SHAKESPEARE’S LIFE AND THE BACKGROUND TO HAMLET
Though we do not know a lot about William Shakespeare’s life, we know more than we know of any other Elizabethan dramatist’s except Ben Jonson. He was baptised at Stratford-upon-Avon 26 April 1564, son of a well-to-do glover who became Town Bailiff (Mayor) but subsequently got into money difficulties. William, no doubt at Stratford Grammar School, learned enough Latin to read, and use in his writings, Ovid, Seneca, Plautus and Terence. He married a neighbour, Anne Hathaway (1582): they had a daughter Susannah (baptised 26 May 1583), and twins, Judith and Hamlet (baptised 2 February 1585). From then, though he may have been a schoolmaster in the country, and must have joined a company of actors, nothing is certainly known of him until 1592. By then his three Henry VI plays had earned him reputation as a playwright, and by 1593 he had the Earl of Southampton as a patron.
1594 sees Shakespeare acting at court as a leading member of the Chamberlain’s Men, a company which had as manager James Burbage, father of Richard Burbage the great tragic actor. They had their own playhouse, the Theatre in Shoreditch, until in 1599 they built the Globe, in Southwark, from its timbers. Shakespeare had shares in the company, which from James I’s accession became the King’s Men. As he prospered, his purchases of Stratford properties are recorded; and during his stage career, some of his London lodgings; but the main events are his plays themselves, written, acted, and some published in authorized or unauthorized Quarto editions. Though in 1613 he collaborated with John Fletcher in Henry VIII and Two Noble Kinsmen, already in 1612 he seems to have retired to his fine Stratford house, New Place, where in 1616 he died. His plays, published and unpublished, were collected by two of his fellow-actors, in the monumental First Follo, 1623.
THE BACKGROUND TO HAMLET
Hamlet exists in three original texts: the Folio (F), mainly from prompt
copy :a ‘Good’ Quarto (Q2, 1604-5) mainly from Shakespeare’s manuscript,
which lacked only final revision; and a ‘Bad’ Quarto (Q1, 1603) which Q2
was published to supersede because it had been illicitly and inaccurately
put together without Shakespeare’s permission. Shakespeare wrote the
play not before late 1599 nor after 1600, except for adding the passage
(II.ii.336-58), topical in 1601, on the child actors, competitors of his own
company (see
Juslius Caesar, written immedaitely before Hamlet, besides being a tragedy of Brutus (with Burbage in the part) was a revenge tragedy - the death and revenge of Julius Caesar. Revenge tradegy was a distinct species in Elizabethan drama. In a play by Thomas Kyd called Hamlet-which has not survived - a contemporary at the Theater like an oister wife, Hamlet revenge; Christened by scholars the Ur-Hamlet, this play was one of Shakespeare's main sources. The other, directly or indirectly, was Belleforest's prose version of the Hamlet story. Hamlet begins the series of what are usually called Shakespeare's 'Great Tragedies' : Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and in 1606, Macbeth.
The Play
The Play and You.
Hamlet is a play for students of all ages. It is full of people asking questions.The comprehensive question the play asks is one we all have to face: howto live and act rightly as human beings in the confusing good-and-evilworld we inherit at birth. The form in which Shakespeare explores the meaning of life and action is dramatic; the theatre itself a profound metaphor for discovering one’s identity, role, and place in life. Through the ambivalent nature of revenge as a sacred duty which involves the revenger in the crime his duty impels him to punish,Shakespeare focuses questions on the painpul mystery of man’s dual nature, god and satyr, which are as relevant now as then. Hamlet’s difference from the single-minded revenger of tradition marks him as ‘ the complex representative ofus all; a hero for whom life’s complexities provide no black-and-white answers on ‘right’ action; who ‘in seeking to right a wrong commits one’ (Jenkins, Arden edn p. 146).
Shakespeare involves you in the maturing process which moves from simple questions - ‘Am I a coward?’ with simple (but wrong) answers, stock preconceptions such as ‘Frailty, thy name is woman; and unrealistic ideals - thy commandment all alone shall live . . ./Unmix’d with baser matter’ – to Hamlet’s eventual acceptance of the limitations of sullied flesh and human knowledge. Yet what student would not seek, like Hamlet, to question the meaning and purpose of the mysteries he finds himself part of ? In Hamlet Shakespeare takes you, with Hamlet, through an enactment of what it means to be a questioning human being, groping through much tragic waste, error, and some comedty, to arrive through constant reassessment at a workable pattern that makes sense of both life and play.The commentary will follow a similar method, for we can hardly separate our approach to the meaning of the play as critics, from our attempts as human beings to grapple with the mysteries of being.
