 When we read the story of Amlith in Saxo Grammatics's Chronicle, The History of the Danes, we learn about a prince who uses verbal irony as a means to conceal his plans for avenging his father. Amlith says that it's better to choose the garb of dullness than that of sense and to borrow some protection from a show of utter frenzy. Yet the passions to avenge my father still burns in my heart, but I'm watching the chances I awake the fitting hour. There's a place for all things, against so merciless and dark a spirit must be used to deeper devices of the mind. Just to be sure that we understand that Amlith wasn't lying by the way he acted and the way that was interpreted by people, that his language was metaphorical or misunderstood. The chronicler Saxo Grammatics acts as a narrator and he explains Amlith's thinking for our benefit. He says for he, Amlith was loath to be thought prone to lying about any matter and wished to be held a stranger to falsehood. And accordingly he mingled craft and candor in such a wise that though his words did not lack truth, yet there was nothing to betoken truth and betray how far his keenness went. And this can lead us to understand the character better, but notice this is not coming from Amlith's words. We're being told how to interpret the things that we've read about, the actions we've read and the dialogue from Amlith that we've read. And we're being told that by the narrator, the author, Saxo Grammaticus. And he narrates a lot. He clearly likes this hero, Amlith. He says, oh, valiant Amlith worthy of immortal fame who's being shrewdly armed with a faint of folly with the pretense of madness. He sings his praises and wants to make sure that we appreciate this strategy as much as he does. And this narration, the term for it is free indirect discourse. I introduced this term when we first read Saxo Grammaticus. This is narration that describes a character's thoughts or speech but doesn't do it through the character's own words. It is the narrator telling us how to interpret what the character says or what the character does. But free indirect discourse is not available on the stage. At least not unless the narrator comes up on the stage and explains to everybody what's happening, how to interpret what they're seeing in front of them. And that's the case with Shakespeare's Hamlet. Shakespeare doesn't use narration. He doesn't even use stage direction. If you read through the play, you see when a character enters and when a character exits. But that's about all the stage direction you see. And Hamlet, we have to figure out what's happening entirely from character dialogue. Even what the characters are doing, we have to figure out from character dialogue. The author is a ghost. And that maybe literally the legend has it that Shakespeare actually played the ghost of Hamlet's father. But he's a ghost in the sense that he doesn't tell us how to interpret what Hamlet is saying. He just gives Hamlet dialogue, gives the other character's dialogue and then leaves it to the actors to interpret that in the way they act and then leaves it to the audience to interpret what to make of Hamlet and his motives and how to judge his actions on our own. And this has led to centuries of debate about how we're supposed to interpret Hamlet as a character. How we're supposed to interpret the message of the play if there is a message to the play. If we can say that this is like a morality play where we're supposed to glean some kind of specific moral from it. Is he insane or is he really pretending to be insane? A lot of ink has been spilled arguing that he is and that he isn't. But unlike Saxo grammatica, Shakespeare is not telling us what to think. And we have to be careful when we read the dialogue because there's no narration. This isn't Shakespeare telling us what to think. We can't take the lines of dialogue as if they're words of advice from Shakespeare directly. For example, there's a one line from the play that gets repeated a lot as sort of life advice is the line, to thine own self be true. To thine own self be true and it follows as the night follows the day you cannot be false to another man. Frequently that's cited as William Shakespeare with the implication that this is good life advice from Shakespeare. The problem with that sort of citation is it ignores the fact that this is a line of dialogue. It's not coming from a narrator. It's coming from the character of Polonius. When Polonius is giving advice to a certain laertes before laertes goes back to France, he's giving the sort of typical fatherly advice. Probably very cliche advice at the time. Don't be a borrower and don't be a lender because you'll ruin friendships that way. Don't pick a fight with somebody else but if somebody else picks a fight with you, you show him that you're not gonna take it. And then to thine own self be true, these are pretty common platitudes. The reason we don't wanna take it much beyond that is because we don't have any justification to really take Polonius as a good source of wisdom. After Polonius gets killed, Hamlet has a very low opinion of him. He says this counselor is now most still most secret most grave who was in life a foolish, prading knave. And a knave is a fool, some clown that he was prading. He talked a lot but he didn't know what he was talking about. So do we wanna take life advice from a character who is portrayed as a clown within the play? Now again, that doesn't mean Shakespeare thought he was a clown but Shakespeare's Hamlet thought Polonius was a clown and that frames the advice that he gives to his son Laertes in a very different light. We have to be especially careful with what Hamlet says because like his predecessor, Amlet, Hamlet uses a lot of verbal irony. For instance, when he's saying goodbye to his uncle, the king, who is his stepfather, he says farewell, dear mother. And Claudius, you know, corrects him and says thy loving father, Hamlet, I'm your father, not your mother. But Hamlet then goes on to say my mother because father and mother is man and wife and man and wife is one flesh according to the Christian marriage vows. Man and wife is one flesh and so you are my mother. There is a truth to what he's saying just like with Amlet would say something that's true but sounded ridiculous. But that truth is an interpretive one. It's a figurative language that gets mistaken for literal language. And this is part of Hamlet's inheritance from the character and the story of Amlet. So we have to understand the characters in order to know how to make sense of the things they say. None of them is a nomination narrator, not even the title character. So as we look at these characters, I'm gonna use images from the 1948 Lawrence Olivier film version of Hamlet. It's not my favorite version of Hamlet, it leaves a lot out. I'm just using these mainly because the characters are in costumes close to what they would have worn on the stage in the Globe Theater in 1600. One of the things I don't like about Olivier's film is it opens with this narration. The voiceover narration tells us this is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind. In other words, this is a narrator telling us how we're supposed to interpret the play of Hamlet. And it's a very simplistic interpretation. It's one we may be familiar with. This is just a guy who's indecisive, who can't make up his mind, who thinks too much. But that overlooks all of the complexity of Hamlet. It overlooks what makes Hamlet Hamlet. And this idea that Hamlet is just somebody who can't make up his mind goes back to the Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the English romantic writer in a lecture he did on Shakespeare. But if we focus on what Hamlet does or does not do, we ignore the majority of the play. Most of the dialogue of the play is focused not on describing actions, but on figuring out what other people are thinking, what they may do, what can be done about them. And understanding Hamlet means understanding his perspective. He is oftentimes delaying action for a very good reason. First of all, his knowledge that Claudius, his uncle killed his father, comes from a ghost. A ghost tells him that his uncle murdered his father, but the problem with that is a ghost, as Hamlet says, could be a devil in disguise. He could be tempting Hamlet to sin so that he could damn Hamlet's soul to hell. So Hamlet needs better proof than just the word of this ghost who could be a demon in disguise. And so he delays until he gets more proof from seeing Claudius' reaction to the play he puts on. Then he has the opportunity to kill Claudius while Claudius is kneeling in prayer. But he doesn't do this because in the belief system of that day, and if you confess your sins, then your soul is pure and you can go to heaven. So if he kills Claudius right after Claudius has confessed his sins, then Claudius will go to heaven whereas Hamlet's father is in purgatory because he died with all his sins unconfessed. So Hamlet wouldn't really be getting an adequate revenge. So in these two instances of delay, Hamlet has a very clear reason for doing what he's doing and that gets overlooked if we just say, well, he's being indecisive. And we can understand more about Hamlet instead of just looking at him and comparing