a macabre mockery of Hamlet’s earlier and more serious consideration of the subject in his ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy.  A most memorable image from this play occurs when Hamlet holds up Yorick’s skull to his face, as he contemplates death on a more serious note once again. 

Act V

Scene ii

Elsinore Castle

Hamlet: “Our indiscretion sometime serves us well, when our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.”

Horatio: “That is most certain.”

Hamlet: “Up from my cabin I fingered their packet and withdrew to mine own room again, to unseal their grand commission; where I found, Horatio, ah, royal knavery!  An exact command that, no leisure bated, no, not to stay the grinding of the axe, my head should be struck off.”

Horatio: “Is it possible?”

Hamlet: “Here’s the commission; read it at more leisure, but wilt thou hear now how I did proceed?”

Horatio: “I beseech you.”

Hamlet: “I sat me down; devised a new commission; wrote it fair.  Wilt thou know the effect of what I wrote?”

Horatio: “Ay, good my lord.”

Hamlet: “England, on the view and knowing of these contents, should those bearers put to sudden death, which was the model of that Danish seal; Now the next day was our sea-fight.”

Horatio: “So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to it.”

Hamlet: “Why, man, they did make love to this employment; they are not near my conscience; their defeat does by their own insinuation grow: tis dangerous when the baser nature comes between the pass and fell incensed points of mighty opposites.”

Horatio: “Why, what a king is this!”

Hamlet: “Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon – he that hath killed my king and whored my mother; popped in between the election and my hopes; thrown out his angle for my proper life, and with such coz’nage – is it not perfect conscience to quit him with this arm?  And is it not to be damned to let this canker of our nature come in further evil?

Horatio: “It must be shortly known to him from England what is the issue of the business there.”

Hamlet: “It will be short: the interim is mine, but I am very sorry, good Horatio, that to Laertes I forgot myself; for by the image of my cause I see the portraiture of his.  I’ll court his favours.  But sure the bravery of his grief did put me into a towering passion.”

Haratio: “Peace; who comes here?”

Enter Osric, a courier

Osric: “Your lordship is right welcome back to Denmark.”

Hamlet: “I humbly thank you sir.” (aside to Horatio) “Dost know this water-fly?”

Horatio: (aside to Hamlet) “No, my good lord.”

Hamlet: (aside to Horatio) “Thy state is the more gracious; for tis a vice to know him.”

Osric: “I should impart a thing to you from his majesty.  My lord, his majesty bade me signify to you that he has laid a great wager on your head.  Sir, here is newly come to court Laertes: believe me, an absolute gentleman.”

Hamlet: “In the verity of extolment, I take him to be a soul of great article.  What’s his weapon?”

Osric: “Rapier and dagger.  The king, sir, hath laid, sir, that in a dozen passes between yourself and him he shall not exceed you three hits.”

Hamlet: “If it please his majesty let the foils be brought.  I will win for him and I can.”

Enter a lord

Lord: “My lord, his majesty sends to know if your pleasure hold to play with Laertes.”

Hamlet: “I am constant to my purposes; they follow the king’s pleasure: mine is ready now.”

Lord: “The King and Queen and all are coming down.  The Queen desires you to use some gentle entertainment to Laertes before you fall to play.”

Hamlet: “She well instructs me.”

Horatio: “You will lose this wager, my lord.”

Hamlet: “I do not think so.  I have been in continual practice, I shall win at the odds.”

Horatio: “If your mind dislike anything, obey it.”

Hamlet: “We defy augury: there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.  If it be now, tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come – the readiness is all.  Since no man owes of aught he leaves, what is it to leave betimes?  Let be.”

Enter King, Queen, Laertes and all of the state.

King: “Come, Hamlet, come, and take this hand from me.” (the King puts Laertes’ hand into Hamlet’s)  

Hamlet: “Give me your pardon, sir: I have done you wrong, but pardon it, as you are a gentleman.  This presence knows, and you must needs have heard how I am  punished with a sore distraction.  What I have done that might your nature, honour and exception, roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.  Was it Hamlet wronged Laertes?  Never Hamlet.  If Hamlet from himself be taken away , and when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, then Hamlet does it not.  Hamlet denies it.  Who does it, then?  His madness.  If it be so, Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged; his magic is poor Hamlet’s enemy.”

