Maggie Kaplan

Hamlet Article Analysis

In the famous Shakespearean tragedy, Hamlet, a royal youth suffers through the murder of his father, discovers that his uncle was the murderer, and watches as that same uncle marries his mother and takes the throne.  On top of all this family drama, Hamlet is also forced to endure the death of his possible lover Ophelia.  Many literary critics and scholars have come to the conclusion that any “madness” exhibited by Hamlet throughout the play is very real and caused by all the stress put upon the troubled young prince.  In his article “The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet”, G. Wilson Knight argues that Hamlet’s madness is only real when he interacts with Ophelia and that Hamlet is not nearly as concerned about his family drama as countless readers have thought.  Knight also reasons that Hamlet has become depressed and diseased after losing everything he loves, giving way to an interesting topic for analysis. 

Knight’s article focuses mostly on the different types of madness that Hamlet exhibits through all the turmoil of his life that seems to fall apart as the reader turns each page.  In the article, there are many examples of the fake madness Hamlet feeds to his mother and uncle accompanied by a few examples of the real, emotional madness that slips out when he interacts with Ophelia.  In between these examples, Knight offers his opinion on the overall depression of Hamlet.  He writes about how Hamlet becomes sick, like a disease, and wherever he goes, he infects everything around him.  As he descends further into his own sorrow, life becomes unbearable, but instead of removing himself from the world, he seems perfectly content with just telling the readers about it. 

I agree with most every point that Knight makes in his article and I think he chose very suitable examples to support his arguments.  I like the way he divided Hamlet’s madness into two different factions; that which he used as a front to disguise his underlying cleverness, and that which he used to bring forth his true emotions and feelings with the last person left that he truly cared for (Ophelia).  I especially like that he presents a metaphor that many other scholars or analysts have left out.  He draws strong similarities between Hamlet’s behavior and a disease.  His dreary disposition is rather like a sickness because wherever he treads, bad things seem to happen, destruction is caused, and death lies at every turn.  Knight’s essay on Hamlet is a very intelligent, well-written piece that correctly informs its readers of themes in Hamlet that they may not have noticed at first, opening their eyes to new sides of the many twisted characters living through the tragedy that is Hamlet.   

The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet

 

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"The Embassy of Death: An Essay on Hamlet," in The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy,Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1949.

One of the most influential of modern Shakespearean critics, Knight helped shape the twentieth-century reaction against the biographical and character studies of the nineteenth-century Shakespeareans. Knight's analytic practice stresses what he calls, in The Wheel of Fire, the "spatial" aspects of imagery, atmosphere, theme, and symbol in the plays. He thus parallels the New Critics with his emphasis on verbal texture; his discussions of symbolism are similar to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's notions of the symbolic as indefinite with multiple meanings. Like Friedrich Nietzsche (1872), Knight defines Hamlet as a character who truly comprehends the futility of his situation and who is paralyzed by that knowledge. His is not Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's gentle, sensitive Hamlet (1795) but a "sick soul, commanded to heal, to cleanse, to create harmony." For Knight, Hamlet is an agent of death who poisons the life around him. Knight's essay was first published in 1930.

Our attention is early drawn to the figure of Hamlet. Alone in the gay glitter of the court, silhouetted against brilliance, robustness, health, and happiness, is the pale, black-robed Hamlet, mourning. When first we meet him, his words point the essential inwardness of his suffering:

But I have that within which passeth show;

These but the trappings and the suits of woe . . .

[I. ii. 85-6]

The mood expressed by these lines is patent. To Hamlet the light has been extinguished from the things of earth. He has lost all sense of purpose. We already know one reason for Hamlet's state: his father's death. . . . Now, duringHamlet's soliloquy, we see another reason: disgust at his mother's second marriage:

. . . within a month:

Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears

Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,

She married. O, most wicked speed, to post

With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!

