 |
| Henry Fuseli's Horatio, Hamlet, and the Ghost (1798) image courtesy of wikipedia.org |
Death. Madness. This is how a kingdom destroys itself.
Forget all the famous speeches. Forget the endless phrases turned so well they have worked their way irrevocably into the lexicon. Lay aside the speculations on the nature of mankind, on the love between a mother and son, the duty of a monarch towards his kingdom.
Put all of this aside, and consider only three questions.
Question One. Is Hamlet experiencing reality, or is he going out of his mind?
Hamlet:O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself aking of infinite space—were it not that I have bad dreams.
Act 2, Scene 2
Consider this one question with the emotional imperative that "who did it?" would have in a good mystery, and everything else in the play will take rank around your answer.
How do we tell when someone is crazy? They see and hear things that aren't there, hearing voices or receiving instructions from persons no one else sees or hears. They behave in a way that reflects paranoia, believing they are in danger from strange or immaterial sources. They suffer from disorganized thoughts and delusions, they behave erratically and in a way not in accordance with reality, sometimes becoming a violent threat to themselves and others.
For newcomers, the plot of Hamlet is both simply and devilishly tricky, depending on how closely you look. The short version is Hamlet is the prince of Denmark, and his father, the king, has died while he was at school before the play begins, and is now the Ghost. His mother, Queen Gertrude, has married his father's brother Claudius, who is now the King, within a month of his father's death.
The first scene of the play is our first hint as to whether or not Hamlet is insane. In it, two guards and Horatio, a college friend of Hamlet's lately arrived in Denmark, witness the appearance of the Ghost, a spectral warrior walking Elsinore Castle's walls in the middle of the night, in the shape of the dead king. They resolve to tell Hamlet about it, as he may be the one person the Ghost will speak to, and so find out what it wants and why it haunts them.
Right off the bat, it seems like we're on solid footing. The whole scene is about Horatio not believing the two guards when they tell him about the Ghost, and then his stunned conversion to a believer when the thing really shows up and walks by.
Strange things are happening, yes. Few of us have seen ghosts, fewer have been invited by others to go see a ghost and then have it actually turn up. But if there's one way we feel sure about being not crazy, it's if other people agree that what we're seeing is really happening.
So they go tell Hamlet, who enters the play moodily, raving about his grief over his father's recent death and muttering about his mother's marriage, and who does he meet? Horatio and the two worthy guards, who tell him exactly what he wants to hear, that his father is alive, at least in Ghost form, and wants probably to talk to him. So he goes and does so.
But do the guards go with him? No. He and the Ghost go off alone because it beckons to him, and he is the only one to hear the Ghost speak.
What does he hear? Exactly what he wanted to hear. That the man who married his mother, his uncle, is the one who poisoned and killed his father. Furthermore, the Ghost is now a doomed spirit locked in Purgatory for who knows how long because he was killed without being first shriven. Finally, it's now up to Hamlet to kill his uncle and get vengeance for his father's death.
So his father's alive, or at least he can still talk to him, and his uncle's to blame for everything wrong in his life, and there's something Hamlet can do to help his father out: act violently against the person he already felt the most violent against.
The problem is, his uncle is now the King, and a wily one at that, and people don't tend to take assassinations very agreeably.
So what does Hamlet do? If you've read the play you know: he spends the next three and a half acts, most of the play, trying to decide whether to kill the King or not, and how to do so.
Step one is to conceal everything: swear the guards and Horatio to secrecy, try and tell the girlfriend what you've heard but decide not to, and start acting crazy so that no one can guess what's really on your mind.
Step two ought to be simple: get the king alone, and get it over with. But what does Hamlet do next? After from a lot of chatting with other friends, who I'll mention later, and some speeches, he resolves to trick the King into confessing to the murder by staging a play, which will feature a man poisoning his lord for his estate and later getting the love of his victim's wife, and watching his reaction.
Why does Hamlet do this?
He says it's because the Ghost may well have been not his father but some demon trying to trick him into damnation by compounding one act of violence with another.
But we can easily see a deeper meaning here, instead of Hamlet's worrying whether the Ghost he saw was an angel or a demon. In addressing the earlier while they were alone, begging it to speak to him, he actually said
"Be you spirit of health, or goblin damned, bring with you airs from heaven or blasts from hell, though comest in such a questionable form that I shall speak to thee, I'll call thee Hamlet, King, father, royal Dane, oh answer me!"Act 1 Scene 5
So it wasn't so important then that the Ghost be legit, and not some evil spirit loosed to do him harm.
I think it's fair to judge that Hamlet's real concern was whether he saw anything at all, really heard those things the Ghost said, and whether he really has to go through with this violent act, or if there's a way out of it, if his uncle isn't really guilty of the murder.
And even if his father's Ghost was real, and really beseeched him to seek vengeance, that does not make the planned murder of the new King any less of a murder.
Hamlet stages the play, and low and behold, the King jumps up after the critical moment and runs away saying he needs a light. (All his dutiful followers race after him to help.)
So Hamlet has his confirmation. What does he do? He gets the King alone, while his royal highness is in confession, and -- chickens out. Since the King is confessing, he reasons, his royal soul is spotless and ready to go to heaven, and killing him now would be a favor, compared to how the King treated Hamlet's dead father.
Ironically, at the same time, the King has an inner monologue about how repentance is impossible for him, since he is unable to feel sorry for inheriting the kingdom and his lovely Queen, but Hamlet hears this not.
Hamlet puts it off the violence until he might catch the King in some guilty deed, perhaps in bed with his mother (his words), and swears he'll get his vengeance then.
What's the next thing that happens?
Well for starters, he accidentally kills Polonius, his girlfriend's dad and the King's windbag advisor, while talking with his mother. He hears a man moving behind one of the curtains hanging in her bedroom, whips out his sword, and without a speech stabs at the first thing that moves. Polonius drops dead. More on this later.
But more importantly, when he turns and interrogates his mother for her part in the old king's death, the Ghost reappears and reminds Hamlet A. to seek vengeance and B. not to drag his mother into the matter.
And the Queen cannot see the Ghost at all. Or at least that's what she says.
So is the Ghost in Hamlet's mind? But Horatio and the guards saw it. And if it's not real, then how did Hamlet know his uncle was guilty before he staged the play?
So is the quest itself just a figment of Hamlet's imagination? He just killed a dude over it, and a pretty important person as well. It's way too late to go back on it now.
But how do we tell when someone is crazy?
They see and hear things that aren't there, hearing voices or receiving instructions from persons no one else sees or hears. They behave in a way that reflects paranoia, believing they are in danger from strange or immaterial sources. They suffer from disorganized thoughts and delusions, they behave erratically and in a way not in accordance with reality, sometimes becoming a violent threat to themselves and others.
Hamlet is acting out exactly what he wants to have happen. He is the rightful heir to the throne, or was before this guy came along. He loved his father, or says he did so repeatedly now that he's gone. He judges his uncle as an unworthy successor, and the few scenes of the King's performance in his duty could be construed to show him as more concerned with the benefits of being a king than with its moral obligations.
So who's to say that the young prince, overwrought with the grief we meet him under, hasn't just snapped, as he pretended to be all along, and started killing people because it's the only way he has left to make sense of the world?
Ultimately the play is invincibly ambiguous about whether or not Hamlet is (at least a little bit) crazy.
Meaning we have perfect freedom to see it the way that makes the most sense to us, to interpret it the way we see fit.
No comments:
Post a Comment