2.2 SUMMARIES AND CRITICAL COMMENTARY
Act I, Scene i
Summary
The ghost of Denmark’s late King Hamlet appears to the castle guards and the level-headed scholar, Horatio, friend to Prince Hamlet. They determine to tell the Prince.
Commentary
Imagine, yourself in the Globe Theatre audience. The first scene rivets your attention, through the ghost of King Hamlet which links past, present, and future action (How?) to prepare you for the rest of the play. It introduces you to Horatio and (by report) to young Fortinbras.
The opening challenge, ‘Who’s there?’ sounds the key themes of identity, disturbed order, and the questioning of appearance and reality. Darkness, in the daylight of the theatre, is created by the words, with the fear that a nameless something is about to happen. But the sceptic Horatio, entering with Marcellus, relaxes the jerky dialogue into regular blank verse.
To surprise you by the apparition you expect, Shakespeare redirects your attention to the guards telling you more, but not too much, of the mystery. ‘This thing, and ‘this apparition’ do not define what it was. You settle down, with the actors, to hear a long account from Barnardo. Yet the time is now the hour he says the ghost came. His unfinished sentence is theatrically completed by the Ghost.
The Ghost is a riveting visual device to raise central issues. Yet some directors, not trusting their audience’s ‘suspension of disbelief ‘, banish the Ghost from the stage of Hamlet’s mind. But to define it as hallucination, Catholic, Protestant or devil is to deny its chief purpose in the play, to be a ‘questionable shape’. Its powerful silence both rebukes your wish topluck out the heart of its mystery and stimulates disturbing questions about life’s meaning. Both its silence and unconventional stage costume of full armour would have commanded attention from an Elizabethan audience.
Experience of the Ghost in I.i is filtered to the audience largely through Horatio, a human being confronting its terror and mystery with human virtues - reason, learning, courage. Shakespeare’s quiet, well-balanced observer is a foil to the mercurial Hamlet. His scholarship gives him mastery of the ritual procedure for addressing a ghost, which could not speak unless spoken to, and credibility as a reliable witness, whose swift transformation from sceptic to believer controls your response to the ‘dreaded sight; and thematic importance - it is a student’s raison d’etre to ask questions. Yet Horatio draws false analogy from ‘the like precurse of fear’d events’ in ancient Rome: this ghost is primarily a consequence of past events. The scholar’s occasional wrong answer guides you to look further than Horatio for meaning. But without Horatio’s interpretations, would you recognise that the Ghost ‘started like a guilty thing/Upon a fearful summons’? Why are you here shown the ‘valiant Hamlet’ you encountered in Horatio’s retrospect, in a less favourable light?
We can trust Horatio on plain facts. Between the Ghost’s two appearances, he explains Denmark’s defence preparations. By his account, Shakespeare again ensures the apparition will catch you off guard. It extends the visual image of a ‘majestical’ silver-bearbed soldier-king in full armour by re – creating a fittingly heroic past, ‘when he th’ambitious Norway combated’, vindicating rights ‘well ratified by law and heraldry’, it contrasts the dead soldier-king’s martial nobility with the live king in the next scene, ruling by devious diplomacy. The same principle of contrast informs Horatio’s introduction of two more soldiers vital to plot and symmetric structure: old Fortinbras and young Fortinbras. The Fortinbras family prepares us for one of the major structural comparisons of the play: a son seeking vengeance for the murder of his father.
As the scene closes the bright, homely sound of the cock gets the disturbing Ghost off-stage, restores a sense of normal daily life, and indicates to the audience, by dramatic shorthand, that several hours of darkness have passed in a few minutes of daylight playing time. It signals the poetic coda in which Horatio and Marcellus set the supernatural visitor in a wider, remoter context of folkore and Christian tradition, contrasting in style and mood with the rest of the scene. For the first time we hear, from Horatio, of ‘young Hamlet’: this spirit, dumb to us, will speak to him’. So at last we will learn the Ghost’s message. What, we wonder, is young Hamlet’s relationship to the dead and living kings?
Act I, Scene ii
Summary
King Claudius, brother to the late King and now married to his widow Gertrude, dispatches ambassadors to avert invasion by the Norwegian Prince Fortinbras who seeks to reclaim lands lost by his father to King Hamlet. Royal permission to live abroad is granted, in Council, to Laertes (son of chief Counsellor Polonius) but refused to Hamlet. Claudius reproves
Hamlet
for protracted mourning. Alone,
Hamlet
expresses disgust at his mother’s incestuous marriage. Informed of the Ghost by Horatio and the guards, he arranges to watch with them that night.
