My progress:
Shakespeare Reading Project
Henry VI, parts 1, 2, 3 and Richard III
Two Gentlemen of Verona
The Taming of the Shrew
Titus Andronicus
The Comedy of Errors
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Romeo & Juliet
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Richard II
King John
The Merchant of Venice
Henry IV, Part 1
Henry IV, Part 2
The Merry Wives of Windsor
Much Ado About Nothing
Henry V
Julius Caesar
As You Like It

Hamlet

Dear friend.
I send you a flower from my garden – Though it dies in reaching you, you will know it lived, when it left my hand –
Hamlet wavered for all of us-
— Emily Dickinson to Mary Higginson, 1877

With all the many many many words in Hamlet – it is Shakespeare’s longest play – there are so many words, so much theorizing and reflecting and articulated mental struggle – so many questions and so few answers – when you get to the center of it, or at least what you might think is the center – what you find is silence. The silence you might hear in a portal to the farthest reaches of the universe. Everyone speaks. At length. What they say has meaning. We still quote what they say. But what, ultimately, does it all MEAN?

The fact that people have been arguing about the play for 400 years, struggling to dominate the discourse or express a Grand Theory of Everything Hamlet, just speaks to the play’s unruly and unnerving power. I feel like people are uncomfortable with the play’s open-endedness, with its refusal to just say what it means. This discomfort is appropriate, and – in fact – might be the play’s reason for existing?

It’s easy to forget that Hamlet is SUCH a strange play. There’s so much in between the play and our experiencing of it – it’s SO well-known we take it for granted. There are centuries of commentary, famous performances, etc. The play is covered in barnacles of research and opinion. And so we are overly familiar with it, and THUS, Hamlet is normalized. It’s “the establishment”. But take a step back. Take a couple. The play is not normal. The play is radically experimental. Nothing about it follows the rules.

This starts with the first moments of Act 1, scene 1, where two sentinels (Barnardo and Francisco) meet up on the ramparts of the castle. Famous opening, right? The first line of the play is “Who’s there?” Famously straightforward. “Who’s there?” (along with “how far that little candle throws its beams” from Merchant) is one of my favorite lines in all of Shakespeare. “Who’s there” is so practical – a question that requires a simple answer. This play – so full of questions – starts with one. Also, “Who’s there?” is such a humorously BRIEF question to open Shakespeare’s longest play. However, if you take “Who’s there?” as a metaphor, or as at least somewhat abstract, there you are again at the portal to the universe … or, if you like, standing down center stage looking out into the darkness. Who’s there? “Who’s there” is a wormhole.

Here is the opening exchange:

BARNARDO:
Who’s there?
FRANCISCO:
Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.
BARNARDO:
Long live the King!
FRANCISCO:
Barnardo?
BARNARDO:
He.
FRANCISCO:
You come most carefully upon your hour.
BARNARDO:
’Tis now struck twelve.

One sentinel relieves the sentinel already on duty. Big whup.

But look closer. It is the relieving-sentinel (Barnardo) who asks: “Who’s there?”

Think about it.

Barnado, the relief sentinel, approaches Francisco, the sentinel on duty, and says, “Who’s there?” Shouldn’t you know who’s there, because you’re approaching to take over the watch? You know the guy who’s on duty. It should not be a surprise who’s there. “Who’s there?” seems like it should be said by the OTHER guy, the sentinel currently on duty, looking out into the night and hearing someone approach. Francisco replies to Barnardo’s “Who’s there”, understandably, with, “Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.” Basically: “hey, asking ‘who’s there’ is MY job. Who are YOU?” Instead of identifying himself, though, Barnardo cries, “Long live the king!” Which is pretty funny. A desperate display of allyship, i.e. “I come in peace!” By this point, and “by this point” I mean three lines into the play – THREE!! – Francisco recognizes the voice and asks, “Barnardo?” These two are friends and Barnardo has complicated – unnecessarily – what should be a simple, “Wassup, I’m here, go home and get some sleep.” Barnardo confirms, “He.” Francisco says, a bit freaked out, “You come most carefully upon your hour.” Why you sneaking up on me, bro?

Again, these are the first seven lines. Hamlet starts in a state of total confusion. Nobody is identified. Everyone is “who’s there”-ing everyone else.

