Hamlet, Revenge!

Author(s): Millicent Bell

Source: The Hudson Review , Summer, 1998, Vol. 51, No. 2 (Summer, 1998), pp. 310-328
Published by: The Hudson Review, Inc

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 MILLICENT BELL

Hamlet, Revenge!

When, villain!
bawdy at the /end of the second
Remorseless, act, Hamlet
treacherous, bawls,kind-
lecherous, "Bloody,
less Villain! / Oh vengeance!", the audience laughed, I guess, the
way modern audiences laugh when viewing Mel Brooks's Young
Frankenstein. They recognized a horror-thriller style old-fashioned
enough to be funny; this was the way the Revenger hero of
Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy had ranted on the stage fifteen
years before. Shakespeare's modern editors disagree about the
"Oh vengeance," which appears only in the 1623 Folio version of
the play. The editor of the Arden edition, who commits himself to
an earlier Quarto text, where it is missing, thinks it must have
been put in later by someone else, probably an actor. It jars, he
feels, with the brooding self-reproach Hamlet has just expressed
after hearing the player orate about the avenging of Achilles by
his son Pyrrhus and about the grief of Hecuba over slaughtered
Priam. The editor of the New Cambridge Hamlet thinks Shake?
speare wrote it himself: "This cry, the great climax of the rant with
which Hamlet emulates the Player, exhausts his futile self-
recrimination, and turns, in proper disgust, from a display of
verbal histrionics to more practical things." I, too, think it was
Shakespeare's, but I disagree about its tone and intent. It is really
a nudge to the funny bone of the sophisticated theatergoer of
1602. It resulted from the irrepressible leaking out of the
playwright's satiric impulse in the midst of high seriousness.
If so, it is a small sign of what happens elsewhere. The
elocutionary set piece that has moved Hamlet is itself an imitation
of the style of a creaky older play about Queen Dido of Carthage.
Hamlet is not put off by its stiff rhetoric; the mercilessness of the
blood-smeared Pyrrhus and Hecuba's lamentation stir him pro?
foundly by their application to his case. But the theater buffs in
the audience must have been amused. Perhaps also by "The
Murder of Gonzago," which the company of strolling players puts

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 MILLICENT BELL 311

on according to Hamlet's instruction. This is to be ano

"Revenge Tragedy"?as the type is called?one, like Kyd's, wi
Spanish setting, but it will represent his own father's murd
so cause his uncle to acknowledge his crime. Its parodic char
is indicated by Hamlet's impatient exclamation to the actor
comes on as the murderer: "leave thy damnable faces and b
Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge."
'The Murder of Gonzago" is, I would say, a fictitious
invented by Shakespeare as an example of the kind of p
makes fun of at various points in Hamlet Though Ham
supposed to have added some lines there is no evidence o
voice we know him by in the fragment we hear before a ter
Claudius rises from his seat. It is stale bombast cast into out-of-
style couplets, unlike the naturalistic dialogue enclosing it. Shake
speare seems to have wanted to exaggerate its theatricality. He
sets it in contrast with the reality of a modern?though medi?
eval?Denmark. At the same time, Shakespeare is letting th
audience know it is going to see the unfolding in his play, despit
its realism, of just another such tale of teeth-grinding and blood
setting-to-rights as those it used to find so thrilling. The Hamle
world is a contemporary realm, and the thought behind it, as I
shall be suggesting, belongs to that latest Renaissance moment
which Shakespeare shares with Montaigne. Yet it deliberatel
frames its modernity within an archaic kind of story (ultimatel
finding its model in Seneca), that of its probable source, a lost
Revenge Tragedy, also by Kyd. This "ur-Hamlet," as the scholar
call it, was undoubtedly the play remembered by a contemporar
as including a "ghost which cried so miserably at the Theatre, lik
an oyster-wife, Hamlet revenge." Shakespeare's Hamlet has all th
prescribed features of the once popular genre (and its surprising
retro success helped bring the genre back into popularity). It ha
a ghost who demands revenge for a murder and a hero wh
promises to achieve it, pretends to be mad, indulges in philo
sophic soliloquies, and does not succeed in his purpose till th
end of five acts. Even the play-within-a-play is a favorite of olde
plays of this kind. Like The Spanish Tragedy, which has all the
features just mentioned, Hamlet also has a secondary revenge plo
whigh brings about the completion of the main plot; it is Laertes
drive to avenge the death of his father, Polonius, which takes th
action to its finish. The audience would recognize these reprise

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312 THE HUDSON REVIEW

and wait for the turn Shakespeare would put on them.

