AWA: Academic Writing at Auckland

                ... thus the native hue of resolution

                Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,

                And enterprises of great pitch and moment

                With this regard their currents turn awry

                And lose the name of action. (Hamlet, III.i.84-88)

            So says Hamlet at the end of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy, but the words could equally well apply to this extract. Again, when faced with the choice of direct action or continued procrastination, he chooses the latter. Hamlet hates Claudius and his crime with his whole heart and soul; but always, when faced with the grimness of actually killing him, he searches through his mind and comes up with a myriad of reasons to delay.

            Laurence Olivier’s 1948 film presents this entire speech as a voice over, almost as a stream of consciousness. This is in response to the metre of the lines; the ebb and flow of Hamlet’s thoughts is reflected in the continually shifting pattern of the stresses. Now that Hamlet is convinced that Claudius is indeed guilty of murder, as the ghost claimed, his former problem of doubt on this score has been replaced by the need to obtain the fullest revenge. He has vowed to avenge his father, but the words of his vow took a curious form:

                Haste me to know’t, that I with wings as swift

                As meditation or the thoughts of love

                May sweep to my revenge. (I.v.29-31, my emphasis).

Meditation (in the sense of deep thinking) and blood-thirsty revenge do not sit comfortably together. Hamlet is a thinker, a university scholar, capable of some of the most lyrical expressions of philosophy in the English language. But he has also been charged with the grim task of avenging his father’s death, and is unable to reconcile these two facets of his character. He is constantly thinking of the ghost and the revenge demanded by it, but that is as far as he gets. However much he might berate himself for his failure to avenge his father’s death (as in “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I” (II.ii.535ff)), he is consistently unable to make a concrete decision, act upon it, and move forward.

            “Now might I do it pat” (l.73): Hamlet recognises what an ideal chance this is to fulfill his task of revenge, and yet manages to talk himself out of it. Though he draws his sword in resolute determination at “And now I’ll do’t” (l.74), he slips back into indecision before the end of the line: “And so ‘a goes to heaven/And so am I revenged” (l.74-75). He retreats again into the protective sheath of his mind, where he can give full vent to his hatred of Claudius without the need for physical action. Hamlet is perfectly capable of very deadly thoughts; he certainly does not refrain from killing Claudius due to a lack of motive. This speech is more chilling than a quick, fatal blow would have been - Hamlet’s coolly logical analysis of when and how to kill Claudius so that he will suffer full torment for his crime is terrifying, described by Johnson as “too horrible to be read or... uttered” (On Shakespeare 242). This Hamlet is not a “gentle” (Hamlet, III.iv.122) one. His “noble heart” (V.ii.352) has disappeared; here is only a man who, quite literally, is hell-bent on the fullest revenge. Death alone is not sufficient satisfaction for Claudius’ crime; he must suffer after death in the same way as Hamlet’s beloved father is suffering.

            Hamlet’s thought processes are clearly reflected in the language he is given. He breaks off line 78 incredulously when he assumes that killing Claudius at prayer will send him “[t]o heaven” (l.78) and consequently everlasting bliss. “[T]his is hire and salary, not revenge,” (l.79) he says - reducing Claudius (whom he has always despised) to the level of a hireling, but one who is rewarded for his crime (Gill 91). The possibility that Claudius may enter heaven while his father was killed

            With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;

                And how his audit stands who knows [...]?   (Hamlet, III.iii.81-82)

is abhorrent to him:

            ... am I then revenged,

                To take him in the purging of his soul,

                When he is fit and season’d for his passage?

                No.                                                         (l.84-87)

Line 87 consists only of this “No”, so heavily stressed that it is necessarily followed by a long pause. All Hamlet’s venom culminates in this single word. Olivier, however, withholds some of the force from this line and throws it instead into the lines immediately following. The language gathers momentum, climaxing in lines 93 - 95:

                 x       /     x      x   x      /       x       /    x    /   x              

                Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven

                   x     x    x      /      x    x  x       /         x      /

                And that his soul may be as damn’d and black

                 x      /       x     / x    /

                As hell, whereto it goes...                  (l.93-95)

These lines are strikingly irregular, the many unstressed syllables giving extra weight to those immediately following. Thus “trip”, “heels” and “kick” become the focus of line 93; “heaven” is immediately contradicted with “damn’d”, “black” and “hell” in lines 94 - 95. The short, sharp syllables arising from the unusual stress pattern give a staccato sound to the lines, reflecting Hamlet’s vicious energy. His desire is for Claudius to suffer forever in the fires of hell; he is thus cursing him in the most terrible way possible. What Hamlet fails to see is that he is also damning himself; anger, from which come hatred and revenge, is one of the seven deadly sins. This coupling of blindness with intense hatred, one feeding off the other in an endless cycle (the more Hamlet hates Claudius, the more blind he becomes to the effect of such hatred, and thus the less there is to inhibit his hatred), is the most disturbing aspect of this scene.

