Will Morrisey Reviews

Prologue

In Lear the hero says, “Ripeness is all.” In Hamlet the hero says, “The readiness is all.” Aristotle considers ripeness the “all” or end of human life. The telos or end of the human soul consists of the virtues, the highest of which is wisdom, the virtue of the philosopher. Faced with death, the pagan will want to say, ‘I lived well, I was a spoudaios, a good man.’ Nature itself is teleological, each thing aiming at its own “ripeness” or perfection. As that most insightful of Shakespeare’s readers, Michael Platt, has remarked, King Lear lives in pagan or pre-Christian England, and his tragedy is that of a pagan hero, albeit one whose daughter argues like the Apostle Paul in Second Corinthians. Christianity is as it were closing in on Lear and his kingdom.

When confronting death, readiness is the Christian virtue. The soul must be prepared to meet its Maker. For that, it needs grace more than virtue, although it is likely to have virtues, too, among the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Hamlet’s soul struggles between Christian faith and the passions of the political man—the love of honor and of victory, moral indignation and the rage for justice. But his psychomachia consists also of the love of wisdom, philosophy, and the love of a woman and of parents. He is not yet a philosopher, but he is the only character Shakespeare shows philosophizing, thinking through theoretical problems as well as deliberating upon political problems. He is a philosophizing prince portrayed reasoning about theory and practice. (The philosopher Prospero, by contrast, delivers philosophic orations—the ripe fruits of philosophizing. As for Brutus, he is a republican politician in the grips of a philosophic doctrine, Stoicism—not a philosopher at all.) Politics, philosophy, religion: These are the conflicting elements of The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.

 

1. Act I: What Is Rotten in the State of Denmark?

Denmark is dark and “bitter cold” (I. i. 7). Denmark is earthy (Horatio and Marcellus are “Friends to this ground” [I. i. 14])—no magic island, no Belmont, no Forest of Arden. Denmark is a grave, containing the stinking corpse of a murdered man, King Hamlet. Danes are decadent, their custom of drunken carousal making the Danes “traduced and taxed of other nations” (I. iv. 17).

“Who’s there?” (I. i. 1): the first line of the play is spoken by a guardian, who needs to know the identity of those who approach, so he can classify them as friends or enemies of the political community. The political man asks ‘Who?’ questions, the most important of which is, ‘Who rules?’ The religious man also asks ‘Who?’ questions; in the Bible to know is to know someone, carnally or spiritually. Who rules? God rules, on earth as in Heaven.

The philosopher asks not ‘Who?’ but ‘What is?’ At first sight, Horatio seems philosophic. The guardians have told him about the ghost, but he will not countenance hearsay; he “will not let belief take hold of him” (I. i. 24). He believes what he sees. When he sees the ghost, he says “It harrows me with fear and wonder” (I. i. 43); there is a conflict in his soul between superstitious dread (fear of ghosts, as distinguished from religious dread, the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom) and the natural and philosophic desire to know. Horatio questions the ghost philosophically, asking “What art thou…? (I. i. 46), not ‘Who are you?’ Yet Horatio’s response to the ghost’s silence is not heightened wonder but an attempt at prophecy: It “bodes some strange eruption in our state” (I. i. 69), he fears. Later, his fear overwhelms his desire to know, as he worries that the ghost will draw Hamlet into madness, “deprive you sovereignty of reason” (I. iv. 73). Unlike Hamlet, Horatio refuses to pursue the ghost, to learn what it wants. Horatio is a student and a good friend; he wants to be a philosopher, but lacks the intellectual intrepidity and the spiritual courage to harrow Hell. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (I. v. 165-166, emphasis added), which is Stoicism. But not in all philosophy. The philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, for example, which would have been taught at medieval Wittenberg, accounts for ghosts, holy and unholy.

Horatio is, however, a good political historian, giving an accurate account of Denmark’s political situation. Thirty years earlier (we will learn later that it was Prince Hamlet’s birthday [V. i. 130]), King Hamlet had slain King Fortinbras of Norway, winning territory. The young Fortinbras now seeks to recover that territory by force, and the Danes prepare for war. “[T]his warlike state” (I. ii. 9) often does that; as Bellforest relates in his Histoires Tragiques, Danes and Norwegians were pirates and warriors, with kings rivaling one another for glory. But Claudius, King Hamlet’s brother and successor to the throne, prefers negotiation to war, dispatching ambassadors to the Norwegian king in a successful attempt to have young Fortinbras restrained. This suggests that Claudius in some way does not partake of the conventions of his people, particularly their warlike conventions. It will transpire that Claudius secretly rejects many conventions.

Hamlet’s first speeches, including his first soliloquy, concern the philosophic theme, nature, and its relation to Christianity. He identifies himself in relation to King Claudius as “A little more than kin”—now a stepson—”and less than kind” (I. ii. 65)—less than natural, and also less than kindly-disposed to his demi-father, whom Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, has in his judgment married rather too precipitately after the old king’s death. Indeed, “a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer” (I. ii. 150-151). In addition to this unreasonable precipitateness is the incestuous or apparently unnatural aspect of marrying a brother-in-law—a liaison made to look unnatural by the law’s conflation of natural with legal brothers. In his first soliloquy, Hamlet ‘Platonizes,’ wishing that his flesh, his body, would melt; he regrets the canon law against suicide. More moderately, he would ‘abstract himself’ from Denmark and return to university in Wittenberg. His Platonic eros for abstraction issues from his (not-so-Platonic) disgust at the world, at things of the body, which rots. This world is ruled by “Things rank and gross in nature” (I, ii. 136), specifically the bestial rulers of Denmark. To have been so betrayed by his mother is to be forced to confront a major philosophic theme: the genesis of the high from the low, the nobler from the base—a problem lessened in Christianity by the doctrine of the genesis of the high and the low alike from nothing, but by the highest, God. The suspected usurpation of Claudius threatens Hamlet’s own natural and legal/conventional, hereditary accession to the throne; his mother’s suspected part in the suspected usurpation raises questions about his own ‘breeding,’ his own identity. With such parents, who and what is Hamlet?

