Whether, however, this bloody revenge play by Shakespeare was merely gratuitous and audience pleasing or a part of a process of learning his craft by imitating Seneca is still a matter for debate. Further modern productions have continued to expose the underlying brutality and violence of ‘civilized’ society itself. Perhaps in that, however, they were beginning to realize Shakespeare’s vision, even at this early stage in his career, of the terrors present within historical, political regimes and within the society ruled over by the Tudor dynasty.
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Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1600–1601)
The complexities of Hamlet are contained by an intricate and tightly woven dramatic structure. The play employs philosophical, political and social debate along with religious and secular themes, imagery and satire. However, for all the thematic issues exposed, the play leaves us with no clear answers – only with questions.
The structure of the play
While taking note of the classical and neoclassical understanding of the structure of the tragedies, you will find that Shakespeare’s underlying structure for many of the tragedies is not all that dissimilar from that of the romantic comedies. In other words, he is able to take a broadly based structure and flex it one way or another to produce either comedy or tragedy. Indeed, in the four great tragedies we can detect the following five-part structure:
1 Problems are raised which relate directly to the protagonist, who must be of significant standing in the social order. These problems may affect that order itself by involving more than just the protagonist, or more than can be contained in a single plot.
2 Journeys. The solutions to the problems involve the protagonist and various other dramatic characters that undertake physical and mental journeys. These may also involve geographical relocations, and they may expose ambitions or anxieties.
3 Arrivals. During these mental and physical journeys, self-enquiry leads those with ambitions or anxieties to arrive at some form of self-knowledge found in recognition scenes (anagnorisis).
4 Complications arise which may postpone or divert the protagonist from the path of a resolution to the problems.
5 Silence through the death of the protagonist (and, sometimes, his antagonist) is the usual result.
So in Hamlet:
1 Problems
Problems initially set at the beginning of the play relate to the death of King Hamlet and are exemplified by the Ghost’s revelations concerning the old king’s murder by his brother, Claudius, who is now king, and his ‘incestuous’ marriage to the Queen. But there is as second, more pressing political problem that endangers the new king’s regime: the threat to Denmark of an attack by the Norwegians, led by young Fortinbras, whose father, Old Norway, was killed in combat by King Hamlet.
2 Journeys
Hamlet embarks on a political journey to test the veracity of the Ghost’s claims, and he initially decides, on the instruction of his father’s ghost, to solve the problem by revenge at whatever cost. He also embarks on a psychological journey, since his father’s death and his mother’s ‘hasty’ remarriage appear to disturb his mental equilibrium. The new king sends emissaries to the King of Norway in order to avoid invasion and, with the Queen, attempts to appease the discontented Hamlet.
3 Arrivals
The King’s two emissaries, Cornelius and Voltemand, return, having secured peace, but for Hamlet various actions occur: they include moments of introspection and the performance of a play before the King, designed to provoke him into revealing his guilt. Claudius has a moment of introspection which he reveals to the theatre audience, but which cannot resolve his dilemma. This is followed by Hamlet’s interview with his mother in her ‘closet’ where Polonius, who has been spying on Hamlet, is accidentally killed. This leads to Hamlet being forced by Claudius to take a physical journey that allows him to resolve a number of his mental difficulties, so that when he returns he can assert his identity: ‘This is I,/Hamlet the Dane’ (5.1.255–6).
4 Complications
A further complication occurs with the return from Paris of Laertes, determined to avenge the death of his father, Polonius. His sister Ophelia’s lapse into madness, clearly more disturbing and clear than Hamlet’s ‘madness’, and her ultimate ‘suicide’ adds further impetus to Laertes’ revenge. Claudius exploits this and hatches a plot to kill Hamlet. Laertes is the ‘stock’ avenger, who is portrayed as less restrained than Hamlet and less responsible for Denmark.
5 Silence
These ‘plots’ all come together in the final act of the play, when Laertes admits his role in the plot to kill Hamlet, and this allows Hamlet to complete his task by turning the poison intended for him to Claudius. The ultimate silence is the result of multiple deaths, including Hamlet’s own, all of which appear to be ‘providential’; Gertrude drinks from a poisoned cup intended for Hamlet, Laertes is killed with his own poisoned sword, and Hamlet then exacts justice for the regicide of his father before the poison takes effect upon him. At the end, the dying Hamlet acknowledges Fortinbras’s entitlement to the throne of Denmark, ‘…He has my dying voice’ (5.2.363); Hamlet dies with the words, ‘the rest is silence.’ Fortinbras claims the Danish crown.
Key idea
The underlying structure of the play allows for the interweaving of various subplots, with action in one plot prompting repercussions in others throughout the play. We find that the structure even allows for a play within a play, which reflects the story of the play and provides an opportunity for Hamlet to reflect on the nature of ‘acting’ and of dramaturgy.
