Hamlet and Meaning

I.
Either meaning is transcendentally signified, or it is not. In Hamlet, it is not. Thus Hamlet's predicament: there are no set principles upon which to act, so he must define them himself. No mean task, that.

A. D. Nuttall uses the word "vertiginous" to describe Hamlet's famous line "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Indeed, the entire play could be described as vertiginous. Hamlet's vertigo, then, is the consequence of understanding that things are only what you define them to be, that you are only what your mind defines yourself to be. Here is the power of mind, which is both a creative force and a destructive force at once. Out of it, Hamlet must invent a self. He has less than four acts left to do it. How?

II.
Polonius offers us the stoic commonplace, so often quoted out of context, "to thine own self be true." To determine the utility of this advice, we must not only look at the character who speaks these words (at best, a doddering fool; at worst, right-hand to a fratricidal murderer) but also consider how they might apply to Hamlet himself were the advice given to him: to what self ought he to be true? Hamlet begins the play a mopey undergrad and ends as something entirely different, not quite a warrior, but someone who can play the role of the warrior to good effect. In between (that is, for the vast bulk of the play), he is nebulously defined. Vertigo is his only identity.

Hamlet is merely an amalgam of words, always shifting, disappearing. He wishes the body to "resolve itself into a dew," but it is only identity that proves itself vaporous, not the body for which Hamlet has so much disdain. Either he possesses no self to which to be true or the self to which he ought be true is no self that's going to get him anywhere he wants to be. Hamlet is a modern character because he faces the same predicament we face in the modern world: he must invent the idea of that self that he hopes to become, and he must then struggle to become it. Easier said than done, even for a character whose only existence is words on a page (or drifting to the heavens from the stage).

III.
Thus Hamlet's preoccupation with drama, which is also Prospero's preoccupation with drama, which also must certainly be Shakespeare's obsession with drama. It is through drama that Hamlet hopes to discover truth. One philosophy of Polonius that is actionable: "by indirections find directions out." Reality--that is, certainty--can be mined by sifting carefully the grains of illusion.

It has been observed that Hamlet is out of place in his own play, a tricksy fool miscast in the part of the prince. Hamlet needs to learn his part, and once he does the actions will define him.

IV.
Harold Bloom says that Hamlet is no more obsessed with death than any other Shakespeare play, but that can't be right. A play that not only contemplates life and death but hinges on suicidal impulse must be said to explore the meaning of death from a singular perspective. The core of the play is the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and in this speech Hamlet identifies the uncertainty of death--"the undiscovered country"--as that which "puzzles the will." Hamlet does not know if death is something he ought to embrace or something he ought to flee from. He accuses himself of cowardice, but if this is so it is a cowardice in need of qualification: a metaphysical cowardice--looking over the edge of the abyss and not knowing where to place your foot--and no mere knocking of the knees with fright.

Hamlet's core problem is that he does not understand the meaning of death.  Once he figures that out, he can learn how to live, even if to do so means to proceed posthaste toward his own certain death.  Thus, as Montaigne, quoting Cicero, has it: "To philosophize is to learn how to die."  Hamlet confronts the uncertainty of death until he finds certainty: and the certainty is that of the grave. This knowledge becomes bedrock for him in Act 5.

V.
The experience upon which Hamlet forges an identity--the experience upon which he rights himself and overcomes his vertigo--is the direct confrontation with death. More than Fortinbras, more then the gravedigger or even Yorick, it is the soil itself--the desolate patch of ground that Fortinbras sends an army to its potential doom to gain, the muck of Yorick's grave, the fresh dirt of Ophelia's--the soil that he will relentlessly become, that gives Hamlet certain knowledge of death. Once he knows it--once he has prepped for his part, practiced the method--then he knows he can play the part. "The readiness is all": Hamlet decides to determine his being through his actions and not through his death. He decides to accept his fate and not to defy it. He will face the uncertainty, which has become a certainty: that the "quintessence of dust" is indeed just that, just so many skulls in the dirt.

VI.
Ultimately, Hamlet goes beyond good and evil, beyond God, beyond character as it is traditionally understood, to a secular mode of being that is on its own level, framed in the mind. There is a relativism at work here, both ethical and epistemological, and it is true that Hamlet--like every other Shakespeare play--offers no moral truths. In fact, it is predicated on the assumption that there are no hard and fast moral truths as we wish to understand them.  That is, there are no transcendentally signified moral truths.  The only values that matter are the ones that Hamlet himself resolves to believe in.

One cannot disavow relativism simply because it bears the potential to present unpleasant consequences. Hamlet gives us those unpleasant consequences--and, in its final act, a way to get past them. It is the power of the mind that causes trouble for Hamlet--more so than his uncle, a middling sort of villain for Shakespeare--but it is also the power of the mind that renders to Hamlet a sense of self, forged from experience.