Thoughts on Hamlet

Lee Lady

(January, 2002)

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

If you look at Hamlet as a successful piece of entertainment (and it was

Shakespeare's most commercially successful play) and imagine seeing it for the
first time, I believe that you will see that although Hamlet does indeed start out
as a revenge tragedy, it quickly turns into a bizarrely entertaining play which is
first and foremost about a character who is pretending to be crazy in the midst
of a bunch of other characters who are not extremely bright. (Of course one of
the things about Shakespeare is that he gives actors a lot of choices. It is
certainly possible to believe that Claudius or Laertes or even Polonius is fairly
intelligent and for an actor to play these roles that way. But you certainly can't
prove it on the basis of the things they say.)

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.

Of course here again, and in all of Hamlet's comic dialogue, there is an irony.
What Hamlet is saying is comic, but the feeling behind the comedy is
extremely hostile. If one plays these scenes to emphasize the hostility and
downplay the humor, then one gets a serious drama, which is the way we think
of Hamlet today. I can't believe that the sort of performances we usually see
today, though, would have been a commercial success for Shakespeare's troupe.

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?

Now keep that same voice as the soliloquy continues in Shakespeare's

language.

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?

Hamlet exists, of course, only in our minds. When we talk about Shakespeare's
plays as containing characters, we are using a figure of speech. No drama or
piece of fiction literally contains characters. The text contains information and
signals which give us the illusion of a real person. (I discuss this at greater
length in my article Character and Motivation in Shakespeare. By signals, I
refer to those things in the text that don't give us factual information, as it were,
but tell us, by style of speech or otherwise, the attitude that we are intended to
take.)

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.

Hamlet (page 2)
Lee Lady

Hamlet and Ophelia

It is commonly said that Hamlet is brutally cruel to Ophelia. But to me it seems

clear that Shakespeare did not start out writing the scenes between Hamlet and
Ophelia with any intention of having Hamlet be cruel.

Of course talking about an author's intentions is fairly futile, since any

statement we make about them can only be guesswork, and in any case it is the
work itself that matters. But the point is that although certainly having Hamlet's
lines to Ophelia be cruel is a legitimate way of playing the scenes in question
(and there are hundreds of performances to prove it), Shakespeare did not write
anything in the play that compels that interpretation. If that's the way he wanted
the scene played, then he was depending on his actors to supply something that,
in my opinion, is not in the text.
I think that Shakespeare's mental notes for the scene between Hamlet and
Ophelia were probably something this simple: "Ophelia goes to Hamlet to tell
him that she cannot accept his love. Hamlet still pretending to be crazy, tells
Ophelia that in fact he never loved her."

And then Shakespeare just listened to his characters and wrote it down what
they said. His primary goal was to write an entertaining scene, and he knew that
he was succeeding because writing it was turning out to be a lot of fun. And
when the scene was finished, he found himself a little surprised by it and
discovered that, as so often happened to him in the middle acts, the direction of
his play had slightly changed.

This was not Shakespeare's method (as I see it) every scene. But I believe that
you can tell the difference between the scenes where Shakespeare let his
characters control what happened and the ones that were more carefully
planned, because the first type of scenes are more alive and the second kind are
more or less predictable.

As background for Hamlet's first meeting with Ophelia, Shakespeare had

Polonius playing the role of a "heavy," the stern father familiar in comedies
from the time of the ancient Greeks (and in modern sitcoms). Polonius, and
then later Ophelia's brother Laertes (a stuffed shirt), disapprove of Hamlet as a
boyfriend for Ophelia. In a comedy, this would be a classic set-up.

Now comes the time for Shakespeare to write the scene where Ophelia
approaches Hamlet to tell him that she is no longer willing to accept his
attentions.

At this point, as I see it, Shakespeare has committed himself to two

incompatible game plans. The classic pattern for Shakespearean plays is that if
two young people are in love, and if their love is opposed by unsympathetic
older characters, then their love should ultimately triumph. On the other hand,
the outline from Belleforest that Shakespeare was following required Hamlet to
spurn Ophelia, since she is a dangerous diversion from his sacred purpose.