him to what we might do in that situation or what a typical protagonist would do in a revenge play. If we look at him in comparison to other characters within the play that resemble him but have slight differences, we'll come to understand him better within the context of that play. We call these kinds of characters foils. A foil is a character who's, when we contrast the character with a protagonist, it serves to help us understand something about the protagonist's qualities or characteristics that we might not have noticed otherwise. So one foil for Hamlet is the figure of Pyrrhus who's not actually a character in the play but a character within a speech within the play. If you remember, Pyrrhus is the son of Achilles in the epic cycle. He's not in the Iliad, but he's in the epic cycle of the Trojan War and he's described in the Aeneid in book two when Aeneas is describing his escape from Troy to Dido. He describes Pyrrhus killing Priam, the king of Troy and Hamlet wants the actors who have come to visit the, you know, him in Elsinore Castle. He wants them to reenact this speech of Aeneas describing how Pyrrhus killed Priam. Now this is a foil because Pyrrhus, his father Achilles had been killed by Paris. So don't confuse Pyrrhus the son of Priam, the one who kidnapped Helen of Troy with Pyrrhus. But Pyrrhus killed Achilles and now Pyrrhus has come to avenge his father. The thing is Pyrrhus is already dead so Pyrrhus wants to take out his revenge on all the Trojans and he's very good at it. Like his father, he's nearly indestructible. What Hamlet wants to hear, what he remembers is this description of Pyrrhus as just this unstoppable revenge machine. He's there avenging his father and he's killed so many people so quickly that he's covered in their blood and their blood is coagulating all over him so that it makes his skin look monstrous. You know, now he is totally ghouls, totally red, horribly tricked with the blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, baked and impasted with the parching streets. So this blood has been dried up after he's killed all of these people, not just warriors, but men, women, children, young and old. So we could definitely characterize Pyrrhus as a person of action, not somebody who is indecisive but somebody who is all about the action and that action is taking revenge for his father and he takes revenge on everybody so much so that he becomes this monster. And maybe this is why Hamlet wants to hear that story. But when the first player picks up on the speech and completes it, he then starts to talk about how Priam was cut down, this old man that was almost helpless, was cut down by this monstrous Avenger and his wife, Hecuba, watches it and is horrified. And the actor uses the phrase mobled queen which might be a typo, might actually be ennobled queen but Hamlet repeats that. His attention has suddenly been brought to this queen who if Pyrrhus is a foil to Hamlet, then Hecuba, the queen, would be a foil to Gertrude. Her parallel would be Gertrude here. So if this queen is watching her husband cut down by this monstrous Avenger, now we, through this dialogue, hear a sort of empathy for her and Hamlet's attention is redirected to her and he repeats that phrase mobled queen indicating that he's now sort of thought of something that he hadn't thought of before by listening to this speech. Maybe he's been reminded that his action, if he were a Pyrrhus who was able to just cut down Claudius and anyone who stood against his slain father, even if he was able to do that, there would be repercussions like turning his mother into this horrified victim. Now, within the play, there's another foil who does avenge his father's death and that is Laertes. Remember that Hamlet kills Polonius and Laertes, when he finds out his father's been killed, he wants to kill the person who killed his father and he's so impassioned about this that he attacks Claudius. He doesn't know who did it. He just raises this mob of people to come with him, all bearing weapons and they get into Elsinor and he's threatening the king. That's how angry he is and he says, how came he dead? How was he killed? I'll not be juggled with. Don't mess with me. To hell, allegiance. He's saying, I don't care about my allegiance to Claudius the king anymore. I don't care about the repercussions of my actions. I dare damnation. He's even willing to go to hell if it will allow him to kill the person who killed his father. Well, let's compare that to what Hamlet says. Remember, when he's not sure if the ghost is actually the ghost of his father or a devil that's trying to trick him into murder so that he'll be sent to hell, he says, I'm gonna find out first. I'm not gonna dare damnation. He says, the spirit I've seen may be a devil and the devil had the power to assume a pleasing shape and perhaps out of my weakness and my melancholy he's very potent with such spirits and he's doing this to dam me. So I'll have grounds, I'll have proof more relative than this, more than just the word of the ghost. So even though both of these sons are inclined to avenge their fathers, Hamlet is the only one who's actually gonna make sure that he's gonna verify that he's doing the right thing before he does it. And just in case you're still tempted to see Laertes as the man of action that does what Hamlet should have done, notice Laertes ends up just as dead as Hamlet and he's very much embarrassed by the situation he ends up in because he got duped by Claudius. Claudius used Laertes rage to make him his own pawn to use him to kill Hamlet. And his last words are to forgive Hamlet and ask Hamlet's forgiveness of him. He says that he's been justly killed with his own treachery. He regrets using treachery to get his revenge and he realizes that Claudius has been using him this whole time. Another foil for Hamlet is Ophelia. If Laertes is someone who acts impulsively and immediately, Ophelia is someone who doesn't act at all but also because she's in a very strange situation. We can infer from the subtext of the dialogue that she and Hamlet have had a relationship and her lover Hamlet has killed her father and it's almost as if she doesn't know which is worse, the fact that Hamlet has turned away from her or the fact that her father is dead or the fact that it's Hamlet that killed her father. So a gentleman describes Ophelia's condition by saying, she speaks much of her father, says she hears there's tricks in the world and hymns and beats her heart, spurns enviously at straws, speaks to things in doubt. She says things that carry but have sense. The only thing we can make of it is whatever we imagine it to be and then we botch the words up to fit our own thoughts. And this gentleman's description of her is someone who says things that people just have to try to make sense of puts her in a close comparison with Hamlet and all the way back to Amlet. Her words seem to mean nothing to the people who listen to them but they seem to have a half sense. In other words, there could be some sort of sense that's made from this but this gentleman and the others who have listened to her haven't quite figured out what it is yet. And after that we hear her singing and she sings two different types of songs. One type of song is a song of mourning. Like when she sings he is dead and gone lady, he's dead and gone, at his head grass green turf, at his heels of stone, in other words, he's in the ground, he's buried. But remember that Polonius is not buried. Hamlet lugged the guts as he says and people ask him where's the body and he says he's at dinner, not where he eats but where he is eaten, in other words, where he's been eaten by worms. These lines come very close to something that's in Saxochromaticus. But she's singing a song of mourning for her father and worry that he's not been properly buried but then she'll sing a song that is the song of a spurned lover. Tomorrow's St. Valentine's Day and in the morning, the time I and I am made at your window to be your Valentine. Then up he rose and donned his clothes and duped the chamber door. Let in the maid that out of maid departed nevermore. In other words, he led in this girl who was a virgin on Valentine's Day and when she left, she was no longer a virgin. She seems to be singing about herself here and this gentleman who's duped her is Hamlet. Hamlet, and we know this from a past speech where Laertes is warning Ophelia that she should stay away from Hamlet because he's not free to marry whoever he wants. So we know that they have this history with each other and that history has been marked by the way we see them interact in the play which is Hamlet's spurning her. So she's having to borrow these songs. The only way she's able to express herself, her mourning for her father and her anger at Hamlet is to sing these lines of songs or these borrowed words to describe emotions. And in that sense, she is borrowing a script and a script in the cognitive sense, the sense that we talked about all the way in the beginning of the semester as the computer scientist and political scientist, Roger Shank and Robert Abelson characterized it. A script is this set of expectations about what's supposed to happen in a well understood situation. The example they give is if you go to a