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Allusions to Hamlet in Joyce's Ulysses

etexts: [ToC] one-page

personae

Bartlett's

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by-scene: UVic,
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summaries: onepage

scene one [etext] [summary]

Bernardo relieves Francisco at midnight, soldiers on guard duty on a 'platform' in front of Elsinore Castle in Denmark. (cf the Tower at the start of Ulysses? Telem)

"Did me good all the same... For this relief much thanks. In Hamlet, that is." [Nausikaa] "He drank drugs to obliterate. For this relief much thanks." [Oxen]

Francisco leaves as two more soldiers arrive for night duty, Marcellus and Horatio.

"RUDOLPH... Are you not my son Leopold...? BLOOM (With precaution.) I suppose so, father. Mosenthal. All that's left of him." [Circe] (Joyce doesn't seem to exploit this vision of Bloom's father as a parallel to King Hamet's ghost...?)

They chat about the Ghost, which promptly re-appears.

"--The ghost walks, professor MacHugh murmured softly" [Eolus]

They compare its appearance to the late King Hamlet.

"--Is it possible that that player Shakespeare, a ghost by absence, and in the vesture of buried Denmark" [Scylla] "Not for nothing was he a butcher's son, wielding the sledded poleaxe and spitting in his palms." [Scylla]

Marcellus asks why Denmark is gearing up for war, and Horatio explains that a Norwegian prince is hoping to recover some territory they'd lost to the late King Hamlet. Bernardo speculates that the Ghost's appearance, fully armed, is a portent of war. (Shakespeare is credited here with coining the phrase 'mind's eye'.)

"Must be strange not to see her. Kind of a form in his mind's eye." [Lestryg] "Stephen's mind's eye being too busily engaged in repicturing his family hearth the last time he saw it" [Eumeus]

"In sleep the wet sign calls her hour, bids her rise." [Proteus]

The Ghost re-appears, and Horatio tries to get it to foretell the future, but it flees when a rooster crows.

"Asked if he had any message for the living he exhorted all who were still at the wrong side of Maya to acknowledge the true path..." [Cyclops]

Horatio and Marcellus exchange ghost-lore, and Horatio greets the dawn a little too poetically.

"--The moon, professor MacHugh said. He forgot Hamlet." [Eolus] (this allusion is unclear)

As the scene closes, they agree to tell young Hamlet about the ghost.

Bartlett's quotes: For this relief much thanks: 'tis bitter cold, And I am sick at heart. --- But in the gross and scope of my opinion, This bodes some strange eruption to our state. --- Whose sore task Does not divide the Sunday from the week. --- This sweaty haste Doth make the night joint-labourer with the day. --- In the most high and palmy state of Rome, A little ere the mightiest Julius fell, The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets. --- And then it started like a guilty thing Upon a fearful summons. --- Whether in sea or fire, in earth or air, The extravagant and erring spirit hies To his confine. --- It faded on the crowing of the cock. Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated, The bird of dawning singeth all night long: And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad; The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike, No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm, So hallow'd and so gracious is the time. --- So have I heard, and do in part believe it. But, look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill.

The new king, Claudius, is dealing with various court matters. Not yet revealed as the murderer of the old king (his own brother!), he makes a hypocritical speech about that 'tragedy', trying to justify his hasty marriage to the widowed queen, Gertrude (cf 'Gerty' in ch13: Nausikaa). He next sends off a letter to the king of Norway to explain the current situation, hoping to prevent a war. He approves young Laertes' request to go back to France, and finally turns his attention to his nephew Hamlet.

Hamlet is still deeply mourning his father after two months (as Stephen Dedalus still mourns his mother after a year, in Ulysses, both still dressing in black). Claudius and Gertrude try to talk him out of it.

"--Don't mope over it all day, he said. I'm inconsequent. Give up the moody brooding." [Telem] "I am caught in this burning scene. Pan's hour, the faunal noon." [Proteus] "--Thanks, Stephen said. I can't wear them if they are grey." [Telem] "Hamlet, the black prince, is Hamnet Shakespeare." [Scylla] "The young man's face grew dark. All could see how hard it was for him to be reminded of his promise and of his recent loss. He would have withdrawn from the feast had not the noise of voices allayed the smart." [Oxen]

"Drawing back his head and gazing far from beneath his vailed eyelids he saw the bright fawn skin shine in the glare" [Lotus]

Hamlet protests he must be allowed to express his real feelings-- he's not just playing a part. Claudius argues that the loss of the father is an inevitable part of a boy's growing up and should be borne like a man.

