Hamlet · William Shakespeare
SUMMARY.
The division between the second and third acts is by common consent placed here. The third act occupies the afternoon, evening, and night of the same day with the second. This soliloquy is Hamlet's first, and perhaps we may find it correct to say _only_ outbreak of self-accusation. He charges himself with lack of feeling, spirit, and courage, in that he has not yet taken vengeance on his uncle. But unless we are prepared to accept and justify to the full his own hardest words against himself, and grant him a muddy-mettled, pigeon-livered rascal, we must examine and understand him, so as to account for his conduct better than he could himself. If we allow that perhaps he accuses himself too much, we may find on reflection that he accuses himself altogether wrongfully. If a man is content to think the worst of Hamlet, I care to hold no argument with that man. We must not look for _expressed_ logical sequence in a soliloquy, which is a vocal mind. The mind is seldom conscious of the links or transitions of a yet perfectly logical process developed in it. This remark, however, is more necessary in regard to the famous soliloquy to follow.
In Hamlet, misery has partly choked even vengeance; and although sure in his heart that his uncle is guilty, in his brain he is not sure. Bitterly accusing himself in an access of wretchedness and rage and credence, he forgets the doubt that has restrained him, with all besides which he might so well urge in righteous defence, not excuse, of his delay. But ungenerous criticism has, by all but universal consent, accepted his own verdict against himself. So in common life there are thousands on thousands who, upon the sad confession of a man immeasurably greater than themselves, and showing his greatness in the humility whose absence makes admission impossible to them, immediately pounce upon him with vituperation, as if he were one of the vile, and they infinitely better. Such should be indignant with St. Paul and say--if he was the chief of sinners, what insolence to lecture _them_! and certainly the more justified publican would never by them have been allowed to touch the robe of the less justified Pharisee. Such critics surely take little or no pains to understand the object of their contempt: because Hamlet is troubled and blames himself, they without hesitation condemn him--and there where he is most commendable. It is the righteous man who is most ready to accuse himself; the unrighteous is least ready. Who is able when in deep trouble, rightly to analyze his feelings? Delay in action is not necessarily abandonment of duty; in Hamlet's case it is a due recognition of duty, which condemns precipitancy--and action in the face of doubt, so long as it is nowise compelled, is precipitancy. The first thing is _to be sure_: Hamlet has never been sure; he spies at length a chance of making himself sure; he seizes upon it; and while his sudden resolve to make use of the players, like the equally sudden resolve to shroud himself in pretended madness, manifests him fertile in expedient, the carrying out of both manifests him right capable and diligent in execution--_a man of action in every true sense of the word_.
The self-accusation of Hamlet has its ground in the lapse of weeks during which nothing has been done towards punishing the king. Suddenly roused to a keen sense of the fact, he feels as if surely he might have done something. The first act ends with a burning vow of righteous vengeance; the second shows him wandering about the palace in profoundest melancholy--such as makes it more than easy for him to assume the forms of madness the moment he marks any curious eye bent upon him. Let him who has never loved and revered a mother, call such melancholy weakness. He has indeed done nothing towards the fulfilment of his vow; but the way in which he made the vow, the terms in which he exacted from his companions their promise of silence, and his scheme for eluding suspicion, combine to show that from the first he perceived its fulfilment would be hard, saw the obstacles in his way, and knew it would require both time and caution. That even in the first rush of his wrath he should thus be aware of difficulty, indicates moral symmetry; but the full weight of what lay in his path could appear to him only upon reflection. Partly in the light of passages yet to come, I will imagine the further course of his thoughts, which the closing couplet of the first act shows as having already begun to apale 'the native hue of resolution.'
'But how shall I take vengeance on my uncle? Shall I publicly accuse him, or slay him at once? In the one case what answer can I make to his denial? in the other, what justification can I offer? If I say the spirit of my father accuses him, what proof can I bring? My companions only saw the apparition--heard no word from him; and my uncle's party will assert, with absolute likelihood to the minds of those who do not know me--and who here knows me but my mother!--that charge is a mere coinage of jealous disappointment, working upon the melancholy I have not cared to hide. (174-6.) When I act, it must be to kill him, and to what misconstruction shall I not expose myself! (272) If the thing must so be, I must brave all; but I could never present myself thereafter as successor to the crown of one whom I had first slain and then vilified on the accusation of an apparition whom no one heard but myself! I must find _proof_--such proof as will satisfy others as well as myself. My immediate duty is _evidence_, not vengeance.'
