Shakespeare 23: Hamlet
Last weekend I finished three plays. By Monday morning I was dreaming in pseudo-Shakespearean, and saying, "Ay, marry!" when people asked me questions.
The first two plays were Julius Caesar and As You Like It, which I've already written about. The third was "Hamlet", probably Shakespeare's most popular play. I'd read Hamlet twice before. Well, once and a half. The first half was when it was assigned to me in a college literature class, and I never quite finished it then. A few months later, I read it on my own. So, this is one that I'd already read in adulthood, but I still got more out of it this time than my previous readings. I guess the reasons are because my Shakespearean reading comprehension has been greatly increased by this project (often now I'll look at the footnotes and already know what they're going to say), and because I sat and read it all in one day.
Moreso than even most other Shakespeare plays, Hamlet has been analyzed and written about endlessly, so I doubt I have any great new scholarly insights to provide. My edition of Shakespeare alone had at least 10 critical essays, including historical ones from the likes of Samuel Coleridge. So I'll just provide a brief outline of my reaction.
The interpretation of Hamlet I've always heard is that, as it says in the introduction to the Laurence Olivier film, it's "the tragedy of a man who cannot make up his mind". This seems to be the most common view of the play, and is how it's portrayed in the popular culture (on those rare occasions when Hamlet is portrayed in popular culture). And so I expected it to be this way, yet, reading the play, I didn't get that impression at all. One action seemed to follow swiftly and logically on from another, at each point. While it's true that Hamlet didn't immediately go and stab Claudius, it makes sense that his goal was actually to kill Claudius in secret, since he had no legally admissible proof that Claudius was a murder. And if clandestine murder was Hamlet's goal, he really moved as swiftly and decisively as possible. (Though of course there is also, as mentioned in one of the essays in my edition of Hamlet, the basic problem of a revenge play: if the wronged person takes revenge directly and immediately, then the play is over in the first act.)
I guess the main counterpoint to the "active Hamlet" view of the play, is that Hamlet himself has some speeches where he chides himself for not being active enough, and/or mournful enough. Taken in the context of all the other Shakespeare I've read, though, they sounded a lot like the hyperbolic mourning language characters often use, trying to express that their grief is inexpressible and/or that they're not good enough to mourn the amount that deserves to be mourned.
Another area of the play where I went in with expectations that were disrupted was Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. Somewhere (probably from Tom Stoppard's "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" I had got it into my head that they were comedic characters, colorful fan favorites. So, I kept expecting their dialogue to turn sparkly and witty, and it never did. They made one jibe with Hamlet about how, if he took no joy from man, the theater company on its way would receive cold welcome from him, but other than that their dialogue was flat and hollow. So, I did some reading on people's interpretations of the characters, and I found that it made much more sense to see them as obsequious, morally bankrupt courtiers, quick to betray their schoolmate Hamlet, quick also to betray Claudius by telling Hamlet that they had been sent by him. So, perhaps a little comedic, but in the sense that you're meant to laugh contemptuously at them, not sympathetically with them. I guess the Stoppard play (and the earlier W. S. Gilbert play) were satirically elevating a minor background character to a foreground character. The only reason Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are so noticeable on their own, is because they have such lengthy names, they appear in quite a few scenes (though they say very little), and Hamlet's cast of characters is rather small to begin with.
I was bothered by one plot hole in the play. When Claudius tells Laertes about his plan to kill Hamlet, he says it will be perfectly designed so that no one will suspect foul play: "And for his death no wind of blame shall breathe, But even his mother shall uncharge the practice And call it accident." The plan, is that he will challenge Laertes and Hamlet to fence one another while the court places wagers on them, and he will secretly give Laertes a sword that still has its cutting edge. Laertes will kill Hamlet with it, and presumably they'll say afterwards that someone must have accidentally put a real sword in with the practice swords.
All well and good, but then Laertes says that he'll add to it by putting poison on the blade, so that if he merely scratches or nicks Hamlet, he'll die. And then Claudius backs that up by saying that he'll put poison in the wine Hamlet will drink between rounds, in case Laertes fails to hit him. And like that, they've tossed the idea of making it look like an accident right out the window. There are now three ways it can play out:
1) Laertes manages to stab Hamlet with his sword, and claims it was an accident caused by his mistakenly being given a sharpened sword.
2) Laertes nicks Hamlet. A few minutes later, Hamlet falls writhing on the floor in pain and then dies.
3) Laertes doesn't hit Hamlet at all. Hamlet takes a drink of wine. A few minutes later, Hamlet falls writhing on the floor in pain and then dies.
