Shakespeare’s Prince
It may seem on the surface, that Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark tells a story of indecisiveness in a lethal power struggle. It is easy to settle for this superficial conclusion and lose sight of profounder messages. In truth, the value of The Tragedy of the Prince of Denmark lies in provoking us with one question only, which despite the flow of time, or whether it is answered or not, will remain of indefinite value to humans.
What does it mean to be human?
To think? To obey our desires? To love? To be noble and just in action, or to ruthlessly pursue power and wealth? To simply live, as it was never our choice to be brought to this world? Shakespeare asks us what sort of path we would like to take, and in what manner, on our brief journey to the grave. We make choices about which paths to take on, and these choices define our character, fates and together humanity. Hamlet dies for his deliberation and nobility, Claudius for his greed for power, Laertes for his foolhardiness, Gertrude for her inconstancy, Ophelia for love and Polonius for his self-deceptive cunningness. The fates of these characters naturally connect to us, for each of them represent a part of ourselves, a fraction of what being human means.
Bringing this question to the absolute, Hamlet asks: “To be, or not to be”, wondering why naturally leads to wondering about what. What is humanity? Cambridge Dictionary has it as: “the qualities and characteristics of people”. And it is certain combinations of qualities and characteristics in Shakespeare’s cast that fascinates us.
Hamlet, most righteous and most enigmatic, first and foremost epitomizes spiritual and moral purity. And that purity, that nobility of mind, that fundamental peace of conscience, seen in Hamlet’s first soliloquy, is something that humans inherently thirst for. In disgust of his uncle’s unworthiness for the throne and his mother’s inconstancy to his father, he wails:
“O God, How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seems to me all the uses of this world! Tis an unweeded garden, in which things grow to seed. Things rank and gross in nature, possess it merely.”
We may thirst for wealth and power, but as humans we also want to attain a higher state of being, where we can disdain the unworthy from our height of moral purity. These words vividly depict what the world looks like from that height.
“this goodly frame the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy in the air”, “this brave overhanging fragment, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire: why it appears no other thing to me, than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.”
Hamlet’s afflicted despise of the world resonates with our daily experiences. Often we are disgusted by the sins and baseness of human nature, the futility of life and ugliness in the world. Then, we look upon everything, even the greatest of feats and most pleasurable of sensations, through a dull, grey lens. We feel discontent with how the world is. We feel a visceral aspiration to rise above the mire of baseness, to a different, more worthy being. But we also find it a struggle to communicate, or qualitatively describe this aspiration. Through Hamlet, Shakespeare brilliantly enunciates it in self-contemplative soliloquies that capture the essence of our discontent. Thus Hamlet connects to us in an unique way, fleshing out brilliantly what we strongly perceive, but can only vaguely describe.
Hamlet’s most infamous attribute, indecisiveness, also adds to our fascination with him in a similar manner. Hamlet thinks, plans, checks and doubts his way through the play, and although it may seem that he is indecisive, much more is at play beneath the surface. Hamlet in this way is a thinker. He prefers to have everything thought through and planned out. He calculates and doubts, trying to lay out the best course of action. He obsessively examines everything he is told and thinks. Indeed, the complexities of revenge were overwhelming. How to do it? Who can I trust? What will be Denmark’s future? My future? What of my mother? How should I then eliminate Claudius’s accomplices…
In this case, we again can sympathize with Hamlet. We want to, desperately want to, make the correct decision for our lives, especially those that impact our future and challenge our values. We fear the uncertain, and thus postpone the decision to live in the certainties of now and avoid possible losses in the future. Decisions are hard to make, because they entail uncertainty and risk. Sometimes we buckle under their crushing pressure, just like Hamlet did when he killed Polonius. In no way was that the best course of action, but under immense burden of responsibility and passion Hamlet’s prudence crippled. This makes him much more human than the typical “revenge-seeker” (such as Hamblet in Belleforest’s Hamblet, who executes every step of revenge perfectly). Hamlet embodies our desire to hesitate, and the susceptibility of human error, and we feel that Hamlet is living our lives.
But, to really find why Hamlet is such a fascinating character not only do we have to consider Hamlet’s character and fate, but we must firstly analyse Shakespeare’s intentions for that of Laertes’s.
Laertes and Hamlet share almost parallel fates. Both spent their lives out of Denmark as students, both return to find their fathers dead, both follow the path of revenge, and both kill each other at the end. But Laertes embodies another outlook to life. Unlike Hamlet, Laertes chooses not to prudently plan for nor think about what he is told or about to do. Upon his return from France, he bursts in front of Claudius, crying: “O thou vile King, Give me my father”.
He will stop at none other than revenge, condemning all the worthy and the degenerate:
“To hell allegiance: vows, to the blackest devil. Conscience and grace, to the profoundest pit. I dare damnation, to this point I stand, that both world I give negligence, let what comes. Only I’ll be avenged, most thoroughly for my father.”
