Here in Stratford upon Avon, the home of William Shakespeare...
it is very difficult to escape hearing the name of Hamlet.
Hamlet mugs and tee-shirts are best sellers in the gift shops...
quotations from the play adorn tea-towels...
diaries, pens, shop signs, books.
The focus on this play by the tourist trade, isjust one indication...
of how important Hamlet has traditionally been, to western culture.
Apart from the Bible, Hamlet is the most quoted work...
in the English language.
Hamlet is a young prince, driven to despair...
by his mother's hasty marriage to Claudius, his uncle.
Hamlet subsequently learns, from his father's ghost...
that Claudius is the man who murdered his father.
The story of the play deals with Hamlets vow for revenge...
and the complexities of his relationships with others...
because of this vow.
The exact date at which Hamlet was written is open to conjecture.
It was entered into the stationers register in 1602.
But it is known to have been acted in one form or another...
as early as 1599.
The uncertainty surrounding the earliest performances...
is mirrored in the choice of text.
There are three versions of Hamlet available to us from the period...
as a matter of fact the first quarter was probably published by an actor...
who had wrongly remembered the lines of Shakespeare's play.
We're on much firmer ground with the two other versions.
The second published quarto, billed as a true and perfect copy...
is almost twice as long as the first...
with clearly Shakespearean poetry.
And then there is the first folio of 1623.
This doesn't include 225 lines which are present in the second quarto...
but it adds another seventy.
The play is regularly performed here at the Royal Shakespeare company...
and countless academic papers on Hamlet are researched...
written and discussed, at Stratford's Shakespeare center...
and Shakespeare Institute.
Dr. Russell Jackson has worked as textural advisor...
on several Shakespearean films, including Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet.
Prof. Wells has been director of the Shakespeare Institute for many years...
and has written countless books and articles on Shakespeare.
Who better than these experts to attempt to define for us...
why Hamlet has become one of the most influential pieces of world literature.
Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio.
A fellow of infinitejest, of most excellent fancy.
He hath boor me on his back a thousand times...
and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is!
My gorge rises at it.
Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft.
Where be your gibes now, your gambols, your songs...
your flashes of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?
It is amazing how influential Hamlet has become.
It has been widely used by other artists and is so popular in so many countries.
It is a very complex matter of what has caused that...
but I think fundamentally...
it has the capacity to acquire mythic status...
it has become one of the myths of the Western world...
and I think the most important reason for that is...
the preoccupation with death quite simply.
Hamlet has stayed popular and Hamlet has been...
so much performed, so much read and so much debated and so much filmed.
Because the raw material of Hamlet has in it...
something to appeal to everybody.
The story is exciting, the fact that it deals with...
what you could call a personal problem in the context of the family...
and beyond that in the context of politics and the kingdom...
means that it has lots of ways of appealing to people...
from different backgrounds for different purposes.
Tell him his pranks have been too broad to bear with...
and that your grace hath screened and stood between much heat and him.
I'll silence me even here.
I pray you, be round with him.
If I had to say what Hamlet is about in a single phrase...
which is a foolish thing to do...
nevertheless, if I had to do it I would say it is about reactions to death.
It has the great symbol of the ghost to start with...
the ghost is the great question mark hanging over all human existence...
the idea of another world, where were things started, where things go to.
The ghost is ever present in Hamlet's mind and in the audiences' minds...
and the play is constantly concerned with what we do about death...
what Hamlet does about death, the way the ghost died...
the way that Hamlet inflicts death on Polonius...
but also contingent deaths like...
the death of Ophelia in her madness for example...
and I think that the constant preoccupation of the play...
with the way that people react to death...
is to me the most fundamental reason why it has been...
such an influential work of art.
To be...
or not to be...
that is the question:
whether 'tis nobler in the mind...
to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles...
and by opposing...
end them.
To die...
to sleep. No more:
and by a sleep to say we end the heartache...
and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.
'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
To die, to sleep.
To sleep, perchance to dream.
Ay, there's the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come...
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil...
Must give us pause.
There's the respect that makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time...
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely...
The pangs of despised love...
the law's delay, the insolence of office...
and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes...
when he himself might his quietus make...
with a bare bodkin?
Who would these fardels bear, to grunt and sweat under a weary life...
but that the dread of something after death...
the undiscovered country...
from whose bourn no traveler returns...
puzzles the will...
and makes us rather bear those ills we have...
than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience...
does make cowards of us all...
and thus the native hue of resolution...
is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought...
and enterprise is of great pitch and moment...
with this regard their currents turn awry...
and lose the name of action.
