Is Hamlet incapable of action, or What is Dramatic Action anyway?

Hamlet is NOT a whiny loser.

Published

24 August 2024

Introduction

For generations of readers, audiences, commentators Hamlet is paralysed by his total inability to act. In act one he swears himself to avenge his father, and only three hours later does he finally achieve what he set out to do which is to thrust a sword into Claudius. The play in between these actions is filled with interminable speeches and an increasingly perplexing series of scenes and actions. It’s as if the Prince actually has gone mad. The view from the 21st century is that we see clearly what Hamlet is about: it’s someone who spends too long deciding what to do, until circumstances dictate that he actually does it. Hamlet is emotionally constipated, a procrastinator, and doesn’t want to risk actual change in his life.

Whenever someone tells me this, I’m like: did you watch the play? Failing that, did you watch a film adaptation? Did you read the play? Whatever the merits or demerits of what Hamlet does, the fact is that he has a singular goal from the end of act one, revenge; and he pursues it, pretty single mindedly, until he dies at the end of act five. His actions speak of nothing else. Other Shakespearean leading men seem lazy by comparison: MacBeth needs to be talked into murdering Duncan; Lear takes a whole play to see his folly; Othello doesn’t believe Iago until well into the middle of the play.

I always have the feeling that I’ve gone slightly mad, that maybe I’ve missed something. What gives?

Who was Hamlet?

Strictly speaking there is no one Hamlet. There are some marks on pages which constitute the playtext. And amongst these marks are some lines attributed to an entity called Hamlet. But there is no Hamlet until an actor steps out onto a stage and assumes the appearance of Hamlet and actually says the lines in a theatre.

But even before this happens, we can learn some things about Hamlet: that he is the Prince of Denmark. Hamlet’s claim to the throne thwarted by his Uncle, who has married his mother after the mysterious death of Hamlet’s father (also called Hamlet). Hamlet is a Protestant, and studies at Wittenberg, the high seat of Protestantism. We know that at the start of the play that he’s depressed (I mean, who wouldn’t be?) But until the play actually commences, this is all we can learn about Hamlet. Because he’s not a collection of facts, but a series of actions. It’s these actions which constitute who Hamlet is, and there’s a lot of them!

What is implied by the lines Shakespeare wrote? Despite the fashion of saying Shakespeare is a poet, and his plays are a sort of performance poetry, if an actor just did that - come onstage and recite a load of lines - it would probably be boring. Instead in drama, an actor’s lines must be transitive: characters are trying to do something, they have a goal, a want, and when they’re onstage, they try to achieve that goal.

Lines and actions and objectives don’t add up to drama. If I can get what I want easily, you won’t be entertained. Anything which doesn’t cost something to get isn’t worth doing. Drama only happens when my want comes up against some kind of obstacle; that’s what generates conflict.

But we can be more specific still. Maybe my obstacle is internal, and to get what I want I have to step outside the suite of actions which have always been second nature to me; I have to ask out the girl, or be assertive where once I’d held my tongue. Maybe instead my obstacle is some natural force; the pitiful gaze of infinity, or an uncaring universe.

Neither of these are dramatic.

No actor can depict a character changing from cowardly to courageous without scenes demonstrating that change. That is drama requires other characters, and dramatic action is my objective, striking against your objectives. A scene only happens when two characters come onstage and have it out. And a play is just a sequence of such scenes.

A good protagonist generates - in front of us! - the will to go on, and demonstrates the change that is the heart of their character. Onstage. In real time. Before our eyes.

All this is to say that there’s not a single character who comes onstage and refuses to act. The part would be unplayable, undramatic, and unentertaining. Which is why it’s so odd that generations of commentators have decided that Hamlet is indecisive, and generations of productions have produced hours of a mopey prince boring audiences shitless.

Every age has it’s own Hamlet: the victorians had a rational and realistic Hamlet; Hamlet was an existential pioneer in the post-WW2 decades; and today he’s an example of someone who talks rather than taking action. But Hamlet was not some indecisive loser who simply couldn’t get on with his task. That interpretation is common, plausible, and wrong. The problem with interpreting Hamlet in this way is that Hamlet is one of Shakespeare’s most active characters. Just consider what he gets done in Acts 1-3:

That’s more than most people get done in a year, and completely consistent with someone who has a goal and is actively, rabidly, pursuing it?

Obstacles

Consider what Hamlet swears himself to do: eventually, he is going to kill the King. To contemplate killing Claudius meant challenging God. In terms of sins, it’s pretty much up there with the worst thing you could possibly do. Let alone even consider. Could you just walk up to King Charles and try to kill him? And if you succeeded, do you think you’d survive? This is a short way of saying that Hamlet has obstacles to overcome in the course of the play:

  1. He doesn’t even know if what the Ghost told him was true, and there are reasons to doubt this.
  2. Everything he does is monitored and reported to Claudius.
  3. He is a Prince, with a legitimate claim to the throne, so he has a big target on his back.