The classical concept of the three Unities is nowhere observed in Hamlet. Shakespeare’s play is about more than just the character that bears its name, especially when we recall that both father and son bear the same name.
There is, however, a further structural issue for us to consider, as we investigate how the play works. You will recall that, in the comedies, Shakespeare uses twins or pairs of characters who mirror each other. This allows him to maintain balance, cohesion and integrity of plot, and to expand the play’s reservoir of possible interpretations. It produces for the audience a sense of security in the fabric of the play through which the plot will come to a satisfactory end, because these mirrors and repetitions can help the audience to remember the events and connect them to each other. Thus we can concentrate on the process of the drama and it reinforces the view that plays are more than their endings. In Hamlet a similar function is found through parallels.
Spotlight
As protagonist, Hamlet has a series of parallels within the play, and there are parallel actions that lead to a resolution. Sometimes the connections are based on elements that the parallel actions and characters have in common. So, for example, young Fortinbras has lost his father, the King of Norway, who was slain by Hamlet’s father, the King of Denmark. But Fortinbras is not King of Norway but nephew to the King of Norway, just as Hamlet is not King of Denmark but Claudius’s nephew. Young Fortinbras, it appears, wishes for revenge over Denmark for the defeat and death of his father; Hamlet is instructed to avenge the death of his father. But the current King of Norway is persuaded by the new King of Denmark to keep his nephew in check. Fortinbras’s rage has to be channelled in another direction, the Polish war. Denmark even promises money to divert Fortinbras from attacking Denmark.
After the killing of Polonius, Hamlet is sent off to England, where it is expected that the English king will execute him, thereby solving what for Claudius is a difficult political problem. The death of Polonius produces further parallels, whereby Laertes, his son, wishes to avenge his father’s death and in doing so threatens completely the stability of the realm. In this, Laertes’s intention to avenge is subtly different from the task that confronts Hamlet, but the murder of Polonius provides an important strand that leads towards the resolution of the main plot. Earlier in the play, Hamlet has feigned madness and, in a fit of depression, had contemplated suicide. Ophelia, whom Hamlet is to say he loved more than ‘forty
thousand brothers’ could, actually goes mad after her father’s death and it is alleged that her death is by suicide.
It is as if there are through the play slightly distorted reflections of characters and issues in the tightly controlled whirlpool of the narrative. The play’s dominant themes and plots find their consistency with each element reinforcing the other in what is a cohesive narrative. In this respect, within the structural harmony of the whole, there are the correspondences that Empson refers to in describing the relationship between plots and subplots, but they are encapsulated in a single narrative:
‘…once you take the two parts to correspond, any character may take on mana because he seems to cause what he corresponds to or be Logos of what he symbolizes.’
Empson, W. (1935: 34), Some Versions of Pastoral. London: Chatto and Windus (See Chapter 4 for an explanation of ‘mana’ and ‘logos’.)
The play works by pulling us into its issues at one moment and reinforcing the narrative through correspondence at another moment. In the middle of all of this, a troupe of actors arrives at court and the leading player speaks a speech at Hamlet’s request, which describes the grief-stricken, dishevelled Hecuba seeing ‘Pyrrhus make malicious sport/In mincing with his sword her husband’s limbs,’(2.2.514–15). The delivery of the tale by the Player King, as Polonius notes, brings the actor to the point of weeping: ‘Look whe’er he has not turned his colour and has tears in’s eyes’ (2.2.520–21). The actor’s response is one of those occasions (and there are others) that remind Hamlet of his failure to complete the task set for him by the Ghost.
Spotlight
In Hamlet’s soliloquy ‘Now I am alone./O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’, the protagonist links the subject of the player’s emotion to his own ineffectiveness:
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to her,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have?
(2.2.559–62).
By the correspondence of the tale of grief, with and through the self-questioning of the protagonist himself in soliloquy, Shakespeare involves his audience in the issues of representation. It is a method of metadrama, a self-conscious manipulation of the audience drawing their attention to the overlapping layers of narrative that are overtly exposed as part of the dramatic technique. Later, the players re-enact the ‘Murder of Gonzago’ before Claudius and Gertrude, because it corresponds to the murder of King Hamlet and exposes for the protagonist proof of the fratricide. The play within the play works in the same way that the story as a whole works, manipulating our response, drawing our attention to the representational nature of the drama.
Memory and remembrance
A further way in which the play works is through ‘memory’ and ‘remembrance’. Hamlet creates its present by reference to the past. It opens with a ghost, a revenant from the past. Its subsequent accusatory story about its death acts as a ghostlike presence that is woven in the narrative fabric of the play from start to finish. The new King Claudius’s first words refer also to one of the ways in which the past informs the present:
Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death
The memory be green,
…
That we with wisest sorrow think on him
Together with remembrance of ourselves.