The rest of the scene does the opposite of providing clarity. Both sentries saw the Ghost the night before and are scared it will come again. Horatio arrives, calm skeptical Horatio. He’s heard the story and scoffs, “‘Twill not appear again.” Barnardo settles in to describe what they saw and you get the sense it’s going to be a long story, but he only gets five lines in when he is interrupted by the Ghost entering. The Ghost doesn’t speak (he only speaks to Hamlet). So … the exposition is interrupted by what the exposition was about to describe. Horatio gives a long (long) shpeel on the politics going on, and the conflict between the old Hamlet (the dad, the ghost) and Fortinbras. Not the Fortinbras who shows up at the end, but Fortinbras’ father, also named Fortinbras. To an audience who doesn’t know that both fathers have the same name as their sons, Horatio’s monologue is basically incomprehensible. Again: only in retrospect does it make sense. In the moment, clarity is not provided.

Meanwhile: let’s see what we HAVEN’T heard about in the first scene. We haven’t heard anything about Claudius, Gertrude, the quickie marriage, we haven’t heard anything about Hamlet! HAMLET doesn’t arrive until the SECOND scene, and he doesn’t speak until halfway through. He’s just part of the crowd (and the first time he speaks – fascinatingly – it’s an aside to us.) Most Shakespeare plays start with a scene where everything is laid out so we can orient ourselves. The first scene here does the opposite of setting up the story. We don’t know who is the lead, or what is the story, we can’t orient ourselves and neither can the characters. Nobody knows who anybody is! Wait, Horatio, which Fortinbras are you talking about?

There’s more strangeness though. The scenes are discrete little pockets, and there is a narrative – sort of – but it keeps diffusing and scattering. There’s no coherent throughline, although the play keeps attempting to straighten itself out. It’s so fascinating. There really is nothing else like it, unless you skip forward four hundred years to the breakdown of narrative in the modernist era. The action – Hamlet getting his revenge – is postponed throughout, almost to the point it becomes funny. Hamlet is going to go meet the ghost, but before that we get a whole long scene with Polonius and his kids Laertes and Ophelia. Then Hamlet and Horatio go to see the ghost, but before that Horatio delays the meeting, and Hamlet has this long speech about scandal. Hamlet is headed to see his mother, and then gets distracted by Claudius praying. Oh, and how about this: Hamlet is told to revenge his father’s death and who is his first target? Ophelia! The totally innocent Ophelia! He decides to “act crazy” and who does he test it on? Ophelia! Scaring her half to death. Ophelia has nothing to do with Claudius marrying Gertrude, so it’s like Hamlet has to cut her off – maybe because he knows he’s going to go somewhere murderous psychologically, and she won’t be able to follow. He knows he is going to change beyond recognition? Or maybe he hates her softness because he hates the softness in himself. (i.e. incel?). In other words, nothing happens when or how it should. There’s no urgency. In the middle of the whole revenge plot, Hamlet devotes himself to directing and writing a play! And he’s way more into THAT than he is into the revenge.

You could say, as Lawrence Olivier does at the start of his 1944 film: “This is a tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” This is a common interpretation: Hamlet can’t make up his mind whether or not to kill Claudius. This is a pretty good summing-up of what the play FEELS like … but the reality is much more fluid. At the end of the play eight people have died. But the way they die … it’s not exactly a one-man massacre. Ophelia dies at her own hand. Gertrude dies by accident, and it’s only because Claudius put the poison in the cup meant for Hamlet. She wasn’t supposed to drink from that cup. Hamlet stabs Polonius, but it’s only because he THINKS it’s Claudius behind the curtain. Laertes and Hamlet fight, but they switch rapiers by accident so Laertes dies but only because Hamlet now has the rapier with the poisoned tip. LOOK at this train of events. This is not just “a man who could not make up his mind”.

It’s well-known that Hamlet is a “revenge tragedy”, a very popular genre in Shakespeare’s time: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy launched a thousand ships, including Hamlet. But … what does revenge even mean in the scenario described in the paragraph above? Did Hamlet get his revenge? Not really! A revenge tragedy has familiar elements, all of which appear in Hamlet, but they are undercut repeatedly: it’s genre as skeleton only.

