Thoughts on Hamlet

Lee Lady

William Shakespeare, Hamlet
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited
Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary
Philip Brockbank (editor), Players of Shakespeare, 1
Russell Jackson and Robert Smallwood (editors), Players of Shakespeare, 2
Joseph Papp and Elizabeth Kirkland, Shakespeare Alive
Richard L. Sterne (editor), John Gielgud directs Richard Burton in Hamlet
Martin Holmes, Shakespeare's Public
 

In trying to understand Hamlet, one should start with the fact that it was one of Shakespeare's most commercially successful productions. Now Shakespeare's audience did not come to the Globe for a cultural experience or a deep thought-provoking character study comparable to a contemporary play by Eugene O'Neill or even Tennessee Williams; they came for entertainment. When thinks about the lugubrious play we now see performed, with its neurotic hero, and tries to imagine this being a major hit in Shakespeare's theatre, either we have to decide that we are drastically mistaken about the nature of the Elizabethan audience, or we have to realize that we have completely failed to understand what kind of a play Hamlet is. (From a very interesting chapter called "Hamlet on Stage and Screen" by Sylvan Barnet in the 1998 Signet edition of Hamlet, we learn that that it was not until Edmund Keen's performance of the role in 1814 that one finds the angst-ridden neurotic character that we think of as Hamlet today. On the other hand, one certainly can't say that earlier performances were more faithful to the true spirit of Shakespeare. Seventeenth century theatre commonly deleted several of the soliloquies, and David Garrick's 1772 performance rewrote the Fifth Act so that when Claudius orders Hamlet to go to England, Hamlet replies by stabbing him.)

Although Hamlet, it seems to me, is of all Shakespeare's plays the one which is most about character, Shakespeare's way of approaching character was, I believe, very different than the approach of modern post-Chekhov drama and the contemporary novel. (See my article on character and motivation on Shakespeare.) Shakespeare's own production of Hamlet was, I believe, on the evidence of the text itself, an entertaining play that was as much a comedy as a tragedy.

In thinking about Hamlet, it's hard to let go of all the things that critics have told us and to think about the play as if we were seeing it performed for the first time, without knowing anything about it. Many critics, whose knowledge is based on having studied the play in detail (something which Shakespeare never suspected anyone would do), have taught us that Hamlet's fatal flaw is indecision. But when you look at the play as if seeing it afresh, indecision is not the element that causes Hamlet's downfall. It is not indecision that causes Hamlet to act and talk in a way that draws attention to himself and alarms the powers that be. It is not indecision that causes Hamlet to kill Polonius without even knowing who he is stabbing. And it is not indecision that causes him to drive Ophelia to suicide and put on a play that is a clear accusation to Claudius.

When we look for a core issue or fatal flaw that leads to Hamlet's downfall, I believe that we're engaging in a form of thinking that is totally alien to Shakespeare's own. And when critics, after centuries of argument, are unable to agree on answers to the sort of questions that are asked about Hamlet, I think it's reasonable to consider the possibility that the questions they are asking, as applied to Shakespeare at least, don't make any sense.

The common sense and truest answer to the question of why Hamlet does the things he does and why things in the play happen the way they do is "Because that's the way Shakespeare wrote it." So then the real question becomes, "Why did Shakespeare choose to have things happen this way, and why does the play make sense to us as an audience (to the extent that we think that it actually does make sense)?"

Hamlet as Comedian

Harold Bloom says about Hamlet that "no other character in all literature changes his verbal decorum so rapidly." Or, to put it another way: no other author in all literature changes the verbal decorum of a character so rapidly as Shakespeare does with Hamlet. (Because after all it was Shakespeare, not Hamlet, who was the real person.)

I believe that if you look at the actual text for Hamlet's dialogue --- not so much the content of the speeches as their tone, which in Shakespeare is always the most crucial factor --- you will most of his dialogue lines throughout Acts 2 through 4 (but not the soliloquies or the lines where Hamlet is not being observed) are ones which would usually be spoken by a jester, such as Touchstone or Feste. Other than Hamlet himself, there is no fool in the play until we get to the gravedigger in Act 5, who might have been played by the same actor who had played Polonius. (This is not, however, the prevailing belief. It is generally thought that the Gravedigger in Hamlet was played by Shakespeare's new clown, Robert Irwin, who would presumably not have played Polonius. But Polonius and the Gravedigger are both comic characters, at least in my opinion, and the Gravedigger only appears on stage after Polonius is dead.)

