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This discussion covers Act III

Hamlet's admonitions to the players at the start of III.2 come across as a laundry list of Shakespeare's gripes about the theatre company.

When he specifically takes to task "those that play your clowns", it is not difficult to imagine him writing this after a row with Will Kemp.

Shakespeare gets in a lot of lessons for us throughout the play. In Act I, we get dressing advice (Polonius to Laertes):

"Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy;..."

And in Act II, how to be magnanimous:

Use them after your own honour and dignity. The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty.

In Act III, extensive acting advice (which Shakespeare should know quite well, and relevant to Mkfs's comment above), including:

[Advice on not overdoing it, but also not being too tame, followed by] "...let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show Virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure..." [And so on, including advice to comic actors not to pander too much].

There's even useful advice for addicts (and for reforming one's morals) which I'm pretty sure has become the theme of a host of self-help guides:

"That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat
Of habits evil, is angel yet in this,
That to the use of actions fair and good
He likewise gives a frock or livery,
That aptly is put on. Refrain to-night,
And that shall lend a kind of easiness
To the next abstnence; the next more easy;
For use almost can change the stamp of nature..."

Ah, and more subtly related to acting advice is Shakespeare's obsession with "seeming," as he is conscious of the idea that humans in their daily lives are also a sort of actor. The illusion of seeming vs. the inner truth are themes that pop up in other plays... I think Richard the II also got hung up on the question of what "seems" vs. what "is." The relevant part in Hamlet is, from Act I, Scene II, when Mom's telling him to get over Dad's death, and commenting that the father's death "seems" particular to Hamlet:

Hamlet: "Seems, madam, Nay, it is. I know not 'seems.'
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passeth show
These but the trappings and the suits of woe."

So, might Shakespeare have favored "Method Acting," as it was later termed in the 20th century? He seems to have a low regard of aping the outward appearance of the soul's stirrings.

The advice from Polonius is great. Why that isn't among the material given to adolescents to memorize in high school, I'll never know.


I hadn't noticed all of the advice given throughout the play. It's not all from one character, either; Denmark is apparently a nation of people who enjoy telling others how to live their lives.

Why would Shakespeare chuck all of this into one play? Did he just have a kid or something? Taken on a younger playwright to mentor? Maybe he thought society at the time needed it? (Hamlet is thought to be written between 1599 and 1602; in 1601 Queen Elizabeth gave "The Golden Speech", and in 1603 was succeeded by King James I).


The Method Acting connection occurred to me as well. Mostly because the advice Hamlet gives the players is very similar to the difference between modern film acting, and the film acting that preceded the flood of actors from the Method school (1960s?).

Mkfs wrote: "Why would Shakespeare chuck all of this into one play? Did he just have a kid or something? Taken on a younger playwright to mentor?"

Hamlet is supposed to have been written soon after the death of his only son, the 11-year-old Hamnet.
I guess the play could have been a response to the pain derived from this experience, since he was away in London and didn't really seem to have had a close relationship with his young children.
Of course, this is only speculation.

Speculation is what we do best!

I hadn't heard that about the timing of Hamlet's writing in relation to the son's death. Puts a lot of it in perspective: changing times (end of the Queen's reign), death of a son. Trying times indeed.

It's becoming more clear to me this time 'round that Hamlet's rash, impulsive acts of violence (stabbing what turned out to be Polonius, the frenzied bloodbath at the end) are a strategy he laid out for himself after not killing Claudius (and ending the play abruptly) in III:iii.

He has to strike at the spur of the moment: he is trying to catch Claudius with his pants down. Send him into the afterlife without the benefit of communion, confession, or last rites -- as was his father.

The more times I read this play, the less mad Hamlet appears to be.

At the same time, Shakespeare contrived to let us know that Hamlet's rationalization for postponing the murder is unjustified. Hamlet didn't know, as we do, that Claudius was never "at risk" of salvation. Even in the moment of prayer he was incapable of true contrition. But from Hamlet's perspective, the true flaw was to forget that we can never know the state of another man's soul. Leave God's business to God.

Zadignose wrote: "Even in the moment of prayer he was incapable of true contrition..."

What leads you to that conclusion? I don't remember specific text about that.

Just after Hamlet decides not to kill Cladius in the midst of his prayers, and Hamlet walks off stage, Cladius concludes his prayers and proclaims:

"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go."

Also, shortly before, he mused "May one be pardon'd and retain th' offence?" He wanted forgiveness, but he was not prepared either to give up his usurped kingdom or to confront the full guilt of his act.

Even more explicitly,

"Pray can I not,
Though inclination be as sharp as will;
My stronger guilt defeats my strong intent"
III.iii:38-40

Not sure I would call the delay "unjustified", although the ghost certainly thinks so. And there is an air of blame after Hamlet rejects the "action hero ending" or killing Claudius in III.iii -- things start to go wrong very quickly.

Zadignose wrote: "Just after Hamlet decides not to kill Cladius in the midst of his prayers, and Hamlet walks off stage, Cladius concludes his prayers and proclaims:

"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Word..."

To be contrite is to be sorrow for what he's done, which he is, but giving up the throne would be way beyond feeling contrition. I always read the scene as him trying to make peace with god and himself, not with Hamlet or Denmark.

But in Christian sense is not merely feeling some degree of regret, which is not enough to make peace with God and receive his grace. True contrition is full awareness and total renunciation of the sin, which Claudius knows and understands. As he expresses in his final line in the scene, his worldly concerns have made it impossible to to receive absolution of sins.

