Hamlet as Actor

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.