Hamlet

“ Hamlet has heen the darling of every country in which the literature of England has been fostered.” — COLERIDGE.
“ No one of mortal mould (save Him ‘ whose blessed feet were nailed for our advantage to the bitter cross,’) ever trod this earth commanding such absorbing interest as this Hamlet, this mere creation of a poet’s brain.”
FURNESS.

To account for an interest so absorbing and a fascination so unique as Coleridge and Dr. Furness unite in claiming for Hamlet, it is fair to assume the existence of some reason stronger than mere wit and wisdom, truth and beauty of thought, witchery of style, or than all of these combined. It is the aim of this paper to show that there is such a reason, and to indicate its nature.

We believe that in the Prince of Denmark Shakespeare has uncovered the spiritual process which lifted our race out of savagery into civilization; has described a conflict, perhaps the only one, in which every human being must take part; has described it so accurately that in the struggles of Hamlet every reader discerns a reflection of his own experience; and that this is the adequate cause of the universal interest excited by the play.

For the tragedy of Hamlet is the inner history of the conflict still in progress between the spirit of paganism and the spirit of Christianity. We do not mean to claim that Shakespeare deliberately intended it to be that. He may not have been aware of all that he was doing for, as Emerson has said, he may have written “his Hamlet as birds weave their nests.” But he wrought in perfect if unconscious harmony with the ethical forces of the universe; and therefore, when the soil and the seed had been chosen, only one result could follow. He may have understood the full significance of his work as little as the sun comprehends its mission when the Creator uses it to make the earth bring forth trees bearing fruit each after its kind; yet none the less, whether consciously or not, the poet has described in Hamlet the experience of every man who struggles out of darkness toward the light, and the drama is a tragedy only because death hides from view the final issue of the conflict.

Gibbon and Uhland have told us what things men did during that period when the pagan was slowly changing into the Christian conscience. Shakespeare has shown us why they did them. Hamlet is a microcosm. In him the process is apparent by which humility and forgiveness, despised as vices by the old world, came to be counted coronal virtues by the new. Gibbon shows the puppets on the stage; Shakespeare the springs that move them. The sufferings of Hamlet are the birth pangs by which so much of faith in the Sermon on the Mount as exists on earth was born into the world. At Elsinore Shakespeare compels Thor with his hammer to face Christ with his cross; describes the duel between the flesh and the spirit so far as it had proceeded in his day, — it has gone but little farther in our own, — and then, refusing to predict the changes by which the tragedy shall in due time become a comedy, closes with the pregnant words, “The rest is silence.”

With entire disregard of chronology, the seer takes his hero out of a Norse saga, lifts him over a chasm of twelve centuries, places him in the centre of Christian influences, and shows us the iceberg melting in the tropics, but freezing many a creature as it melts.

The hero has inherited the conscience of Odin. He has been trained in the ways of Christ. He is placed in circumstances which excite to intense activity both the pagan and the Christian within him, and compel them to fight each other. At times the Norse blood triumphs, and he becomes a splendid savage: witness the slaughter of Polonius, and the Modoc indifference to the crime. At times the Christian conquers : witness the humble prayer: —

At times he is tortured — as the best men often are — by doubt whether to clutch the hammer or cling to the cross. When he hears of his father’s murder, the Norse blood boils : —

A moment’s reflection puts out that fire, or, as he himself afterward, when his mood has changed, describes the mental process, sicklies “o’er the native hue of” that “resolution, with the pale cast of thought; ” and, standing on the ashes of his fury, be says calmly to his friends : —

Those last words, which seem to me the most pathetic in the play, appear to be the key to its interpretation. The Norseman drops the hammer because he sees the cross of Him who said, “Watch and pray lest ye enter into temptation.” All of Hamlet’s indecision is caused by the conflict between these two forces. The door of temptation to pagan vengeance continually opens before him. He never enters in, but always pauses at the threshold to “watch and pray,” until at last duty seems clear, and he does the deed he has long debated, in the spirit not of a pagan but of a Christian.

Hamlet first appears as a mature man. He is a Dane. What that meant to Shakespeare is not doubtful. The fierce customs of the warrior race color all that is shown us of the court at Elsinore. They are customs which Hamlet thinks more honored in “the breach than the observance. ” For he has been educated at Wittenberg. There he feels most at home, and thither he desires to return.

Why did Shakespeare send Hamlet to Wittenberg ? Two replies have been given: First, it was necessary to send him to a northern university. Second, of northern universities Wittenberg was the most important and the best known.

