"This Is I, Hamlet the Dane"

My Take on the Greatest Play of All Time

The search for meaning – meaning in the world, meaning in our own nature – can be agonizing.  We find ourselves in a baffling and treacherous world.  We encounter the darkness, corruption, evil.  Secular power has turned criminal, lawless, base.  Wisdom has been reduced to cunning while truth has been baited, hooked, and devoured by falsehood.

We must respond to this world’s demands.  We must act in it.  And we become puzzled and perplexed.  Our sense of self, our mind, and our soul become confused and conflicted.

Hamlet fails to love anyone, fails to truly listen to anyone.  He is divided against himself. 

And yet Hamlet’s awareness is so perceptive and keen, always expanding its circumference.  His consciousness is so wide, so unbounded, so capacious.  His mind is agile and subtle yet intense and formidable.  No one can see as he does. 

Hamlet can hear himself.  And overhear himself.  He never ceases to question himself.  He knows he can be dangerous, even sadistic.  He knows he can be evasive.  He is afflicted by his own self-scrutiny, self-knowledge, self-revision. 

This complex, charismatic, and charmed character has a hold over us.  We love Hamlet.  We identify with Hamlet.  But we must be careful, we must be on our guard, as he leads us toward the abyss, or we will share in his bitter self-contempt and in his fate. 

To avoid Hamlet’s fate, we must become sure of our bearings.  We must grapple with moral and ethical dilemmas, work out our values, exercise judgment, and restrain ourselves from evil conduct.

We can see people who descend from a life of virtue into a life of contriving and of falling prey to contrivances.  What is the wise response to evil?  What is eating away at our attempts to act in accord with what is good?

We cannot be lazy.  Beyond the surface of things, beyond the world of appearances, we must discover our true motives and make the effort to discern other people’s motives, which are often obscure to us.

“You go not until I set you up a glass,” says he, “where you may see the inmost part of you.”  “Thou turns’t my eyes,” says she, “into my very soul.”

As we look around us at a sea of troubles, will we do what we ought to do, when we “have cause and will and strength and means to do it”?  Will we be “noble in reason”, “like an angel in apprehension”, “admirable in action”? 

We might become, at least some of the time, “passion’s slave”.  But we have within us “that which passeth show”.  What is best within us deserves to be worn “in my heart’s core, ay, in my heart of heart”.  And now life asks us for an answer.  “For ‘tis a question left us yet to prove, whether love lead fortune, or else fortune love.”

Hamlet stands in the cemetery and holds in his hands the skull of the only person who truly loved him when he was a child.  Hamlet leaves us feeling empty with his cheerful brutality about this man’s mortality.  He disquiets us with awareness that our own physical body will succumb to Nature’s laws and to time.  He chills us, for we too will have our pate knocked about by a shovel and filled with dirt. 

Conversely, however, Hamlet thinks quite differently of his own death.  He knows that he will leave behind “a wounded name”.  He knows that his death “will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.  The readiness is all.”  He is prepared and he affirms that “there is special providence in the fall of a sparrow”. 

But this is not his first affirmation.  For he has already affirmed this, at the cemetery, and has affirmed that there is deep meaning in his tragic life: “What is he whose grief bears such an emphasis?  Whose phrase of sorrow conjures the wand’ring stars and makes them stand like wonder-wounded hearers?  This is I, Hamlet the Dane.”