The theologico-political or ‘identity’ question, ‘Who am I?’ leads to the philosophic or ‘nature’ question, ‘What is man?’ A bad custom in a nation—Danish drunkenness—resembles “some vicious mole of nature” in a person (I. iv. 24), a corruption that breaks down reason and rots nobility, those distinctively human characteristics. There is no tragedy without a tragic flaw, which breaks down reason or philosophy and nobility or the (natural and/or conventional) title to political rule. Hamlet calls the ghost “old mole” (I. v. 161); the ghost’s conception of nature is revenge (I. v. 81), that is, an expression of the thumotic or manly passion Claudius accuses Prince Hamlet of lacking (I. ii. 94). In response to the ghost, Hamlet vows to remember the ghost’s advice: “Thy commandments all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain” (I. v. 102-103, emphasis added). The spirit’s spirited commandment replaces religious commandment; the commands issuing from the ghostly image of the natural father proves more authoritative in the soul of Hamlet than the commands of the Father of fathers. Hamlet has his companions swear secrecy not on the Cross but the sword.

 

2. Act II: The Plot’s the Thing

The ghost is one adviser in a play full of advice; Hamlet’s plot is one plot in a play full of plots. Polonius advises kings; his son, Laertes, advises sister Ophelia; Horatio advises Hamlet; Hamlet advises himself and the actors. Hamlet is the Shakespeare play most full of aphorisms. The best advice is wise; advice, in the memorable form of the well-crafted aphorism, is the intersection of philosophy and politics. The worst advice is like the act of Claudius against his brother and king: poison in the ear.

Plotting is the intersection of politics and drama—as is acting, which is done by both players and politicians. The second act is especially rich in plots. Polonius plots to spy on his hedonistic son (the ‘Epicurean’ counterpart to Stoic Horatio) in Paris. Hamlet sets in motion his own plot—to feign madness—which Polonius misinterprets as the result of disappointed eros directed at Ophelia. Madness is the opposite of philosophy, which obeys the Delphic injunction to know thyself; seeming madness seems to separate Hamlet from “th’understanding of himself” (II. ii. 19). Claudius plots with courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to discover the cause of Hamlet’s madness. Gertrude knows her son so little that she supposes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be his most intimate friends, confusing  childhood friends with a potential philosopher’s intellectual companion. Claudius attempts to root out subversion by knowing the mind of a potential rival, even as a tyrant typically suspects a philosopher or anyone else who shows signs of intelligence. An additional worry is Hamlet’s undeniable nobility, his princeliness: “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go” (II. 185). for his part, Hamlet in his seeming madness, like the fool in his folly, enables him to speak truth to a king and to mock the false wisdom of the king’s adviser, who plots with the king to test Hamlet’s supposed love-madness. The political philosopher who is also a politic philosopher could do worse than feign madness. Philosophers are indeed love-mad in a sense, but their eros aims at wisdom more than women. Wisdom tells them, as Hamlet tells the treacherous false friends, that man seems noble, angelic, even godlike, but is less than he seems (II. ii. 283-298). Playacting and plotting enable Hamlet to be and not to be.

Plotting has one purpose in common with philosophy: discovery. Drama has the same purpose. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern hire actors to entertain Hamlet, in an attempt to ‘discover’ him. The actors are tragedians from the city, now exiled by city rulers who have banned plays, perhaps because they, like plots, might subvert the authority of city rulers: goose quills may overthrow rapiers (II. ii. 327-328). Within the actors’ companies themselves, the theme of fathers and sons, rulers and successors, has become as controversial as in Denmark generally (II. ii. 323-340). Swearing by Christ’s blood, Prince Hamlet comments, with Socratic irony, “There is somethin in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out” (II. ii. 346-347). Christ’s blood is more than natural, as Hamlet reminds Polonius, who would do better justice to the players: by “God’s bodkin” (God’s body, Christ), Hamlet exclaims, do “much better” than justice to them, Polonius (II. ii. 498), because sinful men justly deserve only punishment. Christ’s grateful mercy resembles aristocratic largesse: “Use them after your own honor and dignity,” as “the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty” (II. ii. 498-501).

For all his irony, Hamlet is no philosophic atheist. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in pagan philosophy. The ghost may be a demon making lying allegations about Polonius’ guilt, tempting Hamlet to commit a damnable crime. Hamlet’s plot will discover the king’s real nature, and not incidentally the ghost’s true nature. “The play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (II. ii. 571-572). Ancient tragedy, according to Aristotle, makes plot central; Hamlet is a play or plot about plotting, but the purpose of plotting is to discover nature, both in the ‘What is? and the ‘Who is?’ sense. A religious man would pray to god to reveal knowledge about the ghost. Hamlet reasons. Hamlet is a play about reasoning, about philosophizing and the conditions of philosophizing, that is, loving wisdom and pursuing it ardently. To plot a play about philosophizing, one must see that philosophy has its own ‘drama,’ dialectic.

