ACT IV
SCENE i
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem attached at the hip with Claudius now. They enter with the royal couple only to be dismissed immediately without saying any lines. Gertrude doesn’t “rat” out Hamlet regarding the Polonius incident: it’s close enough to be mere reporting, but doesn’t acknowledge what Hamlet is obviously all about. Claudius is nevertheless able now to consider Hamlet a danger, mentions his plan to ship him off, and calls Rosencrantz and Guildenstern back in to have them fetch Hamlet to him.
SCENE ii
Hamlet toys with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern over stashing the body of Polonius. He calls Rosencrantz a “spunge” who “soaks up the king’s countenance, his rewards, his authorities” (IV.ii.15-16). He says, “The King is a thing … Of nothing” (IV.ii.28-30), and agrees to go with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
SCENE iii
Claudius frets over the fact that Hamlet is “lov’d of the distracted multitude” (IV.iii.4). It’s difficult to understand how Hamlet has had such an opportunity, but this too parallels Oxford’s situation. The anonymous celebratory poem (albeit doggerel) recounting Elizabeth’s processional in honor of Sir Francis Drake suggests that Oxford had a beloved, clownish, public persona:
Sir Francis, Sir Francis, Sir Francis is come;
Sir Robert, and eke Sir William his son, [Robert Cecil, son of Lord Burghley]
And eke the good Earl of Huntington
Marched gallantly on the road.
Then came the Lord Chamberlain with his white staff,
And all the people began to laugh;
And then the Queen began to speak,
“You’re welcome home, Sir Francis Drake.”
(qtd. in Clark 360)
The white staff identifies the Lord Great Chamberlain, Oxford. Unless an on-the-spot, rude, visual stunt with his ceremonial prop has gone unreported, it would seem from this immediate public response that the mere sight of Oxford sparked comic delight in the crowd. Such a reputation was more widespread. The Spanish ambassador’s letter to his king about English court events in 1578 wrote, “The Earl of Oxford [is] a very gallant lad … who has a great following in the country” (qtd. in Clark 659). “This ‘following’ was due, I believe, to the popularity of his plays which were rehearsed at the public theatres or so-called ‘private’ theatres in preparation for their production at Court; possibly even to the fact that he sometimes appeared in them himself” (Clark 659). Oxford was a beloved celebrity.
When Hamlet is brought in, he toys with Claudius over stashing the body of Polonius, indulging in a conceit about wormfood: Polonius is at supper, “Not where he eats, but where ‘a is eaten; a certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet” (IV.iii.19-21). Several digs at Burghley are embedded here. Burghley expressed pride at having been born during the Diet of Worms (the convocation of secular and church leaders in the German city and presided over by the emperor) — big deal, and by the way, the Diet of Worms was early in 1521, several months after Cecil’s birth — so Hamlet’s statement that “Your worm is your only emperor for diet” (IV.iii.21) among his other ramblings puns on that connection with Polonius.
The morbid preoccupation with worms is a standard medieval trope, designed to provoke a proper focus away from ultimately futile worldly matters; here, though, it just seems nihilistic. It also serves as a dig at Claudius. Hamlet’s gross depiction of the “circle of life” ends up showing “how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar” (IV.iii.30-31). Hamlet responds to the question as to Polonius’ whereabouts, saying, “In heaven, send thither to see; if your messenger find him not there, seek him i’ th’ other place yourself” (IV.iii.34-35). It’s a clever Shakespearean way of saying, “go to hell.”
Hamlet is to be sent to England, and Claudius will send accompanying papers requesting that he be killed: “Do it, England” (IV.iii.65). Imagine how the original audience would take that!
SCENE iv
Fortinbras has mastered his passions and is directing his energies into military action. Hamlet’s last soliloquy — “How all occasions do inform against me” (IV.iv.32ff) — concerns the matter of honor: if that’s what it is, since so many will die in war.
Supremely impressive is Shakespeare’s recognition of the new “value” system of the Early Modern Period (and the Modern Modern Period still, or Post-Modern, if you like).
What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
(IV.iv.33-35)
It’s the first on-the-scene critique of consumer culture. Originally an aristocratic perspective, now it should be any dignified person’s lament.
One wonders if Shakespeare really believes in his heart that this war business is honorable — it seems so arbitrary: for a scrap of Polish land — “a little patch of ground” (IV.iv.18) — thousands of souls are likely to die. “Rightly to be great / Is not to stir without great argument, / But greatly to find quarrel in a straw / When honor’s at the stake” (IV.iv.53-56). “Shakespeare here, as in many places in his plays, makes plain his sardonic contempt and distaste for the whole apparatus of war and national glory” (Asimov 133). “O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth” (IV.iv.65-66). But the ironies are that he said that same thing in Act I, and that now he’s even heading in the wrong direction!