On top of that, the fact that he didn't follow up his prayers with a confession to a priest, and the fact that he continued in his sinful ways, going so far as to plot Hamlet's death by a variety of ways, shows that he was not "contrite," even if he felt some rudimentary sense of his guilt.

However, when he knelt to pray, I did think he was on his way to possibly make peace with God... he could have reformed. But the end of the scene, though "tragic", also strikes me as a funny bit of wit on Shakespeare's part.

Zadignose wrote: "But contrition in Christian sense is not merely feeling some degree of regret, which is not enough to make peace with God and receive his grace. True contrition is full awareness and total renuncia..."

Since Shakespeare did not not write out the content of Claudius' prayer to god, we can't know his true feelings, as you note in post 9 above.

From the wiki page you linked to:

"in most Christian religions, contrition becomes the first step towards reconciliation with God."

"both the Catholic Church and the Protestant denominations see contrition as the first step of forgiveness of sins."

And so, Claudius has only taken the first step by at least communing with god. Is it likely he would have confessed to seek absolution, and then renounced the throne to to receive divine forgiveness? Not bloody likely, but that doesn't mean he has only a rudimentary sense of guilt.

We can't know why he killed his brother and committed incest with his sister-in-law other than in the Cain/Abel presumption of jealousy.

Anyway, the reason I'm belaboring this point is because I find in Hamlet, as in Infinite Jest, that both writers have created complex psychological and social situations where the characters are faced with difficult choices. And in both books, readers reach a range of conclusions that are not clearly supported by the text itself. Rather, the complex situation is presented, but the author does not specifically spell out the result. And in both books, readers will create their own conclusions and then insist the text clearly supports their findings. I just finished a six week course in Hamlet, and in the materials presented, as well as the thousands of student discussions, theories were presented about Hamlet that people swore were the gods-honest truth based on the text, and for each theory, there were vehement counter theories. This was especially true about Hamlet's mental illness. Many insisted that he is clearly bi-polar, others went with clinical depression, there was the Freudian contingent, and some, including myself, see no madness at all, but instead a normal emotional response to the circumstances he experiences.

I find this all related to the ideas from a course I took last year in Cognitive Poetics, which is simply stated "why we respond to fiction as we do". Main conclusions are that the degree to which we can relate to a character is related to the degree of involvement we feel in their fictional situation. When the identification is strong, we experience the same emotional responses we would if the character were a real person in our life.

Further anyway, Thanks for responding to my probing questions. I'm really curious about the hows and whys of people's responses and conclusions to texts.

Jim wrote: "'why we respond to fiction as we do'. Main conclusions are that the degree to which we can relate to a character is related to the degree of involvement we feel in their fictional situation. When the identification is strong, we experience the same emotional responses we would if the character were a real person in our life."

I find it interesting that some readers attempt to ascribe modern psychological conditions (bipolar disorder, PTSD, etc) to characters in fiction written decades or centuries before the DSM-IV was even created. The Freud gripe I made earlier being just one example.

On the one hand, it is a credit to the author to claim that their characters are so well-developed and well-realized that psychological analysis can be performed accurately. On the other hand, how can you ever know if you are right?


Hamlet, in particular, seems to invite this sort of analysis. It is often claimed that Hamlet is opaque to the reader, and that it is impossible to tell what is going on in his mind.

What I have been finding in this re-read, however, is that Hamlet wears his heart on his sleeve -- like every other character in the play.

In regards to killing Claudius in a state of sin, the Ghost first laments dying "Unhouseled, disappointed, unaneled" (I.v); Hamlet determines that it is not a proper revenge unless Claudius dies likewise (III.iii); and Claudius laments that he cannot truly repent(III.iii).

No mystery there. But it is an interesting narrative twist: III.iii is the scene where the revenge should have occurred. That makes this a pivotal scene in the play: after III.iii, things kinda go off the rails for everybody.

Mkfs wrote: "But it is an interesting narrative twist: III.iii is the scene where the revenge should have occurred. That makes this a pivotal scene in the play: after III.iii, things kinda go off the rails for everybody..."

Right. The revenge would have been achieved, Hamlet would have taken his rightful place on the throne, Gertrude off to the dungeon, and curtain. What makes the play so enduring is exactly the chaos and ruin that follows this moment.

A rather odd thing about Act III, Sc. iv, is that Hamlet kills Polonius very soon after arriving in his mother's room, he has just heard Polonius's voice as he cried out, and he has just come instantly from seeing Claudius in his prayers, yet it is suggested that Hamlet might have mistaken Polonius for Claudius. Though this suggestion is itself rather uncertain (when Hamlet says "Is it the King?", he could have made the association in a fit of madness, not logically and consciously having thought it through, or he may not have thought it was Claudius at all, but rather he's still in the midst of comparing his act to his Mother's and Claudius's guilt in the slaying of the King Hamlet,... and when Claudius and others later suppose that Hamlet had been attempting to kill Claudius, they were speculating without information).

Re analyzing Hamlet w/ modern terms. The great ones can do this. E.g.: you want a stunning picture of the passive-aggressive mentality? Check out Mary Musgrove in Austen's "Persuasion." Written when the description of that particular psychological defect was 300+ years in the future. Or, in the latter part of the 19th century, Tolstoy, in "The Death of Ivan Ilych," described (in harrowing detail) death from internal (probably liver) cancer, at a time when internal medicine was a closed door, even to physicians. So the fact that we can possibly describe Hamlet as bipolar, etc., should not be surprising.