[I. ii. 153-57]

These two concrete embodiments of Hamlet's misery are closely related. He suffers from misery at his father's deathand agony at his mother's quick forgetfulness: such callousness is infidelity, and so impurity, and, since Claudius is the brother of the King, incest. It is reasonable to suppose that Hamlet's state of mind, if not wholly caused by these events, is at least definitely related to them. Of his two loved parents, one has been taken for ever by death, the other dishonoured for ever by her act of marriage. To Hamlet the world is now an 'unweeded garden'.

Hamlet hears of his father's Ghost, sees it, and speaks to it. His original pain is intensified by knowledge of the unrestful spirit, by the terrible secrets of death hinted by the Ghost's words:

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood . . .

[I. v. 15-16]

This is added to Hamlet's sense of loss: this knowledge of the father he loved suffering in death:

Doom'd for a certain time to walk the night,

And for the day confin'd to fast in fires . . .

[I. v. 10-11]

Nor is this all. He next learns that his father's murderer now wears the crown, is married to his faithless mother. Both elements in his original pain are thus horribly intensified. His hope of recovery to the normal state of healthy mental life depended largely on his ability to forget his father, to forgive his mother. Claudius advised him well. Now his mother's honour is more foully smirched than ever; and the living cause and symbol of his father's death is firmly placed on Denmark's throne. Forgetfulness is impossible, forgetfulness that might have brought peace. The irony of the Ghost's parting word is terrible:

Adieu, adieu! Hamlet, remember me.

[I. v. 91]

If the spirit had been kind, it would have prayed that Hamlet might forget. . . .

Hamlet, when we first meet him, has lost all sense of life's significance. To a man bereft of the sense of purpose there is no possibility of creative action, it has no meaning. No act but suicide is rational. Yet to Hamlet comes the command of a great act—revenge: therein lies the unique quality of the play—a sick soul is commanded to heal, to cleanse, to create harmony. But good cannot come of evil: it is seen that the sickness of his soul only further infects the state—his disintegration spreads out, disintegrating.

Hamlet's soul is sick to death—and yet there was one thing left that might have saved him. In the deserts of his mind, void with the utter vacuity of the knowledge of death—death of his father, death of his mother's faith—was yet one flower, his love of Ophelia. . . . Now there is one supreme enemy to the demon of neurotic despair, its antithesis and bright antagonist: romantic love. . . . The love of Ophelia is thus Hamlet's last hope. This, too, is taken from him. Her repelling of his letters and refusing to see him, in obedience to Polonius' command, synchronizes unmercifully with the terrible burden of knowledge laid on Hamlet by the revelation of the Ghost. The result is given to us indirectly—but with excruciating vividness:

Ophelia. My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,

Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced

No hat upon his head; his stockings foul'd.

Ungarter'd, and down-gyved to his ankle;

Pale as his shirt; his knees knocking each other;

And with a look so piteous in purport

As if he had been loosed out of hell

To speak of horrors—he comes before me.

This is no mock-madness. To see it as such is to miss the power of the central theme of the play. Hamlet would not first try the practical joke of pretended madness on Ophelia whom he loved. That pallor was clearly no cosmetic.Hamlet was in truth 'loosed out of hell to speak of horrors': on top of the Ghost's revelation has come Ophelia's unreasonable repulsion of that his last contact with life, his love for her. Therefore

He took me by the wrist and held me hard;

Then goes he to the length of all his arm;

And, with his other hand thus o'er his brow,

He falls to such perusal of my face

As he would draw it. Long stay'd he so;

At last, a little shaking of mine arm,

And thrice his head thus waving up and down,

He raised a sigh so piteous and profound

As it did seem to shatter all his bulk

And end his being . . .

[II. i. 84-93]

From henceforth he must walk alone within the prison of mental death. There is surely no more pitiful thing in literature than this description. . . . The suggestion that in these circumstances, at this moment in his history, he has the presence of mind to pretend madness to Ophelia is a perversion of commentary.