I think that a contemporary writer at this point would scrap the two earlier
scenes between Ophelia and Polonius and between Ophelia and Laertes. But
Shakespeare is known to have bragged that he never crossed out a line once
written, although certainly he did a certain amount of revision. (On the other
hand, not every scene that appears in the written text was actually included in
the performance by Shakespeare's troupe. Like every director who puts on a
play by Shakespeare, Shakespeare himself made substantial cuts in order to cut
the play down to a reasonable time length, which for him was apparently about
two hours.)

The reasonable thing for Shakespeare to have had Hamlet do at this point
would have been to say to Ophelia, "I am sorry, but at this point I have to put
my love for your aside, because something more important has come up that I
need to devote myself to." But this would not make for a very entertaining
scene and having Hamlet overtly state that revenge was more important to him
than love would make him a rather unsympathetic character to the typical
Shakespearean audience. (One of the odd things about the play is how likable
Hamlet is, despite the fact that everything he does, including his treatment of
Ophelia, is quite despicable.)

At this point, in any case, Shakespeare is totally caught up in the fun of having
Hamlet (pretend to) be crazy. Shakespeare's number one priority was to write a
scene that his audience would find entertaining, and his test for this was
whether or not the scene was entertaining for him to write. So, following the
style of most of the play, Hamlet starts talking to Ophelia in the manner of a
jester. Once again, as an experiment, I substitute the word Fool for the name
Hamlet.

Fool:  Ha, ha! Are you honest?

Ophelia:  Why ask you me this, Fool?

Fool:  Are you fair?

Ophelia:  What mean you, Fool?

Fool:  That if you be honest and be fair, your

honesty should admit no discourse to your beauty.

Ophelia:  Could beauty, Fool, have better commerce

than with honesty?

Fool:  Ay, truly; for the power of beauty will sooner

transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the
force of honest can transform beauty into his
likeness: this was sometime a paradox, but now time
gives it proof.
This is a standard Shakespearean joke, and I think that it is in fact a joke that is
found in all cultures (at least Western ones): the idea that a beautiful woman
can never be faithful. And these lines, except for a last sentence I have omitted
("I did love you once"), could be put into the mouth of almost any of
Shakespeare's jesters. In fact, Touchstone says almost this same thing in As You
Like It.

Of course it is one thing to hear these words from a professional comedian and
another to hear them from one's lover. And in the contemporary world, we are
much more sensitive to the veiled hostility behind this kind of joke.

In any case, Shakespeare, knowing that the story outline from Belleforest he is
following requires Hamlet to spurn Ophelia, now hears Hamlet speaking some
truly nasty lines. I don't think we should conclude that these lines reflect
Shakespeare's own attitude toward women, but I do believe that it was great fun
for Shakespeare, and for many in his audience, to have Hamlet be as nasty as
possible at this point. And whether or not we believe that Hamlet's intention
was to hurt Ophelia, certainly by the end I think it is established that he has an
enormous hostility toward women. (And I don't think that this was something
that Shakespeare had planned. It is one of those cases where after Shakespeare
gave his characters a chance to say what they had to say, he found that the
direction of his play had changed a little.)

Hamlet:  I did love you once.

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

Hamlet:  You should not have believed me; for

virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we
should relish of it: I loved you not.

Ophelia:  I was the more deceived.

Hamlet:  Get the to a nunnery: why wouldst thou be

a breeder of sinners? I am myself but indifferent
honest; but yet I could accuse me of such things that
it were better my mother had not borne 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. What on earth should fellows as I do
crawling between earth and heaven? We are errant
 knaves, all; believe none of us. Get thy ways to a
nunnery. Where's your father?

These are still lines that might be spoken by a jester, albeit a deeply cynical
one. (Maybe Jaques in As You Like It). There's nothing so far that's really
hostile to Ophelia or to women in general. Hamlet is saying to Ophelia that
human beings in general are vile and that marriage is vile because it only leads
to the creation of more human beings. So he would recommend that she not
marry.