            Claudius’ words immediately after this extract, spoken as soon as Hamlet has gone to his mother, reveal the whole of Hamlet’s speech to have been a bitter irony. For Claudius can not pray:

             x      /      /   /    x       /       x   /    x  /

            My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.  (Hamlet, III.iii.97)

He tries, in the heavy stress of the first part of the line, to clutch at salvation, but halts midway, the rest of the line trailing off into regular metre. He realises that mere words of repentance are not enough:

            Words without thought never to heaven go. (l.98)

Words are “easily said” (III.ii.371), but without intention behind them, they mean little. (This also applies to Hamlet, who repeatedly declares revenge, but, as this extract shows, has great difficulty finding the “will.../To do’t.” (IV.iv.45-46)).

            Thus Claudius, “still possess’d/Of those effects for which [he] did the murder” (III.iii.53-54), has not fully repented. Consequently, had Hamlet indeed killed him at this point, Claudius would probably have gone to hell. Hamlet’s inability to carry through his initial resolve robs him of the very revenge he describes. His faltering at this critical moment is perhaps the most fatal decision he ever makes; the killing of Claudius now might have prevented many other deaths - those of Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, the Queen, Laertes, even Hamlet himself.

            Much can be made of the theatricality of this extract. Though Claudius does not speak, he is present throughout, kneeling in prayer and oblivious to Hamlet’s presence. Olivier plays on this, coming up behind Claudius and holding the sword poised above his neck before lowering it at line 87. Hamlet controls the scene; though ultimately he does not kill Claudius, he has him in his power throughout in a manner that is extremely uncomfortable for an audience - to kill a man at prayer is hardly honourable. Hamlet’s diabolical musings distance him from the audience; here, probably for the only time in the play, it is Claudius whom we empathise with, for he is the more human. Just before this extract, we see him wrestling with his conscience, wanting to repent and secure salvation, and yet unable to. Hamlet’s position at this point in the action is the strongest it has ever been; his plan for tricking Claudius into a betrayal of guilt has worked to his complete satisfaction, and, as the end of Act 3 scene 2 shows, he feels perfectly capable of dealing with his mother. While his confidence increases, Claudius’ wanes; he is almost “sickly” with fright (III.iii.96).

            This mention of Claudius’ prayer as “a physic [that] prolongs [his] sickly days” (l.96) picks up on a motif that runs through the play - that of disease and decay. From the very first moments of the play, when Francisco is “sick at heart” (I.i.9), imagery of illness is rife. It is Hamlet’s first choice of metaphor to describe the iniquity that enfolds him. The distrust arising from the constant presence of this evil eats away at Hamlet’s soul, so that, in some sense, his “wit” is indeed “diseased” (III.ii.307). Throughout, he is stricken with a paralysing indecision; it takes a whole play of agonised searching before he arrives at the point where he can boldly declare, “This is I,/ Hamlet the Dane.” (V.i.241-242). But by then the power to change the course of the action has passed out of his hands; he loses it forever when he lets slip this chance of killing Claudius, unable to carry through the “native hue of resolution” because the crippling “cast of thought” (III.i.84-85) sways him from his first instinct. This extract is just another of those occasions when Hamlet cannot decide what he should do or how he should do it. As Olivier said, the tragedy of Hamlet is, at least in part, “the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind”. (Hamlet, 1948).

References

Primary Text

Shakespeare, William. The Oxford School Shakespeare: Hamlet, ed. Roma Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Print.

Secondary Sources

Gill, Roma, ed. Explanatory notes to The Oxford School Shakespeare: Hamlet.    Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Print.

Johnson, Samuel. On Shakespeare. London: Penguin, 1989. Print.

Olivier, Laurence, dir. Hamlet. Perf. Laurence Olivier, Basil Sydney, Eileen Herlie, Felix Aylmer and Jean Simmonds. The Criterion Collection, 1948. DVD.