How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (41 page)

“Because murder will speak out in a miraculous way.” Hamlet personifies murder and compares it to a living being who can speak.

I’ll have these players

Play something like the murder of my father

Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks;

I’ll tent
[probe]
him to the quick
[deeply].
If he do blench
[turn pale],

I know my course
.

So Hamlet is going to have the players put on a play that is
something like
the murder of his father. In fact, we’ve learned earlier in the scene that the play is called “The Murder of Gonzago,” and that it will have an additional speech in it that Hamlet has written. During the performance of this play, Hamlet will observe his uncle’s looks. If Claudius flinches, Hamlet will be certain that Claudius is guilty of murder, and Hamlet will know his course: that he must kill Claudius.

Hamlet now delivers the most interesting lines of the soliloquy:

The spirit that I have seen

May be the devil, and the devil hath power

T’ assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
,

Out of my weakness and my melancholy
,

As he is very potent with such spirits
,

Abuses me to damn me
.

Here Hamlet admits that the Ghost may not have been the Ghost of his father, but may have been the devil. After all, the devil does have the power to
assume a pleasing shape
. As your children will recall, Hamlet considered this possibility before:

Angels and ministers of grace, defend us!

Be thou a spirit of health, or goblin damned?

So here Hamlet is asking again: Was the Ghost
really
a ghost? Or was he the devil? Or was he something in Hamlet’s mind? Was he a manifestation of Hamlet’s suspicions? Of his madness? Remember, Horatio and the two guards also saw the Ghost in Act I, Scene 4. So the Ghost could not have been totally in Hamlet’s mind.

On the other hand, only Hamlet heard the Ghost speak. So perhaps the call for revenge was only in Hamlet’s mind. Hamlet recognizes this possibility, and so he needs confirmation of the murder. That confirmation
will come when he observes his uncle watching “The Murder of Gonzago.” (Hamlet later refers to this play as “The Mousetrap.”)

The spirit that I have seen

May be the devil, and the devil hath power

T’ assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
,

Out of my weakness and my melancholy
,

As he is very potent with such spirits
,

Abuses me to damn me
.

And now comes the famous ending to the soliloquy. I’m sure that you and your children have heard it before:

I’ll have grounds

More relative
[relevant]
than this. The play’s the thing

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King
.

What an ending to a remarkable speech. It leaves us on tenterhooks, longing to see what happens next. And the alliteration and rhyme are perfection:
catch/conscience, thing/King
. This is genius at its full stretch. No one in history, before or since, has written better than this.

The play’s the thing

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King
.

T
he next section of the story begins with a soliloquy, and that soliloquy begins with the most famous line in the English language:
To be or not to be, that is the question
. We’ll discuss that speech in detail in the next chapter. For now let’s review the whole story of
Hamlet
, using the soliloquies to help us understand the organization of the play.

Like most stories,
Hamlet
has a three-part arc:

Hamlet
begins with a young prince whose father has died and whose mother has vaulted into his uncle Claudius’s bed with unseemly speed. We meet Hamlet in the second scene of the play, where he delivers his first soliloquy.

Soliloquy 1

O that this too, too sullied flesh would melt…

In this soliloquy (which we discussed in
chapter 35
), Hamlet tries to deal psychologically with his mother’s betrayal. Not long afterward he is
confronted by his father’s Ghost, who reveals that he was murdered by Claudius. The Ghost enjoins Hamlet to avenge him. Hamlet struggles internally with how to cope with the Ghost’s demands. Part 1 ends with Hamlet’s second soliloquy, where Hamlet decides to set a trap to find out if his uncle is in fact guilty.

Soliloquy 2

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!

We discussed this soliloquy in
chapter 36
.

This section of the play opens with the third soliloquy.