did was employ them all with a difference?make a
mystery of the delay of the execution of revenge which
served just to extend suspense, make his hero's detached
quies exceed in profundity and poetry anything the the
ever heard, make the madness the Revenger is supposed
to conceal his purposes an occasion for paradoxical w
cynical philosophy as well as a symptom of the hero'
anguish, introduce in Laertes the model of the effective
yet use Hamlet's relation to the Polonius family as an opp
to contrast him with "normal," or ordinary, persons
though reminding the audience of his effort to reincar
old Revenger persona, Hamlet will still shout at the end
Laertes threatens to outdo him in melodramatic gri
Ophelia, "I'll rant as well as thou!"
Hamlets postmodern status as "metatheater"?theate
theater?is obvious enough. We might suspect a perso
reflexiveness in it. Was not Shakespeare himself an actor
speare was a theater man, fascinated by the problem
craft?and his Hamlet not only knows the history of Eli
drama but gives judicious advice to actors and can act cr
himself, can write a dramatic script or part of one, and he l
see a play put on, quite aside from its possible use as a con
catcher. As a result, there are, from the earliest moment to the
last, occasions when the curtain between the theatrical and the
supposedly real is rent?beginning with Hamlet's remark when
the ghost can be heard groaning as it retreats to its purgatorial
exile: 'You hear this fellow in the cellarage"?"cellarage" being a
term that reminds the audience that an actor is making noises
down in the space beneath the stage.
"Metatheatricality," as it may be too modish to call it, is
detectable elsewhere in the literature of the Elizabethan stage,
and Shakespeare's earlier plays give an emphasis to common
terms that suggest the theater, words like tragedy, play, perform,
show, act, scene or part, are frequent. Hamlet \s particularly rich in
such language. What has not been noted is that Hamlet's theater
interest?and all the hints and references to the theatrical in the
play?constitute a metaphoric motif and the tracking sign of a
dominating theme. Hamlet abounds in situations in which the
actors are audiences. When Hamlet observes Claudius at prayer,

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 MILLICENT BELL 313

he is the unseen watcher who does not detect the deception

the performance; the King's repentance is momentary only
will not gain him salvation. Hamlet himself is watched by Po
from behind an arras both in the "nunnery" scene with Op
and the parallel scene with his mother in her closet. W
Ophelia, Hamlet is, perhaps, consciously "playing a scene" fo
benefit but unaware of hidden witnesses. Most productions o
play want to make it somehow possible for Hamlet to demon
that he knows about Polonius' proximity?and improvise a r
behind the arras at which Hamlet starts before he asks Oph
where her father is. But the theatricality of the situatio
precisely in Hamlet's oblivion?as an actor must be oblivio
the audience in the darkened theater. Meanwhile, the "nun
scene itself is more than an occasion for the abuse of p
Ophelia; it is a commentary on the unreliability of appeara
for Hamlet will tell her not to trust the seeming in men, not ev
his own pose as a lover ("We are arrant knaves all, believe no
us"). He abuses her as though she were herself a deceiv
person?or an actress ("God hath given you one face and
make yourselves another").
In the play-within-the-play, the player king is a represent
not only of the dead King Hamlet but of Claudius, an us
who plays at being the true king ("a king of shreds and patc
and brings to mind the way Richard II is represented contin
as one who can say, "thus play I in one person many people."
Murder of Gonzago" is a representation of the main pl
actuality. But this actuality is itself the matter of a play, S
speare's Hamlet. And this flow of theatricality expands out
from the edge of the stage. Those ranks of interested spectator
the Danish court who watch the performance by the vis
players are mirrored by the theater filled with the spectato
Hamlet. Each spectator in either audience is, besides, not on
viewer of the action but an actor, too. "All the world's a stag
Jacques says in As You Like It. We who watch Hamlet are not
spectators but actors in parts prescribed?some larger co
theater enclosing us.
That Shakespeare did not take the Revenge plot altoge
seriously is signified by the way he let its coherence lapse.
has been made of Hamlet's reasons for delay. He himself giv
reasons. What is clear is that his slowness to execute reven

