Claudius has also wed Gertrude, Hamlet's mother and queen of Denmark. The ghost accordingly accuses her of incest and adultery; she has been seduced by the serpent (cf. 1 Corinthians11:1-3). Thus King Hamlet, "by a brother's hand, of life, of crown, of queen at once dispatch'd" (1.5.74-75). In short, the initial world of the play is a fallen world. Hamlet notes the cosmic dimensions of his predicament with his famous line, "Thetime is out of joint" (1.5.189).
The question that presses the action forward is whether or not Hamlet should, as he puts it, "set it right" (1.5.190). More theologically stated, the question is whether it is man's duty to redeem the fallen world. The ghost encourages Hamlet to take this task into his own hands. But as Northrop Frye has put it, the ghost's credentials are very suspect: "why does purgatory, as the Ghost describes it, sound so much as though it were hell?"[10] The dissonance in the ghost's speeches indicates that he is not what he claims to be. Rather, he has come as a tempter to pour 'poison' into Hamlet's ear.
Hamlet is a revenge tragedy, a common genre in Shakespeare's day. As with other theatrical genres, the revenge tragedy had certain conventions that could not be flouted. As Rene Girard has noted, it is Shakespeare's genius that he challenges the very foundations of the revenge tragedy in the course of writing a revenge tragedy, and that he does it without violating the conventions of the genre. In this sort of play, Girard notes, "all eloquence must be on the side of revenge" and all criticism of the ethic "remains a half-formed thought, an almost incoherent feeling that must fail in the end to gain full control of the hero's behavior." Shakespeare never violates this convention; Hamlet's rhetorical vehemence is spent in attempts to stir himself up to revenge, not to dissuade himself. Yet, there is a "silence at the heart of Hamlet", an implicit condemnation of the revenge ethic itself.[11]
While the criticism is implicit, it is no less insistent for that. Indeed, Shakespeare's rejection of the revenge ethic is so clear that it is difficult to understand the critical confusion that this question has generated. Elizabethan England had its faults, but it was sufficiently Christian to reject the blood feud as savage and pagan. Some critics claim more modestly that, while Shakespeare himself rejected revenge, he was depicting a pre-Christian world, a world in which the revenge ethic still reigned supreme; thus, in the context of the play, Hamlet should have taken revenge. Even the most cursory review of the dramatic movement and literary structure of the play, however, demolishes all such interpretations.
First, there is the mega-fact that the various plots to take revenge all end in utter disaster. At play's end, the stage is littered with bodies. Unless one is willing to claim that Shakespeare was appealing to Elizabethan bloodlust, his point is obvious. The last scene's condemnation of revenge is made all the more profound by the ironic way in which vengeful characters fall victim to their own devices. Laertes is killed by the poisoned sword he planned to use against Hamlet; Gertrude drinks the poisoned cup that Claudius intended for Hamlet; Claudius himself is poisoned by both sword and wine. The wicked, in short, fall into the very traps they set for others (cf. Ps. 7:15-16).
One of Shakespeare's most characteristic dramatic devices is the multiplication of character types.[12] In Hamlet, he includes a number of avengers. Hamlet is the most prominent vengeful son, but in the course of working out his vengeance, he inadvertently kills Polonius. As if that were not enough, he rejects Ophelia, sending her into a pitiful emotional spiral that eventually leads to her death. Laertes, Polonius's son and Ophelia's brother, thus has a double motive for revenge against Hamlet, an opportunity he accepts with relish. Revenge, it becomes clear, never brings anything to resolution; everyone, after all, has some relative, however distant, ready to avenge a wrong. Every avenger inevitably becomes an object of vengeance, and so on, world without end. As the Proverb says, "The beginning of strife is like letting out water, so abandon the quarrel before it breaks out" (17:14).
Hamlet and Laertes do not exhaust Shakespeare's store of avengers. When the players arrive at Elsinore, Hamlet requests the first player to recite a favorite speech about Pyrrhus, the son of Achilles, who killed King Priam of Troy to avenge his father's death. Deeply engrossed with the sins of his mother, Hamlet particularly asks the player to recite the description of the grief of Hecuba, queen of Troy, after seeing her husband hacked to death by the vengeful Pyrrhus (2.2.462-548).