Consider some of Hamlet's interactions. In the following excerpts, I have systematically gone through and changed the name Hamlet to the word Fool.

King. Now, Fool, where's Polonius?

Fool. At supper.

King. At supper? Where?

Fool. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor of diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your fat beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that is the end.

These are lines that could be spoken by almost any of Shakespeare's fools.

Of course the difference is the level of irony here. Hamlet is making a joke, which if told well will get a big laugh from the audience, but at the same time he's talking about a murder he's committed. In contemporary terms, Hamlet's lines here, and in fact much of his humor, is what would be called a "sick joke." In fact, I think that one of the things that fascinates us about Hamlet is the contrast between the way he charms us and enlists our sympathies with his conversation and, on the other hand, the dreadful nature of the things he does. In a contemporary movie, we would rightly regard a character who kills people and then make jokes about it as a psychopath. But the fascinating thing is the way that Shakespeare sets things up so that we see Hamlet as a tragic hero.

Here's another comic interchange (Act 2, Scene 2). Hamlet's lines would work perfectly well for Touchstone in As You Like It.

Polonius. Do you know me, Fool?

Fool. Excellent well, you are a fishmonger.

Polonius. Not I, Fool.

Fool. Then I would you were so honest a man.

Polonius. Honest, Fool!

Fool. Ay, sir, to be honest, this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.

Polonius. What do you read, Fool?

Fool. Words, words, words.

Polonius. What is the matter, Fool?

Fool. Between who?

Polonius. I mean, the matter that you read, Fool.

Fool. Slanders, sir, for the satirical rogue says that old men have grey beards, that their faces are wrinkled, their eyes purging thick amber and plum-tree gum and that they have a plentiful lack of wit, together with most weak hams; all of which sir, although I most powerfully and potently believe, yet I hold it not honesty to have it thus set down; for you yourself, sir, should be old as I am if, like a crab, you could go backward.

The fact is that Hamlet, for all his angst and melancholy, is an extremely entertaining guy. In my opinion, any performance that doesn't bring this out is a disservice to Shakespeare.

If one can't see by reading it that Hamlet is more a tragicomedy than a tragedy, I recommend watching the 1964 performance by Sir Richard Burton, available on DVD. However apparently Burton (and Sir John Gielgud, directing) thought it would be too much of an outrage to portray Hamlet's killing of Polonius and Ophelia's suicide as the comic scenes that the tone of the language makes them seem to be.

I think of Hamlet as being something like the character Hawkeye in the television series MASH. He is the type of comic character who is extremely bright --- twice as intelligent as anyone around him --- but has never figured out how to have any impact on the world around him, and so wastes his intelligence in displays of clever (or, in Hamlet's case, bitter) cynicism.

Imagine Hamlet's lines being spoken by Alan Alda in his Hawkeye persona, and I believe that the play will suddenly come alive and become enjoyable, without losing any of the meaning that we are accustomed to attaching to it.

Consider the way the great soliloquies come to life if rather than being intoned, they are spoken in Alan Alda's Hawkeye voice (although certain a considerable adjustment is needed because of the Shakespearean language and rhythms).

To be or not to be, that is the question.

This is the beginning of a comic monologue. To paraphrase it into a more modern rhythm:

To be or not to be. That's really what it's all about.
Isn't it?

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?

The comedian has stepped up to the edge of the stage --- in a small theatre, he might even sit on the edge of the stage --- and is starting to explain something to the audience.

We know that Shakespeare's language is often extravagent and overblown by our standards. But once one gets used to it, one learns that his language is usually very appropriate to the character and situation. Here the language is very exaggerated, very different from the poetic language which one finds in, for instance, Romeo and Juliet.

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune; a sea of troubles.

And a little further down:

But 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?
    ...
Who would fardels bear
To grunt and sweat under a weary life?

