Welcome back to Online Shakespeare, and welcome to Hamlet.
Hamlet is an exceptionally complex play. Therefore, this week's and next week's
lectures will be divided into sections so that each section is not unduly long.
Today it is not unusual for four hundred-plus essays and books on Hamlet
to be published per year. If Michael Goldman is right in defining an actor as
a man who wants to play Hamlet, and David Scott Kasten is right in defining a
literary critic as someone who wants to write about Hamlet, then this trend is
likely to continue. There are a few things about Hamlet not immediately
obvious that are helpful to know. First, there is not one Hamlet but arguably
three: the so-called Bad Quarto of 1603, the Second Quarto of 1604, and the folio
text, printed in 1623. Most staged versions and modern editions of Hamlet
are based on the Q2 text with some emendations from the Folio. Yet the Bad
Quarto should not be dismissed so quickly, for it is in this version that
Gertrude definitively rejects Claudius and comes over to Hamlet's side at the
end of the play. Is this a mistake? Did Shakespeare change his mind about this?
Why was this scene left out? We may never know. Many criticisms on Hamlet focus on
the plot. The plot, however, was not Shakespeare's. the original source is a
Scandinavian historical saga by Sax Grammaticus. The ferocious and
ultimately successful Amleth is not very much like Shakespeare's philosophical
student from Wittenberg, but he shares one very important characteristic with
him. Amleth, like Hamlet, pretends to be mad, and like him despises falsehood. In
order to protect himself, he tells the truth in such a clever manner that he
misleads everyone. Shakespeare's play was not even the first Hamlet play in
English. We know that there was an earlier play on Hamlet which is now lost.
So what is unique about Shakespeare's play? Revenge tragedies, like the Spanish Tragedy, the Revenger's Tragedy, and many more,
were very popular in Renaissance England. Usually set in Spain or Italy, they often
add ghosts demanding revenge, a wronged party swearing vengeance, and even plays
within a play as Hamlet does, and like Hamlet, end with plenty of blood on the
stage. Hamlet, however, has two different elements: a different setting, and a hero
who does not trust himself. Hamlet is set in Denmark: a very different place from
Italy or Spain. I sometimes say that Hamlet should be subtitled Revenge in a
Cold Climate. Cool and deliberate, the atmosphere of the play is accordingly
very different. Unlike other avengers, Hamlet does not trust himself. On
learning of his uncle's treachery, he does not immediately plan his revenge,
but questions the message and the messenger. After all, Hamlet dislikes
Claudius in any case. The ghost has simply told him what he wanted to hear.
Because of his melancholy, imaginative, and scholarly disposition, he may have
imagined the entire thing, or worse, he may be the victim of some sort of
demonic temptation. The first half of Hamlet, therefore, is not about revenge,
but about Hamlet's careful checking of facts before he commits himself to - he
does another's experiment witnessed by the impartial and sober minded Horatio.
Do these things bear the ghost's story out? Only then can he proceed, then
he must wait for the proper time and place. Ultimately, I would argue Hamlet
cannot enact the revenge enjoined on him by his father's ghost until several
conditions are met. It must be in public, after a public revelation of Claudius's
treachery to the assembled Danish Court, and Hamlet himself must be on the point
of death, and therefore avenging his own death and that of his mother as well as
that of his father. Finally, he needs to have the entire story told properly for
truth's sake, as well as for posterity and his own reputation. So no wonder Hamlet
and the Melancholy Dane are so beloved by literary critics. In his imaginative
capacity, his love of "words words words," his careful and almost obsessive
fact checking, and his insistence on a carefully prepared narrative-- frankly, he
seems a lot like an English professor, and that's probably why we like him so
much. So let's begin with Hamlet. First of all, Hamlet is not a biography. One of the
things that people who think that Shakespeare's plays were written by
somebody else pretty much all have in common is the insistence that Hamlet is
their biography, and it's extraordinary because Hamlet couldn't possibly be the
biography of so many people unless you accept that Hamlet has some qualities in
it that many, many people can identify with, and are very emotionally
accurate. Another thing that was very common when Freud came up with his
Oedipus complex idea--he had a little bit of a problem applying it to Oedipus
Rex because Oedipus doesn't knowingly kill his father and marry his mother.
