Hamlet

“Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems.’”

In one of Hamlet’s first lines, he lays out an important tension between what is real and what only appears to be real. By insisting that his outward shows of mourning truly reflect his inner grief—with an implied criticism of his mother’s speedy recovery from her husband’s death—Hamlet observes that it’s very easy to pretend to feel something you don’t. 

“From this time / Be something scanter of your maiden presence [...] For Lord Hamlet, / Believe so much in him that he is young, / And with a larger tether may he walk / Than may be given you. In few, Ophelia, / Do not believe his vows, for they are brokers”

By discouraging Ophelia from taking Hamlet’s professions of love too seriously, Polonius lays out a number of the play’s dilemmas, and foreshadows later tragedy. Words, Polonius says, are not worth much, and women, in particular, must beware the cajoling words of men. Hamlet is much freer than Ophelia; he can do what he likes, while her safety and well-being in society depend on a public perception of sexual purity. Polonius’s warning is both stern and truthful.

“Tell / Why thy canonized bones, hearsèd in death, / Have burst their cerements, why the sepulchre / Wherein we saw thee quietly interred / Hath op’d his ponderous and marble jaws / To cast thee up again.”

Originally performed on a mostly bare stage, Shakespeare’s plays depended on words to create atmosphere and setting. The image of the tomb opening like jaws to spit up the king’s corpse gives us a vivid grasp of Hamlet’s horror.

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

This famous line, delivered just after Hamlet’s first encounter with his father’s ghost, is often misinterpreted. Hamlet is not putting down Horatio’s life philosophy in particular but speaking of academic philosophizing generally. Hamlet has had a confrontation with something both real and inexplicable, and his entire understanding of the world has been shaken.

“My lord, as I was sewing in my closet, / Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced, / No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled, / Ungartered, and down-gyvèd to his ankle, / Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other, / And with a look so piteous in purport / As if he had been loosèd out of hell / To speak of horrors—he comes before me.”

Ophelia’s first description of Hamlet in his feigned madness focuses on his clothing. The image recalls Hamlet’s description of mourning clothing hiding false grief; here, Hamlet’s performance of madness is only outward show. Ophelia’s description also recalls the ghost: Hamlet has indeed seen some infernal horrors.

“I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth, foregone all custom of exercises; and indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire—why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.”

In this famous speech, Hamlet describes his melancholy with suitably paradoxical language. He eulogizes the glories of the world and of humanity, only to undercut these words with his inability to feel those beauties he describes. This distance between Hamlet’s capacity to perceive and his capacity to feel is another instance of disconnect between the outward and the inward. Though Renaissance England did not have a modern concept of mental illness, Hamlet gives a moving description of what could now be understood as depression.

“To be, or not to be—that is the question: / Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them.”

In this, perhaps the most famous of all soliloquies, Hamlet considers suicide. The only thing that prevents people from killing themselves, he suggests, is the fear that whatever might come after death would be even worse than the agonies of life. This vision of human pain, and the fundamental human dilemma, encapsulates the play’s questions about doubt, suffering, action, and thought.

“O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown! / The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword, / Th’ expectancy and rose of the fair state, / The glass of fashion and the mold of form, / Th’ observed of all observers, quite, quite down! / ...O, woe is me / T’ have seen what I have seen, see what I see."

Ophelia’s mournful eulogy for Hamlet’s sanity frames him both as a beloved paragon and as a figure on whom much depends. Hamlet is not merely himself; he is the hope of Denmark. Ophelia’s phrase “th’ observed of all observers” is also a sharp reading: Hamlet is indeed carefully observed, and an observer to his core. Ophelia’s own observation here is marred: She doesn’t know that Hamlet is putting on a performance.

“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”

Hamlet’s exhortations to the actors, coming as they do in the middle of a play, serve both comic and serious purposes. In counseling the actors not to make a big melodramatic fuss, and the comedians not to take liberties with the script, Hamlet reminds the audience that they are present in the theater. Actors invite the audience to consider how an inherently falsifying art may represent truth.

“Very like a whale.”

Polonius, in agreeing with Hamlet’s capricious description of a cloud—first it is like a camel, then like a weasel, then like a whale—plays into Hamlet’s hands. Hamlet is appalled by the untrustworthiness of the people around him, and the untrustworthiness of language. Here, having decried Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s “playing” him like a pipe, he plays Polonius in turn.

“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below. / Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

In the final words of this scene, Claudius, who has been agonizing over his inability to repent of his brother’s murder while retaining the benefits he gained from it, despairs over his attempted prayers. Claudius, too, is caught up in the distance between what is inside him and how he acts. While he feels deep guilt, he cannot bring himself to take the action that would allow him to atone.

“Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed, / Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse, / And let him, for a pair of reechy kisses, / Or paddling in your neck with his damned fingers, / Make you to ravel all this matter out”

Here, Hamlet describes Claudius making love to his mother with a queasy vividness. Hamlet’s agony over human treachery is connected to his anxiety about female sexuality. His treatment of his mother and Ophelia demonstrates a deep fear that his desires for love and intimacy might be founded on falsehoods.

