Hamlet

By William Shakespeare

Synopsis and Commentary

Act I

The Ghost of the old king of Denmark appears to the guards on watch at the castle of Elsinore on a bitter winter's night. It vanishes without speaking so the guards resolve to tell Hamlet, the dead king's son. Meanwhile at the Court of Denmark, the pomp and ceremony contrasts strongly with the eerie gloom of the first scene and the Queen is celebrating her recent marriage to her late husband's brother, Claudius. State business continues: Claudius gives permission for Polonius' son, Laertes, to return to Paris; letters are sent to the old King of Norway regarding an invasion from Fortinbras. The King and Queen implore Hamlet to cease grieving for his father but Hamlet remains alone and deep in his thoughts. His first words stress the ambiguous relationship within the family: "a little more than kin, and less than kind" (I.ii.60). Immediately his depth of feeling sets him apart from the others and the fact that these words are spoken aside (to himself/ the audience) shows that Hamlet's world is one that depends on solipsism and thought before or in preference to action. He is a performer from the outset: his very first utterance is a pun and serves to prepare us for his cloak of multi-layered riddling. The concentration in this scene is on role playing or "actions that a man might play" (I.ii.84). The guards interrupt Hamlet soliloquising on the weakness of women and his hatred of his stepfather when they arrive at Court to tell Hamlet about the sighting of his dead father. Hamlet is determined to talk to the ghost and to ascertain why unrest in the state of Denmark causes the ghost to remain in purgatory. This fast and simple line interchange between Hamlet and his old friend Horatio heightens the atmosphere. A scene between Laertes and his sister Ophelia shows us a united family, which is soon to be disrupted by Hamlet's divided family.am Before he leaves for France, Laertes warns his sister Ophelia of the dangers of Hamlet's love for her. Polonius, always puffed up with pride and words of 'wisdom', warns Laertes against the vices that will tempt him in foreign lands and instructs Ophelia to reject any romantic advances that Hamlet makes towards her. Ophelia is seen as an innocent object that is being corrupted by the sexual advances of Hamlet: "A violet in the youth of primy nature" (I.iii.7).

Hamlet sees the ghost of his father. The ghost reveals that his own brother killed him: while the king was sleeping in his garden, Claudius poured a fatal potion in his ear. The Ghost, in a parallel to the serpent and the apple in the Garden of Eden, exposes Hamlet to a unique view of the world that cannot be erased. The "unnatural" aspect of the crime is paid particular emphasis, as this was a very strong concept to the Elizabethans and one that circles Shakespeare's tragedies, especially King Lear, like a mantra.

The fact that the Ghost refers to the alleged relationship between Claudius and Gertrude in the past tense suggests that Gertrude was having an affair with Claudius behind the king's back: "O, Hamlet what a falling-off was there!" (I.v.47). Hamlet is directed to revenge the crime without harming his mother:

"But, however thou pursuest this act,

Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive

Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven

And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge

To prick and sting her."

(I.v.85-88)

Hamlet tells the guards of his discovery and warns them that in reaction to a time that is "out of joint" (I.v.189), he will adopt an "antic disposition" (i.e. he will feign madness) and they must promise not to reveal his secret.

Act II

Two months have passed since the events at the end of Act I. Polonius instructs a servant to spy on Laertes in Paris and "by indirections find directions out" (II.i.64). This turns out also to form the basis of Hamlet's assumed madness. The light-hearted meddling in Laertes' life prepares the audience for the serious consequences of meddling in Ophelia and Hamlet's. Further, it demonstrates the suspicious and conniving nature of Polonius, emblem of the devious corruption that rules Denmark. Ophelia runs onto the stage. Seeing Hamlet so altered terrifies her:

"Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced,

No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled,

Ungartered, and down-gyved to his ankle;

Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other,

And with a look so piteous in purport

As if he had been loosed out of hell

To speak of horrors he comes before me."

(II.i.77-81)

Notice, of course, that Ophelia is judging Hamlet's outward appearance: the madness is only on the surface. Polonius asserts that Hamlet's state is caused by unrequited love for Ophelia. The King is worried and suspicious of Hamlet's strange behaviour. He asks the prince's old friends (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern) to discover the cause of Hamlet's eccentric behaviour. This is similar to Polonius' spying on his son but our response is different because whereas Polonius uses a servant, Claudius exploits the position of his nephew's old school friends. Claudius is not convinced by Polonius' theory about love-madness and when he attempts to talk to Hamlet, he is confronted with nonsensical speech that has sense behind it but is symbolic of internal conflict. It prompts Polonius to observe famously, "though this be madness, yet there is method in 't" (II. ii 205). Hamlet's speech can be understood on different levels, suggesting an assumed level of madness. He uses prose instead of verse, with irony residing in the fact that it is usually verse that is seen to contain ambiguities and symbolism. Language has been set out of kilter as much as Denmark has been. By exploiting others' intellect, the prince assumes control over the conversation, a control that he does not have over anything else.

