Hamlet: Denmark's a prison.
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.
Hamlet: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmatk being the one o' th' worst. (II.ii)
These remarks recall the assertion of Marcellus as Hamlet and the ghost go offstage: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" (I.iv). Indeed, Hamlet acknowledges that the rottenness of Denmark pervades all of nature: ". . . this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire-why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors" (II.ii). Much earlier, before his encounter with the ghost, Hamlet expressed his extreme pessimism at man's having to endure earthly existence within nature's unwholesome realm:
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah, fie, ’tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. (l .ii)
As he speaks these lines, Hamlet apparently has no idea of the truth of his father's death but is dismayed over his mother's hasty marriage to the new king. He has discovered a seeming paradox in the nature of existence: the fair, in nature and humanity, inevitably submits to the dominion of the foul. His obsession with the paradox focuses his attention on Denmark as the model of nature and human frailty. Thus a pattern of increasing parallels between Denmark and the cosmos and between man and nature develops. Question and answer, dialogue and soliloquy, become a verbal unity of repeated words and phrases, looking forward to larger thematic assertion and backward to earlier adumbration. The play constitutes a vast poem in which speculation about nature, human nature, the health of the state, and human destiny intensifies into a passionate dialectic. Mystery, riddle, enigma, and metaphysical question complicate the dialogue. Particularly in his soliloquies Hamlet confronts questions that have obsessed protagonists from Sophocles's Oedipus to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
What begins with the relatively simple questions of the soldiers of the watch in act I is magnified and complicated as the play moves on. Increasingly tenuous and rarified probes of the maddening gulf between reality and appearance proliferate. Moreover, the contrast between what the simple man cheerfully accepts at face value and what the thoughtful man is driven to question calls into doubt every surface of utterance, act, or thing. In the world of Hamlet the cosmic implications of myriad distinctions between "seem" and "be" confront us at every hand.
3. "Seeming" and "Being"
An index to form looms in the crucial qualitative differences between Hamlet's mode of speech and that of the other inhabitants of his strange world. Because Hamlet's utterances and manners are characteristically unconventional, the other major characters (except Horatio, of course) assume that he is mad or at least temporarily deranged. Conversely, because they do speak the simple, relatively safe language of ordinary existence, he assumes that they are hiding or twisting the truth. No one who easily settles for seeming is quite trustworthy to the man obsessed with the pursuit of being. Even the ghost's nature and origin (he may be a diabolical agent, after all) must be tentative for Hamlet until he can settle the validity of the ghosts, revelations with the "play within the play." Even Ophelia must be treated as the possible tool of Claudius and Polonius. The presence of Rosencrantz and Guildensterry not to mention their mission on the journey to England, arouses Hamlet’s deepest suspicions. Only Horatio is exempt from distrust, and even to him Hamlet cannot divulge the full dimension of his subversion. Yet though Hamlet seems to speak only in riddle and to act solely with evasion, his utterances and acts always actually bespeak the full measure of his feelings and his increasingly single-minded absorption with his inevitable mission. The important qualification of his honesty lies in his full knowledge that others do not (or cannot) comprehend his real meanings and that others are hardly vitally concerned with deep truths about the state, mankind, or themselves.
For our purposes, of course, the important fact is that these contrasting levels of meaning and understanding achieve formal expression. When the king demands some explanation for his extraordinary melancholy, Hamlet replies, "I am too much in the sun" (I.ii). The reply thus establishes, although Claudius does not perceive it, Hamlet's judgment of and opposition to the easy acceptance of "things as they are." And when the queen tries to reconcile him to the inevitability of death in the natural scheme and asks, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" he responds with a revealing contrast between the seeming evidences of mourning and real woe-an unequivocal condemnation of the queen's apparently easy acceptance of his father's death as opposed to the vindication of his refusal to view that death as merely an occasion for ceremonial mourning duties. To the joint entreaty of Claudius and Gertrude that he remain in Denmark, he replies only to his mother: "I shall in all my best obey you, madam" (I.ii). But in thus disdaining to answer the king, he has promised really nothing to his mother, although she takes his reply for complete submission to the royal couple. Again we see that every statement of Hamlet is dialectic: that is, it tends toward double meaning-the superficial meaning of the world of Denmark and the subtler meaning for Hamlet and the reader.
