Chapter 1Coming to Grief in HamletTrust and Testimony in Elsinore

“Why Seems It So Particular to Thee?”

Claudius's opening speech in act 1, scene 2, is that of a consummate politician, schooled in the art of obfuscation. The public announcement of his marriage to Gertrude so closely following the death of her former husband is tucked behind five qualifying dependent clauses:

Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother's death

The memory be green, and that it us befitted

To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom

To be contracted in one brow of woe,

Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature

That we with wisest sorrow think on him

Together with remembrance of ourselves.

(1.2.1–7)⁹

This acknowledged awareness of what would most fit with King Hamlet's death—that is, the brilliant flash of a nation “contracted” in woe, in which the expression of grief on faces (tensed and diminished in sorrow) is underscored by the idea of a socially unifying social compact—joins all faces together in the same expression of sorrow (“one brow”). But the passage turns on “yet” and “with wisest sorrow.” The communal woe is put aside for “remembrance of ourselves.” The sovereign “ourselves” obscures whether the reflexive plural pronoun refers to the whole nation; to himself and Gertrude; or, as we will later better understand, to himself. The logic of the counterpointed “yet” (still, nevertheless) strongly implies that “ourselves” refers to Claudius. The issue is whether the first-person plural is a cover for the first-person singular. A pseudo-logical “therefore” (1.2.8) creates the impression that his marriage to Gertrude is reasonable, thus following a natural logic. The counterintuitive balanced scale of “delight and dole” (1.2.13) that he purports to be weighing hints that his act is merely judicious; it hides the oxymoronic awkwardness and the offense to decorum and proper order in “mirth in funeral” and “dirge in marriage” (1.2.12). Finally, in this skillful opening flourish, Claudius assures the assembled court that they are complicit in these aberrations of ceremony. Therefore, it is not in fact inappropriate to talk of “ourselves.”

We can already see that Claudius's remarks reveal a most difficult relationship between a “we” and an “I.” In this court Hamlet stands alone, ostentatiously so, among all those who “have freely gone / With this affair along” (1.2.15–16), in garb and demeanor, showing his fidelity to the paternal past. The famous debate with his mother develops the fractures between what is held in common and what is particular, soldered together so calculatedly by Claudius.

In mourning, a particular death is lamented in common. “The end of funeral duties,” says Richard Hooker, “is first to show that love towards the partie deceased which nature requireth; then to doe him that honour which it fit both generallie for man and particularlie for the qualite of his person.”¹⁰ Within the ceremonies, we have ample room to find that the one we lost is irreplaceable in his or her singularity, but we shed tears and wonder at such singleness together. In a funeral, an individual person is mourned. This mourning is a recognition of that unique person and a recognition of who we take ourselves to be in the singularity of death as a common fate. We experience not distaste or disagreement but rather horror, a sense that we and the dead have been violated when we see deaths not honored or recognized. Thus, a mourning rite acknowledges the dead and the grief of the chief mourners, and it also reveals a community bound by its common love. The relationship to the lost one, however, is lived out in singularity. The fact that death is an inevitable fate held in common is nothing but a commonplace if the particularity of the life lost is not particularly mourned. It is precisely this common-ness and the particularity that have become unmoored in act 1, scene 2, of Hamlet.¹¹

Gertrude asks why Hamlet seeks his noble father in the dust and with an obtusely bland reassurance chides: “Thou know’st’ tis common all that lives must die, / Passing through nature to eternity” (1.2.72–3). Hamlet's response is sardonic: “Ay, madam, it is common” (1.2.74). The common as what we share—because she appears not to share his grief—is no more than a commonplace to her. “Ay, madam, it is common” can mean then, yes, it is common to die, so much is obvious, perhaps also it is common to say so; also, ay, madam it is a commonplace (implied, so what do you mean in pointing it out?). Gertrude, however, misunderstands his response as ratification: “If it be, / Why seems it so particular with thee?” (1.2.74–75). This prompts Hamlet's hyperbolical retreat to what he has within “which passes show” (1.2.85), a plausible retreat given that when Gertrude rejects the expressive forms of grief, “all forms, moods, shows of grief” (1.2.82), she rejects his sorrow, and she rejects him.¹² Gertrude understands Hamlet as singling himself out (making an exception of himself, also showing up the court) rather than experiencing a common fate with the particularity of his memory and his relationship with his father. In that commonplace, she is evading her position, her responses and responsibilities in grief, submerging her “I” in a generalized “We.”

Claudius, too, uses the language of the common in bland and superficial ways. Because “your father lost a father, / That father lost, lost his” (1.2.89–90), he says with a chiastic flourish, so all are bound in filial obligation “to do obsequious sorrow” (1.2.92). He suggests that Hamlet is persisting in “obstinate condolement” (1.2.93), which he then goes on to describe as unmanly, impious, and most incorrect to heaven. Harping on the common again, he says, “What we know must be, and is as common / As any the most vulgar thing to sense” (1.2.98–99). The fact that something commonly happens, obviously happens, and happens to everyone does not undermine the need to feel or respond to it; for Claudius, however, what is common is not what is shared but rather is “the most vulgar thing to sense,” ascribing a vulgarity to Hamlet that is all his own. He is counseling denial disguised as pious acceptance, which is an insidious moralization. Once again, he invokes the death of fathers as “a common theme” (1.2.103–4) that has been happening since the beginning of time, although it is not tactful in this case to invoke the death of the first corpse—that of Abel by Cain.

Hamlet makes visible what Claudius wants to consign to oblivion and makes apparent that Claudius thinks on the dead king “together with remembrance of ourselves” (1.2.7). For it is this remembrance of himself that has led to the murder of King Hamlet in the first place—or so we will learn later: All we know in this scene is that the ghost of King Hamlet is restlessly and nightly stalking the battlements. It is the commitment to the remembrance of himself that will lead him to suspect Hamlet, to spy on him, and later, to dispatch him to England with a death warrant on his head. What is buried with old Hamlet is an entire past, but that past is not as finished as Claudius would like it to be. In so misusing the idea of what is “common,” all the particularities of Hamlet's grief are obscured. This grief is alone faithful not simply to his father but also to a better, if idealized, past. If Hamlet will accept a role as son to the new king, the court can perfectly mirror the regime's forgetfulness. He will no longer be an awkward mnemonic of his father. Hamlet senses a violation before he knows quite the extent of it and before he so much as sees his father's ghost and listens to his grievous tale.

Gertrude's moral idiocy turns out to be central: “Why seems it so particular with thee?” (1.2.75). No mourning can take place without its particularity to you or me being felt.

The relationship between the living and the dead, it is now clear, is fundamentally transformed as a result of the reformations. The living can no longer intercede for the dead in intercessory prayers for the souls in purgatory, now a “fond thing, vainly invented.”¹³ In the second Book of Common Prayer, the dead person is no longer addressed in the second person but rather is addressed in the third person, the object of the priest's words to the people, not the subject of them. “I commende thy soule to God the father almighty, and thy body to the ground” says the priest in the first prayerbook of Edward VI: The corpse is a second person, who can be addressed.¹⁴ “Forasmuche as it hathe pleased almightie God of his great mercy to take him unto himselfe the soule of our dere brother here departed: we therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” so says the priest to the assembled congregation about the dear departed in the second prayerbook.¹⁵ Michael Neill, Stephen Greenblatt, Eamon Duffy, and others have helped us gain a vital sense of such radical departures in received customs, in patterns of inheritance.¹⁶ My point builds on their careful investigations of the transformations in mourning with this important emphasis: Burial rites are, as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said, acts of recognition.¹⁷ Dead human bodies in mourning rites are objects of care, singled out for sorrow, the sponsors of grief, not disgust. They are, as Jay Bernstein has reiterated, “exemplary forms of social action” in that in them we are understood to be bound together and recognized as of the tribe of human.¹⁸ As acts of recognition, mourning ceremonies are rites, rather than rights, working through our “thick” ways of acting and living together.¹⁹ They are revocable. Cora Diamond tells the story of a group of Lebanese women beckoned over to bury their dead by the enemies who killed their husbands, only to be shot down in turn.²⁰ To lose a sense of violation in such instances is to lose a sense of humanity. For whom do we grieve? For whom can we care? What happens when mourning rites are theatricalized, when the shapes of true grief can no longer be recognized? What happens when they cannot seem particular to us, to you and to me? To lose these forms for the expression of loss is to lose a basic grammar of recognition. Unable to voice grief and to have it recognized as grief (rather than obstinance, eccentricity, morbidity), Hamlet has his most basic expressive resources denied. He cannot be known in forms and shapes of grief, and the court too is misrecognizing itself—its past and present circumstances—in its theatricalized ceremonies.