Of these two statements, the first is questionable, and the second is untrue.

1. Why was it necessary for a king’s son to go to a university in the north when there were better ones in the south? And why was not the road which Laertes took for one purpose open to Hamlet for another ?

2. But of northern universities Wittenberg was neither the most important nor the most conspicuous. It was the youngest, and but for a single reason the least important of them all. In Shakespeare’s day its influence had greatly waned. To him as to his contemporaries it signified one thing only: Luther with the Bible. It stood for that new light which from the time of Henry VIII. had dawned so fast, especially in England.

Our play contains not less than fifty utterances drawn from the Scriptures. Forty-three of them are spoken by Hamlet; two by Horatio, who also had been at Wittenberg; three by the Ghost, who presumably had learned to see many things as the Scriptures represent them. This can scarcely be an accident. Against that explanation the chances are more than forty to two.

Hamlet is shown to be by nature noble and profoundly religious. Had he never left Elsinore he would have been a pagan of the grandest sort. But he returns to the court filled with Christian sentiment. There the conditions are April to both the weeds and the flowers within him. Affection for his father, his mother, and Ophelia strengthens his conviction that God is love. Unspeakable humiliation combines with the discovery of outrageous treachery to rouse in him a Berserker rage. The temptation to turn from Christ to Thor approaches him in garments of light. Loving his mother with a devotion that is almost a religion, he finds her married to his father’s brother. That he considers incest. Where he learned to regard it so is immaterial. It was his belief, and the belief was fire in his bones. The Norse blood unchecked would have forced him to slay at sight the author of this shame. But the Christian in him is regnant; he does not even think of revenge.

When the interview with his degraded mother and the partner of her degradation has driven the iron still deeper into his heart, his spirit is shown as through an opened window, in the first soliloquy. The figure with which that soliloquy begins is perplexing until the unspoken thoughts which inspired it are perceived: —

How can flesh melt? It can burn, shrivel, change into gases; but melt it cannot. Commentators have wrestled vainly with this figure. “How beautiful,” they say, “is this conception of a human body softly fading, as a mist rolls upward on the mountain, revealing an apocalypse of foliage! ”

That is pretty, but it is not Shakespeare’s figure. When a mist melts, it does not roll up: it drops down; it becomes rain and makes mud. But “too too solid flesh” is far from resembling a mist. The only way in which it can even seem to melt is by excessive perspiration, and no jugglery of words can make Falstaff in a Turkish bath, sweating to the point of deliquescence, appear a poetic figure. Yet that is the only process known to the human mind by which “too too solid flesh ” can be conceived as melting.

To distract attention as far as possible from the grossness of the figure he had to employ Shakespeare introduced the word “dew.” But the figure he was compelled to use. He repeated it three times, to show that it, and no other, was in Hamlet’s mind: “melt,” “thaw,” “resolve itself into a dew.” Whence came that figure? What unspoken thought does it reveal ?

If we remember that Hamlet had been educated at Wittenberg; that there he had fed upon the Scriptures, since Wittenberg was celebrated for its study of the Scriptures, and was celebrated for nothing else; also that Hamlet was in precisely the condition described by St. Paul in the fifth chapter of Second Corinthians, we shall see that chapter shining through the first two lines of this soliloquy (and through the whole of the more famous one, later on) as light shines through latticed shutters. “For we know that if our earthly house of this tabernacle were dissolved, we have a building of God, an house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this we groan . . . being burdened.”

In Elizabethan English the words “resolve” and “dissolve” were interchangeable. To express St. Paul’s figure of striking a tent, both Wycliff, with whose translation Shakespeare may have been acquainted, and the Vulgate, with which he was familiar, use, as our authorized version does, the word “dissolve,” the exact equivalent of “resolve.”

Hamlet is in like case with St. Paul. His suffering seems greater than he can bear. He “groans, being burdened.” He remembers how the apostle found comfort. He seeks help from the apostle’s utterance. He is pondering that fifth chapter. At the word “dissolved ” he breaks into speech: —

But to Paul, as that chapter shows, the uses of “this world ” seemed restful, fresh, pointed, and profitable.

The Norse blood begins to boil, but cools at thought of Him who said, “Neither do I condemn thee, ” and he continues

Tender, Christlike words. Thinking of the sin, he will brand it as worse than beastly. Thinking of the sinner, he will use no harsher term than “frailty.”

Here the Christian triumphs. Outrageous though his provocations are, he will not bring even “a railing accusation.”

