William Shakespeare, Hamlet
William Shakespeare lived in a time of great change and excitement in England – a time of geographical discovery, international trade, learning, and creativity. It was also a time of international tension and internal uprisings that came close to civil war.
Under Elizabeth I (reigned 1558-1603) and James I (reigned 1603-1625), London was a centre of government, learning, and trade, and Shakespeare’s audience came from all three worlds. His plays had to please royalty and powerful nobles, educated lawyers and scholars, as well as merchants, workers, and apprentices, many of whom could not read or write. To keep so many different kinds of people entertained, he had to write into his plays such elements as clowns who made terrible puns and wisecracks; ghosts and witches; places for the actors to dance and to sing the hit songs of the time; fencing matches and other kinds of fight scenes; and emotional speeches for his star actor, Richard Burbage.
The stories he told were familiar ones, from popular storybooks or from English and Roman history. Sometimes they were adapted, as Hamlet was, from earlier plays that had begun to seem old-fashioned. Part of Shakespeare’s success came from the fact that he had a talent for making these old tales come to life.
When you read Hamlet, or any other Shakespearean play, the first thing to remember is that the words are poetry. Shakespeare’s audience had no cinema, television, radio or recorded music. What brought entertainment into their lives was live music, and they liked to hear words treated as a kind of music. They enjoyed plays with quick, lively dialogue and jingling wordplay, with strongly rhythmic lines and neatly rhymed couplets, which made it easier for them to remember favourite scenes. These musical effects also made learning lines easier for the actors, who had to keep a large number of roles in their minds.
The next thing to remember is that Shakespeare wrote for a theatre that did not pretend to give its audience an illusion of reality, like the theatre we are used to today. When a housewife in a modern play turns on the tap of a sink, we expect to see real water come out of a real tap in something that looks like a real kitchen sink. But in Shakespeare’s time no one bothered to build on stage anything as elaborate as a realistic kitchen sink. The scene of the action had to keep changing to hold the audience’s interest, and to avoid moving large amounts of scenery, a few objects would be used to help the audience visualize the scene. For a scene set in a kitchen, Shakespeare’s company might simply have the cook come out mixing something in a bowl. A housewife in an Elizabethan play would not even have been a woman, since it was considered immoral for women to appear on stage. An older woman, like Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, would be played by a male character actor who specialized in matronly roles, and a young woman like Hamlet’s beloved Ophelia would be played by a teenage boy who was an apprentice with the company. When his voice changed, he would be given adult male roles. Of course, the apprentices played not only women, but also pages, servants, messengers, and the like. It was usual for everyone in the company, except the three or four leading actors, to “double,” or play more than one role in a play. Shakespeare’s audience accepted these conventions of the theatre as parts of a game. They expected the words of the play to supply all the missing details. Part of the attraction of Shakespeare is the way his plays guide us to imagine for ourselves the time and place of each scene, the way the characters behave, the parts of the story we hear about but do not see. The limitations of the Elizabethan stage were significant, and a striking aspect of Shakespeare’s genius is the way he rose above them.
Theatres during the Elizabethan time were open-air structures, with semicircular “pits,” or “yards,” to accommodate most of the audience. The pit could also serve as the setting for cock fights and bear baiting, two popular arena sports of the time. The audience in the pit stood on three sides of the stage. Nobles, well-to-do commoners, and other more “respectable” theatregoers sat in the three tiers of galleries that rimmed the pit. During breaks in the stage action – and sometimes while the performance was underway – peddlers sold fruit or other snacks, wandering through the audience and calling out advertisements for their wares.
The stage itself differed considerably from the modern stage. The main part, sometimes called the “apron” stage, was a raised platform that jutted into the audience. There was no curtain, and the audience would assume when one group of actors exited and another group entered there had been a change of scene.
Because there was no curtain someone always carried a dead character off. It would, after all, have spoiled the effect if a character who had just died in the play got up in full view of the audience and walked off stage to make way for the next scene. The stage often had one or more trapdoors, which could be used for entry from below or in graveyard scenes.