The line "Where's your father?" which Ophelia answers with the lie, "At home,
my lord," seems to be a clear tip-off that Hamlet knows that Polonius is
watching this scene. There's no other way that line makes any sense.

The scene continues (four lines further down)

Hamlet:  If thou dost marry, I'll give thee this plague

for thy dowry: be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as
snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a
nunnery, go: farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs marry,
marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what
monsters you make of them. To a nunnery, go, and
quickly too. Farewell.

Ophelia [aside]:  Oh heavenly powers, restore him!

Hamlet:  I have heard of your paintings too, well

enough; God has given you one face and you make
yourselves another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp,
and nick-name God's creatures, and make your
wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't;
it hath made me mad. I say, we will have no more
marriages: those that are married already, all but one,
shall live. The rest shall keep as they are. To a
nunnery, go.   [Exits.]

The misogynism here is certainly extreme. But Shakespeare is no Strindberg.

Throughout Shakespeare, one sees the interplay of opinions as being part of the
interplay of characters. Shakespeare seems to have been someone who spent a
lot of time listening to men talk at taverns and similar places, and who loved
taking the sorts of opinions one hears in such places and putting them in the
mouths of his characters.
I suspect that this last speech here was as much a surprise to Hamlet --- and to
Shakespeare! --- as it is to the audience. Hamlet's control started to slip, and he
momentarily came out of jester mode. I can imagine him walking off and later
thinking, "Did I really say that?"

And yet it makes sense. One doesn't have to have any allegiance to Freud to see
that here Hamlet's anger towards his mother is spilling over onto Ophelia.

Of course it would be natural, and perhaps inevitable, for Ophelia to take what
Hamlet says personally, but nothing he says actually relates to her personally.
The actress playing Ophelia has a lot of choices, but as Hamlet complains of
women who use excessive make-up and exaggerated cuteness, I imagine
Ophelia standing there and wondering, "What the hell are you talking about?
What does any of this have to do with me?"

The reader of the play (as contrasted with the theatre-goer) has the chance to
stop at this point and look back and think about what is really going on. Who is
rejecting who at this point?

Whether we consider Hamlet's words cruel or not will have a lot to do with the
extent to which we consider Ophelia in love with him. And it seems to me that
on the basis of the earlier scenes with Polonius and Laertes, there is no
indication at all that she is really in love with Hamlet, although she was
certainly flattered by his attentions. (She later speaks of having "sucked the
honey of his music vows.")

Ophelia has come to tell Hamlet that she no longer welcomes his attentions.
Hamlet goes into a fury and becomes makes abusive statements about women,
which we today, in any case, can recognize as often typical when a man is
rejected by a woman. In isolation, the scene works perfectly well if played that
way. In fact, it seems to me that that's the only reading of that scene that really
makes sense. But to see Hamlet as an angry rejected male makes no sense at all
in terms of the play as a whole.

We have learned from Chekhov to read between the lines, to pay as much
attention to what is not said as what is said. But Shakespeare was part of a
different tradition. Shakespeare's characters are usually quite overt in telling us
of their feelings. And what does Ophelia say about effect Hamlet's words have
on her?

Ophelia:  Oh, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown.

The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue,
 sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mold of form,
The observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
That sucked the honey of his music vows,
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
That unmatch'd form and feature of blown youth
Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me,
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

As usual, a few footnotes would be helpful here. In particular, "ecstasy" =

"insanity." But in general, the important point is quite clear. Basically, Ophelia
is saying, "Jesus, he seemed like such a wonderful guy; before his words to me
were so sweet and I let myself fall for him, and now he's gone totally round the
bend."  As always, there are lots of choices for the actress here. Ophelia is
certainly distressed, but about the fact that Hamlet has lost his mind. There's
nothing overtly in the text to show that it's because Hamlet has rejected her.

