Hamlet: Stuff to Chew On
In today's episode, we are covering the major themes, tropes, and topics related to William Shakespeare's Hamlet. We'll also discuss the challenges involved in reading, performing, and editing Hamlet as well as how scholars have struggled to determine when exactly Hamlet was written.
Content warning: because of this play's themes, we will be discussing mental health and suicide in this episode. Listen with care.
Kourtney “Korey Leigh” Smith (KS): Hi, Elise.
Elyse Sharp (ES): Hi, Korey.
KS: How are you doing today?
ES: I'm doing very well. How are you?
KS: Good. I'm very excited to start talking about Hamlet. Hamlet is my favorite.
ES: Yeah. Are you ready? Shall we dive in?
KS: Yeah, let's dive in.
ES: To start off this episode, we're going to dive straight into those themes and motifs that when you talk about Hamlet in an English class or in a production, you're likely to talk about or maybe base a production around. Yeah.
So the first one is the sort of impossibility of certainty. Hamlet is really different than other revenge tragedies. It is technically a revenge tragedy, but it's not like Titus Andronicus in that the revenge part is repeatedly delayed as Hamlet tries to be certain about what he's doing.
While many people think of Hamlet's indecisiveness, it might be interesting to think about the play as being more about the many uncertainties that our existence is built upon and how many unknown qualities are taken for granted when people act or they evaluate their interactions with others. Like thinking about Ophelia's line, “we know what we are, but know not what we may be.”
KS: Another theme is the complexity of action. So Hamlet spends a lot of time thinking about how action is affected by rational considerations, emotional, ethical, and psychological factors. So the question, is it more courageous to take action or to choose inaction? That's the “To be or not to be” speech. He mentions this multiple times within the play. And in contrast, other characters simply act without thinking about any of that.
But in a sense, they prove Hamlet's inaction and deliberation to be correct because the results of their actions backfire.
ES: Yeah, think like Laertes.
KS: Yeah. And Hamlet finally only kills Claudius after realizing that Claudius was going to kill him, Laertes, and Gertrude.
ES: Yeah. Our next theme is the nation as a diseased body, which expresses anxieties surrounding the transfer of power from one ruler to the next. Connections are made throughout the play between the moral legitimacy of a ruler and the health of a nation. Denmark is described as sick or famously “rotten” because of the corruption of Claudius and Gertrude.
Under King Hamlet, Hamlet's father—
KS: Yes
ES: —Denmark is healthy. And at the end, Fortinbras suggests that the country will be strong and healthy again.
KS: Another theme is the mystery of death. So we have the ghost who is a physical representation of this. Hamlet also questions if the ghost is to be trusted or if it's real. So this is not set in stone—
ES: Right
KS: —for Hamlet.
ES: Hamlet is presented with this pretty clear clue that there's some sort of existence after death in the ghost, but he still has that line about, we don't know what happens after death.
KS: Yeah
ES: And while the ghost talks about being in purgatory, Hamlet attends school in Wittenberg, which is a Protestant city.
KS: Yeah. Death is also described as, “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.” So we don't have anybody coming back and telling us what's on the other side.
ES: And then last but not least, there are two characters who commit suicide, either actively or passively. That is Gertrude and Ophelia. And this play notes that those who commit suicide will be condemned forever. Hamlet notes in “To Be or Not to Be” famously that no one would actually choose to suffer through life if they weren't afraid of what will come after death.
KS: And we will talk a lot about death and the afterlife in our series. So we're not going to go into it too much because there's so much more to come.
ES: Next theme.
KS: The next theme is performance. This play has a lot of meta moments, a lot of references to theatricality and performance. Very clearly, an obvious one is the play within a play. There's commentary on the nature of theater by constantly reminding the audience that we are also watching a performance. Theater is powerful because it is indistinguishable from reality, “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature.” And that's incredibly relevant to Shakespeare's time because there were laws created because of performance blurring the lines between social status, gender, sex, anything that could blur the line was criticized or feared in the theater.
ES: Then we also have the distinction between Hamlet's outward behavior—his antic disposition—and his inner real feelings. He is pretending to be mad, and Ophelia describes the behavior as a sort of performance. He also tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that he is genuinely depressed. So we will also talk more about antic disposition in our series. Don't worry.
KS: Another element of performance in this play is that by the end of the play, Hamlet seems unable to tell the difference between performance and reality. The distinction between truth and fiction may be blurred for the audience as well.