What, then, are the resources of Hamlet's culture for the expression of grief that, as I have argued, are inextricably bound up with questions of recognition?

Body Without Name: Some Classical Precedents for the Forms and Shapes of Grief and Anger

“Grief suggests grievance,” says Stanley Cavell in his essay “Texts of Recovery (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Heidegger . . .).”²¹ I have already referred to the depths of the etymological connections of grief and grievance in the history of the language. Cavell's point is that grievance fails to bring relief: “It ties us to pastness because it is a modification of vengefulness.”²² Roberto Calasso has cited Robert Frost's introduction to Edwin Arlington Robinson's 1935 collection, King Jaspar, in which he too parses out the connection and difference in these cognates, these homonymic words. Grief is a patient pain (this is why the pauses in revenge tragedy assume such significance); grievance can articulate pain only through vengeance.²³

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle had distinguished the irascible, choleric man from the man whose bitterness constrains his spirit to nurture his wounds, finding that revenge alone will bring him pleasure and relief.²⁴ Commenting on the Ethics, Thomas Aquinas had tersely and economically stated that “anger is caused by sadness” thus articulating the relationship of anger and grief.²⁵ For Thomas, anger is connected to reason, nature, and justice: Anger is a rational response to injury and thus a natural good. Thomas distinguishes anger from hatred, which does not wish the good, and links it to grief. Grief and anger alike focus on “a feeling of injury.”²⁶ What links grief and anger then is a sense of injury. What distinguishes them is the object of attention. Anger's target is an act or person, the perpetrator of harm, whereas grief attends to the loss consequent on the harm. “The loss, not the perpetrator remains its focus,” says Martha Nussbaum.²⁷

Nussbaum usefully distinguishes anger from other reactive attitudes, such as disgust, contempt, gratitude, hatred, and envy, but it is the kinship of grief and anger that are her chief focus. It is precisely this kinship that makes anger a tempting corruption of grief, a denial of helplessness in the face of loss. Grief can be impure in other ways that obscure the painful recognition of loss and cover the conceptual link between anger and helplessness—resentment, or fear, for example. In the genre of revenge tragedy, however, the closeness of anger and grief is characteristically at issue. That genre indulges and explores a standing temptation, the masking of grief in grievance so obscuring the conceptual link between anger and helplessness.²⁸ This is why the question of recognition of loss is so important and wide ranging in Elsinore. To perceive this relation is one of the great achievements of Hamlet.

Hamlet is not so much angry as rather histrionically working himself up to it. I am not suggesting that Hamlet disguises grief in anger, but that his own loss cannot be recognized in the world of the play and that the play systematically pushes us to see the recognitive dimensions of grief. His relation to the role of revenger who characteristically disguises grief in anger is thus extremely vexed. He tries it on for size without ever fully embracing it. This is why the play takes a path through the classical precedents of Aeneas's speech to Dido, and it is also why it detours through the graveyard in understanding the specificities of loss, the forms and shapes of grief. But first the players.

Surrounded by Claudius's spies, rejected by Ophelia, haunted by his father's indeterminate spirit, hunted by necessary, contradictory, and thus impossible tasks, Hamlet greets the players with delight and relief. They offer, embody even, a different occasion for the work of memory in the studied amnesia of Claudius's court. Hamlet relies on the excellent memory of the player to remember word-perfectly the speech he can remember only in snippets, and in so doing, the player brings to life legendary stories of revenge and grief, sacrilege and lament, rooted in Homeric epic and Attic tragedy. At the end of the scene, he will suggest that the good word of players is better than a bad epitaph; they are “the abstract and brief chroniclers of the time,” as he will later put it (2.2.461–62). Hamlet's incomplete memory of an affecting speech is held and preserved in the player's capacious reimagining—no wonder his excitement at the player's arrival is so pronounced.

This famous set speech places a picture of a sacrilegious murder at the dead center of a most complex classical set of precedents and at the heart of the terrible destruction of a great civilization. It is as if Hamlet wishes to test the ghost's purgatorial, yet heroic, lineage against another story “whose common theme / Is death of fathers” (1.2.103–4). Priam's death is, as Reuben Brower puts it, “a drama of fathers and sons.”²⁹ The speech, which the player has recited once to Hamlet before, was from “Aeneas's talk to Dido, and thereabout of it especially when he speaks of Priam's slaughter” (2.2.384–85). The speech begins, twice in Hamlet's false starts, with Pyrrhus, embedded within Aeneas's tale to Dido from book 2 of Vergil's Aeneid: Hamlet moves from speaker to spectator as the player takes his cue and proceeds. How does the death of fathers figure in this set piece? How is this a drama of fathers and sons? How, in sounding its epic tradition and the metamorphoses of that tradition, is it also a story once again about the relation of grief and grievance?

In selecting this complex example, Hamlet is half-remembering an astonishing nexus of ideas about precisely that relation. In book 2 of Vergil's Aeneid, Aeneas tells the story of the fall of Troy after he sees that epochal story depicted on the walls of the temple that Dido is building for Juno in Carthage. That frieze brings him to tears, for he sees there all the battles of Ilium, and Achilles fierce in his wrath against both the sons of Atreus (Agamemnon and Menelaus) and against Priam, King of Troy. He understands that no place on earth is not full of their sorrows (“non plena laboris”): He exclaims, “sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.”³⁰ Fagles translates these famous lines: “Even here is a world of tears / and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.”³¹ I hear a Vergilian echo in the lines “unless things mortal move them not at all” (2.2.454). In these ekphrastic passages in the Aeneid, too, Aeneas sees Hector's body being dragged round Troy's walls by Achilles in unappeasable revenge for the death of Patroclus.³²

In Vergil's poem, we find an astonishing reprise of Homer's Iliad, for the ransom of Hector's body, the scene of the great short-lived but world-shattering reconciliation of Priam and Achilles in book 24 of the Iliad, is referred to here as merely a sale of Hector's body (“auro corpus vendebat Achilles”).³³ We are shown the spoils and the corpse of his friend, Hector, meeting his gaze and also the outstretched, supplicating, and weaponless hands of Priam (“tendentemque manus Priamum conspexit inermis”).³⁴ It is as if the great Homeric ending of the Iliad had not taken place at all. Priam's hands are still outstretched, still in suspended supplication on the walls of Juno's temple. Hector's gaze holds Aeneas's gaze as if he was never laid to rest. Because it is Aeneas's tale to Dido that Hamlet remembers, it is Aeneas's tears, the “lacrimae rerum,” that are also reprised, along with the unappeasable wrath of Achilles and, in this way, the player's speech half-remembers the relations of wrath and grief that are a main subject of Homer and Vergil's epics. For it is wrath that begins both poems, the mênis (wrath) of Achilles in the Iliad, the wrath of Juno in the Aeneid (“tantane animis caelestibus irae?”).³⁵ Vergil wishes us to hear the echo of Homer in his depiction of Priam's death; in Aeneas's long tale of the war told to Dido, he shows that Neoptolemus / Pyrrhus deliberately and transgressively refuses his father's role in responding to Priam's supplication.³⁶ For Vergil, this marks a most conscious rejection of his father, Achilles's precedent: Neoptolemus taunts Priam to report his sad degeneracy in his sacrilegious murder on the altar, rejecting Achilles / Pelides compunction in the return of Hector's body and in the release of Priam back to his people in the brief twelve-day reprieve to war. It is in those days of suspended battle that Priam and the Trojans can mourn Hector.

