Please join us as a paid subscriber or give a gift subscription at our Easter “forever” discount rate. Already a paid or founding subscriber? Watch your inbox for an Easter gift from Word & Song.
“This is the tragedy of a man who cannot make up his mind,” says the voice at the start of Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948). Somebody should have overruled Larry there. When you are confronted with ambiguity, especially in a matter of a capital crime in high places, and when a spirit comes to you in the shape of your recently deceased father and he urges you to take bloody revenge, you had better hesitate. Let me lay out the main moral problems here.
As everyone in Shakespeare’s audience knew, when it comes to vengeance, we must avoid it as poison, for “vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; I will repay.” The question is not whether someone deserves to die. It is what happens to the soul of the revenger — who takes upon himself privately a responsibility that is public. Tudor and Stuart drama is full of what scholars call “revenge tragedy” — Hamlet is no outlier. You’ve got Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, and many more, including Shakespeare’s own Titus Andronicus, Othello, and Hamlet. That’s not to mention his late plays of wonder and redemption, in which revenge, deserved or undeserved, is not taken: Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest.
You see, what should cause Hamlet to doubt is not just the fact of the matter. He himself is aware of what is at stake, though he draws the wrong conclusion about what would suffice to remove the doubt. “The spirit that I have seen,” he says, thinking of his father’s ghost,
May be a devil, and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very pregnant with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me.
So he determines to have a troup of itinerant actors play before the king and the court a tragedy whose plot will parallel what the king has done, murdering his brother (who was Hamlet’s father) and marrying his sister-in-law (Hamlet’s mother the queen). That’s to shock King Claudius into revealing his bad conscience by surprise. Which in fact does happen. But it is one thing to know that Uncle Claudius is as guilty as hell, and another to take vengeance rather than to bring the law or the whole people of Denmark into the picture. Yes, the devil will tell lies to damn you. But when the truth will do, he will tell the truth, or rather he will cheerfully reveal a fact, using it as the lever you pull to bring destruction on the object of your vengeance, and on yourself.
Suppose you ask me, “Does Shakespeare intend for us to decide that the Ghost is not really that of Hamlet’s father, but that whether he is or not, he urges upon Hamlet a damnable course of action, and thus he cannot possibly come from anywhere but Hell?” I would answer that I incline that way, though after all these years I am not entirely confident about it. Obviously, the King is guilty and deserves to die. And Hamlet is an imaginative and shrewd man, though prone to brooding melancholy and slow to act. But one of the features of the revenge tragedy is that the vengeance, unlike a case adjudicated at law, tends toward chaos. At the end of the play, everybody important except for Hamlet’s friend Horatio is dead, and Horatio has expressed a desire to commit suicide. The King is guilty, but did the Queen know that he murdered his brother? We don’t know. Polonius, the meddlesome old fool, is dead, but the last time I checked, being a meddlesome old fool is not a capital crime. He has urged upon his daughter Ophelia, whom Hamlet says he loves or once loved, a sneaky course of action, to play hard to get; she does so, and she goes mad after her father is killed by Hamlet, by mistake; and it seems as if in her madness she has drowned herself. Did she deserve to die? If we look at the stage in the final moment, littered with the dead, we see it dominated not by a Dane but by the young Norwegian prince and adventurer, Fortinbras, so that Hamlet’s action has delivered up the nation to a foreign ruler. That’s a lot to consider.
You might suppose that I’m going to give you one of Hamlet’s famous speeches in which he expresses doubt — for instance, “To be, or not to be”, when he wavers about whether to take his own life. But I’m going to engage in my own bit of indirection. I’m giving you Claudius’ monologue, in which he tries to pray. We overhear his words, which Hamlet does not. Hamlet, unseen, will find him there, on his knees. It’s a perfect opportunity to kill the man, but Hamlet decides — and this desire is damnable — that he really wants not just to kill Claudius but to send his soul spinning off to hell. We learn, when Hamlet leaves, that Claudius has been unable to pray, so that Hamlet might as well have killed him; and that makes us ask why Shakespeare included the scene at all, since neither the King’s action nor Hamlet’s has any effect on the plot. The effect on our moral sense, though, is indeed powerful and dubious: we are no longer in doubt as to the King’s guilt, but we are in more doubt than ever about Hamlet’s soul.
Here, then, is the King attempting to pray.
O, my offense is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon it, A brother's murder. Pray can I not, Though inclination be as sharp as will. My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent, And like a man to double business bound I stand in pause where I shall first begin, And both neglect. What if this cursed hand Where thicker than itself with brother's blood, Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens To wash it white as snow? Whereto serves mercy But to confront the visage of offense? And what's in prayer but this twofold force, To be forestalled ere we come to fall, Or pardoned being down? Then I'll look up. My fault is past. But, O, what form of prayer Will serve my turn? "Forgive me my foul murder"? That cannot be, since I am still possessed Of those effects for which I did the murder, My crown, mine own ambition, and my queen. Can one be pardoned and retain the offense? In the corrupted currents of this world Offense's gilded hand may shove by justice, And oft 'tis seen the wicked prize itself Buys out the law. But 'tis not so above. There is no shuffling; there the action lies In his true nature, and we ourselves compelled, Even to the teeth and forehead of our faults To give in evidence. What then? What rests? Try what repentance can. What can it not? Yet what can it when one cannot repent? O wretched state! O bosom black as death! O limed soul, that struggling to be free Art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay. Bow, stubborn knees, and heart with strings of steel, Be soft as sinews of the newborn babe. All may be well.
Word & Song is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. To support this work, please join us as a subscriber.
We think of our archive as a little treasure trove. Our paid subscribers have on demand access to the entire of Word & Song, many hundreds of entries. For everyone else, there’s always plenty to see here, as well. We hope that all of our readers will revisit and share our posts with others as we continue our mission of reclaiming — one thing at a time — the good, the beautiful, and the true.
