Hamlet Rediscovered

So much ink, so little understanding

Ok, I know the title and subtitle may sound vain, but I hope by the end of this essay about what’s really going on in Hamlet, you’ll agree with my reasoning. If this essay interests you, I’d be grateful for a comment and ask you to subscribe to my Substack. Thank you.

Hamlet has long been understood as a kind of universal Rorschach test: we read ourselves into the play and especially into the character. And we read it into ourselves. My analysis below will itself serve as another justification for this view, so I’ll say no more here about it but to remark that to the extent the statement above is true, Hamlet is the most universal character in literature. We are all Hamlet. And since we cannot escape that fact, what follows is necessarily a projection of myself, which I fully recognize and own.

Millions of words have been spent trying to understand Hamlet (some of them previously in these essays!), yet he remains as inscrutable as ever. How could it be otherwise when we each perceive our own personal Hamlet? A great portion of those words have tried to solve the puzzle of why Hamlet delays killing Claudius. To be direct: I think that’s foolishness. Shakespeare usually wrote on one level for the groundlings (“who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise”) and on another level for the sophisticated auditor and reader. This is not bigotry; no one can process even a small portion of the layers of meaning on one hearing or reading of the play, even when, in the playwright’s day, auditors were much better trained than today to attending closely the spoken word. Shakespeare had far too much to say to simply be a playwright; he was a master poet as well, and poets aim for the truth, which can take quite some effort both to get across and to perceive.

Another great portion of those words have been in service of understanding what Shakespeare meant by Hamlet and what he was trying to say with him and with the play. So many of these attempts are misguided from their origins, since they begin, as critics usually do, by assuming that Shakespeare was trying to say a single main thing. (Others are just plain nuts, such as that Hamlet was actually a woman.) As I’ve commented before, Shakespeare is unequaled in his artistic use of ambiguity, precisely, in my view, to allow the reader or playgoer to project himself into the work, resulting in, among other things, his famous detachment. That said, there are a number of themes that he returns to again and again that undeniably circumscribe a specific sentiment. No commentator I have read assembles those cross-canon themes more coherently and completely (though can anyone ever be complete when it comes to Shakespeare?) than the wonderful Harold C. Goddard, in his magisterial book, The Meaning of Shakespeare.

One of those themes found throughout Shakespeare, and which Goddard explicates so fully is what I call the hidden mind -- the differences between what is internal and known only to one person and what is “played” to others, and the effect of such differences on relations between people. Naturally, Shakespeare makes great comic use of this fact of life throughout the comedies, and more than one might suppose in the histories. But the theme is central to all of the tragedies; consider that neither did Othello know Desdemona’s mind, and thus her actual faithfulness, nor did she know his, adding weight to the unfolding tragedy. In none of the plays is Shakespeare’s obsession with the hidden mind more central than in Hamlet.

Goddard’s main conclusion about Hamlet (though, to be sure, he draws many other interesting ones) is that the prince betrays his true nature from the end of Act IV to the conclusion in acting out the part of avenger to which his father’s ghost exhorts him. (I will argue below that already in the bedroom scene of III.iv, he has lost himself.) This self-betrayal parallels a number of other of Shakespeare’s characters: Romeo’s unrestrained outburst and killing of Tybalt goes against his true self; Hal’s abandonment of the Hal who loved Falstaff, notably when he turns his back on his fat friend, and later when he follows his father’s advice in raping France; Brutus’s betrayal of himself in joining the conspiracy; Othello is not Othello when he gives ear to Iago; Coriolanus, who has been estranged from himself since childhood, tragically finds himself at the end, but too late. And Lear also finds himself too late, beautifully, but with the most painful consequences. Shakespeare was passionate about this theme; when one looks at all these examples (and more), one cannot but conclude that he saw falsity -- the external display of someone different from the internal one -- as the chief problem of humankind, and a thing to detest. It is the most populated theme in the canon for a reason.

I share Goddard’s understanding of Hamlet’s alienation from himself, but I don’t think he goes far enough. Hamlet was false to himself, and that’s an enormous part of his story. But he is also a representation of someone deeply dissatisfied with the world, and the play is a study of how such a person -- coupled with enormous intelligence, sensitivity, and creative powers -- might respond to such a situation.