restaurant, you know that if a person comes up and asks you what you want, it's a waiter, you tell them what you wanna eat, if you wanna appetizer order that first and then at the end, they're gonna bring you a bill. We know the restaurant script, we know the spurned lover script, we know the script of avenging a father. We have all of these narrative scripts available to us before we actually enter into the situation. And Ophelia has several scripts and she doesn't seem to be able to choose between which one occupies her mind the most, is it mourning her father or focusing on her being spurned by her lover, by Hamlet. To interpret what's happening in her own life, all she has are these scripts from these songs and they come from different songs. There's no script for what to do if your former lover kills your father. So she goes back and forth from singing a song about mourning to singing a song about a broken heart. And this is what Shank and Abelson tell us, is we have a hard time dealing with anything that's genuinely new. What we do is try to take a script that's already in our head and use that to interpret what to do next when we come across a new situation. But if there's one thing we know about Hamlet is that he's not limited to a small number of scripts. He's got a lot of different scripts. He looks at any given situation and he'll describe it one way and then he'll say, but it could be this other. He'll think things through the way a chess player thinks through all the potential moves that he could make. But in thinking ahead, in evaluating all of these scripts, he's able to look all the way forward to the endgame. He doesn't just immediately adopt one script or another. He analyzes them all. He doesn't just look at the next step or the step immediately after that. He looks many steps ahead. And the problem he continually faces is that all of these scripts have an outcome that is not something he wants. And this is where the most famous question in English literature comes in, to be or not to be. It's a question that is going to have an answer. A lot of times this gets thrown in as if it's some unanswerable question or at least a question that Hamlet himself can't answer. He will answer it. But first we need to understand that question in the context of when he gives it. That question doesn't exist in isolation. He's asking, is it better, is it nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune? Fortune, fate, these circumstances outside ourselves that we can't change. Should we go fight against these slings and arrows, this sort of storm of projectiles of all these things that we have to deal with? Take arms against the sea of troubles. You're fighting the sea, this unstoppable opponent. Take arms against the sea of troubles and by opposing in them. This might be kind of ironic, kind of sarcastic. You're not gonna be able to take on all the slings and arrows. You're not gonna be able to take on the sea. But the alternative there is, is it better to die, to sleep, no more. And by sleep we say to end the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to. In other words, when you die, you don't have to deal with those slings and arrows anymore. Then he goes on to sort of list, here's what we have to look forward to, these slings and arrows. They're things like the oppressor is wrong, the proud man's contumely, contempt. Some arrogant person has contempt for you. The pangs of despised love, this is what Ophelia suffers from and potentially Hamlet does too. The law's delay, in other words, the law not delivering justice to you. This constant tide of problems, of sadness, of pain, that is really all life is. You beat one arrow, you beat one sling stone down, another one's on its way, or several are trying to hit you at the same time. It doesn't matter if you overcome this one obstacle. Your whole rest of your life is gonna be a series of obstacles in Hamlet's description here. And this is what he's characterizing as fortune. And think of the goddess of fortune, who's referred to several times in the play. This external source for all of these troubles and these troubles will never stop, no matter what you do. Now if this all seems sort of depressing, this seems like a very peculiar way to think, that's because it's the opposite of the way most of us think most of the time. It's natural to have what psychologists call an illusion of control. That is overestimating the influence that our behavior exerts over uncontrollable outcomes. And psychologists like Ellen Langer have been researching this since the 1970s, where people will be playing like a computer game, a video game, and they'll be pressing buttons that they think are controlling the outcome, but turn out to actually not be controlling the outcome. But when asked if they thought that their button pressing actually changed something on the screen, they'll usually say yes. I did some things and things happened on the screen, so I think what I did actually caused that. We typically have an illusion of control when it comes to much more ambiguous phenomenon. Things like how much money you make. We would like to say, well it's just a matter of how hard you work. You have control over your fortune, whether or not you are successful in life based on how hard you work. But of course, we all know people who work really, really hard all the time and never seem to be able to make much money from it. Things like losing weight or getting in shape. There are so many more factors than people are typically aware of. Someone who says that you lose weight by burning more calories than you consume. But the reality is there are things like gut bacteria and genetics that have much more impact on our ability to gain or lose weight than simply exercising or eating less. But we typically have this illusion of control that if I follow this script, let's say the take arms against the sea of trouble script. If I follow that script, then I will have this singular outcome. Very simple action like playing pool or something like that. You hit the cue ball, the cue ball will hit the eight ball, the eight ball will go in the pocket and you'll win the game. But cause and effect in life is never that simple. So our illusion of control or our feeling of control is almost always an illusion. But Hamlet sees through that illusion of control. It's not that he doesn't know what to do. His inaction as described in his own words has more to do with what he perceives as the futility of human action, all human action. No matter what you do, fortune is there to undo it. He frequently refers to fate or to fortune. When we hear him talk about fortune, he's not using it in the sense that we use today when we talk about making a fortune or a Fortune 500 company or that sort of thing. Today, fortune just means wealth but Hamlet is invoking a much older schema of fortune as a goddess. The Romans actually had a goddess named Fortuna who was a personification of fate or luck. She was frequently depicted as turning the rota Fortuna, the wheel of fortune. This is before that was a game show. We all sit somewhere on this wheel of fortune and sometimes we're at the top but then the wheel turns and we fall to the bottom and we may hope to ride the wheel to the top again. But it's the goddess Fortuna who is turning that wheel and deciding where we are on it. And if that sounds overly pessimistic that no matter what we do, fortune's gonna screw up our plans. That's actually what happens. That's what happens throughout the rest of the play. In act three, scene four, now that Hamlet has seen Claudius' guilt in his reaction to the play, the mousetrap or the murder of Gonzago, he's ready to act and he does act. He goes to confront his mother, Gertrude, to see if she knew that her first husband was murdered by her second husband and I'll come back to that conversation later. But while they're arguing, he discovers that someone is spying on them from behind a curtain. He assumes it's Claudius and that's a pretty good bet it is after all his wife's private chambers. And he stabs through the curtain, kills the spy and this is the kind of decisive action that people frequently say Hamlet isn't capable of. It should be obvious in this scene that Hamlet is perfectly capable of decisive action but only now that he is sure of Claudius' guilt. And if it had been Claudius behind the curtain, perhaps the play at this point would be over. Some people say that Hamlet goes from acting indecisively to acting impulsively, the opposite of indecisive when you just act without thinking. But that's not true either in this case. This is the perfect time to kill Claudius if it is Claudius, since Hamlet can claim plausible deniability. He can claim that because the king was behind the curtain he didn't know it was the king but had reason to believe it was an intruder in the queen's personal chambers. So this action fits the script for a revenge play pretty well. Let's call it a revenge script. Identify Claudius at a time when he's in an incriminating position or at least at a time when Hamlet can claim not to recognize him, stab while he's behind the curtain. In doing so he kills the man that killed his father thereby accomplishing exactly what the ghost of his father asked him to do. So that's