And then there are some later interchanges between Hamlet and Ophelia during
the play-within-the-play. There's nothing inherently hostile in them, although
it's easy for an actress thinking in terms of contemporary man-woman
paradigms to play Ophelia as a woman awkwardly trying to deal with a
passive-aggressive hostility from a former lover. Once again I experiment by
replacing the name Hamlet with the word Fool.

Fool:  Lady, shall I lie in your lap? [Lying at

Ophelia's feet.]

Ophelia:  No, Fool.

Fool:  I mean, my head upon your lap?

Ophelia:  Ay, Fool.

Fool:  Do you think I meant country matters?

Ophelia:  I think nothing, Fool.

Fool:  That is a fair thought to lie between a

maiden's legs.
 Ophelia:  What is, Fool?

Fool:  Nothing.

Ophelia:  You are merry, Fool.

Fool:  Who, I?

Ophelia:  Ay, Fool.

Fool:  Oh, God, your only jig maker.

Here it needs to be noted that for Elizabethans "nothing" could be taken as a

slang reference to a woman's vagina (and the word "nunnery" previously could
be taken as slang for a brothel), which makes the joking for us seem a little
more harsh. But I think that with this Shakespeare, as so often, was merely
going for a laugh. In Shakespeare's world, a reference to a woman's sexuality
was not automatically insulting.

Ophelia's Madness

But then Ophelia goes crazy and kills herself. Why does she go crazy?

Or rather we can ask, why does Shakespeare have her go crazy? Well, if one
imagines being Shakespeare and writing this play, one can see that at this point
he has a major character who no longer seems to serve any useful purpose.
She's a loose end that needs to be tied off. It's not going to work very well to
have Hamlet kill her. So why not have her commit suicide? And having
Ophelia go crazy allowed Shakespeare to have the actress, or rather boy,
playing her do a nice little bawdy music hall turn in Act 4. (Modern
performances are usually not brave enough to have this be as comic as it was
clearly written. Shakespeare's audience was not uncomfortable about laughing
at the mentally ill.)

But that's not really an adequate answer. Given that it was useful for
Shakespeare to have Ophelia go crazy and kill herself, how does he go about
making it plausible to us? And I think it is plausible. I don't think there have
ever been many people who left a performance of Hamlet saying, "You know, I
think Ophelia over-reacted a bit. There wasn't really any reason for her to
become so hysterical."
After all, her boyfriend has gone crazy and been very nasty to her and then
killed her father. (I think that in a performance, because of Hamlet's truly vile
comments about women, the audience tends to forget that it was Ophelia who
rejected Hamlet and not the other way around. And I think that Shakespeare, at
least while caught up in writing his first draft, pretty much forgot this as well.)
But I think that for an Elizabethan audience, there may have been a more
significant factor. Namely, when Ophelia commits suicide specifically by
drowning herself, I think that many in an Elizabethan audience would take this
as a clear suggestion that she was pregnant, since drowning was the preferred
method of suicide for umarried women who were pregnant.

But while Ophelia's insanity and subsequent suicide may be sufficiently

plausible in the play, theres not an inevitable logic to these consequences. I
would suggest that the reader perform a thought experiment and imagine some
of the other choices. Suppose that instead of Ophelia killing herself, her love
had changed to hate and she had allied herself with Claudius (not to mention
Laertes) and all the other forces opposed to Hamlet. Or suppose she had simply
disappeared from the play after the nunnery scene, and then reappeared in Act 5
as the bride-to-be of Fortinbras. Perhaps Shakespeare would not have been able
to make the overall structure of the play work quite as well in these cases, but
looking purely at Ophelia's story in isolation, would it still have made at least
as much sense in these cases as it does in the existing play?  I believe that it
would have.

It's not clear from the language whether or not Shakespeare intended Ophelia's
madness to be played as comic. I believe that he did. Of course her mad scenes
play perfectly well if the actress playing Ophelia reads her comic words with a
sad, tragic voice. Certainly for a modern audience, uncomfortable at laughing at
mental illness, this sort of incongruity (irony, actually), where the words are
saying one thing and the tone of voice is saying the opposite, works very well.