When we look at the play from this distance, it becomes clear that questions such as, “why did he delay so long?” are rather trivial. In one sense, Hamlet was struggling with himself: As Goddard astutely observes, Shakespeare, in Julius Caesar, the play written immediately before Hamlet, had studied a man who went against himself after a brief struggle; it might naturally follow that he would study a character who struggled over a longer time. But in a much broader sense, Hamlet was trying to find a way to be (those words!) in such a world, either by capitulating to it, or by stoically tolerating it. That characterizes his struggle much more precisely -- though also much more grandly -- than any theory referencing revenge. Shakespeare soared high.

The first words of the play are “Who’s there?” Shakespeare, famous for artfully rolling out the main themes right away, is at his most concise here. Indeed, it is a play about identity. Hamlet lives in a world of corruption at Elsinore; nearly everyone is a schemer, liar, or deceiver (even Gertrude deceives herself, as we’ll see below). His awareness of this corruption has made him -- well before the action begins -- sick and despondent. Nearly his first words are explicitly about seeming versus being. What could be clearer? Again, Shakespeare is usually up-front and direct in stating his principle themes in the first act. And immediately after his utterance about seeming, once alone, Hamlet’s first soliloquy states his general dissatisfaction with the world boldly and clearly: “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!” Again, what could be clearer. But note: He has not yet even heard about the ghost yet; this disposition has nothing to do with the ghost’s “mission.” I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. Hamlet is already depressed well before the play begins. And the reason for his depression (another million words of ink spilled) is equally clear: The preponderance of seeming versus being all around him.

In the many commentaries I’ve read about the play, the fulcrum of nearly all the arguments posited about it and about Hamlet involve the ghost’s mission of revenge on his murderer. Even my beloved Goddard employs it in his “divided man” perspective, where Hamlet is divided over whether to carry out the ghost’s mission. What I’m saying is that you don’t need the ghost to explain the most important thematic element of the play: How does such a man respond when so alienated from the world?

I think this is why we all identify with Hamlet, why he is the most universal character in literature: We are all -- every one of us -- alienated from the world, whether we know it or not. We are all dissatisfied (there would be no need for the Buddha’s teachings if we weren’t); we are all in our own world, inherently separated from one another. King Lear is often cited as Shakespeare’s “cosmic” play, thematically. Hamlet is on just as great a scale. This -- our universal feeling of alienation -- is the cosmic element of Hamlet, and what theme could challenge that for supremacy?

Why does Hamlet need to be so intelligent to make the play work within this cosmic framework? There has been speculation that in earlier drafts, Shakespeare’s hero was rather a dullard, perhaps like Clotin in Cymbeline. If so, he must soon have found out that such a character wouldn’t be harmonious with the main theme. It seems to me that Hamlet’s most important personality traits, intelligence, sensitivity, and creativity, are essential because without the first two, he couldn’t perceive and feel so strongly the corruption of the world. Forget “what’s Hecuba to him?” If Hamlet is a dummy, what’s the world’s corruption to him? (This is how the gravedigger survives, which I'll discuss later.) His creativity is necessary for him to test his perceptions about the world. And isn’t that a reasonably satisfactory statement of what creativity is -- capturing and testing one’s perceptions of the world and reflecting them externally? And by the way, isn’t it interesting that mirrors play a prominent role in this play?

Again, I stress that the ghost and his mission are not central to the main themes of the play, though they certainly are to the plot. To further convince you, let’s walk through the meaty center of the play, where we will encounter a parade of people being false to Hamlet. We begin in II.i, when Ophelia describes her offstage encounter with his “antic disposition” after obeying her father’s instruction to rebuff Hamlet’s affections. Someone with Hamlet’s sensitivity would surely (a) know that Ophelia really did love him, and (b) see through her falsity, suspecting that her father is behind it. (Poor Ophelia: She’s a tool of corrupt people, and implodes under the pressure.) Next, we find him, in II.ii, testing Polonius -- far too small and easy a fish for Hamlet to be satisfied catching, so he’s merely playing with him for amusement. In the very same scene, he encounters Rosencranz and Guildenstern, clearly suspicious of their intent. (Skepticism, a close cousin of intelligence, is another important personality trait of Hamlet’s.) Toward the end of this first meeting, he tells them directly -- a great example of Hamlet showing both us and them what it looks like to be authentic -- about his depression: “I have of late…lost all my mirth…the earth seems to me a sterile promontory…the air, a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.” Then, in what is often mistaken as another soliloquy due to its grandiosity (itself sometimes a symptom of depression), he telescopes down to mankind itself: “What a piece of work is a man! how noble…the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me…”

Then the players enter. So, Hamlet has just encountered successively and without interruption, four people whom he sees as corrupt, inauthentic, as playing parts. And they are -- each one of them. At just this point, in Shakespeare’s inimitable art, he unfurls his flag so there’s no mistaking what’s going on: He brings in literal actors, and that, in his second soliloquy, provides Hamlet with an opportunity to meditate on falsity: “What’s Hecuba to him?” Hamlet has more motive than the First Player for “acting”, but he simply can’t. He can’t be false to his nature, which is one that is no more a killer than you or me, Dear Reader. No other motive is required for his struggle and delay. It’s not in him. This is Goddard’s main point.

