Hamlet by William Shakespeare

A calmer Hamlet recounts the events leading up to his escape from the plot to kill him. He says that he is convinced now more than ever that divine providence governs man’s life, and that things happen as they are meant to happen. He tells Horatio that the night before the pirates took him, he found himself unable to sleep. He used this opportunity to investigate Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s cabin. Groping about in the darkness, he discovered letters addressed to the English King, which he managed to open with surreptitious skill. To his surprise, he read that Claudius had requested the king of England to imprison and behead Hamlet as quickly as possible. Horatio remains incredulous until Hamlet hands him the letter. While Horatio reads, Hamlet continues. He says that he immediately conjured a brilliant plan. He composed a second set of letters in the flowery style of the original ordering that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern be killed. He sealed the letters with his father’s State Seal, which he carried in his purse. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not know that Hamlet has replaced the letters, and thus, according to Hamlet, their demise will be due to their own actions in delivering the letters to the English king.

Claudius’ behavior horrifies Horatio. “Why what a king is this!” he exclaims. Hamlet reminds him that this same king killed the rightful king, made Gertrude a whore, and robbed Hamlet of his own birthright, all in one fell stroke. Horatio worries that Claudius will learn the outcome of events in England too quickly, but Hamlet assures him that he will now act expeditiously to eliminate the King.

Hamlet says he is only sorry about one thing now: That he has had to engage Laertes in the business. Osric, a courtier, enters and Hamlet mocks the man’s flamboyance. Osric tells Hamlet that Laertes invites the Prince to duel with him. The King has wagered that Hamlet will win, and Osric is to return and report whether Hamlet will accept. He does. After Osric’s exit, a lord enters with instructions from the King to see if Hamlet wants more time before meeting Laertes. Hamlet says he is ready whenever the King wants to get started. Then the lord tells Hamlet that the Queen wishes him to extend Laertes a pre-duel overture of friendship. Hamlet agrees, and the lord exits.

Horatio feels uneasy about the duel and suggests that Hamlet could lose. Hamlet shrugs off any possibility of Laertes’ winning, but says that, in any event, one cannot avoid one’s destiny. Hamlet must do what he must do. All that matters is being prepared for the inevitable. “The readiness is all.”

With great flourish, the scene is set for the duel. The King calls Hamlet and Laertes together and has them begin the duel by clasping hands. Hamlet asks Laertes to forgive his earlier acts of madness at Ophelia’s grave. He further claims that his madness, not he himself, is responsible for Polonius’ death, and he begs pardon for the crime. Laertes remains stiff and suspicious in his response, but says he bears Hamlet no grudge.

Osric brings the swords, and Laertes makes a show of choosing his; Hamlet asks only if the one he has chosen is the same length as the others. The King sets wine out for the duelists to drink and holds up the cup intended for Hamlet. Laertes and Hamlet fence for a moment until Hamlet asks for a judgment call from Osric the referee. Osric proclaims a hit in Hamlet’s favor, and Claudius holds up Hamlet’s goblet and takes a drink. With high pomp, Claudius drops a pearl, his gift to Hamlet, into the wine.

When Hamlet hits Laertes a second time, Laertes protests that it is a mere touch. Claudius assures Gertrude that, “Our son shall win.” Gertrude agrees. She takes Hamlet’s wine, wipes his brow, and offers him a drink, which he refuses. She then toasts her son. Claudius asks her not to drink, but she does and then wipes Hamlet’s brow one more time.

Laertes tells Claudius that the time has come to hit Hamlet with the poisoned tip. Claudius disagrees. In an aside, Laertes expresses a reluctance to hit Hamlet, but Hamlet accuses him of dallying and presses for a third bout. The two fight again and Laertes wounds Hamlet with the poisoned tip. Both drop their swords and, in the scuffle, Hamlet grabs Laertes’ sword and Laertes picks up Hamlet’s. Hamlet hits Laertes with the poisoned sword. Gertrude swoons. Hamlet sees the Queen fall and anxiously asks, “How does the Queen?” The King assures him that she is faint because of the blood, but Gertrude cries out that the drink has poisoned her. Outraged, Hamlet orders the doors locked so that the King cannot escape. Laertes reveals the murder plot to Hamlet and explains that the poisoned sword now rests in Hamlet’s hands.

In a fury, Hamlet runs the sword through Claudius, yelling, “Venom to they work.” Before Claudius dies, Hamlet pours the poisoned wine down the King’s throat. Hamlet then goes to Laertes, who is nearly dead. The two forgive one another so that neither will prevent the other from entering heaven. Laertes dies, and Horatio rushes to Hamlet’s side.

Hamlet tells Horatio that he is dead, and asks that Horatio “tell my story.” Osric announces the sound of an approaching army, which means that Fortinbras has arrived in Denmark after attacking the Poles. Hamlet tells Horatio to ensure that the Danish crown passes to Fortinbras.

With the words “The rest is silence,” Hamlet dies. Horatio wishes him a gentle rest and turns his attention to Fortinbras and the English ambassadors, who have also arrived to announce that the English government has executed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Fortinbras, appalled by the sight of the mayhem that greets him, “with sorrow” recognizes his right to wear the crown of Denmark, which Horatio will corroborate with Hamlet’s words.

