Further Thoughts on Hamlet

I.  The Noble Mind.

     Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
     The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune .... (3.1.57)

     Take these again, for to the noble mind
     Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. (3.1.100-101)

The italics are mine, of course.  The first quotation is from Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy, the second from Ophelia's discussion with Hamlet immediately following the soliloquy.  The repetition of phrasing is startling, and coincidence seems unlikely, given that we are dealing with the one writer who boasts the broadest vocabulary in the English-language tradition, a writer who seems to have taken great pains to craft most carefully every expression his characters utter, even if the texts we read from offer only a corrupt rendition of those expressions. 

Ophelia's speech would bear scanning, in its context.  Hamlet's words to Ophelia immediately preceding this speech are cold, cynical even ("No, not I, / I never gave you aught" -- 3.1.95-96).  His words to her immediately after it, however, are stinging, vitriolic, fraught unmistakeably with violent intent.  Is it possible that this speech -- this phrase, noble mind -- is a trigger to Hamlet, a sign that he has been betrayed? 

Who hears Hamlet's soliloquy, besides the prince himself and the audience?  Do the King and Claudius, onstage but withdrawn, hear him, as some productions would have it?  (One imagines them lurking up on the balcony of The Globe.)  Does Ophelia, who is supposed to be standing by with her nose in a book?  Imagine, if you will, a Hamlet who draws aside an arras at the end of his soliloquy, only to find the fair Ophelia there, and her nervous reply afterward.  A possibility, perhaps. 

Or is it that when Hamlet hears these words that so closely echo his own just-recently uttered sentiments, he knows then that she was there, and why she was there, thus provoking him to question her honesty.  The question -- "Ha, ha!  Are you honest?" (3.1.103) -- not only doubts Ophelia's chastity but also her loyalty, her trustfulness, and it echoes Hamlet's mocking, method-in-madness comments to Polonius in 2.2.174-186, which suggest a suspicion that Polonius will use his daughter as a tool in his campaign of espionage.  To Hamlet's mind, both Polonius and Ophelia are part of the apparatus that is against him.  Hamlet knows that Ophelia has, from his perspective, betrayed him. Perhaps, we reason, Ophelia is merely playing the obedient daughter here, but it matters not to Hamlet.  Perhaps father and daughter both are just following orders -- the councilor his king, the daughter her father -- but Hamlet judges guilt by people's actions and not by their intent (cf. the hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the seemingly harsh sentence Hamlet imposes upon them).

Ophelia's post-mortem on the encounter -- "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!" (3.1.150) -- aptly ties it all together thematically, but it misses the mark in judging the quality of Hamlet's mind,  Perhaps his mind is one that works all too well.

II.  The Process of Encountering Death.

(As foregrounding for this idea, it is worth considering Harold Bloom's claim, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, that Yorick served as the young Prince Hamlet's surrogate father and was, perhaps, the inspiration for Hamlet's wit.)

Hamlet begins with one father figure and ends with another. There is at the beginning The Ghost, and at the end Yorick. We start with Hamlet's namesake, end with his father's fool. That Hamlet himself throughout the play resembles the latter rather than the former is the true source of the play's tension. It is only when Hamlet encounters Yorick's remains, though, that he is able to get past the anxiety of Yorick's influence and become his true father's son.

Each figure is a revenant, and each figure is an emblem of one facet of death: Old Hamlet being the afterlife of the soul, Yorick being a truer, more tangible presence: the aftermath of the body. One cannot be touched, the other can be caressed or tossed, kissed, smelt, and eventually put back down into the dirt.

This encounter with Yorick's mortal remains is a significant further step in a process that begins perhaps with Polonius' death and Hamlet's subsequent meditation upon the dead man's corpse, as though by studying the product of death -- a body devoid of its animating principle -- he could come closer to knowing its meaning and thereby settle his lingering questions about the nature of death and spur himself on to further action.  Setting aside the encounter with Prince Fortinbras, certainly an inspiration for Hamlet's eventually springing into action mode in Act V, this event is a turning point for Hamlet.  His leaping into Ophelia's grave is the culmination of the process, the last such event before we see a changed Hamlet in the final acts of the play, one who is ready to "let be" and face what he seems preternaturally to know will be his own imminent death.

Technically, when he handles Yorick's skull Hamlet is expressing disgust at the skull as a kind of metonym for all human remains – he is disgusted at the material dimensions of death and the decay of the human body.  What what can we make of the fact that we see the whole in terms of the Ghost – armed for battle, head to toe – while we see only a part with Yorick – his bare skull? Which provides the more accurate portrayal of death? The Ghost presents the spirit, while the skull presents the material reality of death.  Perhaps, then, the vision of death presented by Act I (that the soul lives on) is overruled by the the vision of death presented in Act V (that death is a kind of material fragmentation.  Parts of you enter the guts of a worm and so forth, while other parts linger in the dirt and are subsequently mistreated by the sexton some years later -- but the soul is nowhere to be found here.  Death cannot be comprehended in its entirely, with all life's armor still intact, but only in bits and pieces, missing a jawbone.  Just like the monsters in Beowulf can only be depicted through synecdoche, the reality of death in Hamlet can only be understood through its parts.

Earlier, Hamlet presents death as the “undiscovered country.”  Has he been there, now?  Has he explored that country now that he has held Yorick’s skull in his hands and leapt into his lover's grave? Do these experiences make death real to him?  The graveyard here is the very landscape of death itself, and it is worthy to note that 5.1 is one of only two scenes that take place outside the walls of Elsinore.

III. The Symmetrical Structure of the Play

In Acts I and V, Hamlet encounters his father figures, both as revenants.  It is ironic, then, that his encounter with the war-like Ghost inspires Hamlet to play the fool -- the man of wit and words -- and that the encounter with the fool inspires Hamlet to put foolish things away and to become the war-like man of action who will not only best his opponent, Laertes, in swordsmanship but also finally gain his revenge against his father's murderer.  It is also appropriate that, in keeping with the medieval tradition of castrating fools so that they are harmless around the women of the house and so that their jibes do not sting so much, Hamlet in fool mode is figuratively a castrato, impotent in his ability to maintain a healthy relationship with his lover and impotent as well in his ability to stir himself to action.  It is also worth noting that we can extrapolate backward from the beginning of Act I to King Hamlet's funeral, and that we can extrapolate forward from the end of Act V to Prince Hamlet's.

In Acts II and IV, Hamlet encounters his foils.  The first is the Player, a man of words and of gestures that typically bear no consequences in real life.  The second is Fortinbras, the consummate man of action of his generation -- as Hamlet's father was to his own.

Act III, then is the emotional core of the play: the famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy and the play-within-the-play.