Quote 21
HAMLET
How strange or odd some'er I bear myself
(As I perchance hereafter shall think meet
To put an antic disposition on)
(1.5.190-192)
When Hamlet warns his friends that he's going to "put an antic disposition on," he's literally referring to a "clown" or a performer who plays the role of a "grotesque." That means he gets verbal freedom. Like the fool, he can say whatever he wants without getting in trouble. No one holds a crazy man responsible, right?
Quote 22
HAMLET
O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his 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!
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have?
(2.2.577-589)
If the player can conjure up such intensity and "passion" for a fictional character, why can't Hamlet move himself to action against the man who killed his father? By the end of the passage, Hamlet tries to place himself in the position of this stage actor and wonders what the player would do if he had Hamlet's "motive" and "cue for passion" (that is, the knowledge that Claudius has killed his father). In other words, maybe we could all benefit from a few acting lessons.
Quote 23
HAMLET
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. I'll have these players
Play something like the murder of my father
Before mine uncle. I'll observe his looks;
I'll tent him to the quick. If he but blench,
I know my course. The spirit that I have seen
May be the devil, and the devil hath power
To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. I'll have grounds
More relative than this. The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.
(2.2.617-634)
Hamlet wants the traveling players to put on a play, so when King Claudius watches a murder take place on stage, his emotional response will reveal whether or not he's guilty of murdering Old King Hamlet. This may sound a bit wacky to us, but Elizabethans believed that theater was a very powerful place. (If you've ever cried all the way through a Nicholas Sparks movie, you probably agree.)
It could also be dangerous. In 1601, the Earl of Essex's rebel faction asked Shakespeare's theater company to perform Richard II (a play in which Henry Bolingbroke usurps the throne from the corrupt King Richard II). The very next day, Essex stormed the queen's court. Okay, sure, he failed. But the point is that the play seems to have gotten them riled up enough to actually move.
Quote 24
HAMLET
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced
it to you, trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth
it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and
beget a temperance that may give it smoothness (3.2.1-8).
Everyone—we mean, no one—loves an armchair director. Here, Hamlet "helps" the actors prep by telling them to hold back. More cable drama, and less daytime soap.
Quote 25
HAMLET
[…] o'erstep not he modesty of
nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose
of playing, whose end, both at the first and
now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to
nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her
own image, and the very age and body of time
his form and pressure. (3.2.20-26)
Hamlet wants the player's performance to be authentic, as though it were holding a "mirror up to nature." This idea about theater being a kind of "mirror" also seems to be in keeping with Hamlet's belief that the play will reflect King Claudius' guilt. And it does. So what kind of emotions is Hamlet reflecting back to us?
HAMLET
Madam, how like you this play?QUEEN GERTRUDE
The lady protests too much, methinks.HAMLET
O, but she'll keep her word.
(3.2.253-255)
Dude, Hamlet, lay off your mom. At this point in the action, the Player Queen has professed over and over again that she will not remarry after her husband, the Player King, dies. Gertrude says here that the character "protests too much" and Hamlet, as usual, finds a way too insult his mother. The faithful Player Queen, he insists, will "keep her word," unlike Gertrude, who Hamlet sees as unfaithful and adulterous. In this case, life definitely doesn't imitate art.
HAMLET
He poisons him i' the garden for's estate. His
name's Gonzago: the story is extant, and written in
choice Italian. You shall see anon how the
murderer gets the love of Gonzago's wife.OPHELIA
The king rises.
(3.2.287-291)
Veeeery interesting. Claudius looks pretty guilty when he gets up and leaves the room after he sees the on-stage poisoning. Looks like there's something to Hamlet's theory of theater, after all.
Quote 28
HAMLET
O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!
My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark.
(1.5.113-116)
Well, duh. The only question is, which kind of smile is your villain using—the Cheshire Cat Grin? The Sideways Smile? Or—we imagine this is Claudius' favorite—the Psychotic Smirk?
Quote 29
HAMLET
You were sent
for, and there is a kind of confession in your looks
which your modesties have not craft enough to
color. I know the good king and queen have sent for
you.
(2.2.300-304)
The force (of sensing deception) is strong in this one: Hamlet's old friends try to deceive him, but Hamlet sees right through it.
HAMLET
[…] Where's your father?OPHELIA
At home, my lord.HAMLET
Let the doors be shut upon him, that he may
play the fool no where but in 's own house. Farewell.
(3.1.141-144)
When Hamlet confronts her, Ophelia lies to him outright—but she has no choice. As an unmarried daughter, she has to obey her father's order to help him catch Hamlet. And it ends up killing her, just like it kills him.
Quote 31
HAMLET
Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing
you make of me! You would play upon me, you
would seem to know my stops, you would pluck
out the heart of my mystery, you would sound me
from my lowest note to the top of my compass;
and there is much music, excellent voice, in this
little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. 'Sblood,
do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe?
Call me what instrument you will, though you can
fret me, yet you cannot play upon me.
(3.2.393-402)
When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern try to get Hamlet to confide in them, Hamlet is super ticked off. He compares deception to playing a musical instrument to mock his frenemies for not being skilled enough to "play" him. Oh, and guess what? Their deception ends up getting them killed, too.
HAMLET
An earnest conjuration from the King,
As England was his faithful tributary,
As love between them like the palm might flourish,
As peace should stiff her wheaten garland wear
And stand a comma 'tween their amities,
And many suchlike ases of great charge,
That, on the view and knowing of these contents,
Without debatement further, more or less,
He should the bearers put to sudden death,
Not shriving-time allowed.