Behind the main stage was a small inner stage with a curtain in front of it. During productions of Hamlet, the curtain served as the tapestry (or arras) that Claudius and Polonius hide behind when they spy on Hamlet, and later it was opened to disclose Gertrude’s bedchamber. Above the apron stage, on the second storey, was a small stage with a balcony. In Hamlet this small stage served as a battlement and in Romeo and Juliet as the balcony in the famous love scene. Still higher was the musicians’ balcony and a turret for sound effects – drum rolls, trumpet calls, or thunder (made by rolling a cannon ball across the floor).
Shakespeare was born in 1564, in the little English country town of Stratford, on the Avon River. He was the grandson of a tenant farmer and the son of a glovemaker. We know that Shakespeare’s family was well off during the boy’s childhood – his father was at one point elected bailiff of Stratford, an office something like mayor – and that he was the eldest of six children. As the son of one of the wealthier citizens, he probably had a good basic education in the town’s grammar school, but we have no facts to prove this. We also have no information on how he spent his early years or on when and how he got involved with the London theatre.
At 18 he married a local girl, Anne Hathaway, who gave birth to their first child – a daughter, Susanna – six months later. This does not mean, as some scholars believe, that Shakespeare was forced into marriage: Elizabethan morals were in some ways as relaxed as our own, and it was legally acceptable for an engaged couple to sleep together. Two years later, Anne gave birth to twins, Hamnet (notice the similarity to “Hamlet”) and Judith, but by this time Shakespeare’s parents were no longer so well off. The prosperity of country towns like Stratford was declining as the city of London and its international markets grew, and so Shakespeare left home to find a way of earning a living.
One unverified story says Shakespeare was driven out of Stratford for poaching (hunting without a license) on the estate of a local aristocrat; another says he worked in his early twenties as a country schoolmaster or as a private tutor in the home of a wealthy family.
Shakespeare must somehow have learned about the theatre, because the next time we hear of him, at age 28, he is being ridiculed in a pamphlet by Robert Greene, a playwright and writer of comic prose. Greene called Shakespeare an uneducated actor who had the gall to think he could write better plays than a university graduate. One indication of Shakespeare’s early popularity is that Greene’s remarks drew complaints, and his editor publicly apologized to Shakespeare in Greene’s next pamphlet. Clearly, by 1592 the young man from Stratford was well thought of in London as an actor and a new playwright of dignity and promise.
Though England at the time was enjoying a period of domestic peace, the danger of renewed civil strife was never far away. From abroad came threats from hostile Roman Catholic countries like Spain and France. At home, both Elizabeth’s court and Shakespeare’s theatre company were targets of abuse from the growing English fundamentalist movement we call Puritanism. In this period, England was enjoying a great expansion of international trade, and London’s growing merchant class was largely made up of Puritans, who regarded the theatre as sinful and were constantly pressing either the Queen or the Lord Mayor to close it down. Then there were members of Elizabeth’s own court who believed she was not aggressive enough in her defiance of Puritans at home or Catholics abroad. One such man was the Earl of Essex, one of Elizabeth’s court favourites (and possibly her lover), who in 1600 attempted to storm the palace and overthrow her. This incident must have left a great impression on Shakespeare and his company, for they came very close to being executed with Essex and his conspirators, one of whom had paid them a large sum to revive Shakespeare’s Richard II, in which a weak king is forced to abdicate, as part of a propaganda campaign to justify Essex’s attempted coup d’etat. The performance, like the coup, apparently attracted little support. Elizabeth knew the publicity value of mercy, however, and Shakespeare’s company performed for her at the palace the night before the conspirators were hanged. It can hardly be a coincidence that within the next two years Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, in which a play is performed in an unsuccessful attempt to depose a reigning king. The Essex incident must have taught him by direct experience the risks inherent in trifling with the power of the established political order. Elizabeth’s gift for keeping the conflicting elements around her in balance continued until her death in 1603, and her successor, James I, a Scotsman, managed to oversee two further decades of peace. James enjoyed theatrical entertainment, and under his reign, Shakespeare and his colleagues rose to unprecedented prosperity. In 1604 they were officially declared the King’s Men, which gave them the status of servants to the royal household.
Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died in 1596, about four years before the first performance of Hamlet. Whether he inspired the character of Hamlet in any way, we probably will never know. Some scholars have suggested that the approaching death of Shakespeare’s father (he died in 1601) was another emotional shock that contributed to the writing of Hamlet, the hero of which is driven by the thought of his father’s sufferings after death. This is only speculation, of course. What we do know is that Shakespeare retired from the theatre in 1611 and went to live in Stratford, where he had bought the second biggest house in town, called New Place. He died there in 1616; his wife Anne died in 1623. Both Shakespeare’s daughters had married by the time of his death. Because Judith’s two sons both died young and Susanna’s daughter Elizabeth – though she married twice and even became a baroness – had no children, there are no descendants of Shakespeare among us today.
On Shakespeare’s tombstone in Stratford is inscribed a famous rhyme, putting a curse on anyone who dares to disturb his grave:
Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here.Blest be the man that spares these stones, And curst be he that moves my bones.
The inscription had led to speculation that manuscripts of unpublished works were buried with Shakespeare or that the grave may in fact be empty because the writing attributed to him was produced by other hands. (A few scholars have argued that contemporaries like Francis Bacon wrote plays attributed to Shakespeare, but this notion is generally discredited.) The rhyme is a final mystery, reminding us that Shakespeare is lost to us. Only by his work may we know him.
HAMLET Hamlet may be the most complex character any playwright has ever placed on stage. Over the centuries critics have offered a multitude of explanations for Hamlet’s behaviour, but none of them has wholly been able to “pluck out the heart of my mystery,” as Hamlet himself puts it. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theatregoers saw him as the classic ideal of the Renaissance courtier, poet and philosopher. You can make a case for this view, since Hamlet often sees immediate events in a larger perspective. Ophelia’s “O what a noble mind” speech is one of many suggesting that Shakespeare meant us to think of him this way. Yet Hamlet is a deeply troubled young man who may strive for philosophy and poetry, but has in fact, by the end of the play, caused a good many violent deaths. While the earliest view was that Hamlet is simply a victim of circumstances, later critics saw him as a beautiful but ineffectual soul who lacked the strength of will to avenge his father. Passages in the play provide justification for this point of view, most notably in Hamlet’s own soliloquies. Detractors of this view point out the cruel and barbaric aspects of Hamlet’s behaviour – his tormenting of Ophelia, his rough treatment of Polonius’ corpse, his reason for refusing to kill Claudius at prayer, and most of all the callous and seemingly unjust way he has Rosencrantz and Guildenstern put to death.
As the study of psychology developed into a science in the late nineteenth century, critics began applying its precepts to the play, viewing Hamlet as something close to a manic-depressive whose melancholy moods – as his failure to take revenge continues – deepened into self-contempt. This attitude draws some historical support from the Elizabethan belief that every human is dominated by one of four mental conditions called humours, each caused by the dominance in the body of one internal organ and its secretions. Hamlet, the notion runs, would have been seen by Shakespeare’s contemporaries as a victim of the melancholy humour, which was especially associated with thinkers and philosophers. The trouble with this interpretation is that it does not explain Hamlet’s frequent jokes and his many attempts at action.
The advent of Freudian psychology provided an additional twist to the “melancholy” interpretation. Freud’s disciple Ernest Jones asserted that Hamlet was a victim of what Freudians call the Oedipus complex, that is, a desire to take his father’s place in his mother’s affections, a desire that would naturally trigger intense feelings of guilt if the father suddenly died. Jones’ version, which partially inspired Sir Laurence Olivier’s film adaptation (1948), is made believable by the intense overemphasis Hamlet puts on his mother’s actions, despite the ghost’s commands.