It is, however, certain that Hamlet does simulate madness before the Court, and the King and Queen are both rightly unwilling to relate this madness to Hamlet's love of Ophelia. . . . Hamlet's pain is a complex of different themes of grief. But absolute loss of control is apparent only in his dealings with Ophelia. Three times after the Ghost scene he utterly loses mental control: first, in the incident narrated by Ophelia; second, in his meeting with her in III. i.; and third, in the Graveyard scene, with Laertes over Ophelia's body. On all other occasions his abnormal behaviour, though it certainly tends towards, and might even be called, madness in relation to his environment, is yet rather the abnormality of extreme melancholia and cynicism.

Throughout the middle scenes of the play we become more closely acquainted with Hamlet's peculiar disease. He is bitterly cynical:

. . . to be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.

[II. ii. 178-79]

and

Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping?

[II. ii. 529-30]

To Hamlet the world is a 'goodly' prison

in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o' the worst.

[II. ii. 245-47]

His mind is drawn to images in themselves repellent, and he dwells on the thought of foulness as the basis of life:

For if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog . . .

[II. ii. 181]

Hamlet's soul is sick. The symptoms are, horror at the fact of death and an equal detestation of life, a sense of uncleanliness and evil in the things of nature; a disgust at the physical body of man; bitterness, cynicism, hate. It tends towards insanity. All these elements are insistent in Hamlet. He can describe the glories of heaven and earth—but for him those glories are gone. And he knows not why. The disease is deeper than his loss of Ophelia, deeper than his mother's sexual impurity and his father's death. These are, like his mourning dress, the 'trappings and the suits of woe'. They are the outward symbols of it, the 'causes' of it: but the thing itself is ultimate, beyond causality. . . .

It will be clear that Hamlet's outstanding peculiarity in the action of this play may be regarded as a symptom of this sickness in his soul. He does not avenge his father's death, not because he dare not, not because he hates the thought of bloodshed, but because his 'wit's diseased' [III. ii. 321-22]; his will is snapped and useless, like a broken leg. Nothing is worth while. After the player has worked himself into a tragic passion in the recitation of 'Aeneas' Tale to Dido', Hamlet looks inward and curses and hates himself for his lack of passion, and then again he hates himself the more for his futile self-hatred. He cannot understand himself:

. . . it cannot be

But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall

To make oppression bitter.

[III. i. 576-78]

There are often moments when reincarnations of what must have been his former courteous and kindly nature—of which we hear, but which we only see by fits and starts—break through the bitterness of Hamlet as he appears in the play, but they do not last: cynicism and consequent cruelty, born of the burden of pain within him, blight the spontaneous gentleness that occasionally shows itself, strangle it. There is a continual process of self-murder at work in Hamlet's mind. He is cruel to Ophelia and his mother. He exults in tormenting the King by the murder of Gonzago, and when he finds him conscience-stricken, at prayer, takes a demoniac pleasure in the thought of preserving his life for a more damning death. . . . With a callousness and a most evident delight that shocks Horatio he sends his former school-friends to an undeserved death, 'not shriving time allowed', again hoping to compass the eternal damnation of his enemy. . . . Hamlet thus takes a devilish joy in cruelty towards the end of the play: he is like Iago [in Shakespeare's "Othello"]. It is difficult to see the conventional courtly Prince of Denmark in these incidents. We have done ill to sentimentalize his personality. We have paid for it—by failing to understand him; and, failing to understand, we have been unable to sympathize with the demon of cynicism, and its logical result of callous cruelty, that has Hamlet's soul in its remorseless grip. Sentiment is an easy road to an unprofitable and unreal sympathy. Hamlet is cruel. . . . At the end of his scene with his mother there is one beautiful moment when Hamletgains possession of his soul:

For this same lord,

I do repent: but heaven hath pleased it so,

To punish me with this, and this with me.

[III. iv. 172-74]

And his filial love wells up in:

So, again, good-night.

I must be cruel only to be kind:

Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.

[III. iv. 177-79]

But it is short-lived. Next comes a long speech of the most withering, brutal, and unnecessary sarcasm:

Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed;

Pinch wanton on your cheek; call you his mouse . . .

[III. iv. 182-83]

Even more horrible are his disgusting words about Polonius, whom he has unjustly killed, to the King.

