Hamlet: Play or Poem

[Ecurb]

I saw “La Traviata” on Saturday night. It’s one of my favorite operas, including a great party song (from the first act), a great love aria, and the haunting death theme, played in the overture and reprised in the third act. Why (you might wonder) am I beginning a post about Shakespeare by discussing an opera?

“La Traviata” is not only a great opera, but the story was derived from a Novella (Les Dame a Camelias), and it has been made into an excellent dramatic movie (Camille, starring Greta Garbo). Nonetheless, it would be silly to criticize “La Traviata” by emphasizing the motives and characters of Violetta and Alfredo while ignoring the music.

Shakespeare’s plays are like operas, except instead of singing, the characters speak poetic lines. The mood and emotional resonance of the plays results from the poetry, just as in opera, the mood and emotional resonance is created by the music. It is the mood and emotional response (a poetic response) that the audience seeks, and some of Shakespeare’s severest critics (like Tolstoy, Eliot and Shaw) miss the point when they complain about the plot or the implausibility of the character’s motivations.

Hamlet’s motives and madness must (of course) be sussed out by the actor playing the role. But they play a small role in the audience’s enjoyment of the play. Indeed, the almost universal disagreement over Hamlet’s motives support my point: since so many critics disagree about them, and yet Hamlet is revered by all but curmudgeons (yes, Leo, T.S., and G.B., I mean you), it seems hardly credible that the elucidation of character is the play’s shining merit.

If we look at Hamlet as a long poem, the meaning of the poem becomes clear. It is a meditation on death. All tragedies, of course, involve dying. But Hamlet is about what happens after death –“the undiscovered country, from whose borne no traveler has returned”. The play is, after all, a ghost story. Hamlet’s father is the ghost – but he is described as “this dreaded sight” and “a spirit of health or goblin damned” that is likely, at any moment, to take on “some other horrible form”. The form of the story is one of “The Grateful Dead” (yes, the band knew folklore motifs), where a ghost assigns a task to the living. In other plays, the characters think of dying. In Hamlet, they think about being dead.

The ghost scene sets the mood of the play. While the ghost is present, Hamlet believes in it. When it is gone, he has doubts (as any of us might). But the ghost sets the mood for all the great poetry about death, and even the comic relief scene in the grave (“Alas, poor Yorick”). Hamlet’s soliloquies are not (I think) indications of his character. When he says, “I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of things that it were better that my mother had not borne me…..”, he is not elucidating his own character, but talking (poetically) for everyone “crawling between earth and heaven”.

I could go on. "The rest is silence," is Hamlet's last line. But I don’t think we need see the CHARACTER Hamlet as a great poet any more than we need to see Violetta as a great soprano. The poems elucidate Hamlet’s character, and set the emotional tone for the play, just as the songs elucidate Violetta’s character and set the emotional tone for the opera. Of course nobody talks or sings like that.

We must learn to enjoy the play for what it is, not descry it for what it isn’t.

[Lokasenna]

I've never been particularly keen on having cast-iron classifications such as 'poem' and 'play'. Both have a performative aspect, and the further back in time you go the harder it is to separate one from the other. Hamlet is comfortable as both poem and play, or even poem as play.

And, of course, lots of composers have mined Shakespeare for their librettos. For the record, I've long held the opinion that Verdi's Otello surpasses Shakespeare's Othello, much as I love the original play.

[luhsun]

I disagree. Hamlet was about a second-rate son trying to avenge his father but failed. His foibles, frailities and failures...heck, he dithered and screwed up everything.
So it is not about death, but failures of a secondrater trying to rise up to the occasion. We average normals see otherselves in hamlet, vicariously dissecting and enjoying his failures.

[mona amon]

I saw “La Traviata” on Saturday night. It’s one of my favorite operas, including a great party song (from the first act), a great love aria, and the haunting death theme, played in the overture and reprised in the third act. Why (you might wonder) am I beginning a post about Shakespeare by discussing an opera?

“La Traviata” is not only a great opera, but the story was derived from a Novella (Les Dame a Camelias), and it has been made into an excellent dramatic movie (Camille, starring Greta Garbo). Nonetheless, it would be silly to criticize “La Traviata” by emphasizing the motives and characters of Violetta and Alfredo while ignoring the music.

Shakespeare’s plays are like operas, except instead of singing, the characters speak poetic lines. The mood and emotional resonance of the plays results from the poetry, just as in opera, the mood and emotional resonance is created by the music. It is the mood and emotional response (a poetic response) that the audience seeks, and some of Shakespeare’s severest critics (like Tolstoy, Eliot and Shaw) miss the point when they complain about the plot or the implausibility of the character’s motivations.

