The similarities and differences between Hamlet’s and Claudius’s characters can also be seen through this scene. Prince Hamlet, devastated by his father’s death
and betrayed by his mother’s marriage, is introduced as the only character who
is unwilling to play along with Claudius’s gaudy attempt to mimic a healthy
royal court. He speaks in riddles so that he can be rude to the clever Claudius
whilst giving little away to the court. His first words, ‘A little more than kin
and less than kind’, suggest how Hamlet feels that he is neither kindly disposed
towards his uncle, nor does he think that he is of the same kind, meaning from
the same honourable class. His next response, ‘Not so, my lord. I am too much in
the sun’ adds more emphasis to this dark and mysterious side of Hamlet as he
hints of his awareness of all the that is ongoing ever since his father’s death.
The war of words is apparent in this scene between the two characters of
Claudius and Hamlet as is the audience’s sense that both of these characters
know the truth but due to political concerns and fear of confrontation they do
not openly say it, thereby highlighting once again the central theme in the play
is that of the conflict between appearance and reality. While Claudius pretends
to be unaware of the reasons for Hamlet’s anger and hatred and acts as if to
Hamlet’s best interests, Hamlet in his uncertainty on whether he should exact
revenge or not, is afraid to take decisive action and thus has to be content
with making scathing comments through witty remarks, powerfully moving speeches
and then later on under the pretence of madness, in the hope of provoking some
sort of admittance by Claudius of foul play.
In addition, Hamlet’s inability to take action reveals the inner turmoil he
suffers from and the conflicting set of values and beliefs he embodies. This can
be clearly seen in the soliloquies he makes which reveal much of Hamlet’s true
thoughts and feelings that he hides from the other characters in the play. They
probe his own situation, his mind and the problems attached to living in a
society characterized by duplicity, hypocrisy and distrust, illustrating the
stark contrast between Hamlet’s thoughts and earlier action.
Hamlet’s first soliloquy in Act one Scene 2 opens with the emphatic line: ‘O
that this too too sullied flesh would melt’, a cry of anguish and a longing for
dissolution, which is however followed by an acknowledgement of the fundamental
Christian injunction against suicide, thereby precluding escape from the burden
of life. This question of the moral validity of suicide in an unbearable painful
world haunts the rest of the play, reaching the height of its urgency in perhaps
the most famous line in all of English Literature: ‘To be, or not to be- that is
the question’. In this scene Hamlet mainly focuses on the appalling conditions
of life, railing against Claudius’s court as ‘an unweeded garden/ That grows to
seed. Things rank and gross in nature/ Posses it merely’. The listless tempo of
the words ‘How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable’ conveys his weariness. The
speech contrasts dramatically with Claudius’s flowing lines as its verse starts
and stops, punctuated by expressions of pain and confusion. This disjointed
rhyme serves to reflect the dislocated progress of Hamlet’s thoughts which
convey to the audience his fragile emotional and mental state.
Hamlet’s bewilderment and disgust at his mother’s hasty remarriage and sexual
depravity is also revealed in this soliloquy as he proceeds to a comparison in
which his sanctified father is contrasted with his repugnant uncle, ‘Hyperion to
a satyr’, the sun god is set against the mythical half-human, half-beast noted
for sexual appetite. This disgust is not only apparent in the imagery but also
in the sounds of Hamlet’s words. Hissing sibilants convey the young man’s nausea
as he imagines his mother and his uncle in bed together: ‘Oh most wicked speed,
to post/ With such dexterity to incestuous sheets’. The intensity of Hamlet’s
disgust here underlines how impossible he finds it to come to terms with the
incestuous union of his mother and his uncle and the indecent haste of his
mother’s re-marriage. Here, Hamlet objects to his mother’s show of affection to
Claudius and her quick marriage to him as a clear act of betrayal that has
shocked him so much so that he rejects all women in the famous quote ‘Frailty,
thy name is woman’. His show of strong emotions regarding his mother has lead to
the critical applications of the famous theory of the Oedipus complex to the
tragedy of ‘Hamlet’ by critics such as Freud who was the first to attempt to
resolve the enigma offered by Hamlet’s behaviour in psychoanalytical terms.
