Shakespeare After All

by Marjorie Garber

If, of all of Shakespeare's plays, only Hamlet had somehow survived, if we had only Hamlet to represent his theater and his dramatic achievement, we would still regard Shakespeare as a brilliant playwright, and we would have a very good idea of what the early modern stage looked like and how it worked.

As befits a play about the “purpose of playing” in the widest sense, Hamlet provides an excellent guide to the use of the early modern stage, and to the thematic interchangeability of stage and world.

By the time the players arrive, we have already seen in Hamlet a certain tendency to self-dramatization. He thinks in theatrical terms. He moralizes on his mourning clothes as a kind of “show,” or external display. He assumes the role of fool or antic, with a disarranged costume to match.

It is to a very great extent the soliloquies that have

made the play the favorite of poets and philosophers, not to mention actors and directors.

although Hamlet likewise contemplates action, contemplates murder, contemplates revenge, it is being,

not doing, that has made this character the mirror that subsequent writers, philosophers, and critics have held up to human nature.

Friedrich Nietzsche saw memory as that which distinguishes human beings from animals. Cattle forget, and so they are happy. Humans remember, and so they suffer.

ghostliness is never embodied as powerfully, or as multiply, as in this play, where ultimately everyone is a ghost.

Forms, modes, shapes, trappings. Seem, play, act, show. Fake sighs, and dejected looks. This is the language of acting, and acting is what Hamlet sees all around him—a player king and a player queen, acting at grief, and acting it badly.

Hamlet the prince now becomes his own household fool, and allows himself to speak the truth.

It is thought that when the play was first staged Shakespeare himself played the part of the Ghost. Shakespeare's only son, whose name was Hamnet, died in 1596, and Shakespeare's father, John, died in 1601.

play itself, almost obsessively concerned with the relationships between fathers and sons, seems...

In Hamlet we have what is possibly the greatest of these opening scenes, because it develops a mood and a tone that chill the spectator to the core.

Claudius's opening speech, beginning the play's second scene, offers the greatest possible contrast to the dignified and mysterious silence of the Ghost. His speech is a model of policy, a masterly reduction of language

to formal public utterance. Its very first word is the politician's “though”—a conditional hedge:

Can everything be right in such a state, where language contradicts itself so effortlessly, so cosmetically, and where the majesty of the King's public utterance crushes together, almost undetected by his courtly listeners, a comic funeral and a tragic marriage?

“My words fly up,” he will acknowledge, “my thoughts remain below” (3.3.97).

This split between words and thought, words and meaning, is essential to the way Hamlet works.

When the everyday language of human beings cannot be trusted, the only “safe” language is deliberate fiction, plays and lies. The only safe world is the world of the imagination, not the corrupt and uncontrollable world of politics.

To thine own self be true” seem to have a certain moral or ethical force when considered in the abstract, but uttered onstage by a dramatic character who has been interpreted in every mode from hapless wise counselor to doddering old fool, these same words begin to coruscate with inadvertent irony.

Claudius decorated his language with sounding phrases that plastered over and concealed his harsher meanings. Polonius reduces himself to the

even more anodyne level of the completely impersonal and banal word. The advice may be wiser than the speaker.

One of this playwright's most substantial achievements is that, whenever he cites truisms or platitudes, he puts them in the mouths of suspect speakers,

something that the “Bartlett's”—or, now, the Internet—approach to quotation entirely fails to acknowledge, with the result that the irony turns back upon the quoter.

the play repeatedly associates the “rotten” thing that male characters need to be on guard against with women and female sexuality. Hamlet's bitter and despairing instruction to Ophelia,

“Get thee to a nunnery” (3.1.122), incorporates the two apparently opposite meanings of the word, for in Elizabethan slang a “nunnery” was a brothel.

The final fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes, staged, at Claudius's behest, ostensibly as a friendly challenge, a scene of public sport, marks a deliberate and forceful contrast with the previous offstage epic combat between the warriors of an earlier generation,

Old Hamlet is the voice of an older age of stable values, but his values are ultimately inadmissible in a world not of fathers but of sons.

Hamlet is often compared to Brutus, since both spend so much of their onstage time ruminating on the human condition, often in passages of incomparable poetry that echo the thoughts and debates of contemporary philosophers.

The call to revenge is a call to repetition: to do the act again, to

do it back, to repay injury with injury. Revenge is repetition, and repetition is compulsion.

The “revenge play” was a popular part of the early modern repertoire, and Shakespeare continually reworked this genre throughout his career, even in as late a play as The Tempest.

His attraction to revenge and his resistance to it are part of the intellectual tension that makes Hamlet such an engaged and engaging character.

Whatever Hamlet's own view, though, the tempering of justice with mercy, the exploration of both the political and the ethical expediency of revenge's aftermath in reconciliation and

forgiveness, is a principal preoccupation of Hamlet, as it is of many of the plays that surround it chronologically—The Merchant of Venice, Measure for Measure, and All's Well That Ends Well.

Why does Hamlet feign madness? Or is it feigned? Does he change, from first act to last? Why can he kill Claudius in the last act, and not at the beginning of the play?

most centrally, why does he delay? Does he doubt the truth of the Ghost's message? Is he too cowardly to kill for revenge? Is he unfit to be a hero? This is what the German poet Goethe thought. Is Hamlet a habitual procrastinator, who shirks all his obligations, including the obligation to revenge? This is what the English Romantic critic and poet Coleridge thought.

Or is he perhaps not delaying at all, but acting as swiftly as opportunity presents?

The part of Hamlet has not infrequently been played by actresses, including Sarah Bernhardt in 1899 and, more recently, Diane Venora in 2000. “I cannot see Hamlet as a

man,” Bernhardt declared, when asked about her characterization. “The things he says, his impulses, his actions entirely indicate to me that he was a woman.”

this depiction of women's emotions as too frail and too powerful, taken together with the sense that Hamlet is preeminently the figure of consciousness, interiority, and thought, has led, in the reception of the play, to an interesting cultural effect: women, from Sarah Bernhardt on, have often aspired to be Hamlet, rather than Gertrude or Ophelia—not because Hamlet is a woman, but because “mankind” is Hamlet.

In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) he offers a powerful and provocative reading of the Shakespearean character: “Hamlet is able to do anything—except

except take vengeance on the man who did away with his father and took that father's place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of childhood realized.”

As we will continue to see, this technique of “splitting,” producing several versions of a character type split into component

aspects, is one of the most effective devices of Hamlet, and will culminate in Hamlet's dying recognition that all his rivals and friends (Horatio, Laertes, Fortinbras, the First Player) are in some ways aspects of himself.

If we look closely we will see that the entire play is structured as a series of scenes each of which is a play-within-the-play

He is able to move from the soliloquies, which dominate the first four acts—and which are rightly reckoned

among the humanistic beauties of the play—to the active verbs of the final act, which contains no soliloquy, perhaps because there is no longer any need for one.

from the play's principal turning point (3.2), Hamlet will himself begin to act,