exactly what he does, stab through the curtain. But that's when fortune intervenes. Instead of Claudius it's Polonius behind the curtain. Not someone that Hamlet would expect to be hiding in his mother's private chambers. And this one factor, the fact that it's Polonius instead of Claudius is what sets in motion a chain of events that leads to Hamlet's tragic death. Because he's killed Polonius that puts Laertes, Polonius's son in the same position as Hamlet, a son who is now compelled to avenge his father. Now Laertes takes up the revenge script and he comes after Hamlet. And Laertes gets his revenge. He kills Hamlet not because of Hamlet's inaction but because of Hamlet's specific action, the action of killing Polonius. Not only does killing of Polonius lead to Hamlet's death and of course Laertes' death because Hamlet kills him as well, but it also leads to Ophelia's death. If it had been anyone other than her father behind that curtain, she probably wouldn't have lost control and either commit suicide deliberately or just sort of given up on life and drowned. Ultimately it also leads to Gertrude's death since she drinks from the cup that was poisoned to kill Hamlet during the duel that wouldn't have happened if not for Laertes' desire to avenge his father. So Hamlet's tragedy is not as Lawrence Olivier assumed in the introduction to his movie, a tragedy of a man who couldn't make up his mind. It's a tragedy of misfortune, an unforeseen turn of events that interrupted the designs of the characters. And this seems to be what Hamlet is predicting to acts before the death of Polonius in the to be or not to be speech when he refers to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. And we can see more of his thinking in the speech that the player king gives during the play within a play, though the murder of Gonzago or the mousetrap. These lines, even though it's the player king who's saying them, they seem to be lines that Hamlet himself wrote within the play. Remember that in act two, scene two, he asked the actors to learn some new lines before they perform the murder of Gonzago. And when the players perform the play, it's been rewritten by Hamlet to the point that he changes the name from the murder of Gonzago to the mousetrap. And so the player king says during the play that when his wife says that she'll be true, she's making a very clear statement about what her decision is to remain loyal to her husband, even if he dies. But the player king, who's sort of a stand in for Hamlet's actual father, says he sort of looks ahead beyond the immediate circumstance, like he's looking several moves ahead. And he says, I believe that you believe that you think what you now speak, but what we determined to do, we usually don't do. We break our vows. Purpose is but the slave to memory. You have this purpose now, but later you're gonna forget about it. A violent birth, but poor validity. In other words, very emotional in the beginning that you're so confident that you're going to carry out this action, but in the end it sort of falls apart. The thing we propose to ourselves in passion, once our passion is gone, our purpose fades away. The violence of that passion, we either grieve for joy, their own actions, their own inactures, those passions actually end up destroying the actions, the scripts, the planned actions. And in these last lines, this is where fate or fortune comes back in. Our wills and fates do so contrary run that all our devices are still overthrown. Our thoughts are ours, there ends none of our own. In other words, whatever we're planning to do, we're only going to follow that course as long as we feel that passion. And once the passion sort of peters out, then fate intervenes. And fate is gonna intervene and overwhelm all the actions we've performed. So what eventually is going to happen, the end result is gonna have nothing to do with the thing we set out to accomplish. And in these lines, the player king and presumably Hamlet recognize that emotion isn't really accomplishing anything. When we act on passion the way someone like Pyrrhus or Laertes does, we might set something in motion, but what's eventually gonna happen is not the thing we thought we were going to accomplish. Hamlet's describing something that psychologists have now studied at the level of the neuron. You know, watch our brains in the act of thinking about what to do, about what decisions to make and seeing the parts of the brain that function to generate emotions in responses to the things we interact with. For instance, the psychologist and neuroscientist, Antonio Demasio, studies emotion as it relates to reason. And after Shakespeare's time, during the Enlightenment, philosophers and writers and the people in general started to think of emotions and reason as these separate phenomena that the more emotion you had, the less reason you have. And in order to be more rational, to be more reasonable, you had to be less emotional. But what Demasio and others have discovered is that if you don't have an emotion to set in motion a chain of reasoning, you're not gonna be able to make decisions, even if you're extremely rational. Demasio gives the example of a patient he had who had a brain lesion to a part of his brain that generates emotion, so he wasn't able to get emotional to decide if he liked something or hated something. And that had benefits. For instance, when he was driving on ice and his car started to skid, started to hydroplane, what you're supposed to do in those situations is turn into the skid, but it's very counterintuitive. And this patient was describing that a woman in front of him was not able to do that. She panicked and she ended up trying to overcorrect her hydroplane and car and ended up going off the road, but he was able to do it accurately because he didn't overreact. He didn't really emotionally react at all. He went purely on reason. He followed the script without any sort of emotional inclination to follow the wrong script. So without emotion, he was able to think very clearly in a panic situation or a situation that would cause other people to panic. However, this same patient was then able to make up his mind about very simple things, like when Demasio asked him, when do you wanna meet for our next appointment? The guy went on for 30 minutes saying, well, here's all the pros to meeting on Monday, but here's all the cons of meeting on Monday, and here's all the pros for meeting on Tuesday, and here's all the cons of meeting on Tuesday. But he couldn't make up his mind either way until Demasio finally said, okay, let's just do Tuesday. So if we have a very simple goal in mind, the reason is all we need to figure out a way to achieve that goal. But when it comes to deciding among goals and deciding among paths to those goals, we need an emotion. Emotion sets in motion. Emotion can help us decide what outcome we want very quickly, and it's not always right, it's not always the best outcome ultimately, but it has to be there in some form or another for reason to have anything to do. Otherwise, our reason is just a potential advantage. It's not an advantage that actually gets put into use. So it's not enough to say that Hamlet just can't make up his mind. We see this lack of emotional inclination in several points of his speech. He tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, I have of late, but wherefore I know not lost all my mirth. In other words, lately, I just haven't had any, I haven't been happy, mirth literally means happiness, but it's also that sort of energy, that sort of desire to do anything. I've foregone all custom of exercises. You know, I quit doing the things I normally would do. And it's gotten so bad that the world as beautiful as I know it is seems to me like a sewer. He says the excellent canopy, the air, look you this brave overhanging for a minute. He's looking at the sky, the majestical roof fretted with golden fire, like the sky at sunset. But it appears to me nothing other than foul, pestilent congregation of vapors. In other words, this stinking, containing prison. At one point he describes Denmark as a prison. And that's when he gives the, oh, what a piece of work is man's speech. Human beings have such capabilities, such promise, but to me he's the quintessence of dust. He knows the words, he knows the scripts, the poetry to describe the sky at sunset or the God-like potential of human nature. But even though he knows these descriptions, he doesn't feel it. He doesn't feel what he's saying. And so when it comes to the main decision that he has to make, do I follow the advice of the ghost and kill Claudius? Or do I do nothing? He doesn't really feel it either way. And if we look at the outcomes of both of them, in both cases, if all goes well, he would become the king of Denmark. If he kills Claudius, then he's the heir to the throne because he's both as Claudius's adopted son but also as the son of the original king. So he becomes king that way, but if he just waits till Claudius dies, then he also becomes king. So he doesn't really have to do anything. These, as far as his personal interests go, either one of these actions or inactions ends up with the same result. So the only thing that's gonna motivate him is if he's certain the ghost