Category: Enigmata Incarnate: The Immortal Prince Hamlet

The scenery of 2.2 is riddled with so much ancient greek mythology for a play that takes place neither in ancient history, nor Greece, nor myth as to actually be quite unique. And, holy moly, it’s a lot of slaughter tied to just a handful of people. What Shakespeare seems to do here is take this revenge plot and make it a transcendent force; he ties it both to history (via Gesta Danorum) and myth via the Aeneid to posit it as an eternal thing that resonates throughout time. Hamlet, the avenger-prince, is an archetype of sorts, Laertes and Fortinbras, too. Something burned into the collective retina of human experience.

I’m going to take scene 2.2, where Hamlet intellectually squares off with Polonius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern as an example to prove the above, as well as showcase how alarmingly forceful Hamlet’s mind seems to be. 

In this scene, Polonius, Ophelia’s father, takes action and brings love letters that Hamlet previously gave to Ophelia to the King and Queen, claiming to have found the source of his madness. After persuading them, he conspires with Claudius to observe an exchange between Hamlet and Ophelia to prove that his love for her is at the source. The old man is not even remotely correct, but this process is fascinating nonetheless. 

After this, he tries and fails to coax something out of Hamlet that he might further use to prove his point, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two childhood friends of the prince, attempt to also do so at the behest of King Claudius. After a drawn-out encounter where Hamlet toys with the three of them, he relents and delivers his second soliloquy, “And to me what is this quintessence of dust?” which seems to give some insight into what he’s feeling. It’s nothing we don’t already know from the first soliloquy, in fact, there’s actually less substance with more wordplay. It looks an awful lot like a stratagem that connects to 3.1, given that the duo report this to the king, and that upcoming soliloquy is also observed by Claudius and Polonius. The gist of this theory is that he is attempting to leave the king and Polonius with a specific, abstruse impression they will be unable to parse through and this is supported by the deliberation with which he feeds them information, but I’ll go no further into that here. 

It comes out that an actor troupe is coming to Elsinore. He knew these actors from some time in his past and incites one of them to recount a speech he heard the man speak once on the topic of Greek Mythology. In this case, it is Aeneas’ recounting to Dido (the pair are lovers) of the slaughter of Priam at the hand of Pyrrhus in front of Hecuba (Priam’s wife). At a later point in greek mythology, Pyhrrus will see the ghost of Achilles (slain by Paris, son of Hecuba) who demands the sacrifice of the princess of Troy, Polyxena (also a daughter of Hecuba). What’s more, the doomed relationship between Aeneas and Dido (Aeneas leaves her at the command of Jupiter, and she commits suicide) was actually orchestrated by Juno and Venus. 

This is an incredibly oblique intimidation tactic that Hamlet employs against Polonius in particular, invoking the dour fates of three separate women from mythology. This is quite chilling when one realizes that he might already have consigned himself to denouncing and abandoning (like Aeneas) Ophelia, or is at least seriously considering it, as the lords and ladies of Elsinore begin to draw their battle lines. Also, the grief of Hecuba foreshadows Ophelia’s fate after Hamlet makes a corpse of her father. More, Hamlet seems aware of the fact that it is the men in both Greek Mythology and this play that victimize women. Also, the First Player invokes “thou strumpet Fortune.”, when Hamlet himself also makes this claim, before he is even supposed to know that the actors were coming (2.2.228-229, “ In the secret parts of Fortune? Oh, most true, she is a strumpet. What news?”).

After the speech, Hamlet and the First Player come to an agreement about the memorization of lines that he intends to insert within a play called The Murder Of Gonzago. After the whole crowd departs we see, marvelously, how Hamlet really feels. Another legendary soliloquy follows, “Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I!”, in which he rails on himself for not being better motivated to kill than he is. Something about the conviction with which the First Player is blessed with (he is so moved during his speech that the actor starts to weep) that really eats at him, “For Hecuba!/Who’s Hecuba to him or he to her/That he should weep for her?” I would also weigh the argument that this has something to do with the symbolism that speech is rife with, as mentioned before. After this, he voices his intention to use the upcoming play to feel out whether Claudius is guilty.

The overall transition is one from the anhedonic’s dilemma (feeling empty), to how he intends to proceed. More than anything, it drives home the fact that Hamlet is unwell, he hates himself, and he most definitely is playing at something.

“He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” – Aeschylus

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, and the scholar of Wittenburg is the perhaps the most immortal of Shakespeare’s undying creations. He is one of the very few characters to successfully be constructed around an internal mystery and yet still arc and develop in an apparently cohesive manner as a standard character does. Hamlet is, quite honestly, the Petrine Cross, the antichrist of character development, the thing your literature teacher tells you explicitly not to do. 

He is the reckoning of the misdeeds committed by those around him, the recourse of the universe itself manifested in how they have hurt him. The prince may even embody the Shadow, the forcible and painful introspection that people come to fear so much, the accruement of all the things people dislike about themselves. With Polonius, with Claudius, with Gertrude, and even his lover Ophelia, he brings forth that within them they fear and are hurt by. He seems to see it all within them. 

Perhaps more so than anything, he is the progenitor of the Red Right Hand. It’s hard not to see the connections between John Milton’s inspiration within Hamlet as Hamlet himself, “Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell” the prince claims, as a situation so profoundly complex arises that those influences can no longer be meaningfully differentiated. Whether his actions come as divinely vindicated or infernally manipulated, we cannot with certainty say. The reality appears to be at once a combination of both and neither.

