In Shakespeare's powerful drama of destiny and revenge, Hamlet, the troubled prince of Denmark, must overcome his own self-doubt and avenge the murder of his father. This invaluable new study guide to one of Shakespeare's greatest plays contains a selection of the finest criticism through the centuries on Hamlet. Students will also benefit from the additional features included in this volume, such as an introduction by Harold Bloom, an accessible summary, analysis of key passages, a comprehensive list of characters, a biography of Shakespeare, and more.
Hamlet
By Harold BloomChelsea House Publications
Copyright © 2007 Harold Bloom
All right reserved.ISBN: 9780791095928Chapter One
INFERRING HAMLETHamlet is part of Shakespeare's revenge upon revengetragedy, and is of no genre. Of all poems, itis the most unlimited. As a meditation upon humanfragility in confrontation with death, it competes onlywith the world's scriptures.
Contrary, doubtless, to Shakespeare's intention,Hamlet has become the center of a secular scripture. It isscarcely conceivable that Shakespeare could have anticipatedhow universal the play has proved to be. Ringedround it are summits of Western literature: the Iliad,the Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales,King Lear, Macbeth, Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, War andPeace, The Brothers Karamazov, Leaves of Grass, Moby-Dick,In Search of Lost Time, among others. Except forShakespeare's, no dramas are included. Aeschylus andSophocles, Caldersn and Racine are not secular, while Isuggest the paradox that Dante, Milton, and Dostoevskyare secular, despite their professions of piety.
Hamlet's obsessions are not necessarily Shakespeare's,though playwright and prince share an intensetheatricality and a distrust of motives. Shakespeare is inthe play not as Hamlet, but as the Ghost and as the FirstPlayer (Player King), roles he evidently acted. Of theGhost, we are certain from the start that he indeed isKing Hamlet's spirit, escaped from the afterlife to enlisthis son to revenge:
If thou didst ever thy dear father love-
[I.v.23]
The spirit does not speak of any love for his son, whowould appear to have been rather a neglected child.When not bashing enemies, the late warrior-king kepthis hands upon Queen Gertrude, a sexual magnet. Thegraveyard scene (V.i) allows us to infer that the princefound father and mother in Yorick, the royal jester:
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.
[V.i.185-89]
Hamlet is his own Falstaff (as Harold Goddard remarked)because Yorick, "a fellow of infinite jest, ofmost excellent fancy," raised him until the prince wasseven. The Grave-digger, the only personage in theplay witty enough to hold his own with Hamlet, tells usthat Yorick's skull has been in the earth twenty-threeyears, and that it is thirty years since Hamlet's birth. Yetwho would take the prince of the first four acts, a studentat the University of Wittenberg (a German Protestantinstitution, famous for Martin Luther), as havingreached thirty? Like his college chums, the unfortunateRosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet can be no olderthan about twenty at the start, and the lapsed time representedin the tragedy cannot be more than eight weeks,at the most. Shakespeare, wonderfully careless on mattersof time and space, wanted a preternaturally maturedHamlet for Act V.
Though we speak of act and scene divisions, andlater in this little book I will center upon the final act,these are not Shakespeare's divisions, since all his playswere performed straight through, without intermissions,at the Globe Theatre. The uncut Hamlet, in our moderneditions, which brings together all verified texts, runs tonearly four thousand lines, twice the length of Macbeth.Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play, and the prince'srole (at about fifteen hundred lines) is similarly unique.Only if you run the two parts of Henry IV together (aswe should) can you find a Shakespearean equivalent,with Falstaff's role as massive, though unlike Hamlet mysublime prototype speaks prose only-the best prose inthe language, except perhaps for Hamlet's.
The Tragical Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarkestands apart among Shakespeare's thirty-eight plays,quite aside from its universal fame. Its length and varietyare matched by its experimentalism. After four centuries,Hamlet remains our world's most advanced drama,imitated but scarcely transcended by Ibsen, Chekhov,Pirandello, and Beckett. You cannot get beyond Hamlet,which establishes the limits of theatricality, just as Hamlethimself is a frontier of consciousness yet to be passed. Ithink it wise to confront both the play and the princewith awe and wonder, because they know more than wedo. I have been willing to call such a stance Bardolatry,which seems to me only another name for authentic responseto Shakespeare.