is telling the truth that his father actually was murdered by his uncle, and then the motive to act wouldn't just be to become king or to get rid of Claudius, the motive to act would be to avenge a murder. But this all depends on his emotion being ignited by the recognition that this really happened. And in this, Hamlet has a distinct disadvantage over Amleth in the Saxochromaticus tale. Remember that in Saxo's history of the Danes, everybody knew that Fingy, the new king, killed his brother Orvindol, the old king, the father of Amleth. Garuda, the mother knew it, Amleth knew it, Olive Denmark knew it. Fing told everyone that he did it because Orvindol was cruel to his wife and that he hated seeing such a good woman have such an abusive husband. That's why he justified killing his brother. That's all the more reason that Amleth had to pretend to be crazy because everybody knew that Fing killed Orvindol and everybody knew that everybody knew that Fing killed Orvindol. That means that Fing knew that Amleth knew that he killed his father so he would be suspicious of him unless Amleth is not a threat which is why he pretends to be stupid. But in Shakespeare's Hamlet, most people don't know. Obviously Claudius knows that he killed old Hamlet. We don't know if Gertrude knows and Hamlet doesn't know if Gertrude knows. Now we the audience don't even know if the ghost is telling the truth until we hear Claudius in confession admit to killing his brother. Before that we're just as confused as Hamlet about whether or not the ghost was actually the ghost of old Hamlet, Hamlet senior or whether it was a devil in disguise. So most people don't know, Hamlet doesn't know whether he can trust the ghost. We don't know if Gertrude knows that Claudius killed her former husband. We don't even know if Polonius knows. Polonius is a co-conspirator in most things with Claudius but we never hear them actually talk about whether or not Claudius killed old Hamlet. So Polonius never directly mentions it and Claudius doesn't mention it in front of Polonius. So we don't even know if Polonius knows. And the rest of Denmark, Ophelia Horatio, the rest of the cast clearly don't know this. This is significant because Hamlet's lack of emotion, his sort of confusion, his listlessness comes apart from not knowing. We can't expect him to be all motivated, all fired up to avenge his father if his father wasn't actually murdered. So we might even say that his inaction is actually the right thing to do until there's more substantive proof than just what he hears this ghost say. So in order to get more substantive proof he has to get inside Claudius's head because if Claudius is the only one who knows for sure whether or not Claudius killed old Hamlet then it's Claudius' mind that Hamlet has to read. And reading minds is something we've talked a lot about in this class. Remember that theory of mind is the ability to predict, to understand the thoughts of others based on their outward actions as well as their words. We have to be able to understand that people have beliefs and sometimes those beliefs are wrong. We have to know if they know the truth about something or not. They have desires, they have fears, they have hopes. They have certain things they're willing to do that other people might not be willing to do. And they're not always gonna be honest about what these things are. So understanding their mind means more than just listening to what they say. And this kind of mind reading is the sort of thing that good literature really strains in us. It really makes us exercise that theory of mind ability. And the play of Hamlet is all about characters trying to use theory of mind. Characters spying on each other, questioning each other, trying to get inside each other's heads to find out what does he know? Does he know what I know? Does he know that I know what I know? So Claudius and then his cronies like Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are trying to get inside Hamlet's mind. They do this by watching him very carefully. They watch him in particular while he's interacting with Ophelia, because at first Polonius suggests, well maybe it's because he's in love with my daughter Ophelia, let's bring in Ophelia and then hide back here and spy on them while they communicate with each other. Or maybe it's something he'll tell his mother, the source of his disposition. Maybe he'll tell her. So Claudius and Polonius, or sometimes just Polonius, or sometimes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they're always watching Hamlet to see what they can figure out about his internal state, what's going on in his mind. And, but they have to derive this from things other than what he says. They have to depend on this because, as we saw, Hamlet is being ironic. Just like his predecessor, Amleth, he is the iron. This is where the word irony comes from. The character in a Greek play whose name literally means the dissimbler. The one who doesn't necessarily lie, but who misleads, who tricks somebody into thinking the wrong thing by what they do or how they say what they say. And the iron does this because he's always in a weaker position. There's someone who has a lot more power, and when you have a lot of power, you don't have to do a lot of thinking. You can become overconfident, and so the iron uses this against the Alazon, the more confident character. And that more powerful character in this case is clearly Claudius, but also by association, it's also Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and everyone else who is loyal to Claudius and who Claudius rewards. Claudius is able to sort of pull all of these people together and use them to try to figure out what's going on with Hamlet if Hamlet is a threat to him. And like his predecessor, Amleth, Hamlet uses verbal irony. He doesn't directly lie, but he will describe things in a very metaphorical sense or a very figurative sense, use figurative language. Like when Claudius asked him, how is it that the clouds still hang on you? In other words, why are you still so cloudy? Why do you have a cloudy disposition? Why are you so depressed? And he says, not so, my lord, I'm not cloudy. I'm too much in the sun. Of course, you know, he says sun, he could say S-U-N, which would mean that I'm acting sunnier than I actually feel. In other words, I'm not acting like I'm in the clouds. I am actually in the clouds, but I'm pretending to be more sunny than I really am. But also it could be the S-O-N. I'm acting too much like your son, but you're not my father, you're my uncle, and you just married my mother. That doesn't make you my father. So I'm pretending to be your son, but I'm really not. And in that same scene, Gertrude says, why does it seem so particular with you? In other words, why does losing your father seem to be so worse with you than it is with most people? And he says, seems, madam, nay, it is. I know not seems. He's insisting that his actions, the way he's acting is not a pretense. It's not a facade. It is actually who he is. And if she doesn't understand that, well, that's a problem with her understanding. He's sort of pointing the finger at everyone else and saying, you're all putting on facades, but the reason you can't understand me is because I have that within which passive show. In other words, I have something inside me that you can't see. That's not because I'm hiding it. That's not because I'm trying to seem a certain way. It's just because you can't see it. It's not that I'm hiding it, but it's a difference in character. If you can't see within me this thing that passed the show, it's because you don't understand. Maybe you don't have it within you. So just like with Amleth, there is this tension between needing to hide something but also wanting to be known as an honest person. Amleth, Saxo tells us, did not want to be thought to be a liar, but he did actually need to fool people. So he's walking this line between deliberate deception and the sort of verbal irony of this double truth, this requiring people to interpret things beyond just the immediate obvious interpretation. But he's very clear that people can't understand him and shouldn't expect to understand him. In fact, he gets really angry when he finds out that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his friends from the University of Wittenberg, these people he knew that were not from Denmark. They've been summoned to Denmark and at first they don't want to tell him that. They don't want to tell him that Claudius sent for them and asked them to come to try to figure out what was going on with Hamlet. And when they finally admit to him that they were sent for, he's angry, he knows that they're spying on him, that they're reporting back to Claudius. He hands Guildenstern a recorder or a little wooden flute and tells him to play it. And Guildenstern says, I can't, I can't play this thing, I don't know what to do. I don't have the skill. And then Hamlet says, well, if you don't have the skill to play this, why do you think you can play me? Do you think I'm just this little pipe that you can play and make me say whatever you want me to say? You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, in other words, the keys. You would pluck out the heart of my mystery. You