SCENE v
Ophelia’s bizarre behavior bears scrutiny now. She’s acting mad, but not acting.
Her speech is nothing,
Yet the unshaped use of it doth move
The hearers to collection; they yawn at it,
And botch the words up to fit their own thoughts….
(IV.v.7-10)
The interesting facet of this scene is that we hear how everyone at court is listening carefully to Ophelia’s rantings, trying to sift out some key to explain matters. Well, the critics have been doing this ever since. We do this. And there have been some cuckoo notions to come out of the supposed decoding process too, including the theory that Ophelia is pregnant. Claudius seems to want to think that Ophelia’s madness stems entirely from Polonius’ death (IV.v.75-76), and her songs do persistently refer to one dead — but that’s only daddy so far, so what do we make of all her smut? Her statement, “You must wear your rue with a difference,” may be a punning reference to “different rue,” or “divers rue” = Devereux — another Claudius/Leicester connection (Ogburn and Ogburn 674).
Laertes returns, backed by the Danish “rabble” (IV.v.103). “The ease with which popularity can be lost and public opinion made to veer makes it clear that both Claudius and Hamlet are entirely right in trying to effect their respective ends in as cautious and circumspect a manner as possible” (Asimov 135). Claudius asks, “What is the cause, Laertes, / That thy rebellion looks so giantlike?” (IV.v.120-121). Oxford marked Ecclesiasticus 16:7 in his Geneva Bible: “He spared not the old giants, which were rebellious, trusting to their own strength.”
Laertes delivers bombastic pronouncements of vengeance for the death of his father. He is further tortured by Ophelia’s insanity, as are we. Ophelia distributes botanical gifts: rosemary, “symbolic of fidelity in love because its fragrance lingered over long periods” (Asimov 137), pansies, and so on. In any case, the poison that serves so well as a theme in the play is spreading. What the manipulative King tells Laertes privately afterwards (what he puts in his ear, as it were) we don’t hear.
SCENE vi
Horatio reads a letter from Hamlet regarding pirate abduction. Hamlet mentions the pirate attacks on his way to England — entirely extraneous material for this plot, but Oxford’s ship was attacked while he was returning to England in 1576 (Anderson 206).
SCENE vii
The King has told Laertes his side of the story, claiming his own hands are somewhat tied because of the tremendous affection he has for Hamlet’s mother and also “the great love the general gender bear him” (IV.vii.18). Laertes is another willing dupe, and his rage over his father’s death is manipulated by Claudius so that he is goaded into a fight with Hamlet in the future. And poison may be involved too, but they’ll plan more later. Laertes is in a sense opposite of Hamlet in that he’s ready for action without sufficient thought first. Laertes, we suspect, is a composite character, or a palimpsest, first having been a representative of Philip Sidney, later of Robert Cecil (Ogburn and Ogburn 697).
Gertrude enters and recounts her witnessing of Ophelia’s drowning. Maybe it was an accident, or Ophelia may have gone through with what Hamlet obsessively considered: suicide. She was apparently sensitive enough to be in agony after being treated as a sexual pawn by everyone obsessed with her purity. “Ver is punned on for wyll or brook; and ‘willow’ is wyll O” (Ogburn and Ogburn 678). In so far as Ophelia represents Anne Cecil, Oxford’s wife, “She was never so real to him as after her death, when her memory, or the idea of her, tormented him with a sense of anguish and guilt. And this statement applies to both the Earl [regarding Anne] and the Prince” (Ogburn and Ogburn 677).
A question too frequently unasked: how does Gertrude have so much detailed knowledge about Ophelia’s drowning? If she’s telling the truth and not just putting a pretty spin on the event for Laertes’ sake, she couldn’t have simply watched from a tower window. For that matter, do we ever wonder how complicit she may have been in old Hamlet’s murder. One critic points out that when one widowed partner quickly remarries, that second relationship has typically been going on in some form for some time (Gontar). And Earl Showerman furthers scholarship concerning the relevance of Hamlet and classical sources to the case of Mary Queen of Scots, her suspected conspiracy with her lover, the Earl of Bothwell, in the murder of her husband Lord Darnley, and her and rather hasty marriage to Bothwell. And how perturbed was Oxford about his own mother’s quick remarriage? And how guilty was Queen Elizabeth in Oxford’s misfortunes and Leicester’s benefits from them? Once again, it’s not a matter of resolving “either/or/or”: Shakespeare is almost always doing two or more things at once.
Hamlet, Act by Act
Hamlet Act IV