In his rehearsal notes for his 1964 Broadway production of Hamlet starring
Richard Burton, John Gielgud has the following to say about Ophelia's mad
scene.

I'm rather sick of the wild indecency that has been put into the
scene in recent productions, with Ophelia tearing off her clothes
and clutching all the gentlemen. I don't think Shakespeare meant
it. It must be a touching scene. You see, in Shakespeare's time,
people always laughed at lunatics. They visited madhouses right
up to the Eighteenth Century in England as we visit the zoo today.
And Shakespeare knew that the only way to make madness pitiful
 was to give them a poignant, agonized, though not sentimental
scene. And to suddenly make Ophelia lewd onstage is against the
intention of the writing. I don't want to make it sentimental and
Victorian.

Gielgud is offering here one possible approach, and obviously a very good one,
for playing this scene. I think that the most important point here is that the
scene should not be made sentimental, which I think is the result when Ophelia
speaks her lines in a tone of sadness. I personally do not see that the text itself
lends support for the hypothesis that Shakespeare intended the scene to be
pitiful and poignant. I note Gielgud's point that in Shakespeare's time (and for a
couple of centuries later), insanity was seen as comic, and it seems to me that
what Shakespeare offers us here is comedy. It seems to me that Ophelia's mad
scene should be consistent with Gertrude's description of her suicide, where
Ophelia floats down the stream singing happily.

My point is that, if played straight, Ophelia's mad scenes are quite entertaining,
especially if the actress can do a good job with the singing and dancing. And
although we can't know for sure, everything we do know about Shakespeare's
theatre, together with the many other places in Hamlet that are clearly comic,
suggests that this is the way Shakespeare intended the scenes to be played.

Certainly the scene can be played otherwise, but to do so, in my opinion, is to

play "against the text."

(In Players of Shakespeare  2, Frances Barber of the Royal Shakespeare

Company tells about the way she decided to play Ophelia: "She is full of humor
and wit and intelligence; she's strong, courageous, emotionally open..... She's
the only person in the play who sees who's going on, and she goes mad because
she's full of guilt for not having been able to prevent it."  Barber further says
that in the scene where Polonius tells her to break off her relationship with
Hamlet and at the end of the scene she says, "I will obey, my Lord," she has
Ophelia all but spit the line at her father Polonius.

(To me, this really exemplifies the fact that rather than pinning down his
characters, Shakespeare gives his actors a wide range of choices in playing
them, to the extent that a performance can work even when the actor is playing
against the text. Not that I've seen Frances Barber's performance, but I can
believe that it worked quite well, although this sort of disrespect from a
daughter for a father's authority would certainly not have played well to an
Elizabethan audience.)
Of course even if Ophelia's mad scenes are played as straight comedy, the irony
is still there. The audience will still feel pity for Ophelia, just as Claudius and
Gertrude do. It's just that in this case the irony is left to the mind of the
audience rather than being played overtly by the actress. (And incidentally,
speaking as someone who has had encounters with a number of mentally ill
people and had occasion to visit a friend in a psychiatric ward and listen to her
babbling nonsense childishly, I think that playing Ophelia's madness as childish
and comic is actually more true to life.)

As to Ophelia's death, it would take a brave director to have this played as

comic. And yet certainly there's something a little odd about Shakespeare's
brief description that makes it very different than the typical tragic death.

(Enter Queen.) Queen. One woe doth tread upon

another's heel
So fast they follow: your sister's drown'd, Laertes.

Laertes. Drown'd! Oh where?

Queen. There is a willow that grows aslant a brook,

That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them.
There, on the pendant bows her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke,
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element. But long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pulled their wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.

Laertes. Alas, then, she is drowned?

Queen. Drowned, drowned.

 Laertes. Too much water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears; but yet
It is our trick; nature her custom holds,
Let shame say what it will: when these are gone,
The women will be out. Adieu, my lord:
I have a speech of fire, that fain would blaze,
But that this folly drowns it.