would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass. And then he swears, he says, splud, which is a slang swear, it comes from the swearing on Christ blood. So this is a swear word that would definitely raise some eyebrows in the theater. Splud, do you think I am easier to be played than a pipe? Call me what you will, though you cannot fret me, you cannot play upon me. He's reminding them that I have this within that passes the show, you cannot see inside me. It's not because I'm putting up a pretense, it's just because you don't have it in you to figure out what's going on inside my mind. So Hamlet's very aware that he's being spied on, but he also knows that no one can understand him, no matter how much they observe him. But this becomes a double-edged sword. People like Ophelia may not be able to understand him, and that leads him to be suspicious of her. So he's very cruel to Ophelia, especially if they've had this past relationship, and it seems that he's being cruel for no reason. But if you'll notice in the scene where he's the most cruel to her, it's a scene where Polonius, her father, and Claudius are watching them. He's being spied on, and he seems to know that he's being spied on. Because he asks Ophelia, where's your father? And he knows where a father is, he knows her father is watching. But he wants to see what she's gonna say. So while he's being observed, he's now trying to use theory of mind on Ophelia to see if she's in on it, if she's helping spy for Claudius, or if she's on his side. And this is interesting because remember, there's a parallel character in Saxo's story of Amleth, this woman that people are trying to use to get Amleth to reveal his plot is actually a friend of his and helps him out, helps him to fool the people that are spying on him. But in this case, Hamlet doesn't know if Ophelia's on his side or not. This is a test question to see if she'll be honest with him. And she's not. She says, my father is at home, my lord. And that sets Hamlet off. He says, let the doors be shut upon him, that he may play the fool nowhere but in his own home. And then farewell, he wants to get rid of her. And we can tell, even without stage direction, that Hamlet is getting really angry at this point because Ophelia now says, oh, help him, you sweet heavens. In other words, she's worried by the way he's acting right now, that's why she says this. And any potential future relationship between the two of them, he's casting off at this point. He says, if you do marry, I'll give you a plague for your dowry. You're not going to escape Calumne. You're not gonna have a happy marriage when we're in another. So go to a nunnery. Go become a nun. And then the Elizabethan slang, a nunnery could be a slang term for brothel, the opposite of a nunnery. Because, as he says, if you're gonna marry, then marry a fool. For wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them. In other words, you tried to fool me, but I'm wise to your deception about, you know, you're helping your father spy on me. So you might as well marry someone who can't see through this kind of deception. Once again, Polonius in act three, scene four. Polonius spies on Hamlet. This time while he's talking to Gertrude, his mother, and this is a scene taken directly from Saxo's Amleth story. At this point, he already knows that Claudius killed his father, but now he wants to find out if his mother knows. So he begins to interrogate her. And the fact that somebody is spying hunt on him as they have this conversation doesn't seem to help her case. It doesn't make her look very innocent. But he thinks it's Claudius, so he stabs through the curtain, just like Amleth stabbed through the straw at a spy and ends up killing the servant of the king rather than the king himself. And this is the sort of decisive action. You know, once he realizes there's a spy there, he doesn't dither and say, well, maybe I should stab through, maybe I shouldn't. He does it. This is a very emotionally driven decision. This is the sort of decisive action that some people think Hamlet isn't capable of. But notice in this case, even though it's emotionally driven, he would have actually been justified if it had been Claudius. Killing him while he was behind the curtain, you know, would give Hamlet a little bit of plausible deniability that he may not have known, he could say that he didn't know it was the king when he stabbed a spy, but he was actually hoping it was. And if it had been the king, then the story would be over and might have been a happier ending. But after he kills Polonius, then we come to one of those scenes that is hard to read from just the text, just the dialogue. It would depend entirely on the way the actor or actress playing Gertrude would read these lines. So when Gertrude looks at the dead body of Polonius that Hamlet has just killed, she says, what a rash and bloody deed is this? And Hamlet says, a bloody deed, almost as bad good mother is Killah King and marry his brother. And the way Gertrude reads these next lines would make all the differences to helping the audience figure out whether she was in on it or not. As Killah King, as if she doesn't know what he's talking about, what do you mean Killah King? What have I done that thou darest wag thy tongue and noise so rude against me? These seem to indicate that she doesn't know what he's talking about. What do you mean Killah King? And as he goes on describing in oblique terms the death of his father, she doesn't know what he's talking about. It really seems like she doesn't know what he's talking about. What act that roars so loud and thunders in the index, depending on how the actress reads these lines, she could be trying to shut him up or she could be genuinely unaware of what he's talking about. So these are some of these lines that, because Shakespeare's not there to narrate to tell us yes, Gertrude knows or no, she doesn't know, each individual performance could make it seem as if Gertrude was in on the murder of Old Hamlet or completely unaware of it. And of course, it is theory of mind that enables Hamlet to validate the claim of the ghost that Old Hamlet was murdered by Claudius. The play is the thing. We're in, I'll catch the conscience of the king. So now that Hamlet has these players, this troupe of theater actors traveling through Elsinor, he decides that because they have such an ability to pull emotion out of people, then he'll try to see what emotions they can pull out of Claudius. If they act out of play where a relative kills a king and takes his crown, but also then marries his wife. So this play is called The Murder of Gonzago, but then Hamlet rewrites it and renames it the mousetrap and uses that to see, will Claudius react when he sees an event, a murder very close to what Hamlet suspects actually occurred? And what he sees seems to confirm that. At least it confirms it for Hamlet. Now notice that in that play, The Murder of Gonzago, it's not the king's brother that kills him, it's actually the nephew. And remember that Hamlet is the nephew of Claudius. So we, the audience, might infer that Claudius and his reaction, his walking out of the theater, could actually be because he thinks this is a threat from Hamlet, for a nephew to murder his father, the king. But Hamlet doesn't seem to be focusing on that. Hamlet sees his reaction as specifically indicative of the reaction of a guilty conscience. This is somebody who is acting this way because he actually killed the former king and married his wife the same way that is happening in the play. And for good measure, Hamlet has Horatio as a sort of second opinion, watching Claudius to see if he sees a guilty reaction or an innocent reaction to this play. But it's only here, at act three, scene two, that Hamlet really has what he needs to begin his action. And that is confirmation other than this dubious ghost, this ghost that could be a devil. And it is theory of mind that gives him that confirmation, at least satisfies his need to know. And now that he knows he can begin his revenge plot. But this wasn't part of the revenge plot, this was just a plot to find out what Claudius knew, to read Claudius' mind. And then after this mousetrap play, that's when he confronts Gertrude, that's when he kills Polonius, then Claudius has him sent to England, hoping the king of England will kill him. But Hamlet intercepts the letter and changes it to say kill Rosencrantz and Guildenstern instead. Hamlet comes back, he comes back just in time to see Ophelia being buried. While Ophelia's being buried, that's when Lairtes, who now knows that Hamlet killed his father Polonius, they confront each other, challenge each other to a duel. Just like Claudius had planned with Lairtes, they're gonna poison the sword tip during this fencing duel in order to kill Hamlet. Lairtes gets from this plot to kill the man who killed his father. Claudius gets to kill the person who knows, the only person who knows his guilt that leads to the finale of the play in act five, scene two, where everybody kills everybody. Hamlet does kill Claudius, but he's been poisoned by Lairtes' tip, a poisoned sword point. Gertrude drinks from the poisoned cup and dies by accident. And in this ending, which is clearly different than the