Hamlet’s Other Purpose

By GEORGE F. HELD

Hamlet first appears on stage in the second scene; he does not learn of his father’s murder until the fifth. That he is presented to us before learning of that murder is a most important element in the play’s structure, for Shakespeare employs that second scene to bring out that Hamlet, even before learning of his father’s murder and of the need to avenge it, already has another purpose to which he is passionately dedicated. This other purpose remains of primary importance to him throughout the play. His pursuit of it is what impedes his pursuit of the purpose of revenge. His other purpose is to prove that his love, unlike his mother's, really is and does not merely seem.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312142510

Book preview

Hamlet’s Other Purpose

Hamlet’s Other Purpose

By

George F. Held

Preface

This essay (without the Addenda) was previously published in Anglia 106 (1988): 315-37, and in my book The Good That Lives After Them: A Pattern in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1995) 12-38. It is now available online both as a separate essay and as a chapter in my ebook A Christian Pattern in Shakespeare’s Tragedies, for sale at Lulu. I plan to make all the chapters of that book available online for free as separate essays. If you find this essay to be of interest, you might express your appreciation for it by purchasing at Lulu the ebook of which it forms a part.

Hamlet’s Other Purpose

Hamlet first appears on stage in the second scene; he does not learn of his father’s murder until the fifth. That he is present­ed to us before learning of that murder is a most impor­tant element in the play’s structure, for Shakespeare employs that second scene to bring out that Hamlet, even before learning of his father’s murder and of the need to avenge it, already has another purpose to which he is passionately dedicated. This other purpose remains of primary importance to him throughout the play. His pursuit of it, I will argue, is what impedes his pursuit of the purpose of revenge.

His first speech of length suggests what is the nature of this other purpose:

Seems, madam? Nay, it is; I know not seems.

’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,

Nor customary suits of solemn black,

Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,

No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,

Nor the dejected ’havior of the visage,

Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,

That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,

For they are actions that a man might play,

But I have that within which passeth show;

These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (I.ii.76-86)

Hamlet asserts that his grief, unlike his mother’s, really is and does not merely seem. But why does he, or why would anyone, place so great a value on real rather than merely apparent grief? The answer is simple and unmistakable: because he considers the quality of one’s grief to be an index to the quality of one’s love. His mother’s grief merely seems and is not true grief, and from this fact he concludes that her love for his father merely seemed and was not true love. His grief and his love, he protests, really are and do not merely seem. His primary purpose throughout the rest of the play, I suggest, is to prove that what he says here is true. Before discussing further the nature of his primary purpose and the means by which he will achieve it, we ought first to consider the additional evidence that Hamlet believes that his mother never really loved his father, and consider also the general and sweeping conclusions which he draws from this fact.

That Hamlet believes his mother’s current relationship with Claudius is one of lust, not love, is implied in his first monologue (for example, Frailty, thy name is woman: I.ii.146), and is brought out explicitly in his remarks to her in her closet. Hamlet there express­es some doubt that a woman of his mother’s age can be afflicted with lust (III.iv.68-70), but in the end seems to conclude that his mother’s actions can be explained on no other basis:

O shame, where is thy blush?

Rebellious hell,

If thou canst mutine in a matron’s bones,

To flaming youth let virtue be as wax

And melt in her own fire; proclaim no shame

When the compulsive ardour gives the charge,

Since frost itself as actively doth burn

And reason panders will. (III.iv.81-88)

His remarks there, furthermore, make clear his belief that his mother’s present relationship with Claudius reflects back on the nature of her earlier relationship with his father:

Such an act

That blurs the