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.
