DEEP READING · READ 39a

Hamlet

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark · William Shakespeare · c. 1600–1601

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In One Sentence

A prince is told by his father's ghost, "your uncle poisoned me — avenge it," and then spends an entire play not doing it. What has kept this play alive for four centuries isn't the bloodbath at the end; it's that it was the first work to open up the whole interior of a person in the moments before he acts. The instant you stop automatically trusting the instructions the world hands you, you become modern — and the first symptom of being modern is that you can't move.

Coordinates

Shakespeare (1564–1616) was not a man of letters in a study; he was a working playwright and shareholder in a London theatre company, writing to sell tickets. Hamlet was written around 1600–01, and the story was already old: it comes out of a medieval Danish chronicle tale of "Amleth" (recorded by Saxo Grammaticus, retold in French by Belleforest). It also stands squarely on the shoulders of the most bankable genre of the day — the revenge tragedy, invented by Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy: a demanding ghost, a hero feigning madness, delay, a play-within-a-play, a stage strewn with corpses. Every one of those parts is standard issue. That is exactly where this play sits: Shakespeare took a crowd-pleaser that should have run its genre course, swapped in a protagonist who actually thinks, and watched the genre collapse — and out of the wreckage came the first modern interior in literature.

The Central Claims

• The real subject isn't revenge; it's knowing. The play is wall-to-wall spying, testing, eavesdropping, entrapment and verification — and the one fact that matters (is the Ghost telling the truth?) has no reliable way of being checked inside the world of the play. Hamlet doesn't need nerve. He needs ground he can stand on.
• The delay isn't a character flaw; it's the price of consciousness. He is the first person to notice that action requires a reason, and that a reason can always be interrogated one level further down. Follow the questions all the way and you cannot move. That isn't cowardice — it's the side effect of clarity.
• The way out is not to think it through; it's to stop demanding to. In Act 5 he abandons the attempt to choose his moment: "the readiness is all." He never resolves the doubt. He goes around it — and that is precisely when he becomes able to act.

The Core Ideas, One by One

The delay: why he doesn't do it

This is the four-hundred-year-old question. First, correct a popular impression: Hamlet is not "indecisive" — he is paralysed on exactly one item. Everywhere else he is frighteningly quick. Something stirs behind a curtain and he runs it through instantly (killing Polonius). At sea, in a single night, he forges a royal commission, seals it with his father's signet, and sends two former schoolfriends to their execution. A pirate ship grapples his and he is the first man across. So the question isn't whether he has the stomach. It's that for this one killing, he cannot find a reason he himself believes.

The standard answers each supply half of it:

• The Romantic reading. Coleridge held that in Hamlet the capacity for thought overbalanced the capacity for action. Goethe's image is the famous one: an oak tree planted in a delicate vase — the roots spread, and the vase shatters. A great task set on a soul not built to carry it. The weakness of this reading is that it turns the play into a psychiatric report and skips the fact that his situation is genuinely insoluble.
• The melancholy reading. A. C. Bradley pointed out that Hamlet enters the play already flattened by his father's death and his mother's remarriage — the world seems to him "weary, stale, flat and unprofitable." A man with no appetite for living has no appetite for revenge either.
• The theological / epistemological reading (the one most valued now). The Ghost says he is confined to fast in fires until his sins are burnt away — that is purgatory, a Catholic doctrine that Protestant England had formally abolished. The official line after the Reformation was that apparitions of the dead are usually devils in disguise, sent to tempt a man into damning himself. So Hamlet's worry that "the spirit that I have seen may be a devil" is not neurotic foot-dragging: it is a man with no theological floor under him being ordered, on the word of a doubtful source, to kill a king. Wanting corroboration — the Mousetrap — is the rational move.

And there is the moment he could have done it: Claudius alone, kneeling in prayer, sword already drawn — and Hamlet puts it away. His reason: kill him now, purged and shriven, and you send him to heaven; better to catch him drunk, gaming, or in bed with his brother's wife, so the soul goes down "as black as hell." This is often read as one more excuse, but it works better as the play's own dark joke: once the mind takes over even something as primitive as revenge, it immediately grows a precise algorithm — and the output of the algorithm is always "wait." (The irony is sharper still: Claudius has just admitted he cannot pray — his words fly up, his thoughts remain below. Hamlet has walked away from the cleanest blow in the play.)