 

3. Act III: Being and Not-Being

According to the Saxo Grammaticus, Prince Amleth feigned stupidity and madness so that his murdering uncle would not murder him; “none could open the secret lock of the young man’s wisdom.” [1] Guildenstern complains to Claudius of Hamlet’s “crafty madness” which cloaks his knowledge (III. i. 8). Polonius tells his king, “‘Tis too much proved, that with devotion’s visage / And pious action we do sugar o’er / The devil himself” (III. i. 46-48). Claudius already knows this—of himself, whose “painted word” resembles the cosmetics on a harlot’s face (III. i. 53). Both goodness and evil—religion, philosophy, and criminality—may at times go in camouflage, protecting themselves from hostile rulers or laws. This play about a philosopher or potential philosopher does not overlook the conditions of philosophizing; for Hamlet, the chief condition of philosophy is privacy, which enables him to soliloquize, to think things through on his own.

Camouflage or subterfuge is a seeming, a kind of not-being. Hamlet’s second soliloquy begins, “To be, or not to be, that is the question….” (III. i. 56). Death is the most radical camouflage or not-being, final proof against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. But there is a problem, the problem of the first soliloquy, and also the problem posed by the ghost: To die is to sleep, but to sleep may be to dream. Is there life after death? Is Hell real? Unlike dogmatic atheists who call themselves philosophers, Hamlet regards death as “the undiscovered country” (III. i. 79). Opposing God’s bodkin is the “bare bodkin,” the dagger of the suicide (III. i. 76); bareness or nakedness or nature contrasts with the concealedness of the Biblical God, who, like the persecuted philosopher and the prosecuted criminal, keeps His own counsel. [2]  The would-be suicide, if not a faithful materialist, stays his hand; “conscience does make cowards of us all” (III. i. 83). without conscience and prudence—intuitive knowledge and practical reasoning—human life would be simple enough; thumotic passion, spiritedness, the promptings of the ghost or unholy spirit, “the native,” natural “hue of resolution” (III. i. 84) would prevail over the desires. But spiritedness is “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” (III. i. 84-85). Thought “puzzles the will” (III. i. 80). Nietzsche will call Christianity and reasoning alike diseases of the will; man is the tightrope walker who must fall, a sick animal to be overcome. Hamlet is more cautious, in a way more philosophical, more did-passionate. He knows truth is not a woman. His duplicitous mother taught him that; catching Ophelia in a lie (III. I. 127-129) confirms that finding.

Although truth is one thing most needful, truth is weak. “[T]he power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness” (III. i. 111-113). Even Christianity, preaching that the truth shall set you free, does not claim that truth is immediately powerful on earth at all times. Christianity therefore honestly holds out martyrdom as a prospect for Christians. The philosopher or wisdom-lover also knows his own weakness in the world. Judging from the example of Claudius, truth in a political man is weaker still against the power of bodily eros. A political man’s weak truth falls victim to his desire for beauty; to gaze at Aspasia, one had better be Socrates than Pericles. Hamlet, whom Ophelia rightly calls “the observed of all observers” (III. I. 130), a man of “noble and most sovereign reason” (III. I. 153), under the watch of a most ignoble sovereign, must act—not directly and with manly openness, but in the sense of a play-actor. He must plot, disguise himself, seem, not-be, commit a faked suicide, a sacrifizio d’intellectio, in order to act justly, punish the murderer. He must become both philosopher and king. His famous, supposed ‘irresolution’ or hesitation—which has burdened his reputation with comparisons to such as Adlai Stevenson and Mario Cuomo—reflects the daunting difficulties of being both philosopher and king.

Hence Hamlet’s wise or non-Polonian advice to the lesser actors, the lesser tragedians. Here is Hamlet at his most philosophic, in public. The actors are, we recall, in the throes of political difficulties including exile and a crisis of succession—which in politics is always a crisis of legitimacy, striking like a dagger at the heart of political rule or authority. Hamlet speaks to them as if he were an Athenian Stranger, a legislative reformer. Hamlet tells them to fit their gestures to their speeches—to make action congruent with words. They must also avoid the other extreme, not be “too tame” (III. ii. 14). Moderation requires prudence and a degree of autarchia, self-sufficiency: “Let your own discretion be your tutor” (III. ii. 14). Wise playacting in a sense is the natural action; nature is not simple and spirited, but limited, modest. The “purpose of playing” is “to hold as ’twere the mirror up to nature,” reflecting not merely the “image” or externals but the “feature” (III. ii. 17-20). The stock-image of the fool-philosopher has him holding up a mirror to himself. (And notice “as ’twere”: The philosopher knows he has made an image, and calls attention to his making.) The observed of all observers is also self-observed, playing the fool while being ruled by his wisdom, knowing himself as a philosopher and knowing himself to be among non-philosophers in varying degrees foolish or evil. Hamlet’s final advice to the actors is, don’t let the comedians milk the audience for extra laughs. Too much comedy is as fatal to philosophy as too much tragic gesticulation, interfering with the audience’s reasoning about “some necessary question of the play” (III. ii. 36).

The rule of reason enables Hamlet wisely to advise the actors on how to act wisely. It also enables him to govern his friendship with Horatio. Hamlet calls Horatio a man of justice (III. ii. 45). Horatio’s “blood and judgment”—his spiritedness and his reason—are so well-mixed that he is not “a pipe for Fortune’s finger,” not “passion’s slave” (III. ii. 61-64). Unlike the inconstant Gertrude, the treacherous Claudius, the conniving courtiers, Horatio is to be trusted precisely because he can be encourage to be moderate. Hamlet’s friendship for Horatio is not the only exception to his solitude, but it is the only exception that we see enacted. (Another exception is his love for Ophelia, which we don’t see in the scenes between them.) He needs at least one exception to his solitude to assist in his own rational self-governance. Horatio will observe Claudius during the play the actors will stage, a play governed in word and actions by Hamlet. Hamlet will then have (or not have) corroborative evidence of Claudius’ guilt, of the ghost’s story. “[W]e will both our judgments join,” thus governing their “imaginations” (III. ii. 73-74). Soliloquy must give way to dialogue, to dialectic, lest a tiny mole undermine the philosopher’s judgment, reducing a mountain to a mole-hill.

