- When we read the story of
Amleth in Saxo Grammaticus'
chronicle History of the Danes
we learned about a prince who uses
verbal irony as a means to conceal his
plans for avenging his father.
Amleth says that it's better to choose
the garb of dullness
than that of sense and to
borrow some protection from a show of
utter frenzy yet the passions to avenge
my father still burns in my heart but
I'm watching the chances I await the
fitting hour there's a place for all
things against so
merciless and dark a spirit
must be used the deeper
devices of the mind.
Just to be sure that we
understand that Amleth wasn't lying by
the way he acted in the way that was
interpreted by people that his language
was metaphorical or misunderstood.
The chronicler Saxo
Grammaticus acts as a narrator
and he explains Amleth's thinking
for our benefit, he says for he
Amleth was loathed to be thought prone to
lying about any matter and wished to be
held a stranger to falsehood,
and accordingly he mingled craft in candor
and such a wise that though his words
did not lack truth yet there was nothing
to be token truth and betray
how far his keenness went.
And this can lead us to
understand the character better but
notice this is not coming
from Amleth's words,
we're being told how to interpret
the things that we've read about,
the actions we've read,
and the dialogue from
Amleth that we've read and we're being
told that by the narrator, the author
Saxo Grammaticus and he narrates a lot,
he clearly likes this hero Amleth
he says, O valiant Amleth
worthy of immortal fame
who's being shrewdly armed
with a feint of folly
with the pretense of
madness, he sings his praises
and wants to make sure that
we appreciate this strategy
as much as he does and
this narration the term
for it is free indirect discourse.
I introduced this term we
first read Saxo Grammaticus,
this is narration that
describes a character's thoughts
or speech but doesn't do
it through the character's
own words it is the narrator telling us
how to interpret what the character says
or what the character does.
But free indirect discourse
is not available on the stage,
at least not unless a
narrator comes up on the stage
and explains to everybody what's
happening, how to interpret
what they're seeing in front of them.
And that's the case with
Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Shakespeare doesn't use narration,
he doesn't even use stage
direction, if you read through
the play you see when a character enters
and when a character
exits but that's about
all the stage direction you see.
In Hamlet we have to
figure out what's happening
entirely from character dialogue even
what the characters are doing we have to
figure out from character dialogue.
The author is a ghost and that may be
literally, the legend has it that
Shakespeare actually played
the ghost of Hamlet's father,
but he's a ghost in the sense that
he doesn't tell us how to
interpret what Hamlet is saying,
he just gives Hamlet dialogue,
gives the other characters dialogue, and
then leaves it to the actors to
interpret that in the way they act, and
then leaves it to the audience to
interpret what to make of Hamlet and his
motives, and how to judge
his actions on our own.
And this has led to
centuries of debate about how
we're supposed to interpret
Hamlet as a character,
how we're supposed to
interpret the message
of the play, if there is
a message to the play,
if we can say that this is like
a morality play where we're
supposed to glean some kind
of specific moral from it.
Is he insane, or is he merely
pretending to be insane?
A lot of ink has been spilled arguing that
he is and that he isn't but
unlike Saxo Grammaticus,
Shakespeare is not telling us
what to think, and we
have to be careful when we
read the dialogue because
there's no narration,
this isn't Shakespeare
telling us what to think,
we can't take the lines of
dialogue as if they're words
of advice from Shakespeare directly.
For example, there's a one
line from the play that gets
repeated a lot as sort of life advice
is the line, to thine own self be true,
to thine own self be true,
and it follows as the
night follows the day,
you cannot be false to another man.
Frequently that's cited
as William Shakespeare
with the implication that
this is good life advice
from Shakespeare, the problem
with that sort of citation
is it ignores the fact that
this is a line of dialogue,
it's not coming from a
narrator, it's coming from
the character of Polonius.
When Polonius is giving
advice to a certain Laertes
before Laertes goes back
to France, he's giving them
the sort of typical fatherly
advice, probably very
cliche advice at the time, you know,
don't be a borrower, and don't be a lender
because you'll ruin friendships that way,
don't pick a fight with somebody else
but if somebody else
picks a fight with you,
you show him, you know that
you're not going to take it,
and then to thine own self be true,
these are pretty common platitudes.
The reason we don't want to
take it much beyond that is
because we don't have any
justification to really
take Polonius as a good source of wisdom.
After Polonius gets killed
Hamlet has a very low
opinion of him, he says this
counselor is now most still,
most secret, most grave, who was in life
a foolish prating knave,
and a knave is a fool some,
you know clown that he was
prating, he talked a lot
but he didn't know what
he was talking about.
So do we want to take life
advice from a character who is
portrayed as a clown within the play?
Now again, that doesn't mean Shakespeare
thought he was a clown but Shakespeare's
Hamlet thought Polonius was a clown and
that frames the advice that he gives to
his son Laertes in a very different light.
We have to be especially careful
with what Hamlet says because like his
predecessor Amleth, Hamlet
uses a lot of verbal irony
for instance, when he's saying goodbye
to his uncle, the king
who is his stepfather,
he says farewell dear mother
and Claudius corrects him
and says thy loving father Hamlet,
I'm your father not your mother,
but Hamlet then goes on to say my mother
because father and mother is man and wife
and man and wife is one flesh according
to the Christian marriage vows,
man and wife is one flesh
and so you are my mother.
There is a truth to what he's saying.
Just like with Amleth would say
something that's true
but sounded ridiculous,
but that truth is an interpretive one,
it's a figurative language
that gets mistaken
for literal language.
And this is part of Hamlet's
inheritance from the character
in the story of Amleth.
So we have to understand
the characters in order
to know how to make sense
of the things they say.
None of them is omniscient
narrator, not even
the title character, so as we look at
these characters I'm going to use images
from the 1948 Laurence Olivier
film version of Hamlet.
It's not my favorite version
of Hamlet, it leaves a lot out
I'm just using these mainly
because the characters
are in costumes close to
what they would have worn
on the stage in the Globe Theater in 1600.
One of the things I don't
like about Olivier's film
is it opens with this narration
the voice-over narration
tells us this is the tragedy of a man
who could not make up
his mind, in other words
this is a narrator telling
us how we're supposed
to interpret the the play of Hamlet
and it's a very simplistic interpretation.
It's one we may be familiar
with this is just a guy
who's indecisive, who
can't make up his mind,
who thinks too much.
But that overlooks all of
the complexity of Hamlet,
it overlooks what makes Hamlet Hamlet.
And this idea that Hamlet
is just somebody who can't
make up his mind goes back to
the Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
the english romantic
writer, in a lecture he did
on Shakespeare, but if we
focus on what Hamlet does
or does not do we ignore
the majority of the play.
Most of the dialogue
of the play is focused
not on describing actions,
but in figuring out
what other people are thinking,
what they may do, what can
be done about them, and
understanding Hamlet means
understanding his perspective.
He is oftentimes delaying
action for a very good reason.
First of all, his knowledge
that Claudius, his uncle
killed his father comes from a
ghost, a ghost tells him that
his uncle murdered his father.
But the problem with that
is a ghost as Hamlet says
could be a devil in disguise,
he could be tempting Hamlet
to sin so that he could
damned Hamlet's soul to hell.
So Hamlet needs better
proof than just the word
of this ghost who could
be a demon in disguise
and so he delays until he gets more proof
from seeing Claudius' reaction
to the play he puts on.
Then he has the opportunity
to kill Claudius
while Claudius is kneeling in prayer, but
he doesn't do this because in
the belief system of that day
and if you confess your
sins then your soul is pure,
you can go to heaven,
so if he kills Claudius
right after Claudius has
confessed his sins then Claudius
will go to heaven, whereas
Hamlet's father is in purgatory
because he died with all
his sins unconfessed.
So Hamlet wouldn't really be
getting an adequate revenge.
So in these two instances
of delay Hamlet has
a very clear reason for
doing what he's doing
and that gets overlooked if we just say
well he's being indecisive.