At one point in the play...
the villainous character that I play, Claudius...
says that revenge should have no bounds.
The issue of revenge comes back again and again...
to plague the tortured soul of Hamlet.
Time and again he hesitates.
Just what are the factors restraining Hamlet from taking his revenge?
If we had to think about what stops him, the most cynical answer to that...
would be that Shakespeare wants to drag out the play, he has five acts to fill.
And that is not an entirely flippant suggestion I think...
because Shakespeare did want to write about a lot of things...
he didn't want the play to end until he had had a chance...
to write about all the things that are in Hamlet...
but I think fundamentally it must come down to scruples, to conscience.
Hamlet refers to conscience. Also I think the fact that...
he only finally acts as by instinct...
he needs to come together all his impulses...
both logical and illogical, emotional and irrational.
They all need to come together within him...
before he can do the killing without feeling that he has betrayed himself...
that he has killed something important within himself.
That is fundamentally why he doesn't kill Claudius until the very end.
One of the things about revenge in Hamlet...
is that a lot of people want to take it...
and there is an extraordinary scene in which Claudius...
who is about to be the victim of Hamlet's quest for vengeance...
is urging someone else to take vengeance on Hamlet.
Revenge should have no bounds.
Well, revenge isn't a simple matter.
If you've got any conscience in the kind of world that Hamlet is in...
if you have any belief in God then you know that God forbids revenge.
'Vengeance is mine' sayeth the Lord 'and I will repay'.
When for example he has the opportunity to kill Claudius in the prayer scene...
'Now might I do it'. He could do it then...
but he doesn't do it then because it hasn't all come together...
he is not all anxious to do it then.
The complete man would knock me behind it...
he would just be doing it in a colder, calculated way.
Now might I do it pat, now he is praying.
And now I'll do't.
And so he goes to heaven. And so am I revenged.
That would be scanned:
A villain kills my father, and for that I, his sole son...
do this same villain send to heaven.
O, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
No.
Up, sword...
and know thou a more horrid hent:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage...
or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed, at gaming, swearing...
or about some act that has no relish of salvation in't...
then trip him...
that his heels may kick at heaven...
and that his soul may be as damn'd and black as hell, whereto it goes.
My mother stays.
This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.
The dark unspoken undercurrents in the relationship...
between Gertrude and Hamlet, occupy the very heart of this great work.
To an extent Shakespeare might have been thought...
to have prefigured the work of Sigmund Freud.
Freud, in later years, sought to unravel the part played by sexual feelings...
in the complex relationship between any mother and son.
Psycho-analytical critics have argued that such oedipal jealousy...
might be at the root of Hamlet's disturbing description...
of his mothers marriage. But is that really the case?
Now, mother, what's the matter?
Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.
Mother, you have my father much offended.
Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.
Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.
- Why, how now, Hamlet? - What's the matter now?
- Have you forgot me? - No, by the rood, not so.
You are the queen, your husband's brother's wife...
And, would it were not so, you are my mother.
Nay, then, I'll set those to you that can speak.
You shall not budge: till I set you up a glass.
Where you may see the inmost part of you.
What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me? Help, help, ho!
How now, a rat? Dead for a ducat, dead!
- O me, what hast thou done? - Nay, I know not.
Is it the king?
When Hamlet gets so upset with his mother in the closet scene...
he is already in a pretty disturbed state.
He has after all just killed...
he has committed the act of killing for the first time in his life.
Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell. I took thee for thy better.
Peace! Leave wringing of your hands. Let me wring your heart.
For so I shall if it be made of penetrable stuff.
If damn'd custom have not brazed it so that it be proof...
and bulwark against sense.
What have I done that thou dar'st wag thy tongue in noise so rude against me?
Such an act that blurs the grace and blush of modesty...
calls virtue hypocrite, makes marriage vows as false as dicers oaths.
Ay me, what act, that roars so loud and thunders in the index?
Look here upon this picture, and on this...
See what a grace was seated on this brow...
Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself...
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command...
This was your husband.
Look you now what follows. Here is your husband...
like a mildewed ear blasting his wholesome brother.
Have you eyes? Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed...
and batten on this moor? Have you eyes?
You cannot call it love, for at your age the heyday in the blood is tame...
it's humble, and waits upon thejudgment.
And whatjudgment would step from this to this?
O Shame, where is thy blush?
When Hamlet deals with women...
he to most people's minds deals with them very badly.
He deals badly with Ophelia...
and he certainly deals roughly with his mother.
In what he says about his mother's second marriage...
her relationship with Claudius, there is something so vividly...
graphically sexual that a lot of people have found that...
so disturbing they need to find psychological explanations for it.