If you go through the text carefully, you’ll find, in fact, that there is nowhere in the play before his turn away from himself at the end of Act III where Hamlet is false, except a single exception that proves the rule, and which I will discuss below (to Ophelia: “I loved you once/ I love you not.”) We always talk about “Hamlet the actor.” What could be more ironic? We can all at least agree that until the end of Act IV, Hamlet is not much of an actor in the non-thespian sense. Is this contrast with the players (actors) simply incidental? I don’t think so. Shakespeare loved hiding his easter eggs in plain sight, testing us, like Hamlet, to see whether we’re paying attention. And, did you notice, by the way, in the middle of that soliloquy, he eschews the very idea of being false in saying, “Prompted to my revenge…/ Must [I], like a whore, unpack my heart with words…” This is no shrewd and kind observation about whores; he is saying that whores lie, and he can’t stand the thought of being like that.

(As an aside, this brings to mind Harold Bloom’s association between these words and Nietzsche’s aphorism, “that for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts; therefore there is a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.” In fact, it’s the epitaph to Bloom’s book on the plays. Hamlet anticipates Nietzsche, prizing that idea to its highest degree.)

Now we move, in III.i, to the great nunnery scene, directly preceded by the famous “To be, or not to be” soliloquy on suicide and death in general. We see again that Hamlet is so deeply disturbed and depressed that he has to work through the notion of suicide. The beauty of the poetry and the universality of the topic (Hamlet has been called our ambassador to death) tends, I think, to magnify the meaning of the passage beyond what is called for from the thematic perspective; it shows Hamlet depressed and working out what to do about it, with some deep meditation about our universal confrontation with death thrown in for good measure.

He then encounters Ophelia, and we must prepare ourselves for the shattering pathos. First, Ophelia tries to give back Hamlet’s love letters to her, which he claims are nothing (“I never gave you aught.”) Here, he’s again echoing Nietzsche: Those words in his letters are barely even shadows of the real thing, love. He suddenly shifts to a different direction, comparing and contrasting honesty and beauty. Both words have multiple meanings and shadings, and Shakespeare makes maximal use of all. Hamlet recognizes that a woman’s beauty has more power to corrupt (both parties) than honesty has to make beauty entirely wholesome. Appearances versus what's “real.” (This image will come up again shortly.) The last words of this paragraph are, “I did love you once.” (emphasis added)

How hard-hitting these five words are! And, if we feel a punch in the gut hearing them, imagine what poor Ophelia must be experiencing. This appears to be Hamlet at his harshest, but if we read carefully and in context, we see that he has a compassionate purpose. The statement is honest, but it’s made to set up its contradiction, “I loved you not.”

This is the exception in Hamlet’s honesty referred to above. It is logically impossible for both statements to be true, so which is it? We can see that Hamlet loves (present tense) Ophelia, paradoxically not because of the first statement, but instead because of the second (“I loved you not”) and what comes immediately after. “Get thee to a nunnery.” (I’ve not read any notice of it elsewhere, but I find it interesting that up to that line, Hamlet uses the more formal “you” to address Ophelia, to which propriety demands she replies similarly. He switches suddenly now to the intimate form, “thee.” I have no doubt that this switch is intentional and meaningful.) He argues that men are shit and she’ll only be dragged down by them if she marries, so the only safe place for her to be is a nunnery. Hamlet is normally understood in this scene as being cruel, even viscous toward Ophelia. That’s wrong. This is the moment where Shakespeare invented what is now a dramatic trope: The one hurting the other in order to save her. He is sincerely and compassionately pushing her toward safety. Grotesque as it appears on the surface, it’s really an act of generosity and love.