Hamlet sees through Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and makes them admit that they are spying for the king, emphasising the point that nobody is who they seem to be. Pointedly, he admits to them:

"I am but mad north-north-west; when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw."

(II.ii359)

They are interrupted in their own performances by the arrival of a company of actors to the castle. Hamlet persuades the players to perform the following night a play entitled 'The Murder of Gonzago' but with the addition of a speech written by himself. Left alone, he laments his inaction in a rage ("Am I a coward?") but, in choosing a play implicative of the murder of the late king, Claudius' guilty reaction will prove him the murderer. As the sweeping heroic couplet at the end of the long scene declares:

The play's the thing

Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

(II.ii.580-581)

Act III

Immediately after we see Claudius in a state of anxiety over the "heavy burden" of his unnamed "deed", Hamlet ponders over the damnable act of suicide. The soliloquy, of the most famous speeches in drama, is loaded with ambiguity as the speech lurches from the attractiveness of dying to the rejection of suicide because of fear of damnation and the terrors of life after death:

"To die - to sleep -

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to; 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished. To die - to sleep -

To sleep! Perchance to dream. Ay, there's the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause."

To live, in the end, wins, as "conscience does make cowards of us all".

Ophelia enters and, using her as a scapegoat for the flaws of women in general and exhibiting an obsession with life's evils, he commands her: "Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?" (III.i123). This attack on Ophelia effectively convinces the King and Polonius that Hamlet's madness is not the result of unrequited love but, as the King observes: "There's something in his soul / O'er which his melancholy sits on brood" (III.i.164). The King is uneasy and resolves to send Hamlet away to England.

Hamlet talks (under his veil of madness) to the royal party as they enter and take their seats for the play at court. The play begins and the player-queen, Baptista, and the player-king, Gonzago, talk of love and death; she is devoted to him and vows that nothing could persuade her to marry again if he were to die. Meanwhile in the audience at court, the king and queen are becoming disturbed. The player-king lies down to sleep and his nephew pours poison into his ear; he wants to claim kingship and the Queen. At this point, the King jumps up and calls a halt to the play. Hamlet at last has proof of Claudius's guilt.

Hamlet swears to deal with the issue of his mother's involvement in the evil that has been committed but he promises himself that he will "be cruel, not unnatural; / I will speak daggers to her, but use none" (III.ii.369). Hamlet has been summoned to his mother's room for the offence he committed at court and Polonius resolves to spy on him there. Seeing Claudius at prayer, Hamlet is on the verge of murdering him but at the last minute decides against it as killing him in the act of absolving his sins would ensure that the King would go to Heaven instead of Hell. Even here, however, appearance is deceptive, as Claudius confesses that he had been unable to pray:

"[Rising] My words fly up, my thoughts remain below;

Words without thought never to heaven go."

(III.iii.97-98)

Hamlet enters his mother's chamber and just as he previously asked the actors to "hold… the mirror up to nature" so now he swears that "You not go till I set up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you" (III.iv.20). This "glass" (mirror) is to be made of words and just as Hamlet has seen his own nature in soliloquy he wishes Gertrude to see hers. However, she fears that he is about to murder her and shouts for help. An answering noise comes from behind the curtain and, believing it to be the king, Hamlet accidentally kills Polonius who had arranged with Gertrude to listen in on the conversation and was standing behind the arras. This closet scene incorporates a visit from the Ghost warns Hamlet not to harm his motheramlet Laas and "To whet thy almost blunted purpose" (III.iv.112). The conflict here is between the old generation's method of fierce action and Hamlet's ways of intellectual thought and logic. Hamlet reveals to his distraught mother, who is caught miserably between loyalties to her husband and son, that his madness is assumed (he is "But mad in craft"). Hamlet proclaims his place to be "scourge and minister" to Elsinore and as such combine righteous vengeance with loving aid.

Act IV

Hamlet refuses to reveal to the court where Polonius' corpse lies and talks instead in cryptic clues: "The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body" (IV.ii.24), emphasising the fact that physical actions do not embody intentions. Through his punning he emphasises the concept of the two bodies of a king: himself and body politic of the state. The King informs Hamlet that he is to be sent to England, where, unbeknown to the prince, the king has arranged for him to be killed. From this scene onwards we note that there emerges a stream of weapon imagery that lasts until death reigns over the court The language of court has been taken over by that of war, begun by Claudius's reference to Hamlet's "cannon" and "poisoned shot" (Iv.ii.42).

As if summoned by these words, Norwegian soldiers, led by Fortinbras, cross the stage on their way to fight the Poles over a piece of land worth nothing to either side. Fortinbras is brought into the action as a counterpart to Hamlet. Whereas Hamlet is always inside the castle, fighting against himself, Fortinbras suggests a macrocosmic scale of revenge and this is used to spur Hamlet's sense of loyalty and injustice. His trivial code of honour serves as a comparison to Hamlet's inaction in the face of so great an offence.

