VCCS Litonline 

The Hamlet Site

Summary: Hamlet is away at college when his father dies unexpectedly. During his mourning, his mother weds his uncle, who has succeeded Hamlet, Sr., on the throne and married the current queen. The ghost of Hamlet’s father tells him that his brother poisoned him, stole the crown, and seduced the queen. His father’s ghost wants revenge. But was that really his father or some devil trying to trick him? Hamlet decides to bide his time, act a little crazy so the assassin won’t suspect him, and set a trap to confirm the king’s guilt. After Hamlet accidentally kills his girlfriend’s father [thinking he was the king] in his mother’s bedroom, the king sends Hamlet to England with a sealed note to the English king that says, "Please execute the bearer of this note," but Hamlet switches the note to get his companion/guards killed instead. Hamlet’s girlfriend, Ophelia, goes crazy and commits suicide; Hamlet ends up wrestling with her brother in her grave arguing he loved her best. The king gets this brother, Laertes, to challenge Hamlet to a sword match, but Laertes poisons his sword and king Claudius poisons Hamlet’s drink. When the queen drinks instead, she realizes the plot and warns Hamlet, but Laertes has already cut him with the poison sword and been cut in return by a suspicious Hamlet. Hamlet turns on Claudius with the poison sword and the poison drink. As the royal family lies strewn about the stage, Fortinbras arrives, having regained the lands Hamlet’s father took from his father. Denmark has no leader, but Hamlet’s friend, who was in on Hamlet’s plot, survives to tell of Claudius’s guile.

Reading Difficulty: This is Shakespeare, but the Mel Gibson – Franco Zeffirelli movie shortens the story and makes the language as understandable as it gets. It’s poetry—rhyming and rhythmic; so the word order is turned around and the vocabulary is sometimes unusual, as well as customarily metaphorical. For instance, in his "To be or not to be" contemplation of suicide, Hamlet lists a number of reasons why people might want to kill themselves, wondering—

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time

……………………………………………………

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveler returns, puzzles the will . . . . (Hamlet 3.1.70-80)

Footnotes in the text translate the odd words so that readers who will use them can tell that Hamlet is wondering why people don’t use daggers on themselves and answering himself that fear of the afterlife undercuts the desire to escape the problems of this life. Nevertheless, this is very challenging reading—or even watching a movie version.

To Read or Not to Read: Reading/watching Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, is a challenging but rich experience. The play touches on topics of lust, ambition, revenge, fear of dying, the nature of authority vs. power, guilt, vulnerability, madness, and others—all handled with dramatic irony and plot twists during a sort of chess game between Hamlet and Claudius. Hamlet’s seemingly hesitant character is contrasted repeatedly with the heroic man of action, Fortinbras. Hamlet himself frequently contrasts the character of his father, as he perceived him, with his lustier and more vibrant younger brother, Claudius. The play is a tragedy, and by the end the body count is high—8 violent deaths. But Hamlet has to be willing to sacrifice his own life—not just the focus of it—to accomplish his vengeance. That partly explains why he "hesitates."

Being a Renaissance tragedy, the play is mostly about the upper class; in fact, Ophelia is urged by her brother and father to stay away from Hamlet because she wasn’t in his social class. It would be all the more ironic, then, if they really loved each other. Both Hamlet and Claudius are interesting characters because they have multiple motives. Hamlet is devoted to his father but afraid of dying, concerned about devils, his soul, and the afterlife (partly due his father’s description of the consequence of having died with his [venial] sins still on his soul). Claudius lists his three motives in the chapel; he wanted the crown, the power, and the queen. But he feels occasional pangs of remorse for killing his brother, which is how Hamlet confirmed Claudius’s guilt. In Shakespeare’s culture, marrying one’s brother’s wife was considered a kind of incest (though in some other cultures it is an obligation to provide for her).

Shakespeare also has some serious fun in this play when Hamlet interviews a roving band of players and enlists their unwitting aid in playing a scene to pique Claudius’s conscience, despite the performance being semi-public, performed for Claudius and his court. An actor cries for an historical figure he never knew (Hecuba), and Hamlet wonders why he can’t cry for his beloved father. At the same time, Shakespeare includes some commentary on the purposes and nature of acting and dramas.

To some extent, Hamlet is dated. It includes duals, armies who march across the map of medieval Denmark and northern Europe, castles and kings. Yet the play is still read for its "universals": a brother’s jealousy (and a stepson’s), ambition, corruption, deceit, a son’s devotion to his father, conniving, young love, meddling family, thoughts of suicide, assassination plots, and the finality of death.

Hamlet promises to his father—and to himself—to place his father foremost in his memory. Both he and Claudius wear masks to achieve their cross purposes; Hamlet fakes being crazy, Claudius fakes being concerned about Hamlet’s well being, even Polonius, to some extent, fakes buffoonery, as his shrewd scene with Reynaldo shows him to be a tactician as much as the king is.

As a class, I think we should read Hamlet and watch selected scenes from the Mel Gibson - Franco Zeffirelli version, as well as selected scenes from the Branagh version that are not included in the Gibson version--provided we can get beyond the dyed-blond/white-haired (?!) Hamlet, Branagh dragging that poor boat person around a hall of two-way mirrors, and motor-mouthing through speeches that it feels like he is reciting iambic wham-meter. 

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