ES: Right. And our next theme is madness. Hamlet, as we just said, he pretends to be mad, but Ophelia actually goes mad. And as Korey said moments ago, by the end of the play, Hamlet seems to doubt his sanity, even though he previously said he was faking madness and it was easy to turn on and off.
KS: So the question is, when is he mad and when is he putting on an antic disposition? And that is something that actors and directors have to answer in the production. So that is up to the theater makers themselves to decide where his antic disposition versus madness lies.
ES: The combination of these two themes also leads to our next theme of doubt. The performance and madness and the performance of madness create doubt in the minds of the audience members. You can be left as an audience member with questions about Hamlet, about Hamlet's true feelings for Ophelia and the nature of their relationship before the actions of the play, whether Gertrude was having an affair with Claudius before Claudius killed King Hamlet, what the quality of her relationship was with King Hamlet versus Claudius. You could say the world of Elsinore is one with very little certainty.
KS: It can vary depending on who you go see on the stage or in the movies.
ES: Right.
KS: In addition to that, Hamlet is an unreliable protagonist, which can make it difficult to know when he's fibbing, when he's telling the truth. What is the truth for Hamlet? Does he even know what the truth is?
ES: He thinks, but he's not sure that his uncle killed his father. He thinks he saw the ghost, but he's not sure whether or not to trust it. And that doesn't help our certainty as an audience member.
KS: Exactly.
ES: Our next theme is misogyny, because basically Hamlet is a jerk to Ophelia and Gertrude and shows an obsession with his perceived connection between female sexuality and moral corruption.
KS: Yes. And this manifests in many ways. It either has to do with women and their sexuality, it has to do with women and how they present themselves. Hamlet spends a lot of time saying women wear makeup, they paint their faces, and that tricks men. Also, women should marry dumb, foolish men because wise men know that a woman will cuckold them, which is having an affair with someone else and openly doing this. So Hamlet is ripe with a lot of unhealthy feelings towards the female sex.
ES: Yeah. The character of Hamlet—
KS: Correct.
ES: —says a lot of misogynist things. I would also say that contemporary misogyny, like our modern misogyny, has also informed how the characters of
Ophelia and Gertrude are read by—
KS: Yeah.
ES: —modern readers. Some earlier readings of this play would say that Gertrude and Ophelia don't have any power or agency, but they do.
KS: Yeah.
ES: Both Ophelia and Gertrude choose to act before Hamlet finally decides to act, and we're saving that also for a future episode.
KS: Yes. And I'll go on the record. I agree with you, Elyse. These two characters have far more agency, and it is sexist to say that they don't.
ES: Aw, thanks
KS: That's my take. Another theme is ears and hearing. Words can communicate ideas, but they also distort the truth, they manipulate, and they serve as a tool in corrupt quests for power. One example of that is that Claudius manipulates Laertes. Another one is that Claudius literally pours poison into King Hamlet's ear. So this is both literal and metaphorical in the play.
ES: Yeah. And then surveillance. You know, Hamlet watches Claudius. Gertrude, Claudius, Polonius, Guildenstern, Rosencrantz, they all watch Hamlet. Ophelia also watches Hamlet, even though no one's really watching her. And Polonius sends spies to check on Laertes in France and has a habit of hiding behind arrases.
KS: Yeah, he does. He does. And that gets him killed.
ES: Gets him in the end.
KS: So folks, it doesn't pay to hide behind arrases. But that's a big one. Like, everybody is watching Hamlet. And then Hamlet's also watching a lot of them as well.
ES: Right. And this was probably all a commentary on Elizabethan England, which was a surveillance state. There were a lot of spies and spy networks and people were regularly beheaded for treason against the state. If we think back to our conversations when we were talking about Macbeth—
KS: Treason
ES: and the Essex Rebellion
KS: The Gunpowder Plot
ES: and Mary Queen of Scots.
KS: Yeah. Yeah.
ES: Gunpowder plot.
KS: And there's so much distrust. Hamlet doesn't know if he can trust Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I'm not sure why Claudius wholeheartedly thinks that he can trust Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, but that's part of like, who can you put your trust in to watch for you, report back? There's a lot of shady characters in this play.
ES: Right.
KS: So those are themes from this play.
ES: Now, we want to move on to talking about another thing that people talk about when they talk about Hamlet is the challenges of Hamlet, that this is a challenging play.
KS: Yeah. One of those challenges is acting Hamlet, physically getting up on stage and performing the character. There is constant comparison between so many actors who have played Hamlet and there have been so many productions and people have so many opinions about what is right and what's wrong. I mean, it's totally fair to have opinions. I have opinions, but it gets very intense. It gets very like, correct and incorrect versus motivated or not motivated.
