An Isolated Man in a Disturbed Kingdom: An Essay on Hamlet, the Dane

A reflection promoted from reading The New Digest

The New Digest is thrilled to feature this guest essay by Jack Larkin. Jack is a solicitor based in Dublin. He has degrees from Trinity College, Dublin, the London School of Economics, and the University of Oxford.

My friend Conor Casey’s recent post on Hamlet positions the play as having a lot of to say on royal duty, the subjugation of individual wants, and the common good. I’d like to explore these themes a little in what follows.

In one sense Hamlet’s plot is like a Fisher King tale - an archetype originating in the Arthurian saga: In this tradition, the King has been wounded, and with his plight, the whole realm has fallen into danger. Only a wandering knight, on a quest for the Grail, can set the times right by curing the king’s wounds.

In Hamlet, the king has already died but remains tortured in the afterlife, and now his wandering, (mega-depressive) son, Young Hamlet, must journey into himself and the palace of Elsinore to lay his father to rest. In this sense, it is perhaps no accident that the final Act of Hamlet also involves a cup, a reverse Grail, poisoned by the false king Claudius.

Now that’s all very neat. But we understand there’s more to Hamlet than just plot. When we actually meet him, he isn’t much of a knight at all, he’s a Renaissance prince, the individual’s individual. So for the first two acts, this Hamlet isn’t doing any kingdom-saving or general-common-gooding whatsoever: instead, he gives himself to two (two!) long discourses with actors (on acting), wants to lose himself in study and go back to university (Wittenberg U), shrouds himself in public grief and woe (customary suits of solemn black), berates his girlfriend (for liking him), and generally avoids any suggestion of questing or Grail-adjacent activities at all.

Yet, beneath this constant deferral, Hamlet understands that he is a person of consequence, and knows too that things are not good for his country, and that it’s his job to sort them out:-

‘The time is out of joint - O cursed spite - that e’er I was born to set it right’

That Hamlet is a man divided - the individual versus the agent of justice - has caused a lot of frustration for the readers: the realm is clearly in danger; in a play with little agreement, there is shared anxiety by all characters for the state of Denmark - Claudius fears invasion by the Norwegians - Marcellus knows ‘something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ - Horatio fears the ghost of Hamlet’s father ‘bodes some strange eruption to our state.’ Things get so imbalanced that at one point a noble, Laertes, can lead riotous Danes into Elsinore, and has to be eased off from seizing the throne. It’s enough not to shout at Hamlet ‘why are you talking about Pyrrhus - Can you pay attention to your friend Horatio, Denmark needs you!’

I - Hamlet the Individual
What’s more, it’s not like Hamlet can enjoy this splendid isolation - it’s actually becoming quite dangerous for him as well: In Acts 1 and 2, we watch his slow descent from ‘melancholy nephew’ to ‘potentially mad disturbance’ to ‘enemy of the State’. Indeed what justifies Hamlet’s paranoia (in the rare moments the plot stirs him out of his idling) and his insistence on subterfuge, is that Denmark’s most powerful figures have been arrayed against him. The alienation of Hamlet from his uncle’s royal authority is noted right from his first scene, with his mother urging him to ‘let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark’. She is unpersuasive, and in the following three acts, Claudius keeps trying to figure out if Hamlet is his enemy - or whether his madness has another source. To that end; he has the Prime Minister, Polonius, spying on Hamlet, and sets his close friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to watching him too. Claudius even surveils Hamlet personally, noting the great danger to his rule that he presents:

‘Madness in great ones should not un watched go’

None of this surveillance rouses Hamlet to any particular action, save for him sullenly lamenting that Denmark, to him, ‘is a prison’ and one of the worst in the world at that.

So for most of the first two Acts, Hamlet remains an isolated man in a disturbed kingdom; thinking, mourning, and lamenting the world and his circumstances.

II - Hamlet the bloody
But then, at the end of Act II, Something exciting happens: After he watches a visiting actor recite the death of Priam from a play about the Trojan War, Hamlet starts to feel ashamed of his inaction, and wishes he could be moved not only to the emotional heights demonstrated by the player but also to the immediate action which his situation demands:

‘Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murder’d, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words..’

With this, our low-energy prince is transformed; he devises the plan to reenact the circumstances of his father’s murder before Claudius, while he and Horatio bear witness to his reaction. Finally, after (usually) 90 agonising minutes, the game is afoot.