(1.2.1–2, 6–7)
It is worth noting that this speech begins with a conditional ‘Though’ and presents what we later realize is a series of excuses for the marriage that gave Claudius access to the crown. It disguises, even as it claims to reveal.
Another significant element of this scene is that memory of a past in which Claudius has had a criminal hand forces him to seek to account for his own actions. This new king has married the former king’s widow, Gertrude, and usurped the throne, and now he wants to make his position secure. The matter of royal succession assuring political power and social stability was important for Tudor England, and no more so than at the time when the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I, was drawing to the end of her life without an heir. The problem of royal succession had also led to her father Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth’s mother. This was still recent history for Shakespeare and had led to the English Reformation, helping provoke the enmity of Catholic Spain.
The scene, however, reveals a further problem. Hamlet is locked in the past that the Ghost represents, and, as his costume suggests, he continues to mourn his father’s death: ‘But I have that within which passes show,/These but the trappings and the suits of woe’ (1.2.85–6). Shakespeare’s evocation of a fictional memory takes us into the world of the play, and in particular into the inner life of the protagonist. The Ghost fulfils a major dramatic function in emphasizing this, but it also points to a major theme: ‘Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me’ (1.5.91) are his parting words. But the dead King Hamlet, ironically, implores his son, ‘Taint not thy mind nor let thy soul contrive/Against thy mother aught’ (1.5.85–6). Of course, Hamlet’s mind is portrayed as being ‘tainted’ as a consequence of the Ghost’s story, even though we are never sure if his ‘madness’ is a protective cover; also, he almost ‘contrives’ against his mother, although later he says that he will ‘speak daggers to her but use none’ (3.2.398). Hamlet’s reply earlier to the Ghost is:
…Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
…
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
(1.5.95–9,102–3)
You might at this point like to note, for later in our discussion, that Jesus, at the last supper before going to his death, took bread and wine, saying that they were his body and blood, exhorting his followers to eat and drink and in the future to do likewise in ‘remembrance of me’ (1 Corinthians 11.23–5). This biblical reference of remembrance of the death of Christ is the basis for the Mass or Holy Communion Service, in which the faithful remember Christ as having taken on mankind’s sins through his death, thereby bringing about forgiveness and salvation of man and thus negating the necessity for individual revenge. Is there a distorted reflective image here in Hamlet that would have been recognized by some, at least, of Shakespeare’s audience?
Spotlight
Remembrance – as much as Hamlet’s procrastination – drives the plot but it also pulls us, the audience, into the story by providing us with an external, fictional, historical narrative: events created by the dramatist that we are encouraged to think have happened before the actions of the play have begun. We can take such techniques for granted because they are so well executed by Shakespeare. He manipulates the audience through using ‘memory’ as much as he does through the correspondence of characters and differing narratives. Polonius, for example, is reminded by Hamlet that he once played on the stage (3.2.99f.), as Hamlet had been reminded earlier that he had once heard the Player King recite a speech that ‘’twas caviare to the general’ (2.2.437–8). Both examples may appear trivial but they keep up the suspension of our disbelief, compelling us to believe the story being told as history. At the same time, Claudius works to erase memory and it is this tension that contributes to the central ‘action’ of the play.
Other examples are more intense, as in the imagery of ‘feeding’ in the first soliloquy when Hamlet speaks of his father’s relationship with his mother:
…Heaven and earth,
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on; and yet within a month –
(1.2.142–5)
A similar aspect of ‘memory’ is taken up again in the confrontational closet scene between Hamlet and Gertrude, as the Prince forces her to look at the contr
asting portraits of her dead husband and his successor:
Look here, upon this picture, and on this,
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See what a grace was seated on this brow,
Hyperion’s curls, the front of Jove himself,
(3.4.53–6)
The gravedigger’s scene in Act 5, comically playing on particular memories, leads to Hamlet’s ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ speech, in which the protagonist contrasts the happiness of the past with the harsh, levelling reality of death (5.1.182f.). The exchange with the gravedigger prepares Hamlet for the much more serious issue of Ophelia’s death, as the remembered ‘anticks’ of the deceased court jester Yorick give way to the more immediate and tragic consequences of Ophelia’s ‘madness’. Earlier, in her mad reverie, Ophelia had given out flowers to the court:
There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance – pray you, love, remember.
And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.
…
I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died.
(4.5.173f.)
Violets were thought by the Elizabethans to be able to cure melancholy. They symbolized faithfulness and Viola (Italian for ‘violet’) was the name given by Shakespeare to the woman who is faithful in her love for the Duke Orsino in Twelfth Night, which, despite being a comedy and probably written in the same years as Hamlet, is imbued – as discussed in Chapter 8 – with a melancholy arising from death. In Ophelia’s case, she remembers only snippets from a fuller past, an effect of what is the larger process of forgetfulness that is encouraged by Claudius.
Shakespeare- a Complete Introduction Page 21