“Hamlet”, is an examination of the pain a son suffers when his father is murdered by his uncle. Shakespeare looks in detail, at the nature of procrastination and the torments that Hamlet suffers after his father’s ghost begs him for revenge. Hamlet is portrayed as a tragic hero; despite his best efforts to act honourably, he is confused by his mother’s marriage to his uncle, lost as to what should be done regards the ghosts commands and tormented by his own lack of action. These troubles frequently manifest themselves in Hamlet through what appears to be madness. His sweetheart, Ophelia, is driven mad by the occurrences in Denmark, including Hamlet’s murder of her father, Polonius.
Looking to the colourful images and moving speeches with regard to things that are actually much less grand provides some clue as to Hamlet’s true nature. When actors appear he becomes fascinated with the idea of summoning emotion and guilt stricken over not avenging his father’s murder. He refuses to kill Claudius when he is praying, lest he go to heaven. A simple conversation with his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern turns into a marvelling at his own depression christening man a “quintessence of the dust”. Indeed this perpetual contemplation often double backs on itself. There is perhaps no better example of this than Hamlet’s to be or not to be soliloquy. This, in and of itself, is a masterful crafting and a beautiful speech which touches upon thoughts that still puzzle us to the present day. However, the speech does not exist in and of itself but rather as part of the movement of a play and should be considered within such a context. It should be noted, for example, that before Hamlet gives this speech he has seen his father’s ghost walk, others have spoken with him on seeing the ghost walk. It is therefore, both strange and of great importance to his character that it be noted he considers the likelihood of the existence of heaven and hell, especially so late on in the play.
III i 78 “But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others we know not of?”
This is blatantly inconsistent with the happenings of the play; a traveller has returned and delivered a message! It is less inconsistent with Hamlet himself. It is in Hamlet’s nature to spend a lot of time pondering over interesting, if largely irrelevant, intellectual or practical intricacies. His grounding is not really in emotions. Perhaps a grain of consistency might be maintained if it was to be argued that, since Hamlet’s encounter with the ghost of his father was an emotional one, of and tied to the grief of loosing his father, it is of less value than Hamlet’s ponderings. They will always be up most in his mind because that is where his natural tendencies lye.
Hamlet’s flaw then, is that he has no concept of a balance between reality itself and contemplation over it. He is and becomes more and more trapped behind his own thoughts. The longer he ponders them, the more ornamental they become, the deeper he becomes absorbed in them and the further he gets from attachment to them or their associated realities. This aspect of Hamlet’s character has doubtless contributed to his preservation in that it has allowed him to be held up for centauries as someone with great imagination and fascination for life generally. Yet Hamlet is by no means a character that can be relied on to make a decision in a limited amount of time. Since his absorption in contemplation is the cause of procrastination it must be concluded that this is Hamlet’s flaw. As Coleridge put it Hamlet spent most of his time
“…giving substance to shadows, and throwing a mist over all common-place actualities. It is the nature of thought to be indefinite…”
and therefore promote inaction.
What this turning point signifies is a movement away from this indefinite contemplation towards a general acceptance of ambiguity and that some axioms will always be necessary.
V ii “There is a special provi-
dence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to
come; if it is not come, it will be now, if it be not
now, yet it will come. The readiness is all”
This speech provides stark contrast to the Hamlet that doubted the existence of an afterlife having recently met his father’s ghost. Indeed, much of the character of Hamlet is reversed in this scene, a sign that he is on his way to recovering from his flaw. These changes include the disappearance of his madness, feigned or otherwise, it seems to be absent.
There is no evidence of Hamlet’s “madness” from this speech onwards. Indeed, Hamlet is never mad around Horatio’s conversation, the comfort and amusement that the two give each other is evident in their teasing of Osric, when they mimic his sycophantic flattery.
Horatio V ii “Is’t not possible to understand in another tongue?
You will to’t, sir, really.”
Bringing the two together, alone, provides some calm before the traumatic end and allows Hamlet to speculate on what will happen next in a manner both lucid and collected.
Perhaps the most obviously shocking of Hamlet’s wrongs that is reversed is his murder of Polonius. It is important to remember that this took place after the play which mimicked King Hamlet’s death and drove Claudius into a deep guilt. Whatever the case regards his “madness”, Hamlet was undeniably in a state of severe distress and likely hysterical. This is evidently alluded to in the Queen’s fear that Hamlet intends to kill her.
III iv “What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me?”.
His problem of thinking too heavily on matters that are of little importance only presents itself as an obstacle when he has the time to do so. This renders him incapable of premeditation, not impulsiveness. Hamlet has been asked to meet with his mother directly after the play has come to an abrupt end and he has seen the king praying. The killing viewed as an impulse is consistent with the hamartia named above.
The genius is that V ii begins with him giving an account of how he did premeditate the murder of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Indeed Hamlet showed great ingenuity in the crafting of their death, faking two letters from the King and sealing them using a royal signet he happened to have with him. The question “But wilt thou hear now how I did proceed?” comes across more as a boast than anything else. Hamlet’s idea that
V ii “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”
is, again, contradictory of his previous actions and thoughts and suggestive of a movement to a Hamlet that accepts the ambiguity of the finer details. A movement away from, for example
II ii “I’ll have grounds more relative than this”.
Perhaps this awakening is best described as a sudden ability to empathise with his father. Before, when considering the ghosts request to murder Claudius, he always focused on the technicalities of the matter, that it was his duty; the ability actors have to summon their emotion to their duty; the “honour” in Frotinbras’ army, fighting for nothing and the fact that he had “sworn it”. He was “born to set it right”. Yet he couldn’t because Claudius was praying and would be free of sin or the ghost may have been a devil and so on. It was the striking nature and certainty of his imminent death that propelled him into action and, perhaps, to understand more of the emotion of the occurrence.
V ii “Being thus benetted round with villainies-
Or I could make prologue to my brains,
They had begun the play”
He was thus removed from the selfish nature of his procrastination that always put his thoughts on the technicalities of the matter, and not his love or emotion towards his father, to the forefront of his mind. He now understands something of the fear and the panic that his father had felt and something of the injustice that he had suffered. It was with this in mind that he killed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. They were a mechanism that would prevent him from killing the King, stop what Hamlet now recognises as justice. He is blessed with a new certainty through this change in attitude that allows him to cast off any worry about the deaths of his late friends as collateral damage.
V ii “’Tis dangerous when the baser nature comes
Between the pass and fell incensed points
Of mighty opposites.”
This small speech of Hamlet’s then is very significant and marks a major turning point in the play. That is to say it underscores vital changes in Hamlet’s nature. He is no longer an excessive thinker; Hamlet understands the need for immediate action. This change is implied in his speech but is explained by the need that was presented to him for his friends to be killed. The overly thoughtful nature has been replaced by a knowing acceptance that not everything can be controlled. “it will come” &c. The changes that this speech makes are important for the final scene to be a success. How else is Hamlet’s killing of the King to make any sense at all after his procrastination? It is this speech that precipitates the changes and readies the audience for a Hamlet that is prepared to be presidential.