We have seen besides, that, when informed of the haunting presence of the Ghost, he expected the apparition with not a little doubt as to its authenticity--a doubt which, even when he saw it, did not immediately vanish: is it any wonder that when the apparition was gone, the doubt should return? Return it did, in accordance with the reaction which waits upon all high-strung experience. If he did not believe in the person who performed it, would any man long believe in any miracle? Hamlet soon begins to question whether he can with confidence accept the appearance for that which it appeared and asserted itself to be. He steps over to the stand-point of his judges, and doubts the only testimony he has to produce. Far more:--was he not bound in common humanity, not to say _filialness_, to doubt it? To doubt the Ghost, was to doubt a testimony which to accept was to believe his father in horrible suffering, his uncle a murderer, his mother at least an adulteress; to kill his uncle was to set his seal to the whole, and, besides, to bring his mother into frightful suspicion of complicity in his father's murder. Ought not the faintest shadow of a doubt, assuaging ever so little the glare of the hell-sun of such crime, to be welcome to the tortured heart? Wretched wife and woman as his mother had shown herself, the Ghost would have him think her far worse--perhaps, even accessory to her husband's murder! For action he _must_ have proof!
At the same time, what every one knew of his mother, coupled now with the mere idea of the Ghost's accusation, wrought in him such misery, roused in him so many torturing and unanswerable questions, so blotted the face of the universe and withered the heart of hope, that he could not but doubt whether, in such a world of rogues and false women, it was worth his while to slay one villain out of the swarm. Ophelia's behaviour to him, in obedience to her father, of which she gives him no explanation, has added 'the pangs of disprized love,' and increased his doubts of woman-kind. 120. But when his imagination, presenting afresh the awful interview, brings him more immediately under the influence of the apparition and its behest, he is for the moment delivered both from the stunning effect of its communication and his doubt of its truth; forgetting then the considerations that have wrought in him, he accuses himself of remissness, blames himself grievously for his delay. Soon, however, his senses resume their influence, and he doubts again. So goes the mill-round of his thoughts, with the revolving of many wheels.
His whole conscious nature is frightfully shaken: he would be the poor creature most of his critics would make of him, were it otherwise; it is because of his greatness that he suffers so terribly, and doubts so much. A mother's crime is far more paralyzing than a father's murder is stimulating; and either he has not set himself in thorough earnest to find the proof he needs, or he has as yet been unable to think of any serviceable means to the end, when the half real, half simulated emotion of the Player yet again rouses in him the sense of remissness, leads him to accuse himself of forgotten obligation and heartlessness, and simultaneously suggests a device for putting the Ghost and his words to the test. Instantly he seizes the chance: when a thing has to be done, and can be done, Hamlet is _never_ wanting--shows himself the very promptest of men. In the last passage of this act I do not take it that he is expressing an idea then first occurring to him: that the whole thing may be a snare of the devil is a doubt with which during weeks he has been familiar. The delay through which, in utter failure to comprehend his character, he has been so miserably misjudged, falls really between the first and second acts, although it seems in the regard of most readers to underlie and protract the whole play. Its duration is measured by the journey of the ambassadors to and from the neighbouring kingdom of Norway.
It is notably odd, by the way, that those who accuse Hamlet of inaction, are mostly the same who believe his madness a reality! In truth, however, his affected madness is one of the strongest signs of his activity, and his delay one of the strongest proofs of his sanity. This second act, the third act, and a part always given to the fourth, but which really belongs to the third, occupy in all only one day. [Footnote 1: Here follows in _1st Q._ confest a murder Committed long before. This spirit that I haue seene may be the Diuell, And out of my weakenesse and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such men, Doth seeke to damne me, I will haue sounder proofes, The play's the thing, &c.] [Footnote 2: 'Stones have been known to move, and trees to speak;' &c. _Macbeth_, iii. 4.] [Footnote 3: In the _1st Q._ Hamlet, speaking to Horatio (l 37), says, And if he doe not bleach, and change at that,-- _Bleach_ is radically the same word as _blench_:--to bleach, to blanch, to blench--_to grow white_.] [Page 116] _Enter King, Queene, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosincrance, Guildenstern, and Lords._[1] [Sidenote: Guyldensterne, Lords.] [Sidenote: 72] _King._ And can you by no drift of circumstance [Sidenote: An can | of conference] Get from him why he puts on[2] this Confusion: Grating so harshly all his dayes of quiet With turbulent and dangerous Lunacy.