Vergil is aware that Homer's Iliad begins with Achilles's wrath and with the terrifying image of men becoming carrion, food for birds and dogs, as if that anger and that violation of mourning are from the beginning bound up. In this poem of force, as Simone Weil has called it, men can become things, and the best instance of this loss of humanity is the refusal of mourning rites.³⁷ The ransom of the body of Hector is the precondition of the triple threnody of lament that ends the Iliad. His body retrieved at such risk by Priam can be lamented by the three women: Hecuba, herself about to be enslaved at Troy's fall; Andromache, Hector's wife; and, in Homeric generosity, Helen herself, the great “cause” of the war.

This ransom is above all where wrath is suspended for a grief that is shared. In book 24 of the Iliad, after Priam has taken the great risk of entering unarmed the enemy camp of the Greek army, he reminds Achilles of his father awaiting his return, anxious and expectant. “Remember your own father, great godlike Achilles,” says Priam, “as old as I am, past the threshold of deadly old age!” Priam kisses the terrible son-killing hands of Achilles: “I put to my lips the hands of the man who killed my son.” It is these very words that stir in Achilles the desire to grieve for his father: “Overpowered by memory, / both men gave way to grief.”³⁸ In her essay on the Iliad, written at roughly the same time as Weil's equably remarkable essay, during the dark and difficult winter of 1940, Rachel Bespaloff writes of Priam's speech: “This speech is quite without vehemence; self-respect gives the words the exact weight of truth.” She adds, too, that “this is the only case in the Iliad where supplication sobers the man to whom it is addressed rather than exasperating him.”³⁹ The two men weep together for the common grief of their loved ones, Patroclus and Hector, and for each other as men of sorrow. Achilles sees his father in Priam and sees that Priam is a father. He sees, too, that he, Achilles, is a son, and not alone a killer of sons, that Priam has a son. Before they had been only enemies, wanting only to return death for death. Now shockingly, and with full awareness of the risk he is taking, as Priam kisses Achilles's man-slaying hands, both men get the measure of filial and paternal love. The long war is halted only for a short time but the return of his son's body for mourning shows that the endless revengeful killing is held in abeyance by an extraordinary shared grief.

Vergil gives us a chilling image of Priam after his murder. He is left as a huge trunk, a headless body, a corpse without a name (“sine corpus nomine”).⁴⁰ This headless, nameless corpse is a fearful rejection of the great Homeric impulse to bring back Hector's body into a space for human grief. Priam's body is left for the dogs and the birds.

In the player's speech, Pyrrhus does not taunt Priam and does not remind him to tell his father, Achilles, that he will not follow his example in responding to Priam's supplication as he does in book 2 of the Aeneid. ⁴¹ It is a shard of memory, a fragment from the collapse of civilization, punctuated in the pause, absent from Pyrrhus's hectic, relentless trajectory in Vergil, of Pyrrhus's sword sticking in the air over the reverend Priam's head.

It is as if this pause stands for the weight of the great precedent that Vergil elaborates so consciously as Pyrrhus scorns Achilles's example. Another infamous pause appears at the end of the Aeneid. Aeneas's stays his hand on the sword hilt as Turnus supplicates him, just as Priam supplicated both Achilles and Pyrrhus: “If any thought of a parent's grief can touch you, I beg you—you too had such a father in Anchises-pity Daunus's old age, and give me—or, if you prefer, my lifeless body—back to my kin.”⁴² In the Aeneid's ambiguously terrifying ending, Aeneas sinks his blade in fury into Turnus's chest. He has seen the strap worn by young Pallas, a war trophy sported on Turnus's arm. It is that reminder of his loss that turns all into permanent red, that turns from the prospect of loss into the perpetrator of further loss, with no pause, in either case, for mourning. Tony Tanner discusses another such moment in Aeschylus's play The Libation Bearers, the central play of the Oresteia, when Orestes pauses in the murder of his mother, Clytemnestra, and asks Pylades what to do. Tanner describes this as one of the momentous moments in Western drama and describes the Shakespearean continuation of this idiom as one of great pregnancy.⁴³ Hamlet will later be caught in another such moment when he pauses over the praying head of Claudius (3.3.73–74).

Pyrrhus is clearly a model of revenger for Hamlet, but he is also a model of the son who refuses his father's better example of sharing grief. Before Achilles's releases Hector's body to Priam in the famous ransom, he had refused Hector's plea: “Hector, don’t talk to me of pacts. / There are no oaths to be trusted between men and lions.”⁴⁴ Any such pact would have to be between humans, but Achilles takes on the role of both beast and cannibal, and his desecration of Hector's body is, as Redfield notes, a reenaction of his victory over Hector, who is “an eternal object of his malice.”⁴⁵ So too is Achilles's recognition of Priam's claim for the body of his son a reentry into a human world. A corpse is, as Hamlet's gravedigger wittily points out, by no means a person (5.1.127–28) but instead must be granted rites of recognition, marks of honor, and not disgust.

If Claudius has provided a moralizing, inert, and obtuse maxim for Hamlet in the fact that all fathers die, the player's speech sets before Hamlet a complexly embedded example of the recognitive and powerful dimensions of grief. It is grief that is recognized here and here refused. I have shown how a layered topoi of grief and recognition also is found in the pointed Vergilian suppressions of Homeric reconciliation. The player presents a stylized, deliberately archaized and classicizing precedent of an act of outrageous impiety (the murder of Priam), as well as the response of Hecuba, at the same time the player's speech shows up the complexity of the common theme of fathers and sons.⁴⁶ In the player's recitation of the grief of Hecuba and the death of Priam, we are reminded of where the terrible death of Priam ends: a vast trunk, a headless body on a distant shore, a body without a name.

In revenge tragedy, the sharing of grief takes a particularly twisted form. In staging his death-dealing drama at the end of The Spanish Tragedy, for example, Hieronimo wants to force the king into a recognition of his grief; he does this by murdering his son, as his own son has been murdered:

Speak, Portuguese, whose loss resembles mine

If thou canst weep upon thy Balthazar

’Tis like I wailed for my Horatio [my italics].⁴⁷

His grief is then similar to Hieronimo's grief. The distorted hope here is that a similar grief will help him recognize the grief he has inflicted. In Auden's great poem The Shield of Achilles, the poet chillingly imagines a world, a ruined postwar world in which the work of recognizing humanity in each other is at risk, where it will no longer be possible to “weep because another weeps.”⁴⁸ The king in The Spanish Tragedy weeps in the same way as another, Hieronimo, has wept, but not because Hieronimo weeps. Revenge is a perversion of grief because each person can grieve like another but not because or on behalf of that other as in Auden's invocation and in Homer's poem.

