Hamlet: Act 1 Commentary

I am investigating how Shakespeare represents the law and ethics in Hamlet. Here are nine observations from Act 1.

1. Denmark is preparing for war, and Horatio, the “scholar,” connects war with law. Hamlet Sr., the dead Danish king, fought the Norwegian king in a duel for the right to both kingdoms. Because Hamlet Sr. won in a manner “ratified by law and heraldry,” Denmark controls Norway. Fortinbras Jr., the son of the dead Norway king, wants the lands back and has announced his intentions in a series of “lawless resolutes.” The question raised by this conflict then is: will you obey the law or not?
2. Claudius, the new Danish king, says that Hamlet’s excessive mourning is a fault. It’s certainly not against civil law to be sad about a father’s death. Claudius thus introduces two more kinds of law in addition to the laws of state: “these mourning duties to your father…’tis a fault to heaven, / A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, / to reason most absurd.” It is these more complex laws, ones that a political system can’t necessarily enforce, that Hamlet will turn most of his attention.
3. Hamlet begins his first soliloquy by talking about suicide’s evil: “Oh…that the Everlasting had not fixed / His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter.” Suicide and revenge are flipsides of the same coin, and Hamlet harbors thoughts about both of them throughout the play. While the Bible does contain equally stern injunctions against revenge as against suicide, Hamlet never mentions that prohibition this way.
4. Hamlet’s final lines in Scene 2 state a truth about the law: “foul deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes.” His premise is that wrongdoing will be discovered, but he conspicuously focuses on “men’s eyes,” not God’s.
5. In scene 3, Ophelia identifies the hypocritical impulse that accompanies the law. Her brother Laertes has just lectured her about chastity. She responds, “Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, / Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven / Whiles, a puffed and reckless libertine, / Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads.” The law invites judgment, but it also implicates the one pronouncing judgment.
6. Hamlet explains tragedy’s fatal flaw in Act 1 Scene 4 not as an internal state of guilt but a hinge-point for popular opinion. On the one hand, Hamlet seems to think that people can have many virtues and not be mainly responsible for their “vicious mole of nature.” On the other, Hamlet hypothesizes that to the “general censure” (i.e. common opinion), the “fault” that comes from that “mole” obscures all those virtues. The biblical understanding of the law is that if you break one part of the law, you’re guilty of breaking all of it. In general, we seem to have the opposite reaction to law-breaking: we will try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Hamlet says that Danish culture works the other way, pouring on guilt for one fault while not giving credit for virtue. I would think this betrays a more Catholic, rather than Protestant, sensibility.
7. When Hamlet sees the ghost, he calls its bones “canonized.” The word hints that his father was buried according to church law.
8. The ghost appears to be in purgatory and describes his condition this way: “I am…doomed for a certain term to walk the night…Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature / Are burnt and purged away.” Hamlet Sr. died with sins unforgiven and suffers for them now, a description that is undoubtedly Catholic. The Wittenburg-college attending Hamlet should be skeptical.
9. The ghost identifies his sins, names the sins of his brother Claudius (“murder most foul!”), and demands that his son sin: “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.” The ghost does not tell Hamlet how to do this. The ghost does not explain why this revenge will not itself break the law that he is suffering for having broken. He demands that Hamlet kill Claudius for killing him.