That's not something he wants to do. But Hamlet, who seems very mentally tortured,
seemed to be a good argument for somebody who secretly did want to kill
his father and marry his mother, and therefore is jealous of Claudius because
he does do that. So the thing is that that became a very popular way to look
at Hamlet. For a while that was just used as a subtext, until if you see the Mel
Gibson version of Hamlet, Mel Gibson's Hamlet is all over Glenn Close's Gertrude.
They're all over the bed and everything, but you'll have to see that one for
yourself. Melancholy is a major motif in this play. It's something we saw a little
bit in Twelfth Night. Melancholy is one of the four humors, and melancholy is not
really precisely correspondent to the modern idea of depression. It can be a
good thing. Melancholy is associated with calm
contemplation, with a scholarly disposition, with intelligence with the
capacity for imagination, and yet too much melancholy can make one depressed,
unable to act, even indeed crazy. So that is one of the
problems with melancholy. The Renaissance looked at it from from all points of
view. If Hamlet is melancholy, this has a major effect on the way he behaves. There
are a number of people who are very likely to become melancholy, or to have a
problem with it. Scholars are likely to be melancholy,
lovers are likely to be melancholy--we'll see that a little bit with Ophelia-- and
also people who have just experienced a crushing emotional blow.
And so obviously Hamlet fits many of those categories.
Hamlet really exemplifies, in that sense, Melancholy personified. There's a big
political element to this play, and it's interesting to me that in movie versions of
the play, that is very often the bit that is kept out. And yet part of the play is
this political machination of who is king, and who should have been king. And
also there's stuff that's going on in the Danish Court that's very parallel to
what's going on in the Norwegian Court, and vice-versa. There's a character named
Fortinbras, who is something like what Hamlet would have been like if he was a
little more soldierly and a little less melancholy. One of the questions, too, is
how old is Hamlet? That really depends on the version of the play you read. In the
early Quarto, he's described as... this it has to do with the dating of
this little skull right here. Has it lain in the ground seven years, or
three and twenty years? Because the length of time that this has been in the
ground is corresponding to how old this person was when they died, and it's
Yorick's the Kings jester, who was somebody Hamlet had played with as a
child. In other words, Hamlet is either about
eighteen, or about thirty, and that makes a difference to the way you see him.
There's a major religious element of this play. We talked a little bit about
the split between Catholicism and Protestantism that
happened in the English Renaissance, and this becomes a very critical part of Hamlet:
part of the subtext. One of the things is that the older generation-- who believes
in Purgatory, who believe in certain kinds of things- seem to be more on the
Catholic end of the spectrum. The younger generation, like Hamlet himself, seem to
be more leaning toward a Protestant, specifically a Calvinist orientation.
Now one Calvinist belief at the time was something called "double predestination." That is your $64,000 philosophical concept for the day. Double
predestination is the idea that since God is omnipotent and God is omniscient--
knows everything and always has known, and since he knew from before the
beginning of the world who was going to be saved and who is going to be damned,
who's going to Heaven and who's going to Hell, that God must have predetermined
before the beginning of the world who was going to Heaven and who is going to
Hell. Therefore, if you are going to Hell, there
is nothing you can do about it. You have no free will, and if you have no free
will, this is a one-way ticket to despair. Despair is something that I like to
think of as the Renaissance disease: this sense of powerlessness, this idea that
you have no mastery over your own fate at all, and this is a major problem in
Hamlet. Also, the question about whether or not the ghost can really be a real
ghost, because if you don't believe in ghosts and you don't believe in
purgatory, then the ghost is lying, and if the ghost is lying, the ghost might be a
demon. And we'll see a bit more about that later.