Contrary to Freud’s interpretation, the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan thinks that
the real psychological dimension of the play lies not in Hamlet’s behaviour but
in his language. In his famous essay, entitled ‘Desire and the interpretation of
desire in Hamlet’, he holds that the most striking characteristic of Hamlet’s
language is its ambiguity: everything he says is transmitted, in various
degrees, through metaphor, simile and, above all, wordplay. His utterances, in
other words, have a hidden and latent meaning which often surpasses the apparent
meaning. They have, therefore, enormous affinities with the language of the
unconscious which proceeds equally by various forms of distortion and
alterations in meaning, notably through slips of the tongue, dreams, double
entendres, and wordplay. Hamlet is himself aware of the ambiguous nature of his
own speeches as well as of the feelings which drive them. Concerned by the
dialectic between appearance and reality, and surface and depth, he is conscious
that whatever happens to him is deeper and stranger than that which is displayed
by the superficial symptoms of mourning. Thus, through the confusion that is
apparent in Hamlet’s soliloquies, Shakespeare introduces the contrast between
Hamlet’s actions in public and his inner thoughts as a means of exploring the
interior confusion and unrest people of the time suffered from as two differing
set of values and beliefs clashed leaving them unsure of where the moral lines
lie.
Moreover, Hamlet’s considerations of fundamental Christian values of the
afterlife, Heaven and Hell, in this soliloquy seemingly show him to be a
character embodying the Old Catholic beliefs, rather than the Protestant values
Claudius seems to personify. On closer examination of Hamlet’s thoughts,
however, a different interpretation can be derived. While Hamlet comes from a
Catholic background, his all-conquering desire for revenge, his want to commit
suicide, his reluctance to forgive his mother for what he sees as a betrayal of
his father, and the fact that he is a student in the protestant Wittenberg
University paints an opposite image of Hamlet as a character who, very much like
Claudius, is much more of a Protestant than a Catholic. This is further
emphasized in Hamlet’s third soliloquy, ‘To be or not be - that is the
question’, in which Hamlet contemplates suicide from a much less religious
perspective. In this soliloquy, there is little mention of the fire of Hell as
an effective deterrent to committing this grievous sin, instead, Hamlet’s fear
of ‘the undiscovered country’ which ‘puzzles the will’, the unknown, is what
stops him from committing suicide.
Hamlet’s famous ‘What a piece of work is a man!’ speech to Rozencrantz and
Guildenstern in the second scene of act two adds more confusion and debate
concerning the identity of Hamlet. In this speech, Hamlet speaks of how he
thinks that ‘(he) (has) of late…foregone all custom’ and how ‘the earth seems to
(him) a sterile promontory’. Such statements seem to refer to his feeling that
he is breaking all rules and that he feels a loss of God, thus in many ways how
similar he really is to the man he wants to punish. Hamlet’s celebration of
humanity’s capacity for achieving wonderful things in the lines ‘how noble in
reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable…’ is a theme of much Renaissance literature, thus perhaps showing
Hamlet to be a Protestant character. However, in this same speech, it could be
argued that Hamlet’s references to the Earth as ‘sterile’ and ‘pestilent’ and
the question ‘what is this quintessence of dust’ shows Hamlet to be more of a
Catholic than a Protestant. This view is further backed by the fact that the
note of exultation apparent in his admiration of man quickly exhausts itself to
give way to the scathing and dejected tone of ‘Man delights not me - nor woman
either’. Thus, the two interpretations are valid, which in many ways reflects
Hamlet’s embodiment of both set of values and reflects his sense of confusion.
For this reason, one can argue, Hamlet is irresolute: his uncertainty to what is
right or wrong and his indecisiveness in whether he should be part of the old
world or the new leads to his portrayal as a character suffering from inner
turmoil and a man of action rather than words.
Hamlet’s second soliloquy, ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’ explores
further this theme of dilemma and indecision through a comparison between
Hamlet’s thoughts and actions in act one scene two to that of act two scene two.