These aren’t small things!

Claudius’ Guilt

One of the main jobs of a playwright is managing the tension in the audience. Go too hard and it’s too much for the audience. They can’t take in play. Too little tension is also just as bad: the audience tunes out and doesn’t come back after the interval. The tension ramps up until the middle of the play, after which all the forces set up in the first half wind down to an inevitable conclusion. Shakespeare is a master of managing tension. And he gives us what is, in my opinion, the perfect midpoint in any work of fiction.

Up to the performance of the play-within-a-play Hamlet has been looking for one thing: evidence of Claudius’ guilt. Claudius’ reaction is one that Hamlet can only interpret as guilt; it’s not, in fact, a direct admission! Shakespeare gives the audience the decisive confession, and has Hamlet turn up just a little too late. In the theatre you stew to yourself: kill him! Kill him! He can’t pray, he’s so laden with guilt. We know what happens next: Hamlet tells us, explicitly, that if he kills Claudius, then the King goes straight to heaven; which is not a fitting end to someone so murderous.

The whole first half of Hamlet is a mystery!

The power of this scene is that several strands of the play come into their own here. We have seen Hamlet come up with and execute a plan. It’s been successful. But we’ve also seen him try to throw off the scent, and pretend to be mad, to be suicidal. At the midpoint Claudius’ schemes turn in on themselves, and the audience is witness to his confession. Just what they had wanted! The audience has become drawn into the corruption of Elsinore, unwitting aides of Claudius. But Hamlet is left ignorant! He arrives too late to hear the incrimination. The audience is ahead of him, but from now on definitively on Hamlet’s side.

The end

How does Hamlet end? With a curtain and an applause if the performance was any good. But really the play ends with Hamlet stabbing Claudius. The air kind of goes out of the play after that, which is why Shakespeare wraps things up (relatively) quickly.

What happens before that? A sword fight, but what happens the moment before Hamlet stabs Claudius? Let’s look at the text:

The King! The King’s to blame! [320]

Hamlet doesn’t stab Claudius until Laertes announces Claudius’ guilt! (And how close Hamlet comes to flubbing it! No wonder the play is a classic: right up until the end the whole thing hangs in the balance!)

And why does Laertes announce this? Because he’s mortally wounded. And why is he mortally wounded? If you go backwards through the play, you will see what is incidental, and what is necessary for the outcome.

Political Landscape

Let’s do this for one piece of exposition. Think: does Hamlet know that the ghosts’ tale is true? No! Hamlet was a student at Wittenberg, the nexus of the Protestant Revolution in Europe. For Protestants, there are no ghosts wandering the earth in purgatory. There is only the Devil trying to trick you, and the Devil tricks you with truths you want to hear! Of course Hamlet couldn’t just trust the ghost.

So why did he have to play mad? Hamlet isn’t just some guy. He’s the prince. I.e. he should have inherited the throne instead of Claudius. But instead matters got in the way, and he found himself shunted out of the line of succession. Claudius commands the loyalty of the Danish lords, and, most importantly, Polonius, the chief spymaster of the court.

This is all another way of saying that Hamlet couldn’t possibly just kill Claudius: he couldn’t trust the ghost, he can’t trust his friends, and he’s got a big target on his back because he’s a political threat to the new King who hasn’t quite solidified his rule. (Claudius comments later in the play, to Laertes, that Hamlet commands the passion of King’s subjects. Of course there’s a target on his back).

So, going mad doesn’t seem like such a bad idea at all.

Why should we care?

It’s easy to convince yourself that your problems will be solved by talking about them, as opposed to taking action. Taking action means taking a risk, that things may not work out.

Or they may work out, but not in a way which is to our liking. This is why we think that Hamlet can’t kill Claudius in Act 1, Scene 6; instead he drags the whole affair out for a further three hours. The moral we are told to take is that we should be decisive, proactive, generate our own opportunities, and get on with things.

Instead it’s better to see Hamlet as a deeply political commentary. This is a play about who should be king, what a good king is, and what happens to a country when a bad king sits on the throne. Coincidentally, James I ascended to the throne in 1603, the year Hamlet was first published, after a long and protracted battle by the Tudors to prevent Stuart from taking the crown. Forty years later, England would erupt into civil war. This was a play about someone who took political action, and what that meant.

Our age - the modern age - is one of prudence. We like to know the outcomes of our actions before they’ve happened, and in doing so we literalise the outcomes we don’t want. Hamlet is not like this at all: when he vows to avenge the ghost’s tale, he doesn’t even know if the ghost told the truth. It would be right to say that Hamlet is imprudent. He was imprudent to stay in Elsinore, and imprudent to meet with the ghost, and imprudent to stage the play, and imprudent to stab those curtains. He was imprudent, but not indecisive. We should stop interpreting Hamlet as a personal parable. We interpret Hamlet as incapable of action, because we see ourselves incapable of taking political action. Yet Hamlet shows a way: you might have to do things which look, to an outsider, as being completely mad.