Commentary
This scene presents the opposition of ‘young Hamlet’ and ‘the Dane’. Hamlet’s in Polonius and Laertes, both vital to the plot, and Claudius’s diplomacy to avert invasion keeps the Fortinbras pair in mind.
Claudius’s Council (1-128) has many dramatic uses. It prepares for the relationship between the two Kings and the Queen. It prepares for the irony inherent in Claudius’s differing treatment of the three ‘sons’ - Fortinbras, and Laertes and Hamlet, with their identical requests to live abroad. You are bound to compare the young men as sons; each is linked with his father. The father – and one surrogate father – are contrasted too. What is the dramatic purpose of such contrasts?
The Council focuses the character of Claudius. His diplomacy appears to define him as an astute politician and efficient monarch. Yet Shakespeare compels constant reassessment of Claudius’s ordered state as mere show, partly by the sub-text of motives and feelings conveyed by Claudius’s style – its repetitions, paradoxes, antitheses, digressions, dislocations of syntax. The ambiguities, first glossing over his incestuous marriage, come to centre on the aloof, black-clad figure first identified by Claudius, in line 64 (why so late?) as my cousin Hamlet, and my son’. The stress on ambiguous relationships is reinforced by Hamlet’s bitter pun (65), itself an ambiguous form.
By verbal and visual contrasts in the presentation of Hamlet’s character, Shakespeare controls our response to Claudius. Hamlet’s mood of intense feeling in his first extended speech (1-38), absent from Claudius’s measured references to his brother’s death, forces reassessment of the validity of Claudius’s world, which Gertrude had asked Hamlet to join. ‘Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not “seems” strikes the keynote of Hamlet’s character and by contrast Claudius’s. Hamlet makes his ‘nighted colour’ typical of appearances ‘that a man might play’: role - playing is to be recurrent theme. It is ironical that Hamlet, who scorned ‘seems’, is forced later to play roles which both hide and reveal truth. So is the discrepancy between Hamlet’s confidence that he knows who he is (‘I know not “seems” ‘) and the audience’s uncertainties about identity implanted from the beginning.
The exchange between Hamlet and Claudius begins the conflict of ‘mighty opposites’ which shapes the play. Here, in his refusal to acknowledge the King as his ‘father’. the moral victory is Hamlet’s Claudius’s plausible diagnosis of Hamlet’s attitude (a son’s grief and resentment of his uncle’s election to the throne) puts us on a false trail to give the real reason shock value. The stage convention of soliloguy invites us to share Hamlet’s unspoken feelings. It explains his unsocial behaviour, and characterizes him as an idealist shocked into total revulsion against life. including his own, by his mother’s betrayal of the memory of a god-like father for a bestial uncle. The central comparison, ‘Hyperion to a satyr’, highlights the basic oppositions in human nature which Hamlet tries to keep apart (152), so that the soliloquy links the king we have just seen with the ghostly brother king Horatio is about to recall to us. Shakespeare’s stagecraft places the solitary speaker, imprisoned in the circular structure of the Globe and his thoughts, between two contrasting stage images of him: the melancholy drop-out at Claudius’s bright court, and the warm, natural friend of Horatio.
Shakespeare structures the natural torrent of thoughts in the soliloquy to teach us more about Hamlet than Hamlet knows. Heavy-sounding words alert us to his bitter, world-weary mood (129-34). The world ‘sullied’ (Q2) which most editors see reason to accept against the Folio’s ‘solid’, reverberates through the play. To ‘melt’ into the purity of dew (to die) redefines his wish to escape from Denmark as a rejection of ‘sullied’ human identity. Having presented Hamlet’s state, Shakespeare now moves in a quickening, compulsive rhythm to the reason (137-53). The passage enacts Hamlet’s recoil from it by making you wait through 17 lines of obsessive circling round ‘a little month’ and family relationships, for the climactic subject and verb, ‘she …… married with my uncle’. The climax forces Hamlet to face the explicit cause of his revulsion, and you to make sense of the jerky fragments. The soliloquy ends with a hissing of ‘s’ sounds (153-7) that directs the actor to spit out Hamlet’s disgust. It guides us constantly to revise our assumptions, as does the whole play.