Still another vengeful son appears in the play, though he is sometimes left out of stage and film productions. Shakespeare's use of Fortinbras, prince of Norway, clarifies beyond reasonable doubt his own and the play's evaluation of revenge. Hamlet opens with a well-known scene on the battlements of Elsinore. Extra guards are on duty, we learn, because Fortinbras has threatened to invade Denmark. Shortly after seeing the ghost, Horatio, who has an awful lot of inside information for a foreigner, explains the military and political situation:
Our last king,
Whose image even but now appear'd to us,
Was, as you know, by Fortinbras of Norway,
Thereto prick'd on by a most emulate pride,
Dar'd to the combat, in which our valiant Hamlet -
For so this side of our known world esteem'd him -
Did slay this Fortinbras; who by a seal'd compact,
Well ratified by law and heraldry,
Did forfeit, with his life, all those his lands
Which he stood seiz'd of, to the conqueror;...
Now, sir, young Fortinbras,
Of unimproved metal hot and full,
Hath in the skirts of Norway here and there
Shark'd up a list of lawless resolutes,
For food and diet, to some enterprise
That hath a stomach in 't. Which is no other -
As it doth well appear unto our state -
But to recover of us, by strong hand
And terms compulsatory, those foresaid lands
So by his father lost (1.1.80-89, 95-104).[13]
Fortinbras appears in person at the very end of the play, literally having the last word. Denmark's king, queen, and crown prince lying dead on the floor, Fortinbras takes charge of the situation, ordering the removal of the bodies and making appropriate funeral arrangements. More than that, Fortinbras claims "some rights of memory in this kingdom, which now to claim my vantage doth invite me" (5.2.398-99). He ends the play with more than he bargained for; he not only receives the lands lost by his father, but the crown and kingdom of Denmark itself. Among the vengeful sons, Fortinbras is the only one who is alive and prosperous when the curtain closes.
Fortinbras's success entails no approval of revenge, however, since in the middle of the play Fortinbras abandons his vengeance against Denmark. Voltimand, an ambassador of Norway, tells Claudius that Fortinbras's uncle, the acting king of Norway, has suppressed
His nephew's levies, which to him appear'd
To be a preparation 'gainst the Polack,
But better look'd into, he truly found
It was against your highness; whereat griev'd,
That so his sickness, age, and impotence
Was falsely borne in hand, sends out arrests
On Fortinbras, which he, in brief, obeys,
Receives rebuke from Norway, and in fine
Makes vow before his uncle never more
To give th' assay of arms against your majesty (2.2.60-71).
Later, Hamlet, on his way to England under the guard of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, meets Fortinbras's army as it marches through Denmark on its way to attack Poland. Hamlet ponders his own inaction in the light of Norway's willingness to expose "what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death, and danger dare, even for an eggshell" such as Poland (4.4.51-53). Hamlet concludes that his own "dull revenge" contrasts poorly with Fortinbras's "spirit with divine ambition puff'd," but this seems precisely the wrong lesson to draw from Fortinbras's actions. Instead, it seems that Hamlet should have recognized that Fortinbras was breaking off plans to avenge his father's death and recover his father's lands.
The ends of the various vengeful sons dramatically challenges the revenge ethic: Laertes, the hot-blooded avenger, falls into the trap he made for Hamlet; Hamlet, the reluctant avenger, has fallen victim to Laertes's revenge; Fortinbras, who has disavowed vengeance, inherits the kingdom. In this bloody tragedy, Fortinbras's history alone has a comic trajectory.
Hamlet thus presents a negative typology of redemption. Denmark is a fallen world, needing to be set right. Instead of showing us the redeemer, however, Shakespeare shows us the folly and danger of man's efforts at self-redemption and especially redemption through violence. Time out of joint is not, in short, set right by the wrath of men. The vengeful do not prosper. The crown usurped by the serpent is finally worn by one who rejected revenge. The meek inherit the land. CM