The "antic disposition": when the mask conspires with the face

After the Ghost, Hamlet tells his friends he may "put an antic disposition on" — antic meaning grotesque, clownish, wild. Again, a stock part: feigned madness gives cover for investigation and licence to say true things without consequence, because nothing a madman says counts. What Shakespeare does with the part is new: wear the mask long enough and you can no longer tell which lines were performance.

He tells Ophelia to "get thee to a nunnery" (a word that in period slang could also mean a brothel, so the line is at once "keep yourself chaste" and "you women are all the same"), humiliates his mother, and talks filth at her feet during the play. Strategy? Or a man burnt through by betrayal, using the mask to spit out the ugliest things in him? The text will not adjudicate — and the undecidability is the content: a person who must perform continuously loses the coordinate called "my real self."

Shakespeare also supplies a merciless control group: Ophelia goes mad for real. Her father killed by her lover, her brother abroad, herself used as bait by every man around her, she wanders in singing bawdy songs and funeral songs, handing out flowers, and drowns. She gets no mask, no soliloquy, and nobody asks whether she'd like to avenge anyone. The prince's madness is an expensive posture; hers is what it looks like when a person with no exit actually breaks. Read the two lines side by side and the play's distribution of who is allowed an inner life becomes a cold piece of social commentary in itself.

"To be, or not to be": not a suicide note, a calculation

It is the most famous sentence in English and the most misheard. It is usually played as the bottom of a despair spiral. But look at where it sits: dead centre of the play, just after he has set up the Mousetrap and while he is waiting to test the Ghost — and it is written almost entirely in "we," not "I." He isn't saying goodbye. He is doing a sum that everyone has to do.

The sum runs like this. Living means absorbing the slings and arrows: the oppressor's wrong, the law's delay, the insolence of office, despised love. A "bare bodkin" — a plain dagger — would settle the account in a second. So why does anyone carry the load? Because of the killer premise: what comes after death is "the undiscovered country, from whose bourn no traveller returns." The fear isn't of dying; it's that it might be worse over there and nobody has ever come back with intelligence. Hence the conclusion: "conscience does make cowards of us all." Note that in Shakespeare's English "conscience" carries both moral conscience and consciousness, reflection, thinking-about — and you need both senses at once for the line's full weight: think a thing all the way down and you think the action out of existence. What unmans us isn't fear; it's thought. Enterprises "of great pitch and moment," he says, thereby "lose the name of action."

Which is the whole play in miniature: this is not the story of a coward. It is the story of a man who thought it through and discovered that "thinking it through" does not exist.

Inwardness: the first character with more inside than out

The first time he speaks about himself, his mother is telling him to stop wearing black, to stop seeming so bereaved. His answer is the foundation stone of the play: "Seems, madam? Nay, it is; I know not 'seems.'" The black clothes, the sighs, the tears — all of that can be acted. "But I have that within which passes show."

Why does that matter? Because before him, a dramatic character was essentially identical with his role: kings behaved kingly, revengers revenged, villains announced their villainy on entrance. Hamlet is the first to declare that part of him overflows his role — and that the overflow is the real him. From that instant, "the inner life" stops being an explanatory note attached to behaviour and becomes an independent space you can never see the end of. The modern novel, modern psychology, and the distinction you take for granted between "who I really am" and "how I come across" all grow out of that crack.

His seven soliloquies are that space broadcast live. The critic Harold Bloom built a famous — and hotly disputed — claim on them: that Shakespeare "invented the human." His characters feel like people, Bloom argued, because they overhear themselves: they listen to what they are saying as they say it, are changed by it, and come out of a speech as someone slightly different from who went in. (The thesis hands one writer far too much credit, and plenty of scholars say so. But as a description of these particular soliloquies it is exact: what Hamlet believes at the start of a speech is regularly not what he believes at the end.)

The play-within-the-play: "the play's the thing"

Hamlet hires a troupe, writes in a dozen or so lines of his own, has them stage a murder by poison poured in the ear followed by the murderer's courting of the widow — and watches the King's face. Claudius breaks and walks out. This is the hinge of the whole tragedy: he finally gets the thing he has been missing all along, which was never courage. It was evidence.

