Hamlet Read-Along: Act II, Scene 2 -- Part Two

Picking back up where we left off on Thursday, with line 313, and here comes Polonius to tell Hamlet what he already knows, thanks to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:  a troupe of players has arrived at Elsinore.  Hamlet behaves a little off-kilter again when Polonius is there, but mostly he's just being rude and snarky.

Polonius gets another funny bit here, as he drones on and on about all the possible combinations of genres these players like to perform.  Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays that combine genres, so I feel like he's almost poking a little fun at himself and his own acting company here, saying they can't help throwing as many things into a play as possible.  After all, many of his tragedies are rooted in histories, his history plays often swing tragic or comic, and some of his comedies contain so many tragic elements we call them "problem plays" because they refuse to be neatly categorized.

Okay, anyway, here enters Hamlet's other father-figure:  the First Player, also referred to as the Player King.  King Hamlet may be Hamlet's physical father, but the First Player seems to me to be his sort of creative father.  Mentor, older and wiser friend, guide.  Here we learn that Hamlet is not only a devoted fan of theater, but something of an actor himself.  Surely anything he has learned from theater about acting has been helping him with his pretending to be mad.

Hamlet asks the First Player for a speech Hamlet heard once and liked -- and considering he's only heard it once, wow, Hamlet remembers a whole bunch of it, doesn't he?  There's that fierce intelligence of his again.  It's a bit of a play about the sacking of Troy, and I'm going to share this bit of it from Branagh's Hamlet (1996) because I like how the First Player (Charlton Heston) speaks the speech with great passion, but also, they show the scene being acted out by Judi Dench as Hecuba and John Gielgud as Priam.  This is the only way I get to include a scene of John Gielgud in Hamlet, even though he's not playing the title role.

Okay, so why does Hamlet ask for this particular speech?  What is going on in it?  Well, Pyrrhus is the son of Achilles, and he's killing King Priam to avenge his father's death, while Queen Hecuba looks on and mourns.  Suddenly you see why this scene might have readily jumped to Hamlet's mind, why he might desire to hear and see it performed.  Whether anyone else yet gets the connection between it and what's been happening in Elsinore, we don't know.

Also, there's that ear motif again, did you catch it?  The city crashes down around them and "[t]akes prisoner Pyrrhus' ear" (407), which just means catches his attention, but it not only catches his attention, it causes him to do nothing (412).  And Hamlet will soon reveal via soliloquy that he's upset with himself because he's been doing nothing about the information he has heard.  And during that speech, he'll also toss off the idea of "cleav[ing] the general ear with horrid speech" (489).  Once you start looking for them, those ears are everywhere.

The First Player is moved to tears by the scene he's reenacting, and Hamlet thanks him for such a moving performance, then tells Polonius to find them a place to stay and so on.  He tells us just how important he thinks actors and plays are:  "they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.  After your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live" (453-56).  Of course, Shakespeare, being an actor and a playwright, would probably think actors and plays are important, but Hamlet thinking so as well makes us understand how dedicated he is to plays and playacting.  And since this whole play is about the difference between truth and pretending, that's pretty important, I think.

And, hey, check it out!  Hamlet is a bit of a playwright himself -- he plans to write up 12-16 lines to add to the play.  I find that nifty :-)

So after everyone leaves, we get one of my favorite soliloquies:  the "rogue and peasant slave" speech.  Hamlet compares himself unfavorably to his friend the First Player -- Hamlet has so many reasons to be angry and sad, but he's been wasting his time pretending to be crazy instead.  The First Player, on the other hand, can get himself all worked up over something pretend, a story he's telling.  Hamlet wonders if he's a coward, and hasn't killed Claudius because of that -- he's angry with himself, he's just sort of brainstorming here about why he hasn't killed Claudius yet.  And through that brainstorming, he firms up his new idea of having the players perform a play that resembles the way the Ghost described his murder.  If Claudius freaks out about it, Hamlet will know the Ghost was speaking the truth.

Here's Richard Burton's rendition of this speech, just because I feel like including videos in this post.  

Regicide is serious business.  I don't think Hamlet is a coward -- I think he is very intelligent and cautious, and understands what will very likely happen if he does kill Claudius.  Either he'll be killed himself for his crime, or he'll have to flee and live the rest of his life in exile.  It's no wonder he's been hesitating, is it?  Harold Bloom suggests also that "Hamlet cannot believe that the proper use of his capability and godlike reason is to perform a revenge killing" (Hamlet:  Poem Unlimited, p. 70).  He has his whole life ahead of him, and the Ghost of his dead father says he's bound to throw that away to avenge this murder -- is that at all fair or right?  These can be our Possible Discussion Questions today -- is Hamlet is a coward; why does he wait so long to act; should he even have to do this in the first place?

Favorite Lines:

"Out, out, thou strumpet Fortune!"  (423)

"Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?" (468-69)

"Now I am alone" (475).

"...the devil hath power 
T' assume a pleasing shape" (525-26).

"The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king" (530-31).