Simon Russell Beale, who played Hamlet in the National Theatre's 2000 production said, “There has never been a time when there aren't 800 Hamlets. You are aware constantly that there is a history about it. You see this list of Hamlets and you think, oh my God, and there's Adrian opening in five minutes, there's Olivier, there's Gielgud, but there's an extraordinary shut off point when the rehearsal room door closes. You have to, as Adrian says, start from scratch.”
ES: Yeah. And speaking of John Gielgud, he also commented on how he thought when he played Hamlet, he'd end up copying actors he had seen before, but eventually came to the realization that he just had to make up his own choices and forget what anyone else had done before.
KS: Mm hmm. Yeah. A cartoon from 1804 shows John Philip Kempel with William Betty on his back, showing the competition between the two. So not only are actors aware of this, the public is aware of this as well.
ES: Right. And then there's these actors who take on Hamlet and aren't only haunted by the specter of former actors playing Hamlet, but also their own relationship with their fathers. Edwin Booth performed the role from 1853 to 1891 and was apparently haunted by the ghost of his father, Junius Brutus Booth, who also played the title role from 1829 to 1849.
KS: That is layers upon layers of a haunting Hamlet. Yeah.
ES: And then Daniel Day-Lewis withdrew from the 1989 National Theatre production because he also allegedly started seeing his deceased father on stage.
KS: So remember when we talked about Macbeth, how there's a curse surrounding saying the title of that play in a theatre? It seems that there's also a curse in Hamlet where if you play Hamlet-
ES: If your father's deceased and you have some hangups, you might see his ghost.
KS: In the past, actors were also aware of the heritage of specific bits of staging or acting choices made by their predecessors that had since become canonized, and reviewers were aware of these as well. For example, the first actor who chose to crawl menacingly across the stage during the play within a play. Now this is likely due to the longevity of actors in the role from the mid to late 1600s to the mid 1800s. One actor would play the role for 40 years compared to doing a production at one theatre company like modern theatre. So these mid to late 1600s to mid 1800s actors had like really cemented—
ES: Yeah
KS: — their version of Hamlet into the consciousness of theatre makers and audiences.
ES: Yeah, it wasn't just, “Oh, this theatre company is doing this production of Hamlet.” It was, using the Booths as an example, “Oh, we're going to go see Edwin Booth's Hamlet.”
KS: Yeah. And you could go see it many times because guess what? He's playing it for forever.
ES: And then another challenge of Hamlet is editing Hamlet. The length of this play. When Kenneth Branagh attempted to film every line, the film apparently ended up being four hours and some theatrical productions have gone on as long as six. It's not clear if it was ever actually performed in its entirety. Consensus is kind of that Shakespeare wrote it as long as he wanted and then understood that companies would cut it. Either that or it's like supposed to be a marathon event for audiences that would require them to spend more time and money at a theatre.
KS: There's also three versions. We talked about this a little bit in our mini episode on folios and quartos. There's the first quarto, which was published in 1603. That's the shortest, the only one that could plausibly have been acted in its entirety. It's also known as the bad quarto because the play is not as good in this version. It also has very different dialogue and some characters are named differently in the play. Quarto one seems to be a reconstruction of an acting version. It may have been transcribed by an audience member like an early modern bootleg or an actor from memory. This actor could have played small parts like Marcellus because those scenes are closer to quarto two and the folio than, for example, the to be or not to be speech, the “to be or not to be that's the point. To die to sleep. Is that all?”
ES: Yeah. Then there's quarto two, which was published in 1604, and it is probably based on changes made as performances happened. It is very similar to the folio and almost twice as long as quarto one, but it still lacks some famous passages like Hamlet's line, “Denmark is a prison.” The editors of the Arden argue that on the balance of evidence, if they had to choose one version, they'd choose this one as most likely to have authority. Evidence is strong and scholars generally agree that quarto two derives from Shakespeare's manuscript. It was definitely printed during Shakespeare's life, not long after the first staging of the play and apparently as an attempt of the company, presumably with Shakespeare's consent, to correct and displace that quarto one. This would have been like the authorized version.
KS: And the last of the Hamlets we're going to talk about is the folio of 1623. It's very similar to quarto two, though it's a little shorter and it is missing some passages included in quarto two, including the entire Hamlet monologue that begins, “How all occasions do inform against me.” This one is likely to have been set from the theater prompt book or a transcript of it officially. It has much fuller stage directions compared to quarto two and heaven is used in many places to replace God because of the anti-blasphemy 1606 Act to Restrain the Abuses of Players, which outlawed taking God's name in vain on stage. In conclusion, the plot is the same in all three, but reputable editors will stick to one version, likely quarto two or the folio, with annotations where there is an option to insert or remove something based on the other version.