He does go on and on, and that's not the end of it! Tempo is crucial here. A long list like this must be spoken quickly if it is not to be very tedious. Each item simply makes the same point as before with a slightly different example. On the other hand, the soliloquy must not be spoken so fast that some words get swallowed up. Hamlet is very consciously choosing his words in a very entertaining way. Each significant word here (each noun and verb) needs to have its moment in the spotlight, because each new word takes the speech in a slightly new and unpredicted direction.

This unpredictability on the sentence level is characteristic of much of Shakespeare's writing and is also characteristic of much contemporary screenwriting as well as other good literature.

In fact, I think that the whole charm of the "To be or Not to be" soliloquy lies in the way the different ideas and metaphors tumble out one after the other. It needs to be delivered with a wink to the audience, as it were, because Hamlet is simply telling them things that they already know but saying them in a clever way. If it is spoken slowly or in a meditative tone, then the audience will notice that there's almost no actual substance to the speech.

With language like this, there are only two choices for the actor: either be bombastic (à la Olivier and almost all modern actors) or be sardonic. When performed by almost all contemporary actors, this most famous of Shakespearean soliloquies becomes a piece of bad oratory; a bad writer trying to impress the audience by using unusual and difficult words where much simpler ones would actually be clearer and more effective. We listen to it, because we've all been told that it's a great soliloquy, but as usually delivered it is boring and, in truth, at points it's a little difficult even to make sense of it. (The odd thing about this soliloquy is the fact that, despite the general agreement that it is some of Shakespeare's finest writing, critics have never been able to come to a general agreement about what it says. It is not even universally accepted that the opening phrase "To be or not to be" refers to suicide.)

I see "To be or not to be" as the sort of comedy which very calmly, logically, and at great length leads us through a consideration of something which is obviously insane. (Not that people in Elizabethan times didn't commit suicide. But, despite the fact that Hamlet does refer in passing to suicide a couple of times previously in the play, there is nothing at all either in Hamlet's situation or his personality which indicates that that Hamlet would seriously consider suicide.)

Hamlet, as I see it, is not actually debating whether to kill himself or not, but saying to the audience, "You know, at times like this, one really has to wonder what the point of it all is? Why is it that we struggle so much to be alive, when being alive is so difficult? You know, if we really had any guts, we'd just do it: just kill ourselves. But of course we don't. We just sit here, and can't make up our minds to do anything at all."

For this reason, because of what I see as Hamlet's comic and ironic attitude toward what he is saying in this soliloquy, it is absolutely essential that Hamlet's words, even if delivered as a voice-over in a film, be spoken to the audience.

This brings up, incidentally, one of the basic questions about the performance of solilquies, namely: Who is speaking the soliloquy? The obvious answer is that in this case, for instance, Hamlet is speaking. But in fact there are several possibilities.

• The character in the play is speaking the soliloquy as part of the action in the play. The soliloquy represents the thoughts of the character at that moment in the play.
• The character in the play is momentarily stepping out of the play and making a comment on it. Almost certainly this comment is directed to the audience.
• The actor in question is stepping out of his role and commenting on the play and on the character he is playing, objectively, or sardonically, or whatever.
• The actor is in fact ceasing to speak as himself and is making a blatant editorial statement on behalf of the author.

It seems that all of these possibilities are sometimes appropriate in certain plays, although the fourth is rare. In particular, I think I've seen them all in television sitcoms and comedy shows, especially earlier ones, which in their frank acknowledgement of the existence of the audience were, I believe, much closer to the style of Shakespeare's original productions than contemporary theatre is. (See my article Shakespeare and Sitcoms, which gives a more thorough discussion, and a somewhat more scholarly one, on the nature of soliloquies in Elizabethan drama and the proper approach to performing them.)

It seems to me that Hamlet's first two soliloquies fall into the first category. They represent a statement of Hamlet's thoughts at this particular moment of the play. However I am suggesting that the "To Be or Not to Be" soliloquy can definitely be played in the second mode, where Hamlet is making a statement to the audience that is relevant to the play as a whole, but not to the particular moment when the soliloquy is given.

I would also mention that the television program "Set Speeches and Soliloquies," part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1984 BBC television series on the performance of Shakespeare, makes a very convincing case that soliloquies always work best if directed to the audience, not delivered as if the character is speaking to himself.