Polonius impatiently interrupts the labored archaism of the speech, and we are reminded of the spectators’ responses. Hamlet wants the player to “say on, come to Hecuba” (2.2.239). Hamlet's preoccupation, it quickly becomes clear, is the grief of Hecuba, as much as it is the death of Priam. Tanya Pollard has shown that versions of Hecuba gripped Shakespeare's contemporaries: Hecuba is “the period's most prominent representative of the Greek tragic tradition.”⁴⁹ According to Judith Mossman, Euripides’ Hecuba, was indeed one of the most translated and imitated Greek plays of the sixteenth century. Erasmus translated it into verse (1504); Melanchthon lectured on Hecuba in Wittenberg (1525–1526), Hamlet's home university; and Melanchthon's prose translation was published in 1540.⁵⁰ Seven annotated editions were published before 1600. Indeed, Sidney in his Apologie for Poetry, gave Hecuba as his example of a well-constructed tragedy.⁵¹ This was the first play to be read by students in the original form and was also the first play to be widely translated into both Latin and the vernacular, as it was also the first to receive an actual performance.⁵² Hecuba featured in Seneca's Troades, an amalgam of Euripides's plays, The Trojan Women and Hecuba, and in Ovid's Metamorphoses (XIII). Shakespeare also depicted Lucrece, finding the very face of distress in Hecuba's grief in the skillful painting of Priam's Troy: “Staring on Priam's wounds with her old eyes” and shaping “her sorrow to the beldam's woes.”⁵³

Most commentators on Hecuba have thought of Priam and Hecuba as part of an opposition between the execution of revenge (Priam) and the expression of grief at this revenge, with the role of mourning reserved for Hecuba who lost her city, her husband, her great son (Hector), and eventually all of her sons and daughters, including the terrible post-Trojan sacrifice of the son and daughter who feature in Euripides's Hecuba: Polyxena, sacrificed to appease the ghost of Achilles, and Polydorus who was sent to be kept safe, reliant on the xenia of Polymestor. Euripides's Hecuba, reprised in Seneca's amalgam of Euripides's two plays, Trojan Women and Hecuba, is as much about the revenge of Hecuba as about her mourning.

She is associated with grief in Seneca's rendering of the play for Hecuba's early invitation in that play is to the chorus to weep and lament for Hector, for Priam, and for Troy, while also knowing that their fates as fallen warriors will be easier to live out than the life of slaves and concubines—the lot of the Trojan women. “Strike your breasts with your hands, beat out the sounds of sorrow, and perform the funeral rites of Troy,” intones Hecuba, leading the women in mourning for Troy's lost and fallen.⁵⁴ It might thus seem as if the work of revenge is reserved for Pyrrhus, just as the work of mourning and lamentation is reserved for Hecuba, the traditional division of labor in Greek tragedy and ancient culture. This certainly seems to be Hamlet's preoccupation with Hecuba in the soliloquy that follows the departure of the players. How can the player be so affected by Hecuba? What is she to him, or he to her (implying the reciprocity of response, the relation between them) that the recitation should be the cause for tears, indeed, for the perfect coherence of grief and its expression? The tears, the voice, his entire aspect, all conform to “his conceit”—that is, to the picture of woe as if it is all one, composite and integrated. The fit, the congruence of grief, and its expression are what impresses Hamlet. Hamlet can “say nothing” (2.2.504). Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor annotate this line: “Hamlet must mean ‘do nothing,’ since he goes on to chide himself for talking not acting.”⁵⁵ This is to rewrite the words in conformity with some imagined idea of Hamlet's inaction, rather than to see that the soliloquy is preoccupied with the stifled expression of grief. Even Hamlet's preoccupation with what the player would “do” if he had Hamlet's motive and cue for passion is about the expression of grief and a fantasy of the effects of that expression and its truth on an audience. In his unacknowledged competition with Hecuba, he is concerned with how the player might express his passion if the player had Hamlet's rather than Hecuba's cues and prompts. Hamlet, for all his education, has missed what Hecuba is to him.

What has Hamlet forgotten about Hecuba and how consequential is his amnesia? Hamlet's response to the player's’Hecuba is an idea of a perfect congruence between grief and its expression. Given the profound consequences of the suppression and perversion of grief and its recognitions in this play, Hamlet's response to the player is completely understandable. So too is his subsequent investment and faith in the capacity of playing to prompt confession and reveal the truth. There is no simple opposition between “doing” and “saying.” Saying is doing, as Austin taught us. In addition, we have no understanding of any human action absent how we talk about it. Hamlet's inability to express grief in his culture, his attempts to use the fragments and shards of his half-remembered humanist education, and his partially retrieved speeches and stories that are the bequest of Elsinore's heroic culture are a failed attempt to find the necessary congruence between grief and its expression. What Hamlet has forgotten is that Hecuba, like Pyrrhus in the player's speech, also links wrath to grief in the revenge idiom. In Euripides's astonishing version reprised in Ovid's version in the Metamorphoses, Hecuba converts grief to wrath in revenge. In book 13 of the Metamorphoses, her grief, rage, and blinding of Polymestor who has killed her son Polydurus turn her bestial. Hecuba howls, barks and growls when she wants to speak: She becomes a dog.⁵⁶

Nussbaum's analysis of Euripides version of Hecuba is very pertinent to the investigation of wrath and grief in Hamlet. Polymestor traduced the most fundamental rules of hospitality (xenia) in killing Polydorus, Priam's only remaining son, sent to him for safekeeping. For Hecuba it is, in Nussbaum's description, the rending of a world, the “old nomos as a network of ties linking one person with another.”⁵⁷ Polymestor destroys Polydorus and, with him, trust in those basic bonds of community. Hecuba's revenge is both “retributive” and “mimetic.” ⁵⁸ The child-killer must, in turn, witness his own child being killed; he must suffer the same horror he induced. Along with this, according to Nussbaum, is a claim to reveal the world as it really was all along, a world in which persuasion and instrumentality is (and in fact always was) the way of the world. Hecuba, says Nussbaum, “makes the world over in the image of the possibility of non-relation, the possibility knowledge of which destroyed her trust.”⁵⁹ In this way, revenge takes over the world of value, and words become not the bonds of trust but the instruments of ends. Euripides undoes the Aeschylean binding of the polis, showing that the suspension of bonds of trust are a standing possibility. Hecuba's revenge reveals revenge's allure—offering structure and plan without vulnerability.⁶⁰

Hamlet's amnesia about what links Pyrrhus and Hecuba shows him forgetting the relationship of wrath to grief this play so deeply excavates. Hamlet cannot perfectly remember the speech except in bits and pieces. So he cannot also recognize the unbinding consequences of the obscuring of grief, in the very literature that explores so deeply the bonds of the polis, at the center of its epic self-constructions, its translatio imperii.

This soliloquy also provides a notable fantasy about what the effect of his words—if he could express them perfectly—would do: He would drown the stage in tears, cleave the ear with his speech, make the guilty mad and appall the free, amaze and confound all (2.2.495–500). This is all marvelously vague, extravagantly totalizing, and all-encompassing. It produces a lot of passion but lacks point and precision. The next fantasy is that his interpolation in the play will catch the conscience of a king, and perhaps that the guilty thing might confess his sins and proclaim his malefactions.⁶¹ It is a hope placed in theater, a hope that theater can produce the truthful speech of confession. That hope turns out to be utterly misplaced. His play exposes him and not just Claudius. It exposes him to Claudius and shows that his speech acts, just like any other action, cannot be controlled for the precise effect you alone want them to have. That too, as Kyd showed, was a revenger's fantasy. Hamlet has forgotten not only what Hecuba is to him but also what he is to Hecuba—that is, to see himself in relation to her, himself through her eyes. This is the only undeceived way he can understand what Hecuba is to him and thus can excavate the relationship between wrath and grief that her story exemplifies.