Like Richard III, this is a very theatrical play. It talks a lot about
theatre, it talks a lot about illusion. A major theme is seeming versus being: the
nature of playing, the nature of acting. the very name of the Globe Theatre, where
this play was first performed, lends itself to talking about what the
Renaissance called "Theatrum Mundi," which is "the theatre of the world." Jaques says in As You Like It, "all the world's
a stage." And so it leads to this idea that not only the world is on the stage
but also there is a sort of a stage of the world-- that we-- those of us who are
watching Hamlet-- are participating in this. Now, we talked about openings being
very important: Richard III coming down and confiding to us, and in Twelfth
Night, beginning with that sort of musing and music and that sort of romantic
lethargy. The opening of this play begins in the cold, it begins in the dark, it's
midnight, and we know all this because the characters are careful to tell us
that. It also begins in a state of panic. Two sentries alone on the stage,
one of whom has to relieve the other and who cannot tell what's coming next. So
listen for the anxiety in this interchange: "Who's there?" "Nay, answer me." "Stand and unfold yourself." "Long live the King!" "Bernardo?" "He." "You come most
carefully upon your hour." "'Tis now struck twelve. Get thee to
bed, Francisco." "For this relief, much thanks. 'Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at
heart." Just a couple of lines. That was ten lines, and that tells us an awful lot
about the kind of paranoia that's going on. Later we find out that one of the
things, that one of the reasons they're so paranoid, is that there's been a lot
of preparation for war against Norway. They're expecting a Norwegian invasion
any day now. And so they're nervous about that. They're also people who have seen a
ghost three days running, and they're panicky and nervous about that. They have
gone to the lengths of asking Horatio, who is
a scholar connected with the Danish Court. Why do they ask Horatio?
Later on, they say, "thou art a scholar. Speak to it, Horatio." and one of the
questions is--what is it? Horatio has a PhD in ghostology or something? No, the
reason that they asked Horatio--well, there's two reasons, one of which is that
Horatio is a model for being emotionally stable, and Horatio is not likely to
imagine something, so if Horatio says it's a ghost, it's a ghost. The other
thing is that Horatio, like anyone who had been to university, has been trained
in theology, and so therefore he would know all about ghosts and spirits and
religion generally, and so hopefully he would know what to do if he saw a ghost.
Now, one of the things that I think is clever about this beginning, is that
we're intentionally bored. Bernardo starts to tell the story of how they saw
this ghost, and they all settled down, and we've kind of gotten a little bit of this
sort of droning explanation. "Last night of all, when yon same star that's
westward from the pole had made his course to illume that part of heaven
where now it burns, Marcellus and myself, the bell then beating one--" Peace, break
thee off! Look where it comes!" so that's meant to make the audience have a
heart attack. You know, you're not expecting it ,and then the ghost comes in.
And they do that again. There's a big long question about why is it that we're
having this big war against Norway: what's going on? and in brief the answer
to why they're having the war against Norway is that the previous King of
Denmark had killed the previous king of Norway. All of that person's lands then
went to Denmark. The brother of the Norwegian King had become King just the
way that the brother of the Danish King, Claudius, has become king, and
has a disaffected son [nephew], a guy who should have been King: Hamlet and Fortinbras.
Hamlet sits around being depressed. Fortinbras decides that what he's going
to do is attack Denmark, and so he's got a very different response to being left
out of things. So this goes on at some great length.
It starts on line 80 and it keeps going on up to line 125, and they start talking
about how portents are happening, and comets and streaks of blood, and the
thing is, I think you're supposed to lose your interest. I think the audience is
supposed to start wandering off thinking "oh boy ,when is this gonna end?"
and then we don't expect the ghost to come back in again. "..was sick almost to
Doomsday with eclipse, and even the like precurse of feared events, as harbingers
preceding still the fates and prologue to the omen coming on, Have heaven and
earth together demonstrated unto our climatures and countrymen... But stop, behold!
Look where it comes again!" Okay, so we didn't expect that and then they say now
you know "Thou art a scholar. Speak to it, Horatio." You talk to it and
Horatio asks the ghost a couple of questions." I'll cross it, though it blast
me. Stay, illusion! If thou hast any sound or use of voice, speak to me. If there be any
good thing to be done that may thee do ease and grace to me, speak to me.