Before the play, with characteristic false heartiness, Claudius asks, “How fares our cousin Hamlet?” (III. ii. 83). “Excellent, i’ faith, of the chameleon’s dish. I eat the air, / Promise-crammed. You cannot feed capons so.” (III. ii. 84-86). Hamlet puns on “fare,” pretending the king means food instead of doing or being, thus concealing his own doing, the actors’ Hamlet-governed action, and his own being or nature, that of a philosophizing prince. A pun is also a play—a play on words. Man is the punning as well as the cunning animal, the one who feeds on words, opinions, promises (hence “i’ faith”: faith is a feeding upon promises). Only dual man, soul and body, who thinks and speaks, speaks and acts, often at once, and is in both senses of being and seeming, that not-being that is also a form of being. For man the play’s the thing. If sufficiently philosophic, the play catches the conscience—even of that heavily guarded soul, the tyrant.

Hamlet’s play begins with a wordless display, a dumbshow re-enacting the murder of King Hamlet. When the actors play Act II, the player-king comments on the brevity of woman’s love, the consequent disjunction between passion and purpose. (“The lady doth protest too much, methinks” (III. ii. 224), comments the real queen on the player-queen.) A purpose born of passion will disappear as soon as the fleeting passions flies away. Only a rational purpose will endure, or perhaps a willful one. If Fortune abuses the passionate and rewards the rational, how can a ruler, that most fortunate of men, discern true friend and lovers from friends and lovers of his fortune? This was evidently King Hamlet’s failure. It will not be the failure of his son. A “hollow” or false friend is put to the trial by “want” or misfortune (III. ii. 192). such misfortunes are likely, as there is a disjuncture between “our wills and our fates” (III. ii. 195). Hamlet is no Machiavelli, tempting us to imagine that we can conquer Fortune, beat her into submission. “Our thoughts are our own, their ends none of our own” (III. ii. 197). Any playwright knows this, as soon as the critics have their say next morning. Hamlet rolls the dice, having prudently shaved one corner. He further improves his odds by playing the critic, calling this tragedy a comedy, a mere jest. Just kidding, my liege; “free souls” will not be offended (III. ii. 224). To Ophelia he puns that women “mis-take their husbands,” exchanging a worse for a better (III. ii. 233). Wives must choose husbands as judiciously as rulers and philosophers choose friends. Gertrude hasn’t. “O wonderful son, that can so stonish a mother” (III. ii. 303): Is this not the cry of the mother of every philosophic man?

After parrying the questions of false friend Rosencrantz, Hamlet delivers his third soliloquy. He reminds himself of how to govern himself in dealing with his mother, the source of his being and the reason for his contemplated non-being. His first two soliloquies were on suicide, self-murder. This soliloquy is on murdering one’s parent, the over-spirited, immoderate, false-noble attempt to destroy low origins. such immoderation would be unnatural, an overstepping of nature’s ‘modesty’ or limits; “O heart lose not thy nature” (III. ii. 362). But nature and religious precept do not preclude the use of punishing words, even in addressing a mother, if she is errant. “I will speak daggers to her, but use none” (III. ii. 363). This is closer to Christ’s bodkin—risen in order to return one day in judgment—not the bare bodkin of self-destruction, of which mother-murder is one form. “My tongue and soul in this be hypocrites” (III. ii. 365), doubling themselves like puns or actors, governing themselves, forcing their vice to pay tribute to their speaker’s virtue. Hamlet’s punishing words will require him to punish words. To fail in this would be to not-be Hamlet, to be Nero, an impassioned tyrant. In a reversal of the Platonic plot, the potential philosopher tries his parent, rather than being tried by that amalgamation of parents that is the city.

Against Hamlet’s virtuous hypocrisy, this noble lying, Shakespeare sets the vicious hypocrisy of the courtiers, and of the tyrant. Guildenstern sycophantically tells Claudius that obedience to the tyrant’s criminal commands expresses a “most holy and religious fear” (III. iii. 8), inasmuch as so many lives depend upon His Majesty. Privately, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern fear that His Majesty’s fall would take them down, too. Claudius soliloquizes in seeming prayer that guilt makes a man double, like a pun. A good philosopher in an evil regime is a pun or a double; an evil ruler among a decent, or even somewhat corrupt people is another pun. Claudius’s public duplicity derives from a duplicity of soul. He wants God’s mercy, but mercy comes only at the price of repentance, and repentance would require that he cease being a tyrant, seeming-to-be-a-king, give up his unjustly acquired gain, a sacrifice he will not make. This ruler, who should be a man of action, can no longer act; he cannot even pray, but only seems to. He is the embodiment of a bad pun. Inasmuch as an action’s “true nature” lies “above” (III. iii. 60, 62)—in the sight of God—and “words without thought never to heaven go” (III. iii. 98), a word being the action of a thought, Claudius, better at preying than praying, has doubled over from being the hunter to the hunted, caught by a play titled “The Mouse Trap.”

Polonius also puns in action. Hiding behind the curtain, this seeming-philosopher contrives both to be and not to be present. He listens to the trial of the mother by the son, who shows his philosophic nature by acknowledging the lowness of his origins: “would it were not so, you are my mother” (III. iv. 15). Like the good actors to the king, like the fool to himself, Hamlet holds up a mirror to her nature, which implicates his own. When Polonius foolishly unconceals himself, in words but not in action, imagining he must defend the Queen and imagining still further that words alone could do so, Hamlet mistakes the non-philosopher for the tyrant and kills him. Hamlet’s tragic flaw, his old mole, his spiritedness or thumos, acting on words only, not waiting to see, causes him to kill an innocent old fool, who, now as always, talked too much, thought too little.

