Patio de Escuelas, Universidad de Salamanca, Spain: Ceiling – detail (photo (c) Ulrike Boehm; all rights reserved)
... also known as, "Hamlet gets metaphysical." But in truth, can you blame him? Just think about it: He's spent the past three months putting on an ever more convincing "madness" act, while looking for an opportunity (and getting his courage up) to comply with his father's charge, avenge the former King's murder, and let his mother know what kind of guy she has married so quickly after her first husband's death. On top of which, even the fair Ophelia has lately decided to walk out on him. The only person he still has left to trust in is Horatio – and he is no real help, either, because for one thing, Hamlet (probably) still hesitates to fully let him in on the Ghost's revelations, and secondly, even if he told him, Horatio just wouldn't be in a position to actually do anything. But at least he's great company, and that in itself is worth a lot – and I think Hamlet also knows (and appreciates) that Horatio has been true to his word and has not let Claudius and Gertrude sound him on his, the Prince's cause of distemper. Then, out of the blue, arrive our Prince's other "schoolfellows," Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Maybe for a moment, Hamlet is truly delighted to see them. But he quickly begins to sense that there is something else in the air, and in short order discovers that they were sent for by Claudius and Gertrude to discover what the King and Queen have not been able to glean from Horatio. So how is Hamlet supposed to treat them? Clearly he can't trust them fully until they've shown whose side they are really on; and the fact that they have been so reluctant and secretive about their mission certainly doesn't bode much good at all. But on the other hand, he has so far considered them friends – or at least, buddies. He resolves to take things halfway and then leave the next step to them; see what they will do with his revelation. "I will tell you why [you were sent for]," he bluntly informs them about the purpose of their mission: "So shall my anticipation prevent your discovery, and your secrecy to the King and Queen moult no feather." – Of course he will realise soon enough that he is looking at nothing but a pair of Claudius's pawns; and he, too, will then come to treat them accordingly. But before we get to that point, they sure give him plenty of opportunity to wax metaphysi- and -phorically about nature, mankind and life as such.
An interesting external question with regard to this part of the second act's very long second scene is whether it should be set indoors or outdoors. Shakespeare himself doesn't give any express stage direction, and sequentially there doesn't seem to be any break at all, either: The scene begins with the audience during which Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are welcomed by Claudius and Gertrude (i.e., clearly and expressly an indoors setting), then Voltemand and Cornelius report on their mission to Norway, then Polonius expostulates on what he has learned from Ophelia about her and Hamlet's romance, at which point Hamlet enters, and King, Queen and courtiers exit, leaving Polonius at the mercy of the "daggers" in the Prince's talk about fishmongers, the venerable Counsellor's daughter, and slanderous words about old men; and making him wonder about the "method" to Hamlet's apparent madness. And immediately after that, re-enter Rosencrantz and Guildenstern – indeed, they even have a brief exchange with Polonius while he is on his way out. So obviously we're still indoors, aren't we? Yes, well ... I'm not so sure we necessarily must or even should be. I actually love the way this is resolved in the BBC production starring Sir Derek Jacobi, where the entire scene is set on a comparatively sparsely-furnished stage, which – without any changes in set decoration at all – allows you to imaginatively go from the initial indoors setting to an outdoors setting for Hamlet's first meeting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, if you feel this is more appropriate for that part of the scene. And I think Shakespeare at least implicitly permits such a reading – he not only has Polonius ask Hamlet towards the end of their own exchange whether he will "walk out of the air;" moreover, mere minutes after the Prince's welcome of his two "schoolfellows," Hamlet in fact invites them, "Shall we to th' court? for, by my fay, I cannot reason" – which sounds sincere enough to my ears, at least as far as the suggestion of a setting somewhere away from the court, or from the main castle building, is concerned, and which thus only makes sense if they are somewhere else; presumably outside. Particularly given the Prince's then-following elaborate praise of the alleged virtues (or lack thereof) of the universe, nature, and humankind, I therefore think in a movie it makes sense to take up the Bard's implicit permission (or invitation?) and set this part of the second act's second scene somewhere outdoors, in the castle's vicinity (... that is, if you don't do as Grigori Kosintzev does and move the action from outdoors – the ocean setting of the preceding "fishmonger" scene – to an indoors environment, where Hamlet gets to handle a toy globe during his metaphysical expostulations, instead of making more direct reference to Mother Nature).
I have of late – but wherefore I know not – lost all my
mirth, forgone all custom of exercises;
Remember that this follows straight on the heels of Hamlet's discovery that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were sent for by Claudius and Gertrude. And isn't it just a beautiful piece of ambivalence? On the one hand he truthfully tells them that he's been feeling like sh*t lately. (Yeah, well, alright, "lost [his] mirth." But you know what he means ... Hell, he's not even speaking in pentameters here. This is plain prose, throughout the entire soliloquy!) On the other hand, although he knows perfectly well why that's the case, he pretends not to have a clue as to the cause, and swiftly takes advantage of the opportunity to lay the foundation for two more audience members of his "madness" act in case he needs to treat them as such.
and indeed, it goes so
heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth,
seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the
air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical
roof fretted with golden fire – why, it appeareth no other thing
to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.