Soliloquy 3

To be or not to be, that is the question:

Hamlet’s inner struggle has led him to thoughts of suicide. The soliloquy appears toward the beginning of Act III, Scene 1, as Claudius and Polonius watch Hamlet from a hiding place. They have prearranged with Ophelia to stage a meeting with Hamlet
as ’twere by accident
, so that the two men can observe Hamlet’s behavior.

As soon as
To be or not to be
is over, the action rattles along briskly from one incident to the next. The trap for Hamlet’s uncle is sprung during the play called “The Murder of Gonzago,” when Claudius rushes out of the room. A few moments later Hamlet is walking through the castle and by chance overhears Claudius confessing his crimes, wanting to pray to God but unable to do so for reasons of conscience. Claudius soliloquizes:

O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven;

It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t
,

A brother’s murder.…

O, what form of prayer

Can serve my turn? “Forgive me my foul murder”?

That cannot be, since I am still possessed

Of those effects for which I did the murder:

My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen
.

Now, for the first time, Hamlet (and we) are absolutely certain that Claudius did in fact murder old Hamlet. At this moment, at the end of Claudius’s soliloquy, when Claudius finally starts to pray for forgiveness, Hamlet almost kills his uncle but decides against it. This is the occasion for Hamlet’s fourth soliloquy.

Soliloquy 4

Now might I do it pat, now he is a-praying
,

In this soliloquy, Hamlet talks himself into not killing Claudius while Claudius is praying, because then Claudius’s soul would go to heaven. Hamlet reasons that he would rather kill Claudius while Claudius is sinning so that his soul will go to hell. At least that’s what Hamlet says. But his hesitation seems to go deeper and be part of his moral repugnance to cold-blooded murder.

Now might I do it pat, now he is a-praying
,

And now I’ll do’t. (He draws his sword.)

And so he goes to heaven;

And so am I revenged
.

But
, thinks Hamlet:

am I then revenged
,

To take him in the purging of his soul
,

When he is fit and season’d for his passage?

No!

Hamlet decides that he would rather kill Claudius

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage
,

Or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed;

At gaming, swearing, or about some act

That has no relish of salvation in’t;

Remember, if Hamlet went ahead and killed Claudius at this point, he would prevent the eight deaths that follow by the end of the play. But Hamlet doesn’t know that, and, as the great literary critic Northrop Frye says, “Hamlet is too civilized for stealthy murder.”

Hamlet
at the Royal Shakespeare Company, with David Tennant as Hamlet and Patrick Stewart as Claudius
(photo credit 37.1)

In the next scene, Hamlet confronts his mother and begs her to abstain from his uncle’s bed.

QUEEN

Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended
.

HAMLET

Mother, you have my father much offended
.

QUEEN

Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue
.

HAMLET

Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue
.

Things that are said in this famous Closet Scene (which is often staged in Gertrude’s bedroom) have prompted some critics to compare Hamlet’s struggle to aspects of the Oedipus complex. That complex, based on Sigmund Freud’s famous theory of psychoanalysis, maintains that males compete with their fathers for their mothers’ affection. The theory here is that Hamlet is psychologically prevented from killing Claudius because Claudius is fulfilling Hamlet’s own Oedipal desires by killing his father and marrying his mother. But that is only one of the dozens of critical theories about
Hamlet
that have been posited over the years, and the complexity and depth of the play are so stunning that it is subject, quite rightly, to a whole world of interpretation.

While Hamlet is in his mother’s private chamber, he hears a spy behind the curtain and runs him through with his sword. Hamlet thinks he has stabbed Claudius, but it turns out to be Polonius, who was indeed spying on the prince. It is at this moment that the Ghost of Hamlet’s Father revisits the play. He enters the room and exhorts Hamlet not to forget his promise to kill Claudius. Hamlet converses with the Ghost, but Gertrude cannot see the Ghost—she sees Hamlet talking to the thin air—and therefore believes that Hamlet really has gone mad. As Hamlet berates Gertrude for her lustful behavior, Gertrude cries:

O Hamlet, thou hast cleft
[cut]
my heart in twain
[in two],