So why does Hamlet mess up the description? Why doesn't he tell the Court that Lucianus is the brother of the king? The Freudian reading, of course, is that Hamlet has telescoped Claudius and his father together.
After all, Claudius never killed his uncle. If you're Claudius, this looks like a threat, not a representation of your own crime (as Waggish points out). The Mousetrap has shown someone contemplating the murder of the King, but that someone is his nephew. So Hamlet never takes revenge for the murder of Hamlet, Sr. But there's no mention whatever of his father in that last scene. When he kills Claudius its for crimes he himself has seen committed: the manslaughter of his mother, the reckless negligence of Laertes's death, and his own murder. The motive for revenge, the murder of his father, has dissipated. Okay, he does refer to the presumed victim just once more in Act 5, referring to Claudius with the words "He that killed my King and whored my mother," but that just makes it briefly conspicuous that he doesn't refer to Hamlet, Sr. Nor, in Act 5, does he ever mention his father again. Does he ever get evidence as decisive as ours? No he doesn't. So, we know Claudius is guilty, and also may be surprised to learn that Hamlet doesn't know it. (I think there's another way that Othello is a riff on Hamlet, one with the wrong characters in each play: Hamlet would never have killed Desdemona on the evidence Othello's given: Othello would have avenged his father's death as quickly as Laertes plans to.) By contrast, his evil twin Iago (lacks advancement hates the calm and serene leader who has taken power seeks through the sheer outrageous energy of self-resourcefulness to unsettle that supremely stable leader soliloquizes to the audience a lot and even asks who's calling him a villain as Hamlet does spends a lot of time thinking about the sheets on which sexual activity might be taking place) - his evil twin Iago says he doesn't know whether Othello is actually guilty but that he will act as though it's a certainty. Hamlet is clear on this: he won't gamble, since the spirit he saw may be a devil. Orson Welles's Touch of Evil.) You can't gamble on the guilt of another by executing them: the gamble is itself tantamount to depraved indifference. The fact that Claudius is guilty is not enough by itself. So much for Hamlet's delaying too long: he can't justly kill Claudius unless he knows Claudius is guilty. But now we have more information, information that Shakespeare regards as decisive and that Hamlet doesn't have. Up till now, he has all the relevant information that we do. Lewis's idea of common knowledge, we know that Shakespeare knows we know, but this means that Shakespeare didn't know we knew before, which means that we may have thought we knew but we didn't actually know. In his soliloquy he says, "I did the murder," and also that his offense "hath the primal eldest curse upon't: / A brother's murder." So now we know.īut there's a principle of interpretation that also comes into play here: if we know now, then we didn't know before. After "The Mousetrap" (the name of the play The Murder of Gonzago is called "The Mousetrap") Claudius seeks solitude in order to reflect on his sins. (This isn't Levin's emphasis, but I think it's implied in his argument.)Īnyhow Waggish's post prompted me to want to go a little farther.
Shakespeare wouldn't begin the play announcing its most important spoilers. Waggish cites this line to rebut what he thinks a weak argument that Richard Levin makes (one that I find rather appealing, myself): that the fact that the play twice, and early on, raises the possibility that the ghost may be a devil pretty much means that that can't be the solution. The estimable Waggish has been pondering Hamlet's notorious explication of the action in The Murder of Gonzago, that the murderer who pours poison into the porches of the player king's ear is "one Lucianus, nephew to the King." For Waggish, the line conduces to a skeptical reading of Hamlet: we cannot know that the ghost was in fact the ghost of Hamlet, Sr., because whatever elicits Claudius's violent reaction, it isn't the depiction of a brother murdering his brother.