King. Now, Hamlet, where's Polonius?

Hamlet. At supper.

King. At supper! where?

Hamlet. Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that's the end.

King. Alas, alas!

Hamlet. A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

King. What dost thou mean by this?

Hamlet. Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

King. Where is Polonius?

Hamlet. In heaven; send thither to see: if your messenger find him not there, seek him i' the other place yourself. But indeed, if you find him not within this month, you shall nose him as you go up the stairs into the lobby.

[IV. iii. 17-37]

A long and unpleasant quotation, I know. But it is necessary. The horror of humanity doomed to death and decay has disintegrated Hamlet's mind. From the first scene to the last the shadow of death broods over this play. In the exquisite prose threnody of the Graveyard scene the thought of physical death is again given utterance. There its pathos, its inevitability, its moral, are emphasized: but also its hideousness. Death is the theme of this play forHamlet's disease is mental and spiritual death. So Hamlet in his most famous soliloquy, concentrates on the terrors of an after life. The uninspired, devitalized intellect of Hamlet thinks pre-eminently in terms of time. To him, the body disintegrates in time, the soul persists in time too; and both are horrible. His consciousness, functioning in terms of evil and negation, sees Hell but not Heaven. . . . Therefore he dwells on the foul appearances of sex, the hideous decay of flesh, the deceit of beauty either of the spirit or the body, the torments of eternity if eternity exist. The universe is an 'unweeded garden', or a 'prison', the canopy of the sky but a 'pestilent congregation of vapours', and man but a 'quintessence of dust', waiting for the worms of death.

It might be objected that I have concentrated unduly on the unpleasant parts of the play. It has been my intention to concentrate. They are the most significant parts. I have tried by various quotations and by suggestive phrases to indicate this sickness which eats into Hamlet's soul. . . . Now by emphasizing these elements in the figure of HamletI have essayed to pluck out the heart of his mystery. And it will be clear that the elements which I have emphasized, the matter of Hamlet's madness, his patent cruelty, his coarse humour, his strange dialogue with Ophelia, his inability to avenge his father's death, are all equally related to the same sickness within. The coherence of these elements in the play must be evident. Creative action; love; passion—all these can find none but a momentary home in Hamlet's paralysed mind. . . .

The impression of the play, as a whole, is not so gloomy as the main theme: if it were, it would not have been so popular. There are many individual scenes of action, passion, humour and beauty, that take our thoughts from the essentially morbid impact of Hamlet's melancholia. Hamlet himself at times recovers his old instinctive friendliness, humour, and gentleness. We can guess what he was like before. That side of his nature which never quite dies, appearing intermittently until the end is important: it lends point and pathos to the inroads of his cynicism and disgust. His mind wavers between the principle of good, which is love, and that of evil, which is loathing and cruelty. But too much emphasis has been laid on this element of Hamlet. The popularity of the play is not innocent of misunderstanding. To ignore the unpleasant aspects of Hamlet blurs our vision of the protagonist, the play as a whole, and its place in Shakespeare's work. The matter of the disease theme in relation to the rest of the play is difficult. The total impression, the imaginative impact of the whole, leaves us with a sense of gaiety, health, superficiality, and colour, against which is silhouetted the pale black-robed figure of Hamlet who has seen what lies behind the smiles of benevolence, who has broken free of the folly of love because he has found its inward tawdriness and deceit, who knows that king and beggar alike are bound for the same disgusting 'convocation of worms', and that even an 'indifferent honest' man is too vile to be 'crawling between heaven and earth'.

There is no fallacy in Hamlet's reasoning. We cannot pick on this or that of his most bitter words, and prove them false. The solitary and inactive figure of Hamlet is contrasted with the bustle and the glitter of the court, the cancer of cynicism in his mind, himself a discordant and destructive thing whose very presence is a poison and a menace to the happiness and health of Denmark, fulfilling to the letter the devilish command of the Ghost:

Adieu, Adieu, Hamlet, remember me.

