Wallace Monument, Stirling, Scotland – William Wallace's statue (photo (c) Ulrike Boehm; all rights reserved)
Hamlet's almost-meeting with Fortinbras, concluding the play's second major temporal sequence. According to the 1623 "First Folio", it never even takes place – Messrs. Condell and Hemmings would have us believe that all that happens in this scene is that Fortinbras sends a messenger to Claudius to inform him of his intent to march through Denmark on his way to Poland. But the scene is contained in the 1604 Second Quarto, which may well have been a print copy of Shakespeare's own first draft of the play, and it is custumarily included in most modern versions as well. And even accepting that the First Folio may tell us something about the way in which the play was first presented to Globe Theatre audiences, I'm squarely with Sir Kenneth Branagh and his mentor, Sir Derek Jacobi, here: this scene needs to be included in any production with even so much as a remote claim to completeness; it's way too important to be left out – and if that means I'm disagreeing with the worthy Messrs. Hemmings and Condell (plus a substantial part of Shakespearean sholarship), then so be it. Heck, we don't even know what, if anything, eventually prompted the Bard to revise the play and scrap this and a bunch of other monologues: I can think of a whole range of reasons, from the piece's sheer length (four hours, which the vast majority of the audience, the so-called "groundlings," had to stand through without intermission) to political demands or theatrical necessities, and finally also the fact that "Hamlet" was intended in part as a counterpoint to the era's blood-soaked revenge tragedies; an approach to which, on its face, the monologue's end certainly does sound counterproductive. But I think this soliloquy adds so much to the perception of the Prince's character that any production not including it just loses interpretative opportunities galore.
Now, for all intents and purposes, our Prince is on the way out in this particular scene: off the stage in Denmark, away from Elsinore, with his father's charge still unfulfilled. Claudius still lives and is still married to Gertrude. The Devil still reigns the land – the despot, the evil dictator has not been removed. Sin is still in the air. And being shipped away to England, Hamlet seems less in a position than ever to do anything about it: indeed, if Claudius has his way, he will never again be able to do anything about it at all, because he will be executed upon arrival.
At this moment, Hamlet encounters the Norwegian prince. On the surface, their situations don't seem to be all that similar: while the Prince of Denmark is involved in a life-and-death struggle against Evil Incarnate, Fortinbras has let his uncle (who seems a benign enough ruler and probably ascended his country's throne when his own brother was killed by Hamlet's father thirty years earlier; i.e., when Prince Fortinbras was still an infant) persuade him to use the army initially raised against Denmark in the conquest of a piece of Polish territory instead: a piece of territory, moreover, that seems hardly worth the effort. But it is precisely this which nags our Hamlet.
How all occasions do inform against me
And spur my dull revenge!
And although he does seem less in a position than ever to act, his commitment is certainly unbroken. Indeed, unlike the two-minded Prince of Act II, Scene 2 who, for all his self-loathing after the Player King's powerful performance of his part of "Pyrrhus and Hecuba," still developed last-minute doubts and required the confirmation of the "play within the play" to reassure himself that he was on the right path, the Hamlet we see now has absolutely no compunctions as to the justification of his cause. And at least implicitly, he almost seems to be taking it for granted that he will be returning to Denmark, sooner rather than later.
What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and godlike reason
To fust in us unus'd.
This recalls Hamlet's (pseudo-)metaphysical reflections when first encountering Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (also in Act II, Scene 2). And significantly, unlike the pointed hyperbole he had used on that earlier occasion, now the Prince is perfectly serious: these are no grand ideas about man as "the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals;" he doesn't simply praise mankind for being "noble in reason," "infinite in faculties," and even "in apprehension like a god." Now he asks why, if man is indeed made of such superior stuff, we have been given these faculties – for certainly they should not just go to waste.
Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on th' event, –
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, – I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do,'
Sith I have cause, and will, and strength, and means
To do't.