And we can understand more about Hamlet
instead of just looking
at him and comparing him
to what we might do in that
situation or what a typical
protagonist would do in a revenge play.
If we look at him in comparison
to other characters within
the play that resemble him
but have slight differences,
we will come to understand
him better within the context
of that play, we call these
kinds of characters foils.
A foil is a character who's,
when we contrast the character
with the protagonist it
serves to help us understand
something about the protagonists qualities
or characteristics that we might
not have noticed otherwise.
So one foil for Hamlet is the
figure of Pyrrhus who's not
actually a character in the
play but a character within
a speech within the play.
If you remember Pyrrhus
is the son of Achilles
in the epic cycle he's not in
the Iliad but he's in the
epic cycle of the Trojan War
and he's described in
The Aeneid in Book II
when Aeneas is describing
his escape from Troy to Dido
he describes Pyrrhus killing
Priam the king of Troy
and Hamlet wants that the
actors who have come to visit
him in Elsinore castle,
he wants them to reenact
this speech of Aeneas, describing how
Pyrrhus killed Priam, now this is a foil
because Pyrrhus, his father Achilles had
been killed by Paris so don't confuse
Paris the son of Priam, the one who
kidnapped Helen of Troy, with Pyrrhus, but
Paris killed Achilles, and now Pyrrhus has
come to avenge his father.
The thing is Paris is already
dead so Pyrrhus wants to
take out his revenge on all the Trojans
and he's very good at it like his father,
he's nearly indestructible.
What Hamlet wants to
hear, what he remembers
is this description of
Pyrrhus as just this
unstoppable revenge machine,
he's there avenging his father
and he's so you know,
he's killed so many people
so quickly that he's
covered in their blood
and their blood is
coagulating all over him,
so that it makes his skin look monstrous.
Now he is totally ghouls, totally
red, horridly tricked with
the blood of fathers, mothers, daughters,
sons, baked in and pasted on
with the parching streets,
so this blood is dried
up after he's killed
all of these people, not
just warriors but men, women,
children, young and old, so we could
definitely characterize
Pyrrhus as a person of action,
not somebody who is indecisive
but somebody who is all about
the action and that action is
taking revenge for his father
and he takes revenge on
everybody so much so that he
becomes this monster, and
maybe this is why Hamlet
wants to hear that story, but
when the first player picks up
on the speech and completes
it, he then starts
to talk about how Priam was cut down,
this old man that was almost helpless
was cut down by this monstrous avenger,
and his wife Hecuba watches
it and is horrified.
And the actor uses the phrase
mobled Queen which might be a typo,
might actually be a nobled Queen,
but Hamlet repeats that, his attention
has suddenly been brought to this queen
who if Pyrrhus is a foil to Hamlet,
then Hecuba, the Queen, would be a foil to
Gertrude, her parallel
would be Gertrude here.
So if this queen is watching
her husband cut down
by this this monstrous avenger,
now we through this dialogue
here a sort of empathy for her, and
Hamlet's attention is redirected to her
and he repeats that phrase
mobled Queen indicating
that he's now sort of thought
of something that he hadn't
thought of before by
listening to this speech,
maybe he's been reminded that
his action if he were a purist
who was able to just cut
down Claudius and anyone who
stood against his slain
father, even if he was able
to do that, there would be
repercussions like turning
his mother into this horrified victim.
Now within the play there's
another foil who does
avenge his father's death,
and that is Laertes,
remember that Hamlet
kills Polonius and Laertes
when he finds out his
father's been killed,
he wants to kill the person
who killed his father.
And he's so impassioned about this that
he attacks Claudius, he
doesn't know who did it,
he just raises this mob
of people to come with him
all bearing weapons and
they get into Elsinore,
and he's threatening the
king, that's how angry he is,
and he says how came he dead?
How was he killed?
I'll not be juggled with,
don't know mess with me,
to hell allegiance,
he's saying I don't care
about my allegiance to
Claudius, the King anymore.
I don't care about the
repercussions of my actions.
I dare damnation.
No, he's even willing
to go to hell if it will
allow him to kill the person
who killed his father.
Well let's compare that
to what Hamlet says,
remember when he's not sure if the ghost
is actually the ghost of
his father, or a devil
that's trying to trick him into murder
so that he'll be sent to hell,
he says I'm gonna find out first,
I'm not gonna dare damnation, he says the
spirit I've seen may be a devil, and the
devil hath power to
assume a pleasing shape
and perhaps out of my
weakness and my melancholy
he is very potent with such spirits.
And he's doing this to damn me,
so I'll have grounds, I'll
have proof more relative
than this, more than just
the word of the ghost,
so even though both of
these sons are inclined
to avenge their father's
Hamlet is the only one
who's actually gonna make sure,
that he's gonna verify that
he's doing the right
thing before he does it.
And just in case you're
still tempted to see Laertes
as the the man of action that does what
Hamlet should have done,
notice Laertes ends up
just as dead as Hamlet and
he's very much embarrassed
by the situation he ends
up in because he got duped
by Claudius, Claudius used
Laertes rage to make him
his own pawn, to use him to kill Hamlet,
and his last words are to forgive Hamlet
and ask Hamlet's forgiveness of him.
He says that he's been justly killed
with his own treachery,
he regrets using treachery
to get his revenge, and he
realizes that Claudius has been
using him this whole time.
Another foil for Hamlet is Ophelia.
If Laertes is someone who acts
impulsively and immediately
Ophelia is someone who doesn't
act at all, but also because she's in
a very strange situation, we
can infer from the subtext
of the dialogue that she and Hamlet have
had a relationship, and her lover Hamlet
has killed her father,
and it's almost as if she
doesn't know which is worse,
the fact that Hamlet has
turned away from her,
or the fact that her father is dead,
or the fact that it's Hamlet
that killed her father.
So a gentleman describes
Ophelia's condition
by saying she speaks much of
her father, says she hears
there's tricks in the world,
and hymns and beats her heart,
spurns in enviously at straws,
speaks to things in doubt,
she says things that carry but half sense,
the only thing we can make of it is
whatever we imagine it to be
and then we botch the words up
to fit our own thoughts, and
this gentleman's description
of her as someone who
says things that people
just have to try to
make sense of, puts her
in close comparison with
Hamlet, and all the way
back to Amleth, her words seem to mean
nothing to the people who listen to them,
but they seem to have a half sense.
In other words, there
could be some sort of sense
that's made from this, but
this gentleman and the others
who have listened to her
haven't quite figured out
what it is yet, and after
that we hear her singing
and she sings two
different types of songs.
One type of song is a song of mourning,
like what she sings, he is dead and gone,
lady he's dead and
gone, at his head grass,
green turf at his heels
of stone, in other words
he's in the ground, he's
buried, but remember
that Polonius is not buried.
Hamlet lug to the gut says,
he says and people ask
him where's the body?
And he says he's at dinner,
not where he eats but where
he is eaten, in other words,
where he's been eaten by worms.
These lines come very close to something
that's in Saxo Grammaticus, but
she's singing a song of
mourning for her father
and worried that he's
not been properly buried,
but then she'll sing a song,
that is the song of a spurned lover.
Tomorrow's St. Valentine's Day and in
the morning betime, and
I am made at your window
to be your Valentine.
Then up he rose and donned
his clothes and duped
the chamber door, let in the maid that out
a maid departed nevermore.
In other words he led in this girl who was
a virgin on Valentine's
Day and when she left
she was no longer a virgin,
she seems to be singing
about herself here, and this
gentleman who's duped her
is Hamlet, Hamlet's and we
know this from a past speech
where Laertes is warning
Ophelia that she should
stay away from Hamlet because
he's not free to marry
whoever he wants.
So we know that they have
this history with each other
and that history has
been marked by the way
we see them interact in the play, which
is Hamlet's spurning her, so
she's having to borrow these,
the only way she's able to
express herself from mourning
for her father, and her
anger at Hamlet is to sing
these lines of songs,
so these borrowed words
to describe emotions and in
that sense she is borrowing
a script, and a script in
the cognitive sense that
the sense that we talked about all the way
in the beginning of the semester,
as the computer scientists
and political scientist, Sir Roger Schank
and Robert Abelson characterized it,
a script is this set of
expectations about what's supposed
to happen in a well understood situation.