“The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing [...] of nothing.”

Refusing to tell Rosencrantz and Guildenstern where he’s left Polonius’s body, Hamlet brings his slippery word play to new heights. The “body” and the “king” here could refer not only to Polonius and Claudius, but the body of the dead king and his spirit. Calling the king “a thing [...] of nothing,” Hamlet may be referring to lines from Psalm 144 in the Bible: “Man is like a thing of naught: His time passeth away like a shadow.”

“A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.”

Describing worms feasting on Polonius’s dead body, Hamlet turns from metaphysical speculation about the afterlife to cold, fleshy reality. This discussion of the kingship of the worm gives the lie to Claudius’s lust for power. The earthly reality of decay is one thing that Hamlet cannot doubt.

“How all occasions do inform against me / And spur my dull revenge! What is a man, / If his chief good and market of his time / Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more. / Sure he that made us with such large discourse, / Looking before and after, gave us not / That capability and godlike reason / To fust in us unused”

Hamlet’s response to the news that Fortinbras’s army will fight a bloody battle over an almost worthless piece of land draws out his own shame and guilt over his reluctance to take revenge. Where it might be possible to read such a battle as fruitless and dehumanizing, Hamlet interprets it as just the opposite. In his shame, Hamlet sees Fortinbras’s defense of his honor as precisely what separates humans from animals.

“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts [...] There’s fennel for you, and columbines. There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me. We may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays. You must wear your rue with a difference. There’s a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died.”

Ophelia’s catalogue of flowers bears some resemblance to Hamlet’s feigned insanity, though Opelia isn’t pretending. Like Hamlet, Ophelia speaks in puns and double meanings here: “Pansies” are for thought because of the French “pensées,” and “rue” is a synonym for regret. Ophelia, unlike Hamlet, is able even in her madness to make material use of these puns, finding in them some tragic means of consolation or communication.

“There is a willow grows askant the brook, / That shows his hoary leaves in the glassy stream. / Therewith fantastic garlands did she make / Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, / But our cold maids do dead-men’s-fingers call them. / There on the pendent boughs her crownet weed / Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke, / When down her weedy trophies and herself / Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide, / And mermaidlike awhile they bore her up, / Which time she chanted snatches of old lauds, / As one incapable of her own distress, / Or like a creature native and indued / Unto that element. But long it could not be / Till that her garments, heavy with their drink, / Pulld the poor wretch from her melodious lay / To muddy death.”

Gertrude’s lyrical description of Ophelia’s death beautifies a horror. Echoing Ophelia’s own earlier catalogue of flowers, Gertrude’s report seems matched to its subject. The vividness of Gertrude’s description, however, forces a darker thought: If someone was there to hear Ophelia singing, that person should have been able to save her.

“Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a thousand times. And now how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambles, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite chopfallen? Now get you to my lady’s table, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that.”

Here, Hamlet addresses the exhumed skull of his old family jester, Yorick. Between wryness and horror, Hamlet expresses his despairing fear of ultimate meaninglessness and loss of identity. Every skull, he goes on to say, looks pretty much alike.

“I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers / Could not with all their quantity of love / Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?”

When Hamlet learns that Ophelia is dead, he is moved too late to an unequivocal declaration of love. Even this clarity becomes muddied: Hamlet seems to need to outdo Laertes’s love to quantify his own.

“There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes?”

In the wake of his escape from Claudius’s initial machinations, his encounter with the skull of Yorick, and the shock of Ophelia’s death, Hamlet speaks with grim resignation about death. God and fate, he says, will take him when they want him. He sees no point in evading even Claudius’s obvious trap.

“If Hamlet from himself be ta’en away, / And when he’s not himself does wrong Laertes, / Then Hamlet does it not, Hamlet denies it. / Who does it then? His madness. If’t be so, / Hamlet is of the faction that is wronged; / His madness is poor Hamlet’s enemy.”

Hamlet’s apology to Laertes is at once sincere and self-serving. The argument here builds on the gravediggers’ reading of Ophelia’s death: Madness and accident remove responsibility. With Hamlet, it’s hard to tell what has been true madness and what has been mere performance.

“The rest is silence.”

Hamlet’s final words record his passing out of the doubts he has struggled against into the great unknown of death. Throughout the play, Hamlet has been caught up in the problems of language: its falsity, its doubleness. His final silence is both an answer to and an infinite expansion of his questions.

“Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

Horatio’s farewell to Hamlet—another famous passage—is touching in its simplicity. This eulogy, plain where Hamlet was subtle and hopeful where he was despairing, points to the differences between Hamlet and Horatio. It also provides a contrast with Horatio’s earlier assertion that “I am more an antique Roman than a Dane” (5.2.338), as he encourages Hamlet to end his suffering by drinking the poisoned wine. Suicide, as the gravediggers said, was supposed to mean that neither flights of angels nor rest would be prominent in one’s afterlife.