And then, with rocket speed, we suddenly find ourselves bound for Planet Alpha. Of course, we've already been there once in this conversation, immediately after Hamlet's "Denmark's a prison" comment, which had opened the door to all those oh-so profound musings on physical prisons, prisons of the mind, dreams, ambition, shadows, and whathaveyou. But at that moment, we still had the "sent for" business to take care of. Now that that's out of the way, there is no stopping our Prince ... and he's really not sparing us a single cliché now, is he? Because for all the passage's apparent metaphysical overtones; for all that language denoting Heaven and sky, sun, moon and the stars, earth and universe, existence both physically and philosophically, life, death, and all the rest ... he's really laying it on mighty thick, methinks.
What a
piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in
faculties! in form and moving how express and admirable! in
action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! the
beauty of the world, the paragon of animals! And yet to me what
is this quintessence of dust?
And it gets even better when he moves from creation as such to its supreme achievement: man. (As in "mankind," not in "the opposite of woman" – we'll get to that other bit in a minute.) "Noble in reason" – "infinite in faculties" – "like an angel" – "like a god" even – "the beauty of the world" – "the paragon of animals" ... and yet, subject to earthly decay like all matter is. Goodness me.
Filippo Brunelleschi: Dome of Santa Maria del Fiore Cathedral, Florence, Italy – cutaway (1414-1436)
Of course we've seen Hamlet make a similar move from the general to the more specific before, in his observations shortly before his encounter with his father's Ghost, regarding that "stamp of one defect" sometimes so tainting either a nation's or a person's reputation that it is capable to obscure even the greatest virtues. Similarly, we've heard him call the sun and the stars as his witnesses before, in the rather stilted beginning of his love letter to Ophelia. And there couldn't be any doubt that he was speaking seriously on both of those occasions. But now? Are we really to take all this glamour and glory at face value yet again – are we really supposed to understand our Prince to say that while he is well aware of all the universe's and humankind's manifold unsurpassed graces, he alone is unable to appreciate them and indeed finds them their very opposite? Naw. Remember, there are two major types of parody – and it is mordant parody we are looking at here; and not merely Hamlet's but the Bard's very own: You can either turn the object of your mockery into its very opposite, or you can hype it to the nth degree. In his Sonnet 130, Shakespeare presents us with a poignant example of the former method, mercilessly punning the era's conventions of love poetry. In this particular instance now, we're arguably dealing with the latter method. Thus, once more I think the speaker is not only Hamlet, parodying Guildenstern's earlier comment that "dreams indeed are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream" and Rosencrantz's even more airy-fairy add-on, "ambition [is] of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow's shadow;" once more the speaker is the Bard himself, telling his contemporaries to get a grip, just as surely as he did in Sonnet 130. Only this time it's all about metaphysics, another fascination of an era profoundly shaken by the scientific discoveries of Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei, the philosophical and theological treatises of René Descartes, Michel de Montaigne, Erasmus of Rotterdam, Martin Luther, John Calvin and Ulrich Zwingli, the architectural triumphs of Michelangelo (St. Peter's Cathedral, Rome), Filippo Brunelleschi (Cathedral Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence) and Sir Christopher Wren (St. Paul's Cathedral, London), the designs and experiments of Leonardo da Vinci, the opening of naval routes to Africa and Asia and, last but not least, the discovery of a whole New World across the ocean to the west; the combined effect of all of which was the spiritual rebirth which would later cause the entire era to be called Renaissance.
["Aha," someone in the audience mutters. "So it's Hamlet the Renaissance Man after all that we're looking at?"]
To the extent that the Prince prides himself on his scholarship certainly; and I also do believe it's reasonable to assume that Shakespeare took a profound interest in the scientific and philosophical developments of his time. But for all his own overarching intellectual powers, the Bard was a very down-to-earth sort of guy, who reserved a special kind of scorn for those given to speaking in glittering soap bubbles which, when popped, turn out to contain absolutely nothing. We will see this with particular poignancy in the way that Hamlet and even Horatio (!) will be deconstructing Osric's golden words towards the end of the play, but we're certainly getting more than a minor glimpse here, too, in Hamlet's response to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. The BBC/Derek Jacobi production uses a simple but effective technique to get across the notion that Hamlet is not speaking seriously and uttering his own ideas when embarking on all his hyperbole regarding the world in general and mankind in particular: he is reading the words from the book he has previously also used to mock Polonius. I think in a movie you can have even more fun with this passage if you unequivocally set it outdoors ... and much as I love the way this is realised in Franco Zeffirelli's "Hamlet," I do think meteorologically even they could have done much better.
Man delights not me – no, nor woman
neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.
Then, finally, the parting shot: Hamlet is back from Outer Space, and serious again (hence instantly annoyed that Rosencrantz hasn't seemed to be taking him seriously, and making his "schoolfellow" scramble for an answer, which will, however, turn out to provide a smooth segue to the Players' impending arrival) – now moving from "man" as in "mankind" to "man" as in "man and woman." And no indeed, nor is our Prince delighted by woman neither ... particularly not if her name be Ophelia or Gertrude. He clearly isn't a happy camper, our Hamlet. Well, as he himself expressed it at the beginning: feeling like sh... – err, "lost all [his] mirth" ...
Copyright 2002 – 2009: Ulrike Böhm, all rights reserved.