Numerous other explanations of Hamlet’s motives have been offered, ranging from an excessive ambition that uses the ghost as a chance to seize the crown and then feels guilty about doing so, to an apathy that makes him hold back on philosophic grounds, since all action is futile. A few commentators have even proposed the unlikely possibility that Hamlet is a woman who has been raised as a man to provide the throne with an heir, thus explaining Hamlet’s reluctance to commit the “masculine” act of revenge.
What commentators and interpreters sometimes forget is that Hamlet is first a character in a play, and only secondly (if at all) a demonstration of this or that view of human life. You might say that Hamlet is not a classifiable type of person because he is a specific person, who, like ourselves, is made up of many different impulses and moods. It is possible for a soft-spoken professor of philosophy, under the right circumstances, to commit murder, just as it is possible to be depressed one day and crack jokes the next. Hamlet is a person of exceptional intelligence and sensitivity, raised to occupy a high station in life and then suddenly confronted with a violent and terrifying situation in which he must take drastic action. It is hardly surprising to find him veering between extremes of behaviour, hesitating, demanding proof, looking for the most appropriate way to carry out his task.
The fact that Hamlet is a thinking as well as a feeling person, conscious of the good and bad points in every step he takes, makes the act of revenge particularly painful for him. Revenge is not Christian, and Hamlet is a Christian prince; it is not rational, and Hamlet is a philosopher; it is not gentle, and Hamlet is a gentleman.
Unlike the typical hero of an Elizabethan revenge play (or a modern gangster film), Hamlet does not approach his task in an unquestioning, mechanical way. He has qualms about it, as any of us might if asked to do the same thing. It releases violent emotions in him, the intensity of which shocks and unbalances him. This questioning of what is instinctive and preordained, the testing of the old tribal code by a modern, troubled consciousness, is perhaps what makes the play so great and so universal in its interest.
An explanation to the puzzling question of why Hamlet hesitates in carrying out his revenge may in fact be provided by the hero himself. At the end of the famous “To be or not to be” monologue he complains that it is “conscience” (in the modern sense of “consciousness”) that stops him from “action”. This self-articulated opposition describes Hamlet as a sensitive sufferer who will consider every minor point of a deed before he actually undertakes it. Such sensitivity is not always reflected in Hamlet’s dealings with other characters; on the contrary, his actions are often at odds with his deeds, which is a measure of his complexity as a human being.
GERTRUDE Hamlet’s mother, the queen of Denmark, is a touching and mysterious figure. We never learn explicitly how much Gertrude knows about her husband King Hamlet’s death, or how deeply she is attached to her new husband, Claudius. She never expresses her feelings, either, about the morality of marrying her brother-in-law, though this was considered incestuous at the time. But she expresses her concern for her son and her affection for Ophelia, plus (in the Closet Scene) a vague sense of guilt that only adds to the mystery about her. The ambiguity of Gertrude’s position reaches its height in the final scene, when she drinks from the poisoned cup. Whether she knows it is poisoned is something we have to decide for ourselves.
CLAUDIUS The king of Denmark, Hamlet’s uncle and later his stepfather, is shaped from a stock type familiar to Elizabethan audiences – the neglected younger brother who seeks to take over his older brother’s title by unscrupulous means. Claudius, however, is a complex figure about whom Shakespeare provides a good deal of information. We learn how the public attitude towardss him has changed in Denmark (and changes again after Polonius’ death); we learn about his drinking habits and his personal appearance as compared with his late brother’s. Above all, we see him in action politically – manipulating, placating, and making pronouncements – and we see how his tactics in dealing with Norway or Poland link up to the conduct of his personal affairs. There is no question about his political ability, which is tied in with his talent for manipulating people and converting them to his point of view, as he does with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Some interpretations of the play suggest that we are meant to see him as more suited to the role of king than Hamlet is. His constant hypocritical smiling makes him easy to dislike, yet his genuine remorse in the Prayer Scene makes him more sympathetic, and hence more difficult for Hamlet to kill. Note that nowhere in the play does he directly express his feelings for Gertrude.