Hamlet wanting — and delaying — revenge is only part of the whole. There’s a dual investigation going on. Instead of blindly obeying the ghost, Hamlet spends almost the whole play testing whether or not the Ghost was correct. He wonders, worriedly, “What if the Ghost was actually the devil? What if he was lying?” So he puts together all these ways to test everyone around him, wreaking havoc and observing the results. So that’s one side: Hamlet investigating whether or not the Ghost was right. The other side belongs to Claudius, Gertrude, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, basically the whole court: They see that Hamlet is not like himself. They wonder if he is “mad”. If he IS mad, then why? Is it because he’s madly in love with Ophelia? Polonius thinks this is the reason. Or is it something else? This cohort sets up test after test as well, setting themselves up as secret audiences to observe Hamlet’s reactions to things, hoping to understand the genesis of his madness. We swing back and forth between these two investigations, as every character wrestles for control of the play, for what the story actually IS. The castle cohort is still arguing about Hamlet’s madness in Act IV!! They still don’t know why he’s crazy or IF his craziness is real! Meanwhile, Hamlet gets involved in a theatrical production, creating an excuse to continue his investigation into whether or not Claudius killed his father. But … you get the sense that being engrossed in a rehearsal process is more important to Hamlet. In Act IV, he is sent away on a ship to England, after killing Polonius by accident. Act IV is LATE to have the actual theme and plot of the play still so much up in the air.

There are all these patterns and motifs throughout, which you can’t help but cling to for clarity and structure:

Ears. (Not just the body part but that almost every scene features people eavesdropping.)
Boundaries. (corporeal and supernatural)
Garden. (Ophelia drowning, Claudius in the garden)
Rotten-ness. Images of decay, words like “foul” and “rank”. Political corruption.
Poison. Poison in the cup, poison in the ear, poison on the rapier tip, “fanged adders”, but also poisoned reputations, poisoned minds.
“Heaven and earth”. The phrase itself shows up multiple times (or “earth and heaven”). This could be a subset of the “boundaries” motif.
Acting/theatre. This is probably the biggest motif of all! You could say the play itself is a play. Plays within plays. Hamlet “acting” – as an actor – but also “acting” – as a revenger. Putting up pantomimes for an audience, whether paying or not. Hamlet “acting crazy”. Hamlet correcting his own death warrant, writing in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’s names … he’s a playwright. The word “play” shows up … everywhere, always. Even stuffy Polonius gets in on the action when he mentions he was an actor back in his school days (nobody cares, Polonius), and one time he played Julius Caesar. (Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was written around the same time as Hamlet, by the way. And Shakespeare’s Brutus is a clear precursor of Hamlet. So Caesar (Polonius) is stabbed by Brutus (Hamlet). What if, back in the day, the actors who played Julius Caesar and Brutus ALSO played Polonius and Hamlet. The regular audience would get the joke. Worlds within worlds.

All of these symbols and motifs and patterns … they exist. You feel them in the text. But what doe it all mean, ultimately?

Hamlet goes into the duel with Laertes in a suicidal mood. (Or, more suicidal than usual. Hamlet is the prototype of suicidal ideation.) You could see the “duel” as an act – which it is – it’s planned out like a play, it’s not spontaneous. You could also see it as the pretext Hamlet needs for his own death. Death-by-cop. The ultimate avoidance of responsibility. Does Hamlet even want revenge? Does he care about being king eventually? He went away to college. He got OUT. The Ghost is seen wearing full armor: Dad Hamlet was a warrior king. His son is a university intellectual, a poet, a drama club kid. Like father like son is not this story, although Hamlet is filled with fathers and sons: Hamlet, Laertes and Polonius, Fortinbras and his dad, even Pyrrhus in the play within the play. When The Murder of Gonzago/The Mousetrap is presented, everything onstage splits or fractures into multiple spheres of “watching” and “action”: the audience in Elsinore watches the play, while Hamlet watches Claudius. We out here in the audience watch the play Hamlet, and so we watch Mousetrap too, but we can see that the REAL “play” in Act III, scene 2, is going on in the audience. The one up onstage, the fictional one, but also the audience we ourselves are actually in.

A word on the whole ‘Hamlet procrastinates’ thing, and this might get preachy:

Hamlet resists the Ghost’s command and keeps putting off the revenge. This can be frustrating, but only if … you think Hamlet killing a man is okay. In killing Claudius, Hamlet would be killing the thing that makes him him – his sensitivity, his liveliness, his interest in art … and in fact we watch that side of him die over the course of this thing. Hamlet is RIGHT to put off his revenge, because he doesn’t WANT to kill his stepfather, because somewhere he knows if he DOES, he will never be the same again. Wanting the revenge to play out is bloodthirsty and in a way Shakespeare is commenting on how these things usually go and maybe – maybe? – criticizing the audience for wanting to just get to the revenge.