Hamlet’s motives and madness must (of course) be sussed out by the actor playing the role. But they play a small role in the audience’s enjoyment of the play. Indeed, the almost universal disagreement over Hamlet’s motives support my point: since so many critics disagree about them, and yet Hamlet is revered by all but curmudgeons (yes, Leo, T.S., and G.B., I mean you), it seems hardly credible that the elucidation of character is the play’s shining merit.

If we look at Hamlet as a long poem, the meaning of the poem becomes clear. It is a meditation on death. All tragedies, of course, involve dying. But Hamlet is about what happens after death –“the undiscovered country, from whose borne no traveler has returned”. The play is, after all, a ghost story. Hamlet’s father is the ghost – but he is described as “this dreaded sight” and “a spirit of health or goblin damned” that is likely, at any moment, to take on “some other horrible form”. The form of the story is one of “The Grateful Dead” (yes, the band knew folklore motifs), where a ghost assigns a task to the living. In other plays, the characters think of dying. In Hamlet, they think about being dead.

The ghost scene sets the mood of the play. While the ghost is present, Hamlet believes in it. When it is gone, he has doubts (as any of us might). But the ghost sets the mood for all the great poetry about death, and even the comic relief scene in the grave (“Alas, poor Yorick”). Hamlet’s soliloquies are not (I think) indications of his character. When he says, “I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of things that it were better that my mother had not borne me…..”, he is not elucidating his own character, but talking (poetically) for everyone “crawling between earth and heaven”.

I could go on. "The rest is silence," is Hamlet's last line. But I don’t think we need see the CHARACTER Hamlet as a great poet any more than we need to see Violetta as a great soprano. The poems elucidate Hamlet’s character, and set the emotional tone for the play, just as the songs elucidate Violetta’s character and set the emotional tone for the opera. Of course nobody talks or sings like that.

We must learn to enjoy the play for what it is, not descry it for what it isn’t.

I don't think the meaning becomes necessarily any clearer, or that the poetic meaning is the only meaning, or even that there's only one poetic meaning, but I do agree that the poetry is the most important element in our enjoyment of the play, and I'm sure Shaw would completely agree. He really doesn't belong on that list of Shakespeare detractors, despite his numerous bombastic denunciations of Shakespeare, and never being able to spell his name right. His anti-Shakespeare rants are mostly a reaction against the indiscriminate idolatrous worship of Shakespeare (I think it was he who coined the term Bardolatry), and he also deplored what he considered his lack of reformist zeal and social purpose, which he believed was every playwright's duty. Nevertheless, even in the middle of his rants, he usually pays tribute to the one he considered the greatest of all authors in the English language. To quote Shakespeare scholar Robert B. Pierce, "With his habitual bluntness, Shaw frequently makes clear that his attack on Shakespeare is a rhetorical extravagance justified by a strategic purpose. Indeed the passage quoted at the beginning of this article goes on, “But I am bound to add that I pity the man who cannot enjoy Shakespeare. He has outlasted thousands of abler thinkers, and will outlast a thousand more.” Shaw loves his Shakespeare and knows the canon with an intimacy that enables him to catch actors in their minor textual variations and to excoriate managers for their inept cuts and rearrangements. Phrases from the dramas come naturally to his pen, whatever topic he may be writing about. And he regularly displays not only a detailed familiarity with the plays but a powerful grasp of their dramatic technique, the insights of a fellow playwright. It is no accident that theatrical people as intelligent and informed as Ellen Terry and Harley Granville Barker have been glad to discuss Shakespeare with him on equal terms."


The mood and emotional resonance of the plays results from the poetry, just as in opera, the mood and emotional resonance is created by the music. It is the mood and emotional response (a poetic response) that the audience seeks, and some of Shakespeare’s severest critics (like Tolstoy, Eliot and Shaw) miss the point when they complain about the plot or the implausibility of the character’s motivations.

Shaw was a music and drama critic for about ten years before he became a playwright, and was always very appreciative of Shakespeare's 'word-music'. He actually believed in the superiority of music drama over traditional spoken drama for expressing feelings and emotions. This passage, from an essay written in 1894, speaks of Wagner’s ability to integrate music and words and the advantages of music drama over traditional spoken drama -

"Wagner regarded all Beethoven’s important instrumental works as tone poems; and he himself, though he wrote so much for the orchestra alone in the course of his music dramas, never wrote, or could write, a note of absolute music. The fact is, there is a great deal of feeling, highly poetic and highly dramatic, which cannot be expressed by mere words—because words are the counters of thinking, not of feeling—but which can be supremely expressed by music. The poet tries to make words serve his purpose by arranging them musically, but is hampered by the certainty of becoming absurd if he does not make his musically arranged words mean something to the intellect as well as to the feeling.

