The key to Hamlet is drama, plays, playing. First there is
the idea that “these are actions that a man might play, but I have in my that
which passes show.” He’s not telling the truth. He’s saying what he wants to
convince himself and others is true. He’s trying to be, in Girardian terms, the
model for others. But they won’t follow him. They’ve moved on past grief, too
quickly in the case of Gertrude, but other desires were stronger. Shakespeare
isn’t interested in what these are. He gives too little information to us on
how to understand them. Etc. The point is that Hamlet brings up acting for the
first time in this speech, and tries to raise and sustain the idea that there
is a difference between acting and genuine action, a difference which always
has to be asserted because it can never be sustained, not because action can
reproduce anything that the genuine can (Shakespeare again and again, in Love’s
Labour’s Lost and As You Like it, and Much Ado etc. has a player detail how you
can tell the difference between acting and real life but, an actor doing this
on a stage always belies the claim, turns it into a joke in fact, or an
instance of irony—in acting you can’t x, said to the actor who has just x’d)
but because there is no such thing as an unacted genuine, or if there is, it is
a momentary impulse that dies unless acted—such is the impulse to revenge when
it first arises. If anything is genuine it is that moment when Hamlet pledges
to carry out as swift as thoughts of love is revenge, which there is literally
nothing to stop him from doing at that moment. He knows where the king is. He
has been full and immediate access to the king, who is drunk and unable to
defend himself. Shakespeare makes the situation easy as can be for revenge. It
practically takes care of itself. But instead of strutting down to the hall
where the inebriate king is stumbling around, Hamlet pledges to pretend to
madness. A completely unmotivated action.
Why? He’s again acting. This is what we do in plays. Hamlet
has seen The Spanish Tragedy and all the Revenge Tragedies ever performed. And
he knows that to delay he has to pretend to be mad. Why? He could kill
Claudius. And Shakespeare has taken away the one thing that could have made him
hesitate—concern for his own safety. Shakespeare has made it clear that
Hamlet’s suicidal desire is real, his carelessness for his own life is
illustrated by his willingness to approach the ghost (quote the line). In fact
one of the few times in the play when he’s eager to act is when he approaches
the ghost. Why? The ghost may give him reason to live, or to act, or to
distract himself from suicide. And he doesn’t want to kill Claudius because
killing Claudius takes away his reason to live. If he lives to kill Claudius
then he doesn’t have to die. He also in a more profound way doesn’t want to
kill Claudius because if life itself isn’t worth anything, then revenge can’t
be justified. Claudius took from his father something that was not valuable:
his life. As long as earth is an unweeded garden, a rank prison, as long as the
only reason not to kill yourself is fear of what comes next, then there’s no
point in revenge. I can’t go with Nietzsche here in his reasoning, but his
conclusion is sound.