There are a couple of similar theatrical moments that come to mind:

In an episode of Chernobyl, Barry Keough plays a kid drafted into cleanup duty, where he is put on “pet killing” detail. The character resists with every fiber of his being because he knows if he completes his task he will no longer be the same kind of person. He is killing himself, the soft tender part (the best part). I’ve seen YouTubers react to Chernobyl and many get frustrated with him, especially when he wounds a dog and hesitates to put it out of its misery. But … if he came out of the truck on his first day and started blasting away dogs and puppies … he’d be a psycho. No, he has to “come around to it”. In so doing, he has to murder the soft part of himself. His hesitation is the best in him, the best in us.

In Saving Private Ryan, Jeremy Davies crouches on the stairs crying, instead of running upstairs with the ammo. People – safely sitting in front of their computers, never having gone to war – HATE him, and JUDGE him for his cowardice. Spielberg said over and over during the press tour, “That character is me. That’s who I would be in that situation.” We want to think we’d be better than that character. We resist identification with him, even though the director insists we do.

There were those who got frustrated with the dual nature of The Sopranos: there’s the therapy personal-life side, and there’s the mob violence side. The ones who were in it for the violence – who viewed the other stuff as “filler” – were a vocal cohort, as you will recall if you watched the show in real time. I always felt that this cohort conveniently forget the pilot: the ducks in the pool, the panic attacks, the therapy, Tony Soprano breaking down in tears about the ducks, the empty pool, the empty sky. The pilot told you what the show would be, in no uncertain terms. It’s one of the best pilots ever because of this. Those who hated the ending also forgot the pilot. The show was not about bloodshed, cathartic or random. David Chase was very open about why he did what he did. Having the members-only jacket guy come out of the bathroom guns blazing like Michael Corleone would be a betrayal of what the show CLEARLY said it was interested in.

Hamlet putting off revenge reminded me of those things.

We all want catharsis. Aristotle understood this. Some dramas provide it and many of these dramas work, eternally. But when an audience is denied the catharsis they seek, they can turn on the work of art, judge it as imperfect, or somehow “avoidant” – when it is really the audience who is actively avoiding the implications of a work of art WITHOUT a catharsis.

People wish Hamlet would stop dilly-dallying and just kill the king.

But what about the soliloquies? What about everything else in the play? What about Hamlet’s delicacy and imagination? We want him to kill off those beautiful qualities? We think he would be better off if he was a murderer?

This is not to say Hamlet is without its classical elements. Tragedy requires an audience to identify somehow and wish they could intervene in the events. Think Romeo and Juliet. That’s in operation in Hamlet too. You can’t help but think … wouldn’t Hamlet be better off if he just left Denmark altogether and ran away with the acting troupe? He loves being around the actors! His whole mood changes when they show up. It’s the only time in the play he is authentically activated! You want this funny creative drama nerd to kill everyone? Critics considered the “messiness” of the play, and the lack of structure/ambiguity a flaw for centuries. T.S. Eliot called the play a “failure”, since so much is left unresolved, unexplained, and the central character is so ambiguous. The play is very strange but the strangeness is a feature, not a bug. I think part of critical resistance to Hamlet is he is seen as “unmanly”, like Jeremy Davies weeping soldier is, like Barry Keough’s hesitant pet killer is. We want these guys to “man up”. Hamlet is actually called “unmanly” in the play. Shakespeare knew what he was doing. He also knew that the “unmanly” part of Hamlet – the one who went off to school, who reads, who likes theatre – is the best part of him – and us. This is why Hamlet resists the revenge. He likes those parts of himself. He doesn’t want to say goodbye to them.