Laertes: “I am satisfied in nature, whose motive in this case should stir me most to my revenge; but in my terms of honour I stand aloof, and will no reconcilement till by some elder masters of known honour I have a voice and precedent of peace to keep my name ungored – but till that time I do receive your offered love , and will not wrong it.”

Hamlet: “I embrace it freely; and will this brother’s wager frankly play.  Give us the foils.  Come on.”

King: “Give them the foils.  Cousin Hamlet, you know the wager?”

Hamlet: “Very well, my lord; your grace has laid the odds on the weaker side.”

King: “I do not fear it: I have seen you both; but since he’s bettered, we have therefore odds.  Set me the stoups of wine upon that table. If Hamlet give the first or second hit, the king shall drink to Hamlet’s better breath.  Now the King drinks to Hamlet.  Come, begin – and you, the judges, bear a wary eye.”

Hamlet: “Come on, sir.”

Laertes: “Come, my lord.”

They duel

Hamlet: “One.”

Laertes: “No.”

Osric: “A hit, a very palpable hit.”

Laertes: “Well, again.”

King: “Stay, give me drink.  Hamlet, this pearl is thine; here’s to thy health.  Give him the cup.”

Hamlet: “I’ll play this bout first; set it by awhile.  Come.”

They duel

Hamlet: “Another hit; what say you?”

Laertes: “A touch, a touch, I do confess it.”

King: “Our son shall win.”

Queen: “The Queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet.”

Hamlet: “Good madam.”

King: “Gertrude, do not drink.”

Queen: “I will, my lord.”

King: (aside) “It is the poisoned cup; it is too late.”

Hamlet: “I dare not drink yet, madam; by and by.”

Queen: “Come, let me wipe thy face.”

Laertes: “My lord, I’ll hit him now.” (aside) “And yet it is almost against my conscience.

Hamlet: “Come, for the third, Laertes.”

They duel

Osric: “Nothing, neither way.”

Laertes: “Have at you now!” (Laertes wounds Hamlet; then, in scuffling, they change rapiers, and Hamlet wounds Laertes.)

King: “Part them; they are incensed.”

Hamlet: “Nay, come again.”

The Queen falls

Osric: “Look to the Queen, there, ho!”

Horatio: “They bleed on both sides.  How is it, my lord?”

Osric: “How is it, Laertes?”

Laertes: “I am justly killed with mine own treachery.”

Hamlet: “How does the Queen?”

King: “She swoons to see them bleed.”

Queen: “No, no, the drink, the drink! O my dear Hamlet!  The drink, the drink!  I am poisoned.”

The Queen dies

Hamlet: “O, villainy!  Ho!  Let the door be locked.  Treachery!  Seek it out!”

Laertes falls

Laertes: “It is here, Hamlet.  Hamlet, thou art slain: no medicine in the world can do thee good; in thee there is not half an hour’s life; the treacherous instrument is in thy hand, unbated and envenomed.  The foul practice hath turned itself on me; lo, here I lie, never to rise again.  Thy mother’s poisoned.  I can no more.  The King, the King’s to blame.”

Hamlet: “The point envenomed too!  Then, venom, to thy work.”

Hamlet stabs the king

All: “Treason!  Treason!”

King: “O, yet defend me, friends; I am but hurt.”

Hamlet: “Here thou incestuous, murderous, damned Dane, drink off this potion.  Follow my mother.”

The King dies

Laertes: “He is justly served: it is a poison tempered by himself.  Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet.  Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee, nor thine on me.’

Laertes dies

Hamlet: “Heaven make thee free of it.!  I follow thee.  I am dead, Horatio.  Wretched queen, adieu!  You that look pale and tremble at this chance, that are but mutes or audience to this act, had I but time, as this fell sergeant Death is strict in his arrest, O, I could tell you – but let it be.  Horatio, I am dead: Thou livest; report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied.“

Horatio: “Never believe it.  I am more an antique Roman than a Dane; Here’s yet some liquid left.”

Hamlet: “As thou art a man, give me the cup.  Let go.  By heaven, I’ll have it.  O God! Horatio, what a wounded name, things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!  If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, to tell my story.”

Marching afar and shot within

Hamlet: “What warlike noise is this?”

Osric: “Young Fortinbras, with conquest come from Poland.”

Hamlet: “O, I die, Horatio!  The potent poison quite over crows my spirit.  I cannot live to hear the news from England, but I do prophesy the election lights on Fortinbras; he has my dying voice.  So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less, which have solicited – the rest is silence.”