The example they give is
if you go to a restaurant,
you know that if a person
comes up and asked you
what you want, it's a
waiter, you tell them
what you want to eat,
if you want an appetizer
order that first and then
at the end they're going
to bring you a bill.
We know the restaurant script,
we know the spurned lovers script,
we know the script of avenging a father,
we have all of these
narrative scripts available
to us before we actually
enter into the situation,
and Ophelia has several
scripts and she doesn't seem
to be able to choose
between which one occupies
her mind the most is
that morning her father,
or focusing on her being
spurned by her lover, by Hamlet?
To interpret what's happening
in her own life all she has
are these scripts from these
songs and they come from
different songs, there's
no script for what to do
if your former lover kills your father.
So she goes back and
forth from singing a song
about mourning to singing a
song about a broken heart.
And this is what Schank
and Abelson tell us is,
we have a hard time dealing with anything
that's genuinely new,
what we do is try to take
a script that's already
in our head and use that to
interpret what to do next
when we come across a new situation.
But if there's one thing
we know about Hamlet
is that he's not limited to
a small number of scripts.
He's got a lot of different
scripts, he looks at
any given situation and
he'll describe it one way,
and then he'll say but
it could be this other.
He'll think things through
the way a chess player
thinks through all the potential moves
that he could make, but in thinking ahead
in evaluating all of these
scripts, he's able to look
all the way forward to the endgame.
He doesn't just immediately
adopt one script or another,
he analyzes them all, he doesn't just look
at the next step or the
step immediately after that,
he looks many steps ahead and
the problem he continually
faces is that all of these
scripts have an outcome
that is not something he wants.
And this is where the most famous question
in English literature comes
in, to be or not to be?
It's a question that is
going to have an answer.
A lot of times, this gets thrown in as if
it's some an unanswerable question,
or at least a question that
Hamlet himself can't answer.
He will answer it, but
first we need to understand
that question in the
context of when he gives it,
that question doesn't exist in isolation.
He's asking is it better, is
it nobler in the mind to suffer
the slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune?
Fortune, fate, these
circumstances outside ourselves
that we can't change, should
we go fight against this?
These slings and arrows, this
sort of storm of projectiles
of all these things that
we have to deal with,
take arms against a sea of troubles.
You're fighting the sea,
this unstoppable opponent.
Take arms against a sea of troubles
and by opposing end them.
This might be kind of
ironic, kind of sarcastic,
you're not going to be able to take on all
the slings and arrows,
you're not going to be able
to take on the sea,
but the alternative there,
is it better to die, to sleep no more?
And by sleep we say to end the heartache
and the 1,000 natural shocks
that flesh is heir to.
In other words, when you die
you don't have to deal with
those slings and arrows anymore.
Then he goes on to sort of list,
here's what we have to look forward to,
these slings and arrows,
they're things like the oppressors wrong,
the proud man's contumely,
you know contempt,
some arrogant person has contempt for you.
The pangs of despised
love, this is what Ophelia
suffers from, and
potentially Hamlet does too.
The laws delay in other words,
the law not delivering justice to you.
This constant tide of
problems, of sadness,
of pain, that is really all life is.
You beat one arrow, we
beat one sling stone down,
another one's on its, way or
several are trying to hit you
at the same time.
It doesn't matter if you
overcome this one obstacle
your whole rest of your life is gonna be
a series of obstacles in
Hamlet's description here.
And this is what he's
characterizing as fortune,
and think of the goddess
of fortune, who is
referred to several times in the play.
This external source for
all of these troubles
and these troubles will never
stop no matter what you do.
Now if this all seems sort of depressing,
this seems like a very
peculiar way to think,
that's because it's
the opposite of the way
most of us think most of the time.
It's natural to have
what psychologists call
an illusion of control, and that is
overestimating the influence
that our behavior exerts
over uncontrollable outcomes,
and psychologists like
Ellen Langer have been
researching this since the 1970s,
where people will be
playing like a computer game
a video game, and they'll be
pressing buttons that they
think are controlling the
outcome, but turn out to actually
not be controlling the
outcome, but when asked if they
thought that their button pressing
actually changed something on the screen,
they'll usually say yes.
I did some things, and
things happened on the screen
so I think what I did
actually caused that.
We typically have an illusion of control
when it comes to much
more ambiguous phenomenon.
Things like you know,
how much money you make.
We would like to say,
well it's just a matter of
how hard you work, you have control over
your fortune whether or not
you are successful in life
based on how hard you work, but of course
we all know people who
work really, really hard
all the time and never seem
to be able to make much money
from it, things like losing
weight or getting in shape,
there are so many more factors than people
are typically aware of,
someone who says that
you lose weight by burning more calories
than you consume, but the
reality is there are things like
gut bacteria and genetics
that have much more impact
on our ability to gain or lose
weight than simply exercising
or eating less, but we typically have this
illusion of control that
if I follow this script,
let's say the take arms against
a sea of troubles script,
if I follow that script
then I will have this
singular outcome, a very
simple action like playing
pool or something like
that, you hit the cue ball,
the cue ball will hit the eight ball,
the eight ball go in the pocket and
you'll win the game, but cause and effect
in life is never that simple.
So our illusion of control
or our feeling of control
is almost always an illusion,
but Hamlet sees through that
illusion of control, it's
not that he doesn't know
what to do, his inaction as
described in his own words
has more to do with what he
perceives as the futility
of human action, all
human action no matter
what you do, fortune is there to undo it.
He frequently refers to fate or to fortune
when we hear him talk about
fortune, he's not using it
in the sense that we
use today when we talk
about making a fortune,
or a fortune 500 company,
or that sort of thing.
Today fortune just means
wealth, but Hamlet is invoking
a much older schema of
fortune as a goddess,
the Romans actually had
a goddess named Fortuna
who was a personification of fate or luck.
She was frequently depicted
as turning the rota Fortuna,
the Wheel of Fortune.
This is before that was a game show,
we all sit somewhere on
this wheel of fortune
and sometimes we're at the top,
but then the wheel turns
and we fall to the bottom,
and we may hope to ride
the wheel to the top again,
but it's the goddess fortune
who is turning that wheel
and deciding where we are on it.
And if that sounds overly pessimistic,
that no matter what we do
fortune's gonna screw up
our plans, that's actually
what happens, that's
what happens throughout
the rest of the play.
In Act 3 Scene 4, now that Hamlet has
seen Claudius, his guilt in his reaction
to the play, The Mousetrap for the murder
of Gonzago, he's ready
to act and he does act,
he goes to confront his mother
Gertrude to see if she knew
that her first husband was
murdered by her second husband,
and I'll come back to
that conversation later,
but while they're arguing
he discovers that someone is
spying on them from behind
a curtain, he assumes
it's Claudius, and
that's a pretty good bet,
it is after all his wife's
private chambers, and he stabs
through the curtain, kills the spy and
this is the kind of decisive action that
people frequently say
Hamlet is incapable of,
it should be obvious in
the scene that Hamlet
is perfectly capable of
decisive action, but only now
that he is sure of Claudius' guilt,
and if it had been Claudius
behind the curtain perhaps
the play at this point would be over.
Some people say that Hamlet
goes from acting indecisively
to acting impulsively, the
opposite of indecisive.
When you just act without thinking,
but that's not true either,
in this case this is the perfect time to
kill Claudius, if it is
Claudius, since Hamlet can claim
plausible deniability.
He can claim that because the King was
behind the curtain he
didn't know it was the King,
but had reason to believe
it was an intruder
in the Queen's personal chambers.
So this action fits the script
for a revenge play pretty well.
Let's call it a revenge script.
Identify Claudius at a time when he's in
an incriminating position, or
at least at a time when Hamlet
can claim not to recognize him stabbed,
while he's behind the curtain.
In doing so he kills the
man that killed his father,
thereby accomplishing exactly
what the ghost of his father
asked him to do.
