“Something Smells Rotten in Denmark”
Act 1 and 2 in "Hamlet"
Oxford School Shakespeare’s edition of “Hamlet” (2007), a highly recommendable edition to approach the play, ushers the drama with the word “revenge,” an ancestral immemorial impulse to get your own back.
The entourage of sprawling words follows: Tit for tat, reprisal, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life (Exodus, chapter 21), retaliation, vindictiveness …
Like in a room of
mirrors, revenge spawns and hatches through venomous words poured
into the ears of audience and characters. In many Shakesperean
plays, words infect minds and ears literally and metaphorically.
King Hamlet is thought to have been stung by a snake: “”A serpent
stung me—so the whole ear of Denmark /Is by a forged process
of my death /Rankly abus’d” (Act 1, scene 5, lines 35-36) but,
actually, an unidentified poison, hebanon has been poured into his
ear; Lady Macbeth poisons Macbeth’s ear, questioning his “manhood,”
and insuflates his thirst for blood.
The King of Norway and Fortinbras
Retaliation starts even before the play commences: old grudges from Norway weigh heavily upon the plotting king. Claudius mentions that the king of Norway has taken the throne from his brother Fortinbras.
“To Norway; uncle of young Fortinbras--
Who, impotent and bedrid, scacerly hears
of this his nephew’s purpose—to suppress
His further gait herein, in that the levies,
the lists, and full proportions are all made
Out of this subject…”
(Act 1, scene 2, lines 28 and following)
King Hamlet and Claudius
Claudius himself has usurped the throne of King Hamlet and married his belated brother’s wife, leaving Prince Hamlet bereft of father, mother and kindgom. Prince Hamlet forced, as Gielgud says, into an impossible predicament, is inexorably dragged by his father’s ghost to get tit for tat:
“Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhouslel’d, disappointed, unanel’d…
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
But howsomever thou pursuest this act,
….
(Act 1, scene 5, lines 76 and following)
Hamlet’s father has died deprived of communion, unsolved of his sins, and not anointed with holy oil (see notes for the Oxford edition, page 31). He, therefore, moans from a beyond of anguish and instances Hamlet, his son, to avenge “the incestuous, adulterate” deed that has deprived him of wife and kingdom. Conjugal treason metonymically spreads to country’s treason as it can be seen in the allusion to the “royal bed of Denmark,” also indicating the usurpation not only of the bridal thalamus but also of his throne. Yet, his feeling of revenge spares his wife whom she acquits with the following lines:
“Taint not thy mind nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her”
(Act 1, scene 5, lines 85 and following)
Pyrrhus and Achiles
A metaliterary reenactment of “revenge” can also be distilled from the presence of the players in Act, scene 2. Hamlet remembers the players who have been summoned to entertain the king and queen in their convivial nuptials from a previous performance in Venice: Pyrrhus revenge on his father’s death. Hamlet himself recites the lines of “Aeneas tale to Dido” (Act 2, scene 2, lines 434 and following) in which Pyrrhus, son of the Greek hero Achilles, led the final attack on Troy in revenge for the death of his father” (Notes to Oxford edition, page 58):
“The rugged Phyrrus, like th’ Hyrcanian beast--
‘Tis not so. It begins with Phyrrhus--
The rugged Phyrrus, he whose sable arms,
Black as his purpose, did the night resemble
When he lay couched in the ominous horse….”
(Act 2, scene 2, lines 438 and following)
Prince Hamlet asks one of the players to perfom “the Murder of Gonzago”, a play of revenge within a play of revenge.
Written on the stars, imprisoned in the words, cosmic forces have aligned to snowball the tragedy of a deranged Hamlet, equivocally ensnared by love as interpreted by Polonius, but , really, with heart and entrails incensed to avenge the smeared father.
