Hamlet

‘… you would pluck out the heart of my mystery’. Hamlet's words to Guildenstern describe what thousands of books and articles have tried to do since Hamlet was first performed. But his character remains elusive. Hamlet plays many roles throughout the play: alienated outsider, potential suicide, actor, swordsman, joker, friend of Horatio, angry son, blood-thirsty revenger, lacerating self-critic. His mood swings from depression to elation, from extreme self-loathing to quiet acceptance of his fate in ‘the readiness is all’.

Hamlet has been seen as an ironic commentator on mortality and sin, a man with acute sexual problems, a genuine madman, a clever impersonator of madness, a man tortured by irreconcilable moral dilemmas, an unhappy adolescent, a puritanical fundamentalist, a dreamer, a philosopher, a truly noble prince.

The script shows that Hamlet is a great listener. He listens intently to what is said to him and often seizes on a word or phrase to construct his own reply. His very first words: ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind’ (Act 1 Scene 2, line 65), imply that Claudius is too presumptuous in calling him ‘son’ (kin), and that his nature (kind) is unlike Claudius’s. His next line ‘I am too much i’th’sun’ puns on Claudius's ‘son’. His following two replies to Gertrude pun ironically on her use of ‘common’ and ‘seems’.

Hamlet revels in how the slipperiness of language gives potential for bitter or comic puns or ironic retorts. He uses puns to great effect, picking up a speaker's words and giving them back with a different meaning. The Gravedigger is the only other character in the play to use this style of deliberate misunderstanding. He gives Hamlet a taste of his own medicine.

• ⧫ Identify examples of this linguistic technique of Hamlet’s. Against which characters does he use it most frequently?

• ⧫ Hamlet not only listens carefully to others. He listens intently to himself and comments on his own thoughts. Identify passages in his soliloquies in which he comments on his own thoughts and feelings (e.g. with self-disgust or reproof).