So that's exactly what he does,
stabbed through the curtain.
But that's when fortune
intervenes, instead of Claudius
it's Polonius behind
the curtain, not someone
that Hamlet would expect to be hiding
in his mother's private chambers.
And this one factor, the
fact that it's Polonius
instead of Claudius,
is what sets in motion
a chain of events that leads
to Hamlet's tragic death
because he's killed
Polonius, that puts Laertes,
Polonius's son in the
same position as Hamlet.
A son who is now compelled
to avenge his father,
now Laertes takes up the revenge script
and he comes after Hamlet,
and Laertes gets his revenge,
he kills Hamlet, not because
of Hamlet's inaction,
but because of Hamlet's specific action,
the action of killing Polonius.
Not only does the killing of
Polonius lead to Hamlet's death
and of course Laertes death
because Hamlet kills him as well
but it also leads to Ophelia's death.
If it had been anyone
other than her father
behind that curtain she probably
wouldn't have lost control
and either commit suicide deliberately,
or just sort of given
up on life and drowned.
Ultimately it also leads
to Gertrude's death
since she drinks from
the cup that was poisoned
to kill Hamlet during the duel.
That wouldn't have happened
if not for Laertes desire to
avenge his father, so
Hamlet's tragedy is not as
Lawrence Olivier assumed, in
the introduction in his movie
a tragedy of a man who
couldn't make up his mind,
it's a tragedy of misfortune,
an unforeseen turn of events
that interrupted the
designs of the characters
and this seems to be
what Hamlet is predicting
two acts before the death of Polonius,
and the to be or not to
be speech when he refers
to the slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune.
And we can see more of
his thinking in the speech
that the player king gives during the play
within a play, through
The Murder of Gonzago
or The Mousetrap, these lines,
even though it's the player king who's
saying them they seem to be lines that
Hamlet himself wrote within the play.
Remember the in Act 2 Scene 2,
he asked the actors to
learn some new lines
before they perform The Murder of Gonzago,
and when the players perform the play
it's been rewritten by
Hamlet to the point that
he changes the name from
The Murder of Gonzago
to The Mousetrap.
And so the player King says during the
play that when his wife
says that she'll be true,
she's making a very clear statement about
what her decision is to
remain loyal to her husband
even if he dies, but the the
player king who's sort of
a stand in for Hamlet's actual father,
says you know, he sort of looks ahead
beyond the immediate circumstance,
like he's looking several
moves ahead and he says
I believe that you believe
that you think what you now
speak, but what we determined
to do we usually don't do,
we break our vows, purpose
is but the slave to memory.
You have this purpose now
but later you're going to forget about it.
A violent birth but poor
validity, in other words,
you're very emotional in the beginning
that you're so confident that you're going
to carry out this action, but in the end
it sort of falls apart.
The thing we propose to
ourselves and passion,
once our passion is gone,
our purpose fades away.
The violence of that passion,
we'd agree for joy of their
own actions, their own in
actors, those passions actually
end up destroying the
actions, the scripts,
the planned actions.
And in these last lines
this is where fate or
fortune comes back in.
Our wills and fates do
so contrary run that
all our devices are still overthrown.
Our thoughts are ours,
their ends none of our own.
In other words, whatever
we're planning to do,
we're only going to follow
that course as long as we feel
that passion, and once the
passion sort of peters out,
then fate intervenes and
fate is going to intervene
and overwhelm all the
actions we've performed
so what eventually is going to happen,
the end result is gonna
have nothing to do with
the thing we set out to accomplish.
And in these lines the player
king and presumably Hamlet
recognize that emotion isn't
really accomplishing anything.
When we act on unpassioned
way you know someone
like Prryhus or Laertes does, we might set
something in motion, but
what's eventually gonna happen
is not the thing we thought
we were going to accomplish.
Hamlet's describing something
that psychologists have,
can now study at the level of the neuron.
Watch our brains in the
act of thinking about
what to do, about what decisions to make,
and seeing the parts of
the brain that function
to generate emotions and
responses to the things
we interact with, for instance
the psychologist and
neuroscientist Antonio Damasio
studies emotion as it relates to reason,
and after Shakespeare's time
during the Enlightenment
philosophers, and writers,
and people in general
started to think of emotions and reason
as the separate phenomena.
That the more emotion you
had, the less reason you have.
And in order to be more
rational, to be more reasonable,
you had to be less emotional.
But what Damasio and
others have discovered
is that if you don't have
an emotion to set in motion
a chain of reasoning,
you're not going to be able
to make decisions, even if
you're extremely rational.
Damasio gives tyhe example of a patient
he had who had a brain lesion to a part
of his brain that generates
emotion so he wasn't able
to get emotional to decide
if he liked something
or hated something, and that had benefits.
For instance, when he was
driving on ice and his car
started to skid, started to hydroplane
were you supposed to do in
those situations is turn into the skid,
but it's very counterintuitive, and this
patient was describing that a woman in
front of him was not able to do that,
she panicked and she ended
up trying to over correct
her hydroplaning car and ended up going
off the road, but he was able to do it
accurately because he didn't overreact.
He didn't really emotionally react at all,
he went purely on reason,
he followed this script
without any sort of emotional
inclination to follow
the wrong script, so
without emotion he was
able to think very clearly
in a panic situation
or situation would cause
other people to panic,
however this same patient was
unable to make up his mind
about very simple things
like when Damasio asked him
when do you want to meet
for our next appointment?
The guy went on for 30
minutes saying, well
here's all the pros to meeting on Monday,
but here's all the cons
to meeting on Monday,
here's all the pros
for meeting on Tuesday,
here's all the cons meeting on Tuesday,
but he couldn't make up his
mind either way until Damasio
finally said okay, let's just do Tuesday.
So if we have a very simple goal in mind
the reason is all we need to figure out
a way to achieve that goal, but when it
comes to deciding among goals
and deciding among paths
to those goals we need an emotion.
Emotion sets in motion a
motion can help us decide
what outcome we want very
quickly and it's not always right
it's not always the best outcome
ultimately but it has to be
there in some form or another
for for reason to have
anything to do, otherwise our reason
is just a potential advantage, it's not
an advantage that actually
gets put into use.
So it's not enough to say that
Hamlet just can't make
up his mind, we see this
lack of emotional inclination
in several points of his speech
he tells Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern I have of late,
but wherefore I know
not lost all my mirth.
In other words, lately
I just haven't had any,
I haven't been happy.
Worth literally means happiness,
but it's also that sort of
energy, that sort of desire
to do anything, Iv'e forgone
all custom of exercises.
I quit doing the things
I normally would do
and it's gotten so bad that the world
as beautiful as I know it
is, seems to me like a sewer.
It says the excellent
canopy the air look you this
brave o'erhanging firmament.
He's looking at the sky
the majestical roof fretted
with golden fire, that's
like the sky at sunset,
but it appears to me
nothing other than foul,
pestilent, congregation of vapors.
In other words this
stinking, containing prison.
At one point he describes
Denmark as a prison
and that's when he gives
the oh what a piece
of work is man speech.
Human beings have such
capabilities, such promise,
but to me he's the quintessence of dust.
He knows the words, he knows the scripts,
the poetry to describe the sky at sunset,
or the godlike potential of human nature,
but even though he
knows these descriptions
he doesn't feel it, he
doesn't feel what he's saying.
And so when it comes to
the main decision that
he has to make, do I follow
the advice of the ghost
and kill Claudius, or do I do nothing?
He doesn't really feel it either way,
and if we look at the
outcomes of both of them
in both cases if all goes well,
he would become the King of Denmark.
If he kills Claudius then
he's the heir to the throne
because these the both as
Claudius sort of adopted son,
but also as the son of the original king.
So he becomes king that way, but
if he just waits though, Claudius dies,
then he also becomes king, so he doesn't
really have to do anything, as far as his
personal interest go,
either one of these actions
or inactions ends up with the same result.