In this soliloquy Hamlet fancies he has sounded the depths of anguish. In fact he has only touched its marge. A sterner trial is at hand. A noble nature can turn the other cheek when it is his own that has been smitten. Thus far Hamlet’s thoughts have been fixed on wrongs done to himself. He has yet to learn that the author of his shame is also the assassin of his father. The discovery of that fact spurs him to revenge not his own hut his father’s wrongs.

Ink makes the paper appear whiter. For that reason, the noble interview between the majestic spirit and his son is preceded by the conversation of Polonius, the false and shifty courtier, with his two children : Ophelia, a trivial creature, whom Hamlet loves, and Laertes, who is a Polonius in the tadpole state.

As Polonius is foil to the august Ghost, and Ophelia to the usurping Claudius, Laertes is the antipodal contrast to Hamlet. For Laertes does, and by doing shows the wickedness and folly, of precisely those deeds which the Norse blood urges Hamlet to do, hut which conscience prevents him from doing.

The pith of the interview between Polonius and his children is that the advice of Laertes to his sister (to care for no one but herself; to distrust her noble lover, and take for her pole-star suspicion in place of faith) is essentially the same as the counsel he receives from his father.

It is interesting to compare the instructions of Polonius to his son with those given by Cardinal Wolsey to Cromwell when the experience of a life ruined by following the maxims of Polonius had taught the cardinal their futility, and to note how at every point the two contradict each other. It is still more interesting to contrast the precepts of Polonius with the Sermon on the Mount, and then to observe the fall of the house built upon the sand.

This is the substance of the courtier’s charge:—

That is, Never say what you think, and do nothing till you are sure it will prove expedient.

Worm their opinions from others, but conceal your own.

The outward appearance is the thing worth minding; the inward substance is not even thought of.

A statement which, like Franklin’s “Honesty is the best policy,” is true, but which no one ever made the rudder of his conduct without becoming false to those with whom he had to do. That fact is delicately hinted in the phrasing, “It must follow as the night the day, ” which suggests to every intelligence higher than the garrulous chatterer who utters it that, however bright the dawn of a life fed on such precepts, it must end in darkness. And so Polonius who preaches and Laertes who adopts them, both prove in due time false to the king, false to the queen, false to Ophelia, false to Hamlet, and, more conspicuously still, each false to himself; while Ophelia, who hears without understanding, and tries to obey, loses her wits in the attempt.

In relief against this black background is placed the interview between Hamlet and his father’s spirit. It takes us out of the reek of selfishness into the clean air of self-sacrifice. The moment Hamlet learns the ghastly secret, he decides that his business is to be true, not to himself, but to the parent who, he thinks, needs to be avenged, to the mother who needs to be redeemed, to the uncle who needs to be punished. His only perplexity is how best to perform these fidelities. In their presence self vanishes. His ardent love for Ophelia he resigns, but not until he has convinced himself that he can do so without wounding her heart. To the end he remains true to her. Believing that she has played with his affections, that she has deceived and betrayed them, he still strives, by means which wring his own heart, to make her what he thinks she is not, a good woman. Ambition does not touch him, for he believes that doing his duty will give him, not a throne, but a grave.

His father charges him to avenge the murder. The Norse blood surges. He vows revenge. But how to accomplish it is not clear. Whatever may prove wisest in the future, secrecy seems needful for the present. Therefore he swears his friends to silence. While they hesitate to duplicate their oath, the voice of his father’s spirit urging them to do so is heard from beneath.²

In Hamlet’s high-wrought state the voice produces a moment of hysteria. He laughs; lie jokes about the mystery that is crushing him; he calls the awefilling spirit “old mole.” The effect of such strange conduct on his companions gives him the hint, and with lightning swiftness he determines to feign madness for a cloak of concealment. But soon he begins to question whether revenge is right. The spirit of Wittenberg has cooled the Norse blood when he murmurs: —

The second act shows Hamlet living a double life. While observed he feigns insanity, and, as George MacDonald has said, feigns well enough to deceive not only the whole court except King Claudius, hut most of the commentators ever since. His object is to throw his uncle off guard. But feigning and all methods of indirection are repugnant to his nature. To his mother in the first act he described his character as the play reveals it: —

His singleness of heart is emphasized by contrast with Polonius, who naively uncovers his own soul and shows that falsehood is its home, in the speech to Reynaldo, in which, after telling his hearer how to lie dexterously for the benefit of Laertes, he concludes with,

Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth,” and bids him

The episode of the players inspires the second soliloquy and makes it intelligible. Hamlet’s reflections upon the interview with his father’s spirit have excited doubts whether he ought to fulfill his vow of vengeance, or leave retribution to the unseen powers. “ Vengeance is mine. I will repay, ” says Wittenberg. Meditation brings distracting thoughts.