The implications run further. His coaching of the actors is Shakespeare stating his own aesthetics through a character: the purpose of playing is "to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature" — don't overdo it, don't underdo it. So the structure nests: actors performing a man who investigates by staging a performance, on the theory that a fake play can force out a real reaction. Which stakes the entire drama on a paradox: this is a world made of performance — the mother's mourning, the uncle's benevolent-king face, the friends' concern, Hamlet's own madness — and the only instrument that can cut through performance is another performance. That is the context in which his line about the world being a prison, "Denmark being one o' th' worst," actually bites: not because of walls, but because here no true thing can get out of a mouth without first putting on a costume.

"The time is out of joint": how one family crime becomes a diseased world

At the end of Act 1, with the Ghost gone, he cries: "The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!" "Out of joint" is the language of bone-setting: the age itself is dislocated, and the curse is that he is the one born to reset it. That single line escalates a private grievance into a cosmic assignment — he is not being asked to fix a murder, he is being asked to fix the era; and nobody can fix an era, so he is doomed from the moment he accepts the job.

Everything in the play props that up. A guard says "something is rotten in the state of Denmark" — note that it's the state that is rotten, not merely the king. The court runs on surveillance: a father sends a man to spy on his own son abroad, a daughter is used as live bait, two old schoolfriends are summoned expressly to sound the prince out, and courtesy itself functions as an interrogation tool. What makes Claudius's crime terrible isn't that one man died; it's that it turned the entire grammar of who owes obedience to whom into a lie, while everyone went on bowing exactly as before. That is why the play can be restaged as the present moment in any era: a world where the top is rotten, the machinery still runs, and everyone knows — everyone recognises that.

The graveyard and the skull: the acid that dissolves every meaning

Act 5 opens with two gravediggers cracking jokes and riddles over a grave. Hamlet takes up a skull; the gravedigger tells him it belonged to Yorick, the old king's jester. "Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio." He rode on this man's back as a child; he kissed those lips, which are gone. Then he follows the logic all the way down: Alexander died, was buried, returned to dust; the dust is earth, of earth we make clay — and why should that clay not stop a beer-barrel's bunghole? Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might patch a wall to keep the wind out. Earlier he puts it more savagely still: a king may "go a progress through the guts of a beggar" — the worm eats the king, a man fishes with that worm, a beggar eats that fish.

The graveyard scene isn't melancholy decoration. It is the play's final reagent: drop revenge, kingship, love and honour into it one at a time and see what survives. What survives is dirt. And the striking thing is that Hamlet comes out of this acid bath calmer than he went in — once you fully accept that every calculation ends at zero, the compulsion to finish the calculation before you move lets go of you too. The play makes a quiet turn here: not that he has figured it out, but that he has stopped requiring himself to.

"There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow": from calculation to readiness

Before the duel Hamlet feels a heaviness around his heart. Horatio offers to call it off. His answer is the quietest and heaviest passage in the play: "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." He has already said something similar coming home: "There's a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will."

This is the actual solution to the delay problem, and it is deliberately anticlimactic: he never verifies the Ghost and never settles whether he ought to kill. He simply stops insisting on picking the moment himself. For four acts he tried to direct his own life — set the trap, run the test, choose the hour. In Act 5 he agrees to be an actor in it instead: walk on, take what comes, improvise. So the massacre is something that half happens to him: only after he has been poisoned, his mother has collapsed, and the dying Laertes has exposed the plot does he finally, in the last thirty seconds, drive the blade home.

You can read this as Christian trust — hand the outcome to providence. You can also read it as something plainer and more modern: in a world that cannot be known for certain, the achievable thing is not to wait for certainty before acting, but to keep yourself in a state where you are able to act. His last words are "the rest is silence" — not an answer, just the end of the shift.

The Distilled Skeleton

The five acts trace one very clean line: receive an order that cannot be verified → exhaust every means of verifying it → succeed, and still be unable to move → get shipped out of Denmark and sent round by sea → come back a different man, and finally act.