Nussbaum's distinctive and compelling insight about Euripides's version of Hecuba helps us see that what is at stake in the revenger's fantasy involves a transformation of a relationship to language. Whatever his acquaintance with Euripides, in ways Nussbaum helps us to see, Shakespeare is a Euripidean in his understanding of grief, wrath, and revenge.

The revenger has the fantasy that his act can be carved out in a world of action in ways he determines and decides; his act can be carved out of its effect on others, save the effects he wills. The revenger's act then denies his implication in the act and denies that any act is woven for its very significance and intelligibility in a world with others. His path is both violent and ignorant.

In the next two sections of this chapter, I show how people characteristically and damagingly talk with each other in Elsinore, and then I examine how the play implicates the revenger's putative act within the speech community as the inescapable horizon of intelligibility. These two sections precede an analysis of the play's scintillating ending.

Take You, As ’Twere, Some Distant Knowledge of Him

In Elsinore, people characteristically learn about each other by spying. Surveillance pervades human relations and structures Elsinorean ways of knowing.⁶² Claudius wishes to remain unknown because he is a killer: The primal act on which his regime is founded is murder, usurpation, and the necessities that arise from the concealment of this basic truth. Hamlet must reveal both the murder and the cover-up so the great battle is from the start about truthful speech and its very possibility in Denmark. If Claudius must remain unknown, he nevertheless wants to know what others are thinking and doing. He can learn about Hamlet only, so he thinks, by spying on him. To this end, Hamlet's friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and his erstwhile love, Ophelia, are suborned as well as his chief counselor and queen.

Polonius reveals what words and expressions come to in this scheme of things. In act 1, scene 3, he tells Ophelia that she is not to believe Hamlet's words: His vows are merely the “implorators of unholy suits” (1.3.128) under the guise of “pious bonds” (1.3.129), spoken only with the intention to beguile and deceive. With utmost scorn and a conviction hard to gainsay if you are his (fragile) daughter, Polonius tells her that Hamlet's words to her, his “tenders” (1.3.98) are “Springes to catch woodcocks” (1.3.114).⁶³ Polonius converts the tenderness (tentativeness, hope, unguarded openness) to a commercial or legal offer. In his untender words, Hamlet's expressions can only cover over an unworthy intent (Polonius thinks it is lust). Hamlet has indeed tendered his love to Ophelia: In his poor sonnets, he writes: “Doubt truth to be a liar / But never doubt I love” (2.2.116–17). The very awkwardness and amateur craftsmanship of the sonnets indicate their authenticity. When he rejects Ophelia, he also destroys her trust in his former words, and in the words of any man: “You should not have believed me” (3.1.116) makes her the gull that Polonius merely thinks she is. We are left with “believe none of us” (3.1.129), which is not livable.⁶⁴ This sentiment echoes what her brother and her father have already told her. There are now no masculine exceptions to the regime of suspicion as far as Ophelia is concerned. (Does this knowledge kill her?) Polonius's general idea, call it the paranoid style in Elsinore, is that “best safety lies in fear” as Laertes says to Ophelia. (1.3.42).

Polonius has specifically undermined Ophelia's natural credence in the words of her lover. Indeed, on the only occasion in which she answers her father back, she does so twice to insist that Hamlet has shown his love “in honourable fashion” (1.3.110) and “hath given countenance to his speech, my lord / With almost all the holy vows of heaven” (1.3.112–13). One can hear in that “almost” how subtly and pervasively Polonius has already infected her. Ophelia has believed not only his vows but also his words. In trustful conversation one does not need royal words to commitment, such as vows and promises, to be believed.

It is fully natural to Polonius, merely the height of good strategy, tofind out about people by spying: He prefers to know about his son through means the scene with Reynaldo makes clear: “Take you, as ’twere, some distant knowledge of him” (2.1.13), says Polonius. That distance is central: Polonius can learn about Laertes without being known to him, and without being in communication with him at all. For Polonius this is a surer way to know: Such “evidence” is more reliable and certain than the trustful ways in which we might more naturally take someone at their word. Indeed, Reynaldo is to give his own thoughts no tongue (a common piece of advice from Polonius); his words are “baits” to trap the “carp of truth” (2.1.60), that is, by indirections finding out directions.

In taking this tack, which is also paradigmatic of Claudius's diseased state, Polonius shows up a central philosophical picture of human relations in which we opt for a more certain knowledge than we think we can derive from accepting each other's “mere” words. The knowledge gained by taking someone's say out of the picture is judged to be more secure than if we were to trust to or rely on their imperfect testimony. What I require is information about you, and it is more secure and more reliable that anything you might have to say if it cannot be independently verified.⁶⁵ This model is a picture of skepticism as knowing others in ways that bypass their specific relation to us. Claudius describes how he and Polonius will spy on Hamlet as he talks with Ophelia as “seeing unseen” (3.1.32). Thus, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spy on Hamlet; Polonius spies on Laertes, Hamlet, and Ophelia. Human expressions have been treated as evidence, and the spy has avoided the risk of exposure.

It is easy to forget this is an odd, and sometimes perverse, way of thinking about exchange with others. Its naturalness in Elsinore is an indication that human communication as such has been distorted, and profoundly so. Everyone in this play learns about each other more or less obliquely. This is a vitiation of our usual ways of understanding. Mistrust and suspicion are seen as natural in Elsinore, and this is unnatural. It is as if the surer way of finding out what someone is thinking or feeling is to obliterate his or her expression, to distrust the commitments he or she is enacting in talking.⁶⁶ In talking, a speaker is not invariably—or only under special circumstances—presenting his or her words as evidence. Richard Moran shows the effects of substituting epistemic access for avowal in respect to a speech act, such as a promise, the kinds of vows and promises, for example, that Hamlet makes to Ophelia: “For the speaker to offer a promise as evidence must mean she must be offering it at, at best, as defeasible evidence, with respect to which the promisee is on his own. And to do so is contrary to the point of making a promise, which is binding assurance.”⁶⁷

The evidential view, Moran suggests, reveals a fundamental disharmony between speaker and audience. To tell someone something is to aim at, to bank on, being believed. (Ophelia is acting with the usual, normative kind of trust in which we go on with each other in the exchange of words.) What Moran calls the evidential stance decouples the speaker's responsibility in speaking from its reception in his audience: It is the difference between “now I have spoken, make of it what you will,” and “Take it from me.” It is the difference between, in another of Moran's examples, accepting an apology in which this means putting away resentment and taking the apology as evidence of a certain state of mind, and making of it what one wills.⁶⁸ Radical distrust, of the kind that is ubiquitous in Hamlet, is a form of other minds’ skepticism, and this turns out to be lethal.