As we have observed, Hamlet's overriding concern/ even before he knows of the ghost's appearance, is the frustration of living in an imperfect world. He sees, wherever he looks, the pervasive blight in nature, especially human nature. Man, outwardly the acme of creation, is susceptible to "some vicious mole of nature," and no matter how virtuous he otherwise may be, the "dram of evil" or the "stamp of one defect" adulterates nobility (I.iv). Hamlet finds that "one may smile and smile, and be a villain" (I.v). To the uncomprehending Guildenstern, Hamlet emphasizes his basic concern with the strange puzzle of corrupted and corrupting man:
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me-no, nor woman either, though by your smiling you seem to say so. (II.ii)
This preoccupation with the paradox of man, recurring as it does throughout the play, obviously takes precedence over the revenge ordered by the ghost. Instead of the ideal world Hamlet seeks, the real world that he finds is his father’s death, his mother's remarriage, the defection of his supposed friends, and the fallen state of man.
Reams have been written about Hamlet’s reasons for the delay in carrying out his revenge; for our purpose, however, the delay is not particularly important, except insofar as it emphasizes Hamlet’s greater obsession with the pervasive blight within the cosmos. From almost every bit of verbal evidence, he considers as paramount the larger role of investigator and punitive agent of all humankind: his verbal attack on the queen, his accidental murder of Polonius, his indignation about the state of the theater, his castigation of Ophelia, his delight in foiling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and arranging their destruction, and his fight with Laertes over the grave of Ophelia. Hamlet, in living up to what he conceives to be a higher role than that of mere avenge, recurrently broods about his self-imposed mission, although he characteristically avoids naming it. In his warfare against bestiality, however he asserts his allegiance to heaven-sent reason and its dictates:
Rosencrantz: Then is the world one.
Hamlet: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmatk being the one o' th' worst. (II.ii)
These remarks recall the assertion of Marcellus as Hamlet and the ghost go offstage: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark" (I.iv). Indeed, Hamlet acknowledges that the rottenness of Denmark pervades all of nature: ". . . this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire-why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors" (II.ii). Much earlier, before his encounter with the ghost, Hamlet expressed his extreme pessimism at man's having to endure earthly existence within nature's unwholesome realm:
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah, fie, ’tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. (l .ii)
As he speaks these lines, Hamlet apparently has no idea of the truth of his father's death but is dismayed over his mother's hasty marriage to the new king. He has discovered a seeming paradox in the nature of existence: the fair, in nature and humanity, inevitably submits to the dominion of the foul. His obsession with the paradox focuses his attention on Denmark as the model of nature and human frailty. Thus a pattern of increasing parallels between Denmark and the cosmos and between man and nature develops. Question and answer, dialogue and soliloquy, become a verbal unity of repeated words and phrases, looking forward to larger thematic assertion and backward to earlier adumbration. The play constitutes a vast poem in which speculation about nature, human nature, the health of the state, and human destiny intensifies into a passionate dialectic. Mystery, riddle, enigma, and metaphysical question complicate the dialogue. Particularly in his soliloquies Hamlet confronts questions that have obsessed protagonists from Sophocles's Oedipus to Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
What begins with the relatively simple questions of the soldiers of the watch in act I is magnified and complicated as the play moves on. Increasingly tenuous and rarified probes of the maddening gulf between reality and appearance proliferate. Moreover, the contrast between what the simple man cheerfully accepts at face value and what the thoughtful man is driven to question calls into doubt every surface of utterance, act, or thing. In the world of Hamlet the cosmic implications of myriad distinctions between "seem" and "be" confront us at every hand.