Scenario #1 would look like an accident, but scenario #2 and especially #3 would not. Unless Laertes takes advantage of Hamlet's collapse to stab him, and makes it look like Hamlet tripped or something.
I can think of a couple of in-character explanations for this sudden forgetting of the desire for secrecy, but neither one is great. First, Laertes and Claudius might both be so desperate for Hamlet's death that they're not thinking rationally. Clearly Laertes doesn't care about it, he'd cut Hamlet's throat in church. Claudius still does, but gets easily distracted and stops caring about whether it will really look like an accident or not. The second possible explanation is that they didn't realize what the effects of the poison would be. When we see it in use in the final scene, it's pretty dramatic and it's clear to the poisoning victims that they are being poisoned, and they have plenty of time to explain this to on-lookers. But Laertes probably hadn't seen anyone actually get poisoned by his tincture before, and Claudius might not have either. Maybe they were expecting it to make Hamlet sluggish first, so that Laertes would have a chance to step in and stab them. Heck, maybe it does have that effect. The stage directions in my edition of Hamlet indicate the poison's first visible effect is to make the victim swoon onto the floor, but as stage business it could make the victim stagger and sway first.
Personally, I think this is just a continuity error on Shakespeare's part. There are a lot of those in Shakespeare's plays, for various reasons not least of which is the editing process for their 17th century original printed editions.
Normally, this would be the point where I would post some of my favorite passages from the play. But with Hamlet, virtually every line is so well known and well quoted that it's a cliche unto itself. I've been trying to Tweet Shakespeare one-liners as I go through the plays (difficult because even his one-liners are often more than 140 characters), but every one-liner in Hamlet was already a cliched quotation. "The lady doth protest too much", etc. In the end I quoted a couple of the gravedigger's gallows-humor jokes, which are perhaps not as well known as they could be.
And on the note of the e-book edition, strangely with Hamlet I found no good editions, at all. There were dozens of e-book versions of Hamlet (more than any other play so far, I think), but only a handful that had scholarly annotations, and the most readable of those I could find had "bottom of page" annotations. And they didn't feel as explicatory as they could be; they were mostly about vocabulary.
Next up, on to "Twelfth Night", a play performed by the theater department when I was in high school! I was supposed to play in it, but got cold feet and dropped out shortly after auditions.
The first two plays were Julius Caesar and As You Like It, which I've already written about. The third was "Hamlet", probably Shakespeare's most popular play. I'd read Hamlet twice before. Well, once and a half. The first half was when it was assigned to me in a college literature class, and I never quite finished it then. A few months later, I read it on my own. So, this is one that I'd already read in adulthood, but I still got more out of it this time than my previous readings. I guess the reasons are because my Shakespearean reading comprehension has been greatly increased by this project (often now I'll look at the footnotes and already know what they're going to say), and because I sat and read it all in one day.
Moreso than even most other Shakespeare plays, Hamlet has been analyzed and written about endlessly, so I doubt I have any great new scholarly insights to provide. My edition of Shakespeare alone had at least 10 critical essays, including historical ones from the likes of Samuel Coleridge. So I'll just provide a brief outline of my reaction.
The interpretation of Hamlet I've always heard is that, as it says in the introduction to the Laurence Olivier film, it's "the tragedy of a man who cannot make up his mind". This seems to be the most common view of the play, and is how it's portrayed in the popular culture (on those rare occasions when Hamlet is portrayed in popular culture). And so I expected it to be this way, yet, reading the play, I didn't get that impression at all. One action seemed to follow swiftly and logically on from another, at each point. While it's true that Hamlet didn't immediately go and stab Claudius, it makes sense that his goal was actually to kill Claudius in secret, since he had no legally admissible proof that Claudius was a murder. And if clandestine murder was Hamlet's goal, he really moved as swiftly and decisively as possible. (Though of course there is also, as mentioned in one of the essays in my edition of Hamlet, the basic problem of a revenge play: if the wronged person takes revenge directly and immediately, then the play is over in the first act.)
I guess the main counterpoint to the "active Hamlet" view of the play, is that Hamlet himself has some speeches where he chides himself for not being active enough, and/or mournful enough. Taken in the context of all the other Shakespeare I've read, though, they sounded a lot like the hyperbolic mourning language characters often use, trying to express that their grief is inexpressible and/or that they're not good enough to mourn the amount that deserves to be mourned.