[…]
HORATIO
So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to 't.
(5.2.43-52; 63)
Hamlet is patting himself on the back pretty strenuously about how he got revenge on Rosencrantz and Guildenstern by sending them to their deaths. Totally fair, he says: they deceived him, so they get what they deserve.
Quote 33
[…] O God, God,
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on 't! ah fie! 'Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this:
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two.
So excellent a king; that was, to this
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and Earth.
Must I remember? Why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on. And yet, within a month
(Let me not think on 't; frailty, thy name is woman!)
[…]
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good.
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.
(1.2.136-150; 161-164)
Hamlet's got a serious problem with mom. It's not just that he's disgusted by Gertrude's incestuous marriage to Claudius —Hamlet can hardly stand to think about his mother having sex, period. Which, um, seems normal to us. What's not normal is the way that he keeps thinking about it, anyway.
HAMLET
For if the sun breed maggots in a dead
dog, being a god kissing carrion—Have you a
daughter?LORD POLONIUS
I have, my lord.HAMLET
Let her not walk i' th' sun. Conception is a
blessing, but, as your daughter may conceive,
friend, look to 't.
(2.2.197-203)
To Hamlet, pregnancy is less the miracle of life than the miracle of death: given that Hamlet has just said "dead dogs" and "breed maggots" in the sun, it's obvious that Hamlet is equating Ophelia's body with "carrion" (another word for road kill). This suggests that women's bodies are putrid and rotten: they give birth to dead things. Gross? Yeah. But in a way, Hamlet's right: everything born dies. (Oh, he's also punning on the word "sun," which alludes to the big shiny thing in the sky and also to Hamlet, the "son" of the dead king and the guy who would impregnate Ophelia with "maggots.")
Quote 35
HAMLET
Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a
breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest,
but yet I could accuse me of such things that it
were better my mother had not borne me: I am
very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences
at my beck than I have thoughts to put them
in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act
them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling
between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves,
all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery.
(3.1.131-140)
Since Hamlet thinks all women are "breeders of sinners," he obviously doesn't think much of women. But, it also suggests that he doesn't think much of himself either, being one of those "sinners" that's been "bred" by a woman. In fact, Hamlet says it would be better if his "mother had not borne" him at all. Bonus: that would mean she'd never had sex. Double win!
Quote 36
HAMLET
Nay, but to live
In the rank sweat of an enseamèd bed,
Stewed in corruption, honeying and making love
Over the nasty sty!
(3.4.103-106)
Wait, Hamlet, tell us again how you think sex is pretty much the most disgusting thing ever. We didn't catch it the first time. Or the second time. Or the… well, you get the point. Hamlet thinks sex is gross.
HAMLET
Lady, shall I lie in your lap?OPHELIA
No, my lord.HAMLET
I mean, my head upon your lap?OPHELIA
Ay, my lord.HAMLET
Do you think I meant country matters?OPHELIA
I think nothing, my lord.HAMLET
That's a fair thought to lie between maids'
legs.OPHELIA
What is, my lord?HAMLET
Nothing.
(3.2.119-128)
Hamlet's dirty talk (which we translate into modern lingo in "Steaminess Rating") puts Ophelia in an impossible situation. When Hamlet makes lewd innuendos, Ophelia can't respond in a way that suggests she knows what he's talking about. If she does, then it would suggest that she knows a little too much about sex. This could be as damaging to her reputation as, say, losing her virginity before marriage. Our point? Hamlet gets the power to control Ophelia's conversation, just like Polonius and Laertes have the power to control her body.
HAMLET
Mother, for love of grace,
Lay not that mattering unction to your soul
That not your trespass but my madness speaks.
It will but skin and film the ulcerous place,
Whilst rank corruption, mining all within,
Infects unseen. Confess yourself to heaven,
Repent what's past, avoid what is to come,
And do not spread the compost on the weeds
To make them ranker. Forgive me this my virtue,
For in the fatness of these pursy times
Virtue itself of vice must pardon beg,
Yea, curb and woo for leave to do him good.
QUEEN GERTRUDE
O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain!
(3.4.165-177)
There's that word "rank" again. This time, Hamlet warns Gertrude to stop spreading "compost on the weeds" (sleeping with Claudius), which will make her sins (incest) even "ranker" than they already are. What's more, Hamlet's talk of "ulcers," "infection," and "corruption" seems to allude to venereal disease. It's as though Hamlet thinks women are contagious. Given contemporary standards of hygiene, we're thinking both men and women were running around contagious most of the time.
Quote 39
HAMLET
[…]That it should come to this:
But two months dead—nay, not so much, not two.
So excellent a king, that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and Earth.
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on. And yet, within a month
(Let me not think on 't; frailty, thy name is woman!)
[…]
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good.
But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue.
(1.2.141-150; 161-164)
Hamlet's got a serious problem with mom. It's not just that he's disgusted by Gertrude's incestuous marriage to Claudius —Hamlet can hardly stand to think about his mother having sex, period. Which, um, seems normal to us. What's not normal is the way that he keeps thinking about it, anyway.
Quote 40
HAMLET
That it should come to this:
But two months dead—nay, not so much, not two.
So excellent a king, that was, to this
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and Earth.
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on. And yet, within a month
(Let me not think on 't; frailty, thy name is woman!)
(1.2.141-150)
Hamlet may start with his mom, but he ends with all women. He's disgusted by his mother's sexual "appetite," and blames that for her treacherous remarriage. Ergo, somehow, all women are "frail." He doesn't say "Frailty, thy name is Gertrude!"; he says, "Frailty, thy name is woman."