We see the man first just after the death of his father. In the events preceding this, something so profoundly terrible has happened to him as for him to be unable to articulate it in the slightest. He warns people of it regularly, too: his mother in 1.2, Laertes in 5.1, and many others, albeit in more oblique ways. This thing within him seems to be on the most fundamental level, pain, even anguish. Hamlet is a trauma victim; his old life is gone, and he cannot go back home again. The actions of his mother and uncle-turned-father only stoke this fire within him. He cannot go back to school in Wittenberg. Even the way he grieves the loss of his father is wrong to them. They go so far as to accuse him of putting it on, like a costume to eschew his responsibilities. “But I have that within me which passes show/These but the trappings and the suits of woe.” is Hamlet’s ponderous, abysmal response. From this perspective, it’s relatively easy to see why he grows to resent those two so very much. What he wants, what he needs, and what he feels all seem to have become a nonfactor within their obliviousness, willful or otherwise.

This failure to communicate and understand runs rampant throughout the text. Everyone who claims to fathom Hamlet’s madness is at some point proven wrong (except for perhaps Claudius, who doesn’t ever really seem to believe he’s mad). This street is not two way, however, as Hamlet himself apppears to understand people extraordinarily well and correctly predicts motivations in nearly every scene, even underhanded attempts to know him better by his detractors (and prey, eventually).

The anatomy of Hamlet’s alleged madness is one of the great debates of world literature, and nothing about him can be definitively established. That said, the concept of him being mad is notoriously challenging to support, given that there isn’t a definition of madness we can contrive that would soundly contain him.

Take his “To be or not to be.” soliloquy, for example. There is ambiguity as to whether or not he knows he’s being watched by no fewer than two, perhaps three people. The content of this monologue is incredibly different from his past or future ones, which are incredibly emotional, and one can almost taste the bitterness within his words. This one is downright cerebral, reptilian, almost. He isn’t telling us how he feels; he tells us how it is. He’s lecturing an empty room that isn’t empty. The prince even goes so far as to clarify what he meant by specific terms (“and by a sleep to say we end/The heartache and thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to”). 

But it doesn’t stop there. When Ophelia enters the room and attempts to return him all the tokens of affection he has given her in the past, stating “Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.” he seems to reject her in earnest. There is a caveat to his performance here, however. Hamlet is acting precisely in the manner that the men in Ophelia’s life, Polonius and Laertes, accuse him of being. He seems to cater precisely to Polonius’ fears, who asserts, “That hath made him mad,” referring to a previous rejection Ophelia had made towards him when Hamlet now claims, “It hath made me mad.” And yet we know that this cannot be so, as Ophelia is almost definitely not the cause of his manifest instability. In fact, Hamlet reaches out to her twice and seems to be twice spurned before he treats her in the way he does here. But there is yet another layer added when the prince asks Ophelia that fateful question, “Where’s your father?”, strongly suggesting that the jig is up, and it may have never been sprung on him in the first place. He murders Polonius (presumably later that night) when eavesdropping on the private exchange with his mother. This decision, too, is either chillingly calculated or made to suit his purposes in one manner or another. 

Hamlet is an unusual character due to his two most significant developments occurring where we cannot observe. One comes before we ever meet him and the other when he is away at sea in Act 4. He later sees the burial of Ophelia and wrestles with Laertes atop her grave. One might argue both of them were driven to a spell of madness by the sight of the young lady. The reality is that only one of them, Laertes, seems to be distraught in this scene. We see Hamlet making yet another calculated decision when he chooses to antagonize the brother. Hamlet may have once loved Ophelia, but never does he grieve her beyond this scene; she is, at this point, a means to an end in his eyes. Hamlet is jealous of Laertes because the noble youth is everything the prince is not; Laertes becomes the mad avenger that Hamlet once was, better in every capacity except perhaps cunning, and cannot bear it. It’s easy to believe that Claudius was lying when he claimed Hamlet was envious of Laertes, but I’d like to open the possibility that he was telling the truth, if albeit not the whole truth.

In the next and final scene, Hamlet has what seems to be a frank conversation with Horatio. He opens up about the nature of his decision making this far and posits that the only reason he survived his death sentence in England was due to the spontaneity with which his madness led him into God’s providence.

 

It’s not altogether clear if providence is manifesting through Hamlet’s madness itself, or if he claims that even a raving madman is not out of the reach of God’s grace. He develops this logic to the ultimate conclusion of “Let be,” a clear capstone to his “To be or not to be.” dilemma. I suspect that this has more to do with Hamlet accepting things as they come, Amor fati, than an actual spiritual awakening.

 

Though, one might interpret even this as deliberate strafing. “To be” seems to have been a stratagem to at least some extent, and the woman he loved previously he mistreats in that scene, and really ought to be grieving her in this one.

 

If this is the case, and Hamlet is performing his crazed dance of pretend around everyone, it begins to show the sheer extent of the game that he’s been playing with us this whole time. 

After the fateful duel is done, he realizes that he’s got what he wanted. The people he’s grown to resent are now dead, all dead, and soon he too will be gone. His tragic reckoning comes not in the form of death, but rather that which comes after. His story will never be told, not by him nor anyone. History will know him as Hamlet, the Mad Prince. The final tragedy comes not from without but within, from his unarticulated internal motivations, from the influences of heaven and hell, from whatever his desired outcome was. He is noticeably bitter over these revelations but remains true to his previous epiphany, “Oh I could tell you, but let it be.” It’s only in the arms of Horatio that the ultimate truth of his story comes forth: “The rest is silence.”

Like Iago, like Edgar, like Lady Macbeth, we see that we don’t know, and we cannot know what brought this tragedy to bear. The explanation we feverishly yearn for within them remains forever out of reach.