_King._ Sweet Gertrude leaue vs too, [Sidenote: Gertrard | two] For we haue closely sent for _Hamlet_ hither, [Sidenote: 84] That he, as 'twere by accident, may there [Sidenote: heere] Affront[2] _Ophelia_. Her Father, and my selfe[3] (lawful espials)[4] Will so bestow our selues, that seeing vnseene We may of their encounter frankely iudge, And gather by him, as he is behaued, If't be th'affliction of his loue, or no, That thus he suffers for. _Qu._ I shall obey you, And for your part _Ophelia_,[5] I do wish That your good Beauties be the happy cause Of _Hamlets_ wildenesse: so shall I hope your Vertues [Sidenote: 240] Will bring him to his wonted way againe, To both your Honors.[6] _Ophe._ Madam, I wish it may. _Pol. Ophelia_, walke you heere. Gracious so please ye[7] [Sidenote: you,] We will bestow our selues: Reade on this booke,[8] That shew of such an exercise may colour Your lonelinesse.[9] We are oft too blame in this,[10] [Sidenote: lowlines:] 'Tis too much prou'd, that with Deuotions visage, And pious Action, we do surge o're [Sidenote: sugar] The diuell himselfe. [Sidenote: 161] _King._ Oh 'tis true: [Sidenote: tis too true] How smart a lash that speech doth giue my Conscience? The Harlots Cheeke beautied with plaist'ring Art Is not more vgly to the thing that helpes it,[11] Then is my deede, to my most painted word.[12] Oh heauie burthen![13]
_Ophe._ What meanes your Lordship? _Ham._ That if you be honest and faire, your [Sidenote: faire, you should admit] Honesty[10] should admit no discourse to your Beautie. _Ophe._ Could Beautie my Lord, haue better Comerce[11] then your Honestie?[12] [Sidenote: Then with honestie?[11]] _Ham._ I trulie: for the power of Beautie, will sooner transforme Honestie from what it is, to a Bawd, then the force of Honestie can translate Beautie into his likenesse. This was sometime a Paradox, but now the time giues it proofe. I did loue you once.[13] _Ophe._ Indeed my Lord, you made me beleeue so. [Footnote 4: Note the entire change of mood from that of the last soliloquy. The right understanding of this soliloquy is indispensable to the right understanding of Hamlet. But we are terribly trammelled and hindered, as in the understanding of Hamlet throughout, so here in the understanding of his meditation, by traditional assumption. I was roused to think in the right direction concerning it, by the honoured friend and relative to whom I have feebly acknowledged my obligation by dedicating to him this book. I could not at first see it as he saw it: 'Think about it, and you will,' he said. I did think, and by degrees--not very quickly--my prejudgments thinned, faded, and almost vanished. I trust I see it now as a whole, and in its true relations, internal and external--its relations to itself, to the play, and to the Hamlet, of Shakspere.
Neither in its first verse, then, nor in it anywhere else, do I find even an allusion to suicide. What Hamlet is referring to in the said first verse, it is not possible with certainty to determine, for it is but the vanishing ripple of a preceding ocean of thought, from which he is just stepping out upon the shore of the articulate. He may have been plunged in some profound depth of the metaphysics of existence, or he may have been occupied with the one practical question, that of the slaying of his uncle, which has, now in one form, now in another, haunted his spirit for weeks. Perhaps, from the message he has just received, he expects to meet the king, and conscience, confronting temptation, has been urging the necessity of proof; perhaps a righteous consideration of consequences, which sometimes have share in the primary duty, has been making him shrink afresh from the shedding of blood, for every thoughtful mind recoils from the irrevocable, and that is an awful form of the irrevocable. But whatever thought, general or special, this first verse may be dismissing, we come at once thereafter into the light of a definite question: 'Which is nobler--to endure evil fortune, or to oppose it _à outrance_; to bear in passivity, or to resist where resistance is hopeless--resist to the last--to the death which is its unavoidable end?'