So the only thing that's
gonna motivate him
is if he's certain the
ghost is telling the truth,
that his father actually was murdered by
his uncle, and then the the motive to act
wouldn't just be to become king, or to
get rid of Claudius, the motive to act
would be to avenge a murder.
But this all depends on his
emotion being ignited by
the recognition that this really happened.
And in this Hamlet has
a distinct disadvantage
over Amleth in the Saxo Grammaticus tale.
Remember that in Saxo's
those history of the Danes
everybody knew that Fengy, the new king
killed his brother,
Horwendil, the old king,
the father of Amleth,
Gerutha the mother knew
it, Amleth knew it,
all of Denmark knew it.
Feng told everyone that he did it because
Horwendil was cruel to his
wife, and that he hated
seeing such a good woman
have such an abusive husband.
That's why he justified
killing his brother.
That's all the more reason that
Amleth had to pretend to be
crazy because everybody knew that Feng
killed Horwendil and everybody
knew that everybody knew
that Feng killed Horwendil that means
that Feng knew that Amleth knew that he
killed his father, so he
would be suspicious of him
unless Amleth is not a threat,
and which is why he pretends to be stupid.
But in Shakespeare's Hamlet
most people don't know.
Obviously Claudius knows
that he killed old Hamlet,
we don't know if Gertrude
knows and Hamlet doesn't know
if Gertrude knows, we the
audience don't even know
if the ghost is telling
the truth until we hear
Claudius in confession admit
to killing his brother.
Before that we're just as
confused as Hamlet about
whether or not the ghost
was actually the ghost
of old Hamlet, Hamlet senior, or whether
it was a devil in disguise.
So most people don't
know Hamlet doesn't know
whether he can trust the ghost.
We don't know if Gertrude
knows that Claudius killed her
former husband, we don't even know if
Polonius knows, you know Polonius is a
co-conspirator in most
things with Claudius,
but we never hear them actually
talk about whether or not
Claudius killed old Hamlet,
and so Polonius never directly
mentions it and Claudius
doesn't mention it in front
of Polonius so we don't
even know Polonius knows.
And the rest of Denmark
Ophelia and Horatio,
the rest of the cast
clearly don't know this.
This is significant because
Hamlet's lack of emotion,
his sort of confusion, his
listlessness comes part
from not knowing,
we can't expect him to be all motivated,
all fired up to avenge his father
if his father wasn't
actually murdered, so we
might even say that he
his inaction is actually
the right thing to do until
there's more substantive proof
than just what he hears this ghost say.
So in order to get more
substantive proof he has to
get inside Claudius' head because if
Claudius is the only
one who knows for sure
whether or not Claudius killed old Hamlet
then it's Claudius's mind that Hamlet
has to read and reading minds is
something we've talked a
lot about in this class.
Remember that theory
of mind is the ability
to predict and to understand
the thoughts of others
based on their outward actions
as well as their words.
We have to be able to understand that
people have beliefs and
sometimes those beliefs are wow.
We have to know if they know the truth
about something or not.
They have desires they have fears,
they have hopes, they have certain things
they're willing to do that
other people might not
be willing to do, and they're not always
gonna be honest about
what these things are.
So understanding their mind means
more than just listening to what they say
and this kind of mind
reading is the sort of thing
that good literature really strains in us,
it really makes us exercise
that theory of mind ability.
And the play of Hamlet is all about
characters trying to use theory of mind.
Characters spying on each other,
questioning each other trying to get
inside each other's heads to find out
what does he know, does
he know what I know,
does he know that I know what I know?
So Claudius and then his
cronies like Polonius,
and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern
are trying to get inside
Hamlet's mind, they do this by watching
him very carefully, they
watch him in particular
while he's interacting with
Ophelia because at first
Polonius suggests, well maybe it's
because he's in love
with my daughter Ophelia?
Let's bring in Ophelia and then
hide back here and spy on them while
they communicate with each other,
or maybe it's something
he'll tell his mother.
The source of his disposition,
maybe he'll tell her,
so Claudius and Polonius
or sometimes just Polonius or sometimes
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
they're always watching Hamlet
to see what they can figure
out about his internal state,
what's going on in his mind, but they
have to derive this from
things other than what he says,
they have to depend on this
because as we saw Hamlet
is being ironic, just like
his predecessor Amleth.
He is the eiron this is where
the word irony comes from.
The character in a Greek play
whose name literally means the dissembler,
the one who doesn't necessarily
lie, but who misleads,
who tricked somebody into
thinking the wrong thing
by what they do or how they say
what they say, and the eiron
does this because he's always
in a weaker position, there's someone who
has a lot more power and
when you have a lot of power
you don't have to do a lot of thinking.
You can become overconfident and so the
eiron uses this against the the alazon,
the more confident character and that
more powerful character in
this case is clearly Claudius,
but also by association
it's also Polonius,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
and everyone else
who is loyal to Claudius,
and who Claudius rewards.
Claudius is able to sort
of pull all of these
people together and use
them to try to figure out
what's going on with Hamlet,
if Hamlet is a threat to him.
And like his predecessor Amleth,
Hamlet uses verbal irony.
He doesn't directly lie
but he will describe things
in a very metaphorical sense
or a very figurative sense.
Use figurative language like when Claudius
asked him you know how
is it that the clouds
still hang on you?
In other words why are
you still so cloudy,
why do you have a cloudy disposition?
Why are you so depressed?
And he says not so my
Lord, I'm not cloudy,
I'm too much in the
sun, of course you know
he says sun, he could say S-U-N, which
would mean that I'm acting sunnier than
I actually feel, in other
words I'm not acting like
I'm in the clouds, I am
actually in the clouds,
but I'm pretending to be
more sunny than I really am,
but also it could be the S-O-N
and I'm acting too much like your son,
but you're not my father, you're my uncle
and you just married my mother,
that doesn't make you my father.
So I'm pretending to be
your son but I'm really not,
in that same scene Gertrude says,
why does it seem so particular with you?
In other words, why
does losing your father
seem to be such a, so worst with you
than it is with most people?
And he says seems madam nay it is
I know not seems, he's insisting that his
actions, the way he's
acting is not a pretense,
it's not a facade, it
is actually who he is
and if she doesn't understand
that well that's a problem
with her understanding.
He's sort of pointing the finger
at everyone else and saying
you're all putting on facades but
the reason you can't understand me is
because I have that
within which passeth show.
In other words, I have something
inside me that you can't see that's not
because I'm hiding it, that's not because
I'm trying to seem a certain way,
it's just because you can't see it.
It's not that I'm hiding
it, but it's a difference
in character, if you can't see within me
this thing that passeth show
it's because you don't understand.
Maybe you don't have it within you.
So just like with Amleth
there is this tension between
needing to hide something
but also wanting to be known
as an honest person.
Amleth, Saxo tells us did not want to be
thought to be a liar,
but he did actually need to fool people.
So he's walking this line
between deliberate deception
and the sort of verbal
irony, this double truth,
this requiring people to
interpret things beyond just
the immediate obvious interpretation.
But he's very clear that
people can't understand him
and shouldn't expect to understand him,
in fact he gets really
angry when he finds out
that Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern, his friends from
the University of Edinburgh, these people
he knew that were not from Denmark,
they've been summoned to Denmark.
And at first they don't
want to tell him that,
they don't want to tell him that
Claudius sent for them, asked them to come
to try to figure out what
was going on with Hamlet.
And when they finally admit to him
that they were sent for, he's angry,
he knows that they're spying on him,
that they're reporting back to Claudius.
He hands Guildenstern
a recorder or you know
a little wooden flute,
and tells him to play it.
And Guildenstern says I can't,
I can't play this thing,
I don't know what what to do.
I don't have the skill and then Hamlet
says well if you don't
have the skill to play this
why do you think you can play me?
Do you think I'm just this
little pipe that you can play
and make me say whatever
you want me to say?
You would play upon me, you
would seem to know my stops?
In other words, the keys,
you would pluck out the heart
of my mystery, you would sound me
from my lowest note to
the top of my compass,
and then he swears, he says
splud, which is a slang swear,
it comes from the swearing
on Christ's blood.
