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+++ date = '2025-11-14T04:56:25-04:00' title = 'On Hamlet' banner_left = '/on-hamlet/on-hamlet-banner-left.jpg' banner_right = '/on-hamlet/on-hamlet-banner-right.jpg' banner_title = 'Visão de Hamlet, 1893 by Pedro Américo' +++
HAMLET
Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.
And now I’ll do’t. And so he goes to heaven;
And so am I reveng’d. That would be scann’d:
A villain kills my father, and for that
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven. O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
He took my father grossly, full of bread,
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
And how his audit stands, who knows save heaven?
But in our circumstance and course of thought,
’Tis heavy with him. And am I then reveng’d,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and season’d for his passage? No.
Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep; or in his rage,
Or in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed,
At gaming, swearing; or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in’t,
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damn’d and black
As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays.
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.¹
{{}}²
With this monstrous utterance, Prince Hamlet ends his appearance in the third scene of the third act of Shakespeare's tragedy of the same name. This is the most intense moment of the play: all the threads must come together, the encounter with the ghost who introduced himself as his treacherously murdered father, all the torment that followed, then the resolution of all doubts and the focus of attention and turmoil on one point - revenge. Hamlet transforms from a doubting character into a character of action!
And now, the long-awaited moment. The prince grips the hilt of his sword, creeps up on the hated murderer, and is ready to strike. And what happens to the audience at this moment! What happens to me! Just imagine how, from Hamlet's very first appearance on stage, we fell under the spell of his performance, his misfortune, his reasoning, and his madness; he dragged us through three acts to the logical conclusion of the story of this cursed king... And nothing happens. There is no resolution. The terrible, confusing action intensifies itself into the fourth act.
But why? Yes, it's a strange question: Hamlet himself says that the king is praying for forgiveness, and if he is killed now, according to the laws of faith, he will go to heaven repentant, but Hamlet believes that the king should go to hell, so he shall be killed when the circumstances are more deserving. But wait, yes, no matter how terrible this speech is in its confidence and malice, I cannot get out of my head the fact that this is a turning point, a key moment after which rivers of blood will flow, the conflict will fall into inevitability and repeat itself in eternity, as it has repeated itself thousands of times before, - this very speech clearly shows that there is a divine presence in history. Of course, it is not at all surprising to us that Hamlet believes in heaven and hell, being a man of his time, but what is surprising is how belief in heaven and hell carries weight in reasoning and in making such a decision! They are relevant not only to Hamlet as a religious man, but also to the plot twist in the entire tragedy!
Do you recall the second scene from the first act?
HAMLET
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God! O God!
Such a comparison! At the very beginning of his first monologue, where the viewer and reader are shown the full depth of Hamlet's grief, the divine prohibition is already mentioned. How easy it would be to end his miserable existence, but that's not the way out... And not because of faith in something better, not out of pity for his mother, and not out of revenge against the king — that is still very far off, and the prince has not even begun to think about murder. It is not a solution because of the covenant! And, suffering, Hamlet chooses life in spite of everything: "But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue."
Hamlet's thoughts during the king's prayer, when the murder could have been committed, are all the more frightening. To go that far! A man who, in deep misery, dreams of suicide and resists weakness only because of his faith - this same man decides without hesitation when another should die, “just so long as it's not for Heaven,” because he, Hamlet, knows better, and he doesn't need God for that! It is harsh and even painful to let such intense hatred into oneself, reading this from the distant future.
It seems that we can now conclude our discussion of Shakespeare's genius, having revealed Hamlet from the perspective of being motivated by growing spite. The image is already profound and striking: the prince does not simply hate the king, but arranges his murder in such a way as to send him straight to hell, just so that God does not intervene. What more can be said! One could also bring up the phenomenon of the Renaissance, how Shakespeare himself was its recognized playwright, and how the attitude of the ill-fated Prince of Denmark and faith served as a warning for the era: where human-centeredness can lead, and so on and so forth.
Time goes by. Several books go by. I am now separated from Hamlet by entire volumes of other works, my head filled with completely different things, although the impressions of what I have read are never completely erased. The time has come for me to read the work “The Autumn of the Middle Ages” by Johan Huizinga - I had a file with it from long ago, and, as is usually the case with everything, I never got around to it. And now, as I prepare to go to sleep, I lie down with the book and read the following from the very first chapter:
We have to transpose ourselves into this impressionability of mind, into this sensitivity to tears and spiritual repentance, into this susceptibility, before we can judge how colorful and intensive life was then.³
Moving on. Here is an excerpt from examples of public executions and the intricacies of court proceedings:
The Dominican who preached the funeral service for the murdered duke caused considerable outrage because he dared to point out the Christian duty of not taking revenge. ... honor and revenge were both political desires ...
