Hamlet's Play

 Part of Hamlet’s tragedy is that he knows what play he’s in.

An expert of theatrical convention and an avid student of the dramatic arts, Hamlet—the would-be playwright and actor—is keenly aware of how this is all going to end, particularly if he sets the plot in motion. But Hamlet is actually a lover of life, even in his current state of melancholy. He doesn’t want to die. If Hamlet were in Othello’s play and vice versa, things might have ended up differently for both of them. The delay Hamlet creates is part of his vast knowledge and brilliant mind, but he is also too cognizant to see his story ending any other way.

Just as Hamlet suspected the plot against him set to be carried out by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he almost definitely suspects that Claudius will make an attempt again. He goes into the final act with calm, steady resolve, partially because of what he doesn’t know, but partially because he knows more than any of us. Hamlet’s mind is too great for this world and all of its fardels.

Shakespeare partly answers Hamlet's irony by an enormous advance in the representations of villains: lago, Edmund in King Lear, Macbeth. Extraordinary as these are, they do not bruise the demarcations between their plays and reality. Hamlet's undiscovered country, his embassy of annihilation, voids the limits that ought to confine his drama to stage dimensions.

The malaise that haunts Elsinore is not the unrevenged regicide, or the other corruptions of the shuffling Claudius, but the negative power of Hamlet's consciousness.

No two directors, critics, actors, readers, auditors ever can agree on the center of Hamlet's being. Victor Hugo, always infectiously outrageous, saw Hamlet as a new Prometheus, presumably thefting the fire of divine consciousness in order to augment the genius of humankind. Scholars scoff at Hugo; I revere him. Though one wonders, How can you be a Prometheus in a cosmos devoid of a Zeus? Unsponsored and free, Hamlet longs for a mighty opposite, and discovers he has to be his own. He inaugurates the situation in which each of us has to be our own worst enemy.

Is that the stuff to be quarried by dramatic art? Hamlet, Goethe remarked, already is a novel, but so is what scholars call the Henriad: Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV, and Henry V. Falstaff, like Hamlet, is a cosmos too vast for stage representation, as Lear may be also. But Hamlet the play, while it has fostered many novels, ruggedly seems something other than novelistic, though that something has lite to do with revenge tragedy. Hamlet's self-enmity is not Dostoevskian or Conradian-Faulknerian. Despite his musings, he is the least likely of suicides, unlike his imitators Svidrigailov, Decoud in Nostromo, and Quentin Compson.

The dramaturgical crisis of Hamlet lies in the closet scene—not to be interpreted either as an Oedipal Complex or as another play-within-the-play. Hamlet, so individual everywhere else, is absolutely bizarre in his language as he confronts his mother (as has been seen), tub-thumping away like a televangelist denouncing sin. Shakespeare threw away all decorum of diction by inventing Hamlet, who will not ever shut up or confine himself to courtly conventions.

Since Hamlet is perpetually revived on stages everywhere, palpably it works as a play, though by all rational standards it should not. Every production that I've seen thins the complexities out, wishing them away. We set limits upon the poem unlimited, thus warding off what it is in Hamlet himself we cannot assimilate, an apprehension of mortality a touch too sharp to bear:

“O that that earth which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw.”

[ V.i.213-14]

Hamlet, in the graveyard, jests on "Imperious Caesar," but all of us are Adamic, earth to earth. Commonplace as a reminder, this would be intolerable if we had to maintain it in consciousness constantly, for all our remaining moments.

Staged with fitting force, Hamlet would be drama transfigured to a death march.