1. My father has sworn me to revenge. He was my ideal of manhood:

He appeared as I knew him in life, a warrior impelled by pagan passion, as

Such a man the Norse blood in Prince Hamlet tells him he ought to be. Because he is not such he reviles himself, calls himself “coward,” and says all manner of evil against himself.

2. But this vengeance-seeking spirit has confessed that he is

If that is what comes of doing as my father did, and as I have sworn to do in his behalf, perhaps the things taught at Wittenberg are true.

It has tempted to what Wittenberg counts devil’s work. It may have slandered Claudius. Obedience to it may mean damnation.

This, and no other, is the question we shall hear Hamlet trying to decide in his most famous soliloquy. Reflection compels a pause, for though Thor cries, “Revenge! ” Christ whispers, “Take heed.”

Forced by these conflicting thoughts to wait, when the Norse blood boils, he despises himself for waiting; calls his caution cowardice, and in the third soliloquy condemns himself in language extreme as that in which St. Paul declares himself the chief of sinners.

The players have been wrought into energetic action by a sham crime, while he is torpid before a real one.

By this we are prepared to understand the fourth soliloquy, “To be or not to be.” This soliloquy has been generally considered a disquisition on suicide. In it Hamlet is supposed to explain why he does not end his troubles by taking his life.

It was suggested to George MacDonald that this conception might be erroneous. He accepted the suggestion. That fact gives it great weight. The following considerations are added to his words as reasons for believing that the idea of suicide was not in Hamlet’s mind: —

1. It seems unnatural that a man absorbed in the effort to decide whether he should kill Claudius should suddenly pause to explain why he does not kill himself, especially when there is no hint in any other part of the play that he ever contemplated doing so. As if to guard us from the common interpretation, we are shown in the first act that the idea of suicide, when it occurred, was once and forever banished from Hamlet’s mind by his knowledge of the canon fixed by the Eternal “’gainst self - slaughter.” The same fact is again made prominent when, though he tells Polonius there is nothing he would part with more willingly than his life, he does not even think of suicide.

2. He begins by saying that the thought in his mind is “ the question; ” that is, the question he deems most important, the question to which he has given most consideration, the question that is pressing him. There can be no doubt what that question is. For only one question occupies his mind during the entire play. From it he never escapes, and beside it every other question seems to him trivial. We know what it is, and that it has nothing to do with suicide.

3. The conclusion Hamlet arrives at in the soliloquy is that he is a coward. He often at other times brings this charge against himself, and always for the same reason. That reason never is that he is afraid to kill himself, but always that he shrinks from killing Claudius.

4. If Hamlet were thinking of suicide, he used the word “be ” as a synonym for “exist,” and “To be or not to be ” is synonymous with “To continue or to cease existing.” Could a man whose mind was controlled by the conviction that one who had died existed still and had visited him speak of suicide or of any kind of death as “ceasing to exist”? Imagine Paul speaking of death as the beginning of non-existence! Every line of the soliloquy indicates that the speaker sees in death the continuance of life. His recognition of his father’s spirit; his refusal to kill Claudius while praying, because that might send the criminal to heaven, whither he ought not to go, rather than to hell, where he belongs, imply that Hamlet never thought of death as annihilation. The alternative, therefore, between “To be ” and “not to be ” is not between “existence ” and “non-existence.” “To be or not to be ” cannot mean “To live or to die.”

5. “To be or not to be,” that is “the question.” What question ? Obviously the question in his mind when “his silent sea of thought broke into surf of speech; ” the question he is trying to decide, has been trying to decide, will die without being able to decide. That question certainly had nothing to do with suicide, for suicide had not occurred to him as a “ question; ” but when it did occur, it came as a matter settled beyond question by the canon of the Eternal. The only question which has perplexed him is whether to act as a pagan or a Christian; whether to kill his uncle, as in a moment of Berserker rage he has sworn to do.

To make this evident the thought of the first line is repeated immediately in different language. “To be or not to be, ” or in other words: —

Suicide is not taking arms against troubles. It is accurately the reverse of opposing them. It is dropping arms and flying from them.

6. The “question, ” whatever it may be, “puzzles” the will. We have seen that suicide did not puzzle Hamlet’s will; no, not for an instant.

7. It is “conscience” (if the word means “consciousness,” the argument is not modified in the least) which makes “the question ” hard to decide, because conscience makes cowards of us all, and sicklies o’er the native hue of resolution with the pale cast of thought. The reference is to the self-accusations to which he has so often given voice. Thinking upon “the question ” has sapped the blood of the strong resolve formed in the presence of his father’s spirit, and made him seem to himself, when the Norse nerves were strung, a coward. Thus an enterprise of great pith and moment has turned its current awry, and lost the name of action.

But surely no stretch of imagination can count suicide an enterprise of “great pith and moment.” Here as elsewhere Hamlet calls himself a coward because he has allowed the native hue of his resolution to kill Claudius to be sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. These facts show clearly what “the question” is. It is the question at issue between Christ and Thor, love and hate, forgiveness and revenge.

If the first line of the soliloquy stood alone, there might be room for doubt about its meaning; but restated as it is immediately in different words, it seems sufficiently plain. “To be, ” — that is,’to be a man ; or “not to be, ” — that is, to remain a cipher. So the Norse blood puts it. If he acts as he has sworn to do, if on his own responsibility he wreaks vengeance upon his uncle, that may serve for the present world. But how about that other world, in which, St. Paul declares, he must give an account of the deeds done in the body? Yet is it not better to be a man than to remain a cipher ? “ That is the question! ” In other words: “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer ” (that is, to endure) “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune ” (as did He who bade us turn the other cheek), “or to take arms ” “and by opposing (that is, with the sword) end them.” Which obviously would mean for Hamlet death, though not by suicide. For if he succeeds in killing the king, it will be against forces sufficient to make his own death certain. But when, after taking the sword, as Wittenberg tells him not to do, he shall have perished, as Wittenberg tells him he will, what then?

Yet if he does not kill he will remain what to the Norse blood seems a cipher, a coward, a man of broken oath, a nidering.

He knows that if he strikes it will insure his own death, and that then he will have to give an account. Therefore: —

(here follows an exhaustive catalogue of his own burdens)

This last expression has cradled the belief that Hamlet contemplated suicide. Readers have been misled by what Max Muller named “the Mythology of language.” They have been influenced by the sound of unfamiliar words without considering their meaning. “Quietus ” sounds as if it signified “made quiet,” and “bodkin” has sounded to Englishmen since 1750, when Shakespeare began to be seriously studied, as if it meant a large needle. If such were the meanings of the words, they might signify, “When one could give himself peace by thrusting a needle into his heart.” But “quietus” is a law term, and means the settling of one’s accounts with other people. “Bodkin ” was the name of a weapon for defense of one’s life, a stiletto. The natural meaning of the sentence therefore is, “Why do I patiently endure, when I might settle accounts with my uncle by a thrust of my dagger into his heart ?”

That is precisely the kind of settlement which he started to make, and was by “the pale cast of thought” restrained from making, when he found Claudius praying: —

(We must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad, says that fifth chapter of Corinthians upon which he appeared in the first act to be brooding.)

He has in mind the flight, not of a suicide’s, but of a warrior’s spirit.

Through the fourth act Hamlet remains spellbound by conscience between the two alternative answers to “the question.” Whenever he has been sure a thing is right, he has done it instantly and thoroughly, with lightning speed. Whenever he is completely mastered by either the Norse blood or the New Light, his decision is prompt and bis action swift. But he continues to suffer agonies of self-accusation ; counts himself a beast because he does not execute his vow, yet cannot execute it for fear that if he does he shall have to count himself a devil.

When he learns that Fortinbras has promptly taken arms, he sees in that another condemnation of himself: —

The fifth act shows Laertes in Hamlet’s circumstances. His father has been murdered, and he has a suspicion that Claudius is the murderer. Laertes yields instantly to the savage impulse which Hamlet has continuously resisted. Without proof of Claudius’ guilt, without a thread of principle to restrain his impulse, he rushes like a beast to glut his passion; falls instantly into the snare of the king, who has tried long and vainly to entrap Hamlet, and dies by his own treason to truth and manhood, though not until he has been forced to see that he has been the fool, and Hamlet the wise man.

Then, not to revenge an injury, but to prevent more crimes; not to wreak vengeance, but to protect his country; not in the spirit of Thor, but in the spirit of the Christ who said, “Woe unto him who causes one of these little ones to offend,” Hamlet slays his uncle. Was it right or wrong? Even yet he cannot answer “the question,” for “the rest is silence.”

William Burnet Wright.