ES: So we have these three versions. The next question, when was it actually first performed? One big question is, was there an earlier Hamlet play? You'll sometimes see this referred to as Ur-Hamlet, U-R hyphen Hamlet. References to Hamlets appear as early as 1589, 1594, and 1596. These refer to this Hamlet as a tragedy that features a ghost and revenge.
KS: And that 1596 account suggests a play performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Another account suggests that this earlier play was by Thomas Kyd and Kyd's Hamlet, if it existed, has since been lost.
ES: Stylistically, scholars agree the versions of Hamlet that exist from Shakespeare in both quartos and the folio cannot stylistically be from pre-1590. So this Ur-Hamlet would have either been an earlier version by Shakespeare or this version by Kyd.
KS: So there may have been an earlier version of this play by Shakespeare that contained the words “Hamlet, Revenge,” but the play as we know it must have been written or rewritten a decade later.
ES: But we do look to other contemporary plays when trying to date Hamlet. Many scholars believe that the allusions to Julius Caesar are references to Shakespeare's own play. We know that Julius Caesar was probably playing at the Globe on September 21st, 1599, so Hamlet would have been performed sometime after that.
KS: Some scholars also assume that the actors who played the original Hamlet and Polonius, Richard Burbage and John Hemings, respectively, must have also played Brutus and Caesar.
ES: This and the references to boy actors lead scholars to generally agree that the play was written either very late 1599 or early 1600, but that possibly the references to boy actors were added in 1601 when a boys acting company really became popular in London.
KS: Now let's take a look at some of the first performances. The first performance we have a specific record for took place on board a ship called the Red Dragon when it was anchored off the coast of Africa in 1607. A Captain William Keeling's journal refers to performances of two plays, Hamlet and Richard II. These would have been amateur productions by the sailors.
ES: This performance specifically took place when Keeling, who commanded three ships sponsored by the East India Company, two of those ended up having to anchor off the coast of what is now Sierra Leone for six weeks.
KS: I could definitely see passing the time by performing some plays.
ES: Yeah.
KS: This play was definitely performed by Shakespeare's company before 1607. The title page of Quarto I from 1603 claims that it is the version of the play as it was performed many times by, “his highness servants in the city of London, as also in the two universities of Cambridge and Oxford and elsewhere.” No one has been able to corroborate these statements by producing hard evidence of any particular performance in London, Cambridge, or Oxford, but if we were to believe this title page from Quarto One.
ES: If we're going to trust the bad Quarto, then it was performed many times by 1603. What we do know is that by 1604, there are references to it in other plays, which suggests it was very well known by that time. First up, we have The Honest Whore, Part One by Thomas Decker and Thomas Middleton, which parodies the skull scene. 1605's Eastward Ho by George Chapman, John Marston, and Ben Johnson. The play introduces a footman named Hamlet, presumably only to allow another character to say, quote, “‘s’foot Hamlet, are you mad?” It also parodies Gertrude's description of Ophelia's death and makes other joking references to Shakespeare's Hamlet. In 1606, we get The Revenger's Tragedy by Thomas Middleton, which also references the skull scene in its opening scene, calling the skull “Gloriana”. And two more plays, The Woman Haters from 1606 by Beaumont and Fletcher and 1613's The Scornful Lady by Beaumont and Fletcher also contain parody scenes of Hamlet.
KS: We know that Richard Burbage originated the role of Hamlet. An anonymous funeral elegy of the death of the famous actor Richard Burbage from 1619 lists young Hamlet as one of his parts and notes, “oft have I seen him leap into the grave,” which is understood to be a reference to the graveyard scene, even though Quarter One is the only text to contain that specific stage direction.
ES: There's also the conspicuous absence or diminishment of the role of a clown. Hamlet includes the clown, like the character, in his enumeration of the stock dramatic characters. But no clown actually appears among the players for the play within a play. And Yorick has been dead for, “three and 20 years.”
KS: Hamlet was written as the Lord Chamberlain's Men were in transition between Will Kemp, who played Falstaff and Dogberry, and Robert Armin, who would play Touchstone later that same year. In our episode on Shakespeare's comedic tropes, we discuss how while the gravedigger scene seems like a very small scene for a comedic giant like Kemp, it may have been a tribute scene and the speech about Yorick may contain details that reference Kemp.