Hamlet continues his indictment of his mother. At her age, passion can be no excuse for her misalliance. It must be her judgment that is at fault. Her folly implicates her son, for if a mature woman’s virtue is so changeable, what of the nature, the virtue, of Hamlet, a younger and therefore more passionate person? If truth is a woman, what then? And if the woman in question is the potential philosopher’s mother, what then? Is philosophy then not a passion of the head but the head of a passion, as Marx and Nietzsche contend? At this moment, the ghost reappears. Hamlet sees it. Gertrude cannot see the image of her dead husband; she assumes that Hamlet is mad. But her son, in this play full of advice good and bad, offers advice so sane it is Aristotelian: Do not go to Claudius’ bed; “custom” or habit can improve the soul as well as corrupt it; habituate yourself to virtue by abstaining from vice. ‘Habits’ is another pun; it means custom and clothing. The garment of good habits improves a bare bodkin. Habituation means that acting well, ‘playing good,’ can improve a soul that intends to be good. When it comes to the virtues, moral or intellectual, we must seem before we can be. The ghost here not only steels Hamlet’s resolve but reminds him of the other half of his nature, the natural if imprudent father betrayed by his false brother and inconstant wife, now false father and inconstant mother of Prince Hamlet.

Hamlet’s speech to the queen, his mother, on custom is natural. “I must be cruel only to be kind” (III. iv. 182). His speech, being so natural and so right, has its proper effect. Hamlet now plots with the Queen, discloses his distrust of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his suspicion of the king’s plot to use them to eliminate him. The success of his plot against the king will succeed only if the Queen does not betray her son. She will not. “O, ’tis most sweet / When in one line two crafts directly meet” (III. iv. 213-214). He plots with her, but another two “crafts” will also meet. Claudius’ statecraft will meet Hamlet’s stagecraft, the tyrant’s plot will meet the plot of the philosophizing prince.

 

4. Act IV: Eros Deranged, Thumos Released

Claudius fears Hamlet because Hamlet is “loved of the distracted multitude” (IV. iii. 4). Until now he has been a poor Machiavellian, one who is not thoroughly bad. Machiavelli despises Christianity precisely because it has the effect of making princes inept in their badness. A Christian conscience makes cowards of them. It is “necessary to a prince, if he wants to maintain himself, to learn how to be able not to be good, and to use this and not use it according to necessity.” [3]  Now Claudius resolves to eschew halfway measures. “Diseases desperate grown / By desperate measures are relieved, / Or not at all” (IV. iii. 9-11).

Seeming-mad Hamlet openly taunts Claudius. “A man may fish with the worm”—the courtiers, who will escort Hamlet to England, where Claudius intends him to be killed—”that eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm” (IV. iii. 26-27). This is how “a king may go on a progress through the guts of a beggar” (IV. iii. 29). In effect Hamlet tells Claudius to go to Hell (IV. iii. 33). Hamlet verbally dethrones Claudius in accordance with nature and in accordance with religion.

But Hamlet’s old mole, spiritedness, returns. On his way out of Denmark he comes upon young Fortinbras and his army, on their way to war with Poland. Publicly, Hamlet philosophizes on the absurdity of spending blood or treasure either to conquer Polish land or to defend it. Privately, in his fourth soliloquy, in the central scene of Act IV, he persuades himself that his very humanity—his reason and his spiritedness—requires him to take revenge on his stepfather. He admires the “divine ambition” of Fortinbras and his men (IV. iv. 48). “Rightly to be great / Is not to stir without great argument, / But greatly to find quarrel in a straw / When honor’s at the stake” (IV. iv. 33-36). If real men fight for nothing more substantial than honor, can he “let all sleep”—perchance not to dream?—when Claudius has murdered his father and “stained” his mother? “O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” (IV. iv. 65-66). This is a dangerous conflation of reason and spiritedness, though not yet a fatal one. When Hamlet tricks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, justly sending them to the death Claudius meant for him, and returns to Denmark, he writes to Horatio, saying he’s now “naked in your kingdom” (IV. vii. 41-42); his “bodkin” is “bare,” natural, and he himself is also a dagger, an embodiment of spiritedness, aimed at the tyrant. Denmark is now Horatio’s kingdom more than Hamlet’s, its legitimate heir. Hamlet is now too natural to inherit, weak and vulnerable in conventional terms, naked to his enemies, and yet, precisely because natural, also dangerous, deadly to the tyrant.

Ophelia has gone mad, the victim of the love-madness her late father had misdiagnosed in Hamlet, and of grief at her father’s murder by Hamlet’s hand. If her mad speeches are true, she had succumbed to Hamlet’s erotic advances, advances her brother Laertes had warned her against, quite probably after the fact. Laertes had told her that Hamlet’s love for her might be true, but nonetheless futile, as he would be required to marry her not for love but in consideration of “the safety and health of the whole state” (I. iii. 21). Hamlet’s true love is for wisdom and for his intellectual companion, Horatio; yet Ophelia, who understood him as a man of noble and most sovereign reason, and, even more perceptively, as the observed of all observers, might well have made a worthy wife. Hamlet’s plot—to feign madness and mock her love—and his too-quick spiritedness—the accidental killing of Polonius—caused her derangement and her consequent suicide by drowning—water being the opposite of the fire of her brother’s rage against Hamlet (IV. vii. 188).