[I. v. 91]

Hamlet does not neglect his father's final behest—he obeys it not wisely but only too well. Hamlet remembers—not alone his father's ghost, but all the death of which it is a symbol. What would have been the use of killing Claudius? Would that have saved his mother's honour, have brought life to his father's mouldering body, have enabled Hamlethimself, who had so long lived in death, to have found again childish joy in the kisses of Ophelia? Would that have altered the universal scheme? To Hamlet, the universe smells of mortality; and his soul is sick to death. . . .

The general thought of death, intimately related to the predominating human theme, the pain in Hamlet's mind, is thus suffused through the whole play. And yet the play, as a whole, scarcely gives us that sense of blackness and the abysms of spiritual evil which we find in Macbeth; nor is there the universal gloom of King Lear. This is due partly to the difference in the technique of Hamlet from that of Macbeth or King Lear. Macbeth, the protagonist and heroic victim of evil, rises gigantic from the murk of an evil universe; Lear, the king of suffering, towers over a universe that itself toils in pain. Thus in Macbeth and King Lear the predominating imaginative atmospheres are used not to contrast with the mental universe of the hero, but to aid and support it, as it were, with similarity, to render realistic the extravagant and daring effects of volcanic passion to which the poet allows his protagonist to give voice. We are forced by the attendant personification, the verbal colour, the symbolism and events of the play as a whole, to feel the hero's suffering, to see with his eyes. Now in Hamlet this is not so. We need not see through Hamlet's eyes. Though the idea of death is recurrent through the play, it is not implanted in the minds of other persons as is the consciousness of evil throughout Macbeth and the consciousness of suffering throughout King Lear. Except for the original murder of Hamlet's father, the Hamlet universe is one of healthy and robust life, good-nature, humour, romantic strength, and welfare: against this background is the figure of Hamlet pale with the consciousness ofdeath. He is the ambassador of death, walking amid life. The effect is at first one of separation. Nevertheless it is to be noted that the consciousness of death, and consequent bitterness, cruelty, and inaction, in Hamlet not only grows in his own mind disintegrating it as we watch, but also spreads its effects outward among the other persons like a blighting disease, and, as the play progresses, by its very passivity and negation of purpose, insidiously undermines the health of the state, and adds victim to victim until at the end the stage is filled with corpses. It is, as it were, a nihilistic birth in the consciousness of Hamlet that spreads its deadly venom around. That Hamlet is originally blameless, that the King is originally guilty, may well be granted. But, if we refuse to be diverted from a clear vision by questions of praise and blame, responsibility and causality, and watch only the actions and reactions of the persons as they appear, we shall observe a striking reversal of the usual commentary. . . .

Now Claudius is not drawn as wholly evil—far from it. We see the government of Denmark working smoothly. Claudius shows every sign of being an excellent diplomatist and king. . . . The impression given by [his early] speeches is one of quick efficiency—the efficiency of the man who can dispose of business without unnecessary circumstance, and so leaves himself time for enjoying the good things of life: a man kindly, confident, and fond of pleasure.

Throughout the first half of the play Claudius is the typical kindly uncle, besides being a good king. His advice toHamlet about his exaggerated mourning for his father's death is admirable common sense. . . . It is the advice of worldly common sense opposed to the extreme misery of a sensitive nature paralysed by the facts of death and unfaithfulness. This contrast points the relative significance of the King and his court to Hamlet. They are of the world—with their crimes, their follies, their shallownesses, their pomp and glitter; they are of humanity, with all its failings, it is true, but yet of humanity. They assert the importance of human life, they believe in it, in themselves. WhereasHamlet is inhuman, since he has seen through the tinsel of life and love, he believes in nothing, not even himself, except the memory of a ghost, and his black robed presence is a reminder to every one of the fact of death. There is no question but that Hamlet is right. The King's smiles hide murder, his mother's love for her new consort is unfaithfulness to Hamlet's father, Ophelia has deserted Hamlet at the hour of his need. Hamlet's philosophy may be inevitable, blameless, and irrefutable. But it is the negation of life. It is death. Hence Hamlet is a continual fear to Claudius, a reminder of his crime. It is a mistake to consider Claudius as a hardened criminal. When Polonius remarks on the hypocrisy of mankind, he murmurs to himself:

O, 'tis too true!