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314 THE HUDSON REVIEW

against Claudius is not due to the explanation availab

sources?that it is difficult to get at a monarch surrounde
guards; Shakespeare omits the guards present in thes
versions of the story. Hamlet never complains of lack o
tunity. Though he pretends to be mad it is not evide
purpose this really serves; in the revenge plays it diverts
while in Hamlet it actually arouses it, and it is not always cl
when Hamlet is pretending to be crazy or when indulgi
bizarre humor or when expressing his desperate but
guish. The soliloquies seem even more disconnected f
action surrounding them than is true in other plays of t
The first announces Hamlet's desire for suicide?that this "too
too solid flesh would melt"?without justifying cause beyond
mother's remarriage, since he still has not learned about
father's murder. In "O what a rogue and peasant slave am
having just heard the player's Pyrrhus-Hecuba speech, Ham
reproaches himself because he can "say nothing" to match su
passion, then shifts, illogically, to accuse himself of having b
like "a whore" who can only "unpack [his] heart with wor
instead of acting. "To be or not to be," following shortly upon
resolution to confirm Claudius' guilt by means of his expect
reaction to "The Murder of Gonzago," reverts to the theme
suicide so inappropriately that some scholars feel that it mu
have been misplaced in the texts we have. "How all occasions
inform against me," which follows the appearance of Fortin
and his troops in the fourth act, renews his resolution ("from
time forth, / My thoughts be bloody") when the moment f
action may well be passed, even though it is at this time
Hamlet most clearly reproaches himself ("I do not know / W
yet I live to say this thing's to do, / Sith I have cause, and will, a
strength, and means / To do't"). The fact of the matter is tha
is about to board ship in forced exile to England. But precise
these "weaknesses," these denials of the dramatic coherence the
standard Revenge plot provides, open up larger questions of
human identity and destiny. In his indifference to causality even
when available in his models, Shakespeare reveals the nature of
his struggle to evade tradition and audience expectations.
There is a discrepancy between the hero and the play, but this
results from what I take to be a general skepticism to be felt in the
tragic plays Shakespeare would write from Hamlet on?a skepti-

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 MILLICENT BELL 315

cism threatening our confidence in the consistency of char

and in the linking of character to either its origin in
circumstance or its effect in action. The cavalier way in w
Shakespeare ignores the logic that his sources often pro
inferior as they are, has not been sufficiently observed?so
is our admiration for his wonderful art. But as he does in the case
of Hamlet, Shakespeare will actually reduce the motivation avail?
able in his source for Macbeth. In Macbeth he seems to want to
show us the inexplicable spectacle of a good man doing an
deed. Othello, also, ignores the suggestion of comprehensi
causes for Iago's malignity which Shakespeare's source provid
And it is not only Iago who is "motiveless," as Coleridge sa
having no real reason for his fiendish malice. Othello's jealous
arises from provocation so inadequate that it is difficult
understand how anyone so reasonable could have been inflame
by it?and so, Iago's persuasive powers must be made near
demonic. In acting out his preposterous rage Othello's charact
must be temporarily transformed from what it was.
Hamlet is a mystery play, and concealment and secrecy a
essential to its style, but they serve, also, to reinforce the idea th
appearances, like the actor's role, are deceptive. The ghost its
is forbidden, it tells Hamlet, to tell the secrets of its prison ho
otherwise, it could a tale unfold of horrors to make the hearer's
hair stand on end like porcupine quills! The murder is known
only to the perpetrator; Claudius' guilt is "occulted." As the ghost
relates, Hamlet's father was killed, significantly, by poison in the
ear, "by which the whole ear of Denmark is by a forged process of
my death rankly abused." Hamlet himself continues to keep it
secret, swearing Horatio and Marcellus to silence not only about
the ghost but about his plans to assume a mask himself, to put on
an "antic disposition" to hide his purposes. Of course the
usurping murderer is the supreme example of dissembling; and
Hamlet cannot get over the way "one may smile, and smile, and
be a villain." The play is full of spying?another way of seeing
those spectatorial moments when a hidden witness watches a
performance as though shown in a theater. Polonious, who sends
a spy to look into the life abroad of his own son, is ludicrous and
inefficient in his secret-service surveillance of Hamlet, and dies for
his spying upon the Prince. Only when he is dead is he said by
Hamlet to be, at last, "most still, most secret, and most grave." But

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316 THE HUDSON REVIEW

deception and disguise do not break down, finally, to re

unchangeable truth?as in detective fiction; the chara
Hamlet remains identified only with a succession of appea
As the play, in the first act, shifts from Hamlet to the Pol
family, Laertes' counsel to his sister to resist the sweet spe
the Prince suggests that human nature, especially a prin
determined by social position?and has no other meani
may not, as unvalued persons do, / Carve for himself, fo
choice depends / The sanctity and health of this whol
Hamlet's love is definable only by his limited power to "
saying deed." Polonius' advice to his son, which seems a st
stale truisms?because so often repeated as counsel to
young?boils down to the idea that self-expression should
attempted. "Give thy thoughts no tongue, / Nor any un
tioned thought his act." But if the self should not be ex
what is the meaning of the famous conclusion, "This abov
thine own self be true"? Is there a self to which one can be "true"
without letting it be heard or seen in speech and action? To
Ophelia he gives advice that echoes her brother's resort to the
familiar metaphor of theatrical costume. Hamlet's vows, he tells
her, wear false vesture (he uses the unusual word "investments").
They plead "unholy suits" while pretending holy intent. The idea
that personal reality is something shaped or "carved," not inher?
ent in character, may be implied even when Hamlet facetiously
ponders with Polonius over the shapes of clouds. He seems to
have in mind the arbitrariness of all our interpretations which
impose form and meaning on the meaningless, but it has been
noted that the passage resembles one in Antony and Cleopatra
when Antony says to Eros, after describing cloud shapes that
resemble now this, now that,