"For example, the unfortunate Shakespeare could not make Juliet say:

O Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, Romeo, Romeo;
and so on for twenty lines. He had to make her, in an extremity of unnaturalness, begin to argue the case in a sort of amatory legal fashion, thus:

O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name,
Or, if thou wilt not, etc., etc., etc.
It is verbally decorative; but it is not love. And again:

Parting is such sweet sorrow
That I shall say goodnight till it be morrow;
which is a most ingenious conceit, but one which a woman would no more utter at such a moment than she would prove the rope ladder to be the shortest way out because any two sides of a triangle are together greater than the third.

"Now these difficulties do not exist for the tone poet. He can make Isolde say nothing but "Tristan, Tristan, Tristan, Tristan, Tristan," and Tristan nothing but "Isolde, Isolde, Isolde, Isolde, Isolde," to their hearts’ content without creating the smallest demand for more definite explanations; and as for the number of times a tenor and soprano can repeat "Addio, addio, addio," there is no limit to it."

According to Shaw the poet tries to make his words serve this purpose by arranging them musically, and he thought Shakespeare was more successful at this word music than any writer in the English language.

[MorpheusSandman]

Hamlet is verse drama, so it's both. However, we have to be careful when making a distinction between "poetic" and "poetry." "Poetic" are things often associated with poetry, "poetry" is what we (should) define as being different than prose. A great many prose writers are "poetic" without writing poetry, and however much Finnegans Wake may resemble poetry more so than the typical novel, it is still a novel in prose, not poetry in verse. I agree that the emotion and tone of Hamlet come through via the poetry, however, most of the drama is generated by the rife ambiguity (things like Hamlet's "madness"), and the sheer willingness of Shakespeare to toy with audience's expectations of what a typical "revenge drama" should be.

Hitchcock once said "I enjoy playing audiences like a piano," and I can't help but think Shakespeare thought the same. Shakespeare took the most extrovert of genres, one in which external conflict is created over actions and succeeded by other actions, and introverted it. In Hamlet, the external conflict provides access to internal conflict, which then becomes the focus. Those that struggle with Hamlet as a play consistently harp on the external aspects: why Hamlet doesn't act and take revenge, eg. They miss that the real purpose of the play is Hamlet's interior disillusionment. The death of his father, his mother's remarriage, his Uncle's usurpation of the throne, Ophelia's rebuffs... all of these "external" things causes Hamlet, probably for the first time in his life, to meditate on things that he'd never thought about (death, female infidelity, ambition) in his life. The fact that he has such a reaction to seeing Yorick's skull, even though Yorick had been dead for years, is a clue at how such "facts of life" are just now striking him. Before all of these things, Hamlet thought himself the center of the universe, with a kingly father, queenly mother, jesters and servants at his disposal... he essentially lived in a fantasy world that he now sees crumbling around him. The majority of the play represents his emotional and intellectual reaction to his own personal apocalypse.

One of the consistent dichotomies presented in Shakespeare's plays is that of appearance, what the characters see/think/feel/etc., and that of truth. This is especially true of his mature tragedies, whether it's the deception of Iago on Othello; Lear's realization that true love is different than professed love; the hallucinations of MacBeth and Lady MacBeth generated by guilt; Antony and Cleopatra's cloistered, child-like hedonism in which they try to ignore/deny the wars closing in on them; Coriolanus's inflexibility and inability to cater to the people that subsequently allows himself to be manipulated. In every case, including Hamlet, it's the characters' delusions that lead to their demise, one way or the other. Hamlet is probably the most subtle of these because Shakespeare thrusts Hamlet's confusion on the audience, while in the other plays the audience usually senses the dramatic irony between what the characters say/think and what the truth is (obviously so in Othello). In Hamlet, however, the audience is as clueless as the characters: is Hamlet really mad? Is he really upset about Ophelia? His mother's remarriage? His uncle's usurpation? His father's murder? What is he really attempting to do with all of his antics? In a sense, the "play within a play" is the most telling moment, as that's when Hamlet comes to realize that an illusive mirror can reveal truth more strongly than when you're staring directly at the truth. Art is the lie that reveals the truth we often can't see. In that sense, Hamlet also learns the value of "acting" as well, the value of putting on a persona to manipulate what others think/feel (even in the very first scene he mentions how the external "shows" of grief are things that a man might "play," but he has that within which can't be seen). So there's a metacommentary there about the relationship of art and life and well.