ES: Also in that episode, we discuss that if Kemp and his comedic partner Richard Cowley were the gravediggers, the speech about Yorick would be a tribute to the imminent departure of Kem from the company. However, some argue that the single scene is indicative that Kemp didn't play a gravedigger because he was that big of a deal. Therefore, he was no longer part of the Lord Chamberlain's Men by the time Hamlet was written or performed. For what it's worth, Richard Cowley, Kemp's comedic partner who could have played a gravedigger, would leave the company after As You Like It.
KS: And the last thing we want to talk about is we want to talk about Hamlet and Freud. There are a lot of modern readings of this play, specifically Anglo-American readings, that involve psychoanalysis. Freud referenced Hamlet in a letter to Wilhelm Fleiss in October 1897 as he sketched out his theory of the Oedipus Complex and argued that Shakespeare's “unconscious understood the unconscious of his hero.”
Now if you listened to our King Lear episode on Shakespeare's influence on early psychiatry, you were not surprised to hear that Freud or anyone like him would be looking to Shakespeare's plays to legitimize or raise up their ideas of psychoanalysis and the human mind and condition. But yeah, he did.
ES: Yeah.
KS: That's one place where we see Freud referencing Hamlet and sending that theory off to a contemporary, to a peer and using it to lift up this Oedipus Complex idea that he has been working on with his patients or his theory.
ES: Right. From that linking of Hamlet to Oedipus, Hamlet and Ophelia have become modern iconic representatives of male and female instability. Although again, going back to our episodes on mental health that we did in our Lear series, it's really clear that the distinction in their madness, their “madness” comes from what is performance versus what is real. In our opinions, Ophelia's madness looks more like Lear's, where Hamlet's looks more like poor Tom's.
KS: If we're reading Hamlet through Freud, again, an Anglo-American reading, this reading often makes it primarily a domestic drama, especially when the geopolitical subplot is cut. In other parts of the world, specifically Eastern and East Central Europe during say the height of the Soviet Union and the Cold War, Hamlet was seen as primarily a political play enacting the possibility of dissent from various forms of totalitarianism. So that Oedipal reading of Hamlet emphasizes the misogyny of the reader and places the blame for Hamlet's misogyny and the aesthetic and moral failings of the play on Gertrude.
ES: Yeah, instead of on the choices Hamlet makes and whether or not he chooses to do them.
KS: Yeah.
ES: Freud also insisted that Hamlet was written immediately after the death of Shakespeare's father in 1601 and not long after the death of Shakespeare's son Hamnet in 1596. So it must have been affected by his personal sense of bereavement. And remember, if you rewind this episode back, scholars now agree on dating Hamlet as late as 1599 to 1600. So it would not have been written after the death of Shakespeare's father.
KS: Yeah. So Freud likes to claim that he has an authority or an understanding of Hamlet and tries to use that a lot.
ES: Yeah.
KS: If you have not yet, go back and listen to our two episodes on Shakespeare and mental health in our Lear series. So part one is mental health care in Shakespeare's time that was based on community care and a belief that a person's condition was temporary and they could return to their sane self. And the second episode that we have is about Shakespeare's influence on early psychiatry. And just like Freud, the white men in top hats and coattails who established a lot of the basic principles of psychoanalysis were really hung up on using Shakespeare's popularity to add legitimacy to their theories. Please check them out if you have not already.
ES: But for now
KS: That's just some stuff for you to chew on.
ES: Thank you for listening.
Quote of the Episode:
KS: From As You Like It, Act 5, Scene 4, spoken by Touchstone, “Oh, sir, we quarrel in print by the book, as you have books for good manners.”
Shakespeare Anyone? is created and produced by Kourtney Smith and Elyse Sharp.
Note: When this episode was recorded, Kourtney Smith was using the stage name "Korey Leigh Smith".
Music is "Neverending Minute" by Sounds Like Sander.
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Works referenced:
Green, John, et al. “Ghosts, Murder, and More Murder - Hamlet Part 1: Crash Course Literature 203.” YouTube, Crashcourse, 13 Mar. 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My14mZa-eq8.
Green, John. “Ophelia, Gertrude, and Regicide - Hamlet Part 2: Crash Course Literature 204.” YouTube, Crashcourse, 20 Mar. 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDCohlKUufs.
“Hamlet.” Edited by SparkNotes Editors, Sparknotes, SparkNotes, 2005, https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/hamlet/.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, Revised ed., Bloomsbury Arden, 2016.