The Queen's description is a nice little vignette, but it is not clear that the
overall impression is tragic. Gertrude seems almost more interested in the
flowers in Ophelia's garland than in her death. It is not quite clear whether the
audience is intended to laugh at the image of Ophelia slipping and falling into
the brook and singing as she floats down the brook before drowning. The
phrase "melodious lay" certainly seems a comic touch. A lot would depend on
how this is played. Shakespeare usually tells us how to think and how to feel,
and except for the phrase "poor wretch" there is an absence of the usual words
such as "piteous" which would mark a tragic scene.

Incidentally, for those addicts of "close reading," one can note that the text
doesn't actually say that Ophelia committed suicide. It seems to say that she
slipped and fell into the brook, although one can certainly wonder why she was
climbing down the bank if she wasn't thinking of killing herself. In any case, in
Act 5 her suicide seems to be accepted as a matter of fact.

Is Hamlet Really Crazy?

When we ask, "Was Hamlet really crazy or was he only pretending to be

crazy?" we really need to think about the question, "What is the difference
between a pretend character who is pretending to be crazy and a pretend
character who is really crazy?" Shakespeare did have a means available for
indicating that a character was merely pretending: namely, he could have the
character from time to time make asides to the audience to indicate this. In the
case of Hamlet, Shakespeare does not choose to do this, but I don't think we
can take this as an indication that Shakespeare meant us to believe that Hamlet
is really crazy. Shakespeare had a lot of fun portraying Hamlet as insane, and I
don't think he was really that concerned with the question of whether the
insanity was supposedly real or whether it was only a sham. The only things we
can say are that at times, Hamlet really does seem crazy, but this is only in
scenes in which he is being observed, and at the beginning of the play he
explicitly states that he plans to pretend to be mad. That's the information
given.

My own opinion is that since the story by Belleforest that Shakespeare was
following has Hamlet pretend to be crazy, and nothing in Shakespeare's text is
inconsistent with Hamlet's madness being feigned, then probably Shakespeare's
intention was that Hamlet be perceived as feigning madness. In fact, this is the
point of view that almost all critics take.

However there is another possibility. I can imagine Shakespeare on a late-night

talk show. The host asks him, "Mr. Shakespeare, in your play Hamlet, you have
the lead character apparently pretending to be mad. However some critics have
suggested the possibility that Hamlet might have actually been really crazy.
Can you tell us, sir, when you wrote that play, what was in your mind? Were
you thinking that Hamlet was in fact crazy, or only pretending to be crazy?"

And I can imagine Shakespeare answering, "Actually, my intention was to

make it impossible for the audience to ever figure out whether Hamlet was
really crazy or not."

Scenario versus Scene

The overall story lines of Shakespeare's plays is where most critics focus most
of their attention. And yet I believe that the evidence is fairly clear that this was
not the major focus of Shakespeare's effort. When we ask questions about the
overall story line of Hamlet, questions such as, "Why did Hamlet decide it
would be a good idea to pretend to be crazy?" or "Why was Hamlet so cruel to
Ophelia?" we are asking about things that weren't even Shakespeare's ideas, but
which were copied directly from his sources.

It is fairly well accepted that Shakespeare based Hamlet on an account by a

French storyteller Belleforest, who in turn based his saga on a twelfth century
chronicle by Saxo Grammaticus which Shakespeare was probably not familiar
with.

Not having read Belleforest mayself, I quote Harold Bloom's summary of his
story:

The heroic Horwendil, having slain the King of Norway in single

combat, wins Gerutha, the daughter of the King of Denmark, who
 bears him Amleth. Horwendil's jealous brother Fengon murders
Horwendil and incestuously marries Gerutha. Amleth, to preserve
his life, pretends to be mad, resists a woman sent to tempt him,
stabs a friend of Fengon's hidden in Gerutha's bedchamber,
berates his mother into repentance, and is sent off by Fengon to be
executed in England. On the voyage, Amleths alters Fengon's
letter and thus sends his two escorting retainers to their deaths.
Returning home, Amleth kills Fengon with the usurper's own
sword, and then is hailed as king by the Danish populace.