Yet, although the Prince's commitment to his cause is unbroken, although he has come to realise the true nature of his sudden doubts before the "play within the play" ("some ... scruple of thinking too precisely on th' event"), and although it is also clear that he concludes that he should be putting all his superior faculties as a member of the human race to work in the fulfilment of his cause, he can't bring himself to also pinpoint the precise reason for his reluctance to act. While by far not expressed with such extreme self-loathing as before the "play within the play," still the question torments him – and maybe now more so than ever: "Am I a coward?"
Note, incidentally, that he gives four reasons why he should no longer delay decisive action: cause, will, strength, and means. ("Means?" the observer again pauses and wonders. "While you're on your way to England?" Hmm.) – Moreover, he is referring to his thoughts before the "play within the play" as "quarter'd, [having] but one part wisdom and ever three parts coward." This implicitly negates a well-known maxim referring to art (and to the creative process as such), whose result is said to be "1/4 inspiration and 3/4 perspiration," as the creative idea must yet undergo an in itself ultimately much more substantial transformation into reality for the work to be completed. Hamlet thus associates cowardice – if cowardice it be in his case – not with his initial, or underlying state of mind, but rather, with something that gets in the way of his follow-through.
Examples gross as earth exhort me.
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit, with divine ambition puff'd,
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell.
In the middle of these persistent self-doubts he now comes across Fortinbras who, though but "tender and delicate," seems to know no scruples, no doubts, and no fear; whose willpower alone is enough to make him risk his own life and those of an entire army's worth of soldiers for a prize hardly worth the shedding of a single drop of blood: the very opposite of the attitude Hamlet observes in himself.
Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake.
And indeed, he concludes, this is the attitude he himself should be adopting, at least if honour is in the picture (in other words, if you would be branded a coward otherwise): in such cases, what matters is not merely action per se; what matters is forceful action and resolve regardless of the importance of the cause. But since his observations are clearly not of a general nature but also refer to his own case, he in fact associates honour and action with vengeance and justice. And the question arises: can any of these exist without the others? Or conversely, does the absence of one also indicate the absence of the other attributes?
How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain?
Answer: Honour, at least honourable action, can stand for itself and will always be found right and just. (On the other hand, when honour is not involved, action might not be necessary at all.) But if, in addition to honour, vengeance and/or justice is also at stake, inaction is always both unjustified and dishonourable.
Again, Hamlet's reflections here recall those from Act II, Scene 2. But while what stirred his profound self-loathing then was the First Player's powerful ability to display feelings (and fake feelings at that), and our Prince was scolding himself for his inability to express his own (no less powerful, and real) feelings by putting them into action, now he has moved from a mere emotional response to his cause to a rational, attitudinal one – moreover, one intricately linked to an entirely abstract virtue (honour), which will much later also figure prominently in Hamlet's exchange with Laertes before the final duel. Thus, of the four reasons for decisive action he himself has given – cause, will, strength, and means – his one internal reason, will, has been transformed from an impulse-driven motivation into one driven by the mind, from a force associated with the heart into one associated with the head. And now, finally, his resolve is firm:
O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
Now the code of revenge is established once and for all; now there is no more wavering, no positioning of O, vengeance! in the structural center of a soliloquy, only to be followed by yet more self-loathing and doubts. Now he really means it, and his exit from the stage (for the moment) is associated with the same weighty foreshadowing we have already seen at other critical junctures: Act I, Scenes 2 and 5, Act II, Scene 2, and Act III, Scenes 2 and 4. Now we know that if he speaks of "bloody thoughts," this is precisely what he means. And it no longer even matters that he is speaking of "thoughts" rather than "acts," because thoughts – in other words, a will controlled by the brain rather than by emotions – is precisely what had been lacking before. Only now that his response has moved from the level of the (part-)impulse-driven to an exclusive application of those faculties that make man so unique and so much nobler than animals, will he be able to follow through with his cause.