Good night:
but go not to my uncle's bed.
Assume a virtue if you have it not. Refrain tonight...
and that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence.
What shall I do?
Not this, by no means, that I bid you do:
Let the bloat king tempt you again to bed...
Pinch wanton on your cheek, call you his mouse...
or for a pair of reechy kisses or paddling in your neck...
with his damned fingers... Make you to ravel all this matter out...
that I essentially am not in madness...
but mad in craft.
Be thou assured...
if words be made of breath and breath of life...
I have no life to breathe what thou hast said to me.
I must to England; you know that?
Alack, I had forgot. 'Tis so concluded on.
This fellow set me packing.
Some actors make him violent physically with his mother and...
that isn'tjust some kind of generalized misogyny or what have you...
it seems to me to be something in Hamlet that he is brought face to face with.
I think Shakespeare shows us that his own reactions to that killing...
are to throw him into emotional turmoil.
I don't myself think it drives him mad...
but it drives him perilously close to madness.
He certainly is in a very pent up state...
when he gets to his mother's closet...
and of course it is exacerbated by the appearance of the ghost...
so I think when he is talking to his mother...
all his pent up feelings come to the surface.
It is a most brilliantly written scene the way that Shakespeare...
contrives language to give the impression...
that we are actually in the mind of a man...
is a brilliant technical feat.
Save me and hover o'er me with your wings. You heavenly guards!
What would your gracious figure?
Alas, he's mad!
Do you not come your tardy son to chide...
that, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by...
Th' important acting of your dread command?
- O, say! - Do not forget.
This visitation is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose.
But look, amazement on thy mother sits.
O, step between her and her fighting soul.
Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works.
Speak to her.
- Ho is't with you, Lady? - How is't with you...
That you do bend your eye on vacancy...
And with th' incorporal air do hold discourse?
- Whereon do you look? - On him, on him.
Look you how pale he glares. His form and cause conjoined...
preaching to stones, would make them capable.
Do not look at me, lest with this piteous action you convert...
My stern effects; then what I have to do will want true colour...
- tears perchance for blood. - o whom do you speak this?
- Do you see nothing there? - Nothing at all; yet all that I see.
- Nor did you nothing hear? - No, nothing but ourselves.
Look how it steals away. My father, in his habit as he lived.
Look, even now as the leaves out the portal.
This is the very coinage of your brain.
This bodiless creation ecstasy is very cunning in.
Hamlet as we have seen treats his mother harshly...
he's equally harsh to Ophellia, the young lady he supposedly loves.
And this contributes to her eventual madness and suicide.
Can his treatment of her in any way bejustifiable?
Soft you now, the fair Ophelia!
Nymph, in thy orisons be all my sins remembered.
Good my lord, how does your honour for this many a day?
I humbly thank you, well...
I don't think Hamlet's behavior towards Ophelia can bejustified...
but hardly anything Hamlet does is capable of a simplejustification.
He is never completely right, I don't think in anything that he does.
Towards Ophelia he behaves quite brutally...
but on the other hand he thinks he has been betrayed...
and as far as she is concerned in the course of the scene...
he seems to betray and reject her conclusively.
I never gave you aught.
My honoured lord you know right well you did...
And with them words of so sweet breath composed...
As made these things more rich.
Their perfume lost. Take these again:
for to the noble mind rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.
- Are you honest? - My lord?
- Are you fair? - What means your lordship?
That if you be honest and fair, your honesty should admit...
no discourse to your beauty.
Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?
Ay, truly, for the power of beauty will sooner transform...
honesty from what it is to bawd...
than the force of honesty can translate beauty to his likeness.
This was sometime a paradox...
but now the time gives it proof.
I did love you once.
Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.
I think one may say that Hamlet's treatment of Ophelia...
is understandable given his own condition, given his state of mind...
the state of mind of somebody who has recently, very recently...
experienced the murder of his father in mysterious circumstances...
which he is desperately trying to unravel combined...
with the recent remarriage of his mother...
to the person that we know at least is the murderer of his father.
He is in a terrible state of mind.
Go thee to a nunnery and quickly too.
Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool...
for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.
To a nunnery, go, and quickly too. Farewell.
O heavenly powers, restore him!
I have heard of your paintings too, well enough...
God gives you one face, and you make yourselves another:
you jig, you amble, you lisp, you nick-name God's creatures...
you call your wantonness your ignorance.
I'll have no more on't; it made me mad.
I say, we shall have no more marriages:
those that are married, all but one...
shall live; the rest shall stay as they are.
To a nunnery, go.
I think another facet of Ophelia though...
is in the overall large design of the play.
The play is partly about reactions to death.