If thou art privy to thy country's fate, which happily foreknowing may avoid, oh,
speak. Or if thou has uphoarded in thy life extorted treasure in the womb of earth
for which, they say, your spirits oft walk in death, speak of it. Stay and
speak ! Stop it, Marcellus!" "Shall I strike it with my partisan?" "'Tis here!" "'Tis here!" "'Tis gone."
Now one of the questions is, how does the
ghost get on and off? That is, at this point the ghost is entering and exiting
through the stage doors, which are upstage, remember, in a Renaissance
theatre. He's just wandering through like this, probably counterclockwise like the
ghosts in Richard III, because that's what people would expect. Horatio
asks a lot of questions of the ghost, and these are the things that you would
expect a ghost to be walking around for. One of the extraordinary things about
ghosts and witchcraft and magic is that even though it doesn't exist, there are
certain things that we all know are true about magic, and one of the things that
is often true about ghosts, is that ghosts wander around if they have
unfinished business: if they've died in a violent death, if they have picked up
some treasure that doesn't belong to them and they've left it somewhere, or, in
this case, if the king has this vision of something horrible about to come to his
country, he'll come back and warn them. And so Horatio says, "well is it this? Is
that? Is it something else?" Ghosts tend to go away
when you resolve what they want, so that's another thing. It would be nice to
get rid of him: find out what it is, and get rid of them. and so they decide "all
right, this is really nerve-racking. It was going to speak but it didn't speak.
Maybe we're gonna have to have Hamlet come ,because maybe the ghosts--it's his
father, after all--will speak to Hamlet." This opening-- in the cold, in the dark, and
in the panic, is very different from the scene which follows, which begins in
court .It's almost a combination wedding and coronation of Hamlet's uncle to his
mother. Yes indeed. Hamlet's father has died, and within two months
his mother has married his father's brother.
Hamlet thinks this is gross, and he's left out. This is a big, warm, luxurious
scene. Probably every available actor is on the stage, wearing the glitziest possible
clothing with gold or copper lace upon it, and it probably has Hamlet standing
down at the extreme edge of the stage, dressed much the way I am, totally in
black. This is wearing mourning to a wedding, and it's
almost a calculated slap in the face. When Claudius gives his opening speech, a lot
of people have a lot of trouble figuring out what it is he's saying. There's a
reason why it's hard to make out what Claudius is saying. He's a very oily guy,
and he doesn't like to be pinned down, so it's hard to figure out
exactly what he's saying, because he's being intentionally obscure. "Though yet
of Hamlet, our dear brothers death, the memory be green, and that it us befitted
to bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom to be contracted in one
brow of woe, yet so far hath discretion fought with nature, together with
remembrance on ourselves. Therefore our sometime sister, now our queen..." we sort of
slide that in the middle where no one will notice it-- "the imperial jointress
to this warlike state, have we, as 'twere, with a defeated joy, with an auspicious
and a dropping eye, with mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, an
equal scale weigh delight and dole, taken to wife." So the real business
of this is, "even though our brother just died, we married Gertrude." "And then he
hastens to say, "-- nor have we herein embarred your better wisdom, which have
freely gone with this affair along." --You gave us permission to do this. So this is
something that the Danish Court has said it's alright for Claudius to do. They've
given permission. He thanks them, and then he proceeds to take care of a bunch of
business. He sends off some messengers to Norway to find out what's going on with
these attacks, to let the King of Norway know it's happening, because they don't
think he knows that Fortinbras is attacking Denmark. And then in comes
Polonius and Laertes. Claudius makes reference to Polonius being his right
hand. He says, "you cannot speak of reason to the Dane and lose your voice. What
wouldst thou beg, Laertes, that shall not be my offer not thy asking? The head is
not more native to the heart, the hand more
instrumental to the mouth, than is the throne of Denmark to thy father. What
wouldst thou have, Laertes?" So Claudius is bending over backwards to give Laertes
something he wants, and that's because Polonius is so important to him.
That means Polonius can't be the idiot gasbag that he sometimes portrayed as
being. Laertes wants to go back to France, he gets permission to go, and then
we finally get to Hamlet, who has been sulking. "But now my cousin Hamlet, and my
son--" "A little more than kin, and less than kind." So there's something unnatural.