How should we begin reading Hamlet, or how attendit in performance, in the unlikely event of findingthe play responsibly directed? I suggest that we try toinfer just how the young man attired in black became soformidably unique an individual. Claudius addresses theprince as "my son," meaning he has adopted his nephewas royal heir, but also gallingly reminding Hamlet thathe is a stepson by marriage. The first line spoken byHamlet is, "A little more than kin, and less than kind,"while the next concludes punningly, "I am too much inthe sun." Is there an anxiety that Hamlet actually maybe Claudius's son, since he cannot know for certain exactlywhen what he regards as adultery and incest beganbetween Claudius and Gertrude? His notorious hesitationsat hacking down Claudius stem partly from thesheer magnitude of his consciousness, but they may alsoindicate a realistic doubt as to his paternity.
We are left alone with Hamlet for the first of hisseven soliloquies. Its opening lines carry us a long wayinto the labyrinths of his spirit:
O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw and resolve itself into a dew ...
[I.ii.129-30]
The First Folio gives us "solid flesh," while the SecondQuarto reads "sallied flesh." While "sallied" could mean"assailed," it is probably a variant for "sullied." Hamlet'srecoil from sullied flesh justifies D. H. Lawrence's darkobservation that "a sense of corruption in the fleshmakes Hamlet frenzied, for he will never admit that it ishis own flesh." Lawrence's aversion remains very striking:"A creeping, unclean thing he seems.... His nastypoking and sniffling at his mother, his traps for theKing, his conceited perversion with Ophelia make himalways intolerable." Though Lawrence's perspective isdisputable, we need not contest it, because Lawrencehimself did: "For the soliloquies of Hamlet are as deepas the soul of man can go ... and as sincere as the HolySpirit itself in their essence." We can sympathize withLawrence's ambivalence: that "a creeping, unclean thing"should also be "as sincere as the Holy Spirit" is theessence of Hamlet's view of humankind, and of himselfin particular.
The central question then becomes: How did Hamletdevelop into so extraordinarily ambivalent a consciousness?I think we may discount any notion that the doubleshock of his father's sudden death and his mother'sremarriage has brought about a radical change in him.Hamlet always has had nothing in common with his father,his mother, and his uncle. He is a kind of changeling,nurtured by Yorick, yet fathered by himself, an actor-playwrightfrom the start, though it would not be helpfulto identify him with his author. Shakespeare distancesHamlet from himself, partly by appearing on stage at hisside, as paternal ghost and as Player King, but primarilyby endowing the prince with an authorial consciousnessof his own, as well as with an actor's proclivities. Hamlet,his own Falstaff, is also his own Shakescene, endlessly interested in theater. Indeed, his first speech thatgoes beyond a single line is also his first meditation uponacting:
These indeed seem, For they are actions that a man might play; But I have that within which passes show ...
[I.ii.83-85]
In some sense, Hamlet's instructions to the actors goon throughout the play, which is probably the best of alltextbooks on the purposes of playing. Hamlet is neithera philosopher nor a theologian, but an enthusiastic andremarkably informed amateur of the theater. He certainlyseems to have spent more time playing truant atthe Globe in London than studying at Wittenberg. TheGhost exits, murmuring, "Remember me," and we hearHamlet reminding the Globe audience that he is oneof them:
Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe.
[I.v.95-97]
Shakespeare might have subtitled Hamlet either TheRehearsal or Unpack My Heart with Words, for it is a playabout playing, about acting out rather than revenging.We are self-conscious, but Hamlet is consciousness ofsomething. For Hamlet, the play's the thing, and not justto mousetrap Claudius. At the very close, Hamlet fearsa wounded name. I suggest that his anxiety pertains notto being a belated avenger, but to his obsessions as adramatist.
Chapter Two
HORATIOWith Horatio and Marcellus as his initial audience,Hamlet starts playing the antic, and will not ceaseuntil he abandons the graveyard scene, to act instead theapotheosis of his dying. Marcellus fades quickly away, butHoratio abides to tell Hamlet's story. William Hazlitt, agreat critic, observed, "It is we who are Hamlet," butactually we are Horatio, Hamlet's perpetual audience,which is why Horatio is in the play. Though without visiblemeans of support, and without either status or functionat the Court of Elsinore, Horatio is omnipresent.