THE GHOST Barnardo’s remarks in the first scene make clear that the ghost is identical in appearance to the late King Hamlet. Hamlet’s worry over whether it is “an honest ghost” is unusual for the time, an aspect of his intellectually probing nature. Ghosts were common figures in Elizabethan plays – an inventory of costumes for one theatre included a cloak “for to go invisible.” Belief in ghosts and omens was prevalent in England, and in the theatre it was assumed that they could be trusted. A long-standing but unverifiable tradition, incidentally, says the role of the ghost was played by Shakespeare himself, and was his greatest performance.
POLONIUS The father of Laertes and Ophelia is clearly a knowledgeable man. He holds an influential position at court, though the text never specifies what title he holds – or whether he is a holdover from King Hamlet’s reign or newly appointed by Claudius, who appears to hold him in very high esteem. We know from Gertrude’s reaction to his death that she is fond of him (“the good old man”), and that she has considered a marriage between her son and his daughter. In the context of the Fortinbras subplot, Polonius’ name, which means “from Poland,” is worth noting. Though a comic figure at whose bureaucratic doubletalk we are meant to laugh, he has a visibly sinister side as well, a penchant for political intrigue and spying. While his tactics are shady, his intentions are usually good, making him, like Claudius, a mixture of good and evil.
LAERTES Polonius’ son is one of several young men whose behaviour is explicitly contrasted with Hamlet’s. A courtier in training, he is not a politician like his father, but proud, hasty, sincere, and utterly devoted to fulfilling the demands of honour – traits that will sadly prove his undoing when he falls in with Claudius’ plot. Apart from the implied running comparison with Hamlet, the chief interest of his character is the genuine intensity of his passion for the outward forms of honour. To get his sister a decent burial, for instance, he will openly quarrel with the priest; to avenge his father, he will violate the code of honour and even the dictates of his conscience with the poisoned weapon. In his own way he is an innocent like his sister, comparing himself at the end, as Polonius compared Ophelia at the start, to a game bird caught in a trap.
OPHELIA Ophelia is Polonius’ daughter. Her name is generally thought to be derived from the Greek word apheleia, meaning “innocence.” This is certainly a good description of her outlook on life, every bit as ingenuous as her brother’s. It may not, however, apply to her sexual activity. The intensity of her feeling for Hamlet suggests that something more than a flirtation has gone on between them, and the bawdy “St. Valentine’s Day” song that she sings in her madness must have been learned somewhere, though its words should not be taken as literally describing the state of their relations. Some commentators have expressed shock at the coarse language Hamlet jokingly uses towardss her in the Play Scene, but aristocratic manners were looser then, and it is really no worse than some of the interchanges between courtly lovers in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies. In the conflict between her love for Hamlet and her duty of obedience to her father’s orders, she bows to Polonius’ wishes. Hamlet is less obedient to the orders of the ghost, his father.
HORATIO Hamlet’s trusted friend Horatio is a gentleman and a scholar, but he is not of the nobility, since he appears to have no position at court except in relation to the prince. Hamlet’s much-quoted tribute to him before the Play Scene (“Give me that man / That is not passion’s slave”) points up the balanced nature of Horatio’s personality, precisely the quality Hamlet himself lacks. Of course, Horatio is also not forced to undergo any experience as intense as those that Hamlet suffers through. In his moderation of temperament, as in his intermediate rank, he represents the Renaissance version of the ancient classical ideal, the man fortunate enough to live without either excessive joy or suffering in his life. His vaguely Roman name and his Roman-style attempt to join Hamlet in death at the end confirm this.