"If he had smiled why would he have smiled? To reflect that each one who enters imagines himself to be the first to enter whereas he is always the last term of a preceding series even if the first term of a succeeding one, each imagining himself to be first, last, only and alone whereas he is neither first nor last nor only nor alone in a series originating in and repeated to infinity." [Ithaca]

Claudius encourages Hamlet to see him as a father (cf Bloom with Stephen), and to stay with them as a family rather than going back to college in Wittenberg (Germany).

"At all events he wound up by concluding, eschewing for the nonce hidebound precedent, a cup of Epps's cocoa and a shakedown for the night plus the use of a rug or two and overcoat doubled into a pillow. At least he would be in safe hands and as warm as a toast on a trivet." [Eumeus]

"If you hold that he, a greying man with two marriageable daughters... is the beardless undergraduate from Wittenberg" [Scylla]

Gertrude agrees with Claudius, and Hamlet politely assents (Stephen is also polite, but dissents):

"THE MOTHER I pray for you in my other world... Years and years I loved you, O my son, my firstborn, when you lay in my womb." [Circe] "No, mother! Let me be and let me live." [Telem]

Left alone, Hamlet speaks his real misery (cf Stephen's inner monologues, especially in the first three chapters).

"O, fie! Out on't! Pfuiteufel!" [Scylla] "Murderer's ground. It passed darkly. Shuttered, tenantless, unweeded garden." [Hades]

He's appalled by his mother's hasty remarriage but doesn't yet suspect the murder.

"Frailty, thy name is Sceptre." [Cyclops]

The guards now arrive from scene one. Hamlet banters a bit with Horatio, even touching on the issue of his mother's remarriage. (The allusion to getting drunk vaguely parallels Joyce and Gogarty.)

"--The sacred pint alone can unbind the tongue of Dedalus, he said." [Telem]

"--The truth is midway, he affirmed. He is the ghost and the prince. He is all in all." [Scylla]

Horatio explains about the Ghost.

"--Paddy Dignam dead! says Alf... Sure I'm after seeing him not five minutes ago, says Alf, as plain as a pikestaff. --You saw his ghost then, says Joe" [Cyclops]

Hamlet asks for more details.

"But, because loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed. His beaver is up." [Scylla] "So in the moon's midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore's tempting flood." [Proteus]

Hamlet swears the guards to silence and agrees to join their watch that night.

Bartlett's: The memory be green. --- With an auspicious and a dropping eye, With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage, In equal scale weighing delight and dole. --- The head is not more native to the heart. --- A little more than kin, and less than kind. --- All that lives must die, Passing through nature to eternity. --- Seems, madam! nay, it is; I know not 'seems.' 'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black. --- But I have that within which passeth show; These but the trappings and the suits of woe. --- 'Tis a fault to Heaven, A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, To reason most absurd. --- 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! --- That it should come 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. --- Why, she would hang on him, As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on. --- Frailty, thy name is woman! --- A little month. --- Like Niobe, all tears. --- A beast, that wants discourse of reason. --- My father's brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules. --- It is not nor it cannot come to good. --- Thrift, thrift, Horatio! the funeral baked meats Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. Would I had met my dearest foe in heaven Or ever I had seen that day. --- In my mind's eye, Horatio. --- He was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again. --- Season your admiration for a while. --- In the dead vast and middle of the night. --- Arm'd at point exactly, cap-a-pe. --- A countenance more in sorrow than in anger. --- While one with moderate haste might tell a hundred. --- His beard was grizzled, no? It was, as I have seen it in his life, A sable silver'd. --- Let it be tenable in your silence still. --- Give it an understanding, but no tongue. --- Upon the platform, 'twixt eleven and twelve. --- Foul deeds will rise, Though all the earth o'erwhelm them, to men's eyes.