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein leads us to understand that trust is the indispensable and normative background in and by which we come to know others. This is hard to see because trust is assumed not on the basis of reason or past experience but instead as the invisible background to talking and acting. Trust becomes visible only as mistrust. Jay Bernstein has suggested that the difficulty in accepting the centrality and normativity of trust comes from how elusive it is, because when it is operating ideally, it is invisible. It is likely to appear paradoxical to philosophies that are based on speculative reason.⁶⁹

Polonius's pseudo-philosophy is Hobbesian: “He that performeth first has no assurance the other will perform after; because the bonds of words are too weak to bridle man's ambition, avarice, anger, and other Passions without the feare of some coercive power.”⁷⁰ Trust is impossible to understand as anything other than credulity or gullibility in this picture as in Hecuba's dreadful understanding in Euripides’ imagination. The Wittgensteinian philosopher Peter Winch has suggested that the concept of “being bound” is impossible in Hobbesian psychology.⁷¹

In such a Hobbesian world, the project of knowing others and oneself through acknowledgment, which involves the kind of relationship abjured in the evidential model, becomes more or less impossible. The default condition of communication cannot be mistrust—the idea that, on the whole, people are just as likely not to tell the truth as to tell it. The liar, after all, relies on the norm of truth-telling in his or her audience, and his or her abuse of truth is also an abuse of trust. To understand this is also to understand that a commitment to truth means not merely correspondence between one's statements and reality, but also the truth of one's relationship to the audience or interlocutor.⁷²

Claudius's theatricalization of grief, as well as Polonius's generalized mistrust of words as traps, show that they are skeptics in relation to language. This is part of what is rotten in Denmark.⁷³ Attempting to see without being seen, the distant knowledge of the other turns out to be, when not simply wrong, catastrophically destructive. It is so because the naturalness of expression (the language of feeling) has become degraded and the possibilities of knowing and being known within it have been compromised severely. The vitiation of the languages for grief and loss are part of a more pervasive impairment of words as bonds of trust, and its relation to love and care.

Telling

For the revenger, the act projects an isolated event, imagined in his fantasy to be shaped solely to meet the ends he both desires and determines. But the very nature of the act Hamlet is enjoined to do is in this play inseparable from the way it is enjoined, understood, communicated, and bound up in acts of witnessing and testimony, and thus in trust. For that reason, I explore the complexity of the speech act of telling in the play, a speech act that has the benefit of also being “indicative of the necessities in a wider range of language games.”⁷⁴ I have shown that the telling of grief becomes impossible in this play, and this makes the articulation and identification of loss impossible in consequential ways.⁷⁵ But the play scrutinizes acts of telling as a whole in ways that do differentiate it from any other form of contemporary revenge tragedy. Indeed, the radical innovation of Hamlet is to return us over and over again to the community of speakers in which any act takes shape. It is the indispensable, inescapable imbrication in a community of speakers that entails that no act is self-standing or subject to the definition of the actor alone. The play decisively refuses the revenger's fantasy, which turns out to be a fantasy about the capacity to carve out an action according to your own definition.

Hamlet goes out of its way to reveal the complexities of the act enjoined, the difficulties of discerning it from the testimony of speakers. It provides us with an astonishing ending that renders the very nature of the acts Hamlet performed inseparable from and dependent on the responses and articulations of those around him.

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says we regard it as too much a matter of course that one can tell anything to anyone.⁷⁶ In his article, “Captivating Pictures,” Steven G. Affeldt, building on some remarks of Stanley Cavell in The Claim of Reason, parses out some of the necessary conditions of the speech act of telling.⁷⁷ I go over his careful reasoning with examples from Hamlet.

“Buzz, buzz,” says Hamlet when Polonius announces that the players have come to Elsinore (2.2.330). His mockery implies that this is old news; he knows it already. In such circumstances, Polonius is not telling him anything at all. In the chilling sequence in which Hamlet has finally confronted the ghost of his father, Hamlet mutters about arrant knaves being villains in Denmark. The point, as Horatio notes, is tautological. Horatio's response invariably gets a laugh when this scene is staged: “There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave / To tell us this” (1.5.123–24). Hamlet is telling Horatio nothing at all, just as Polonius is telling Hamlet nothing. One is making sure to withhold what he has to tell, and the other's news is simply stale.

But even if the teller has something to tell, he cannot tell it unless the other is in a position to receive it, and specifically from the teller. A basic condition of telling is that you are believed; if not, your words will count for nothing. This is a question of the position that the teller and the recipient take themselves to hold in relation to each other. Take the characteristic riposte: Why should I take that coming from you? If you give me a piece of advice that you have by no means adhered to yourself, I may fail to respect your authority to speak to me on the subject. Ophelia gives a mild reproach to Laertes along these lines when he warns her off Lord Hamlet, heedless of his journey along the primrose path (1.3.45–49). In the surveillance society of Elsinore, as I have suggested, the idea of believing particular people is dispensed with, and this is a fundamental discounting.

When you tell someone something, you make it clear what relation you stand in to them; you want their acknowledgment, their response, and thus you show not only the light in which you hold them but also how you imagine they stand in relation to you. It is impossible to engage in the act of telling without such revelations taking place.

It is vital that in Hamlet (unlike say, Kyd's play, which is framed by Don Andrea's ghost and the figure of Revenge) we learn about the secret act on which the entire regime of Claudius is founded from a tale told by a ghost whose provenance is unclear, and who will tell his tale alone to young Hamlet. Young Hamlet in turn cannot tell that tale to anyone else. Everything about the act of telling makes us alert to the tricky conditions of possibility and address in a community of speakers. It is not just that we do not know definitively where the ghost comes from but that he will speak only to Hamlet.

We initially hear about his father's ghost entirely through testimony—from the testimony of Marcellus and Barnardo—before he makes his entrance. Even then, he will not speak, although enjoined to do so: He will not speak to Horatio. When he does speak to Hamlet, he has become not an “it” but a second person, singling out Hamlet just as Hamlet singles him out in exchange. The exchange is theirs alone. Furthermore, after he has this dreadful knowledge from the ghost, Hamlet cannot tell anyone about it for this king is a most plausible monarch, and Hamlet is unlikely to be credited. Hamlet becomes burdened not only by his impossible “task” but also by his inability to share his grief. After pondering the player's speech he bewails the fact that he “can say nothing” (2.5.504). The players on the contrary “cannot keep council-they’ll tell all” (3.2.135); and he hopes his play will prompt Claudius's confession, so that his “occulted” guilt will not have to be told by Hamlet but rather will issue from his own mouth (3.2.76). Hamlet, of course, spends a great deal of time making sure he cannot be understood to say anything at all.

In his article on telling, Affeldt says that the everyday action of telling involves “projecting the grounds of intelligibility”: “One can, perhaps, say anything at all to another, or at least at another. However, one can only tell another something if the other is able to comprehend what is told, and that will be inseparably connected with understanding you and understanding your telling when and as you do.”⁷⁸

The usefulness of putting it this way comes from the standing possibility that we will be unintelligible to each other, that our ability to tell each other anything at all is itself a fragile and breakable relation. Once again, it is the desire for recognition at play in the most basic of speech acts. This is precisely what Shakespeare is alert to in this astonishingly transitional play. He has taken a genre that predicates itself on a singular piece of scripting: The playwright and the revenger are alike in their instrumentalizing of words, scripting roles for others to play, carving out their act according only to the consequences they intend. Shakespeare, on the contrary, has shown that even the most simple of speech acts concerns claims to acknowledgement and to recognition.

When Polonius devastatingly says to Ophelia, after they have set her up as a stooge with Hamlet in act 3, scene 1 that “you need not tell us what Lord Hamlet said- / We heard it all,” he discounts her utterly (3.1.178–79). In so doing, he reveals how the culture of surveillance is a culture of discounting anyone's say in the matter at hand.

Hamlet's concern is always significantly more with the finding of truth than with the revenge of his father. His play is an attempt to elicit a confession from Claudius. He attempts likewise to “confess” his mother. Confession in this understanding is truthful speech, the opposite of a lie, which seeks possession of language. At the same time, Hamlet must act in such a way that he “tells nothing,” because to reveal himself is to expose himself, even as he is mesmerized by players who, as chroniclers of the time, “tell all.”

All of these instances show the extent to which the play is concerned with the idea of testimony as the knowledge acquired through a speaker's telling, a most fundamental and routine way in which we routinely act in our dealing with each other. Above all, in ways I will shortly examine, Hamlet's final act is utterly dependent on Horatio's telling for its most basic significance. Absent Horatio's telling, the audience on stage and off would not understand what he had done. But we must go through the graveyard, as Hamlet does, to arrive at the last scene of the play.

