Hamlet, Prince of Denmark Second lecture

1. Hamlet, Prince of DenmarkSecond lecture “I am mad but north-northwest. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.” (II, 2, 321 Just how mad is Hamlet?

2. From Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guilenstern Are Dead Ros: Hamlet is not himself, outside or in. We have to glean what afflicts him. Guil: He doesn’t give much away. Player: Who does, nowadays? Guil: He’s – melancholy. Player: Melancholy? Ros: Mad. Player: How is he mad? Ros: Ah. (To Guil) How is he mad? Guil: More morose than mad, perhaps. Player: Melancholy. Guil: Moody. Ros: He has his moods.

3. Player: Of moroseness? Guil: Madness. And yet. Ros. Quite. Guil: For instance Ros: He talks to himself, which might be madness. Guil: If he didn’t talk sense, which he does. Ros: Which suggests just the opposite. Player: Of what? small pause Guil: I think I have it. A man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense not to himself. Ros: Or just as mad. Guil: Or just as mad. Ros: And he does both. Guil: So there you are. Ros: Stark raving sane!

4. Polonius’ take • II.2. 92-“Your noble son is mad./ Mad call I it, for, to define true madness,/ What else is it but to be nothing else but mad.” • Gertrude: “More matter and less art” • Polonius: “Madam, I swear I use no art at all./ That he’s mad, ‘tis true; ‘tis true ‘tis pity,’/ And pity ‘tis ‘tis true – a foolish figure.” • Hamlet fell into madness by recognized degrees, Polonius says: II, 2, 142ff. • The evidence is Hamlet’s “mad scene,” but this is only reported by Ophelia: II, 1, 76ff. • According to Polonius: “The very ecstasy of love, Whose violent property fordoes itself/ And leads the will to desperate undertakings/ As oft as any passions under heaven/ That does afflict our natures.” (II, 1). • Which is good Renaissance psychology.

5. Has rejected love driven H. mad? • Recall that Hamlet said he was going to forget everything except the injunction to avenge. • And he told Horatio not to give him away if he should begin to act odd: “As I perchance hereafter shall think meet/ To put an antic disposition on.” • But in the rather bad poem that Polonius has taken from Ophelia and reads to the court, H. swears he loves her: II, 2, 116. • So Ophelia’s “betrayal” (as he thinks it) comes on top of what he understands as his mother’s betrayal of his father and Claudius’ murder/betrayal of his father.

6. On the other hand . . . • His treatment of Polonius later in this scene looks like “antic disposition” material: II, 2, 170. “You are a fishmonger.” • “Though this be madness, yet there’s method in it.” • And quickly toggles the “sane” switch when R & G arrive. (“Hawk from handsaw”) • And he’s quite sane, even cheerful, when talking to the actors, delivering the Pyrrhus speech, etc. (l. 363ff). • R & G report “a crafty madness” when they report to the king in III, 1. • Very sane in working out the playing of “Murder of Gonzago” and writing his speech of some dozen or sixteen lines.

7. Hamlet’s mercurial temper • He can joke about what touches him most deeply: “Thrift, thrift,Horatio -- the funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage feast.” • His speech in response to the player’s emotions: II, 2, 488: “O what a rogue and peasant slave am I!” (clip from Branagh?) • Seen also in III, 1, with Ophelia.

8. “To be or . . .” • World’s most famous soliloquy isn’t really a soliloquy -- who else on stage? • The scene seems crucial to our sense of H’s mental state. • Clearly Hamlet longs for death, is attracted to suicide. • The “native hue of resolution” is the resolve to kill one’s self; it’s what’s “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought” • Does this make Hamlet mad, or only powerfully depressed? • He begins gently with her: “Soft you now, The fair Ophelia! – Nymph in thy orisons/ Be all my sins remembered.”

9. But suddenly turns nasty . . . • And speaks in prose: l. 103. • Is he angered by her returning his gifts? • Or is there a missing stage direction at l. 102? • To whom speaking at l. 122ff? • How do we take his abuse of Ophelia at this point? • “Go to, I’ll no more on’t. It hath made me mad.” What hath? • Ophelia’s opinion of his mental state: 150ff • And the king’s opinion following: “something on which his melancholy sits on brood.” • Hamlet’s state of mind at the play.

10. The queen’s “closet” • His violence toward her: III, 4, 18ff. • And Polonius! • He believes she killed Hamlet Sr. • A fevered idealization of Hamlet Sr. and disgust at Claudius. • His imagining of mother’s sexual passion: 76ff, 91ff. • G. three times cries “no more,” but H. doesn’t give it up.

11. And the ghost appears • Gertrude thinks he’s mad: 119ff. • But is he? He makes himself a figure of Virtue and counsels her. • Twice bids her good night. • Then obsesses on what she should not do in a highly sexualized way. • But the request is sane! Don’t tell the king I’m faking madness.

12. “Hamlet and Oedipus” • The title of a famous essay by Ernest Jones, a disciple of Freud. • Jones suggests that as a child Hamlet enjoyed a close relation with his mother. • “Now comes the father's death and the mother's second marriage. The association of the idea of sexuality with his mother, buried since infancy, can no longer be concealed from his consciousness. As Bradley well says: ‘Her son was forced to see in her action not only an astounding shallowness of feeling, but an eruption of coarse sensuality, 'rank and gross,' speeding post-haste to its horrible delight’. Feelings which once, in the infancy of long ago, were pleasurable desires, can now, because of his repressions, only fill him with repulsion. The long "repressed" desire to take his father's place in his mother's affection is stimulated to unconscious activity by the sight of someone usurping this place exactly as he had once longed to do. More, this someone was a member of the same family, so that the actual usurpation resembled the imaginary one in being incestuous.”

13. In Jones’s reading, Hamlet has a complex attitude toward his uncle, at once hating him and at the same time recognizing in his uncle his own repressed fantasy and desire. • “In reality his uncle incorporates the deepest and most buried part of his own personality, so that he cannot kill him without also killing himself. This solution, one closely akin to what Freud has shown to be the motive of suicide in melancholia, is actually the one that Hamlet finally adopts.” • “Only when he has made the final sacrifice and brought himself to the door of death is he free to fulfill his duty, to avenge his father, and to slay his other self —— his uncle.”

14. Has this proved all too influential? • Play clip of “closet scene” from Olivier film. • Also used in Mel Gibson film of Hamlet, in which Glen Close plays Gertrude (and is only a few years older than Mel). • Of course an unresolved Oedipus complex doesn’t make Hamlet mad. • Just seriously neurotic.

15. Where else do we suspect Hamlet’s madness? • At Ophelia’s grave? V, 2, 264: “Woo’t weep, woo’t fight, woo’t fast? . . .” • Queen: “This is mere madness.” • Does this bring us back to the idea that Ophelia’s betrayal was decisive? • His casual killing of R & G? • Ophelia’s madness, which we don’t doubt, seems the mirror image of Hamlet’s madness. • But does Hamlet seem less agitated, more settled after his sea voyage?