Laertes is saying goodbye to his sister Ophelia, and advising her not to be seduced by Hamlet's promises of love. Ophelia protests that Laertes doesn't practice what he preaches.

"In the question of the grazing lands his peevish asperity is notorious and in Mr Cuffe's hearing brought upon him from an indignant rancher a scathing retort couched in terms as straightforward as they were bucolic. It ill becomes him to preach that gospel." [Oxen]

Their father Polonius arrives and demonstrates himself a greater windbag than his son by rattling off a stream of parting truisms.

"The christian laws which built up the hoards of the jews... bound their affections too with hoops of steel." [Scylla]

Ophelia tells her father they were discussing Hamlet, and Polonius (violating several of his own truisms) declares Hamlet untrustworthy, and high-handedly forbids her to talk to him again.

Bartlett's: A violet in the youth of primy nature, Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting, The perfume and suppliance of a minute. --- The chariest maid is prodigal enough, If she unmask her beauty to the moon: Virtue itself 'scapes not calumnious strokes: The canker galls the infants of the spring Too oft before their buttons be disclosed, And in the morn and liquid dew of youth Contagious blastments are most imminent. --- Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven; Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine, Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, And recks not his own rede. --- Give thy thoughts no tongue. --- Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel. --- Beware of entrance to a quarrel; but being in, Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy, But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy; For the apparel oft proclaims the man. --- Neither a borrower nor a lender be; For loan oft loses both itself and friend, And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry. This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man. --- Springes to catch woodcocks. --- When the blood burns, how prodigal the soul Lends the tongue vows. --- Be somewhat scanter of your maiden presence.

Hamlet, Horatio, and Marcellus are waiting in the cold night for the Ghost.

"Airs romped around him, nipping and eager airs." [Proteus]

Hamlet philosophises about Claudius's drunken revelling being a Danish character-flaw (ie, no blame).

"Then did you, chivalrous Terence, hand forth, as to the manner born, that nectarous beverage" [Cyclops] "--'Tis a custom more honoured in the breach than in the observance." [Cyclops]

The Ghost appears and Hamlet emotionally challenges it.

"Or their skirt behind, placket unhooked. Glimpses of the moon." [Lotus]

The Ghost indicates it wants Hamlet to follow it, and Hamlet tells the others he has no reason to be afraid.

"Her glazing eyes, staring out of death, to shake and bend my soul. On me alone." [Telem]

Horatio argues it may lure Hamlet to his death.

"So in the moon's midwatches I pace the path above the rocks, in sable silvered, hearing Elsinore's tempting flood." [Proteus] "--I mean to say, Haines explained to Stephen as they followed, this tower and these cliffs here remind me somehow of Elsinore. That beetles o'er his base into the sea, isn't it?" [Telem] "Jesus! If I fell over a cliff that beetles o'er his base..." [Proteus]

Hamlet goes with it anyway, but the others decide to follow.

Bartlett's: Ham. The air bites shrewdly; it is very cold. Hor. It is a nipping and an eager air. --- But to my mind, though I am native here And to the manner born, it is a custom More honoured in the breach than the observance. --- Angels and ministers of grace, defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou comest in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee: I'll call thee Hamlet, King, father, royal Dane: O, answer me! Let me not burst in ignorance, but tell Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements; why the sepulchre, Wherein we saw thee quietly inurn'd, Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws To cast thee up again. What may this mean, That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel Revisit'st thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature So horridly to shake our disposition With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls? --- I do not set my life at a pin's fee. --- My fate cries out, And makes each petty artery in this body As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve. --- Unhand me, gentlemen. By heaven, I'll make a ghost of him that lets me! --- Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

The Ghost speaks to Hamlet, seriously and articulately, of its suffering.