Horatio’s promised visit, coming next, evokes a glimpse of the once- normal Hamlet – affectionate, clear-headed – forestalling distortion of him as a neurotic ‘case’. The shared memory of Hamlet’s father recalls (a constant theme) his human status: ‘A was a man’. The style of dialogue, appropriate as always, creates rising excitement. The human give-and take contrasts with the formal rhetoric of the court, the isolated torrent of Hamlet’s soliloquy, and the tense response to the supernatural. Hamlet’s close questioning of the witnesses breaks the regular line pattern without breaking the driving rhythm. Resumption of the regular iambic pentameter (254) points Hamlet’s resolution to watch for the Ghost and his prophetic suspicion of foul play (confided to you as an aside), leaving you keyed up for the encounter of ghost-father and son, while in Scene iii Shakespeare directs your interest to a more normal family meeting.
Act I, Scene iii
Summary
Laertes, about to set sail for Paris, warns his sister Ophelia against Hamlet’s courtship: Polonius forbids it.
Commentary
Scene iii focuses on the united family of Polonius – soon to be disrupted by the divided family of Hamlet – his son Laertes, and a surprise, his daughter Ophelia. Laertes’ affectionate leave-taking keeps him in mind and prepares for the tragic contrast of his return from France as avenger of his dead father and mad sister. The plot-interest of Hamlet’s courtship of Ophelia and Polonius’s well-meant ban on it intensifies Hamlet’s isolation. Advice given by Laertes to his sister and by Polonius to both, on how to live in an imperfect world, compels comparison of their values with those implied in Hamlet’s soliloquy, and in two more scenes of instruction given by ‘fathers’ (Claudius and the Ghost) to sons.
Shakespeare invests Ophelia from the first with pathos. Our fear for her romance has deeper cause than Polonius’s ban: Hamlet has revealed to us, but not yet to Ophelia, a mind poisoned against sexual relationships by his mother’s ‘sullied flesh’. Ophelia’s unexplained withdrawal can only strengthen his belief that ‘frailty, thy name is woman’. Ophelia’s constant association with flowers begins here. The family matters more, here, than individual characterization. Ophelia’s purpose in Hamlet is to be a dutiful daughter and innocent. Productions denying her chastity go against Laertes’ warning to her to guard it, and Hamlet’s tragic error in projecting his mother’s sexual corruption on to the girl whose purity contrasts it.
Laertes’ chief role here is to present, with Polonius, a memorable stage image of the close father/son relationship familiar to Elizabethan readers of proverbial precepts. The stereotype prepares us for the return of the son to avenge the father he loved, and for a critical response both serious and comic. The comedy is built into the situation of repeated advice, with Laertes’ lordly giving of worldly wisdom punctured by his reversal into receiving it from his father. Directors who exaggerate Polonius as a pompous old buffoon, with his children inviting the audience to snigger with them behind his back, rob him of respect as a good father and counsellor.
The prudent advice he gives his son implies a clear-eyed acceptance of human nature as ‘a little soil’d i’ th’ working’ (II.i.41) and high standards within his narrow premises.
The confidence informing their maxims for living challenges us to question the adequacy of such wisdom. The imagery, in view of sequels unforeseen by the speakers, often has ironic significance. Laertes, allowing that ‘now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch’ Hamlet’s virtuous intentions, is ignorant, as his words tell us, of a Hamlet already afflicted by a sense of sullied flesh which will motivate his conduct. His trite comparison of Hamlet’s love to a fragile violet will prove tragically applicable to his sister’s wits and life. At her grave, Shakespeare makes him point the connection for us: ‘from her fair and unpolluted flesh/May violets spring’. Another flower image of his, the worm in the bud, gathers resonance from the ‘contagious blastment’s which blight not only Ophelia (though not in the way her mentors fear) but also Hamlet and Laertes himself, corrupted into achieving his revenge by treachery. Such images, though culled from a young courtier’s commonplace book, initiate an under – pattern of corruption, disease and mortality essential to the play’s meaning. Further irony lies in Polonius, a caring father but a worldly judge of love, discouraging a courtship which you learn, at Ophelia’s grave, the Queen would have encouraged.
The gap between simple appearance and complex reality is at the heart of the scene’s irony, and is mirrored in Polonius’s language patterns: tortuous digression (as at 94-7) , extended metaphor, and, in admiration of his own cleverness, running a phrase to death. By his style, unconsciously. Comic, Shakespeare brings to attention (as in Hamlet’s puns) a serious topic: the ambiguity of language, illustrating the world’s complexity which is to prove Polonius’s simple remedies consistently wrong.
