Hamlet

The RSC Shakespeare
Edited by Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen
Chief Associate Editor: Héloïse Sénéchal
Associate Editors: Trey Jansen, Eleanor Lowe, Lucy Munro, Dee Anna
Phares, Jan Sewell

Hamlet
Textual editing: Eric Rasmussen
Introduction and “Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater”: Jonathan Bate
Commentary: Héloïse Sénéchal
Scene-by-Scene Analysis: Esme Miskimmin
In Performance: Karin Brown (RSC stagings), Jan Sewell (overview),
Jonathan Bate (captions)
The Director’s Cut (interviews by Jonathan Bate and Kevin Wright):
Michael Boyd, John Caird, Ron Daniels

Editorial Advisory Board
Gregory Doran, Chief Associate Artistic Director,
Royal Shakespeare Company
Jim Davis, Professor of Theatre Studies, University of Warwick, UK
Charles Edelman, Senior Lecturer, Edith Cowan University,
Western Australia
Lukas Erne, Professor of Modern English Literature,
Université de Genève, Switzerland
Maria Evans, Director of Education, Royal Shakespeare Company
Akiko Kusunoki, Tokyo Woman’s Christian University, Japan
Ron Rosenbaum, author and journalist, New York, USA
James Shapiro, Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
Columbia University, USA
Tiffany Stern, Fellow and Tutor in English, University of Oxford, UK

Introduction

Hamlet’s Questions

Revenge

Conscience and Resolution

How Many
Hamlets
?

Talking About Hamlet

About the Text

Key Facts

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

List of Parts

Act 1

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Act 2

Scene 1

Scene 2

Act 3

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Act 4

Scene 1

Scene 2

Scene 3

Scene 4

Scene 5

Scene 6

Act 5

Scene 1

Scene 2

Textual Notes

Second Quarto Passages That Do Not Appear in the Folio

Scene-by-Scene Analysis

Hamlet
in Performance: The RSC and Beyond

Four Centuries of
Hamlet:
An Overview

At the RSC

The Director’s Cut: Michael Boyd, John Caird, and Ron Daniels

References

Shakespeare’s Career in the Theater

Beginnings

Playhouses

The Ensemble at Work

The King’s Man

Shakespeare’s Works: A Chronology

Further Reading and Viewing

Acknowledgments and Picture Credits

The mood of
Hamlet
is set by its opening exchange: “Who’s there?” “Nay, answer me.…” The play creates the illusion of asking as many questions of its audience and interpreters as we may ask of it. Shakespeare won’t tell us who he is or where he stands. Instead, he makes us—and our culture—reveal ourselves. That is the source of his endurance and one of the reasons why
Hamlet
has long been regarded as his greatest, or at least his most characteristic, play.

The Prince of Denmark himself is the most famously interrogative of all dramatic characters. He is Shakespeare’s ultimate man of words. The actor who plays him has to learn over 340 speeches; the role has a higher proportion of its play’s words (nearly 40 percent) than any other in Shakespeare. Hamlet’s favorite intellectual move is to make an action that he witnesses—a player weeping, a skull tossed from an old grave—into the occasion for speculation: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should weep for her?,” “Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs, your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?” In watching or reading the play, we are moved, like Hamlet, to ask the big questions: What should we believe? How should we act? What happens after death? In whose version of the truth should we have faith?

Horatio, the commentator who comes closest to being the voice of the audience, says that he “in part” believes stories about ghosts and portents. His qualifier is a watchword for the whole play. Humankind is
in part
a godlike creature, full of mental and verbal powers, “The beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.” But, to take the other part, we are also “quintessence of dust”—the politician, the lawyer, the heroic man of action (Alexander the Great), and the humble clown (Yorick) all end up in the same place.

Like the wood in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, but with tragic as opposed to comic consequences, Elsinore is a place where “everything seems double.” Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are a double act engaged to spy on Hamlet, with the result that he has “at each ear a hearer.” Hardly anyone in the play seems able to speak without producing a double epithet: “the sensible and true avouch / Of mine own eyes,” “the gross and scope of my opinion,” “post-haste and rummage in the land,” “the grace and blush of modesty,” and so on. Stage props also come in pairs: two contrasting portraits of two brothers, a pair of rapiers (one of which is sharpened and anointed for the kill), two skulls. Entrances seem to repeat themselves: the appearances of the Ghost; Hamlet overheard in meditation, first with a book, later with his reflections on being and not being; the king and Gertrude in their respective private rooms after the trauma of the
Mousetrap
play; Ophelia’s two mad scenes.