"--The play begins. A player comes on under the shadow, made up in the castoff mail of a court buck, a wellset man with a bass voice. It is the ghost, the king, a king and no king, and the player is Shakespeare who has studied Hamlet all the years of his life which were not vanity in order to play the part of the spectre. He speaks the words to Burbage, the young player who stands before him beyond the rack of cerecloth, calling him by a name: Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit bidding him list. To a son he speaks, the son of his soul, the prince, young Hamlet and to the son of his body, Hamnet Shakespeare, who has died in Stratford that his namesake may live for ever." [Scylla] "ZOE (Tragically.) Hamlet, I am thy father's gimlet!" [Circe] "...Shakespeare has no rhymes: blank verse. The flow of the language it is. The thoughts. Solemn. Hamlet, I am thy father's spirit Doomed for a certain time to walk the earth." [Lestryg] "No. The corpse of John Shakespeare does not walk the night." [Scylla]

"Our Father who art in purgatory." [Scylla] "I will appear to you after death. You will see my ghost after death. My ghost will haunt you after death. There is another world after death named hell." [Hades] "...Hamlet his father showeth the prince no blister of combustion." [Oxen] "Jack Power could a tale unfold: father a G man." [Lestryg] "If the accused could speak he could a tale unfold" [Circe] "--He will have it that Hamlet is a ghoststory, John Eglinton said for Mr Best's behoof. Like the fat boy in Pickwick he wants to make our flesh creep. List! List! O list! My flesh hears him: creeping, hears. If thou didst ever..." [Scylla] "PADDY DIGNAM Bloom, I am Paddy Dignam's spirit. List, list, O list!" [Circe]

It asks Hamlet to avenge its murder, and Hamlet readily agrees (unlike the dull weeds).

"STEPHEN Aha! I know you, gammer! Hamlet, revenge!" [Circe] "I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen." [Scylla] "Under the upswelling tide he saw the writhing weeds lift languidly and sway reluctant arms... Lord, they are weary: and, whispered to, they sigh." [Proteus]

The Ghost accuses Claudius, but asks Hamlet to leave Gertrude to her conscience (cf Bloom with Molly).

"Is there anything more in him that they she sees? Fascination. Worst man in Dublin." [Hades]

"And in the porches of mine ear did pour. By the way how did he find that out? He died in his sleep. Or the other story, beast with two backs?" [Eolus] "They list. And in the porches of their ears I pour. --The soul has been before stricken mortally, a poison poured in the porch of a sleeping ear. But those who are done to death in sleep cannot know the manner of their quell unless their Creator endow their souls with that knowledge in the life to come. The poisoning and the beast with two backs that urged it king Hamlet's ghost could not know of were he not endowed with knowledge by his creator. That is why the speech (his lean unlovely English) is always turned elsewhere, backward. Ravisher and ravished, what he would but would not, go with him from Lucrece's bluecircled ivory globes to Imogen's breast, bare, with its mole cinquespotted. He goes back, weary of the creation he has piled up to hide him from himself, an old dog licking an old sore. But, because loss is his gain, he passes on towards eternity in undiminished personality, untaught by the wisdom he has written or by the laws he has revealed. His beaver is up. He is a ghost, a shadow now, the wind by Elsinore's rocks or what you will, the sea's voice, a voice heard only in the heart of him who is the substance of his shadow, the son consubstantial with the father." [Scylla]

"Two deeds are rank in that ghost's mind: a broken vow and the dullbrained yokel on whom her favour has declined, deceased husband's brother... If you deny that in the fifth scene of Hamlet he has branded her with infamy, tell me why there is no mention of her during the thirtyfour years between the day she married him and the day she buried him." [Scylla]

"--He had a sudden death, poor fellow, he said." [Hades]

The Ghost leaves as dawn breaks, and Hamlet seethes with new resolve.

"Put a pin in that chap, will you? My tablets." [Proteus] "Horn of a bull, hoof of a horse, smile of a Saxon." [Telem]

Horatio and Marcellus have been eavesdropping.

"STEPHEN... (He cries, his vulture talons sharpened.) Holà! Hillyho!" [Circe]

Hamlet swears them elaborately to secrecy.

"Has no-one made him out to be an Irishman? Judge Barton, I believe, is searching for some clues. He swears (His Highness not His Lordship) by saint Patrick." [Scylla] "STEPHEN... But by Saint Patrick...! " [Circe] "A VOICE Swear!" [Circe] "--But this prying into the family life of a great man, Russell began impatiently. Art thou there, truepenny?" [Scylla]

Hamlet warns them he may feign madness, and regrets the burden he now bears.