My good knave Eros, now thy captain is

Even such a body. Here I am Antony
Yet cannot hold this visible shape, my knave

I suspect that in Hamlet the talk about clouds also implies

something about the way our characters seem fixed in one form
or another but are really capable of infinite change. Hamlet tells
Ophelia that he has "more offences at my beck than I have thoughts
to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them

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 MILLICENT BELL 317

in." He is all potentiality. There is no limit to the unen

unthought, unimagined "offences" of which he might be ca
Hamlet's first utterance in the play is a reference t
problematic relation of essence and appearance and, at the
time, to the representation of this problem by the theatri
comes on stage clothed in the black of mourning, and the Q
already speaking metaphorically, asks him for a change of
saying, "cast thy nigh ted colour off." She asks him why
"seems so particular" to him, and he answers,

Seems, madam? nay it is. I know not seems.

'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play,
But I have that within which passes show?
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

This is more complex than appears at first glance. Hamle

not saying that he has put on a false appearance to cover
self. He does not deny the message of his appearance,
declares his grief. Yet the way he looks and behaves const
only signs, after all, "actions that a man might play" as o
stage, a collection of gestures established by tradition for
and easily enacted by the accomplished actor. If there is an
mystery of some sort it is one that escapes all arts of act
expression and can hardly be spoken of, for no terms of d
tion or manifestation exist for it. Shakespeare, the crea
theatrical character, expresses his own recognition of the c
tionality of all the ways in which drama represents the sel
also the conventionality and insufficiency of all self-conce
by means of which men and women carry on.
Hamlet resists all typological confinement. Is he bol
hesitating, passionate or sluggish, loving or cold, refin
coarse? The evidence for the first term in these pairs i
attracts us to him, yet the evidence for the second set of te

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318 THE HUDSON REVIEW

plentiful?and those many attempts to summarize his cha

and explain his behavior in a unitary way must founder.
his negative aspects are off-putting enough to threaten h
tion as the hero. His reluctance to kill Claudius when he was
kneeling in prayer?because then he might not send him stra
to hell?shocked Dr. Johnson. His contrived killing of his sl
false friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, has seemed to m
to be something that should have been beneath him. He i
brutal and vulgar with his mother and Ophelia. Yet we end
these spectacles for the glimpses given of that noble nature
Ophelia remembers, his tender filial memory and his appre
tion of Horatio's friendship, and his generosity to the
Laertes, who deals him his death blow. And the elevation of his
mind, his play of wit and philosophy, his keen understanding of
others and of society. Horatio's loyalty is a warrant we accept, for
Horatio is our representative in the play?the sensible, decent,
ordinary man who gives his complete loyalty to someone worthy
of it. But the contradictions remain. Shakespeare's hero may be
seen as someone who wants to be undetermined, unclassifiable,
though, ultimately, he can find no selfhood outside of prescribed
forms, no history but in established plots. He cannot be anything
other than the Revenger the play sets out to make him.
Some say too quickly that Hamlet is a humour type?a melan?
cholic, or a victim of an excess of black bile; he himself wonders
if the devil has not been able to delude him with a false ghost "out
of my weakness and my melancholy, / As he is very potent with
such spirits." Then there is his madness to which one might refer
his inconsistency; sometimes put on but perhaps not always. At
the very end he apologizes to Laertes for his intemperate wrath.

I am punished
With a sore distraction. What I have done,
That might your nature, honour and exception
Roughly awake, I here proclaim was madness.