Now the first thing that strikes one here is that in adapting this story to the
stage, Shakespeare, like some modern screenwriters writing an adapted
screenplay, except for the ending follows the basic story line rather closely. (A
tragedy, by definition, is supposed to end in the death of the hero. Although
Shakespeare did not label Hamlet as a tragedy, but rather as a revenge play, he
knew that his audience in fact liked to see lots of deaths at the end. So he
ditched Belleforest's happy ending.)

And the second thing one can notice is that despite the striking similarity,
Belleforest's story makes a lot more sense than Shakespeare's.

So when we ask, "Why did Shakespeare decide to have things happen in

Hamlet the way they do?" I think the answer is clear: That was the outline he
got from Belleforest, and he simply followed it. Furthermore, so little effort did
he put into thinking about this story line that he didn't even bother to put the
ingredients into his own play which would have made the story make sense.

In Shakespeare's play, Claudius at the beginning of the play seems more

paternalistic than hostile to Hamlet or suspicious of him, so there is no
justification for Hamlet to pretend to be insane. In fact, it is clearly
counterproductive for Hamlet to do so. But Shakespeare had already decided to
follow Belleforest in having Hamlet pretend to be mad, and this clearly
engaged Shakespeare's imagination as a writer (since it became the central
element of the play), so that's what he did.

In Belleforest's story (or at least In Harold Bloom's summary), Ophelia has

been sent to tempt and subvert Hamlet. But this aspect of the story didn't
interest Shakespeare, and so we are left with the puzzle of why Hamlet treats
Ophelia so harshly. If, in fact, we believe that he does.

The whole question of character and motivation in Shakespeare is the subject of

a separate article of its own by me, but in general I think it is clear that
Shakespeare, unlike modern psychological writers, was much more interested
in behavior than in the reasons that for behavior. This is because his primary
interest was in the scenes of his play, not in the story line.

A scene or a speech in any play can serve two different purposes. First, there is
the role it plays as a step in the development of the overall story. And second,
there is the value that the scene has in and of itself, independent of the rest of
the play. In general, an important scene will serve both purposes. But critics
tend to find it easier to focus on the second purpose, whereas to me it seems
clear that Shakespeare was focused first of all on the entertainment value of a
scene in and of itself, even if creating an entertaining scene meant changing the
direction of the plot.

In this way, I believe, Shakespeare's plays are (or at least were, when originally
produced) sometimes like operas or musical comedies, where the story,
although sometimes compelling in a rather archetypal way, is primarily a
device for getting from one song to the next. Or, in Shakespeare's case, from
one speech to the next.

In this respect, one can note that one can come into a Shakespeare play in the
middle and, despite a little confusion about what the play is about, still enjoy
the individual scenes. And you can excerpt a speech or, in many cases, a scene
from one of his plays and put it in an anthology and it will still retain a lot of its
value. It is much more difficult to do this for a play by Ibsen or Chekhov. On
the other hand, Shakespeare is the sort of writer who you can't paraphrase
without significantly diminishing the impact of the work. We don't read or
watch Shakespeare for story. We read his plays, especially Hamlet, primarily
for the words. Which makes it strange that critics often concentrate so much on
the story.

Perhaps some people would claim that one of the primary reasons Shakespeare
interests us is his characters. Well, so be it. But again, compare him in this
respect to Ibsen or Chekhov. Shakespearean characters fascinate us because of
the speeches they make and because of the ways they function in individual
scenes, whereas for Ibsen or Chekhov, the interest of a character has more to do
with the overall story.

Motivation
To the extent that the characters in a piece of fiction or play seem real to us, we
will naturally often attribute motivations to them or puzzle over their
motivation. Where one goes astray with Shakespeare, in my opinion, is in
thinking that such questions of motivation are what the play is really about (as
it would be in many more modern plays) or in thinking that there is necessarily
a correct answer to motivational questions.

