How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (40 page)

If we listen closely, we realize that Hamlet’s anguish is based primarily on shock at his mother’s lust and infidelity. She has vaulted incestuously into her brother-in-law’s bed:
A beast would have mourned longer!
cries Hamlet. She is
rank and gross
like an
unweeded garden
—and Hamlet uses the same metaphor when he confronts his mother in the famous Closet Scene in Act III:

Repent what’s past; avoid what is to come;

And do not spread the compost on the weeds

To make them ranker
.

This realization of his mother’s betrayal changes everything for Hamlet. He can never look at a woman the same way again. Suddenly for Hamlet, all women, including Ophelia, are false. (
Frailty, thy name is woman!
) And for the moment, he can do nothing to resolve his wounded feelings. He hasn’t met the Ghost yet and doesn’t suspect at this point that he has a murder to avenge. Therefore, his heart must
break,…for I must hold my tongue
. By understanding this soliloquy, your children will have a very good handle on the whole opening of the play.

Passage 23
O, What a Rogue and Peasant Slave Am I!

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!…

I have heard

That guilty creatures sitting at a play

Have, by the very cunning of the scene
,

Been struck so to the soul that presently

They have proclaimed their malefactions
.

For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak

With most miraculous organ. I’ll have these players

Play something like the murder of my father

Before mine uncle. I’ll observe his looks;

I’ll tent him to the quick. If he do blench
,

I know my course. 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. I’ll have grounds

More relative than this. The play’s the thing

Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King
.

(
Hamlet
, Act II, Scene 2, lines 577ff.)

W
e know what happens next in the story: That night—the same night as Hamlet’s first soliloquy—Hamlet goes to the battlements of the castle and meets the Ghost of his father. The Ghost tells Hamlet that he, the Ghost, was poisoned by his brother Claudius, and he urges Hamlet to avenge his murder. End of Act I.

Act II contains one of the greatest scenes in all of Shakespeare, Scene 2, where events tumble forth one after another. In essence, four things happen in this scene:

1. Claudius and Gertrude get two of Hamlet’s old school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to spy on Hamlet, and Hamlet discovers what they’re up to.

2. Hamlet begins to
act
as though he were mad, but he seems to do it out of anger and contempt for Polonius, not because of real insanity. As Polonius himself admits,
Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t
.

3. A group of traveling actors visit Elsinore Castle and perform an excerpt from one of Hamlet’s favorite plays. When it is over, Hamlet realizes, to his shame, that he has shown less passion in avenging his father’s death than the players have shown in enacting a mere play about the Trojan War.

4. Hamlet sets a trap to find out if Claudius did, in fact, murder his father.

The genius of Hamlet’s second soliloquy, which ends the scene, is that it encapsulates all the action of the play up to this point, and, at the same time, it is wildly emotional. This makes it an ideal passage for your children to memorize.

I have suggested that your children memorize only the last third of the soliloquy not because the whole thing isn’t miraculous, but out of concern that your children might feel defeated if they tried to learn the whole thing. However, if your children are up for it, do, absolutely, help them memorize the whole soliloquy. This is the first long passage of Shakespeare I learned myself, and I suppose I was about twelve when I did it. Kids are sponges, and if you go into the exercise with the whole soliloquy as a
given, you’re apt to get excellent results. In any case, I’ll explain the whole soliloquy now, and you and your children can decide how much of it to memorize.

Certainly, at a minimum, they must memorize the opening line. We want them to know the opening lines of all five of the great soliloquies, and they already know the opening sentence of the first one:

O that this too, too sullied flesh would melt
,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew
,

Or that the Everlasting had not fixed

His canon ’gainst self-slaughter!

The opening sentence of the second soliloquy is shorter:

O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!

Hamlet is heartsick. He is about to compare himself to the actor—the Player King—who has just poured out his heart in a fiction, while he, Hamlet, should be acting upon a real-life betrayal. Read the soliloquy to your children a section at a time, and explain what it means as you go.

DO NOT BE DAUNTED BY ITS LENGTH OR ITS SEEMING DIFFICULTY. IF YOU TAKE IT A SENTENCE AT A TIME, IT WILL BECOME PERFECTLY CLEAR. THE PURPOSE OF YOUR WORK WITH YOUR CHILDREN IS TO DEMYSTIFY SHAKESPEARE. PERSEVERE!

And now we come to the next portion of the soliloquy that your children should memorize.

I have heard

That guilty creatures sitting at a play

Have, by the very cunning of the scene
,

Been struck so to the soul that presently
[instantly]

They have proclaimed their malefactions
[crimes].

This passage is so clear and straightforward that it hardly needs paraphrasing. Hamlet has heard that a cleverly placed scene in a play will strike so into the soul of a guilty audience member that that person will admit his crimes.

For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak

With most miraculous organ
.