Bartlett's: I am thy father's spirit, Doom'd for a certain term to walk the night, And for the day confin'd to fast in fires, Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature Are burnt and purg'd away. But that I am forbid To tell the secrets of my prison-house, I could a tale unfold, whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, Thy knotted and combined locks to part And each particular hair to stand an end, Like quills upon the fretful porpentine: But this eternal blazon must not be To ears of flesh and blood. List, list, O, list! --- And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf. --- O my prophetic soul! My uncle! --- O Hamlet, what a falling-off was there! --- But, soft! methinks I scent the morning air; Brief let me be. Sleeping within my orchard, My custom always of the afternoon. --- Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, Unhousell'd, disappointed, unaneled, No reckoning made, but sent to my account With all my imperfections on my head. --- Leave her to heaven And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge, To prick and sting her. --- The glow-worm shows the matin to be near, And 'gins to pale his uneffectual fire. --- While memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee! Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivial fond records. --- Within the book and volume of my brain. --- O villain, villain, smiling, damned villain! My tables, meet it is I set it down, That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain: At least I'm sure it may be so in Denmark. --- There's ne'er a villain dwelling in all Denmark But he's an arrant knave. There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave To tell us this. --- Every man has business and desire, Such as it is. --- Art thou there, truepenny? Come on-- you hear this fellow in the cellarage. --- O day and night, but this is wondrous strange! --- There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. --- Rest, rest, perturbed spirit! --- The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!

scene one [etext] [summary]

Polonius sends Reynaldo to Paris to check up on Laertes.

"--Was that Mulligan cad with him? His fidus Achates!" [Hades] "--I see, he said. I didn't recognize him for the moment. I hear he is keeping very select company. Have you seen him lately?" [Sirens]

Ophelia has been alarmed by (hatless) Hamlet's feigning madness.

"Passing now. A side-eye at my Hamlet hat." [Proteus]

"--Yes, Mr Best said youngly, I feel Hamlet quite young. The bitterness might be from the father but the passages with Ophelia are surely from the son." [Scylla]

Polonius mistakes the 'madness' for proof of Hamlet's good intentions toward Ophelia, and regrets having ordered her not to see him.

Bartlett's: The flash and outbreak of a fiery mind, A savageness in unreclaimed blood. --- This is the very ecstasy of love.

Claudius and Gertrude send Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (R&G) to discover why Hamlet is suddenly acting mad. Polonius arrives with good news from Norway (the war is off). He then windily explains his interpretation of Hamlet's madness, and they hatch a plan to test the theory by spying on Hamlet and Ophelia together.

Claudius and Gertrude see Hamlet coming, and leave. Hamlet plays mad for Polonius.

"He knows it well too. Or he feels. Still harping on his daughter." [Sirens] "Poor Mrs Purefoy! Methodist husband. Method in his madness." [Lestryg]

R&G arrive as Polonius leaves. Talking with them, Hamlet becomes lucid.

"A primrose doublet, fortune's knave, smiled on my fear." [Proteus]

"--Man delights him not nor woman neither, Stephen said." [Scylla]

R&G tell Hamlet the theatrical company is coming.

"John Eglinton made a nothing pleasing mow." [Scylla]

Polonius returns and Hamlet acts mad again.

"You say right, sir. A Monday morning. 'Twas so, indeed." [WRocks] "Buzz. Buzz." [Scylla]

The players arrive, and Hamlet reminds them of a performance they did about Priam, swapping long quotes from memory.

"He creaked to and fro, tiptoing up nearer heaven by the altitude of a chopine" [Scylla]

"--She lies laid out in stark stiffness in that secondbest bed, the mobled queen" [Scylla]

He secretly requests they perform 'The Murder of Gonzago' and asks them to add a new speech he'll write for them. R&G and the players leave Hamlet alone, and he ponders his hesitancy but hopes the play will free him to act.