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN Hamlet’s two fellow students from Wittenberg are unmistakably members of the Danish nobility, and noticeably frivolous students compared to the serious Horatio. (The life Polonius fears Laertes may be leading in Paris probably has some similarity to theirs in Wittenberg.) Their names, which mean “wreath of roses” and “golden star,” are authentic touches of local colour, since both belong to aristocratic Danish families still in existence today. They are certainly courtiers skilled at politicking, and we learn enough from their evasion at their first meeting with Hamlet to justify his being suspicious of them. Whether they deserve to be put to death, however, is debatable, since they can have no idea of the king’s true motives in employing them. On the other hand, the fact that they meddle in the business of kings and princes without questioning motives is a comment on their lack of principle.
FORTINBRAS The prince of Norway is a conventional, correct, ambitious military man, yet he is more an image in the play’s structure than an individual personality. Fortinbras’ chief role is to remind us, in the sphere of politics and kingship, of what Hamlet is not, just as Laertes does in the realm of family honour. Fortinbras figures in the play three times: at the beginning, when Horatio and, later, Claudius discuss his actions; in the middle, when Hamlet meets his troops; and at the very end. Like Hamlet, Fortinbras is the nephew of a reigning king, who is physically weak as Hamlet’s uncle is morally weak. The throne of Norway being occupied, he seeks conquests elsewhere, never questioning their value. When he assumes the throne, he reverses the military victory that was the great triumph of King Hamlet’s life. Fortinbras displays his inability to understand Hamlet when he orders a military funeral for him and declares that Hamlet would have made an excellent king. (He could not possibly know this; in any case, it is not likely to be true, at least not by Fortinbras’ own standards.) In short, Fortinbras’ soldierlike ability to ignore the moral complexity of life is a sort of saving grace for him. He is aptly summed up in his name, French for “strong-of-arm.”
MARCELLUS, BARNARDO, AND FRANCISCO The three soldiers of the Danish King’s Guard are all ordinary, honest men, all suffering in their own way from the sight of the ghost, and from the mysterious air of gloom that has settled on Denmark with King Hamlet’s death. Marcellus is apparently of slightly higher rank than Francisco and Barnardo (also spelled Bernardo); he is on sociable terms with Hamlet and up to date on his whereabouts. Both he and Barnardo are articulate officers of an elite guard rather than common soldiers. Barnardo is more bluntly straightforward but not less intelligent. Marcellus’ belief in ghosts, like his religious faith, is balanced against his honest practicality. His assumption that there is a logical reason for every phenomenon makes him similar in character to the captain of Fortinbras’ army, who speaks bluntly to Hamlet about the valuelessness of the land they are marching to conquer; possibly the same actor played both parts.
CLOWNS The two characters usually – and mistakenly – designated as “First and Second Gravedigger” are a comedy act, the company’s resident low comedian and his straight man, identified in early editions of the play as “Clown” and “Other.” Although in many Elizabethan plays the material performed by clowns is irrelevant to and detachable from the story (since they traditionally “worked up” their own material), Shakespeare always took unusual pains to make them an organic part of the larger work. The role he creates here for the clown is a comic contradiction in terms – a cheerful gravedigger. His robust good spirits, talkativeness, and a love of argument are all amusingly inappropriate to the cemetery where he works, and are balanced by his democratically stoic sense that everyone is equal because we all come to the same end. This simple workingman’s philosophy is elegantly balanced, at exactly the right point in the action, against the complexity of Hamlet’s soul-searching. The gravedigger’s companion, though often erroneously played as an apprentice or younger work partner, is a warden or church official in charge of the placement of graves in the churchyard. He does not argue with the clown for the simple reason that, as he is finally forced to admit, he agrees with him.
THE PLAYERS Typically for professionals at work, these actors say virtually nothing that is not connected with their job, and are resolutely uninvolved with the events at court. What you learn from them is chiefly how Hamlet feels about them. As you might expect from a prince who is himself the hero of a play (at a time when the growth of Puritanism was causing constant protest against the dangerous influence of theatres in London), Hamlet is an enthusiast and a friend, one who believes deeply in the theatre’s importance to society and who has many objections to performers who do not live up to his high ideals for the art. From Hamlet’s friendly greeting, especially as contrasted with his reserve towards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, you can see that Hamlet is extremely fond of this particular company of actors; he is an aficionado of their less successful plays and twice addresses the player king as “old friend.”