Another area of the play where I went in with expectations that were disrupted was Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern. Somewhere (probably from Tom Stoppard's "Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" I had got it into my head that they were comedic characters, colorful fan favorites. So, I kept expecting their dialogue to turn sparkly and witty, and it never did. They made one jibe with Hamlet about how, if he took no joy from man, the theater company on its way would receive cold welcome from him, but other than that their dialogue was flat and hollow. So, I did some reading on people's interpretations of the characters, and I found that it made much more sense to see them as obsequious, morally bankrupt courtiers, quick to betray their schoolmate Hamlet, quick also to betray Claudius by telling Hamlet that they had been sent by him. So, perhaps a little comedic, but in the sense that you're meant to laugh contemptuously at them, not sympathetically with them. I guess the Stoppard play (and the earlier W. S. Gilbert play) were satirically elevating a minor background character to a foreground character. The only reason Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern are so noticeable on their own, is because they have such lengthy names, they appear in quite a few scenes (though they say very little), and Hamlet's cast of characters is rather small to begin with.
I was bothered by one plot hole in the play. When Claudius tells Laertes about his plan to kill Hamlet, he says it will be perfectly designed so that no one will suspect foul play: "And for his death no wind of blame shall breathe, But even his mother shall uncharge the practice And call it accident." The plan, is that he will challenge Laertes and Hamlet to fence one another while the court places wagers on them, and he will secretly give Laertes a sword that still has its cutting edge. Laertes will kill Hamlet with it, and presumably they'll say afterwards that someone must have accidentally put a real sword in with the practice swords.
All well and good, but then Laertes says that he'll add to it by putting poison on the blade, so that if he merely scratches or nicks Hamlet, he'll die. And then Claudius backs that up by saying that he'll put poison in the wine Hamlet will drink between rounds, in case Laertes fails to hit him. And like that, they've tossed the idea of making it look like an accident right out the window. There are now three ways it can play out:
1) Laertes manages to stab Hamlet with his sword, and claims it was an accident caused by his mistakenly being given a sharpened sword.
2) Laertes nicks Hamlet. A few minutes later, Hamlet falls writhing on the floor in pain and then dies.
3) Laertes doesn't hit Hamlet at all. Hamlet takes a drink of wine. A few minutes later, Hamlet falls writhing on the floor in pain and then dies.
Scenario #1 would look like an accident, but scenario #2 and especially #3 would not. Unless Laertes takes advantage of Hamlet's collapse to stab him, and makes it look like Hamlet tripped or something.
I can think of a couple of in-character explanations for this sudden forgetting of the desire for secrecy, but neither one is great. First, Laertes and Claudius might both be so desperate for Hamlet's death that they're not thinking rationally. Clearly Laertes doesn't care about it, he'd cut Hamlet's throat in church. Claudius still does, but gets easily distracted and stops caring about whether it will really look like an accident or not. The second possible explanation is that they didn't realize what the effects of the poison would be. When we see it in use in the final scene, it's pretty dramatic and it's clear to the poisoning victims that they are being poisoned, and they have plenty of time to explain this to on-lookers. But Laertes probably hadn't seen anyone actually get poisoned by his tincture before, and Claudius might not have either. Maybe they were expecting it to make Hamlet sluggish first, so that Laertes would have a chance to step in and stab them. Heck, maybe it does have that effect. The stage directions in my edition of Hamlet indicate the poison's first visible effect is to make the victim swoon onto the floor, but as stage business it could make the victim stagger and sway first.
Personally, I think this is just a continuity error on Shakespeare's part. There are a lot of those in Shakespeare's plays, for various reasons not least of which is the editing process for their 17th century original printed editions.
Normally, this would be the point where I would post some of my favorite passages from the play. But with Hamlet, virtually every line is so well known and well quoted that it's a cliche unto itself. I've been trying to Tweet Shakespeare one-liners as I go through the plays (difficult because even his one-liners are often more than 140 characters), but every one-liner in Hamlet was already a cliched quotation. "The lady doth protest too much", etc. In the end I quoted a couple of the gravedigger's gallows-humor jokes, which are perhaps not as well known as they could be.
And on the note of the e-book edition, strangely with Hamlet I found no good editions, at all. There were dozens of e-book versions of Hamlet (more than any other play so far, I think), but only a handful that had scholarly annotations, and the most readable of those I could find had "bottom of page" annotations. And they didn't feel as explicatory as they could be; they were mostly about vocabulary.
Next up, on to "Twelfth Night", a play performed by the theater department when I was in high school! I was supposed to play in it, but got cold feet and dropped out shortly after auditions.