Continued from "Best of Shakespeare " Part Three.
2) Hamlet:
Shakespeare's most philosophical tragedy may also be the Bard's most personal. The poet John Keats remarked that Shakespeare possessed a "negative capability," the creative skill which allowed Shakespeare to lose himself into hundreds of characters, making each one unique, well developed, and wholly separate from the playwright's belief system. It is easy to study the characters of Lady Macbeth, Iago, Oberon, and Brutus and deduce their morality and biases. But what does Shakespeare the man believe in? Which character reflects Shakespeare's personality? It is difficult to say.
However, of all the plays, Hamlet provides the most insight into the inner thoughts of the mysterious Bard of Avon. For example, Hamlet's monologue to the players, "Speak the speech, I pray you." This play runs over four hours, does the audience really need this lecture on the dos and don't of acting? It hardly moves the plot along, yet here's this treatise on drama and a warning about clowning on stage.
And let those that play your clowns
speak no more than is set down for them, for there be of them that
will themselves laugh, to set on some quantity of barren spectators
to laugh too, though in the meantime some necessary question of
the play be then to be considered. That's villainous, and shows
a most pitiful ambition in the fool that uses it.
Clearly, Shakespeare has instilled his own bias within the speech. We get a glimpse at his stage-related complaints as well as his hopes for how his lines might be delivered.
Yet to really witness Shakespeare at his most personal, one should study the most famous soliloquy in the world, the "To be or not to be" speech. During some moments in this monologue, it seems that Hamlet is speaking out of character. After all, this conversation with himself asks a very existential question: why do we continue to live? What prevents us from ending our lives in order to eliminate our suffering? However, Hamlet already addressed this topic of suicide in Act One in which he begrudges the laws of the Bible:
O! That this too, too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew;
Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd
His canon 'gainst self-slaughter.
In plain, watered-down English: "I wish I would just disappear, or I wish that God wasn't against suicide."
In the "To be or not to be" speech, the laws of the Bible, the will of a Christian god, does not play into his reflections. Hamlet's philosophy grapples with the agnostic and the spiritual, but not religious doctrine. More specifically, Hamlet calls death the "undiscover'd country, from whose bourn / No traveler returns." Here, the melancholy Dane claims that those who die never return from death (the undiscovered country). But why does Hamlet say this? He has met his father's ghost who has told him information about the afterlife, so how can Hamlet suggest that "no traveler returns"? Hamlet seems to speak out of character in this moment. It seems that Shakespeare might be forgetting about Hamlet's perspective and instead waxes eloquent, expresses his own views regarding the mysteries of life and death.
Also, it might not be a coincidence that Hamlet's name sounds very similar to Shakespeare's son, Hamnet - who died when he was only eleven years old. Many of the speeches within this play are delivered by characters who come to terms with mortality. Scholars have speculated that this was Shakespeare's way of processing the death of his son. Perhaps Shakespeare's sense of loss can be found in another famous monologue, this one delivered by Hamlet to the skull that belonged to his childhood playmate, a jester named Yorick.
Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow
of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: he hath
borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how
abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rims at
it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know
not how oft. Where be your gibes now? your
gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment,
that were wont to set the table on a roar?
Here, Shakespeare (speaking through the character of Hamlet) comments upon the strangeness of how a living, breathing life-form is transformed, by death, into an inanimate object. As he studies the remains, he wonders where is Yorick's personality? His humorous actions? His affection? His soul? (Just as Hamlet, as a father, may have wondered what became of his son).
One could spend a lifetime studying Hamlet; there are countless intellectual treasures to plunder. Yet the personal reflections found within the play are what make Hamlet one of Shakespeare's best.
Find which Shakespeare work landed at the top of my list of all-time favorites.