So this is a swear word
that would definitely
raise some eyebrows in
the theater, splud do you
think I am easier to
be played than a pipe?
Call me what you will
though you cannot fret me,
you cannot play upon me.
He's reminding them that I
have this within the past
of the show, you cannot see inside me.
It's not because I'm putting up a pretense
it's just because you don't
have it in you to figure out
what's going on inside my mind.
So Hamlet's very aware
that he's being spied on but he also knows
that no one can understand
him no matter how much
they observe him, but this
becomes a double edged sword.
People like Ophelia may not
be able to understand him
and that leads him to
be suspicious of her.
So he's very cruel to Ophelia.
Especially if they've had
this past relationship,
and it seems that he's
being cruel for no reason,
but if you'll notice in the scene where
he's the most cruel to her
it's a scene where Polonius, her father
and Claudius are watching them,
he's being spied on, he seems to know that
he's being spied on
because he asked Ophelia
where's your father?
And he knows where her father
is, he knows her father
is watching, but he wants
to see what she's gonna say.
So while he's being observed
he's now trying to use theory
of mind on Ophelia to
see if she's in on it,
if she's helping a spy for Claudius,
or if she's on his side.
And this is interesting because remember
there's a parallel character
in Saxo's story of Hamlet.
This woman that people are
trying to use to get Amleth
to reveal his plot is
actually a friend of his
and helps him out, helps
him to fool the people
that are spying on him,
but in this case Hamlet
doesn't know of Ophelia's
on his side or not.
This is a test question
to see if she'll be
honest with him, and she's not, she says
my father is at home my Lord,
and that's sets Hamlet off, he says let
the door should be shut upon him that he
may play the fool nowhere
but in his own home
and then farewell, he
wants to get rid of her.
And we can tell even
without stage direction
that Hamlet is getting really
angry at this point because
Ophelia now says, oh help
him you sweet heavens.
In other words she's worried by the way
he's acting right now,
that's why she says this.
And any potential future
relationship between
the two of them he's
casting off, at this point
he says if you do marry,
I'll give you a plague
for your dowry, you're not going to
escape calmny, you're not gonna
have a happy marriage one way or another.
So go to a nunnery, go become a nun.
And in the Elizabethan slang the nunnery
could be a slang term for
a brothel, the opposite
of a nunnery, because as he says
if you're gonna marry than marry a fool
for wise men know well enough what
monsters you make of them, in other words
you tried to fool me but I'm wise to
your deception about, you know, you're
helping your father spy on me, so you
might as well marry someone who can't
through this kind of deception.
Once again Polonius in Act
3 Scene 4, Polonius spies
on Hamlet this time while
he's talking to Gertrude,
his mother and this is
a scene taken directly
from Saxo's Amleth story, at this point he
already knows that
Claudius killed his father,
but now he wants to find
out if his mother knows.
So he begins to interrogate
her, and the fact that
somebody is spying on him as
they had this conversation
doesn't seem to help her
case, it doesn't make her look
very innocent, but he thinks it's Claudius
so he stabs through the curtain.
Just like Amleth stabbed through the straw
had a spy, and ends up
killing servant of the king
rather than the king himself.
And this is the sort of decisive
action, once he realizes
there's a spy there he
doesn't dither and say
well maybe I should stab
through, maybe I shouldn't?
He does it, this is a very
emotionally driven decision.
This is the sort of decisive action that
some people think Hamlet isn't capable of,
but notice in this case even though
it's emotionally driven,
he would have actually been
justified if it had been
Claudius, killing him while he was behind
the curtain would give Hamlet a little bit
of plausible deniability
that he may not have known he could say
that he didn't know it was the king when
he stabbed a spy but he was actually
hoping it was and if it had been the king
then the story would be over and
might have been a happier ending, but
after he kills Polonius and we come to
one of those scenes that is hard to read
from just the text, just the dialogue.
It would depend entirely on
the way the actor or actress
playing Gertrude would read these lines.
So when Gertrude looks at
the dead body of Polonius
that Hamlet has just killed, she says
what a rash and bloody deed is this?
And Hamlet says a bloody deed
almost as bad good mother
as kill a king and marry his brother.
And the way Gertrude reads these
next lines, it would make all the
differences to helping the audience
figure out whether she
was in on it or not.
As kill a king ,as if she doesn't know
what he's talking about,
what do you mean kill a
king, what have I done that
thou darest wag thy tongue
in noise so rude against me?
These seem to indicate
that she doesn't know
what he's talking about,
what do you mean kill a king?
And as he goes on
describing in oblique terms
the death of his father.
She doesn't know what he's
talking about, it really seems
like she doesn't know
what he's talking about,
what act that roars so loud
and thunders in the index
depending on how the
actress reads these lines,
she could be trying to
shut him up, or she could
be genuinely unaware of
what he's talking about.
So these are some of
these lines that's because
Shakespeare is not there to narrate to
tell us yes Gertrude knows,
or no she doesn't know,
each individual performance
could make it seem
as if Gertrude was in on
the murder of old Hamlet,
or completely unaware of it, and of course
it is theory of mind that enables Hamlet
to validate the claim of the ghost that
old Hamlet was murdered by Claudius.
The plays the thing wherein
I'll catch the conscience
of the king.
So now that Hamlet has
these players this troupe
of theater actors traveling
through Elsinore he decides that
because they have such an
ability to pull emotion
out of people then he'll
try to see what emotions
they can pull out of Claudius
if they act out a play where
a relative kills a king
and takes his crown,
but also then marries his wife.
So this play is called
The Murder of Gonzago,
but then Hamlet rewrites it and renames
it The Mousetrap and uses that
to see will Claudius react
when he sees an event, a murder
very close to what Hamlet
suspects actually occurred?
And what he sees seems to confirm that,
at least it confirms it for Hamlet.
Now notice that in that
play The Murder of Gonzago
it's not the king's
brother that kills him,
it's actually the nephew, and remember
that Hamlet is the nephew of Claudius,
so we the audience might infer that
Claudius and his reaction his
walking out of the theater,
could actually be because he thinks
this is a threat from Hamlet
for a nephew to murder
his father the king,
but Hamlet doesn't seem
to be focusing on that,
Hamlet sees his reaction as
specifically indicative of
the reaction of a guilty conscious.
This is somebody who is acting this way
because he actually killed the former king
and married his wife the
same way that is happening
in the play, and for good
measure Hamlet has Horatio
as a sort of second opinion
watching Claudius to see if
he sees a guilty reaction
or an innocent reaction to this play.
But it's only here at Act 3 Scene 2
that Hamlet really has what
he needs to begin his action
and that is confirmation
other than this dubious ghost,
this ghost that could be a devil,
and it is theory of mind that
gives him that confirmation
at least satisfies his need to know.
And now that he knows
he can begin his revenge plot, but this
wasn't part of the revenge
plot, this was just a plot
to find out what Claudius
knew, to read Claudius' mind
and then after this Mousetrap
play, that's when he
confronts Gertrude, that's
when he kills Polonius,
then Claudius has him
sent to England hoping
the King of England will kill him,
but Hamlet intercepts the letter and
changes it to say kill Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern instead,
Hamlet comes back, he
comes back just in time
to see Ophelia being buried,
while Ophelia's being buried
that's when Laertes who
now knows that Hamlet
killed his father Polonius,
they confront each other,
challenge each other to a duel just like
Claudius had planned with Laertes.
They're gonna cheat, they're
gonna poison the sword tip
during this fencing duel
in order to kill Hamlet.
Laertes gets from this
plot to kill the man
who killed his father.
Claudius gets to kill the person who
knows the only person who knows his guilt.
That leads to the finale of
the play in Act 5 Scene 2
where everybody kills
everybody, you know Hamlet
does kill Claudius, but he's
been poisoned by Laertes tip,
a poisoned sword point.
