UNDERSTANDING HAMLET

The play begins with the guards at the castle in Elsinore reporting two separate sightings of a ghost on successive nights. Horatio, being an educated person, doesn’t believe a word of what he is being told about the ghost and asks to see for himself. He therefore joins the watch on the ramparts on the third night and one hour after midnight he indeed sees the ghost which closely resembles the last king of Denmark. Horatio, after giving serious consideration to all the facts, decides to ‘impart’ to Hamlet what he had seen because, in his understanding,

     This spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him…

    (Act 1, Scene i, 171)

The first impression we have of Hamlet, both from what he says and how he looks, sets the tone for the entire play. With his intense brooding eyes, tousled hair and serious demeanour, Hamlet reveals himself to be a man apart from his peers. Unlike everyone else at court, Hamlet is still in mourning. Everyone in court therefore can’t help but notice his grief. Hamlet has a great deal to grieve about as his father is dead, his mother has with unbecoming haste married Claudius and his own succession to the throne has been impeded. He has cause, indeed, to be very sore within himself. In the circumstances Claudius will not succeed with his flattering appeal,

We pray you to throw to earth

This unprevailing woe, and think of us                                                                              

As of a father.                                                                                                                               

(Act I, Scene ii,106-8), merely serves to heighten his outrage.

At the beginning of the play there is no real indication that Claudius is a villain. He shows himself off initially as a confident and caring monarch who balances public duty with private pleasure. As the play progresses, however, Claudius reveals himself as a shrewd and calculating man who is not overly particular about being ethical or moral in his dealing with people. As such, he is the core of the rottenness that pervades Denmark. To confirm that this is so, the ghost lets Hamlet know that his uncle had murdered his father and seduced his queen:

                        Ay, that incestuous, that adulterate beast,
                        With witchcraft of his wit, with traitorous gifts -
                        Oh wicked wit, and gifts that have the power
                        So to seduce! - won to his shameful lust
                        The will of my most seeming-virtuous queen.
                        Oh Hamlet, what a falling off was there,
                        From me, whose love was of that dignity
                        That it went hand in hand even with the vow
                        I made to her in marriage; and to decline
                        Upon a wretch whose natural gifts were poor
                        To those of mine!
                        But virtue, as it never will be moved,
                        Though lewdness court it in a shape of heaven,
                        So lust, though to a radiant angel linked,
                        Will sate itself in a celestial bed
                        And prey on garbage.

                        (Act 1 Scene v,  42- 57)

Just before this, Hamlet had reacted to what the ghost revealed with, “Oh my prophetic soul! My uncle!” showing that he had already intuitively suspected Claudius of doing evil. Having heard all that the ghost had to disclose, Hamlet vents his fury thus:

                        O most pernicious woman!

                        O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain!

                        My tables-meet it is I set it down

                        That one may smile, and smile, and be a

                                villain;

                        At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark.

                        So, uncle, there you are.

                        (Act 1 Scene 5, 105 - 111)

Whereas before his encounter with the ghost he knew only intuitively that he had to settle a few scores with his uncle, he now knows for certain that his uncle's villainy has to be exposed. Over and above that he will have to  murder Claudius. This places him in an immense moral quandary. While he can be impulsive and reckless, Hamlet is also an introspective scholar who knows that wreaking revenge cannot be separated from seeking justice. How is he to do this? One part of his being urges him to act with haste and purpose, the other part obliges him to reflect on the consequences of murdering the king. He is between a rock and a hard place.

He knows that Claudius has to be killed in order to avenge his father’s death, but the act must damn Claudius, not him. Even when he blames himself for his inaction nothing changes in respect of his moral dilemma. He cannot sink to the level of Claudius and kill him by stealth or any foul means. Hamlet recognizes that it is one thing for him to don black clothes to signify that he is in mourning, it is quite another thing to be genuinely afflicted:

His mother, Queen Gertrude tries to console the inconsolable Hamlet with the commonplace observation that,

      Thou know'st tis common, all that lives must die

      Passing through nature to eternity

     (I.ii.71-2)

All of these rather limp efforts to console him serve only to evoke his deep love for his father,         

In Hamlet’s estimation,  his late father was a god-like Titan while his uncle is little more than a lustful satyr, a creature half-goat and half-man. The king’s continual drinking and merrymaking is an affront to Hamlet. He loathes Claudius not only for what he did to his parents but also for bringing Denmark into disrepute amongst the people of the world as a place of debauchery:  

In Hamlet’s view all Danes are regarded as drunkards and made the butts of jokes on account of the King’s propensity for ‘heavy headed’ revelry and drinking. Hamlet has therefore to clash with Claudius to avenge his father, rescue his mother, revive his own hopes and restore the good reputation of the Danish people. As the play progresses, Hamlet has to first deal with the king’s cronies before he can take on the king.