Hamlet reacts to his father's death...
Ophelia reacts to her father's death.
She and Laertes react to her father's death.
Now the death of Polonious causes...
his daughter to go mad...
and it causes his son to seek revenge.
Now in a sense they polarize out...
two aspects of Hamlet's reactions to his father's death.
Hamlet nearly goes mad...
Hamlet certainly wants to take revenge...
but Hamlet is a more complex figure...
so in a sense Laertes and Ophelia...
are simplified portrayals of certain aspects of Hamlet himself I think.
Th' expectancy and rose of the fair state...
The glass of fashion and the mould of form...
Th' observed of all observers, quite, quite down!
And I...
of ladies most deject and wretched, that sucked the honey of his music vows...
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason...
like sweet bellsjangled out of tune and harsh...
That unmatched form and feature of blown youth blasted with ecstasy.
O, woe is me...
T' have seen what I have seen, see what I see!
Although any description of the action of the play...
gives the impression of a series of grim events...
there is actually a great deal of humor contained within it.
There is this tension between the comic touches...
and the obsessions with death account for the plays unusual popularity.
Here's a skull now hath lain you i'th' earth three-and-twenty years.
- Whose was it? - A whoreson mad fellow's it was.
- Whose do you think it was? - Nay, I know not.
A pestilence on him for a mad rogue!
A' poured a flagon of rhenish on my head once.
This same skull, sir, was Yorick's skull, the king'sjester.
- This? - E'en that.
Let me see.
It is remarkable that Hamlet is the funniest of all Shakespeare's tragedies.
The climatic comedy of the play I suppose...
is in the graveyard scene which itself is a paradox, isn't it?
You have a really funny character except that he is digging graves...
for dead people to be buried in, but that is only one aspect of...
a sequence of comedy which runs throughout the play.
Shakespeare is constantly concerned in other words...
to permit a comic perspective on the tragic action he is portraying.
As thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried...
Alexander returneth to dust, the dust is earth...
from earth we make loam, and why from that loam...
to which noble Alexander was converted...
may we not find it stopping a beer-barrel?
lmperous Caesar dead and turned to clay...
might stop a hole to keep the wind away.
O, that earth which kept the world in awe...
might patch a wall t' expel the winter's flaw!
We should also remember that the most comic figure in the play is Hamlet.
Hamlet is a wit.
He is an intensely intelligent figure who is a satirist...
and he satirizes for example Polonius.
In the graveyard scene he has more abstract satire of lawyers...
when he is talking there. He is the intelligent character of the play...
and intelligence often takes the form of wit...
in the capacity to send people up quite frankly.
I have heard that guilty creatures...
sitting at a play...
have, by the very cunning of the scene, been struck so to the soul...
that presently they have proclaimed their malefactions.
For murder, though it have no tongue...
will speak with most miraculous organ.
Hamlet we might say in a happier life would have been...
the hero of one of Shakespeare's romantic comedies.
He is the only one of Shakespeare's tragic heroes...
who might have been the hero of comedy, if circumstances had been better to him.
And I think that this is part of the attraction of the play too...
that Hamlet is an intensely attractive man.
I don't mean necessarily physically. He can be so physically...
but he is attractive in the sense that he is...
introspective which has a sympathetic side to it...
but also that he is so articulate, he may be...
feeling himself to be inarticulate, but his inarticulateness itself...
is explored in marvelously articulate language by himself...
and this draws the audience to Hamlet in quite an exceptional way I think...
so that the comedy within Hamlet...
is in itself an important aspect of the comic treatment of Hamlet.
I think Hamlet has got so much variety in it...
and Hamlet the character has so much variety and vitality...
that its appeal is hard to beat.
Now I am alone.
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here...
but in a fiction, a dream of passion.
Could force his soul so to his own conceit that from her working...
all this visage wanned. Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect.
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting with forms to his conceit?
And all for nothing!
What would he do? Had he the motive and the cue for passion that I have?
He would drown the stage with tears...
and cleave the general ear with horrid speech...
make mad the guilty, and appal the free...
confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed...
the very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I...
a dull and muddy-mettled rascal...
peak like John-a-dreams...
unrepentant of my cause, and can say nothing...
no, not for a king upon whose property and most dear life...
a damned defeat was made.
Am I a coward? Who calls me villain?
Breaks my pate across? Tweaks me by the nose?
Gives me the lie i' the throat, as deep as to the lungs?
Who does me this?
'Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be...
but I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall to make oppression bitter...
or ere this I should have fatted all the region kites...
with this slave's offal: bloody, bawdy villain!
Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain!
O, vengeance!