Words in one position may mean more than one thing. The multiple valences of meaning lend mood and tone to poetry. In assuming a single meaning, one may be misdirected; in hearing more than one meaning, one might be hearing into unintended dimensions. Conveying more than intended or initially heard, speaking along more than one axis, writing checks that cash out in multiple dimensions: these are the provinces of poetry.
I have no opinions on the Oxfordian theory. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet, was written sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is amongst the greatest works in English, written during the language’s prime. I highly recommend seeing it performed, or watching a filmed version (Kenneth Branagh’s is good). The speeches herein make for some of the best memorization and recitation, if only by virtue of bombast and the savor of origination that so many frequently-riffed-upon texts tend to have.
It is a revenge tragedy that flutters through farce and ends in a bloodbath. One might think of it as a study of hesitation, of acedia. Another way to think of it is as the audience may have seen it, in 1603, as a muffled and disguised portrait of James I, who ascended the throne that year, whose mother (Mary Queen of Scots) remarried the man suspected to be his killer. One might also be drawn to the hysterically perfect portraits of human hesitation, balking, doubt, circumspection, stalling, dawdling, and downright avoidance of an onrushing future that seems to insist upon itself, but only so far as the future Hamlet can see for himself awaits. Or, one might see it as the chronicle of a rigged course of action thrust upon a man who holds the spying, lying, intriguing machinations of his family and political rivals at bay through strategic madness contending with the depths of despair at being manipulated by family.
Perfect knowledge murders action. Hamlet knows all, and cannot decide what to do, much less act upon a decision. Imagine a version of the play without a ghost, or, where the ghost is less decisive in its declarations, in which some shadow of a doubt remains, wherein there is a shred of mystery that might be chased and torn aside: this is a play where Hamlet is driven to chase the tatters of hope. In the void of perfect knowledge at the center of the “distracted globe” of the Elsinore panopticon, the Prince quails into acedia.
I have mentioned acedia before (from the Greek kēdos, meaning “care, concern, or grief,” negated with the prefix a-). It slant-rhymes with Sloth, but is closer to the noonday demon of Psalm 91:6, or, as in Psalm 119:28, a state where the soul sleeps from weariness. It is when the soul seeks to bind itself up in other affections and occupations than from the task at hand (ie. in plays, in women, in catching him in another situation, in gawking at an army), such that it hopes against itself to lose sight of what that task was in the first place.
Regardless of how one reads the play (whether the ghost is real, or a trick of the Norwegian agent Horatio; whether Ophelia can be trusted, or Gertude is guilty or not). It contains several of the most wrenching, painful, hilarious, and irritating soliloquies in English. I feel infinitely tender toward them though they are totally maddening in content, they are beautiful, and annoying, yet capture so perfectly the dithering that hesitation owes to consciousness. There are seven major soliloquies (“O, that this too too solid flesh would melt”; “O, all you host of heaven”; “What a rogue and peasant slave am I”; “To be or not to be”; “‘Tis now the very witching time of night”; “Now might I do it pat, now ‘a is praying”; “How all occasions do inform against me”) each of which marks another moment of excruciatingly reasoned, exquisitely phrased dithering along the sweet prince’s path to damnation. I share the first one here, as jewel and as caution:
From Hamlet
Act 1 Scene 2, l. 131-61
O, that this too too solid flesh would melt
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!
Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d
His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!
How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. That it should come to this!
But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two:
So excellent a king; that was, to this,
Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother
That he might not beteem the winds of heaven
Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth!
Must I remember? why, she would hang on him,
As if increase of appetite had grown
By what it fed on: and yet, within a month–
Let me not think on’t–Frailty, thy name is woman!–
A little month, or ere those shoes were old
With which she follow’d my poor father’s body,
Like Niobe, all tears:–why she, even she–
O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason,
Would have mourn’d longer–married with my uncle,
My father’s brother, but no more like my father
Than I to Hercules: within a month:
Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears
Had left the flushing in her galled eyes,
She married. O, most wicked speed, to post
With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!
It is not nor it cannot come to good:
But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.
-Shakespeare (~1602)
“Too too solid”- there are multiple Octaves and Folios of Hamlet, which frequently disagree on key words, one of these quarrels taking place around whether Hamlet is complaining of flesh that is too “sullied” (by the visions of the ghost, whencefrom questionable; by the knowledge of murder, unbearable; by the taboo specter of incest, perhaps) or “solid” (too mortal, earthly, and thereby imperfect to act; perhaps our prince was a fat kid in Wittenburg).
“tis an unweeded garden, / That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature / Possess it merely”- While the sentence structure indicates Hamlet wails this imprecation at the world being such a damned Eden, one might also understand him to be referring to himself, or his own mind: it being an unweeded garden, possessed of supernatural sightings he is unable (unwilling?) to set aside.
“Increase of appetite had grown / By what it fed on”- All growth is reversed, all weeds have roots in Hell. Hungers and appetites are inverted. There is a psychoanalytic reading that takes Hamlet’s chronic, relentless disgust as sign that the primal taboo against realization of incest is violated throughout the play, thus bringing on Hamlet’s despair, inaction, and eventual rageful spree.
“Hyperion to a satyr” / “than I to Hercules”- more inversion, doubling, and reversing. This is the primal evil— a father slain, a mother stolen— that is the divine excuse for action, and yet what we receive from Hamlet is speech after speech of florid contemplation on the theme of violent hesitation. To think and to dwell and to ruminate are the thieves of impulse, yet it is difficult to read the beautiful verbal dramatics Hamlet recedes into, and not believe that the more elaborate the speech, the more it ventilates the urgency of action into merely more words, words, words.