Ophelia enters, driven insane by grief for the loss of her father. Madness is her only liberation from her stock female role. Her true madness is juxtaposed against Hamlet's assumed disposition but the states are related by the fact that they have both been caused by the death of their fathers. She sings ditties to the court and through these speaks of the truth and taboo subjects, reiterating the definition of madness as not fitting into social conventions.

Laertes returns from France to avenge his father's death but is impeded by the vision of his sister who re-enters, singing distractedly, and handing out flowers to the court, each weighted with symbolic meaning. The herbs evoke a grotesque mixture of corruption and freshness that is reminiscent of Hamlet's reference to the "unweeded garden" of Denmark in the first scene of the play. Ophelia acts as a social commentator, as Laertes observes: "a document in madness; thoughts and remembrance fitted" (IV.v.174). She performs the corresponding role as the Ghost for Hamlet, a voice that is beyond this world and prompts thirst for revenge.

News returns through a letter that Hamlet is back in Denmark as he escaped from the ship bound for England. In a depiction of a corrupt pupil and teacher conversation, the King convinces Laertes that it is not he, as Laertes had wrongly assumed, but Hamlet, who is guilty of Ophelia's madness and Polonius' death. Together the king and Laertes plot to kill Hamlet by challenging him to a fencing match in which one of the swords is 'bated' so that

"With ease,

Or with a little shuffling, you may choose

A sword unbated, and, in a pass of practice,

Requite him for your father."

(IV.vii.136-140)

A cup of poisoned wine will also be prepared for Hamlet to drink. The King builds up Laertes' passionate desire for revenge, which is further fuelled by the news that the Queen has seen Ophelia drown in a brook. Drowning is a traditionally feminine death, the water representing the fluidity perceived in women: tears, menstruation, amniotic fluid and milk. She dies with the utmost human dignity, rising from the animal imagery that Hamlet attributed to her in the closet scene. The lyrical and beautiful depiction of the death is cut short by an abrupt ending that finishes halfway through a line, suggesting the innocent beauty of Ophelia's life and the tragedy of it being cut short:

"Pulled the poor wretch from her melodious lay

To muddy death."

(IV.vii.182-183)

Act V

Two gravediggers, who prepare us for the deaths to follow, offer light relief as they dig a grave for Ophelia. For Hamlet to understand his own identity, he must see the graveyard where all are equal and all identities disappear into nothingness. Hamlet and Horatio stand watching them and Hamlet soliloquises on a skull that they throw up from the earth:

"Let me see. [Takes the skull] - Alas, poor Yorick! - I knew him, Horatio. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy."

(V.i.166-167)

At this point, Hamlet realises man's mortality in the emblem of his own friend's death and that physical corruption is the inevitable end for all.

Ophelia's funeral procession enters and Laertes declares the extent of his love for his sister as he leaps with passion into Ophelia's grave. It is here that the two revengers finally meet, as they grapple over love and death. Hamlet joins Laertes in jumping into Ophelia's grave, proclaiming that his love for her was infintely stronger:

"I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers

Could not, with all their quantity of love,

Make up my sum."

(V.i.249-251)

It is Hamlet's obsessive revulsion from sex and sinful mankind that stops him from loving Ophelia; he rejects her because she would tempt him to the evil committed by his uncle and mother. We remember his repulsive images spoken to Gertrude:

"Nay, but to live

In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,

Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love

Over the nasty sty" (III.iv.91-4)

In Hamlet's mind, reproduction has been reduced by his mother's actions to a gross act. There is no longer a future and as such Hamlet, rejecting his obsessive musing ("some craven scruple / Of thinking too precisely on th'event" (IV.iv.40-1)), resigns himself to oblivion in death itself.

The fencing match begins as arranged. Hamlet wins the first two; the Queen drinks to him from the poisoned cup. This is the first time that she acts against the desires of Claudius. She dies in honouring Hamlet and warning him of the poisoned cup, suggesting the transference of love and loyalties from husband to son. Laertes, already fatally wounded as Hamlet has accidentally acquired the poisoned sword, confesses the plot and tells Hamlet that they will both die:

"Hamlet, thou art slain;

No medicine in the world can do thee good,

In thee there is not half an hour of life;

The treacherous instrument is in thy hand."

(V.ii. 296-300)

The revenge has come full circle and killed the instigators; Hamlet dies both as a revenger and as an object of revenge; he has accepted that a soldier's role is to be killed and to kill.

Finally, private revenge is transformed into public justice and cleansing. Hamlet, as he dies, dissuades Horatio from taking his own life, and states that the next king of Denmark should be Fortinbras: "He has my dying voice" (V.ii.338). Hamlet dies with Horatio by his side and Fortinbras, representing the restoration of order, but an order based of course on violence, enters with his army to claim the throne.