Hamlet has fired himself up with this, and continues with a little-noticed but important recalling of the basic theme: He remarks on the falsity of women in general (he returns to using the plural “you” throughout the passage): “I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another…it hath made me mad.” He is talking about the avid practice in the Elizabethan age of women of a certain class applying lots of makeup to their face -- they literally put on a false mask. (Shakespeare notes this, always with derision, in several other places throughout the canon. John Donne, a near contemporary, wrote an entire essay on it. It was a point of discussion at the moment, apparently.) It’s another metaphorical statement of the theme. It’s also an opportunity, with “it hath made me mad” for Hamlet to show us how upsetting to him is the idea of false masks in general.

I skipped over another bit in the scene relevant to this discussion. Immediately after the first of his two cries “get thee to a nunnery,” Hamlet, to illustrate the inherent “calumny” of man, admits that even he, though basically honest, has done such things that are so awful that it would have been better for him never to have been born. Now, consider this for a minute: Hamlet does not think himself morally worse than most people; rather the reverse. Yet still, he detects enough dishonesty - falsity - within himself that he doesn’t deserve to live. Such a statement can only come from the mouth of a person thoroughly disgusted with the highly imperfect human condition, and throws light once again on the cause and depth of his depression.

In the next scene, we find Hamlet instructing the players on acting. I return again to the fantastic irony of Hamlet -- unable to act -- instructing the actors. When Shakespeare wanted to say something in the loudest, clearest way, he did so through irony. (To cite a delicious case, how about putting into the scheming, false as can be Polonius’s mouth, “to thine own self be true, and it must follow…thou canst not then be false to any man.”) When you examine the full speech to the players (which I won’t here) with the theme of falsity fixed in your mind, you’ll hear this come through his instructions. He is saying to them, “act in a real way, nothing exaggerated, no affectations; let the words convey the meaning as you deliver them as naturally as possible.” This again is Hamlet’s creed: Be real and natural, and all will be well (or rather, all has a chance of being well).

Then Horatio walks in, and Hamlet says, “Horatio, thou art e’en as just a man / As e’er my conversation coped withal.” The greatest epitaph Shakespeare could confer was to call someone a man, as Antony says of Brutus when he finds him dead, and as Hamlet himself characterizes his own father. (Contrast with Alfidius calling Coriolanus “boy” at the end of that play. Horatio is Hamlet’s epitome of a man because he is

…one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing;

A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards

Hast ta’en with equal thanks: and blest are those

Whose blood and judgement are so well commingled

That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger

To sound what stop she please. Give me that man

That is not passion’s slave, and I will wear him

In my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart,

As I do thee.

I quote this passage at length because it provides important support for my thesis and because it’s been sadly neglected and passed over. Horatio, personality-wise, is a cipher, a zero. What would you say about him other than that he’s loyal and friendly -- and honest -- to Hamlet. Yet, this cipher is the one person in the play whom Hamlet extols. Hamlet is plainly envious of Horatio’s ability to suffer with equanimity what we all suffer. That’s what he’s saying here. He is expressing his ideal of a person, the fruit of which is freedom. Someone who cannot be played by fortune like a pipe (a metaphor re-used later with R&G). Hamlet wants freedom, and can’t get it because he can’t tolerate the corruption and falsity all around him as Horatio appears able to do. The corruption fetters him, but he allows it to because of his own unrealistic standards. This brief passage seems incidental and transitory in the text, but one must always beware of such seeming things in Shakespeare; like the garden scene in Richard II, to cite just one example, such scenes often tell the whole story.

Next comes the Mousetrap, about which I’ll say little because it serves mainly to advance the plot rather than the theme I’ve been discussing. (Also, Goddard has a superb account of every moment of this scene.) After the king has run off, Hamlet meets up with R&G, jibing at them for trying to play him like a pipe (see above) which enrages him. On his way to his mother’s bedroom, he passes by the king praying, and we hear Hamlet struggling with himself on carrying out the ghost’s mission. Importantly, Hamlet does some serious rationalization to avoid executing the mission. He’s already being false to himself. Hamlet is turning. Now he’s off to see his mother.

Very soon after entering his mother’s bedchamber, Hamlet says to her, “You go not till I set you up a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you.” Hamlet understands that his mother has been deceiving herself. (Is this perception heightened by his own self-deception in the previous scene?) Whether she had conscious knowledge that Claudius murdered her husband, or even whether she and Claudius had been adulterous for some time before, that’s all detail. Such obsessions are like the foodie who wants to know from what field every herb came instead of the most important prep and cooking techniques that bring the dish to fruition. This implicit statement of Hamlet’s extraordinary perceptive power is very meaningful in underscoring such sensitivity and intelligence in his character. Even more importantly, the mirror device brings us back to the main theme: Hamlet and Shakespeare both understand that the masks we wear are not only outward-facing, but also inward-facing, often with the most disastrous consequences. He will not tolerate such self-deception by his mother. She is being willfully blind at best, and he’s determined to turn the lights on (did the king’s call for lights as he ran out of the play contain more meaning than appeared on the surface?).