The story of a son seeking vengeance for his father’s death is doubled after Hamlet kills Polonius: “by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his,” remarks Hamlet of Laertes. The motif is redoubled in the figure of Young Fortinbras out to avenge the defeat of Old Fortinbras. A further commentary is provided by the Player’s speech about Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, furiously seeking atonement for his father’s loss by slaughtering old King Priam. But this might be construed as a negative example: Priam himself is an “unnervèd father” and his slaughter moves a wife and mother, Hecuba, to distraction. If Hamlet were to become a killing machine like Pyrrhus, he would be diminishing himself to the inhumanity of his adversary, besides emotionally destroying his mother: that is his dilemma “bounded in a nutshell.”

Hamlet is a student, a model for the perpetual students and idealists who populate later literature, especially in Germany and Russia. Like Shakespeare’s other highly intellectual drama,
Troilus and Cressida
, this is a play that debates the great questions of epistemology, ethics, and metaphysics. “Humanism,” the dominant educational theory of the sixteenth century, proposed that wisdom was to be derived from book learning. The student developed the arts of language through his rhetorical training, while collecting the wisdom of the ancients in the form of citations and
sententiae
copied into a commonplace book. Polonius’ maxims on how Laertes should behave when away from home, climaxing in the cliché “to thine own self be true,” are classic examples. The art of “reason” was refined through the study of “common themes,” one of which was “death of fathers.” Reason and judgment were supposed to prevail over will and passion. The Stoicism of Seneca provided a model for the use of “philosophy” as protection against the fickleness of fortune and the vicissitudes of court politics.

Hamlet’s uncle must once have been a good student. He is a master of balanced rhetoric, the measure and decorum of his verse belying his crime against the order of nature and state:

He thinks he knows, and that everyone in the court will accept, what is the appropriate length of time to mourn the death of a brother, husband, father.

Hamlet despises such propriety. He is not interested in the “common” way of behaving. He speaks for the “particular,” the individual. “Mourning duties,” maintained for a set period, are to him mere outward show, the signs of a “seeming” with which he refuses to play along. He has “that within which passeth show”: the solitary self is set against social custom. He has returned from university determined to “wipe away” all the customary wisdom of Stoic decorum, all that “discourse of reason” which humanist theorists regarded as the gift that set men above the beasts. He will have nothing to do with “saws of books” or the codes of behavior that “youth and observation” are supposed to copy from their humanist texts. After encountering the ghost, he vows to fill his commonplace book (“my tables”) from experience instead of books.

This new way of seeing is initially regarded by his fellow students Horatio and Marcellus as no more than “wild and whirling words,” madness brought on by an encounter with an evil spirit. But Hamlet knows what he is doing. He tries on his “antic disposition” as a way of testing the limits of the rational “philosophy” embodied by Horatio. Ophelia tells of how she witnessed Hamlet utter a sigh that seemed to “end his being.” That end is also a beginning: the birth of a new man dedicated to the proposition that the opposite of reason is not madness, but true feeling. Later, when Ophelia is mad, she is described as “Divided from herself and her fair judgement, / Without the which we are pictures or mere beasts.” When Hamlet feigns madness, by contrast, he speaks with true judgment, as even Polonius half recognizes: “A happiness that often madness hits on, which reason and sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of.”

Hamlet
is a political drama as well as a play about the journey of an individual self. It begins with portents betokening “some strange eruption to our state.” It holds up a mirror to a world of royalty, courtiers, politicians, and ambassadors, but also ordinary people: students, actors, gravediggers, even (on the margins) an underclass of “lawless resolutes” following Fortinbras and a “rabble” who want Laertes to be king.

“Denmark’s a prison”: Hamlet is cabined, cribbed and confined by his princely birth, by the machinations of statecraft, and by the limitations of the material world. In his melancholy, when he complains that he has lost interest in all gentlemanly pursuits (“custom of exercise”), he points to the “canopy” over the stage. The self-conscious allusion to the architecture of the Globe Theatre hints at how he finds his freedom: in play, first by pretending to be mad, then through theater. It is the arrival of the actors that reinvigorates him. Hamlet loves plays and the players because he recognizes the power of acting to expose the feigning of public life, the fact that courtiership and rhetorical decorum are themselves but performances. He comes to the truth through “a fiction” and “a dream of passion.” In this he can only be regarded as an apologist for the art of his creator.