Hamlet dies

Horatio: “Now cracks a noble heart.  Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.”

Enter Fortinbras and English ambassadors with attendants

Fortinbras: “Where is this sight?”

Horatio: “What is it you would see?  If aught of woe and wonder, cease your search.”

Fortinbras: “This quarry cries on havoc.  O proud death, what feast is toward in thine eternal cell that thou so many princes at a shot so bloodily hast struck?

Ambassador: “The sight is dismal; the ears are senseless that should give us hearing to tell him his commandment is fulfilled, that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead.”

Horatio: “Let me speak to the yet unknowing world how these things came about.  So shall you hear of carnal, bloody and unnatural acts; of accidental judgments, casual slaughters; of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause; and, in this upshot, purposes mistook fallen on the inventors’ heads – all this can I truly deliver.”

Fortinbras: “Let us haste to hear it. And call the noblest to the audience.  For me, with sorrow I embrace my fortune; I have some rights of memory in this kingdom, which now to claim my vantage doth invite me.”

Horatio: “Let this be presently performed , even while men’s minds are wild, lest more mischance on plots and errors happen.”

Fortinbras: “Let four captains bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage; for he was likely to have proved most royal; and for his passage the soldier’s music and the rite of war speak loudly for him.  Take up the bodies.  Such a sight as this becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.  Go, bid the soldiers shoot.”

Analysis

The unrelenting final scene of Hamlet is simply breathtaking in its ferocity and pace.  The violence finally erupts in stunning rapidity, as the Queen, the King, Laertes and Hamlet fall and litter the stage in less than 100 lines, after more than four acts of procrastination, rumination and philosophical ineptitude.  Hamlet is finally revenged for his father’s death.  Laertes is revenged for his father’s death.  And Fortinbras is revenged for his father’s death.  Laertes and his entire family are dead.  Hamlet and his entire family are dead.  Only Horatio survives to tell the tale.  Hamlet, the play, is like one very long case of constipation and Act 5 is the laxative.  In the final line of the play Fortinbras declares: “Go, bid the soldiers shoot.”  It is generally assumed that this refers to a tribute, like a twenty-one gun salute.  However, there was at least one director who had the shooters level their shots at all the lords and attendants who remained alive in the Danish court, including Horatio.  

Final Thoughts

Hamlet represents the high-water mark of William Shakespeare’s glorious career in the theatre.  It also represents, for many, the finest singular work in world literature. Certainly, in terms of characters and themes it remains unmatched.  Volumes have been written on the personage of Hamlet and volumes more regarding Hamlet’s relationship to his father, his mother, his uncle, Ophelia, Laertes, Polonius, the Players, Horatio, the gravedigger, and even Poor Yorick.  Thematically, this is as rich as it gets, with powerful reflections on happiness, sexual politics, lust, personal truth, changeability, friendship, love, the heedlessness of youth, parents and children, fates, quests, madness, appearance vs reality, the play within a play, wit, innocence, guilt, murder, suicide, dark depths, dreams, weariness, justice, revenge, points of view, death, mourning, dark humour, sex, forgiveness, power, authority, violence, family tragedy, evil, horror, tragic fixation, masculinity, political power, resolution, honour, ambition, charisma, blood, public vs private lives, virtue, character flaws, indecision, existential crisis, Freudian psychology, guilt, soaring intellect, thinking vs action, passion vs reason, jealousy, villainy, honour, despair, suffering, self-knowledge, betrayal, inner turmoil, political coup, disintegration of a great person, the supernatural, being true to self, balance, reconciliation, heroism, legitimacy, cycles of murder, conscience, kingship, succession, political incompetence, political cunning, moral integrity and moral dilemma.  All in one play.  Hamlet has so much for everyone, regardless of the type of yarn one might prefer.  It is a bit much packed into a single story for some people.  At over 4,000 lines, it is more than can easily fit into a reasonable duration.  The entire play, as that directed by Kenneth Branaugh, is near 5 hours in length.  Shakespeare lost both his only son, Hamnet, and his father, in the years immediately preceding the writing of Hamlet.  To say he was inspired remains an understatement.  The death of a child is one of those events that can change us forever.  Shakespeare was never the same writer after Hamlet.  Where he mostly  wrote brilliant English histories and comedies before Hamlet, he subsequently inaugurated the composition of the most blistering tragedies ever conceived: Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus.  Hamlet was the summit as well as the turning point for the Bard of Stratford-Upon-Avon.