It's "unkind" --unnatural --and yet there's too much kin. There's something
incestuous about being somebody's son and nephew at the same time. And his
mother, Gertrude ,also tries to remonstrate with him and says why are
you so depressed, why are you wearing all this black, why are you not snapping out
of it? "Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted color off, and let thine eye look like a friend
on Denmark. Do not forever with thy vailed lids seek for thy noble father in
the dust. Thou knowst tis common, all that lives must die, passing through nature to
eternity." " Ay, madam, it is common," suggesting that she is common. "If it be,
why seems it so particular with thee?" "Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems. 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, nor customary suits of solemn black, nor
windy suspiration of the breath, no, nor the fruitful river of the eye, nor the
dejected havior of the visage that can denote me truly. These indeed seem, for
these are actions that a man might play. But I have that within which passeth
show: these but the trappings and the suits of woe."
This brings up a major theme in our play: seeming versus being. Hamlet says, no
I am NOT mourning because I'm wearing black for my father. I AM mourning. inside
It's the inside that creates the mourning. And Claudius gives him some
hollow comfort. He says don't feel so bad about it because everybody loses his
father sooner or later. Now, of course, when you consider that Claudius has
killed his father, that's kind of a little bit, you know.... that's... that's not
very good advice. The other thing is that somehow veiled in this criticism or the
saying, "stop," (you know), "stop mourning," is a bunch of insults. He says, "to persevere
in obstinate condolemeny is a course of impious stubbornness. 'Tis unmanly grief. It shows
a will most incorrect to heaven, a heart unfortified, a mind impatient, an
understanding simple and unschooled." So in about five lines Claudius has
suggested that Hamlet is unmanly, that Hamlet is dumb, that Hamlet is uneducated,
and that Hamlet is also irreligious, and it's amazing how he manages to cram
that into such a short space and still kind of gloss it over with a little bit
of sugar. And the end of it is while Laertes has gotten to go back
to Paris, Hamlet is not permitted to go back to school in Wittenberg. Now,
Wittenberg is associated with two famous people from the point of view of the
Renaissance stage: with Martin Luther, who founded the Lutheran Church, even though
that's not what he meant to do. It's a place of Protestant thought and ferment
and protest. And it also is the home of Dr. Faustus, the scholar who thought that
he could make a deal with the devil so that he could learn everything.So
there's these two different models that are connected with Wittenberg, and I
suspect that is why Hamlet is made a graduate of Wittenberg U. Hamlet agrees
to stay, even though he does not want to, and when everyone is left,
you see that he has developed a profound distaste, a profound dislike, of life and
everything it entails: huge hatred of self, huge disgust with the world. And
listen to the difference in between this soliloquy and the kind that we got
from Richard III, who was coming down and talking directly to us."Oh that
this too too sullied flesh would melt, thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,
or that the Everlasting had not fixed his canon against self-slaughter.
Oh God, God ,how weary, flat, stale and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of
this world. Fie on it, ah fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden that grows to seed;
things rank and gross in nature possess it merely. That it should come to
this! but two months dead-- nay, not so much, not two; so excellent a king, that was to
this Hyperion to a satyr, so loving to my mother that he might still not beteem
the winds of heaven visit her face too roughly--Heaven and earth, must I remember?--
Why, she whould hang on him as if increase of appetite had grown by what
it fed on. Yet within a month--let me not think of it; Frailty, thy name is woman!-- a
little month, or ere those shoes were old with which she followed my poor
father's body to the grave, like Niobe, all tears-- why she, even she--Oh, God, even a beast
that wants discourse of reason would have mourned longer!--married with my
uncle." Now, you listen to that. He's interrupting himself. This is a person
whose sanity, or inside, his internal spirit is split, and he's talking to
himself like we're not even there .It's not as though he's confiding in us, like
Richard III. It's a very different way of using this kind of soliloquy
style. Now Horatio has the awkward task of telling Hamlet that he's seen his
father. and if you can imagine telling somebody who's in a state of so much grief that
the his father's ghost has been walking around--it's a very tricky thing.