Fortinbras orders that Hamlet be given military honors, “with music and rite of war.” He orders his soldiers to carry the bodies out, and the play ends.

Commentary

Maynard Mack says that in the last act of the play “Hamlet accepts his world and we discover a different man.” He has existed outside of the corrupt system, and yet, he has been unable to resist being drawn in. The Ghost sealed Hamlet’s fate when he challenged him to “remember me.” In this final scene, the maelstrom finally catches Hamlet stripped of his words, and at the mercy of his “bare bodkin.” He maneuvered around the world of “seems” and “acts” and “plays” as long as he could, and tried to beat this world by using its own tactics. He feigned madness and betrayed the woman he ostensibly loves, her father, and his school chums. He committed three cold-blooded murders and sent Ophelia to her death. He had thought he towered above such dirty fighting, but found himself swept into it. He must now face the inevitable. As Mack says, Hamlet has finally “learned, and accepted, the boundaries in which human action, human judgment, are enclosed.”

We recognize Hamlet’s change in the first part of the scene when he explains to Horatio with complete dismissal how he sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths. The calculating premeditation of his actions is a complete reversal of the Hamlet we have come to know. Horatio’s next comment indicates that he is horrified. He says, “So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to’t,” meaning that they go to their deaths, to which Hamlet counters    

    Why man, they did make love to this employment.

    They are not near my conscience. Their defeat

    Does by their own insinuation grow.

Hamlet has transformed himself from a man who wallows in self-recrimination into one who can blithely justify cold-blooded betrayal and murder. More significantly, Hamlet has become a man who assumes he can take responsibility for righting all the wrongs created by his corrupt uncle’s usurpation of the old order by killing Claudius and reclaiming the throne.

Shakespeare juxtaposes Osric’s entrance against Hamlet’s resolve to act. As the representative of Claudius’ court, Osric embodies all that is rotten in the state of Denmark. According to Hamlet, Osric is one of the many superficial fashionable people overrunning Denmark in these frivolous times. This ostentation is the canker of Denmark’s nature, and Hamlet is sure that he is ready to obliterate it. Osric, about whom Hamlet says, “ ‘tis a vice to know him,” represents the evil Hamlet spoke of in Act II when he observed the court in drunken revel. Speaking about the party going on is the kind that causes the rest of the world to see Denmark as a country of drunken louts. Hamlet presumes it his duty to obliterate the King’s evil, and that includes Osric.

After Osric and the lord have both been assured that Hamlet will participate in the duel at the King’s pleasure, Horatio urges caution. Nevertheless, Hamlet—in a speech that resonates with the resolve he found in Act IV Scene 4 when he watched the Norwegians head toward Poland—states unequivocally how prepared he is to take on all his responsibilities.

His words paraphrase the Biblical passage that no sparrow falls without God’s knowledge: “There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be 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. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let it be.” Here, Hamlet portrays the consummate existentialist, facing his struggle to play out with dignity and honor the part that has been written for him on the stars. He truly exists in the moment, and will seize it.

Having declared his intentions, Hamlet enters the ring amid great fanfare, and begins his journey by making the first move toward reconciliation with Laertes. He realizes that he must do so at this juncture. Hamlet recognizes himself in Laertes, and needs to release himself from the burden of self-loathing by forgiving and being forgiven by Laertes. He said earlier of Laertes    

    But I am sorry, good Horatio,

    That to Laertes I forgot myself,

    For by the image of my cause, I see

    The portraiture of his. I’ll court his favours.

    But sure the bravery of his grief did put me

    Into towering passion.

By reaching out to Laertes, Hamlet reconciles the conflicting aspects of his own nature, freeing himself for what he must do. Some other hurtles still lie ahead of him, but he believes he is ready, which is half the battle for him—if not quite the entire battle.

Laertes’ resolve to kill Hamlet as punishment for the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia mirrors Hamlet’s perceived newfound freedom from words.

    I am satisfied in nature

    Whose motive in this case should stir me most

    To my revenge; but in my terms of honour

    I stand aloof, and will no reconcilement

    Till by some elder masters of known honour

    I have a voice and precedent of peace

    To keep my name ungored.

In the end, the readiness is indeed what matters most. And so, the fight begins.

From the start of the fight, Hamlet is clearly aware that the duel is to the death and not just “play.” He recognizes the direness of the situation, and understands that Laertes presents his final challenge. What remains unclear is whether Hamlet knows about Claudius’ and Laertes’ plot. Does he, for example, refuse the wine that Claudius offers him because he suspects danger? All he says is “I’ll play this bout first, set it by awhile.” After Gertrude takes her fatal sip, he says, “I dare not drink yet, Madam, by and by.” Is Hamlet afraid that the wine will dull his fencing skill? Or does he guess that the wine poses a danger? He does not remark at all when the King says, “Gertrude, do not drink!” Does he not hear the King, or does he choose to ignore the warning? Laertes presents a sympathetic and formidable adversary for the sympathetic and formidable prince. Laertes will garner as much support from the audience as Hamlet will, and the confrontation will be doubly moving as the audience will be torn in its allegiance.

