Hamlet – Act II

“The play’s the thing, wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.”

At the end of act I we found Hamlet anguishing over the apparent assassination of his father by dear old Uncle Claudius. The guy has a big problem. Does he follow through and seek revenge by killing Claudius? The answer is, for now, no. Hamlet, patently indecisive, only plans to add a few lines to a play to be presented at court that evening. These new lines change the play into a murder-the-king affair that, Hamlet hopes, will strike too close to home and elicit a reaction from Claudius. Hamlet will “catch the conscience of the king” by watching his reaction, meaning I guess that if the guy flinches or something then he is guilty.

Is it just me, or does this strike you as a rather unreliable way to determine someone’s guilt? What if Claudius frowns just because he doesn’t like the play? Or, what if he gets a backache at some crucial moment and rubs his neck, inadvertently grimacing out a confession? Or, more likely, what if he is the consummate stoic and sits there like a rock, unmoving. Then he’s innocent? By hatching this harebrained scheme, Hamlet comes across as a little weird, which is probably the point. When I first read this, I imagined the Bard trying to write this scene, way back in 1600, sitting there, quill in hand, gazing upward, thinking deeply, trying to develop his Hamlet. Suddenly, in one of his many ah ha! moments, the idea strikes him: a play-within-a-play (we’ve seen this before), the play as a mechanism for obtaining the truth, albeit in a most ambiguous, peculiar, and flawed way (just the way the Bard likes it). Strangeness everywhere, which is of course pure Shakespeare.

Besides this bizarre plan, there is a whole lot else going on in this act, the longest in the play. Roughly speaking, the action proceeds through Polonius’ conversation with Claudius and Gertrude (on political matters and on his theory of Hamlet’s madness), Hamlet’s subsequent conversation with Polonius (with Hamlet feigning madness), Hamlet’s bright reunion with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (where he doesn’t seem to feign any madness), the bit with the arrival of the theater company (players), and finally Hamlet’s long soliloquy at the end where his famous plan is hatched. In all this, I found the language at times very complex, obscure, and hard to follow. There’s a lot going on here, with copious footnoting, so I probably missed a pun or two. Nothing new there of course.

The play-within-a-play, the complex language, the deep and detailed characters, and the developing themes…this one is a biggie. You really have to pay attention or get left behind. We’ll see what the next act brings.