How smart a lash that speech doth give my conscience!

The harlot's cheek, beautied with plastering art,

Is not more ugly to the thing that helps it

Than is my deed to my most painted word:

O heavy burthen!

[III. i. 48-53]

Again, Hamlet's play wrenches his soul with remorse—primarily not fear of Hamlet, as one might expect, but a genuine remorse—and gives us that most beautiful prayer of a stricken soul beginning, 'O, my offence is rank, it smells to Heaven' [III. iii. 36]. . . . He fears that his prayer is worthless. He is still trammelled by the enjoyment of the fruits of his crime. 'My fault is past', he cries. But what does that avail, since he has his crown and his queen still, the prizes of murder? His dilemma is profound and raises the problem I am pointing in this essay. Claudius, as he appears in the play, is not a criminal. He is—strange as it may seem—a good and gentle king, enmeshed by the chain of causality linking him with his crime. And this chain he might, perhaps, have broken except for Hamlet, and all would have been well. Now, granted the presence of Hamlet—which Claudius at first genuinely desired, persuading him not to return to Wittenberg as he wished—and granted the fact of his original crime which cannot now be altered, Claudius can hardly be blamed for his later actions. They are forced on him. As King, he could scarcely be expected to do otherwise. Hamlet is a danger to the state, even apart from his knowledge of Claudius' guilt. He is an inhuman—or superhuman— presence, whose consciousness—somewhat like Dostoievsky's Stavrogin—is centred ondeath. Like Stavrogin, he is feared by those around him. They are always trying in vain to find out what is wrong with him. They cannot understand him. He is a creature of another world. As King of Denmark he would have been a thousand times more dangerous than Claudius. . . .

I have concentrated on Claudius' virtues. They are manifest. So are his faults, his original crime, his skill in the less admirable kind of policy, treachery, and intrigue. But I would point clearly that, in the movement of the play, his faults are forced on him, and he is distinguished by creative and wise action, a sense of purpose, benevolence, a faith in himself and those around him, by love of his Queen. . . . Instinctively the creatures of earth—Laertes, Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, league themselves with Claudius: they are of his kind. They sever themselves from Hamlet. Laertes sternly warns Ophelia against her intimacy with Hamlet, so does Polonius. They are, in fact, all leagued against him, they are puzzled by him or fear him: he has no friend except Horatio, and Horatio, after the Ghost scenes, becomes a queer shadowy character who rarely gets beyond 'E'en so, my lord', 'My lord—', and such-like phrases. The other persons are firmly drawn, in the round, creatures of flesh and blood. But Hamlet is not of flesh and blood, he is a spirit of penetrating intellect and cynicism and misery, without faith in himself or any one else, murdering his love of Ophelia, on the brink of insanity, taking delight in cruelty, torturing Claudius, wringing his mother's heart, a poison in the midst of the healthy bustle of the court. He is a superman among men. And he is a superman because he has walked and held converse with death, and his consciousness works in terms of deathand the negation of cynicism. He has seen the truth, not alone of Denmark, but of humanity, of the universe: and the truth is evil. Thus Hamlet is an element of evil in the state of Denmark. The poison of his mental existence spreads outwards among things of flesh and blood, like acid eating into metal. They are helpless before his very inactivity and fall one after the other, like victims of an infectious disease. They are strong with the strength of health—but the demon of Hamlet's mind is a stronger thing than they. Futilely they try to get him out of their country; anything to get rid of him, he is not safe. But he goes with a cynical smile, and is no sooner gone than he is back again in their midst, meditating in graveyards, at home with death. Not till it has slain all, is the demon that grips Hamlet satisfied. And last it slays Hamlet himself:

The spirit that I have seen

May be the devil. . . .

[II. ii. 598-99]

It was.