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Before we get back to the text of the play, after our little exegetical detour, I thought it would be nice to get back in the spirit of things with this passage from Rosenberg. We are getting ready to resume act two, and Hamlet is pacing through the court and reading a book, as has become his practice, and Polonius is going to approach him, to see if he can glean some more insight into Hamlet’s strange turn of moods and behavior, hoping to confirm that it is love for his daughter that has caused him to go a little trippy.
_ _ _
The time has come to re-evaluate Hamlet’s objectives: He is not the same man we experienced before the meeting with the Ghost. It may seem - and some have said - that he has no objectives: that his “madness” serves no purpose: that he is caught in an eddy of inaction, and events must stimulate him. But does not the actor-reader know better? We-Hamlet are on the way somewhere, and our body, our emotions, and our minds are at work. We do not walk here every day for no reason: we are watching, we are listening, we are seriously disturbing Claudius, we are trying to work out a strategy we can pursue. We are reading for that purpose. Hamlet is, as Empson observed, successfully keeping a secret by displaying that he has one.
The design of this act, building steadily in tension to the soliloquy, depends on Hamlet’s ever intensifying frustration, ever closer approach to explosion. [...]
Empson writes brilliantly of Hamlet’s “dream-like though fierce quality, … all his behavior must be startling.” We-Hamlet are a revenge hero: we can kill, we will kill, we are getting to know how much now we want to kill. We are trying to loosen and throw off unidentifiable inner bonds with as much energy as we would try to free our bodies from constricting ropes. Above all, always: we are dangerous.
-- Marvin Rosenberg, “The Masks of Hamlet”
_ _ _
The time has come to re-evaluate Hamlet’s objectives: He is not the same man we experienced before the meeting with the Ghost. It may seem - and some have said - that he has no objectives: that his “madness” serves no purpose: that he is caught in an eddy of inaction, and events must stimulate him. But does not the actor-reader know better? We-Hamlet are on the way somewhere, and our body, our emotions, and our minds are at work. We do not walk here every day for no reason: we are watching, we are listening, we are seriously disturbing Claudius, we are trying to work out a strategy we can pursue. We are reading for that purpose. Hamlet is, as Empson observed, successfully keeping a secret by displaying that he has one.
The design of this act, building steadily in tension to the soliloquy, depends on Hamlet’s ever intensifying frustration, ever closer approach to explosion. [...]
Empson writes brilliantly of Hamlet’s “dream-like though fierce quality, … all his behavior must be startling.” We-Hamlet are a revenge hero: we can kill, we will kill, we are getting to know how much now we want to kill. We are trying to loosen and throw off unidentifiable inner bonds with as much energy as we would try to free our bodies from constricting ropes. Above all, always: we are dangerous.
-- Marvin Rosenberg, “The Masks of Hamlet”
