turn away,
And lose the name of action....
In Elizabethan English "conscience" meant not only moral scruple but also "consciousness." A polyglot dictionary of the period glossed the word as "witness of one's own mind, knowledge, remorse." It is Hamlet's extreme self-consciousness that sets him apart from the traditional revenger. When alone on stage, reflecting on his own situation, he seems to embody the very nature of human being. It is "conscience" in its multiple senses that forms his self-image, his "character," and in so doing makes it agonizingly difficult for him to perform the action that is demanded of him. Yet when he does come to act, he is decisive and ruthless. He reaches the point of "readiness" when he accepts--never easy for an intellectual--that what will be will be. Thereafter, he considers it "perfect conscience" to kill the king and has no compunction about his treatment of the former schoolfellows who have betrayed not only him but the precious virtue of friendship: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he says, "are not near my conscience."
1. "Rapier and dagger": on-guard position, as illustrated in Vincentio Saviolo's English fencing treatise of 1595. There were strong links between the actors and Saviolo's fencing school in Ludgate.
It is sometimes said that chance, not Hamlet, brings the plot to a resolution. Hamlet certainly believes that Providence is operating on his behalf, as witnessed by the good fortune of his having the means to seal Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's fate. But the exchange of rapiers during the fencing match with Laertes is not a matter of chance, as is sometimes suggested. Many modern productions use the epee that had not been invented in Shakespeare's time--a flexible foil that may be knocked from the hand, leading to the possibility of an accidental exchange of weapons. But Hamlet and Laertes would originally have dueled with "rapier and dagger," the commonest weapons for such an encounter, as illustrated in Vincentio Saviolo's treatise on fencing skills, The Art of Practice (1595).
2. They change rapiers: disarm and exchange by left-hand seizure, as illustrated in Henri de Saint-Didier's French fencing treatise of 1573.
The grip used for the rapier meant that it was very hard to remove it from the opponent's hand save by an advanced maneuver known as the "left-hand seizure." Hamlet would have dropped his dagger to the ground and grabbed the hilt of Laertes' rapier with his left hand, twisting it out of his grip. Laertes would have responded with the same action, resulting in the switch of weapons.
The move, which is illustrated in continental fencing handbooks of the period, is so skillful that Hamlet's action must have been purposeful. He would not initially have seen that Laertes' rapier was "unbated" (not blunted in the way that was customary to prevent the injury of gentlemen participating in sporting fights), but on receiving a "hit" his skin would have been pierced by the point. Realizing that Laertes is in earnest, not play, he instantly responds with the maneuver that makes the switch. Now he is in deadly earnest himself. Deeds take over from words, revenge is performed without further compunctious visitings of nature, and "the rest is silence."
HOW MANY HAMLETS?
Shakespeare couldn't decide what to do with his most famous speech. The earliest surviving text of Hamlet* is highly inaccurate in many of its particulars, but there is little doubt that its shape reflects that of the play as performed early in its stage history. In that text (known as the "First Quarto"), Hamlet enters "reading on a book" and launches into his soliloquy "To be or not to be there, ay, there's the point." His famous question is asked as if in response to something in the book he is reading. The soliloquy is followed by the "get thee to a nunnery" dialogue with Ophelia and then the "Fishmonger" sequence with her father.
But in the Second Quarto and First Folio texts--published later, but considerably longer and more accurately printed than the First Quarto--Hamlet's entrance with the book leads straight to the "Fishmonger" dialogue (this page-this page). "To be or not to be, that is the question" and the "nunnery" scene are held back until after the arrival of the players (this page-this page). This is only the most striking of the many textual variants between the early versions of Hamlet. Is the flesh that Hamlet wishes would melt too "sullied" or too "solid"? Did Old Hamlet smite a leaded or a steeled poleaxe on the ice or did he smite the Polack from a sledge on the ice? So much depends on whether you favor Quarto or Folio.
Scholars traditionally prefer the Second Quarto because it is the fullest text and apparently the one closest to Shakespeare's original manuscript. But it may represent a "reading text" as opposed to a "performance" one. Coming in at around four thousand lines, Second Quarto Hamlet could never have been played in full within the 160 or so minutes that was the legal maximum for an Elizabethan play (shows began at 2 p.m., there was always a closing comedy and dance routine known as a jig, and then the theater had to be cleared by 5 p.m.). The full flow of Shakespeare's tragic vein must be reined in and cut for performance, and with a play as long as Hamlet he must have known that this would be the case.
Every modern production makes its own choice of cuts, of textual variants, and of innovative business. In working on his text for the Royal Shakespeare Company production of 2004, director Michael Boyd* considered not only the three versions that emerged from Shakespeare's own acting company but also the so-called Players' Quarto that was handed down--with cuts marked up--to their Restoration successors, the acting company of Shakespeare's godson William Davenant. Both the First Quarto and the Players' Quarto offer striking suggestions as to how the play may have been cut in Shakespeare's own time. The cuts are not always the most obvious ones: Reynaldo, whom Polonius commissions to spy on Laertes in Paris, might seem an obvious candidate for the ax, but in the Players' Quarto he remains, probably in order to highlight the way in which the world of Elsinore--like that of Elizabethan England--was one of pervasive spying.