In Act 3, Scene 3, Hamlet comes across Claudius apparently at his prayers and
thus has a clear chance to kill him. But at this point, he goes into a brief
soliloquy to the effect that killing Claudius while praying would not be an
adequate revenge, because the result would be to send his soul to Heaven, so it
would be better to wait until he can find Claudius in the midst of some dreadful
sin so that his soul will go to Hell.

I think it is a little hard for most of us today to relate to this theological

consideration. But Dr. Samuel Johnson, roughly a century and a half after
Shakespeare, found this speech to be so atrocious and horrible as to be unfit to
be put into the mouth of a human being. Still later (1811/12), Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, on the other hand, stated that Dr. Johnson had failed to understand
the character of Hamlet, and that Hamlet's speech is a mere rationalization for
the fact that Hamlet has not yet been able to decisively make up his mind to kill
the King.

Now since there never was a real Hamlet, it would be incorrect to say that there
is one correct answer to the choice between motivations given by Johnson and
Coleridge. It is in fact possible to read (and perform) Hamlet with either
interpretation. And since Shakespeare did not put his views on record, one
cannot definitively say what his own intention was.

However I myself believe that if one considers the type of entertainment that
Shakespeare was trying to produce, and the way this scene functions in the play
as a whole, then one can see that Coleridge was wrong, precisely because of
what Johnson complains about. Since the scene in question doesn't contribute a
whole lot in terms of making a plot point, in my opinion its whole raison d'être
is in the emotional response it evokes from the audience. Shakespeare was
never one to soften the emotional impact of his scenes for his audience. Quite
the contrary. (In this way, he was somewhat like Alfred Hitchcock, another
great entertainer.) And it would have been very weak to simply present Hamlet
saying, "Ah good! This would be a good time to kill Claudius; well, no, come
to think of it, I'm still not sure I'm ready for that yet."  Not at all Shakespeare's
approach to the theatre.
But I think that the really significant point here in understanding the nature of
Shakespeare's work is the fact that which interpretation one chooses in cases
like this doesn't actually have much effect on the overall impact of the play. All
the motivational questions the we ask (and critics especially ask) about
Shakespeare's plays --- why doesn't Hamlet get on with killing the king, why
does he treat Ophelia the way he does, how can he justify causing the deaths of
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern --- these are all questions that we ask after the
play is over. They're really not relevant to our experience of the play.

Hamlet's Age

In the gravedigger scene of Act 5 of Hamlet, Shakespeare (or whoever

assembled his plays for publication), goes to great length to establish the fact
that Hamlet is thirty years old. There's something a little odd about this.
Shakespeare did not usually take this much care in providing factual
information about his characters, and in fact often their ages seem to fluctuate
throughout the play.

Furthermore, at the beginning of Hamlet (as Harold Bloom points out), Hamlet
is clearly a very young man, probably about eighteen. Since no significant
amount of time passes in the first four acts, by the logic of the real world (and
the logic which students in writers workshops are taught to be very aware of),
this means that Hamlet continues to be a very young man throughout these four
acts. But in Act 5, after a relatively short trip to England, the gravedigger says
that Hamlet is thirty. (and in fact he seems to be even older than this.) This is a
very drastic fluctuation indeed!

Sometimes the solution to this kind of riddle depends on considerations that are
much more pragmatic than literary. It is possible, for instance, that Shakespeare
made a point of stating that Hamlet was thirty year old in order to avoid
offending some important person who might have otherwise believed that
Shakespeare had modeled Hamlet on him. (We can be fairly sure that similar
pragmatic considerations resulted in the loss of several important scenes from
the version of Macbeth that survives today.)

But we can't ask, "What is Hamlet's age?" Because Hamlet only exists in
Shakespeare's mind, in the text, in the performance, and in our own minds. In
Shakespeare's mind, I am convinced, Hamlet had no age except at a few
moments. And this is also true in the text, and I believe this is almost always
true in the mind of audience members. The question of Hamlet's age is relevant
only for critics and for performers.