Hamlet story in Saxo where he kills the previous king and goes on to become king himself, this ending where everybody dies, people take that as, well, Hamlet died tragically because he failed to make a decision or at least he failed to make a decision in time. But if we revisit the sequence of events and see things from Hamlet's perspective, we see that the decisions he made were actually building up to a positive resolution. It's just that he couldn't act until he knew for sure that a murder had been committed, that Claudius was the murderer. But we could look at this final scene as in the context of everything that we've heard from Hamlet and others so far as an actual positive or at least a consummation that Hamlet had been looking for. You know, in his to be or not to be speech, he was sort of hinting at suicide being preferable to enduring the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and enduring a life of constant trouble. But he ultimately does decide to accomplish something, the thing he wants to accomplish is kill Claudius. He does kill Claudius before he dies and then he dies so he actually does complete this action. And in order to look at it that way, I want to look at one more foil, the most common foil that people use to compare to Hamlet and that is Fortinbras. Fortinbras is a character that only shows up in two scenes and he has very few lines but he's important as a foil because like Hamlet, he is the son of a murdered father and he's a prince and he's someone who can't immediately act out the way he wants to act out. Fortinbras is the son of the former king of Norway and who was also named Fortinbras so there's old Fortinbras and young Fortinbras just like there's old Hamlet and young Hamlet. Old Hamlet, the former king of Denmark killed old Fortinbras when Denmark and Norway were at war and took over some of Norway's territory. So Fortinbras, the younger, wants to revenge on Denmark because his father was killed by old Hamlet. We can't get revenge on old Hamlet so the next best thing he wants to do is take back the land that they won when that land back from Denmark for Norway. And we know this from what Horatio says in Act One Scene One. Fortinbras is usually described as the sort of man of action who is the foil to Hamlet as the man of thought but in action. Because at the beginning of the play he is well on his way to getting his revenge, to invading Denmark, as Horatio tells us, remember that Horatio in the first act comes out to talk to the guards who were on guard duty because they're expecting an invasion from Norway. So Horatio says that Fortinbras has sharked up a list of lawless resoluts to some enterprise to recover from us by strong hand. Those foresaid lands so by his father lost. In other words, Fortinbras has put together an army, now he's invading Denmark or he might be invading Denmark. However, we learn shortly after that that Claudius has put a stop to that. When Vultemann, the ambassador to Norway, comes to speak to Claudius, he says that the king of Norway has suppressed his nephew's levies. In other words, Fortinbras can no longer recruit an army because the king of Norway who is Fortinbras's uncle, so now if Fortinbras's father was killed his uncle is now the king and his uncle the king has prevented him from raising an army to go invade Denmark. And that's because of an agreement between the new king of Norway and Claudius. So the two uncles are now the kings of the two Scandinavian countries. And now they've made an arrangement so that Fortinbras can't get the revenge he wants. So despite the fact that Fortinbras is described as this man of action because he starts the action of invading Denmark, he's actually in a similar position to Hamlet. He can't overrule the decision of his uncle the king who has replaced his father as king. So Fortinbras's action of invasion is actually stopped and it's not stopped by his own decision or his own thinking through several steps ahead. It stops simply because his uncle says stop. So it might be an exaggeration to say Fortinbras is really this unimpeded man of action. So instead of invading Denmark, the king of Norway tells Fortinbras to go invade Poland and take this army you've raised and go fight for this little tiny patch of land which we find out later is not big enough to bury all the dead on. It's so small but that's not the point. The king of Norway wants Fortinbras not messing up the diplomatic situation and the agreement with Denmark. So the invasion of Poland is just a distraction. And it's after everyone is dead in act five, scene two that Fortinbras returns. He's coming from Poland where he's been victorious and he comes in to pay respects as he crosses Danish territory. He's supposed to pay his respects to the king but when he does so he just happens to see everybody's dead. But his reaction is very telling not just for who he is but who Hamlet is and the regard he has for Hamlet. Because everybody is dead, Fortinbras has been named as the new king of Denmark. So he gets what he wants without invading Denmark but notice he says that with sorrow I embrace my fortune. I have some rites of memory in this kingdom which now to claim my vantage doesn't invite me. In other words, okay I now have the outcome that I wanted but it's not from the action that I thought I was gonna have to act out. It's not from the script. So just like Hamlet says we can try to accomplish things and then fate intervenes to give us something we didn't want. In this case, Fortinbras gets something he want not from any action. So to say that action is necessarily good, especially action without thought is to ignore and oversimplify what's actually happening here. Fortinbras also did not enact the revenge plot for his father and yet he got exactly what he wanted. Not only that but Fortinbras seems to respect Hamlet. He says, let four captains bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage. For he was likely, had he been put on, in other words, had he been attacked to prove most royally. In other words, if I had attacked him I bet he would have been a fierce opponent. So he gives Hamlet a soldier's funeral even though Hamlet famously is unsoldier like. Hamlet is this sort of intellectual who went to college at Wittenberg and spends all his time analyzing and over analyzing these situations. We tend to judge Hamlet as a man of inaction the opposite of a soldier, the opposite of a conqueror. But the person who's been labeled as the conqueror respects him as a conqueror, as a fellow soldier, as an opponent but also somebody who would have been a fierce opponent. And even though Fortinbras probably didn't know this, that respect was mutual. Hamlet's desire to actually do something was inspired in act foreseen for when he saw Fortinbras heading from Norway to Poland. And in that soliloquy in act foreseen for we get the answer. If to be or not to be is the question then this speech in act foreseen for is the answer to that question that Hamlet has decided. When he sees Fortinbras leading this army he says, examples gross as earth exhort me. In other words, gross here means large. So examples as large as the real world that I'm now in call me to actually do something. Look at this army. When is this army of such mass in charge led by a delicate and a tender prince not by a brutal warlord but by somebody as refined as himself. Somebody Hamlet as a refined intellectual royal sees this other person who's focused on military pursuits as somebody who is much like himself in those regards. Who's spirit with divine ambition puffed makes mouths. In other words, doesn't care, throws insults at the invisible event, the event that he's going to fight, the battle he's going to fight. Exposing what is mortal and unsure to all that fortune, death and danger dare. In other words, fortune, that thing that intervenes, he knows it's there, he knows it's a threat, he knows death is lurking, but he doesn't care. He's going to expose himself to death, he's going to expose himself to misfortune because the end result is not really the point. The action is the point. He's starting to see this now. Even for an eggshell as if this patch of land that they're going to fight over is just a tiny eggshell. And he realizes rightly to be great is not to stir, not to do something without great argument, without a reason, but to greatly find quarrel and a straw when honor is at the stake. Straw in this case stands for something meaningless, something, an outcome that's not really that relevant. But the relevance that he's fighting for isn't the thing itself, it's the honor that fighting for symbolizes. And this reference to straws is nothing. Remember Ophelia was described as kicking at straws. This might make us go back and look at what she's dealing with. Nobody else understood what she was dealing with, her emotion, they thought it was just over nothing, but it was something other than the thing people saw. But what has happened with this speech when Hamlet sees Fortenbrass going to war, he now has a new script. It probably wasn't a script he was unaware of that he hadn't thought of, but he's got something more than just a script now. He has inspiration. He says, how all occasions do inform against me and spur my dull revenge. Dull