Keys to Interpretation of Hamlet
William Shakespeare's Hamlet is, at heart, a play about suicide. Though it is surrounded by a fairly standard revenge plot, the play's core is an intense psychodrama about a prince gone mad from the pressures of his station and his unrequited love for Ophelia. He longs for the ultimate release of killing himself - but why? In this respect, Hamlet is equivocal - he gives several different motives depending on the situation. But we learn to trust his soliloquies - his thoughts - more than his actions. In Hamlet's own speeches lie the indications for the methods we should use for its interpretation.
Hamlet's reason for suicide is the death of his father, the late King Hamlet - or at least this is what he tells the world. He claims his father's death as the reason in his first soliloquy (1.2.133-164), but we are led towards other reasons by the evidence he gives. In the famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy, he says: "For who would bear... the pangs of despised love... when he himself might his quietus make/with a bare bodkin?" (3.1.78-84). The word "despised" is glossed as "unrequited" - and thus we are led to speculation that Ophelia, not the late King, is the true cause of his suicidal urges. The claim that he is mourning his father seems to me to be at best an excuse - in the public eye as he is, Hamlet cannot sink so low as to be moved to kill himself by a woman.
This is an example of a phenomenon that we note throughout Hamlet - the separation of what is stated on the surface from the implications a few layers beneath. The play works on two levels - the revenge drama works as a backdrop for Hamlet's internal psychodrama. It is clear that Shakespeare intends for Hamlet's thoughts to be superior to his outward actions in interpretation of the play. After listing all the outward signs of his depression, he tells his mother that he would prefer to be considered on the basis of his thoughts: "These indeed 'seem'/For they are actions that a man might play;/But I have that within which passes show/These but the trappings and the suits of woe" (1.2.86-89). Yet Hamlet, for all the disdain for played action that he shows here, also appreciates its power, in his remarks on the player's soliloquy on Hecuba (2.2.576-634). The soliloquy of which he speaks, though, was like his own soliloquies intended to show the actor's thoughts; Hamlet clearly then believes that thoughts are superior to actions.
And thus we return to the central speech of the play, the "to be or not to be" soliloquy. In ruminating on the dichotomy of thought and action, Hamlet tells us:
HAMLET
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 enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action. (3.1.91-96)
Hamlet is a coward when it comes to suicide, lacking the internal resolve to go through with this ghastly deed. It is not that he does not wish to die. He has been thinking of it throughout the play, and indeed earlier wished that death would come to him: "O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt,/Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew,/Or that the Everlasting had not fixed/His canon 'gainst self-slaughter!" (1.2.133-136). Rather, his introspective character keeps him from suicide. Similarly, our "conscience" should guide us in our interpretation of the play. We should not come too quickly to conclusions, but rather stop, mull over the language, and allow Shakespeare's characters to reveal their magic to us.
As it is with all literature, we cannot separate ourselves from our interpretation of the work. Great works of literature tend towards the oracular, as Ophelia does in her madness, and they can be interpreted in many ways: "Her speech is nothing./Yet the unshaped use of it doth move/The hearers to collection. They aim at it/And botch the words up fit to their own thoughts..." (4.5.9-12). Similarly, Shakespeare's message in this play, especially with four centuries of intervening linguistic static, is found more in the reader than in the writer. The writer merely sets words to the page; it is our job to make them our own.
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