"A hesitating soul taking arms against a sea of troubles, torn by conflicting doubts, as one sees in real life." [Scylla]

"Clues. A shoelace. The body to be exhumed. Murder will out." [Hades] "Pallas Athena! A play! The play's the thing!" [Scylla]

Bartlett's: Brevity is the soul of wit. --- More matter, with less art. --- That he is mad, 'tis true: 'tis true 'tis pity; And pity 'tis 'tis true. --- Find out the cause of this effect, Or rather say, the cause of this defect, For this effect defective comes by cause. --- Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love. --- To be honest as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand. --- Still harping on my daughter. --- What do you read, my lord? Words, words, words. --- They have a plentiful lack of wit. --- Though this be madness, yet there is method in't. --- On fortune's cap we are not the very button. --- There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. --- A dream itself is but a shadow. --- Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks. --- This goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appears no other thing to me than a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension how like a god! --- Man delights not me: no, nor woman neither. --- There is something in this more than natural, if philosophy could find it out. --- I know a hawk from a handsaw. --- O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou! --- One fair daughter and no more, The which he loved passing well. --- Come, give us a taste of your quality. --- The play, I remember, pleased not the million; 'twas caviare to the general. --- They are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time: after your death you were better have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live. --- Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? --- What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? --- Unpack my heart with words, And fall a-cursing, like a very drab. --- For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. --- The devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape. --- Abuses me to damn me. --- The play's the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.

scene one [etext]

R&G tell Claudius they couldn't discover why Hamlet was acting mad, but that he'd showed enthusiasm for the scheduled play. Claudius, Gertrude, and Polonius arrange with Ophelia to test Hamlet. Gertrude leaves, Claudius and Polonius hide, Hamlet arrives and delivers his famous soliloquy.

"Music hath charms Shakespeare said. Quotations every day in the year. To be or not to be." [Sirens] "BLOOM... All insanity. Patriotism, sorrow for the dead, music, future of the race. To be or not to be." [Circe] "STEPHEN To have or not to have, that is the question." [Circe] "Mr Bloom was rather inclined to poohpooh the suggestion as egregious balderdash for, pending that consummation devoutly to be or not to be wished for..." [Eumeus]

"--That model schoolboy, Stephen said, would find Hamlet's musings about the afterlife of his princely soul, the improbable, insignificant and undramatic monologue, as shallow as Plato's." [Scylla]

"Still the plain straightforward question why a child of normally healthy parents... succumbs unaccountably... must certainly, in the poet's words, give us pause." [Oxen] "full of courteous haughtiness and pouring in chastened diction, I will not say the vials of his wrath but pouring the proud man's contumely upon the new movement." [Eolus] "--Spaniards... give you your quietus double quick with those poignards they carry in the abdomen." [Eumeus] "the forbidden country of Thibet (from which no traveller returns)" [Ithaca]

Ophelia greets him warmly but he rants cruelly, then leaves. She's fooled, and brokenhearted. Claudius was not fooled, and decides to send Hamlet to England to distract him. Polonius was fooled, but agrees about England if Gertrude can't get Hamlet to say what's bothering him.

Bartlett's: With devotion's visage And pious action we do sugar o'er The devil himself. --- To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep: No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to-- 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action. --- Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember'd. --- Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. --- I am myself indifferent honest. --- Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go. --- I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another. --- O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown! The courtier's, soldier's, scholar's eye, tongue, sword. --- The expectancy and rose of the fair state, The glass of fashion and the mould of form, The observed of all observers! --- Now see that noble and most sovereign reason, Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh. --- O, woe is me, To have seen what I have seen, see what I see!

Hamlet lectures the actors (sanely) on dramatic technique.

"LYNCH (Points.) The mirror up to nature." [Circe]

He praises Horatio and asks him to help watch Claudius's face during the play. Claudius and Gertrude watch first a pantomime of the poisoning, then hear the player's speeches.

"SHAKESPEARE (With paralytic rage.) Weda seca whokilla farst." [Circe]

Claudius stalks out. Hamlet confirms his guilt with Horatio and R&G. Polonius tells Hamlet that Gertrude wants to see him (Hamlet plays mad).

"Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale." [Proteus]

Hamlet, alone, prepares to face the guilty pair.