Hamlet's happy to see Horatio. He's a fellow student from Wittenberg, and he
then says, you know, "I shall not look upon his like again." I'll never see somebody
like my father again. and Horatio has to say, you know, I think I saw him last
night. In fact, there's a very funny bit where Hamlet says, "my father... methinks I
see my father..." and all the people who have come in to tell him this are "where?
Where, my lord?" Yhey're almost expecting to see the
ghost appear again. And Hamlet asks some very searching questions: what did he
look like? Well, did he have his helmet on? What was
he wearing? If he had his helmet on, was the mask up or down? What was his
beard like? What did he look like? He wants to know the details, because he
doesn't want to believe this too quickly. And then he agrees yes, I will go. I will
go and I will see it this, and I will try to speak to this ghost. Now in the next
scene, which is Act 1 scene 3, we get to see Laertes and Ophelia. And one of the big
questions that everybody always wants to know about Ophelia is, "did she sleep with
Hamlet or not? My favorite answer to this question is John Barrymore's. Somebody asked
John Barrymore if Hamlet slept with Ophelia, and he said, "only in the Chicago
company." But in this particular case, Ophelia can't "really" have done anything
because, of course, she's a fictional character. When this play
is staged or made into a film version, usually the director and the actress
have to make some sort of decision about that. In your case, when you're
interpreting it, I will leave it up to you. Laertes makes sure that Ophelia is
aware that maybe she should not trust everything that Hamlet says. He doesn't
say that Hamlet doesn't love her. What he says is this: "Perhaps he loves you now,
and now no soil nor cautel doth besmirch the virtue of his will; but you
must fear, his greatness weighes, his will is not his own." In other
words, maybe he really does love you, but he's not going to be able to marry you
because he's the Prince of Denmark. He's not going to be able to choose. And so
what I want you to be careful of is not to get too invested in this. Now a lot of
people immediately seize on the fact that Laertes says "don't lose your
chastity, don't lose your virginity," but there are a number of things Laertes is
concerned about. "Then weigh what loss your honor may sustain if with too credent ear you list his songs, or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure
open to his unmastered importunity. Fear it ,Ophelia; fear it, my dear sister, and
keep you in the rear of your affections, out of the shot and danger of desire."
He's talking about this as though it were a war; as though she were going to
have to keep out of the cannon shot of Hamlet's desire. He's worried about his
sister's emotional fragility. Don't lose your heart, don't lose your honour, don't
lose your reputation, because even if you behave well, the fact that you're
spending all your time talking to Hamlet is going to have a bad effect on your
reputation. Laertes doesn't seem to be particularly
pushy on this issue-- the idea that Hamlet does not really love Ophelia.
Polonius, as we'll see in a minute, has a very different approach but one of the
things too is why does he do they both, Laertes and Polonius, assume that Hamlet
is just in it to get Ophelia into bed and to dump her? Well, there's nothing
we've seen about Hamlet that suggests that he's that kind of guy. What I'd like
to suggest is that the guys in the Polonius family-- that's the way they
behave, and so they expect it of other men. Polonius is a long speech the
"neither a borrower nor a lender be" speech, which I'm not going to go into in
a great deal of detail. But when you look at it carefully, you can see that this is
all very political advice; you know, look like this, listen to everyone, keep your
mouth shut, be careful of your friends, pick them
carefully, don't get in too many fights, but if you get
into a fight, make the other guy know you've been in a fight-- all of these
things--- and then finally he says, "oh by the way: act natural."
"To thine own self be true. It's very political advice it's kind of slimy, and
it tells you something about Polonius-- the kind of person he is;
so that might alter your opinion some when Polonius is played as some kind of
senile guy who never knows what he's doing: that sort of is mitigated by
this view. He's also very worried about Ophelia. He wants to know what they were
talking about, he wants to know what was going on with Hamlet, and he insists that
in fact, not only is Hamlet after Ophelia for unreasonable reasons, but also that
Ophelia is kind of dumb that she's believed any of this. "these blazes
daughter.." ctually he says, "AY, springes to catch woodcocks!
I do know when the blood burns, how prodigal the soul lends the tongue vows.