Like most modern directors, Boyd was eclectic in his choices, weighing each textual variant according to its merits, moving freely between the early texts and opting for rigorous pruning rather than reckless lopping. So, for instance, the First Folio cuts the whole of Hamlet's last soliloquy, "How all occasions do inform against me," delivered after witnessing the army of Fortinbras on the march, whereas Boyd retained an abbreviated version of it that makes the key distinction between acting upon "great argument" and finding "quarrel in a straw."
The Reynaldo role was also retained, but the character was merged with Osric. Since one of them only appears near the beginning of the play and the other only near the end, the roles may well have been doubled in the original production. To make them into the same character is both an elegant economy and a device to highlight the role of Polonius as spymaster-general. Most boldly, the nunnery scene was placed early, as in the First Quarto, while--as Boyd explains in his interview about the production--a radical new position for "To be or not to be" was seriously considered, but ultimately rejected. The process of thinking through production choices of this sort is what enables directors and actors to defamiliarize and remint the language and action of the best-known play in the history of world drama, and so to keep it alive. The progressive alterations through the early texts are of a piece with the process of remaking in the play's subsequent theatrical life.
TALKING ABOUT HAMLET
Hamlet is not only the pre-eminent talker in Shakespeare. He is also the most talked-about character in western literature. Because he is both poet and philosopher himself, poets and philosophers have been particularly enamored of him. Hamlet-mania reached its zenith with the self-consciously troubled musings on art and life of the nineteenth-century Romantics. One of their favored literary devices was the "imaginary conversation," in which their cultural heroes gathered round a table and talked about a topic of absorbing interest. It was in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Table Talk that he said "I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so." Hamlet is a play that provokes so many opinions, animates so many energetic voices, that the best way to conclude an introduction to it is simply to bring together some of the play's most impassioned readers in an "imaginary conversation."
Let them begin from that key moment when Hamlet decides not to kill King Claudius while he is praying, since that would be to send him to heaven, not hell:
Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in th'incestuous pleasure of his bed,
At gaming, swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in't,
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven.
And that his soul may be as damned and black
As hell, whereto it goes....
Dr. Samuel Johnson, eighteenth-century Christian of high moral sensitivity: "This speech, in which Hamlet, represented as a virtuous character, is not content with taking blood for blood, but contrives damnation for the man that he would punish, is too horrible to be read or to be uttered."
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Romantic poet with a smack of Hamlet himself, if he may say so: "Dr. Johnson's mistaking of the marks of reluctance and procrastination for impetuous, horror-striking fiendishness!--Of such importance is it to understand the germ of a character."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in the voice of Wilhelm Meister, hero of the archetypal Romantic Bildungsroman, the novel in which a young man or woman grows to emotional maturity (a genre for which Hamlet itself was a key model): " 'The time is out of joint: O, cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!' In these words, I imagine, will be found the key to Hamlet's whole procedure. To me it is clear that Shakespeare meant, in the present case, to represent the effects of a great action laid upon a soul unfit for the performance of it. In this view the whole piece seems to me to be composed."
August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Romantic critic: "Hamlet is singular in its kind: a tragedy of thought inspired by continual and never-satisfied meditation on human destiny and the dark perplexity of the events of this world, and calculated to call forth the very same meditation in the minds of the spectators."
Lord Byron, always glad to play the devil's advocate:
Who can read this wonderful play without the profoundest emotion? And yet what is it but a colossal enigma? We love Hamlet even as we love ourselves. Yet consider his character, and where is either goodness or greatness? He betrays Ophelia's gentlest love; he repulses her in a cruel manner; and when in the most touching way, she speaks to him, and returns his presents, he laughs her off like a man of the town. At her grave, at the new-made grave of Ophelia his first love, whom his unkindness had blasted in the very bud of her beauty, in the morn and liquid dew of youth, what is the behaviour of Hamlet? A blank--worse than a blank; a few ranting lines, instead of true feeling, that prove him perfectly heartless. Then his behaviour in the grave, and his insult to Laertes, why the gentlest verdict one can give is insanity. But he seems by nature, and in his soberest moods, fiend-like in cruelty. His old companions, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he murders without the least compunction; he desires them to be put to sudden death, "not shriving-time allowed" ... Polonius, father of Ophelia, he does actually kill; and for this does he lament or atone for what he has done, by any regret or remorse? "I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room"--"You nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby!" But suppose him heartless, though he is for ever lamenting, and complaining, and declaiming about the false-heartedness of every one else; Richard III is heartless--Iago--Edmund. The tragic poet of course deals not in your good-boy characters. But neither is he, as Richard is, a hero, a man of mighty strength of mind. He is, according to his own admission, as "unlike Hercules" as possible. He does not, as a great and energetic mind does, exult under the greatness of a grand object. He is weak, so miserably weak as even to complain of his own weakness.
