Reading today’s Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, I got all “someone is WRONG about HAMLET on the INTERNET!”
1. Hamlet couldn’t have said anything much before the play starts, because he was off at school in Wittenberg.
2. He sees the ghost on the night of the first day in the play where he appears. Not a long delay there. And his reaction to being told “The serpent that did sting thy father’s life now wears his crown” is, “O my prophetic soul!” Or, in a different idiom, “Called it!”
3. He has every reason not to act rashly, because (a) he wants to be King (Claudius “popp’d in between the election and my hopes”), and (b) he can’t trust that the ghost is really his father. “The devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape”, etc. Watch your Star Trek, people! Emo!Hamlet is a comparatively recent invention. Prior to the late 1700s, the standard was to play Hamlet as a chessmaster, a brilliant young man trying to turn a bad situation to his advantage, facing a shrewd opponent.
4. It’s the characters in the play who remark on Hamlet’s “transformation”. That’s why Claudius sends for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Welcome, dear Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!
Moreover that we much did long to see you,
The need we have to use you did provoke
Our hasty sending. Something have you heard
Of Hamlet’s transformation; so call it,
Sith nor the exterior nor the inward man
Resembles that it was.
5. He’s so antisocial that he…has a girlfriend? And, as Claudius says, is beloved by the general populace of Denmark? Indeed, that’s a big part of why Claudius doesn’t have Hamlet killed for stabbing Polonius. As he tells Laertes, he doesn’t want to hurt Gertrude, and in addition…
The other motive,
Why to a public count I might not go,
Is the great love the general gender bear him;
Who, dipping all his faults in their affection,
Would, like the spring that turneth wood to stone,
Convert his gyves to graces; so that my arrows,
Too slightly timber’d for so loud a wind,
Would have reverted to my bow again,
And not where I had aim’d them.
6. He won’t kill his uncle first because he wants to be crowned, not executed; and second, because he wants Claudius damned, not just dead.
Continue reading “Seneca Cannot Be Too Heavy” →