First of all he has to deal with Polonius who was supposed to have been loyal to King Hamlet but who quickly switched his allegiance to the deceitful Claudius. Polonius loves to speak in a grandiose style about virtue and honour but he is for ever engaged in deeds that are totally dishonourable. His hypocrisy is so clearly evident in his admonishment of his daughter Ophelia,

You do not understand yourself so clearly as it behooves my daughter

and your honour

(Act I Scene iii)

Polonius cares nothing about how his daughter feels. He cares only about himself and his standing with the new king. As Ophelia’s relationship with Hamlet threatens to prejudice his own situation at court he commands her thus:

            I would not, in plain terms, from this time forth have you so slander

any moment leisure as to give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet.

(Act I Scene iii.131-134).

Polonius is equally ready to have his own son’s reputation sullied in order to force him to return to Denmark   to satisfy his own selfish needs to have him close by. He encourages his servant Reynaldo to,

            breathe his faults so quaintly that they may seem the taints of liberty,

 the flash and outbreak of a fiery mind, a savageness in unreclaimed blood,

 of general assault.

 (Act II Scene i.31-34)

While Polonius has a penchant for moralizing he is ironically lacking in moral integrity. He loves to involve himself in the lives of others and it is little wonder that he is the first person to be killed by Hamlet while he is concealed in the Queen’s chamber.   

After this he has to deal with his former friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. It doesn’t take Hamlet long to work out that his university friends were sent for by the king and queen to spy on him and to betray him. It is at this point that Hamlet makes one of his most evocative speeches:

What a piece of work is man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties!                                      in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in  apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!   And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.                                (Act II Scene ii, 115-117)

Hamlet is really astonished at the contradictory nature of human beings. On the one level man could be like a god but at another level human beings are debased, corrupt and evil. His university friends are quite willing to forego their precious friendship to become the spies and lackeys of the king. Ophelia too is willing to subject herself to her father’s command and her brother’s advice to break off with Hamlet. They are so different from what they could have been if only they had answered to the nobler nature in tthemselves. 

In Ophelia’s case the situation is compounded by Hamlet’s sense of  his mother's deep betrayal of her former husband. He judges Ophelia not as the innocent woman she is but as one who has the potential to become a replica of his mother. He sees his mother as a whore who betrayed his father to take a new husband to answer the needs of her base nature. Ophelia, where she was supposed to have been true to him, is willing to allow another man, albeit her father, to come between them and destroy what they had. This, in Hamlet’s view, is similar to prostitution. He therefore in an angry outburst orders her to join a nunnery so that she can retain her purity.  

As Hamlet’s disillusionment with those who are closest to him grows, he becomes less restrained in dealing roughly and callously with them. He argues, for instance, that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern deserve what comes to them:  

            Why, man, they did make love to

this employment;

They are not near my conscience; their

            defeat

Does by their own insinuation grow …

            (Act 5 Scene ii 57-58)

As the play progresses to its climax Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet all fall victims to the evil plots of Claudius. By this time, however, Hamlet is no longer afraid of death because, as he sees it,

            There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,

            Rough-hew them how we will.

            (Act V Scene ii 10-11)

He places his fate in the hands of God. When his true friend Horatio asks him to put off the duel with Laerters by making an excuse, Hamlet counters with:

Not a whit, we defy augury:

there is a special providence in the fall of

a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come; it will be now; if it

be not now, yet it will come – the readiness is all. Since no man owes of aught 

he leaves, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be.

(Act 5 Scene 211-15)

As fate will have it, the queen drinks from the poisoned chalice and dies. Laertes and Hamlet wound each other with the poisoned sword and will soon die. Hamlet forces Claudius at this point, when his guilt is revealed to everyone, to drink the very wine he had poisoned so that he could join his mother in death.

The play shows that when corruption spreads from the top it pervades the whole of society and the rottenness spreads everywhere. Hamlet, in spite of his many faults, retains his moral integrity and does what he has to do both to avenge his father’s death and to restore Denmark to its former glory. He had to die in the end but his death will have served to restore moral integrity and that would have been something worth giving up one's life for.

 Farouk Cassim ©

Excellent Link:

http://www.shakespearean.org.uk/#Hamlet