"BLOOM... The witching hour of night. I took the splinter out of this hand, carefully, slowly." [Circe] "Shades of night hovering here with all the dead stretched about. The shadows of the tombs when churchyards yawn" [Hades]

Bartlett's: Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness. Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings, who for the most part are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb-shows and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod. --- Suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. --- To hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature. --- The very age and body of the time his form and pressure. --- Though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve. --- Not to speak it profanely. --- I have thought some of Nature's journeymen had made men and not made them well, they imitated humanity so abominably. --- We have reformed that indifferently with us, sir. O, reform it altogether. --- Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man As e'er my conversation coped withal. --- No, let the candied tongue lick absurd pomp, And crook the pregnant hinges of the knee Where thrift may follow fawning. --- A man that fortune's buffets and rewards Hast ta'en with equal thanks. --- They are not a pipe for fortune's finger To sound what stop she please. Give me that man That is not passion's slave, and I will wear him In my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart, As I do thee.-- Something too much of this. --- And my imaginations are as foul As Vulcan's stithy. --- Here's metal more attractive. --- Nay, then, let the devil wear black, for I'll have a suit of sables. --- There's hope a great man's memory may outlive his life half a year. --- For, O, for, O, the hobby-horse is forgot. --- This is miching mallecho; it means mischief. --- Is this a prologue, or the posy of a ring? 'Tis brief, my lord. As woman's love. --- Our wills and fates do so contrary run That our devices still are overthrown. --- The lady doth protest too much, methinks. --- Let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung. --- The story is extant, and writ in choice Italian. --- Why, let the stricken deer go weep, The hart ungalled play; For some must watch, while some must sleep: So runs the world away. --- 'Tis as easy as lying. --- It will discourse most eloquent music. --- Pluck out the heart of my mystery. --- Do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? --- Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed. Methinks it is like a weasel. It is backed like a weasel. Or like a whale? Very like a whale. --- They fool me to the top of my bent. --- By and by is easily said. --- 'Tis now the very witching time of night, When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out Contagion to this world. --- I will speak daggers to her, but use none.

Claudius orders R&G to make sure Hamlet goes to England. Polonius heads off to eavesdrop on Hamlet and Gertrude. Claudius, alone, debates his guilty conscience and kneels to pray. Hamlet enters and debates whether to kill Claudius while praying (perhaps sending him to heaven), but decides to wait until he's sinning, so he'll go to hell.

Bartlett's: O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven; It hath the primal eldest curse upon't, A brother's murder. --- Like a man to double business bound, I stand in pause where I shall first begin, And both neglect. --- 'Tis not so above; There is no shuffling, there the action lies In his true nature. --- O limed soul, that, struggling to be free, Art more engag'd! Help, angels! Make assay! Bow, stubborn knees; and, heart with strings of steel, Be soft as sinews of the new-born babe! --- With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May. --- About some act That has no relish of salvation in't. --- My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

Hamlet accuses his mother, who cries for help. Polonius replies from behind the arras, and Hamlet stabs him. Hamlet condemns Gertrude's choice.

"Before and after. Grace after meals. Look on this picture then on that." [Lestryg]

Hamlet sees and speaks to the Ghost, whom Gertrude can't see.

"(Stephen's mother, emaciated, rises stark through the floor... FLORRY (Points to Stephen.) Look! He's white." [Circe]

"There was the allimportant question and she was dying to know was he a married man or a widower who had lost his wife or some tragedy like the nobleman with the foreign name from the land of song had to have her put into a madhouse, cruel only to be kind." [Nausikaa]

"Where is poor dear Arius to try conclusions?" [Proteus]

Hamlet swears Gertrude not to tell Claudius what really happened.