3. "Seeming" and "Being"
An index to form looms in the crucial qualitative differences between Hamlet's mode of speech and that of the other inhabitants of his strange world. Because Hamlet's utterances and manners are characteristically unconventional, the other major characters (except Horatio, of course) assume that he is mad or at least temporarily deranged. Conversely, because they do speak the simple, relatively safe language of ordinary existence, he assumes that they are hiding or twisting the truth. No one who easily settles for seeming is quite trustworthy to the man obsessed with the pursuit of being. Even the ghost's nature and origin (he may be a diabolical agent, after all) must be tentative for Hamlet until he can settle the validity of the ghosts, revelations with the "play within the play." Even Ophelia must be treated as the possible tool of Claudius and Polonius. The presence of Rosencrantz and Guildensterry not to mention their mission on the journey to England, arouses Hamlet’s deepest suspicions. Only Horatio is exempt from distrust, and even to him Hamlet cannot divulge the full dimension of his subversion. Yet though Hamlet seems to speak only in riddle and to act solely with evasion, his utterances and acts always actually bespeak the full measure of his feelings and his increasingly single-minded absorption with his inevitable mission. The important qualification of his honesty lies in his full knowledge that others do not (or cannot) comprehend his real meanings and that others are hardly vitally concerned with deep truths about the state, mankind, or themselves.
For our purposes, of course, the important fact is that these contrasting levels of meaning and understanding achieve formal expression. When the king demands some explanation for his extraordinary melancholy, Hamlet replies, "I am too much in the sun" (I.ii). The reply thus establishes, although Claudius does not perceive it, Hamlet's judgment of and opposition to the easy acceptance of "things as they are." And when the queen tries to reconcile him to the inevitability of death in the natural scheme and asks, "Why seems it so particular with thee?" he responds with a revealing contrast between the seeming evidences of mourning and real woe-an unequivocal condemnation of the queen's apparently easy acceptance of his father's death as opposed to the vindication of his refusal to view that death as merely an occasion for ceremonial mourning duties. To the joint entreaty of Claudius and Gertrude that he remain in Denmark, he replies only to his mother: "I shall in all my best obey you, madam" (I.ii). But in thus disdaining to answer the king, he has promised really nothing to his mother, although she takes his reply for complete submission to the royal couple. Again we see that every statement of Hamlet is dialectic: that is, it tends toward double meaning-the superficial meaning of the world of Denmark and the subtler meaning for Hamlet and the reader.
As we have observed, Hamlet's overriding concern/ even before he knows of the ghost's appearance, is the frustration of living in an imperfect world. He sees, wherever he looks, the pervasive blight in nature, especially human nature. Man, outwardly the acme of creation, is susceptible to "some vicious mole of nature," and no matter how virtuous he otherwise may be, the "dram of evil" or the "stamp of one defect" adulterates nobility (I.iv). Hamlet finds that "one may smile and smile, and be a villain" (I.v). To the uncomprehending Guildenstern, Hamlet emphasizes his basic concern with the strange puzzle of corrupted and corrupting man:
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me-no, nor woman either, though by your smiling you seem to say so. (II.ii)
This preoccupation with the paradox of man, recurring as it does throughout the play, obviously takes precedence over the revenge ordered by the ghost. Instead of the ideal world Hamlet seeks, the real world that he finds is his father’s death, his mother's remarriage, the defection of his supposed friends, and the fallen state of man.
Reams have been written about Hamlet’s reasons for the delay in carrying out his revenge; for our purpose, however, the delay is not particularly important, except insofar as it emphasizes Hamlet’s greater obsession with the pervasive blight within the cosmos. From almost every bit of verbal evidence, he considers as paramount the larger role of investigator and punitive agent of all humankind: his verbal attack on the queen, his accidental murder of Polonius, his indignation about the state of the theater, his castigation of Ophelia, his delight in foiling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and arranging their destruction, and his fight with Laertes over the grave of Ophelia. Hamlet, in living up to what he conceives to be a higher role than that of mere avenge, recurrently broods about his self-imposed mission, although he characteristically avoids naming it. In his warfare against bestiality, however he asserts his allegiance to heaven-sent reason and its dictates:
