Ignatius Critical Edtions: Hamlet by Shakespeare William

Author:Shakespeare, William [Shakespeare, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781586172619
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2010-06-04T04:00:00+00:00

To Play or Not to Play:

How to Lie or Tell the Truth in Hamlet’s Denmark

Anthony Esolen

Providence College

Claudius, that “king of shreds and patches” (3.4.103),1 a clever rhetorician who understands that one who would be a king had better be adept at playing the king before the audience of his court and nation, has been eyeing his nephew and now stepson, Hamlet. He is suspicious of the young man’s purported madness and has suborned the friends of Hamlet’s youth to serve as spies, to discover what only he and perhaps his queen Gertrude must fear: that Hamlet knows of the murder of the old king his father. But at the same time, Hamlet himself has been eyeing the King, circling about him, and putting on an “antic disposition” (1.5.172) to mislead his pursuers.

Finally, Hamlet hits upon the trap he needs: he will discover the player king by means of a player king, and a player queen, and a play murder. He who lives by the stage will die by the stage, hoist with his own ropes. What interrogation and direct accusation could never have done, the indirection of art accomplishes in a moment. For at an apparently innocent entertainment staged to please the troubled Hamlet (a murder melodrama aptly called The Mousetrap), with all the court watching the prince, and with Hamlet and his friend Horatio watching the unwitting king, Claudius witnesses a reprise of his own crime. His conscience is seized. Before he can regain his stage presence, he interrupts the proceedings, calling for the last thing a murderer should desire: “Give me some light. Away!” (3.2.263).

The King’s shock comes not simply from Hamlet’s having found him out. He is shocked also to have found himself out; for art enlists our sympathies before reason can sort through them or, more precisely, before the words we use to deceive ourselves can marshal their mendacious evidence. That appears by what the King does immediately after he bolts from the crowd. The man is no fool, nor is he plagued by indecision. He dispatches his spies, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to smuggle Hamlet off to England; then he consents that his foolish counselor Polonius should stow himself in the Queen’s chambers to eavesdrop upon her conversation with Hamlet—the Queen intends it to be an angry rebuke, but that overmatched actress is in for an unpleasant surprise. Yet once his audience is away and he remains alone on stage, Claudius can no longer sustain the pretense. For a few brief moments, the play is suspended—I mean the play of corrupted Denmark, directed by the King. Suspended is the merciless need to keep up appearances, to praise the capable servant, to indulge the fool, to deceive the gullible, to weep the natural tears for a brother suddenly deceased, to win the acclaim of a restive people, to outface the young upstart Fortinbras of Norway, to carouse with no joy in the heart, even to pretend to a sister-wife that all has been done with due decorum

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