But neither melancholy nor madness is really the right explana?

tion for the overmastering philosophic doubt?and the mood
that leads to Hamlet's desire for death. In Hamlet the incoherence
of what men do is profoundly and continuously explored. The
famous "To be, or not to be" soliloquy at the beginning of the

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 MILLICENT BELL 319

third act, spoken on the day the court play is to be presented,

not a word about this imminent test of Hamlet's suspicion
does not mention revenge. The question it opens is, most c
have supposed, again the issue of suicide. "To be" may be rea
simply, "to live," and "not to be" as, simply, "to die." If this
choice that poses "the question" and if it is meant to be par
(A:B as C:D) in the alternatives then offered?whether it is
"nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, /
And by opposing, end them"?one must assume, somewhat
implausibly, that the ending of his troubles by the taking of arms
against them is deliberate and certain suicide. But the choice is
phrased so abstractly that one can also say that these terms are
syntactically in opposition ("chiasmatically," their order reversed
to make the comparison A:B as D:C) with the ideas of passive
suffering and active battle. In this way, to act is "to be." Merely to
feel is "not to be." Hamlet may be reflecting that there is no being
aside from our deeds. Still, are we only our acts? If Hamlet seems
to be appealing to an "inmost part" of Gertrude when, in the
closet scene, he proposes to set a glass before her in which she
may view her true self, he also pleads with her to be an actress, "to
assume a virtue if you have it not," with the hope that the
appearance of virtue will, somehow, create an essence.
That Hamlet is inconsistent, variable, even uncertain himself as
to who he is?this corresponds to his skepticism about human
conceptions in general. The play, we must remember, is contem?
poraneous with Montaigne's Essays. Florio's English translation
was published in London only months, perhaps, after the staging
of Shakespeare's play. Perhaps Shakespeare saw the Florio Mon?
taigne even before it was published; the very phraseology of the
English version as well as Montaigne's balancing of contrary
arguments is echoed, some think, in the soliloquies. Hamlet
brings Montaigne to mind when he says about Denmark being a
prison, "There's nothing good or bad but thinking makes it
so"?a reflection expressed in Montaigne's essay, "That the taste
of goods or evils doth greatly depend on the opinion we have of
them." But Montaigne particularly denied the stability?or even
reality?of personal essence, saying, "there is no constant exis?
tence, neither of our being, nor of the objects. We have no
communication with being, for every human nature is ever in the

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320 THE HUDSON REVIEW

middle between being born and dying, giving nothing of itsel

an obscure appearance and shadow." Montaigne also wr
the essay, "Of the Inconstancie of our Actions," "We
framed of flaps and patches and of so shapeless and di
contexture, that every peece and every moment playeth h
And there is as much difference found betweene us and our

selves, as there is betweene our selves and other." What bein

have, then, is only what we assume in that phantasmic pla
which we struggle to escape and to fulfill an idea of our
which owes its shape to cultural formulations.
"All the world's a stage" has so long been a platitude that
is apt to forget how revolutionary it might have sounded
first uttered, and how the idea is likely to shock us still w
expressed by a modern thinker like Clifford Geertz in his
known statement, "There is no such thing as human n
independent of culture." In Shakespeare's time the tension fe
those who adventured out of the bounds of inherited status?new

classes, new professions?was intense, and what one was, as an

individual, became more problematic. The process that Stephen
Greenblatt calls "Renaissance self-fashioning" was strenuous and
fraught with anxiety. For Shakespeare, a "new man" who wa
making a name and a fortune for himself in a once-despised
trade, the problem of selfhood was fundamental. But the litera
ture of the theater, changing with such rapidity in the few years of
his participation, directly dramatized the contest between pre?
scribed form and innovation. The standardized types into which
mankind might be classified were no longer fixed in society nor
were they for more than a moment useful literary conventions
What Shakespeare thinks of such types is represented in his
portrait of Laertes?the perfect avenger, but stupid and not really
so honorable when he consents to have his rapier poisoned in
order to make sure he will win the duel with Hamlet. Osric, the
courtier fop, a comic type himself, is the spokesman for fading
categories when he describes Laertes in typecasting terms as the
"absolute gentleman . . . the card or calendar of gentry; for you
shall find in him the continent of what part a gendeman would see."
Hamlet's personal speeches, even aside from the soliloquies,
often express an excessive despair that has baffled the critics. He
tells Rosencrantz and Gildenstern,

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 MILLICENT BELL 321

I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth, for
all custom of exercises, and indeed it goes so heavily with
disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a s
promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this
o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with g
fire?why, it appeareth no other thing to me but a foul and pes
congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! How
in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how ex
and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how
a god! The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals?and y
me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me?n
woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