And culminating in the following fragment:
The blind passion with which a man supported his party and his lord and, at the same time, pursued his own interests was, in part, an expression of an unmistakable, stone-hard sense of right that medieval man thought proper. It demonstrated an unshakable certainty that every deed justified ultimate retribution. The sense of justice was still three quarters heathen and dominated by a need for vengeance.
The unchristian extreme to which this mixture of faith and thirst for revenge led is shown by the prevailing custom in England and France of refusing individuals under the sentence of death not only extreme unction, but also confession. There was no intent to save souls; rather, the intent was to intensify the fear of death by the certainty of the punishments of hell.
200 years before William Shakespeare! What Renaissance!.. what warning for the future! A little explanation is needed here:
Where colors mean the following: {{}}Medieval Age{{}} {{}}Italian Renaissance{{}} {{}}English Renaissance{{}}
In general, the English Renaissance is a very arbitrary phenomenon. There's even a joke that in most of Europe, the "Renaissance" was the name given to what was happening there while the Renaissance was taking place in Italy. England was still recovering from the Hundred Years' War and the subsequent War of the Roses; apart from the influence of Protestantism, without delving into historical details, there was no major turning point that would allow us to say, “Yes, there were people of the Late Middle Ages, and these are the new people of the Renaissance.” I have no reason to doubt that in Shakespeare's time, the people and their moods fully shared the passions expressed in the above excerpts.
Furthermore, the legend of Hamlet itself is not Shakespeare's invention; it dates back to the 1200s, 400 years before the famous tragedy. Let's update the explanation:
With: {{}}The first mentions of Hamlet in chronicles{{}} {{}}The Life of William Shakespeare{{}}{{}}Writing the tragedy Hamlet{{}}
So, what is actually going on? Did Shakespeare familiarize himself with the ancient legend and transform it into poetry in accordance with the literary flourishing of England, using all the power of his genius? Or did he take only the plot and translate the inner world of the hero and his mental anguish into the modern world with all the demands and moods of the society of his time, full of echoes and remnants of the fading Middle Ages? Or did Shakespeare nevertheless guess the direction of the entire Renaissance, its essence and where it would ultimately lead, how it would degenerate and end, and merely embody a warning to humanity through a system of literary images?
Of course, there can be no single answer here, and studying each of these points of view could provide material for many books. Yes, great works are always greater than the sum of their interpretations! But here's what interests me: returning to the conversation about genius and how I concluded my discussion of the king's prayer scene. Now looking at the time and place when the work was written, at the whole tiny historical context (because it's obvious that this topic is endless—just think of the Renaissance phenomenon alone!), the fullness of the author's genius takes on a slightly different, more refined and clearer form.
The author as an artist does not exist in isolation. The environment influences him as it does any other person, shaping his experiences and providing him with insights that subsequently take the form of a literary work. Ideas, meanings, images, their representations and forms are always contemporary for the author at the moment of writing, so in a sense, art is always contemporary and responds to the questions of the present at the moment of writing. But in the process of reading and reflecting on what has been read, the idea of the author's genius and what it means seems to blur, to become simplified. Like, "Yes, it's amazing how Shakespeare described the conflict, how powerful, and what a god-defying pathos, how he came up with it... or he didn't? anyway, great stuff! Well, doesn't matter." It is precisely in the process of relating to the context that the vague feeling from the experience of art seems to break down into its constituent parts, which makes it easier to operate with the experience gained in reflection or in relation to something else.⁴
And what is your Hamlet like?
- THE TRAGEDY OF HAMLET, PRINCE OF DENMARK by William Shakespeae. Project Gutenberg version, 1998
- Kenneth Branagh - William Shakespeare - The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1600-1) Hamlet, Prince of Denmark BBC Radio 3, 26 April 1992
- Johan Huizinga - The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Translated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637, 1996
- There can be many contexts. Viewing a work through the prism of history is just one of many such approaches.
Cover illustration by Sir John Gilbert, 1881.