Hamlet's four reasons for decisive action – cause, will, strength, and means – have thus been recreated as a much more powerful unity than before by the transformation of a will substantially controlled by emotions and impulse into a will solely controlled by rationality and by the mind. Nothing – at least nothing resting inside the Prince himself – will now ultimately hinder the completion of his purpose.
And, yes, since this scene isn't even contained in the First Folio, I'm well aware that I might be completely, totally off with my interpretation here; and given that we won't see our Prince again for a some time – and while he is gone, plenty of other necessary questions of the play are to be considered back in Elsinore – by the time he returns, one might also wonder whether we're not still dealing with the same old undecided Hamlet after all. Indeed, if you listen to him in that graveyard, contemplating the old court jester Yorick's skull, there seems to be plenty more gloom and doom at work for sure. But even so, I think at the very least you have to remember that by the time of Hamlet's return we have already learned that he has been involved in a sea-fight and managed to save himself onto a pirate ship a mere three days into his see journey to England; and we will soon also learn that he had, even earlier, dispatched Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to the English gallows awaiting him: Yes, I know, ultimately this seems like another completely pointless action, but it is certainly a manifestation of "bloody thoughts" ... and also of a rather elaborate plot, not merely a "rash and bloody deed" like the killing of Polonius. And it does also seem to me that there is a new determination in his voice when he later speaks to Horatio about the short interval remaining to him before Claudius must learn of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's death – so although his final resolve to kill Claudius is certainly spurred considerably by the fact that he, himself, is at that time likewise already on the way to meet his Maker, I do think ultimately we have left the old Hamlet behind and he has run his course when exiting from the stage at the end of this very soliloquy – and a newly resolved Prince will be returning to Elsinore at the beginning of Act V.
[If, incidentally, you accept that the scholarly interpretation which tells us that we're now in Act IV, Scene 4 is a reasonable construction of the play as written (never mind that the quartos, like those of all of the Bard's plays, only contained scenes – no acts at all – and that the 1623 "First Folio", probably due to an editor's or printer's error, never gets beyond Act II, Scene 2), it's tempting to go one step further and conjecture that this soliloquy's meaning, like that of Claudius's anti-prayer, may be underscored even more by the tragedy's very own dramatic structure, because we are now looking at the numerical symbolisms of both four and eight, as contrasted to that of two, the number of division, which would then come to be associated with the Prince's earlier doubts and self-loathing in Act II, Scene 2. Four, however, stands for the idea of completion, as well as the related concepts of strength, stability, certainty, reliability, and predictability, as well as creation as such. There is a plethora of powerful groups of fours: the four biblical Evangelists; the four seasons of the year and of the cycle of creation; the four temperaments (sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic); Ovid's four ages of the world (gold, silver, bronze, and iron – the latter, i.e, the fourth age being an age of warfare and violence); Plato's four cardinal virtues (prudence, courage, temperance, and justice); the four continents known in Shakespeare's time (Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia); the four cardinal directions; the four elements (fire, water, earth, and air – all also represented on the wheel of fortune). In the bible's fourth verse (Genesis 1:4), God divides light from darkness. In its fourth chapter (Genesis 4:1 et seq.), Adam and Eve begin to procreate; humanity itself comes into being. And also according to Genesis, the river flowing from the Garden of Eden divided into four other rivers. – Eight, on the other hand, is the number of recreation and regeneration, of a new beginning: Christ appeared to Thomas on the eighth day after his resurrection; baptisms have therefore traditionally been held on the eighth day after a child's birth, and baptismal fonts usually have the form of an octagon. – As with regard to Claudius's anti-prayer, any such interpretation should be viewed with extreme skepticism, though, however tempting it may be; if for no other reason, for the fact that the structure of the play we have come to take for granted is largely based on scholarly analysis, not on any primary textual sources from Shakespeare's own lifetime.]
Copyright 2002 – 2009: Ulrike Böhm, all rights reserved.