In the Graveyard: Ends and Endings

Hamlet is at a most important crossroads in the interconnection between ethics and tragedy. Drawing on the idea that speech enacts—minutely and at every point—a relationship between people that shifts at every turn, and for which we are accountable, Hamlet shifts the very terrain of tragedy and our understanding of tragic action. “Why seems it so particular with thee?” turns out to be one of the play's most central questions. I close this chapter by showing how this question plays out in the last stunning scenes of the play.

In Elsinore, it is impossible to express grief, for that would reveal the truth of the usurping king's relation to the past. In revenge, the relationship between grief and grievance is nurtured but in such a way as the relationship between them is obscured further still. For this reason, Shakespeare has so scrupulously marked the dense classical precedents of this story, for the crisis in grieving is a crisis in the heroic culture. Hamlet has for too long been seen according to an utterly deracinated moral theory, one privileging choice over attention.⁷⁹ The ethical dimensions of the play have been lost as questions of “choice” usurp and mask our ethical attention and thus the very object of the play's scrutiny. It is only when we see the profound examination of the concept of action undertaken in Hamlet in relationship to the genre of revenge tragedy and its epic precedents in Vergil that the radical nature of the play comes to light.

The relationship between the commonalty of death and the necessity of understanding its particularity (why it seems so particular with thee) is utterly reoriented in the last scenes, chiefly through Hamlet's encounter with the skull of Yorick and with the corpse of Ophelia, both of whom are intimately particular to him, bound up with him in a singular biography. Indeed, the trajectory of act 5, scene 1 for Hamlet is to single out the known dead from the vast generalities, the massed and disintegrating bodies who can be recast according to Hamlet's imagination. As Hamlet and Horatio enter the graveyard, they see the witty and tuneful gravedigger displacing all kinds of old skulls as he makes room for a new coffin. The question of whose grave this “belongs to is” thus playfully deferred for their death-talk. Hamlet speculates about the identity of the first two skulls unceremoniously flung on the stage. The first skull might be Cain, the first murderer, or perhaps a politician, perhaps a courtier. Hamlet assigns words to the skull, casting him in a morbid drama: “Good morrow, sweet lord, how dost thou, sweet lord?” (5.1.77–78) As Hamlet ponders the fine revolution of death that brings his imagined courtier to the chapless, knocked about, worm-ridden state he is now in, a second skull lands next to him, as so much spray off the gravedigger's shovel. Once again Hamlet conjures up miniplays: perhaps the skull was once a lawyer, involved in complex land conveyancing, and he goes on to imagine the concrete details of lawyerly work, imagining a set of purposes now suspended or made pointless by the end to which he comes: “Is this the fine of his fines [F], . . . to have his fine pate full of fine dirt?” (5.1.104–5). Hamlet has surpassed himself in making four puns with the use of fine. A fine is a legal document by which entailed property is changed to freehold possession; it is fine as in elegant and praiseworthy; it is fine as in thin and refined, and it is fin—an end—evoking the deepest pun in the play: the one on endings and ends, end as telos or purpose, and end as death, the cessation of life. Hamlet now decides to engage in conversation with the gravedigger rather than simply watch over his work. For how long has he been making graves? The gravedigger's answer dates his current employment to the twin events of old King Hamlet's duel with Fortinbras and to Hamlet's very birth. It is as if the jester's death has shadowed his own. How long, Hamlet asks him, does it take for a man's body to begin rotting and disintegrating? As the gravedigger gives his expertise on the subject—a tanner's body outlasts that of others—he selects an exemplary skull, a skull he dates to be precisely twenty-three years old. At this point, Hamlet wants to know: “Whose was it?” (5.1.165). He does not, however, expect to know the one-time inhabiter of the skull. The anonymous bones now tossed up from a sea of death, the countless and innumerable prior generations suddenly give way to one with a minute and particular history, a history that turns out to have been an intimate part of his own. This was a man Hamlet knew. “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio” (5.1.174). It is shocking. No longer part of a history of truisms and platitudes, such as “all that lives must die,” no longer an evasive harping on the common theme of deaths of fathers but instead an encounter—raw and surprising—with one whom he once had an intimate relationship. It pertains to him. He cannot cast this skull as a courtier, doctor, or lawyer; he cannot ascribe him any mordantly witty words that come into his head, but instead he must contemplate a man whose life was once so particularly entwined with his own. It “abhors” his imagination and pushes him out of satirical distance into horror and repugnance.⁸⁰ His mind moves quickly away from these particularities again, as he imagines even the most mighty of military commanders coming to just such a foul-smelling and ignoble end, and more, stopping a bunghole. He has recast Yorick as Alexander, and then he has imagined Alexander himself as a piece of loam to stop a beer barrel.

This wordplay is interrupted by the “maim’d rites” (5.1.207) of a funeral cortege. Once again, death's great and common generalities are interrupted by a particularly known and loved person. When he asks for whom he is digging the grave, the gravedigger tells him he is digging a grave for a woman. We know it is Ophelia's grave, but Hamlet does not. That knowledge is deferred for several more lines as Hamlet deflects his intimacy with Yorick into further speculation about Alexander and the bunghole. Once again he experiences a transformation from a sense of the common generality of death, to the stark realization of a particular dead person who is profoundly intertwined with his history. Hamlet identifies Laertes as he declaims the churlish priests about the “maim’d rites” given to his suicidal sister. It is in this way that Hamlet realizes that it is Ophelia who is dead, one who has been “particular to him.” Exactly how particular we are about to learn in Hamlet's astonishing declaration: “This is I, / Hamlet the Dane” (5.1.246–47), as he too steps into the new grave. He says he will fight with Laertes forever on “this theme” (5.1.255). We have learned that the queen wished Hamlet to marry Ophelia, so Polonius's advice to Ophelia has been pointless, her enforced return of Hamlet's “remembrances to her” wasteful and cruelly redundant. Gertrude now asks on what theme he wishes to fight Laertes, and he bursts out: “I loved Ophelia” (5.1.258). In singling her out, he singles himself out as a lover—one who loved, and was perhaps loved, although thwarted in that love. It is a world of possibility lost, and now only realized through that loss.⁸¹ It is as such an affirmation of a world worthy to be lived in, worthy to be loved.

In a memorable production at Stratford in 2013, Ophelia's body was left on stage for the entirety of the rest of the play.⁸² The periphery of the stage was made of earth, which gradually encroached on the boards framing her burial site with its loamy, advancing dust, the promised oblivion of death. It was, I think, a deeply appropriate image of Ophelia's centrality in the play, for it is alone in her exquisitely sad and broken fragments that anyone at all is appropriately mourned: “And will ’a not come again?” (4.5.182). It is Ophelia who blesses her father buried “huggermugger”: “God a’ mercy on his soul. / And of all Christian souls” (4.5.191–92). We might be reminded that Hamlet is torn between his fascination with the death of Priam and the grief of Hecuba.

Hamlet's astonishing declaration in Ophelia's grave—“I loved Ophelia”—“takes us beyond the questions of what we ought to do to what it is good to be, and then even beyond that, and related to that, to what can command our fullest love.”⁸³ I do not think we knew that he loved Ophelia. His world was not one conducive to the expression of love, and his poor love, Ophelia, is bullied into rejecting him on the falsest grounds and on altogether wrong assumptions. Ophelia's madness, her drowning, is the truest indication of the price of such stupidity, and it is given to her, as I and many other critics have suggested, to offer the most fitting funeral rites of the entire play.