Gertrude drinks from the poison
cup and dies by accident,
and in this ending which is clearly
different than the Amleth story in Saxo
where he kills the
previous king and goes on
to become king himself,
this ending where everybody dies,
people take that as well,
Hamlet died tragically
because he failed to make a
decision, or at least he failed
to make a decision in time,
but if we revisit the sequence
of events and see things
from Hamlet's perspective,
we see that the decisions he
made were actually building up
to a positive resolution.
It's just that he couldn't
act until he knew for sure
that a murder had been committed,
that Claudius was the
murderer, but we could look
at this final scene as in
the context of everything
that we've heard from
Hamlet and others so far as
an actual positive or at least
a consummation that Hamlet
had been looking for, in his
to be or not to be speech
he was sort of hinting at
suicide being preferable
to enduring the slings and
arrows of outrageous fortune
enduring a life of constant trouble.
But he ultimately does decide
to accomplish something.
The thing he wants to
accomplish is kill Claudius,
he does kill Claudius before
he dies and then he dies
so he actually does complete this action.
And in order to look at it
that way I want to look at one more foil.
The most common foil that people use to
compare to Hamlet and that is Fortinbras.
Fortinbras is a character that
only shows up in two scenes
and he has very few lines,
but he's important as a foil
because like Hamlet he is
the son of a murdered father
and he's a prince, and
he's someone who can't
immediately act out the
way he wants to act out.
Fortinbras is the son of the former king
of Norway and who was
also named Fortinbras,
so there's old Fortinbras
and young Fortinbras,
just like there's old
Hamlet and young Hamlet,
old Hamlet the former King of
Denmark killed old Fortinbras
when Denmark and Norway
were at war and took over
some of Norway's territory
so Fortinbras the younger
wants to revenge on Denmark
because his father was killed
by old Hamlet, he can't
get revenge on old Hamlet
so the next best thing he
wants to do is take back
the land that they won, win
that land back from Denmark
for Norway, and we know
this from what Horatio says
in Act 1 Scene 1.
Fortinbras is usually described
as the sort of man of action
who is the foil to Hamlet
is the man of thought
but in action because at
the beginning of the play
he is well on his way
to getting his revenge,
to invading Denmark,
as Horacio tells us, remember,
the Horacio in the first act
comes out to talk to the
guards who were on guard duty
because they're expecting
an invasion from Norway,
so Horatio says that Fortinbras
has sharked up a list
of lawless resolute's, for
to some enterprise to recover
from us by strong hand
those foresaid lands
so by his father lost.
In other words Fortinbras
has put together an army,
now he's invading Denmark
or he might be invading Denmark.
However, we learned shortly after that
that Claudius has put a stop to that,
when Voltimand the Ambassador to Norway
comes to speak to Claudius
he says that the king of Norway has
suppressed his nephew, his nephews levies,
in other words Fortinbras
can no longer recruit an army
because the king of Norway
who is Fortinbras' uncle,
so now as Fortinbras,
his father was killed,
his uncle is now the king,
and his uncle the king has
prevented him from raising
an army to go invade Denmark, and that's
because of an agreement
between the new king of Norway
and Claudius, so the two
uncles are now the kings
of the two Scandinavian
countries and now they've
made an arrangement so that Fortinbras
can't get the revenge he wants.
So despite the fact that
Fortinbras is described as this man
of action because he starts
the action of invading Denmark,
he's actually in a similar
position to Hamlet.
He can't overrule the decision
of his uncle, the king
who has replaced his father as king.
So Fortinbras' action of
invasion is actually stopped
and it's not stopped by his own decision
or his own thinking through
several steps ahead,
it stops simply because
his uncle says stop.
So it might be an exaggeration to
say Fortinbras is really
this unimpeded man of action.
So instead of invading Denmark the king
of Norway tells Fortinbras to go invade
Poland and take this army you've raised
and go fight for this little tiny patch
of land which we find out later is not
big enough to bury all
the dead on it's so small,
but that's not the
point, the king of Norway
wants Fortinbras not messing
up the diplomatic situation
the agreement with Denmark.
So the invasion of Poland is
just a distraction and it's
after everyone is dead in Act 5 Scene 2
that Fortinbras returns.
He's coming from Poland
where he's been victorious
and he comes in to pay respects as he
crosses Danish territory
he's supposed to come
pay his respects to the
king but when he does so
he just happens to see everybody's dead,
but his reaction is very
telling, not just for who he is,
but who Hamlet is and the
regard he has for Hamlet
because everybody is dead
Fortinbras has been named
as the new king of Denmark
so he gets what he wants
without invading Denmark
but notice he says that with
sorrow I embrace my fortune.
I have some rights of
memory in this kingdom
which now to claim my
vantage death invite me.
In other words,
okay, I now have the outcome that I wanted
but it's not from the
action that I thought
I was going to have to to act
out, it's not from the script.
So just like Hamlet says we can try to
accomplish things and then
fate intervenes to give us
something we didn't want in
this case Fortinbras gets
something he want not from
any action so to say that
that action is necessarily good,
especially action without
thought is to ignore
and oversimplify what's
actually happening here.
Fortinbras also did not
enact the revenge plot
for his father and yet he
got exactly what he wanted,
not only that but Fortinbras
seems to respect Hamlet,
he says let four captains bear Hamlet
like a soldier to the stage,
for he was likely had he been put on.
In other words had he been
attacked to prove most royally.
In other words if I had
attacked him I bet he would have
been a fierce opponent.
So he gives Hamlet a soldier's
funeral even though Hamlet
famously is unsoldier like,
Hamlet is this sort of
intellectual who went
to college at Wittenberg
and spends all his time
analyzing and over analyzing
these situations we tend to judge Hamlet
as a man of inaction the
opposite of a soldier,
the opposite of a conqueror,
but the person who's been
labeled as the conqueror
respects him as a conqueror,
as a fellow soldier, as a as
an opponent, but also somebody
who would have been a fierce
opponent and even though
Fortinbras probably didn't
know this that respect
was mutual, Hamlet's desire
to actually do something
was inspired in Act 4 Scene
4 when he saw Fortinbras
heading from Norway to
Poland, and in that soliloquy
in Act 4 Scene 4 we get the
answer if to be or not to be
is the question, then this
speech in Act 4 Scene 4
is the answer to that question that Hamlet
has decided, when he
sees Fortinbras leading
this army he says examples
gross as earth exhort me.
In other words gross here means large,
so examples as large as the
real world that I'm now in
call me to actually do something.
Look at this Army, witness
this army of such mass
in charge led by a delicate
and a tender prince,
not by a brutal warlord
but by somebody as refined
as himself, somebody Hamlet as
a refined intellectual royal
sees this other person who's
focused on military pursuits
as somebody who is much like
himself in those regards.
Who's spirit with divine
ambition puffed makes mouths
in other words doesn't
care, throws insults at
the invisible event, the
event that he's going to fight
the battle, he's going to fight.
Exposing what is mortal
and unsure to all that fortune,
death, and danger dare.
In other words fortune that
that thing that intervenes
he knows it's there, he knows
it's a threat, he knows death
is lurking, but he doesn't care,
he's going to expose himself to death,
he's going to expose himself
to misfortune because
the end result is not really the point,
the action is the point.
He's starting to see this now.
Even for an eggshell as
if this patch of land
they're going to fight over
he's just a tiny eggshell
and he realizes right when
to be great is not to stir
not to do something without
great argument, without a reason
but to greatly find quarrel
in a straw when honors
at the stake.
Straw in this case
stands for something meaningless,
an outcome that's not
really that relevant.
But the relevance that
he's fighting for isn't
the thing itself, it's the honor
that fighting for it symbolizes.
And this reference to
straws as nothing remember,
Ophelia was described
as kicking at straws, this
might make us go back and look
at what she's dealing with,
nobody else understood
what she was dealing with
her emotion, they thought
it was just over nothing but
it was something other than
the thing people saw/
But what is happened with this speech?
When Hamlet sees Fortinbras going to war
he now has a new script it
probably wasn't a script
he was unaware of that he had thought of
but he's got something more
than just a script now,
he has inspiration
He says, how all occasions
do inform against me and
spur my dull revenge?