Then comes a pause, during which he is thinking--we will not say 'too precisely on the event,' but taking his account with consequences: the result appears in the uttered conviction that the extreme possible consequence, death, is a good and not an evil. Throughout, observe, how here, as always, he generalizes, himself being to himself but the type of his race. Then follows another pause, during which he seems prosecuting the thought, for he has already commenced further remark in similar strain, when suddenly a new and awful element introduces itself: ....To die--to sleep.-- --To _sleep_! perchance to _dream_! He had been thinking of death only as the passing away of the present with its troubles; here comes the recollection that death has its own troubles--its own thoughts, its own consciousness: if it be a sleep, it has its dreams. '_What dreams may come_' means, 'the sort of dreams that may come'; the emphasis is on the _what_, not on the _may_; there is no question whether dreams will come, but there is question of the character of the dreams. This consideration is what makes calamity so long-lived! 'For who would bear the multiform ills of life'--he alludes to his own wrongs, but mingles, in his generalizing way, others of those most common to humanity, and refers to the special cure for some of his own which was close to his hand--'who would bear these things if he could, as I can, make his quietus with a bare bodkin'--that is, by slaying his enemy--'who would then bear them, but that he fears the future, and the divine judgment upon his life and actions--that conscience makes a coward of him!'[14]
To run, not the risk of death, but the risks that attend upon and follow death, Hamlet must be certain of what he is about; he must be sure it is a right thing he does, or he will leave it undone. Compare his speech, 250, 'Does it not, &c.':--by the time he speaks this speech, he has had perfect proof, and asserts the righteousness of taking vengeance in almost an agony of appeal to Horatio. The more continuous and the more formally logical a soliloquy, the less natural it is. The logic should be all there, but latent; the bones of it should not show: they do not show here.] [Footnote 14: That the Great Judgement was here in Shakspere's thought, will be plain to those who take light from the corresponding passage in the _1st Quarto_. As it makes an excellent specimen of that issue in the character I am most inclined to attribute to it--that of original sketch and continuous line of notes, with more or less finished passages in place among the notes--I will here quote it, recommending it to my student's attention. If it be what I suggest, it is clear that Shakspere had not at first altogether determined how he would carry the soliloquy--what line he was going to follow in it: here hope and fear contend for the place of motive to patience. The changes from it in the text are well worth noting: the religion is lessened: the hope disappears: were they too much of pearls to cast before 'barren spectators'? The manuscript could never have been meant for any eye but his own, seeing it was possible to print from it such a chaos--over which yet broods the presence of the formative spirit of the Poet.
_Ham._ To be, or not to be, I there's the point, To Die, to sleepe, is that all? I all: No, to sleepe, to dreame, I mary there it goes, For in that dreame of death, when wee awake, [Sidenote: 24, 247, 260] And borne before an euerlasting Iudge, From whence no passenger euer retur'nd, The vndiscouered country, at whose sight The happy smile, and the accursed damn'd. But for this, the ioyfull hope of this, Whol'd beare the scornes and flattery of the world, Scorned by the right rich, the rich curssed of the poore? The widow being oppressed, the orphan wrong'd, The taste of hunger, or a tirants raigne, And thousand more calamities besides, To grunt and sweate vnder this weary life, When that he may his full _Quietus_ make, With a bare bodkin, who would this indure, But for a hope of something after death? Which pulses the braine, and doth confound the sence, Which makes vs rather beare those euilles we haue, Than flie to others that we know not of. I that, O this conscience makes cowardes of vs all, Lady in thy orizons, be all my sinnes remembred.] [Page 126] _Ham._ You should not haue beleeued me. For vertue cannot so innocculate[1] our old stocke,[2] but we shall rellish of it.[3] I loued you not.[4]
_Ophe._ I was the more deceiued. _Ham._ Get thee to a Nunnerie. Why would'st [Sidenote: thee a] thou be a breeder of Sinners? I am my selfe indifferent[5] [Sidenote: 132] honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things,[6] that it were better my Mother had [Sidenote: 62] not borne me,[7] I am very prowd, reuengefull, Ambitious, with more offences at my becke, then I haue thoughts to put them in imagination, to giue them shape, or time to acte them in. What should such Fellowes as I do, crawling betweene Heauen [Sidenote: earth and heauen] and Earth.[8] We are arrant Knaues all[10], beleeue none of vs.[9] Goe thy wayes to a Nunnery. Where's your Father?[11] _Ophe._ At home, my Lord.[12] _Ham._ Let the doores be shut vpon him, that he may play the Foole no way, but in's owne house.[13] [Sidenote: no where but] Farewell.[14] _Ophe._ O helpe him, you sweet Heauens. _Ham._[15] If thou doest Marry, Ile giue thee this Plague for thy Dowrie. Be thou as chast as Ice, as pure as Snow, thou shalt not escape Calumny.[16] Get thee to a Nunnery. Go,[17] Farewell.[18] Or if thou wilt needs Marry, marry a fool: for Wise men know well enough, what monsters[19] you make of them. To a Nunnery go, and quickly too. Farwell.[20] _Ophe._ O[21] heauenly Powers, restore him.