 
Of course Hamlet is not a comedy, despite the fact that it contains a large number of scenes that seem to me obviously comedic. It seems to me that it would be very difficult to read Hamlet's first soliloquy, in Act I Scene 2, as being comic:

Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fixed
His canon against self-slaughter! Oh, God! God!
How weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Here, before ever encountering the ghost, Hamlet does seriously mention suicide as a possibility. In this soliloquy Hamlet speaks his heart, and to some extent this is true of the second one ("Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I").

But "To Be or Not to Be" has a very different quality. It is a carefully crafted speech definitely intended to be spoken to an audience, not a record of Hamlet's thoughts at the moment.

But from the time when Hamlet decides to pretend to be crazy, up to the end of Act 4, almost everything can be played as comic.

Hamlet's killing of Polonius, for example. I don't want to suggest that Elizabethans considered running a sword through someone as funny. But I think that there is indeed something a bit farcial about Polonius's very brief death scene, and it's the sort of humor that works because it makes sport of very real fears that were part of Elizabethan life.

Hamlet is talking to Queen Gertrude. Polonius is hiding behind the arras and listening. [An arras, incidentally, is a hanging tapestry.]

Hamlet to Gertrude: Come, come, and sit you down. You shall not budge.
You shall not go until I set you up a glass
To see the inmost part of you.

Queen: What wilt thou do? thou wilt not murder me?
Help, help, ho!

Polonius (behind the arras): What, ho! Help, help, help!

Hamlet (drawing): How now! A rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead! (Stabs through the arras.)

Polonius (from behind the arras): Oh, I am slain!

Queen Oh me, what hast thou done?

Hamlet: Nay, I know not. Is it the king?

Queen: Oh, what a rash and bloody deed is this!

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

Queen: As kill a king!

Hamlet: Ay lady, 'twas my word.

If this is not farce, then Hamlet's Stab-first-ask-questions-later policy here is truly disturbing, and the joke about worms afterwards is even more disturbing.

Imagine something like this in one of Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry movies, for instance. Movie audiences are willing to give Dirty Harry quite a bit of slack for his sometimes irresponsible behavior (and there have been occasions in some of the movies where he winds up killing a completely innocent person), but if he were shoot and kill someone behind a curtain or wall the way Hamlet does, without even knowing who it was and without any reason to believe that there was any danger, he'd quickly lose the audience's sympathy.

If one has any doubts that this is more farce than tragedy, I simply suggest comparing the language here to that in any truly tragic death in Shakespeare. (In the Gielgud-Burton performance, there was no intention to play this scene as comic. Nonetheless, the audience laughed at it, to the annoyance of the cast.)

The interesting thing here is the way that when, in the next scene, Claudius takes the killing of Polonius as the deadly serious thing it was, we the audience simply take that as a point against Claudius. It's almost as if we think that Claudius is not being a very good sport to take the killing of one of his key councilors so seriously.

What Sort of Person is Hamlet?

Certainly I do believe that fictional characters can have a reality that transcends the intentions of their author. When an author has finished writing a work, he can be surprised by the characters in it, and sometimes as much puzzled by them as any critic is. And while writing, he can sometimes that find his characters are recalcitrant and insist on going their own way rather than following his game plan. Nonetheless, Hamlet is not a real person.

However, even though the character Hamlet is an illusion that exists only in our minds, there is an assumption that since a fictional character is created by the information and signals in the text, all of us, if we read the text carefully, will have pretty much the same conception of the character.

But for Shakespeare's characters, and most especially for Hamlet, this assumption simply doesn't work. The fact is that Hamlet is not really a character in the sense that we find characters in most fiction. Shakespeare shows Hamlet doing certain things and speaking certain words, but he does not give us a collection of traits which determine what is usually considered a fictional "character."

Arguments about Hamlet the individual can never be conclusively settled, any more than can be done with persons in real life with persons in real life. Hamlet is a role which can be interpreted (by the actor or by the reader) in a wide diversity of ways, all of which are consistent with the words he says and the things he does. (I think that this is one of the main differences between those who look at Shakespeare's play as written texts to be read silently and studied and those who look at them as texts to be performed. To the former, it makes sense to talk as if Hamlet were a person and we could investigate him and settle questions about him, whereas I think that actors are very aware that characters in Shakespeare are roles that give that actor a much wider range of choices than the characters in Ibsen, Chekhov, Shaw, or in fact most other dramatists.) This is where I believe Harold Bloom is flat out wrong in his whole approach to Shakespeare.