It is complained that Hamlet's expression of such thoug

such auditors, who can only respond with stupid snicke
preposterous. Besides, he does know why he has lost all his m
The explanation generally offered is that he is trying to t
these spies off the scent. The Cambridge editor of the play
"So often pointed to as a brilliant perception of the anguis
Renaissance man in general and of Hamlet in particular, it
glorious blind, a flight of rhetoric by which a divided
distressed soul conceals the true nature of his distress and
substitutes a formal and conventional state of Weltschmerz." But I
would say that the instinctive response of reader or hearer to the
power of the famous speech is sounder than this critical insistence
upon its plot-logic. Hamlet has ceased to be, as he so often ceases
to be, simply the character whose motives advance the plot. What
he expresses is the root of his gloom, his sense of the paradox in
the contradictions of human nature. Hamlet's desire for suicide,
which continually erupts in the midst of the action and seems to
have no sufficient explanation in the plot, derives from the
discrepancy between what is felt and what is done that the play
will go on to reinforce after the first soliloquy. To lose all one's
mirth without apparent cause is to be someone whose altered
response to life is all-inclusive and goes beyond specific occasions.
In contrast with his ghostly, impalpable sense of self, the outer
man and his roles are "too too solid."
Hamlet's "lunacy," as Polonius calls it, may have been appar
before Hamlet heard the ghost's tale. His melancholy, as the f
soliloquy showed, has already aroused that loathing for sexua
which even causes him to wish that his own flesh would melt. But
he can put on the madman act, as he shows in his exuberant

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322 THE HUDSON REVIEW

teasing of Polonius or of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern?

baffle them by the famous "method" in his madness. Op
report to her father about Hamlet's strange behavior m
appear that he has been driven out of his mind by the re
has administered at her father's command. Polonius is conversant
enough with conventional typology to recognize in Ophelia's
description the standard symptoms of what was called "love
ecstasy." But the audience may legitimately suspect it was all "an
act"?an exhibition of that pretended madness Hamlet has
resolved upon. Beyond this uncertainty, however, I want to point
out another which is generally overlooked. Simulated or no,
Hamlet's appearance of madness is a representation of the
fragility of that notion of identity in which he has ceased to
believe. It is this uncertainty that is even expressed in Ophelia's
authentic mad talk. "Lord, we know what we are, but we know not
what we may be," she says. Is not madness what we call "not being
oneself"?an alienation from the essential consistency one pre?
fers to believe in? But what if one has ceased to believe in it? By
keeping us in continual doubt about Hamlet's madness, Shake?
speare raises this suspicion of essences and of any truth beyond
appearance.
Hamlet's transformation into an avenger requires him t
surrender, as much as he can, his character as lover. He has sworn
to the ghost that he will wipe away from the table of his memo
"all trivial fond records" and let only the ghost's comman
remain. In this process his previous character has been co
stricted. The nature of man as a sexual being, and of woman a
one, also, is reduced. From the outset of the play Hamlet
oppressed by the idea of sex as a perversion; his mother ha
caused him to look at the consummation of marriage with
loathing, as an incestuous horror. In retrospect, he regards ev
her feeling for his father as a kind of gluttony: "she would han
on him / As if increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on.
No one is chaste in the Danish court?not even Ophelia, in h
view. It is unnecessary, I think, to psychologize this, as has so often
been done?to see Hamlet as suffering from oedipal fixation on
his mother, hatred for the usurper father now represented b
Claudius. Hamlet's rejection of the "normal" sexual and familia
set of attitudes is still another mark of the shrinking of identi
with which he is afflicted.

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 MILLICENT BELL 323

Does Hamlet ever come close to accepting entirely?or re

ing without question?the Revenger model? There is one
ment when, I believe, he invokes it consciously?and puts it a
As he goes to meet his mother in the third act he revs himse
with an old-style invocation of dark powers?then dismisses t
prompting,

'Tis now the very witching time of night,

When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on. Soft, now to my mother.
0 heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever
The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom.
Let me be cruel, not unnatural:
1 will speak daggers to her but use none.

"When churchyards yawn" is a reminder to himself of the ghost

who returned from the realm of death to lay its demand upon
him. Now it is the "witching hour," as we still say, when he "could
drink hot blood," as murdering witches were believed to drink the
blood of their victims. Now he could do the unnamable horror
that "the day would quake to look on." But he draws back. He
"speak daggers" to his mother but he will not commit the cr
of Nero, the matricide. He calls upon something almost ne
acknowledged in this drama of borrowed, fabricated selfhood
upon the promptings of the heart, "of nature." But it is
"nature" that keeps him from killing the King when he com
upon him in prayer?on the way to the Queen.
"Nature" as a term for an original human nature that persi
despite the impositions of borrowed form appears rarely
Hamlet. The principal reference that comes to mind is th
curious comment on Danish drunkenness which Hamlet makes as
he listens in the first act to the "heavy-headed revel" of the royal
wedding feast. Hamlet speaks here of "nature" as a source of
human defect: "So oft it chances in particular men, / That for
some vicious mole of nature in them, / As in their birth, wherein
they are not guilty, / Since nature cannot choose his origin." The
passage, deleted from the Folio, seems out of place as a reflection
Hamlet might make as he waits for his father's ghost to appear?