For Hamlet and Fortinbras are not the only dangerous men now in Denmark. Laertes has returned from Paris at the news of his father’s death, full of vengeful spirit, his epicureanism purged. A messenger tells Claudius: “The rabble call him lord, / And as the world were now but to begin, / Antiquity forgot, custom not known, / The ratifiers and props of every word, / They cry, ‘Choose we, Laertes shall be king!'” (IV. v. 100-104). Antiquity forgot, a new world, the rabble call him lord: Laertes returns like an avenging Christ, but with no Christlike mercy. Less prudent than Hamlet, he wants revenge even if it means going to Hell. Ophelia’s madness enrages him further, and Claudius easily redirects that rage away from himself and onto Hamlet. In plotting Hamlet’s destruction with him, Claudius tells Laertes of a Norman named Lamord, that is, Death. Lamord is such an excellent horseman that it is as if he “grew into his seat… demi-natured with the brave beast” (IV. vii. 83-86). This centaur-like personage is from The Prince Chapter XVIII, “In What Mode Faith Should Be Kept by Princes.” A prince who proceeds faithfully will lose to a rival who knows “how to get around men’s brains with astuteness.” A prince must “know well how to use the beast and the man,” force as well as law; hence “ancient writers”—Machiavelli does not forget antiquity, finding it useful—”wrote that Achilles, and many other ancient princes, were given to Chiron the centaur to be raised, so that he would look after them with his discipline. to have as teacher a half-beast, half-man means nothing more than that a prince needs to know how to use both natures; and the one without the other is not lasting.” [4]  Claudius is Machiavelli’s disciple, using the man and particularly the beast in Laertes, exploiting Laertes filial love and outraged justice in order to get him to murder a dangerous rival. This adds to the weight of Hamlet’s first complaint about his mother, that a beast would have waited longer to remarry; Claudius pursued this same Machiavellian strategy to her, too, using both the beast and the woman in her to destroy a rival prince.

 

5. Act V: Duel and Dialogues: The Readiness Is All

There are no soliloquies in the final Act. The clowns’ dialogue apes or ‘puns’ a scholastic/philosophic one. They dispute the question, Why should Ophelia, a suicide, receive a Christian burial? They draw the conclusion of a philosopher of the Cynic school: Ophelia receives a Christian burial because she was a gentlewoman.

Horatio and Hamlet also dialogue. Horatio observes that custom or habit has made the clown-gravedigger easy in his business. Hamlet’s reply ironically recalls the leisured condition of philosophizing: “The hand of little employment hath a daintier sense” (V. i. 62). In considering the skull the clown casually shovels up, Hamlet, like the clowns, finds that the consideration of death leads to a critique of aristocratic convention: “Here’s a fine revolution” (V. i. 81)—from politician or courtier, keening on honor, to a skull unceremoniously tossed by a clown. “Mine ache to think on’t” (V. i. 82-83)—he who had steeled himself to quarrel over honor as the sign of his identity as a son, a man, and a prince. The clown reinforces this identify, with his ‘doubled’ speech, his puns, as he speaks to Hamlet of Hamlet, another doubling that focuses Hamlet’s identity for Hamlet. The clown’s speech elicits Hamlet’s ‘Ubi sunt?’ speech on Yorick’s skull. “To what base uses we return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till ‘a find it stopping a bung-hole?” (V. i. 180-181). Horatio, no real philosopher, gets queasy: “‘Twere to consider too curiously to consider so” (V. i. 183); to non-philosophers, philosophers will always appear too curious, in both senses of the word. After the cold air of the early sciences, the fire and water of the central scenes, the drama has come down to earth. These four elements make up nature as a whole, which, for humans, consummates in bodily death physical non-entity. In view of one person’s death, ‘Who is?’ and ‘What is?’ are the same question.

The most observed of all observers watches Ophelia’s “maimed rites” (V. i. 195), unobserved. Overhearing Laertes blaming him for causing Ophelia’s madness, Hamlet fatally reveals himself, puts an end to all the play, the concealment and disguising and doubling. The flaw that makes Hamlet a tragic hero instead of a philosopher-king is his thumos. His thumos reveals itself in his guilty recognition of an erotic failure, his botched wooing of Ophelia. (The Iliad, rich epic source of so many tragedies, also concerns thumotic conflict over a woman who allows herself to be stolen from her husband.) Hamlet and Laertes fight in the grave, the image of Denmark. [5]  Leaping into the grave is returning to warlike Denmark, the philosopher’s return to the cave—but here too precipitate, a voluntary act of anger, not the reluctant act of the mature thinker; philosophy is learning how to die, but the learning is not so sudden. In so doing, however, the near-philosopher confesses his eros, his love for Ophelia, claiming he loved her more than her brother did. He asserts natural love and attack a man he sees as a symbol of the incestuous love exhibited by his beast-mother and tyrant-stepfather. In leaping, Hamlet later admits he “forgot myself” in the “tow’ring passion” of indignation (V. ii. 76-79). But in the grave, as he also sees, he meets Laertes, mirror of himself, who brings him to himself, the beginning of the end of all his doubling. Why are Hamlet and Laertes doubles? Because each is an Epicurean. Laertes represents the superficial side of Epicureanism: the love of pleasure, of Paris. Hamlet represents the philosophic side of Epicureanism, what Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy calls Dionysianism: the claim that beneath the glimmering and seductive surface of the world all is nothing but matter in motion, kings metamorphosing into worms.