Note that Hamlet is so aggressive in this -- a good director must make the actor so -- that his mother actually fears he might kill her. This leads to the slaying of Polonius, hidden behind the arras. Very quickly, Hamlet divulges what’s so upsetting to him about his mother’s behavior: Her marriage to his uncle. Recall that the revenge motive is unnecessary to the character study. In this short speech, the key words are “hypocrite” and “false,” our theme coming to the surface; Hamlet’s obsession is now trained on his mother. He goes on to contrast his “mildew’d” uncle with his “wholesome” father and to explain to her that she has disabled her own judgement with her self-deception. His rage grows until the ghost reappears, the latter’s main purpose being to get Hamlet to reason with his mother calmly and compassionately, which he proceeds to do. The ghost breaks Hamlet’s fever of rage. Her son exhorts her to confess and repent, to “throw away the worser part of [your heart], / And live the purer with the other half.” He instructs her not to go to the king’s bed, to instead “assume a virtue, if you have it not.” Now, that last bit deserved a little remark -- Hamlet is telling his mother that in this case, it’s better to be false -- his most abhorred quality -- rather than continue in her wifely duties. “Take it till you make it.” Hamlet is turning a little more away from himself, from his ideal. Shakespeare clearly recognized this incongruity and the difficulty auditors and readers might have with the seeming contradiction, so he slyly puts in Hamlet’s mouth the justification that the means, if good, justify the ends. I quote these under-examined lines:

That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat,

Of habits devil, 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.

(Several times in the canon, Shakespeare rails against “custom.” No greater iconoclast ever walked the earth.) I identify this moment as Hamlet’s true turning point (we can quibble on whether it was his rationalization in the previous scene), the start of his descent into the nihilism of the last two acts. He has thrown out his precious ideal -- at least right now he’s willing for his mother to cast it aside -- to gain the outcome he desires. Isn’t that just the sort of falsity he can’t tolerate? The rest of the play is, thematically, denouement. For Hamlet, the game is out. We’ll not see his like again.

Hamlet’s appearances in the fourth act, apart from his soliloquy in scene iv, consist in sarcastic and playful taunting of R&G and of the king, whom he knows is sending him to be executed in England. In that soliloquy (“How all occasions do inform against me”), Hamlet spurs himself to action with various rationalizations and perversions of logic. (I'll write about this great scene elsewhere.) Recall that he has already given up his idealism moving away from it fast, apparently unaware of the fact, remarkable for the most perceptive character in literature; perhaps, though, that’s wrong, and he does know, but no longer cares. That interpretation would add weight to his tragedy.

The rest of Act IV consists mainly in plot development, particularly the king’s plot with Laertes and the pathos of Ophelia’s drowning. We next encounter Hamlet in the first scene of Act V: The graveyard scene. Recall the parade of characters being false to Hamlet in Acts II and III? We are again viewing the parade, but here with an inversion: Aside from Horatio, who is a special device to bring us into the play, and who as mentioned, has essentially no personality, the first gravedigger is the only character who lives up to Hamlet’s ideal of honesty, even if his literalness makes him a bit tiresome to Hamlet (and comic to us). It’s precisely like Shakespeare to give the highest virtue to the lowest-ranking character in the play. Hamlet is clearly delighted by him, though he doesn’t seem quite sure why. The gravedigger is Shakespeare’s way of showing us what it would take for Hamlet to be in this world, and as the remainder of his initially conceived Hamlet as a dullard.

Following Ophelia’s funeral cortege and Hamlet’s tussle with Laertes, we find Hamlet in the castle telling Horatio his sea-story. We hear a different Hamlet now: More sure of himself and without anxiety, he is entirely uncompassionate and unremorseful about sending R&G to their deaths (“they are not near my conscience”), once again leaning on rationalization to justify his actions. The Hamlet of the first three acts is the patron saint of neurotics; a dose of nihilism will clear that up nicely.

Then Osric appears to inform him about the king’s challenge with Laertes. The scene with Osric is as comic as the gravedigger scene, and is beautifully twinned with it. Osric is a reminder, in caricature, of the false person. Everything about him is false, which Hamlet mocks brutally; even Horatio joins in a little -- the high point of his personality. So in close juxtaposition, we have the purity of the gravedigger’s simple honesty contrasted with the ostentatious falsity of Osric. Such combination of dramatic art with poetic truth is something only Shakespeare does consistently.