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324 THE HUDSON REVIEW

except, perhaps, for the fact that the ghost refers to his own
of nature" when he committed the crimes for which he suffers
now.

But "histrionics" is never discarded altogether

had wondered, after hearing the player's recital,
was so inferior in expression, having "the motive
passion" that he had. He found himself in compe
actor who lacked his own great "cue": "What's He
He is in a similar competition later on, in the four
Norwegian Prince, Fortinbras. Fortinbras, who h
original desire to revenge his own father's death
property, now marches to Poland with an army o
sand to gain a worthless scrap of land, findin
straw"?while Hamlet, "a father killed, a mother st
not acted. And Hamlet is stirred and humbled
exhibition of pure performance without motive?
like the actor's. "How all occasions do inform aga
stir my dull revenge," he begins his last soliloquy

Witness this army of such mass and charge

Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition pufFd
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell.

The difficulty with Fortinbras' presence in the play has not

been addressed properly by the critics. Most commentators think
of him in comparison or contrast with Hamlet because he is heard
of at the very beginning as a son aroused to reprisal by a father's
cruel death; one is tempted to see a parallel between him and
Laertes and even ancient Pyrrhus as instances of unhesitating
filial action. Laertes really is a misguided hothead and Pyrrhus a
butcher who makes Hecuba, with her copious tears, a foil to
Gertrude who has dried her own too quickly. But they fulfill their
avenger roles. Fortinbras, however, disappears as an avenger
promptly. Claudius averts his threat to Denmark by sending
envoys to Fortinbras' uncle, the King of Norway?and by return
mail, one might say, news arrives that this rash young man has

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 MILLICENT BELL 325

promised to give up his personal project and embrace instea

assignment to lead his soldiers elsewhere. Has he any persist
role in the play? Well, someone has to be there at the end to
up the pieces and assume the throne?Horatio would hardl
as Denmark's new king; he is not a royal person. The gr
Harvard Shakespearean, George Lyman Kittredge, made
matter even simpler. The dramatic character of highest r
customarily spoke the speech which brings an Elizabethan pla
a close, and so "this accounts for the presence of Fortinbras
Hamlet. But for him there would be no one left of sufficient rank

to fulfill this office." But there may be a special meaning in the

resemblance of Hamlet's late envy of Fortinbras and his early envy
of the stage actor who performs his part with such noble fervor. In
both cases it does not seem to matter that the brilliant perform?
ances of the theatrical actor and the soldier are without personal
motive. Their merely spectacular action for action's sake seems
superior to Hamlet's inadequate expression of what he calls
"excitements of my reason and my blood." Hamlet's envy even
expresses that existential lack of confidence in essences and in
the connection of character and deed which is at the heart of the
play, for only acts, in this skeptical view, count, not intention.
Pragmatically, Man is no more than "a beast" if "capability and
godlike reason . . . fust in us unus'd." Inner selfhood has no real
existence compared to the show of those who "find quarrel in a
straw / When honour's at the stake." Earlier, in the "To be or not
to be" soliloquy, as I have noted, "to be," may be interpretable as
action, mere "in the mind to suffer" as "not to be." But such a
challenge to the importance of essential being and the necessary
relation it bears to doing may have been too radical and disturb?
ing a skepticism for Shakespeare's audience. Because Hamlet
seems finally ready to acknowledge his laggardliness as an
avenger, modern directors often retain the fourth act Fortinbras
passages even though self-reproach seems out of place at a
moment when Hamlet has been rendered powerless and is a
virtual prisoner. Shakespeare might have had second thoughts
about this dramatic illogic. But, besides, the skeptical paradox
posed by the Fortinbras model was bound to puzzle many. This
final soliloquy of Hamlet and the preceding scene which provokes
it are found in the quarto, probably Shakespeare's own earlier
script, but they are absent from the later Folio text of Hamlet, the