• Act 1 — the commission. The Ghost appears, names the murder, demands revenge. Hamlet accepts, announces he may feign madness, and realises the thing he must repair is a dislocated age.
• Act 2 — doubt. Everyone probes him; he probes himself. Is the Ghost trustworthy? Why have I done nothing? An actor can weep real tears for a fictional Hecuba while I do nothing for a real father. Out of this comes the Mousetrap.
• Act 3 — the turn. The play-within-the-play confirms the uncle's guilt (he finally knows). Immediately he spares the praying Claudius. Immediately after that he kills Polonius by mistake — he is granted permission to act and puts the blade into the wrong man, and from here the revenger is also someone else's target.
• Act 4 — loss of control. He is deported; Ophelia goes mad and drowns; Laertes storms home with a mob and is instantly co-opted by the King. The engine of the play has slipped out of the protagonist's hands.
• Act 5 — acceptance. Graveyard, skull, "the readiness is all," the duel. Poisoned blade, poisoned cup, four dead; Fortinbras marches in and collects the kingdom on his way past.

And the bones of that line are three sons avenging three fathers, laid side by side — this is how Shakespeare argues: he doesn't hand you a conclusion, he hands you three variables.

Misreadings & Serious Objections

• Misreading 1: "Hamlet is indecisive." He stabs through a curtain, forges a death warrant for two schoolfriends, boards a pirate ship, and jumps into an open grave to wrestle Laertes — none of it hesitantly. His paralysis is local and has one target: killing a king on a ghost's word. Turning that into a personality defect shrinks the play.
• Misreading 2: treating "to thine own self be true" as the play's distilled wisdom. It is spoken by Polonius — a windbag and schemer who uses his daughter as bait and dies behind a curtain — in the middle of a long string of stale copybook maxims fired at a departing son. Shakespeare almost certainly put it in that mouth with irony attached. Its career as an inspirational slogan is a pure product of being cut loose from context.
• Misreading 3: treating "to be or not to be" as the peak of a suicidal spiral. It sits mid-play, is phrased in the first-person plural, and leads straight into his attack on Ophelia; many directors (with some textual warrant) even play it as spoken by a man who knows he is being overheard. It reads better as public metaphysics than as a private farewell.
• The Oedipal reading: enormously influential, thinly evidenced. Freud floated it in The Interpretation of Dreams; his follower Ernest Jones expanded it into a book: Hamlet cannot strike because Claudius has done what he unconsciously wanted to do (kill the father, take the mother), so killing him is a kind of self-execution. Laurence Olivier's 1948 film fixed it in the popular imagination, and the closet scene has been staged suggestively ever since. The text gives it very little support — Hamlet's fury at his mother is directed at the speed of the remarriage and at its "incest" (under the church law of the period, marrying a dead brother's widow genuinely counted as incest), not at some buried desire. It is a twentieth-century lens, not a seventeenth-century script.
• The strongest attack: T. S. Eliot called the play "an artistic failure." In "Hamlet and His Problems" (1919) he introduced the term objective correlative — to make an audience feel an emotion, a writer must supply a set of events and situations capable of equalling that emotion. His charge: Hamlet's disgust and nausea vastly exceed anything the facts (a mother's remarriage) can carry, so the feeling has no object adequate to it, and the play hangs in the air, unintelligible. Most readers today reject the verdict — many reply that emotion overflowing its object is precisely the truth of modern experience — but it remains the sharpest blade ever put to this play, and worth knowing.
• The Ophelia problem. She has no soliloquy. She exists between being used (by her father to test the prince, by the prince as a target for his rage) and going mad, and even her death is reported by someone else. Feminist criticism — Elaine Showalter's essay on "representing Ophelia" is the standard reference — argues she functions less as a character than as a screen onto which each era projects its own picture of the madwoman. Likewise, "frailty, thy name is woman" is Hamlet's line, not the play's verdict — but it does show how narrow the play's gender vision is.
• The Hamlet you have read does not exist. Three early texts survive: the First Quarto of 1603 (Q1, short and garbled, probably reconstructed from memory by actors — its version of the speech opens "To be, or not to be, I there's the point"), the Second Quarto of 1604–05 (Q2, the longest), and the First Folio of 1623 (F, which has passages Q2 lacks and cuts passages Q2 has, including the "how all occasions do inform against me" soliloquy). The script in general use today is an editorial splice of Q2 and F, and even the first soliloquy's opening — "too too solid flesh" versus "sallied / sullied flesh" — depends on which text you follow. Keep that in mind whenever anyone tells you what Shakespeare "really meant."
• Don't reduce it to a case study. Reading only the prince's psychology loses the tougher half: this is also a political play about how power turns manners, surveillance and family affection into an informant network. Denmark isn't the setting. Denmark is an accomplice.

Ten Sentences