There was a time when I thought that the weighty bit after Osric leaves -- “we defy augury; there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now,...The readiness is all. Let be” was the core of the play and of Hamlet the character. He had embraced the equanimity he so admires in Horatio. I now think that’s dead wrong, that while beautiful poetry, these lines simply show us the nihilistic Hamlet, resigned to whatever will happen. The lines are necessary, but not central, because Hamlet was already lost before he left his mother’s bedroom. For the groundlings, the climax is the two minutes when everyone is killed during the duel with Laertes. But for we who read for the poetry, it’s all been over for some time, and we weep that this universal titan of intelligence and sensitivity will have to suffer such an disastrous and inevitable end. One way we know this is Hamlet’s “apology” to Laertes before they duel. Hamlet is as false to Laertes as anyone in the play in explaining that it was only “mad” Hamlet who insulted him outside Ophelia’s grave. Hamlet has gone to the dark side of his formerly idealistic world. The rest is silence.

I’ll conclude with a few additional thoughts, though it’s clear to me that Hamlet provides for endless meditation, and thus continues to open up like a magnolia flower, revealing ever greater beauty. As I hope to have made clear, Hamlet’s chief tragic character flaw is his intolerance of people who deviate from his impossible ideal of honesty. I’ve also explained that his extraordinary intelligence, sensitivity, and creativity -- qualities that attract us to him perhaps as no other literary character -- are essential for the study of such a character caught in a world he can’t tolerate. Put all this together, and we must ask: What character in the play can possibly understand Hamlet, even remotely? Who can identify with him? Certainly not Horatio, who is simply there to serve as our eyes and ears. Not the gravedigger, who, though honest, can’t approach Hamlet’s central qualities (thus protecting him, the gravedigger, from a similar tragic fate). Perhaps Yorick, who carried young Hamlet on his back so many times, though of course, he’s now only represented by a skull.

From this, I can only conclude that Hamlet is the loneliest character ever created. The greatest pain is not to be understood. If there ever were a cause for depression, wouldn’t this be it? Who can Hamlet get close to? With whom can he even approximate the Vulcan mind meld? His separation from everyone else is extreme, to be sure, but don’t artists create extremities to dramatize and show us universal truths more clearly? The plain fact is that we are all separate from one another. None of us can do the Vulcan mind meld (which I regard as a very great literary invention). We all go through life suffering this basic condition of isolation and alienation. We all face the exact same terror of death, yet we cannot share it and comfort one another as we would wish to do. This is why Hamlet is the most universal of all characters. None of us is as intelligent or as sensitive or as creative as him, but we all live with his condition. We all live in a world where corruption and beauty exist side by side, and we do the best we can to balance them out to hang on for another day. Hamlet is the emblem of that struggle, which he tragically lost.

Finally, I’ll come back to Goddard’s emphasis on Hamlet’s betrayal of his true nature, which he shares with Romeo, Hal, Brutus, and others from different plays. I said earlier that Goddard doesn’t go far enough, by which I meant that he didn’t discuss my main point here: That Hamlet is alienated from the world by his disgust with people’s falsity. Here, I wish to bring together Goddard’s main theme with my own.

Goddard himself discusses the age-old wisdom that some of what we hate in others may reside in ourselves and that the resulting inner conflict drives our behavior accordingly (part of which may be a self-loathing depression). In Hamet’s case, each of his encounters I described above from the middle of the play, where his interlocutors are being false in some way, are devices Shakespeare uses as mirrors (a prominent metaphor in the play) for the prince to see his own falsity in. In Goddard’s view, Hamlet is struggling to fix onto his true nature, which is clearly not a revenge-murderer’s. The first part of accomplishing this, though, must be for him to understand what his true nature is. Remember “Who’s there?”; this is a play about Hamlet’s identity. Hamlet hates what he sees in these mirrors, accounting for his anger and outrage, partly because he genuinely hates falsity, but also because he knows sub-consciously that he is not the superman of probity he’d like to think he is. For most of the play, he’s locked in this struggle, which neatly accounts for his delay. The delay is just an effect of the greater issue (which Goddard beautifully illuminates): Hamlet loses the struggle to discover who he really is, with the tragic consequences that follow. In his own words, he has “shot [his] arrow o’er the house / And hurt [himself].”