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326 THE HUDSON REVIEW

longest of such cuts in a revision which may have been ma

the playwright's consent. Perhaps the acting company's d
or even Shakespeare himself cried "Cut!" at this point wh
play was first run through.
Death, of course, is the ultimate loss of selfhood, and the
jesting of the gravediggers and of Hamlet in the last act is not
merely comedy but reflects that mystery. Where are those self?
hoods of the politician, the courtier, the lawyer, "with his quid?
dities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks," of the
lady painting herself an inch thick, and of Alexander the Great
and Caesar, and of Yorick? Yet it is precisely at this moment when
the awfulness of the loss of identity by death is brought to mind
that Hamlet is also made to recall his own childhood, when, as a
little boy, he was carried on Yorick's shoulders. When he leaps
into Ophelia's grave to contest with Laertes, it is not only with the
declaration of the love he has denied, but with a momentary sense
of recovered selfhood. "This is I, Hamlet the Dane," he shouts in
thrilling tones as though setting himself into history along with
his father, who bore the same name. Yet this renewed identity is,
after all, the rage of the old action-man that his father was and
expected him to be. To Laertes, he says in a desire not to be
exceeded, "Woo't weep, woo't fight, woo't fast, woo't tear thyself?
/ Woo't drink up eisel [vinegar], eat a crocodile? / I'll do it."
Finally, Hamlet is ready to acknowledge how impossible it is to
avoid role-playing. He will accept the end shaped for him in the
role he has been unable to elude. Describing to Horatio how he
had?accidentally?discovered and foiled the plot against him
on the ship taking him to England, and sent Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern to their deaths, he says,

Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well

When our deep plots do pall, and that should learn us
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will?

A good many critics have found Hamlet's easy disposal of thi

paltry pair, "no shriving-time allowed," as somehow too brutal for
the "sweet prince" we love, and wince at the fact that when he kills
Claudius at last it is not only with the "envenom'd" rapier but,
gratuitously, by a forced swallow from the cup of poisoned wine as

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 MILLICENT BELL 327

well. But Hamlet has accepted the Revenger role, and the
ruthlessness which goes with it, by this time. The divinit
shapes our ends is commonly thought to be a reference to
determination, to which, it is said, Hamlet at last acquiesc
the religious note is so scantily sounded in this play that on
as properly think of the shaping force Hamlet calls "a divin
simply Destiny?something assigned to us as much by custo
circumstance as by Divine intention. Hamlet may be allud
Matthew 10:19 when he tells Horatio, as he prepares for h
with Laertes, "There is a special providence in the fal
sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come
be now; if it be not now, yet it will come?the readiness is a
his sense of ineluctable necessity is a part of the acceptance
role into which he has been "shaped" by determinants tha
not necessarily heavenly. I think of them, in relation to my id
Shakespeare and his times, as the determinants Geertz ref
when he speaks of "culture" as the definer of character.
The ghost (very uncertainly a divine messenger; there is
Protestant theological argument behind Hamlet's idea t
could be an impersonating fiend) appears as an agent who
it is to haunt Hamlet literally and figuratively with reminder
Revenger role. In the closet scene with Gertrude it app
"whet [Hamlet's] almost blunted purpose." Hamlet has p
ately inveighed against her "act / That roars so loud and th
in the index"?her marriage to his uncle, "in the rank swea
enseamed bed, / Stewed in corruption, honeying and m
love / Over the nasty sty"?but has said not a word abo
murder. There is a tradition that Shakespeare himself too
part of the ghost in performance. In a sense it is Shakespea
is both haunted and haunting. It is he himself who tries to
the expectations of his audience?yet, ultimately, cannot re
so. As the play wears on, the ghost quite disappears. At t
when its appeal for revenge is about to be answered, H
hardly speaks at all about his father except to mention th
used his signet to seal the death warrant of Rosencran
Guildenstern, and to refer to the murder of his father (wh
now calls, more impersonally, "my king") as one item only
charges against his uncle:

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328 THE HUDSON REVIEW

He that hath killed my king, and whored my mother

Popped in between th'election and my hopes,
Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage?is't not perfect conscience
To quit him with this arm? And is't not to be damne
To let the canker of our nature come
To further evil?

?a speech in which, among other reasons for killing Claudius,

one hears of frustrate ambition, which Rosencrantz and Guilden?
stern had scented in Hamlet (much to one's annoyance, when
one heard them say so). The word "revenge," which one would
expect to hear at the end, is never sounded. Hamlet, in a last
reminder of theatricality, turns to the audience in the theater as
well as to witnesses on the stage when, dying, he says,

You that look pale, and tremble at this chance,

That are but mutes or audience to this act

Had I but time, as this fell sergeant death

Is strict in his arrest, oh I could tell you?
But let it be. Horatio, I am dead,
Thou livest; report me and my cause aright
To the unsatisfied.

But what account of Hamlet Horatio will give is no longer clear

"Story," in a received sense, the story of Hamlet and his "cause"
has collapsed, and Horatio now speaks only of the "accidental
and "casual" and mistaken chances that produced the carnage on
the stage. He does not speak of revenge, that chain of calculate
steps leading inexorably to conclusion.

How these things came about. So shall you hear

Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on th'inventors' heads.

If there is another story to tell, only the play itself tells it.

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