Dull revenge means simple
it's something that
I didn't care about but now
the occasion has spurred me.
Specifically it has given him
purpose, a sense of purpose
a feeling of purpose, because
if I'm just someone who's
sleeping and feeding I'm
no better than an animal
and of course he's not an animal because
he's very intellectual
but notice he says whether
it's bestial oblivion,
in other words being
a simple-minded animal,
being a simple-minded beast,
living in oblivion, and
in lack of awareness
or the opposite some
craven scruple of thinking
too precisely on the event,
a thought which quartered
which cut into four
parts has one part wisdom
in every three parts
coward, in other words only
about a quarter of these analyses
are actually worth anything,
there are only about a fourth
of all of these scripts,
all of these thoughts,
are actually worth anything.
The rest are just cowardice
just delaying just dithering,
in Hamlet's own opinion.
Why have I spent all this
time thinking about what to do
when I have the will, and the strength,
and the means to do it?
So even though he's had
the will, and the strength,
and the means to carry out his
revenge, now he has something
he didn't have before, which
is an emotional compulsion.
He's got that that feeling
not just the reason,
not just the knowledge
of how to figure out who
the guilty party is and enact revenge
but the actual drive, the
emotional drive to set in motion
those actions.
And so this is the other end
of his character arc remember this term
from all the way back in
the epic of Gilgamesh.
The character arc is
the entire progression
of a character's state
from the very beginning
when we first meet him or her,
to across all the changes,
all the decisions, all the
experiences, to the the end state
and Hamlet's character
arc isn't really about
his social position or his
action, whether or not he kills
Claudius or not, the ark, the
change that he goes through
is going from somebody
who was not motivated,
not emotionally engaged
in the world, even though
he could understand the
world, he had the words,
the theories, the
descriptions, he didn't have
the emotional connection
to the world of action.
Now he does, now he's
suffering the slings and arrows
of outrageous fortune,
now he's taking arms
against a sea of troubles,
now he's in the fight.
Even though he's no longer
concerned just with the outcome.
So just like Fortinbras,
if we take what he admired
about Fortinbras and applied it to him
we see that even though
he dies in Act 5 Scene 2,
he dies after doing the thing
that he wants to be
known for, he dies after
accomplishing something,
after engaging in the world.
And so in that sense he is successful,
and when he dies notice his
last wish is for someone
to tell his story and it
seems that he's made some
sort of realization but he knows that
he won't live long enough to
explain it, this character
who's made speech after
speech analyzing everything
can't tell us in these final
moments what he's learned from
his final actions, he says had I but time
and this fell sergeant death
is strict in his arrest
oh I could tell you, in other words
because death is here to
take me away if he wasn't
I would tell you this story.
I could explain these
things that you look at
and can't comprehend, but I can't.
So he tells Horatio while
you live report my cause,
tell my story to those unsatisfied,
to those who don't understand it,
and notice Horatio now
wants to commit suicide too,
he's so emotionally
overwhelmed that he's actually
driven to suicide, not
because of a lack of emotion,
but because of an overwhelming emotion,
and he says you know, I'm
more like an ancient Roman
than a Dane, meaning that he believes in
a sort of honor suicide,
but Hamlet tells him no,
don't, if you're a man give me that cup,
that poison cup, Hamlet says, I have
a wounded name, things
standing thus unknown,
people don't know what happened,
I don't want to leave it up
to other people to tell my story,
so if you ever held me in
your heart, wait a while
before that felicity.
In other words that release,
that final sort of relief
from life in death,
he's still like Horatio
just hang on, live a little
bit longer, and in this
harsh world draw thy breath
in pain to tell my story.
Yeah, I know the world
sucks, life is hard,
but keep doing it for this
purpose so you can tell
the story of what happened here.
Once again he has this
in common with Amleth,
even though Amleth survived
his fight with Feng, his uncle,
Amleth spends about three
pages, if you're reading this
in the book Saxo Grammaticus'
History of the Danes,
spends about three pages
explaining to everyone
why he did what he did, that
he wasn't actually crazy,
that he had to avenge
his father and all that
because it's very important to
him what people think of him
after the event, even
though Shakespeare's Hamlet
is centuries and very culturally removed,
this story did start
in the Old Norse world
where judgment after you
die, what people think of you
after you're gone, that's
what's most important,
that's dome where we get our word doom,
but it's specifically
judgment of whether you lived
your life in the right way
in a way that's admirable,
and it makes a good story,
even though all your wealth
is gonna die, all your
kinsmen are gonna die,
and you are gonna die, but
what's really important
is how people remember you,
the same sentiment in Beowulf.
Beowulf is described after he dies as
(speaking foreign language)
most eager for glory, and he told Hrothgar
after Hrothgar's Thane was
killed by Grendel's mother
Beowulf tells him do not sorrow too much,
it's better for everyone
to avenge his friend
than to mourn too much.
Each of us must await the
end of life in this world
but he who can should gain
glory, gain good judgment, dome
before death, that's best
for the warrior who dies
that's the best kind of afterlife.
Same sentiment in Beowulf, and
this is exactly what Hamlet
has done, he has stopped
mourning for his father.
He's gotten revenge and
now his story is complete.
He has achieved this dome,
this judgment, even though
he's died doing it.
And this connects him all the way back
to the quest for Kleos,
Kleos Aphthiton, the glory imperishable,
that Achilles and Diomedes
and all the the Greek warriors
fought for, as different as
the character of Hamlet is this
sort of indecisive intellectual,
he does have this in common in the end,
at the end of his
character arc he has become
one of these warriors who
has won on the battlefield.
Even if the battlefield is
within this castle, in this
room, in what started out
as a seemingly friendly fencing match,
it is actually a battleground,
it's his battleground,
not just against Laertes
but against Claudius.
And this is what Fortinbras
recognizes, but then again
the battlegrounds of
Shakespeare's time weren't just
actual fields, they were
courtrooms, they were castles,
they were places where
people were fighting battles
of narrative, battles of reputation,
battles that would shape
international policy, just as much
as battles fought outside
on a battlefield by armies.
And this is how the story
ends with a storyteller.
With someone who has
witnessed all of this and says
let me speak to the yet
unknowing world how these things
came about, you will hear of
carnal, bloody, unnatural acts,
accidental judgments,
casual slaughters, deaths
put on by cunning and forced cause,
and and this upshot purposes mistook,
fallen on the inventor's reads, this all
I can truly deliver, I can
explain to you all of this
that lies beneath the surface
that which passeth show,
that which you cannot
see from this courtroom
full of dead people.
It all makes sense if
I tell you the story,
according Horatio.
But as we're reminded
this is all taking place on the stage.
This storytelling is
itself within a story,
a play that has already
featured a play within it
now has a storyteller but
of course that storyteller
is the creation of another storyteller.
This is a character in
Shakespeare's tragedy of Hamlet.
Horatio's lines about telling
the story are lines written
as part of the story, and so
Hamlet's achievement of a story
of a sort of immortality
through his action
and the retelling of that
action by future generations
that is the sort of thing
that you know Kleos Aphthiton
consisted of, that's the
sort of thing that dome
consisted of, and as much
as I would like to end
this lecture, this
description of Shakespeare
and the final lecture
of the class, with that
sort of redefinition of
immortality as being commemorated
in a narrative, if we've
learned one thing throughout
this entire semester through
all of these examples,
it's that, those narratives
never stay the same.
The stories are multiform,
each iteration makes its own
interpretive decisions, and a character
like Shakespeare's Hamlet didn't start out
as Shakespeare's Hamlet.
In its past there was the Ur Hamlet,
which was apparently a
very unimpressive play
according to critics,
there was the sort of
Viking Hamlet that we read
about in Saxo Grammaticus'
History of the Danes,
and that iteration itself
came from an oral tradition
that shows up in Ambales Saga
in Iceland, in kennings, so
has Hamlet become immortal
through our retelling his
story over the centuries,
well yes as much as Achilles or Gilgamesh,
but he hasn't stopped evolving
over that time either.