These blazes, daughter, giving more light than heat, extinct in both, even in
their promises as it is a-making you must not take for fire. From this time, be
something scanter of your maiden presence. Set your entreatments at a
higher rate than a command to parle." In other words, "I know perfectly well how
young men are. I've been young myself. I know how quick people are to promise
things that they don't mean." So that tells you more about Polonius than it
really does about Hamlet. He gives her very strict orders: I don't want you to
talk to him, I don't want you to write to him, I don't want you to have anything to
do with him, and she says, "yes, daddy." I think modern girls are very inclined to
think, "why would she do that? Why doesn't she defy him?" but you have to consider
the cultural difference between a girl in the Renaissance--a fairly young girl
in the Renaissance-- and a modern teenager who would never (perhaps)
listen to her father in this way. We move into the ghost's coming back again in the
next scene. And one of the questions, one of the things that they're worried about,
is whether or not this is a demon. Hamlet sees the ghost, and the
ghosts motions him to come away, and they try to stop him, and Hamlet says I don't
care. "What can it do to me? I do not set my life at a pin's fee, and for my soul,
what can it do to that, being a thing immortal as itself?" and Horatio says "no,
no, that's not what I'm worried about. I'm afraid that it might tempt you to jump
over the cliff .I'm afraid that it might suddenly reveal itself in some horrible
form and drive you crazy. I'm concerned this is a demon. I want you to be careful."
And Hamlet refuses to listen, and he runs ahead. He wants to hear this. This is a
problem when somebody is melancholy, when they know they're prone to imagination,
when they know they're prone to think the worst, that means it's going to be
extremely difficult to really believe in what you see. He sees a ghost, but he
can't trust himself. The other thing is that what the ghost tells him is exactly
what he wants to hear. The ghost tells him briefly that he was killed by his
uncle. Well, Hamlet already hates his uncle. This is, in fact, exactly what he
wanted to hear. And if a ghost shows up and says exactly what he wants to hear,
maybe that's a little suspicious. And the ghost also says that he's coming from
Purgatory. He says that he's" doomed for a certain time to walk the earth, and then
to spend the day confined to fast in fires." Well, if you don't believe in
Purgatory, that can't possibly be true. Another thing that's very common, I
mentioned that in revenge tragedy, usually the idea is that the ghost comes and
says "I'm going to walk around until you get revenge, and then I'll go away." But
this ghost is going to walk around and haunt things whether Hamlet kills his
uncle or not. So the question, is what good does it do the ghost, except for
emotional satisfaction, to have his murderer killed? So that is something
that they're concerned about. There's a certain emphasis - upon
Gertrude's sudden marriage to Claudius. Hamlet had thought his parents' marriage was
perfect. When he hears this from his father, he hears that in fact, Gertrude
had started an affair with Claudius before he actually died so this is
something that had already gone on-- something Hamlet did not know. And he
ends by saying, "adieu, adieu, adieu-- remember me." Now, in this case, the Ghost
probably goes down through the trapdoor in the floor of the Globe and that means
he's underneath this wooden floor that vibrates like a drum, so that when he
cries out "swear," everything echoes and the audiences around the Globe stage and
they can suddenly hear the ghost appearing near them, and that is a shock
effect. It's something hard to imagine in our days, when we are used to to movies,
but it's still very frightening. Hamlet decides he's not going to confide
in these guys right away, and what he does is he makes them swear and he
starts to get very crazy. He says, "you know, let's move over here." He keeps
making all these references: "you hear this fellow in the cellarage;"
"can you work in the earth so fast?" a reference to the actor playing the ghost
walking around under the stage with his echoey sound, and they do ultimately
swear and then Hamlet says "promise that you will not not only will you not say
anything of this, but when you see me in the future, I'm going to start to act
very strang. I'm going to put on what he calls an "antic disposition." I'm going to
start to act crazy. Don't even hint that you know anything about it" and they
promise, "my lord I will not," and then he says "The time is out of joint. Oh cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right."
This is Hamlet's destiny. It's a miserable one, but you're stuck with what
you're stuck with. And the question is, what is that antic disposition
going to look like? Well, we'll see
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