I want to mention that I am especially indebted to G. Wilson Knight's 1934 essay, "Tolstoi's attack on Shakespeare," reprinted in the second edition of The Wheel of Fire, for clarifying my thoughts about characterization in Shakespeare and especially in Hamlet.

As G. Wilson Knight says that Hamlet, more than almost any other character in Shakespeare, is a blank slate which we can fill in in many different ways. Of course there are certain things Hamlet cannot be and still be consistent with the text. He cannot be stupid. He cannot be a person who makes up his mind quickly and acts without worrying about whether he is doing the right thing.

So when I say that I see Hamlet as somewhat like the character Hawkeye in MASH, I am simply claiming that this is one interpretation which makes sense and which produces an entertaining play, which I am sure was Shakespeare's own primary objective. Olivier's interpretation also makes perfectly good sense, but from a theatrical point of view, I don't believe that it brings out some of the best qualities in Hamlet's dialogue, namely the humor.

It really comes down to the question not of which interpretation of Hamlet is "correct," but which interpretation is more interesting and meaningful for me. To me, the Hawkeye interpretation has a resonance because I can relate it both to myself and to people I've known in real life, whereas the Olivier interpretation makes Hamlet someone believable but remote.

The Polish author Jan Kott has written one of the most fascinating (as well as controversial) modern critical books on Shakespeare: Shakespeare Our Contemporary. To me, some of his insights are incredible and quite on the mark. Here are some of his comments on Hamlet, which to me are a different way of looking at the idea that Hamlet is not a fictional character in the usual sense, but rather a role which can be filled by many different possible characters.

Hamlet is a great scenario, in which every character has a more or less tragic and cruel part to play, and has magnificent things to say. Every character has an irrevocable task to fulfill, a task imposed by the author. The scenario is independent of the characters; it has been devised earlier. It defines the situations, as well as the mutual relations of the characters. But it does not say who the characters are. It is something external in relation to them. And that is why the scenario of Hamlet can by played by different sorts of characters.

Here Kott suggests (although not in these words, of course) that for the secondary characters in the play, Hamlet is analogous in some ways to a book by Robert Ludlum. Things happen, and for the most part the characters in the play have no idea how they are happening and have little control over them.

The exception, of course, is the character of Hamlet himself. Although Hamlet is what would usually be called a character-driven story, there is only one person doing the driving. It is not a story about interactions of characters, because there is only one person in the interactions who responds in any but a completely predictable way.

Jan Kott continues:

The King, the Queen, Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern have been clearly defined by their situation. Character and situation are clearly connected. Claudius does not play the role of a murderer and a kind; he is a murderer and a king. Polonius does not play a despotic father and a king's councilor; he is despotic father and a king's councilor.

It is different with Hamlet. The situation does not define Hamlet, or at any rate does not define him beyond doubt. The situation has been imposed upon him. Hamlet accepts it but at the same time revolts against it. He accepts the part, but is beyond and above it.

I would only add, repeating what I've said above, that not only does the situation not define Hamlet, but Shakespeare does not define him either.

Shakespeare's characters often seem very alive to us. I believe that one of the main reasons for this is that very fact that, as discussed above, they are not characters in the ordinary literary sense of the word. I listen to what a character in Shakespeare is saying and watch what he does and I think, "Oh yes, I know that person. That's just like someone in my own life." Yet you, on the other hand, can read the same lines and find a very different resonance in them. Because Shakespeare doesn't really pin down who his characters are.

Shakespeare's characters do not say the things they say because of the way they are. Instead, it's quite the opposite. They are the way they are because of the things they say. In other words, Shakespeare's writing process, I am convinced, was like that of many other writers of fiction. At this best, in writing a scene he started out with some general sense of what that scene needed to accomplished, and then waited for words to come. Basically, he listened for what his character wanted to say. And then, having written down his words, he knew more about his character than he had before.

To me, at least, this is very clear from reading the texts. And furthermore, I believe that I can usually distinguish between those times when Shakespeare was listening to his characters speak (or, to put it less metaphorically, just letting the words come) and those times when he was working out their speeches by an intellectual process.