Experiments in Criticism

At the end of my last post, I indicated that Hamlet has a biblical precedent for his play ploy: Nathan’s story about the sheep when confronting David in II Samuel. Hamlet doesn’t handle this prophetic office as well as he should, but it made me think about Hamlet’s role as a prophet.

Meditating on Hamlet as a prophet made me think harder about Hamlet’s status in literature (“the modern man” as novelist Hugh MacLennan dubbed him) and as a representative man of both the Renaissance and Reformation.

The symbolic offices for man, according to the Bible, are embodied in the roles of KING, PRIEST, and PROPHET. My conclusion is that Hamlet displays a distortion of each function. He has the potential in the play to demonstrate the power of each role. Through his ethical waywardness, he avoids the necessary responsibility required by each function. The commentary I offer on these roles in what follows is deeply indebted to James Jordan’s analysis in Through New Eyes.

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.

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.

These are three contexts I’ll need to consider as I offer a covenantal interpretation of Hamlet.

1. The Protestant Reformation. The play has clear Protestant elements: the setting in a traditionally Protestant country, Denmark; the school that Hamlet, Horatio, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern attend in Wittenburg, the Reformation’s birthplace; and the focus on the individual’s salvation or damnation apart from the representatives of the church (i.e., priests). The play also has clear Catholic elements: the ghost of Hamlet, Sr. appears to be in purgatory; the rites surrounding Ophelia’s burial are Catholic. The central contextual question is this: does the play favor Protestantism or Catholicism? The context matters.
2. Political Succession. The play asks how power gets transferred from one ruler to another. Hamlet Sr. should have passed his authority to Hamlet, but Claudius has usurped Hamlet’s place. Fortinbras Jr. rages through the play’s background seeking to avenge his dead father’s losses. In 1601, when Shakespeare’s troupe first performed the play, England was on edge as Elizabeth I grew closer to death without having an heir or a clear successor. Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras are analogs to contemporary English gentlemen like the Earl of Essex and Earl of Southhampton. They harbored ambition but never fulfilled their quests for more power.
3. The Revenge Tragedy. Hamlet is not just a tragedy. It’s a revenge tragedy that was popular in 16th Century England. During the 1590s, the most famous English stage was The Spanish Tragedy, which Hamlet echoes and improves in many ways. Other revenge tragedies are typically set in Catholic countries and contrast the loyalty to family and the state. Another conspicuous feature of this genre is metadrama leading to inset plays.

I began working on the third play in my Covenantal Shakespeare e-course this week: Hamlet. The play is primarily about ethics, namely the law regarding revenge.

Here’s the plot.

• The ghost of Hamlet’s father charges Prince Hamlet to revenge his murder by killing Claudius, Hamlet Sr.’s brother and the current king.
• Hamlet feigns madness causing various stand-ins for Claudius–including Polonius, Ophelia, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern–to try and find out what’s wrong with the prince.
• Hamlet confirms Claudius’s guilt but errantly kills Polonius instead of the king.
• While Hamlet goes into exile in England, Polonius’s son Laertes returns to avenge his father’s death. In contrast, his sister Ophelia goes mad and commits suicide.
• Under Claudius’s instruction, Laertes fences against Hamlet with a poison dagger. By the match’s end, the following people are dead: Laertes (poison), Hamlet (poison), Claudius (sword), and Gertrude (poison). Fortinbras, the son of an old opponent of Hamlet Sr., takes over Denmark.

Hamlet says in his first soliloquy that he wishes “the Everlasting had not fixed his canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!” The Everlasting has also fixed his canon against revenge, the preoccupation of three different sons in the play: Hamlet, Laertes, and Fortinbras. Vengeance pays in death and more death.