Elaine Showalter, turn-of-the-millennium feminist, as if responding to Byron's remarks about Ophelia:
When Ophelia is mad, Gertrude says that "Her speech is nothing," mere "unshaped use." Ophelia's speech thus represents the horror of having nothing to say in the public terms defined by the court. Deprived of thought, sexuality, language, Ophelia's story becomes the Story of O--the zero, the empty circle or mystery of feminine difference, the cipher of female sexuality ... we could provide a manual of female insanity by chronicling the illustrations of Ophelia; this is so because the illustrations of Ophelia have played a major role in the theoretical construction of female insanity.
Soren Kierkegaard, melancholy Danish philosopher, himself a Hamlet wracked by sexual guilt, coming perhaps to the heart of the mystery: "Hamlet is deeply tragic because he suspects his mother's guilt."
Sigmund Freud, inaugurating the language of psychoanalytic criticism which Showalter has been employing and Kierkegaard subtly anticipating: "In Sophocles' Oedipus the child's wishful fantasy that underlies it is brought out into the open and realized as it would be in a dream. In Hamlet it remains repressed; and just as in the case of a neurosis, we only learn of its existence from its inhibiting consequences ... Hamlet is able to do anything--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 his childhood realized."
James Joyce, Shakespeare-soaked Irish novelist, in the voice of Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, weaving a somewhat Freudian reading into a biographical fantasy:
The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the cast-off mail of a court buck, a well-set man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling him by a name: "Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit," bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever. Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark, a ghost by death, speaking his own words to his own son's name (had Hamnet Shakespeare lived he would have been prince Hamlet's twin), is it possible, I want to know, or probable that he did not draw or foresee the logical conclusion of those premises: you are the dispossessed son: I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen. Ann Shakespeare, born Hathaway?
T. S. Eliot, poet and stern critic, dissatisfied with the Freudian solution, but agreeing that there is a problem: "Shakespeare's Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare's, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son, and ... Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the 'intractable' material of the old play.... So far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure."
Jan Kott, Polish critic, writing under tyranny, swinging away from psychology to politics: his Hamlet is not "the moralist, unable to draw a clear-cut line between good and evil" or "the intellectual, unable to find a sufficient reason for action" or "the philosopher, to whom the world's existence is a matter of doubt," but rather "the youth, deeply involved in politics, rid of illusions, sarcastic, passionate and brutal ... a born conspirator ... a young rebel who has about him something of the charm of James Dean."
From Wilhelm Meister to Stephen Dedalus to James Dean and beyond, Hamlet is always our contemporary. To be or not to be Hamlet? That is the question for every young aspiring intellectual or actor. Or indeed actress: of all Shakespeare's major male roles, it is the one that has most often and most effectively been played by women. In Renaissance terms, action was the prerogative of the male and feeling of the female, so perhaps Hamlet's intense gift of feeling, and talking about his feelings, makes him a "feminine" character.
For those who do not get to play the part itself, there is the compensation of imagining themselves in a supporting role. Tom Stoppard's razor-sharp existential tragicomedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) rewrites the drama from the point of view of the two men on the margins who are cogs in the wheel, and in the cult film Withnail & I (1986), an old actor (Uncle Monty, played by Richard Griffiths) is broken by the realization that he will never "play the Dane" (he has only managed to secure the tiny part of Marcellus the nightwatchman) and a young unemployed actor (Withnail, played by Richard E. Grant) ends up in London Zoo reciting Hamlet's great prose discourse "I have of late--but wherefore I know not--lost all my mirth" (2.2.296-311) to an enclosure of bedraggled wolves. Hardly the "paragon of animals" and yet, because of Hamlet, still he can dream.*
*For further discussion of the play's complicated textual history, see "Text," this page-this page.
*See further the interview with Michael Boyd about his production in "The Director's Cut."
*Further selections from critical commentaries on the play, with linking narrative, are available on the edition website, www.therscshakespeare.com.
ABOUT THE TEXT
Shakespeare endures through history. He illuminates later times as well as his own. He helps us to understand the human condition. But he cannot do this without a good text of the plays. Without editions there would be no Shakespeare. That is why every twenty years or so throughout the last three centuries there has been a major new edition of his complete works. One aspect of editing is the process of keeping the texts up to date--modernizing the spelling, punctuation, and typography (though not, of course, the actual words), providing explanatory notes in the light of changing educational practices (a generation ago, most of Shakespeare's classical and biblical allusions could be assumed to be generally understood, but now they can't).
But because Shakespeare did not personally oversee the publication of his plays, editors also have to make decisions about the relative authority of the early printed editions. Half of the sum of his plays only appeared posthumously, in the elabor