Separated by bystanders, Hamlet and Laertes agree to a duel. Hamlet says of his thumotic leap, “Our indiscretion sometimes serves us well; / When our deep plots do pall; and that should learn us / There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, / Rough-hew them how we will.” (V. ii. 8-11). What is man? A sub-plotter. Divinity—God for Christians, Nature for philosophers?—”shapes our ends,” provides the telos for human beings. For Aristotle, a wise man can in large measure shape his own end; in Machiavelli, a man of virtù can shape the ends of a people, control Fortuna herself. In Hamlet’s more modest and more nearly Christian and classical-philosophic view, human beings act like gardeners rough-hewing a shrub, an attempt that interferes with but does not prevent the providential or natural end from coming out. You can’t drive out God and nature with pitchforks or pruning shears. Hamlet knows this, even though, among men, he is a master-plotter or playwright (V. ii. 31), having re-written Claudius’ commands to the English, sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to the death intended for himself. The play, as any playwright (indeed any writer) knows, is only as good as the last edit. Written commands may lose their author’s intention thanks to editors judicious or injudicious; the final editor, God or nature, has the last word in any event.

Regicide is unnatural, but tyrannicide is natural. It is therefore crucial to know the difference between a king and a tyrant. The tradition inaugurated by Machiavelli contends that tyranny is but monarchy misliked. Claudius is a fine exhibit against this opinion. He is an unnatural, incestuous ruler who interrupted the divine/natural right of succession: “And is’t not to be damned / To let this canker of our nature”—of human nature—”come / In further evil?” (V. ii. 68-70), Hamlet rightly asks. Claudius plots to use Laertes to kill Hamlet in the duel with ‘doubled’ weaponry—a poisoned rapier and poisonous drink. The duel is also a “trial” (V. ii. 156). with Claudius’ plot to kill Hamlet, Hamlet plays the editor, counterplotting Claudius’ killing. In considering the risks of the duel, he chooses the Christian side of the philosophic matter: “There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it [death] is now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.” (V. ii. 199-202). If you cannot out-plot your enemy, and if (as is surely true) you can’t out-plot God, you can at least make ready to meet Him. If evil mars human ripeness, setting problems for Aristotelians, it has more difficulty preventing human readiness—although, as the ghost has told Hamlet, it can surely do that, too, especially if one fails to account for the existence of evil. The philosopher who teaches readiness is Montaigne, in “Of Physiognomy,” his essay on human identity wherein he holds up the mirror to the human face. But Montaigne’s conclusion—that the least premeditated death is best—contrasts with Hamlet’s considered and Christian stance.

Choice of weapons, gentlemen! Foils and daggers are Laertes’ choice, which Hamlet accepts, but the daggers, instruments symbolic of corporeal nature, will remain unsheathed. The tyrant’s real weapon, now as before, is poison, which acts by means of treachery, deception. “Foil” is a pun, both a dueling weapon (a dual dueling weapon, for play-combat) and a gem-setting. This duel of duality, this conflict of rival likenesses, a dialogue-in-action, results in death by poisoned pun, a tragic joke, an uncreating word. A tyrant is a god in reverse; his words do not create but kill. Claudius oversees a duel/trial that is a play, but a deadly play, a play that isn’t enacted ‘in play,’ although it seems to be.

Hamlet begs Laertes’ pardon—a gentleman’s pardon, not a Christian’s. Hamlet blames the tragic outcome of his plot on his madness, which was faked, except in the sense that his rage made him hastily kill Polonius. Hamlet was indeed an angry or ‘mad’ man, playing a madman. Hamlet’s madness is “poor Hamlet’s enemy” (V. ii. 218). Hamlet now separates his rage from himself, even as he had told his mother to separate her vice or tragic flaw from herself. Hamlet has stopped ‘multiplying,’ doubling himself, and now starts subtracting from the sum of his parts. (The problem with so much of philosophy that came after Shakespeare is precisely that it never stops ‘multiplying’; it ‘synthesizes’ opposites when self-subtraction would be wiser, and it unphilosophic followers end by ‘subtracting’ all too many human lives in the in the quest of the final ‘synthesis.’ Modern tyrants or ‘totalitarians’ are political/thumotic men in the grips of certain modern doctrines which do not let them know when to stop; as thumotic men, they very much need such limits.) Appealed to as a gentleman, Laertes replies as a gentleman. Imitating the philosophic act of separating, he replies that his nature accepts the apology but his honor does not; he courteously or conventionally awaits the king’s permission to stand down, which of course he does not receive, inasmuch as the king is neither philosopher nor gentleman. The gentleman will always be vulnerable to the tyrant, if not advised by a philosopher—living or dead—who sees the profound unconventionality of the tyrant, an unconventionality mirroring the philosopher’s own conventionality. Absent such advice (philosophers are rare), religious counsel may suffice. In the circumstances prevailing in Denmark, such counsel appears to be absent.

Claudius uses the appearance of a just rule of law in setting down the rules for the duel/trial. To win at odds, in twelve passes the expert Laertes must touch Hamlet three times more than Hamlet touches Laertes. This seems an arrangement of equal justice, except that the real odds are: touch him just once, and he loses everything. Hamlet tells Claudius: “Your Grace”—he hasn’t given up one kind of ‘doubling’ speech, irony—”has laid the odds o’ th’ weaker side” (V. ii. 240). Socrates-like, Hamlet prepares to make the weaker argument the stronger; tyrant-like, Claudius intends to make the potential philosopher and potential king drink hemlock. When unphilosophic Gertrude drinks the poison instead, when Hamlet kills Claudius with the poisoned rapier and (for good measure) doubles the action with poisoned drink, this completes the rough-hewn justice done by the mutual killing of the ‘doubles,’ Hamlet and Laertes.

