Professor Phillip Virgen
More has been said and written about William Shakespeare’s Hamlet than any other text in the Western literary tradition. For me to add my poor two cents worth, is tantamount to foolishness and audacity. But please excuse it as the sort of foolishness and audacity engendered by first love. Shakespeare’s plays, and especially the poetic language that infuses all of his writing, was, and still is, my first love. First loves also inspire epiphanies: brief moments of sudden insight.
My moment of insight occurred when, as a college sophomore, I first read Hamlet. Although I would go on to read many more plays by Shakespeare, that reading of Hamlet changed my life forever. Regardless of whether or not I became a professor of literature, a construction worker like my father or a cowboy-boot maker like my grandfather, I knew then that reading, studying, acting, and teaching Shakespeare’s plays could—no MUST—always be a part of my life. You are probably wondering what (or even how) the son of an ex-Marine who was also a high school dropout and the grandson of an abuelito/grandfather who never learned to read or write in either English or Spanish, –could find so fascinating in a four hundred year- old text? I was fascinated by Shakespeare’s poetic language, language that drove me (and drives my students) to marginal footnotes and opposite-page glossaries for definitions of words. But despite the archaic and unfamiliar vocabulary, Shakespeare’s poetic language was somewhat familiar in its rhythms and cadences because that English informed the English I had learned from the Authorized version of the Bible, my other great first love. However, it was primarily the character of Hamlet who, because of extraordinary events, is forced to question all he thinks he knows to be true, captured my imagination. “Who am I?” is the question Hamlet and all of us ask.
Michael Neill illuminates the attraction of the play for me:
“Over the sensationalism and rough energy of a conventional revenge plot is placed a sophisticated psychological drama whose most intense action belongs to the interior world of soliloquy.”
Neill’s statement seems surprising in light of the fact that by the end of the play nine people will have died, five of them killed by Hamlet. Indeed, in the final scene of the play four dead bodies will litter the Danish throne room; a sight which the young Fortinbras says “becomes the field [of war] but here shows much amiss” (Hamlet 5.2.447). How then, can the “interior world” of Hamlet be more intense? It is more intense because as mentioned earlier, extraordinary events have forced Hamlet to question everything he held true.
While he is away at college, Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet, dies suddenly. After a brief interim, Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, remarries. Her new husband, Claudius, becomes the king of Denmark.
Hamlet returns for the funeral of his father and is present at the marriage of his mother to Claudius. Hamlet is deeply saddened by the death of his father and disturbed by his mother’s subsequent wedding. His feelings are evident in the remarks he makes to his friend Horatio:
“Thrift, thrift Horatio. The funeral baked meats / Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. / Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven / Or ever I had seen that day” (1.2.187-90).
Whatever grief and misgivings Hamlet feels, they are nothing compared to what he finds out next.
Unbeknownst to Hamlet, his father’s ghost has been seen by members of the Danish night watch. The sight of King Hamlet’s ghost terrifies the watch, as well as Horatio, who also sees the ghostly apparition. Horatio tells young Hamlet what they have seen and urges him to also watch. The ghost does reappear and it speaks to Prince Hamlet. What the ghost of Hamlet’s father tells, him, turns Hamlet’s world upside down and challenges everything he thought was true. In brief, the ghost tells Hamlet that his death was not accidental, not the result of a serpent’s bite, but an act of murder. The murderer was Claudius, King Hamlet’s own brother, who poured poison in King Hamlet’s ear as he slept. Although Claudius now wears the crown of Denmark, the ghost urges Hamlet to revenge his murder by killing Claudius. The Ghost tells Hamlet:
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
But howsoever thou pursues 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. (1.5.89-95)
The words uttered by the ghost change everything in Hamlet’s life,from his appearance to his actions. Gone is the Hamlet Ophelia once knew and perhaps loved:
The courtiers, soldiers, scholars eye, tongue, sound
The expectation and rose of the fair state
The glass of fashion and the mold of form, The observed of all observers. (3.1.150-54)
Ophelia laments the change in Hamlet: What a noble mind is here overthrown!. . . quite, quite down” (3.1. 149, 153).
Hamlet is thrust onto a dilemma. One horn that impales him is the ghost’s injunction to remember him by revenging his murder. The other horn of the dilemma is his distress over how the ghost’s news has affected his relationships with all those whom he loves: Ophelia, his mother, and life. Although the Ghost has asked him to remember,
Hamlet is also forced to re-evaluate. Hamlet’s relationship to Ophelia is influenced by the repugnance and disgust he now feels at his mother’s “o’er hasty marriage” to his uncle Claudius. That disgust at the “damned incest” spills over into his rejection of Opelia’s love, which coupled with her father Polonius’death, drives Ophelia into madness and death.What remains fascinating to me about Hamlet is that his search for answers to the question “Who am I?’ is that what he knows is all changed by the ghost’s words. Hamlet remembers the ghost’s injunction to leave his mother to heaven, but the news forces him to re-evaluate his attitude and feelings toward his mother. Of his mother’s remarriage he says it is “such an act that blurs the grace and blush of modesty/ Calls virtue hypocrite, takes off the rose/ From the fair forehead of innocent love/ And sets a blister there, makes marriage vows as false as dicers oaths” (3.4.40-45).
Hamlet’s view of life is also newly jaded, the consequence of remembering and re-evaluating. He sees Denmark as a rank, oergrown garden, full of weeds and stinking of corruption. In Act Two Hamlet states that now, “this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air. . . a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors” (2.2.293-297). Furthermore, Hamlet states that “Man delights not me, nor women neither” (303-304). These are harsh statements; they are statements uttered by an individual whose psyche has been shattered by his father’s murder and his mother’s apparent incest. His psyche is so broken that the madness he feigns becomes real madness that lashes out in rash acts of violence.
Hamlet seeks answers to his problems, but just as we grope our way to understanding in fits and starts, Hamlet also delays his “solution”—revenging his father’s murder. He delays because he must test the ghost’s story; because he must confront his mother, and because he must re-evaluate the new relationships, which are “little more than kin, but less than kind.” Hamlet arrives at a final solution—but that solution is compounded of mistakes, passion, filial duty, betrayal and unfortunate accident.
I will not spoil the play for you by telling you how it “ends;” my wish is that you will all become readers of Hamlet. Hamlet is a play, that as Susanne Wofford reminds us, invites us to “be among the shapers of future understandings of Hamlet , which will serve to articulate the concern of future ages as much as they do the moral lessons of the past. Hamlet will continue to puzzle and possess the minds of future generations, who can make the play their own only by in turn taking critical possession of it. “Remember me!” says the play, and we will not forget.