_Ham._[22] I haue heard of your pratlings[23] too wel [Sidenote: your paintings well] enough. God has giuen you one pace,[23] and you [Sidenote: hath | one face,] make your selfe another: you gidge, you amble, [Sidenote: selfes | you gig and amble, and] and you lispe, and nickname Gods creatures, and [Sidenote: you list you nickname] make your Wantonnesse, your[24] Ignorance.[25] Go [Footnote 6: He turns from baiting woman in her to condemn himself. Is it not the case with every noble nature, that the knowledge of wrong in another arouses in it the consciousness of its own faults and sins, of its own evil possibilities? Hurled from the heights of ideal humanity, Hamlet not only recognizes in himself every evil tendency of his race, but almost feels himself individually guilty of every transgression. 'God, God, forgive us all!' exclaims the doctor who has just witnessed the misery of Lady Macbeth, unveiling her guilt. This whole speech of Hamlet is profoundly sane--looking therefore altogether insane to the shallow mind, on which the impression of its insanity is deepened by its coming from him so freely. The common nature disappointed rails at humanity; Hamlet, his earthly ideal destroyed, would tear his individual human self to pieces.] [Page 128] too, Ile no more on't, it hath made me mad. I say, we will haue no more Marriages.[1] Those that are [Sidenote: no mo marriage,] married already,[2] all but one shall liue, the rest shall keep as they are. To a Nunnery, go.
_Exit Hamlet_. [Sidenote: _Exit_] [3]_Ophe._ O what a Noble minde is heere o're-throwne? The Courtiers, Soldiers, Schollers: Eye, tongue, sword, Th'expectansie and Rose[4] of the faire State, [Sidenote: Th' expectation,] The glasse of Fashion,[5] and the mould of Forme,[6] Th'obseru'd of all Obseruers, quite, quite downe. Haue I of Ladies most deiect and wretched, [Sidenote: And I of] That suck'd the Honie of his Musicke Vowes: [Sidenote: musickt] Now see that Noble, and most Soueraigne Reason, [Sidenote: see what] Like sweet Bels iangled out of tune, and harsh,[7] [Sidenote: out of time] That vnmatch'd Forme and Feature of blowne youth,[8] [Sidenote: and stature of] Blasted with extasie.[9] Oh woe is me, T'haue scene what I haue scene: see what I see.[10] [Sidenote: _Exit_.] _Enter King, and Polonius_. _King_. Loue? His affections do not that way tend, Nor what he spake, though it lack'd Forme a little, [Sidenote: Not] Was not like Madnesse.[11] There's something in his soule? O're which his Melancholly sits on brood, And I do doubt the hatch, and the disclose[12] Will be some danger,[11] which to preuent [Sidenote: which for to] I haue in quicke determination [Sidenote: 138, 180] Thus set it downe. He shall with speed to England For the demand of our neglected Tribute: Haply the Seas and Countries different [Footnote 3: _1st Q_. _Ofe._ Great God of heauen, what a quicke change is this? The Courtier, Scholler, Souldier, all in him, All dasht and splinterd thence, O woe is me, To a seene what I haue seene, see what I see. _Exit_.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.