Again, Hamlet speaks in riddles, this time to Polonius. Although his words sound
like nonsense, a thread of bitter satire runs through it giving the audience the
impression that Hamlet’s remarks indeed are not madness, but forthright
contempt, privileged rudeness in a court where no one speaks the truth. For
example, importantly Hamlet declares, ‘I am but mad north-north-west. When the
wind is southerly’, that is, he is only ‘mad’ at certain calculated times, and
the rest of the time he knows what is what. And, although he presents himself as
sounding mad, a closer look at the directions reveals they do in fact point in
one and the same way.
Furthermore, in this scene, the presence of actors and the idea of ‘a play
within a play’ points to an important theme: that real life is in certain ways
like play-acting. Hamlet professes to be amazed by the player king’s ability to
engage emotionally with the story he is telling even though it is only an
imaginative recreation. He berates himself for displaying less passion when
overwhelmed with grief and outrage than that displayed by an actor who is merely
producing a performance. His self-disgust is evident through the insults he
hurls at himself, calling himself among other things ‘a rogue and pleasant
slave’ and through his questioning of himself: ‘Am I a coward?’ As his
indignation reaches its zenith, assonance, rhythm and repetition illustrate the
intensity of emotion, portraying his ever-worsening inner turmoil that threatens
to erupt in the climax ‘Bloody, bawdy villain! / Remorseless, treacherous,
lecherous, kindles villain!’ only to collapse into a state of exhaustion due to
the continual failure to take action. The theme of dilemma and indecision is
clearly dominant here, and it is due to Hamlet’s apparent lack of willingness to
take action here that many view ‘Hamlet’ as a play of words and emotion rather
than action. One such critic, who takes this view, T.S. Elliot, remarked that
‘Hamlet’ presented a character ‘dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible
because it exceeds the events that occur’, the absolute opposite of Macbeth.
Similarly, the celebrated French critic Henri Fluchère, who saw Hamlet as ‘the
first Shakespearean drama which can lay claim to both extremes in personality
and universality’, interpreted the play as a symbolic representation of the
battle between man and his destiny, his temptations and contradictions.
Yet, in contrast to these interpretations, Hamlet by the end of the play evolves
from a dreamer to a man of action. While the play begins with Hamlet
contemplating his father’s death and later on, in the graveyard scene, death
itself, in the key image of the play where he holds Yorick’s skull, Hamlet by
the end of the play is no longer just like a student of the concepts of death.
Instead, he becomes the tragic action hero who finds a ‘divinity’ working
through action. Although it is true that the impulse for his actions is imposed
on him by other characters or by events, another interpretation see Hamlet as
nevertheless extremely active: he listens to the ghost (which his friends refuse
to do), he adopts a coarse attitude verging on insubordination, he violently
rejects Ophelia, he thwarts one after the other plots aimed at revealing his
plans, he stages for the court a show which is nothing but a trap in which he
hopes to catch the king, he confronts his mother in a scene of extreme violence,
and he fights Laertes. Engaging further in pure physical violence he kills
Polonius, sends his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths, kills
the king, and is indirectly responsible for the death of Laertes.
In conclusion, through the first two acts of the play, Shakespeare explores the
main themes of the play through his presentation of the conflict between
Claudius and Hamlet’s thoughts and actions. The main instruments for this
include Claudius’s opening speech in Act one scene two and Hamlet’s first and
second soliloquies, which serve not only as a means of sharing Hamlet’s feelings
with the audience, but also as a way of probing the most daring aspects of the
psychology of man and the history of human thinking. A play of unresolved
questions, Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’ is a study of the discrepancy between
appearance and reality, as well as an examination of many thematic
preoccupations of the time including that of the concepts of disorder, dilemma
and indecision, madness and revenge, disease and decay. The conflict between the
old way of life, supported by the Catholic Church, and the new, embodied by the
Renaissance men is another central theme of ‘Hamlet’, and yet Shakespeare gives
us no definitive answers to these questions. The different interpretations of
Hamlet and the play in general is therefore only a natural consequence to the
ambiguity and uncertainty that Shakespeare creates from very early on in his
play. As one critic, John Dover Wilson remarks, ‘Hamlet’ is very much like ‘a
dramatic essay in mystery; that is to say, the more it is examined, the more
there is to discover’.