Horatio is a fellow student of Hamlet's at Wittenberg,and his age is even more ambiguous than Hamlet's,since he tells Marcellus in the play's first scenethat he saw King Hamlet battle against both Norwayand Poland, at the time of what turns out to havebeen Prince Hamlet's birth. If Horatio is still at Wittenbergat forty-seven or so (at the least), he disturbs ourcredulity, but Shakespeare doesn't care, and would havebeen amused at our arithmetic. Hamlet, who shows littleenough evidence of affection for either Ophelia or Gertrude,manifests astonishing esteem for the startledHoratio:
Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice, And could of men distinguish her election, Sh'ath seal'd thee for herself; for thou hast been As one, in suff'ring all, that suffers nothing, A man that Fortune's buffets and rewards Hast ta'en with equal thanks; and blest are those Whose blood and judgment are so well commeddled That they are not a pipe for Fortune's finger To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, As I do thee.
[III.ii.64-74]
Only the audience, in suffering all, suffers nothing ata tragedy, and Horatio suffers so much when Hamlet isdying that he shocks us by attempting suicide. Hamlet'stribute is enigmatic, since the play permits Horatio onlyto be Hamlet's adoring straight man, and we simply areshown nothing of Horatio's supposed freedom from theslavery of passion. All that we know of Horatio is thatClaudius does not even try to suborn him, which rendershim unique at Elsinore. What matters is that Horatioloves Hamlet, and desires no existence apart from theprince. Though critics have asserted that Hamlet findsqualities in Horatio that are absent from himself, theyplainly are mistaken. Hamlet is so various that he containsevery quality, while Horatio, totally colorless, hasnone to speak of.
And yet there is no one else in all Shakespeare whoresembles Horatio, whose gracious receptivity lingerson in our memories of the drama. Though many fightagainst idolatry of Hamlet, Shakespeare makes it difficult for us not to identify with Horatio, who is idolatrous.Horatio is Shakespeare's instrument for suborningthe audience even as Claudius manipulates Elsinore:without Horatio, we are too distanced from the bewilderingHamlet for Shakespeare to work his guile uponus. Critics keep coming forward to protest that actuallyHamlet is cold, brutal, a hero-villain at best. But suchcritics work against their own grain and ours, becausethey work against Shakespeare's subtle art. Horatio preciselyis not Antony's freedman, Eros, who kills himselfto "escape the sorrow / Of Antony's death." Eros is nomore than a grace-note in Antony and Cleopatra; Horatiopragmatically is the most important figure in thetragedy except for Hamlet himself. Through Horatiowe the audience contaminate the play.
That contamination is unique in Shakespeare, and isone of the elements that render Hamlet a class of oneamong Shakespeare's high tragedies. No other dramaever is so overtly audience-aware, or makes us so complicitin its procedures. In a curious sense, Shakespearewrites with Horatio and ourselves, rather as Iago composedwith Othello, Desdemona, and Cassio, or Edmundwith Edgar and Gloucester. Hamlet seems to write himself,and the other characters as well, except for Horatio.Lest this seem my own madness, consider Horatio's onemild protest against Hamlet's imaginative extravagancesin the graveyard:
Hamlet To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why, may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till a find it stopping a bung-hole?
Horatio 'Twere to consider too curiously to consider so.
[V.i.202-206]
"Curiously" means something like "oddly," over-ingeniousand on the wrong scale. Undeterred, Hamletrushes on to clinch his point:
No, faith, not a jot, but to follow him thither with modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it. Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth, of earth we make loam, and why of that loam whereto he was converted might they not stop a beer-barrel?
[V.i.206-212]
Highest and lowest are one in the Hamlet-world. Butthey aren't for us, and our representative in that world isHoratio. Where theatricalism governs all, and Hamlet ismaster of the revels, we hold fast to Horatio, who is toodrab to be theatrical. We hope we are not drab, but wecannot keep up with Hamlet who is always out ahead ofhimself.
We may wonder, Where does Horatio find the eloquencethat responds so beautifully to Hamlet's final"The rest is silence"? Horatio utters a hope-not acertainty-for an angelic chorus:
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince, And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.
[V.II.3
Continues...
Excerpted from Hamletby Harold Bloom Copyright © 2007 by Harold Bloom. Excerpted by permission.
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