In Christianity, mercy (a form of grace) supplements justice. The dual duelists now forgive one another in more than gentlemanly fashion; gracious exchange in speech replaces conflict in speech and action. But to leave things there would be merely to moralize. Justice and mercy alone do not solve the grave dilemma of Denmark. For that, prudence is needed—one final plot. Hamlet charges his friend Horatio with rightly telling of Hamlet and his just cause. Stoic Horatio says he’ll commit suicide instead, multiply his friendship unto death. He is “more an antique Roman than a Dane” (V. ii. 326), and ancients do not eschew suicide. Horatio’s ‘Stoicism’ is emotional, all-too-emotional. The (erstwhile) antic Dane stops him, lest Hamlet’s “name” be “wounded.” Hamlet does this with gentle iron: “If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart / Absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, /To tell my story.” (V. ii. 331-334). Do not be an Epicurean in your Stoicism by killing yourself—a fine refutation of both Epicureanism and Stoicism, and one that needs no Hegelian/synthetic dialectic to formulate. Has Hamlet also learned not to be Stoical in his Epicureanism?

“The potent poison quite o’er crows my spirit” (V. ii. 338). The cock’s crow chases the ghost, the old mole; the cock’s crow, in Christian symbolism, represents Christ’s Word. Hamlet prophetically anoints Fortinbras, whose name means strong-arm, a foreign king for the Danish people. Hamlet gives the election to the good prince, rather than to some inferior, drunken, home-grown lord, and plausibly so, because Hamlet is the people’s favorite. But if Prince Strong-Arm is to be a good king, he will need an education. It cannot be a philosophic education, at least not directly. Fortinbras is no potential philosopher or philosophizing king, as far as we know. The aphoristic, old-fashioned ‘philosophy’ of Polonius served old King Hamlet poorly; the real philosophy of Wittenberg served young Hamlet well, but proved difficult when it came time for the prince to re-enter the cave. Yet philosophy cannot be discarded, either, lest gentleman-kings leave themselves vulnerable to tyrannic usurpers. The scene Fortinbras and the English commanders come upon is full of woe and wonder, tragedy and philosophy, Horatio says (V. ii. 348).

Nor can politics be discarded. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. The sycophants who make tyranny possible are punished justly in accordance with Hamlet’s plot, one plot that worked very well. This is a forceful reminder that not all plotting is futile. Without knowing this, one would conclude that prudence and the statecraft prudence supports are utterly impotent. One would veer from Machiavellian hubris to quietist providentialism—either way, inviting the sway of tyrants. To understand political life one needs to understand the plot, and plotting. Not aphorisms but political history will impart political wisdom to a political man. Horatio will speak, bear witness now, “Even while men’s minds are wild, lest more mischance / On plots and errors happen” (V. ii. 378-379). This very wildness or freedom from custom and habit tragedy brings, imitating for the decent, nonphilosophic, but political and warlike mind an effect philosophizing brings peacefully to the philosophic or philosophically-disposed mind. Tragedy thus makes political mind, the minds of strong-armed men, impressionable to a better mold. Horatio’s story will be the completion of the political education of Fortinbras, whose strong arm had been too inclined to strike untimely. Political history, the history of plotting, teaches the just timing a statesman needs. Horatio’s role is not to be a philosopher but to be a political historian, full of non-aphoristic but practical wisdom for the foreign warrior-king. That is why the play is not a tragedy but a “tragicall historie.” After telling it, might Horatio become for Fortinbras what he might have been for KIng Hamlet II—a wise and faithful friend and counselor, no suicide?

Fortinbras gives Hamlet “The soldier’s music and the rite of war” (V. ii. 384). In Plato, the soldier’s music educates the guardians to share rule with the philosopher-kings. In Hamlet, the soldier’s music is the public sign that the potential philosopher, reluctant to act, would have made a fine king, would have “proved most royal” (V. ii. 383). In recognizing this (or, at least, in seeming to recognize it, as he has yet to hear the whole story), and in making sure that Hamlet receives no maimed rites, Fortinbras shows that he is ready—not so much for death, as for life, and not for any life, but the life of a genuine king. Fortinbras says that the many bodies—of bodkins, embodying nature—belong on a battlefield, not at court. Fortinbras is a warrior who has put a limit on his warring by turning to his civil side, where the ruler puts everything into its just place.

 

Epilogue

Hamlet begins with the political and religious question: Who’s there? Hamlet ends with a good answer: Fortinbras and Horatio, governed by the spirit or ‘ghost’ of Prince Hamlet, are there. They are ruling Denmark. Prince Hamlet, freed from his tragic flaw, from the imprudent-in-life, thumotic-in-death spirit of his father, rules Denmark from the grave. Is that not the only way philosophers ever become kings?

In its course the play has answered ‘Who is?’ questions: Claudius is a murdering tyrant; Gertrude is a bad or at least weak wife and a mother at last faithful to her son; Hamlet is a potential philosopher who would have made a philosophic king; Fortinbras is a warrior who will make a good king; Horatio is a faithful friend and political historian who, thanks to the philosophic instruction of his friend, likely to be a wise adviser, far better than Polonius. ‘Who?’ questions lead to ‘What?’ questions: What is a tyrant, a wife and mother, a philosopher, a king, warrior, a friend, a historian? In a drama, ‘What?’ questions turn back into ‘Who?’ questions, as they are answered by example rather than by definition. This ‘turn’ serves political justice and the life of philosophy. Political philosophy is political because it governs the political passion, thumos, in accordance with the philosophic ‘passion,’ logos. Philosophers who philosophize on political life never forget that they are persons thinking about persons; they ascend to realm of ideas, outside the cave of opinions and conventions, but they return with the knowledge that the philosophic ‘way of life’ plays out among non-philosophers.