Hamlet: Act 2 Commentary

I am investigating how Shakespeare represents the law and ethics in Hamlet. Here are nine observations from Act 2.

1. The kingdom is full of hypocrites. Claudius, the new king, got his throne by murdering his brother. His chief advisor, Polonius, reveals himself as a spymaster in Act 2 Scene 1. He doesn’t trust Laertes in Paris, so he’s sending someone to “By indirections find directions out.” Laertes himself was called out for potential hypocrisy by Ophelia when he lectured her about Hamlet.
2. Polonius indirectly seeks Claudius’s help concerning Hamlet. As we’ll see again and again in this play, no one directly addresses anything. I think there’s a critical insight about the law here.
3. Claudius and Gertrude have their spies: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The king and queen task these college chums of Hamlet with discovering the reason for his “transformation.” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern bear false witness to their friend because they have to lie about why they’ve come back from college.
4. Hamlet’s speech on man captures both the optimism of the Renaissance (“How noble in reason, how infinite in faculties“) and the doctrinal stoutness of the Reformation (“what is this quintessence of dust?“). The law is one measure of this dichotomy. On the one hand, the law demonstrates man’s reason and faculties. On the other, reason condemns man to death. It expresses both salvation and damnation.
5. Hamlet loves acting. This love sheds light on his preoccupation with “seeming” and the state of madness he’s performing in this scene. Hamlet is taciturn and elliptical in response to Polonius but direct and approving in his interactions with the actors. He particularly likes a speech taken from a play about the Trojan War. The playwright describes Hecuba’s horror at seeing her husband struck down. There are parallels to Hamlet’s situation. Still, what matters are the context for Pyrrhus’s action (war, not peace; and the classical world, not a Christian one) and the performance by the actor (empathetic, not detached).
6. Hamlet ends Act 2 with a soliloquy that displays some wonky reasoning. While Hamlet ridicules Polonius for his “indirections,” he engages in the same kind of schemes. Hamlet holds himself guilty for two things: inaction and gullibility. Initially, he says that “heaven and hell” drive him to revenge. Heaven certainly isn’t. He does not consider the prudent way of executing his uncle’s capture. Instead, he upbraids himself for not having captured him yet. It’s as though mentioning “heaven” begins a change, however. He considers that the ghost “may be the devil” seeking “to damn” him.
7. As a result, he comes up with the idea of performing a play with a murder like that of his father’s to see Claudius’s reaction. The play will not tell Hamlet how to execute his uncle’s capture, but it will confirm Claudius’s guilt: “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” The biblical precedent for this is Nathan’s story to David in II Samuel. If Polonius is the evil prophet in this play, does Hamlet think himself true? The Player King certainly acts as one for him: calling him out to self-reflection due to his delivered speech.