Between this moment and Act V however, it isn’t altogether clear whether Hamlet is even that moral a person; and it is in these scenes that we see Hamlet at his coldest: first, he murders Polonius. Mistaking him for Claudius, Hamlet sends him off with a hard pity:-

Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!
I took thee for thy better: take thy fortune;

When pursued through the palace and asked for the body’s location Hamlet abuses Claudius and, not unlike Achilles, mocks their sensibilities for a proper burial:

CLAUDIUS
Where is Polonius?

HAMLET
In heaven; send hither to see: if your messenger find him not there, seek him i' the other place yourself. But indeed, if you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.

Claudius then exiles the Prince to England, escorted under guard by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the King arranges for his secret execution upon arrival (though Hamlet seems to know this already). But then, another intervention: as he is escorted to the waiting ship, the army of Norway, led by a ‘delicate’ yet impetuous prince, Fortinbras, appears. Hamlet hears from a passing captain that this army goes to their grave for little purpose: to fight against the Poles for some inconsequential plot of land.

Shocked by the madness of this act, but also moved by the audacity and grandness of Fortinbras’ will, Hamlet is once again reminded that he must act, and act violently, if he is to carry home his purpose of revenge:

How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

Hamlet recognises that Fortinbras is really his foil, his reflection: like him, Fortinbras is the nephew of a king. Unlike Hamlet, however, Fortinbras understands that royal power and authority don’t exist to be debated or unused, but should be exercised, directed towards some end. Though Shakespeare doesn’t approve of Fortinbras’ purpose - a pointless slaughter - its very meaninglessness places Hamlet’s own cause - the murder of his father - in such sharp relief as to quicken him to his purpose as both the proper monarch and the injured party. After this scene, Hamlet will no longer cast the murder of his father as a private tragedy, but as a violent act of treason against the true royal succession:

He that hath kill'd my king and whored my mother, Popp'd in between the election and my hopes, Thrown out his angle for my proper life,
And with such cozenage--is't not perfect conscience, To quit him with this arm? and is't not to be damn'd, To let this canker of our nature come In further evil?

So a few scenes later we find Hamlet emerging before his enemies in Act V, in one of the play’s most exciting moments, and laying claim for the first time to his birthright and to true royal authority by using a title that has been exclusively Claudius’ or his father’s up to this point:

What is he whose grief Bears such an emphasis? whose phrase of sorrow Conjures the wandering stars, and makes them stand Like wonder-wounded hearers?

This is I, Hamlet the Dane.

III - Hamlet the Good?
So we know as Hamlet moves from the passive to the active that he is accompanied not only by violence but also by an awakening to his Royal authority. There is some tragedy here: we see a man moving towards his death because he is alive to the consequences of his political and moral duty.

Yet, this isn’t sufficient to understand the argument to the play - it does nothing to answer why Hamlet is good, nor why the Kingdom is sick after the death of its proper King. After all, while his overthrowing of his brother was a crime, there is nothing implicitly awful in how Claudius rules: he seems to drink a lot, but so does everyone in Denmark - they clepe us drunkards - yet Claudius is a diplomat, makes peace, but prepares for war, listens to his counsellors, and generally keeps order. Indeed, the importance of kingly authority and the dependence of the commonwealth on Claudius’ safety is constantly underscored by his spies Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildernstern - who put the many personal reasons they might love Hamlet to one side in their obedience to the sovereign:

POLONIUS
I assure my good liege,
I hold my duty, as I hold my soul,
Both to my God and to my gracious king

GUILDENSTERN
Most holy and religious fear it is
To keep those many many bodies safe
That live and feed upon your majesty.

ROSENCRANTZ
The single and peculiar life is bound,
With all the strength and armour of the mind,
To keep itself from noyance; but much more
That spirit upon whose weal depend and rest
The lives of many. The cease of majesty
Dies not alone; but, like a gulf, doth draw
What's near it with it: it is a massy wheel,
Fix'd on the summit of the highest mount,
To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortised and adjoin'd; which, when it falls, Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boisterous ruin. Never alone Did the king sigh, but with a general groan.

So if these arguments about stable authority are so well understood by Shakespeare, why is he telling us that Hamlet must raise hell and set events in train that kill many more people? Again, why is Hamlet the good guy?

This is where Shakespeare’s particular brand of kingly Christianity arises. Good Kings in Shakespeare’s plays are (typically) (I) Christians and (II) warrior kings. They are the type of men who kiss the earth on the eve of battle, recall Jesus washing the feet of the poor, and then brain a treacherous continental or two.

Claudius is not this guy. Claudius is defined by a kind of sad insincerity - he can speak the words of remorse but never feel them -

‘My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go’.