In declaring his love, he declares himself: “It is I, Hamlet the Dane.” He discloses himself as a lover, a lover of Ophelia, but not of Ophelia alone, because the declaration is also an affirmation of a world in which love is possible, an affirmation of a world that can command our love.

The possibilities now opened up by this way of thinking help us make sense of the ending of the play. After the graveyard scene, Hamlet and Horatio engage in two extraordinary conversations. It is worth observing that we are learning about Hamlet not through his soliloquies (he stops soliloquizing after 4.4: “How all occasions do inform against me”) but through his interactions with others.⁸⁴ His antic disposition and his histrionic trying on of roles has obscured our understanding of him as a courtier, soldier, and scholar. We can now learn about him through his engagements with others around him for he is no longer hiding. In these conversations, he tells Horatio of the events on board the ship—both his discovery of his death warrant in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's keeping, and his substitution of theirs for his as well as the utterly fortuitous capture by pirates that allow him a safe voyage home. All this he says he did “Rashly— / And praised be rashness for it” (5.2.6–7). His deep plots have palled, and it is through unplanned and responsive action that he fortuitously has saved his own life. Hamlet ascribes these events to a providence shaping our ends. This coheres with Lionel Abel's sense that our exits—in that famous dramatic metaphor, their timing, the way they happen—are not fully under our control and that this is one of the great insights of the graveyard scene.⁸⁵

When Horatio advises Hamlet not to engage in the duel with Laertes, my students often call Hamlet's response fatalistic: “We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be, ‘tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all, since no man of aught he leaves knows what is’t to leave betimes” (5.2.197–201).

But it is only from the point of view of the naked human will that these words can be seen in a fatalistic light. Hamlet is saying that his end will come, and this is not so much fatalistic as true. His end is inevitable; but he cannot know or predict how it will come about. An acceptance of one's necessary ignorance in a contingent world is not the same as fatalism. What he knows now is what he does not and cannot know. He accepts the inexorable contingency of the world and what happens in it. The attitude of the will has undergone a thorough-going transformation. He is not concertedly willing, plotting, or designing the end of the king, but he is ready to face whatever comes his way, including his own death. We are no longer on the terrain of the oughts of action but in the category of response. Hamlet, at this point, is not going to plot or plan but rather will be ready for whatever may come, while not anticipating or knowing what that is or what it will be. Such an attitude might involve a trust in one's own resources. More important, it involves relinquishing any fantasies of will rough-hewing our own ends or the ends of others. Of course, the complex pun on ends involves its meaning as both purpose (the teleology or end of action, the purpose toward which it tends) and also the ending of life (one's own life, or the other's life on whom revenge sets its violent and histrionic designs). In this astonishing finale, the play concludes with a great sense of the mystery of the life beyond, the undiscovered country. Hamlet ends midsentence with his enigmatic phrase: “The rest is silence” (5.2.342). He wants and needs Horatio to explain the circumstances and causes of the carnage around him so that what he has done can be properly understood. We observe a great sense of a continuation of life that does not totally end in our deaths. Charles Taylor puts it this way: “The point of things is not exhausted by life, the fullness of life, even the goodness of life”; this might be “an affirmation that there is something beyond death on which life draws.”⁸⁶ Hamlet is open now to this possibility and it has changed him. He is converted.

For what does Hamlet do at the end of the play? Under one description we could say this: He duels with Laertes bravely. He wins the first two bouts with Laertes. The queen drinks to his health against the king's advice. (Very much depends on how Gertrude plays this line.) In the third bout, they exchange daggers in the scuffle and they both hit each other; but because Hamlet now mistakenly has Laertes’ poisoned dagger, Laertes is poisoned by his own dagger in Hamlet's hand. The queen announces to Hamlet that she is poisoned and lets him know that the king has envenomed the drink. Laertes tells Hamlet that he is poisoned by the rapier, and he tells Hamlet that the king is to blame for both the poisoned cup and the poisoned rapier. It is now and only now that Hamlet stabs the king with the poisoned dagger and forces him to drink the remaining poison from the chalice.

Let us pause to consider the fast-moving action and reaction in the last scene: What has Hamlet done? His act could superficially be described as an act of revenge. Critics of Hamlet's delay can also breathe a sigh of relief to say, “Mission accomplished!” This action, however, might just as easily be described as an act of self-defense or revenge of the mistaken death of the queen, who has gone out of her way to save Hamlet's life and not the king's face. His truth is out; it is public, and for that reason, Hamlet has killed the king not in a private act of vengeance but as a tyrant who has usurped his brother's throne and wife and has perverted the course of justice in such a way that it is obvious to all that the entire court and kingdom have been living lies. Another way of describing this is the following: He has succeeded in dealing with Claudius without becoming like him, without, that is, becoming evil.⁸⁷ He has also overcome the specter of his former self—the hatred expressed in the fifth and sixth soliloquies. He has not undertaken an act of secret murder, which would have been his act had he killed the king in prayer. We might also say that he has, despite the horrors of murderous lust that seem to have subsumed for him all possibilities of human erotic affection, succeeded in both loving and declaring his love. He has succeeded in seeing that both a human and a divine love are possible. We can still think him with Horatio, as a “sweet Prince” (5.2.343) and join the prayer that flights of angels may sing him to his rest.

In a superb book on Hamlet, Nigel Alexander has said that it is thus also Hamlet's triumph that he has rescued the mourned dead from the oblivion, those whose memory has been submerged, made invisible through Claudius's “remembrance of himself.” In this project, both memory and understanding are subsumed in will. Hamlet's dramaturgy theatrically restores the past and brings it to bear on the present. Alexander says that the “entire play acts as a theatre of memory which stamps upon the mind of the audience an impression of Hamlet's consciousness.”⁸⁸ Thus, even in the awareness of the great disintegrating anonymity of death, in the company of the sardonic gravediggers, ready to face the odds stacked against him, the prince can know that no matter the universality, the commonness of ends, of death, how we play our particular part is all important. The commonness of our fate absolves us of no responsibility for figuring out our role in it.

Only under the most superficial description is Hamlet's act what his father's ghost envisaged. We might also say of Hamlet's act at the end of the play that it is his act, and not his father's. This is a remarkable achievement of identity—that is, to play his role and not the role his father's ghost has given to him. He wants and needs his act to be described aright because he knows that it could fall under many descriptions.

Consider what the witnesses of the last scene confront and how they might describe it. To those witnessing the duel, and seeing Hamlet pour poison down the king's throat and thrust him with the poisoned rapier, his actions might seem those of a murderous madman, a regicide. They have seen Gertrude die announcing she is poisoned, but they do not know who poisoned her. Although they might hear Laertes pronounce the reason for his imminent death and Gertrude's, the king is still calling for defense and thinking with remembrance of himself. Hamlet announces that there are things he could tell us, but he is dying and hence not able to tell them. Those in a position to tell, Laertes and Gertrude, are dead. Hamlet will not be believed. All depends on Horatio to report the situation aright if the onstage audience members are to understand what has passed before their eyes. Nothing can be comprehensible to them outside a pattern of significance that now only Horatio can trace, and only if he is to be counted as authoritative in the story.

It is astonishing how very much in the middle of things Hamlet is when he dies. Whether or not we think that Hamlet's last sentence is grammatically incomplete, broken off by death, he ends with the enigmatic “the rest is silence” (5.2.342). What is affirmed is not an isolate heroism but the deep dependence on others for the story of his life, in Horatio's hands and not under his control, delegated to us in an act of trust. To the end, our dependence on each other in grief and in love is affirmed, our testimony of grief and sorrow in showing what we care about.