revenge means simple, it's just something that I didn't care about, but now the occasion has spurred me. Specifically, it has given him purpose, a sense of purpose, a feeling of purpose. Because if I'm just someone who's sleeping and feeding, I'm no better than an animal. And of course, he's not an animal because he's very intellectual, but notice he says whether it's bestial oblivion, in other words, being a simple-minded animal, being a simple-minded beast, living in oblivion and lack of awareness, or the opposite, some craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event, a thought which quartered, which cut into four parts, has one part wisdom and every three parts coward. In other words, only about a quarter of these analyses are actually worth anything. They're only about a fourth of all of these scripts, all of these thoughts are actually worth anything. The rest are just cowardice, just delaying, just dithering in Hamlet's own opinion. Why have I spent all this time thinking about what to do when I have the will and the strength and the means to do it? So even though he's had the will and the strength and the means to carry out his revenge, now he has something he didn't have before, which is an emotional compulsion. He's got that feeling, not just the reason, not just the knowledge of how to figure out who the guilty party is and enact revenge, but the actual drive, the emotional drive to set in motion those actions. And so this is the other end of his character arc. Remember this term from all the way back in the epiphyic Gilgamesh? The character arc is the entire progression of a character's state from the very beginning when we first meet him or her to across all the changes, all the decisions, all the experiences to the end state. And Hamlet's character arc isn't really about his social position or his action, whether or not he kills Claudius or not. The arc, the change that he goes through is going from somebody who was not motivated, not emotionally engaged in the world. Even though he could understand the world, he had the words, the theories, the descriptions, he didn't have the emotional connection to the world of action. Now he does. Now he's suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Now he's taking arms against the sea of troubles. Now he's in the fight even though he's no longer concerned just with the outcome. So just like Fortenbras, if we take what he admired about Fortenbras and apply it to him, we see that even though he dies in act five scene two, he dies after doing the thing that he wants to be known for. He dies after accomplishing something, after engaging in the world. And so in that sense he is successful. And when he dies, notice his last wish is for someone to tell his story. And it seems that he's made some sort of realization, but he knows that he won't live long enough to explain it. This character who's made speech after speech, analyzing everything, can't tell us in these final moments what he's learned from his final actions. He says, had I but time, and this fell sergeant death is strickened as a rest, oh, I could tell you. In other words, because death is here to take me away, if he wasn't, I would tell you this story. I could explain these things that you look at and can't comprehend, but I can't. So he tells Horatio, while you live, report my cause, tell my story to those unsatisfied, to those who don't understand it. And those Horatio now wants to commit suicide too. He's so emotionally overwhelmed that he's actually driven to suicide not because of a lack of emotion, but because of an overwhelming emotion. And he says, I'm more like an ancient Roman than a Dane and meaning that he believes in a sort of honor suicide. But Hamlet tells him, no, don't. If you're a man, give me that cup, that poison cup. Hamlet says, I have a wounded name, things standing thus unknown, people don't know what happened. I don't wanna leave it up to other people to tell my story. So if you ever held me in your heart, wait a while before that felicity. In other words, that release, that final sort of relief from life in death. He's telling Horatio, just hang on, live a little bit longer, and in this harsh world, draw thy breath in pain to tell my story. Yeah, I know the world sucks, life is hard, but keep doing it for this purpose so that you can tell the story of what happened here. Once again, he has this in common with Hamlet, even though Hamlet survived his fight with Feng, his uncle. Hamlet spends about three pages, if you're reading this in the book, in Saxo Grammaticus's History of the Danes, spends about three pages explaining to everyone why he did what he did. That he wasn't actually crazy that he had to avenge his father and all that because it's very important to him what people think of him after the event. Even though Shakespeare's Hamlet is centuries and very culturally removed, this story did start in the Old Norse world where judgment, after you die, what people think of you after you're gone, that's what's most important. That's dome, where we get our word doom, but it's specifically judgment of whether you lived your life in the right way in a way that's admirable, that makes a good story. Even though all your wealth is gonna die, all your kinsmen are gonna die and you're gonna die, but what's really important is how people remember you. The same sentiment in Beowulf. Beowulf is described after he dies as Lufgornos, most eager for glory. And he told Hrothgar after Hrothgar's fame was killed by Grendel's mother, Beowulf tells him, do not sorrow too much. It's better for everyone to avenge his friend and to mourn too much. Each of us must await the end of life in this world, but he who can should gain glory, gain good judgment, dome before death. That's best for the warrior who dies. That's the best kind of afterlife. Same sentiment in Beowulf. And this is exactly what Hamlet has done. He has stopped mourning for his father, he's gotten revenge, and now his story's complete. He has achieved this dome, this judgment, even though he's died doing it. And this connects him all the way back to the quest for Klios. Klios Amphitan, glory imperishable, that Achilles and Diomedes and all the Greek warriors fought for. As different as the character of Hamlet is, this sort of indecisive intellectual, he does have this in common in the end. At the end of his character arc, he has become one of these warriors who has one on a battlefield, even if that battlefield is within this castle, in this room, in what started out as a seemingly friendly fencing match, it is actually a battleground. It was his battleground, not just against LARTs, but against Claudius. And this is what Fort Gras recognizes. But then again, the battlegrounds of Shakespeare's time weren't just actual fields, they were courtrooms, they were castles, they were places where people were fighting battles of narrative, battles of reputation, battles that would shape international policy just as much as battles fought outside on a battlefield by armies. And this is how the story ends with a storyteller, with someone who has witnessed all of this and says, let me speak to the yet unknowing world how these things came about. You will hear of carnal, bloody unnatural acts, accidental judgments, casual slaughters, deaths put on by cunning and forced cause, and this upshot, purposes mistook, fallen on the inventor's reeds. This all I can truly deliver. I can explain to you all of this that lies beneath the surface, that which passeth the show, that which you cannot see from this courtroom full of dead people. It all makes sense if I tell you the story, according to Horatio. But as we're reminded, this is all taking place on the stage. This storytelling is itself within a story, a play that has already featured a play within it, now has a storyteller, but of course that storyteller is the creation of another storyteller. This is a character in Shakespeare's tragedy of Hamlet. Horatio's lines about telling the story are lines written as part of the story. And so Hamlet's achievement of a story, of a sort of immortality through his action and the retelling of that action by future generations, that is the sort of thing that Cleos Amphitan consisted of. That's the sort of thing that Dome consisted of. And as much as I would like to end this lecture, this description of Shakespeare and the final lecture of the class, with that sort of redefinition of immortality as being commemorated in a narrative. If we've learned one thing throughout this entire semester, through all of these examples, it's that those narratives never stay the same. The stories are multi-form. Each iteration makes its own interpretive decisions and a character like Shakespeare's Hamlet didn't start out as Shakespeare's Hamlet. In its past, there was the Ur Hamlet, which was apparently a very unimpressive play according to critics. There was the sort of Viking Hamlet that we read about in Saxo Grammaticus's History of the Danes. And that iteration itself came from an oral tradition that shows up in Ambala Saga in Iceland, in Kennings. So has Hamlet become immortal through our retelling his story over the centuries? Well, yes, as much as Achilles or Gilgamesh, but he hasn't stopped evolving over that time either.