He couldn’t care less for sanctuary, agreeing that Laertes would be justified in cutting Hamlet’s throat in a church. On the warlike front, we know he has ridden against the French and perhaps the English, but never for his crown. He took and keeps his throne by lies and subterfuge. Claudius would never more stake anything at Bosworth Field, Agincourt, or Shrewsbury than a modern executive. Notice how he won’t ever move against Hamlet directly: fearing the prince’s popularity amongst his subjects, there must always be cat’s paws - Laertes, Polonius, the King of England, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern.

Chief among his faults however is that Claudius is motivated by complete selfishness: he coveted his brother’s wife and his kingdom. He couldn’t abide being an NPC in Denmark, notwithstanding that we are constantly told how much better his brother was at literally everything.

But there’s one young Prince who does possess these kingly virtues. At the end of Act IV and the beginning of Act V we see all the values Shakespeare believes a sovereign should have align within Hamlet - first, Hamlet becomes much much more bellicose in his final days on earth - remember: my thoughts be bloody! Or be nothing worth’. Fortinbras, tellingly, in his impromptu eulogy of Hamlet strikes this note chiefly:

‘Let four captains
Bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally: and, for his passage, The soldiers' music and the rites of war Speak loudly for him.’

The second virtue, Hamlet’s Christianity, comes to the fore in Act V: Hamlets mission is slowly made less an individual matter, or an issue of earthly kingly duty, but more a divine mission of justice: First, Hamlet acknowledges that he’s managed to survive the events of the play so far and make it to Act V because he has been chosen and helped by God, despite his dawdling:

HAMLET
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will,--
HORATIO
That is most certain.

Moreover, Hamlet, who feared the afterlife in Act III, who cursed his role in a troubled kingdom to ‘set it right’, now calmly looks at his impending death and accepts whatever his God wills for him:

there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes?

Yet I will not overemphasis Hamlet as being possessed of some special quality of faith: his Christianity is ordinary, typical: his final breaths are spent in forgiving his murderer (Laertes) ‘heaven beg thee free of it’ and disabusing the forlorn Horatio of suicide - ‘Give me the cup: let go; by heaven, I'll have't.’ - but for Claudius and his mother the ‘wretched queen?’ They die unforgiven; Hamlet is not saintly, he forgives but he does not yield, and in that half-giving mode dies the warrior king of another world: not the Renaissance, but the sterner Middle Ages, when to be a king meant to stake one’s life and throne on singular moments of personal courage and decision.

Finally, Hamlet seals his authority by speaking on the matter of succession: giving the kingdom to the warlike Fortinbras of Norway, who buries Hamlet in honour, sending him to that final place from whence borne no traveller returns.

From the languid Acts I and II of Hamlet, it’s easy to get lost in the charm of its thoughtful, sad prince: we live in a time where this Hamlet seems so very accessible - a time where mental trauma, its discourse, indecision and an inner powerlessness feel like the air: Hamlet is here (a bit) like Schmitt’s liberal man - locked in impotent conversation with himself. But the later forms of Hamlet, the dread, pious monarch who drives an entire family to its death (Ophelia, Laertes and Polonius) with the ultimate goal of slaying his own kin, all in a mission sanctioned by heaven for the good of the polity; this Hamlet is as alien to our age as a Henry Tudor or Gustavus Adolphus. The pitiless calm with which Hamlet kills those around him, and his own self-sacrifice, all speak to a much harder age.

Yet there is within Hamlet small indications that Shakespeare knew this, and that Hamlet is at a transition point in the same way Shakespeare was - caught between the Renaissance and the early modern period- and that the bloodstained piety of Hamlet and his father would have to yield to a gentler, more civilised era. Hamlet expresses his disgust at this new ‘dressy age’ - full of flashy insubstantial types like the courtier Osric, who only have ‘the outward habit of encounter’. This is to be expected, but it is also curious that while in the same passage praising him, Fortinbras delivers what might be considered a criticism of Hamlet’s methods, offering some indication that his own rule will be more gentle and less violent:

Take up the bodies: such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.

If I’m right about that, that Hamlet is placed at crossing ages, and within conflicting values on kingship, then there is the interpretation open that the play reinforces the idea of heaven-mandated progress: Hamlet must kill Claudius not only to avenge his father, but to pave the way for a peaceful existence with Norway under one ruler, whose authority is beyond reproach.

This adds some hope to the tragic quality of the play and strikes a not-dissimilar chord to the feeling at the end of Macbeth and Richard III - a king has died, but perhaps a better king will emerge, one able to uphold his duty to promote peace and justice, and secure the ‘Safety and health’ of the body politic.