He is not stupid, but he only cares about the act of revenge, not revenge. His idea of revenge, begetting his decisiveness, creates a sharp contrast with Hamlet. But ironically, before he knew it Claudius has manipulated him into the tool Hamlet is killed with. This comes even though Laertes has proclaimed: “I shall not be juggled with.” When we choose to live our lives in a certain way, we pay its price. And Laertes had traded his doubt for decisiveness. Where Hamlet stops and questions what he is told and even what he himself thinks, Laertes makes high-staked, irreversible decisions without a blink. Yet that decisiveness, the supposed quality that would have supposedly perfected Hamlet, became life’s cruel, ironic joke that costed Laertes his life. And so perhaps Shakespeare wasn’t telling a story of decisiveness after all.
As said before, both Hamlet and Laertes may be noble-minded, but Hamlet is a thinker.
But it was his contemplation of the metaphysical, the fundamental, that truly revealed his character. Beside Yorick’s skull, Hamlets asks of life and death.
“That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once: how the knave jowls it to th’ ground, it might be the pate of a politician which this ass now over-reaches, one that would have circumvented God, might it not?”
“This fellow [skull] might be in his time a great buyer of land, with his statues, his recognizances, his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries. Is this the fine of this fines, and recovery of the recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt?”
“Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander turneth into dust.”
Hamlet asks: what is life if whatever it was, will only be dust and dirt?
“[Yorick], a fellow of infinite jest; of most excellent fancy, he hath borne me on his back a thousand times: and now how abhorred in my imagination it is, my gorge rises at it.”
We are always hearing about death, war, cancer and suffering, but because they are happening to “others”, our perception of them is unreal. We believe that they only exist in books and on the TV. We don’t pause to deeply reflect on things that seem so far away from daily lives. It is only when they really cast their shadows over our lives, that we really begin to understand them. Hamlet is a young, sheltered scholar returning from England to find that themes such as death, incest and distrust suddenly ensnares every aspect of his life. His life has drastically changed. He needs to re-orientate his principles from his life past, he needs a new answer to what it means to live.
And what if one day, like Hamlet, our lives become overshadowed by death, suffering and despondence? Will we be prepared? Has the life that we have chosen to live been the one we would be truly content with? Been the one we can stand up to the new challenges with? In this aspect, Hamlet connects with us in a sublime way. At every stage of our lives our lives change. The joy of youth becomes the struggle of manhood. The independence of maturity becomes the musings of old age. Life changes, but we want to pause and reflect on what was. We want to savour what joy was, want to seek meaning through struggle, want to examine our pain and have the time to contemplate death before it arrives. And so did Hamlet, who represented humanity in his exploration of human sensation and thought, particularly of death. And so Hamlet was not only a thinker who made political or logistical calculations, he was also a thinker of the “humanness” inside of him.
However reality arrived too fast for him to achieve his self-elevation of being. In dynamic, ruthless power struggles, thinking and soul-searching is simply unaffordable. It was his fate, to be a righteous, contemplative thinker in an immoral power struggle, to suffer from the satire of reality.
These instances fully reflect Hamlet’s contemplative nature. He seeks to understand, to question. It may seem he is indecisive, but he simply wants to achieve a higher understanding of existence and humanity. To raise a question, an idea, and to explore and answer it, gives true value to humankind. We still profit immensely from people who do this, such as Tolstoy, Aristotle, Einstein, Shakespeare, Lao Tzu, and so on, who give us new definitions and perspectives of human thought, sensation and being.
Hamlet’s cause may have been fulfilled at great cost, but it was his contemplative temperament that Shakespeare intended to capture. Through Hamlet, he embodied the entire new intellectual movement in Britain after the European Renaissance, representing thousands of “gentlemen” that would arise to found the immense British Empire in one man. Instead of rustically carrying out the conventional form of revenge, where one simply kills one’s injurer, the new class of intellectuals, bred in urban cities and civil education, starts to raise fundamental questions about morals and thinking in systematically, scientifically. Instead of toiling day to day on the lands of feudal landlords and languishing in a state of intellectual numbness, people are starting to think, about the world and about themselves.
At the dawn of humanity’s intellectual enlightenment, Shakespeare intended to show us what different paths on the road to death look like. Hamlet’s philosophical deliberations costed him his life and Laertes’s noble decisiveness his. Humans die for their nature, for what they think it is to be human. It was their choice of the road to take, each meeting its own end, but all converging upon death.
Claudius, another intriguing character, suffered the certain outcome of his nature too. He saw the pursuit of power to be what it meant to be human. It charred away all other than greed and desire. Yet his political prowess ensured his road to the throne, as seen in his cunning dissipation of Norwegian hostility and manipulation skills (converting a murderous Laertes into an obedient tool). However, his immoral character in turn ensured his fall. His life was defined by his prowess and his immorality.
The Tragedy of the Prince of Denmark is not about indecisiveness. It asks us what we choose to be and connects to us with its different answers, each exhibiting a part of what being human means. The characters in The Prince of Denmark connect to us, because they are us.
And we are them.
“What does it mean to be human?” This question may never be answered, but it will help us recognize what we are.