In production, Claudius’ directive becomes a pivotal moment. How the director and actor interpret the four words determine the tenor of the rest of the play. If Claudius mutters the line under his breath, then he has no thought to protect Gertrude or to warn Hamlet. If he cries it out, the director must find a reasonable way for Hamlet to react, one that reflects a commitment to Hamlet’s being aware of the poison—does he want Gertrude to die?—or a commitment to his being tunnel-visioned, intent on his mission to “end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.” Is Gertrude’s death “a consummation devoutly to be wished,” or is it a shocking blow that crushes any will Hamlet may have had left to live?

Still another question that must be asked and answered in production: Is Gertrude’s death an accident or suicide? Here the answer to the question about how much Gertrude knows concerning King Hamlet’s murder is crucial. Does she know that Claudius has poisoned Hamlet’s cup, and does she drink from it to save Hamlet? If she was innocent before Hamlet came to her closet and killed Polonius, did she believe Hamlet’s raving, mad indictment of her husband? Either way, she dies, and her death spurs Hamlet into finally doing what he has said he will do since the beginning of the play—kill Claudius

Laertes’ death and revelation serve as another catalyst to Hamlet’s resolve. When Laertes’ is cut by his own sword, again he speaks for Hamlet, “Why, as a woodcock to mine own springe, Osric. I am justly killed with mine own treachery.” Traps from which they cannot extricate themselves catch both Hamlet and Laertes. They must commit murder in order to uphold the blood feud they have sworn, but they are both Christians and bound by Christian morality to abhor violence. Each must fall due to his own treachery, and each must die and leave the greater good to mitigate any consequences he will face in his afterlife.

For all his great rhetoric, Hamlet has still not taken charge of the deed he must perform: Claudius still lives. Now, wading through the bodies of the people whose deaths he has caused by his hesitancy, Hamlet faces the final truth he cannot avoid. Laertes bears the news:

It is here Hamlet. Hamlet, thou art slain,

    No medicine in the world can do thee good,

    In thee there is not half an hour of life —

    The treacherous instrument is in they hand,

    Unbated and envenomed. The foul practice

    Hath turned itself on me; lo, here I lie,

    Never to rise again. Thy mother’s poisoned —

    I can no more—the king, the king’s to blame.

Knowing that he is a dead man, and realizing, at last, exactly what fate the stars hold for him, Hamlet attacks Claudius with the vengeance that has resided in his heart all along. He stabs Claudius and, for extra measure, pours the poison down the King’s throat. To heighten the drama as Claudius’ death approaches, a chorus of the assembled court cries, “Treason, treason!” and Claudius begs, “Oh yet defend me friends, I am but hurt.” A tense moment occurs as Hamlet must consider that his adoring public may perceive him a villain. After all, executing a king who rules by Divine Right constitutes high treason. Yet the court does not stir, and Claudius dies. Hamlet’s sense of righteous vengeance fortifies him.

Now Hamlet must face his own death. In order to shuffle off his mortal coil, Hamlet must make peace. He first reconciles with his foil Laertes. The two men exchange pardons, and they consign one another to Christian Heaven by releasing themselves from culpability for the lives they have taken. The one task Hamlet must still complete is to find a conduit for the words that have kept him alive, which have been as much his sustenance as his torture. So he asks the loyal Horatio to tell his story.

Horatio, Hamlet’s calmer mirror image, now carries the responsibility of juggling the conflict between thinking and doing, between words and action. Hamlet gives his “dying voice” to Fortinbras, who has arrived in Denmark from fighting in Poland just as Hamlet prepares to take his final breath. In Fortinbras, Hamlet recognizes a kindred spirit who can appreciate the significance of the words and who can restore honor to Denmark as he claims the throne. Hamlet then releases himself to death once and for all. “The rest is silence.”

Fortinbras takes immediate charge, listening to the story Horatio tells and immediately ordering his soldiers to clean up the mess. He replaces the confusion with calm by ordering a hero’s funeral for Hamlet. He will obliterate the corruption of Claudius’ reign, and end what Horatio reported as the “carnal, bloody and unnatural acts” that have ruled Denmark.

We know that all will be well because the last words in the play belong to strong, unequivocal Fortinbras:

    Take up the bodies. Such a sight as this

    Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

The final scene also completes the revenge triangle. All the sons of the murdered fathers (King Hamlet, King Fortinbras, and Polonius) have seen vengeance served. The sons have appeased the medieval code of honor while satisfying the Christian expectation of forgiveness. Most importantly, Hamlet is finally a warrior. Like Achilles’ son Phyrrus, to whom the First Player referred in Act II, Hamlet has stopped standing “like a neutral to his will and matter.” After his stunned pause, Phyrrus took a “rousèd revenge” and killed King Priam. So Hamlet has overcome his paralysis and has killed King Claudius. And, like Phyrrus, he will be buried with the hero’s glory that he has finally earned.

Glossary