However, let’s not get it twisted: Hamlet is not a softboi. He is unpredictable and can be breathtakingly cruel. Hamlet has a little Hal in him. (“For worms, Percy.”) Hamlet’s treatment of Ophelia is shocking. We know they had a relationship but we never see the good times. We come in at the end, just in time to watch Hamlet put a torch to the whole thing. He doesn’t “break up” with her, he shatters her, and still refuses to leave her alone. He accuses her of all kinds of things, which clearly aren’t true … all in full view of her family, who fail to protect her, and just continue to use her as a way to get close to Hamlet and see what’s going on with him. Hamlet is shockingly vicious to his mother. “the inmost parts of you” is terrifying. He is cruel to the point of psychopathy to Polonius, including calling his dead body “the guts”. He knows he is the center of everyone’s attention, and so he goes about pulling on puppet strings because he sees everything that’s going on. He knows Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are up to no good. (Yes, but sending them off to their deaths is extreme.) He also knows Horatio is good and trustworthy. He commands Horatio to tell his story…

I read the play three times this year, once before I watched Riz Ahmed’s Hamlet and then twice for this, and each time I’m surprised by it. I remember all the scenes but still they take me by surprise, it’s like they arrive before I’m ready for them. I’m like “Oh! Claudius is praying now? I thought it came later??” or “Oh wow, the players are here already??” “Oh shit, here’s ‘rogue and peasant slave’, here we go …”

You can memorize the order of Romeo and Juliet, and the story/play is intact in any re-telling of it. The play exists on its own events, gorgeous language or no. There’s nothing outside the play’s plot. Not so with Hamlet. Awareness of “everything outside” the play flickers on the periphery, sometimes visible, always felt … At one point Polonius says:

I will find
Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed
Within the center.

This is true of the play Polonius is in. Truth is hid, and it’s hidden in the center. Meaning can be found in the center. And the center is so deep you can’t even GET to it.

Hamlet without the magnificent soliloquies ceases TO BE. This makes me think of a great exchange in the Canadian television series Slings & Arrows, when Jack, the movie star playing Hamlet (played by Luke Kirby), is freaking out before opening night about the bigness of the role, and Geoffrey, the artistic director (played by Paul Gross), tries to talk him down.

Geoffrey: I want you to think of it in terms of six soliloquies, okay? Count them off with me. ‘O that this too too solid flesh’. ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I.’ ‘To be or not to be.’ ‘Tis now the very witching hour’ – that’s a short one, that’s only twelve lines. ‘Now might I do it pat’. ‘How all occasions do inform against me.’ That’s it. Six. And the rest, as they say, is silence.
Jack: I think there’s some dialogue in between.
Geoffrey: Filler.

An exaggeration, of course, although to the guy playing Hamlet it might be helpful. Put your focus where it matters. Without the soliloquies, Hamlet isn’t Hamlet. The play is ABOUT the experience of interiority, which is why Act V is such a shock to the system. Hamlet has no soliloquies in Act V. He’s beyond it. He’s closed the door on his own interior life. Also, alarmingly, awfully, he starts to refer to himself in the third person.

So. These are (some of) my thoughts on Hamlet. When I read the play, I try to come to it fresh. I try to forget the interpretations handed down to us over the years. The amazing thing is Hamlet resists interpretation, ultimately. And it doesn’t matter somehow what everyone has said over the centuries … the experience of reading the play is still – still – a shock. The whole thing is so improbable, so unruly, so diffuse. The pieces can’t be gathered together. This is not to say the play is imperfect, or whatever, but I do believe strongly that uncategorizable works – works which cloak themselves in a genre but then undercut and wriggle out from under the rules of the genre – works that refuse the rules, and allow themselves to be wide-ranging, loose-limbed, even chaotic, have more staying power, not because of what they say, but because of what they suggest. A work that suggests will always be more powerful than a work that says. (Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia comes to mind. A mad work of art, resistant to easy explanation.) This is true, too, of great movie stars: the ones who lead with eccentric individuality (however curated) rather than tried-and-true formulas … they are the stars we keep coming back to again and again, drawn to the mystery, drawn to what they suggest. (Cary Grant, for example. Greta Garbo, for another. We cannot get to the bottom of them. Our conversation with them will never end.)

Hamlet is scary because it is endless.

Quotes below, mainly from my own personal reference library:
Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Charles Lamb’s pieces on Shakespeare’s plays
Oscar Wilde, various essays and lectures
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: essays / lectures
W.H. Auden, lectures
Mark Van Doren, Shakespeare
Harold Goddard, The Meaning of Shakespeare (volumes 1 and 2)
William Hazlitt, Characters in Shakespeare’s Plays
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All
Stephen Booth, “On the Value of Hamlet” (from the collection Close Reading Without Readings

Quotes on the play

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