OSRIC, REYNALDO, VOLTEMAND, and CORNELIUS The court nobles. Being a noble in attendance at a Renaissance court meant a variety of things.
It meant a formal skill at elegant conversation, bearing, and dress; training in such gentlemanly activities as riding and swordsmanship on the one hand, music and writing poetry on the other. It meant the ability to use these skills in the service of the king, on matters ranging from international diplomacy to minor errands about the court such as the errand on which Osric is sent to Hamlet. And it meant the cunning to use the same skills for one’s own advancement in the royal favour, which could mean titles, decorations, and large grants of land or sums of money if one were successful. Osric is a courtier who is preoccupied with formal behaviour.
It is clear from Hamlet’s comments, and from Osric’s failure to perceive that he is being mocked, that he is little more than a foppish, gesticulating fool. (Compare his manner to the dignified bearing of the anonymous lord who comes to Hamlet immediately after Osric has left; the lord carries out his mission with a minimum of fuss in barely a quarter of the time it takes Osric to deliver a simple challenge to a fencing match.) Some critics have tried to read into Osric’s presence the notion that Claudius’ court is pretentious and decadent, but this is an exaggeration of both his foppishness and his importance. Courtiers were under no obligation to behave elegantly; they were members of a hereditary aristocracy and largely did as they pleased, which is precisely why displays of elegant manners and fine speaking were so valued by monarchs. Consequently, every court had its Osrics, and they turn up regularly in Elizabethan plays. It could more likely be considered a measure of Claudius’ good sense that he confined the trivial Osric to domestic errands and sent a reliable, well-spoken man like Voltemand on ambassadorial missions. From Voltemand’s brief report on his meeting with the king of Norway you can infer that he (and presumably the silent Cornelius as well) is an efficient, intelligent person of dignified bearing, just the sort a king can trust to get the business done. You get a glimpse of how such a man is molded, and of the kinds of backstairs business he might have to meddle in, from the little scene between Polonius and Reynaldo (presumably a young courtier in training). While sending him on a simple errand to bring money and letters to Laertes in Paris, Polonius teaches the boy to find out how Laertes is behaving by spreading mild slanders about him. Reynaldo is an alert and eager student.
PRIEST Stage tradition has made this “churlish priest” an unpleasant character. What his two brief speeches portray is a somewhat snobbish professional, compelled under political pressure to perform a task he regards as distasteful and improper. The only surprising part is that he is so outspoken in the presence of the king and queen, possibly from a wish to underline the extent to which he is protected by the church from their taking action against him.
Because the Elizabethan theatre used little or no scenery, the sense of place in a Shakespeare play changes as the characters enter and leave the stage. Where it is important, Shakespeare always indicates the time and place of the scene through a line of dialogue (as in the first scene, “’Tis now struck twelve.”) or through a formal device like the fanfares that announce the entrance of the king and his court. The fact that the story takes place in Denmark in the twelfth century mattered very little to Shakespeare and his audience; the tradition of reproducing a historical period with realistic accuracy on the stage did not come into being till nearly two hundred years later. Elizabethan costumes were as lavish and expensive as could be, but they were the costumes of Shakespeare’s own time, whether the play was set in ancient Rome or medieval England. The image of Denmark is mainly communicated to the audience by Shakespeare’s using the cliche that the Danes were heavy drinkers, which is one reason he so strongly emphasizes Hamlet’s dislike for Claudius’ drinking habits. The world was just beginning to be mapped at this time, and a London audience probably had only the vaguest notion where Denmark was located: Shakespeare himself was so uninformed he confused Dansk, the Danish word for Denmark, with the Baltic seaport of Gdansk or Danzig, at that time a free city-state, which is how he came to the mistaken idea that Denmark shared a common border with Poland. All this proves that Shakespeare’s plays are set “in the mind’s eye,” in an imaginary world of their own, which is yours to conceive as you choose, within the limits of the play.
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