Bartlett's: Dead, for a ducat, dead! --- And let me wring your heart; for so I shall, If it be made of penetrable stuff. --- Such an act That blurs the grace and blush of modesty. --- False as dicers' oaths. --- A rhapsody of words. --- What act That roars so loud, and thunders in the index? --- Look here, upon this picture, and on this, The counterfeit presentment of two brothers. See, what a grace was seated on this brow: Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself; An eye like Mars, to threaten and command; A station like the herald Mercury New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill-- A combination and a form indeed, Where every god did seem to set his seal, To give the world assurance of a man. --- At your age The hey-day in the blood is tame, it's humble. --- O shame! where is thy blush? Rebellious hell, If thou canst mutine in a matron's bones, To flaming youth let virtue be as wax, And melt in her own fire: proclaim no shame When the compulsive ardour gives the charge, Since frost itself as actively doth burn, And reason panders will. --- A cutpurse of the empire and the rule, That from a shelf the precious diadem stole, And put it in his pocket! --- A king of shreds and patches. --- Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works. --- How is't with you, That you do bend your eye on vacancy? --- This is the very coinage of your brain: This bodiless creation ecstasy Is very cunning in. --- Bring me to the test, And I the matter will re-word; which madness Would gambol from. Mother, for love of grace, Lay not that flattering unction to your soul. --- Confess yourself to heaven; Repent what's past; avoid what is to come. --- Assume a virtue, if you have it not. That monster, custom, who all sense doth eat, Of habits devil, is angel yet in this. --- Refrain to-night, And that shall lend a kind of easiness To the next abstinence: the next more easy; For use almost can change the stamp of nature. --- I must be cruel, only to be kind: Thus bad begins, and worse remains behind. --- For 'tis the sport to have the enginer Hoist with his own petar.

scene one [etext]

Gertrude tells Claudius that Hamlet killed Polonius by accident in his madness. Claudius determines to send Hamlet off to England with R&G.

R&G find Hamlet in the chapel but he refuses to tell them wehere he's hidden Polonius's body.

Claudius asks Hamlet where the body is, and Hamlet answers in riddles.

"God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain." [Proteus]

Claudius sends Hamlet off with R&G. Claudius, alone, admits he's sending Hamlet to his execution.

Bartlett's: Diseases desperate grown By desperate appliance are relieved, Or not at all. --- A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

Hamlet (with R&G) encounters the Norwegian army on its way to war with Poland, and reflects on their pointless courage, and his own timidity.

Bartlett's: Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To fust in us unused. --- Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honour's at the stake.

Ophelia has gone mad from all the murderous scheming. She visits Gertrude.

"No. My cockle hat and staff and his my sandal shoon." [Proteus] "If others have their will Ann hath a way. By cock, she was to blame." [Scylla] "...a boldfaced Stratford wench who tumbles in a cornfield a lover younger than herself." [Scylla]

Ophelia leaves and Claudius grieves to Gertrude.

"Extraordinary the interest they take in a corpse... Huggermugger in corners." [Hades]

Laertes bursts in demanding satisfaction regarding his father's death. Ophelia wanders in, singing mad songs. Claudius promises Laertes he had no hand in Polonius's death, and offers the kingdowm if Laertes' friends don't agree.

Bartlett's: So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt. --- We know what we are, but know not what we may be. --- To-morrow is Saint Valentine's day, All in the morning betime. --- Then up he rose, and donn'd his clothes. --- Come, my coach! Good night, sweet ladies; good night. --- When sorrows come, they come not single spies, But in battalions. --- There's such divinity doth hedge a king, That treason can but peep to what it would. --- Nature is fine in love, and where 'tis fine, It sends some precious instance of itself After the thing it loves. --- There's rosemary, that's for remembrance... and there is pansies, that's for thoughts. --- You must wear your rue with a difference. There's a daisy; I would give you some violets, but they withered. --- His beard was as white as snow, All flaxen was his poll.

Horatio gets a letter from Hamlet claiming he was accidentally separated from the ship to England, while R&G are still on it.

Claudius convinces Laertes to kill Hamlet in a fencing-match, but proposes a poisoned cup as a fallback strategy. Gertrude arrives with the news that Ophelia has drowned herself.

"Leah tonight: Mrs Bandmann Palmer. Like to see again her in that. Hamlet she played last night. Male impersonator. Perhaps he was a woman. Why Ophelia committed suicide." [Lotus] "Yet sometimes they repent too late. Found in the riverbed clutching rushes." [Hades]

Bartlett's: A very riband in the cap of youth. --- That we would do, We should do when we would. --- One woe doth tread upon another's heel, So fast they follow. --- Nature her custom holds, Let shame say what it will.

scene one [etext]

Two gravediggers are preparing Ophelia's grave.

"You must laugh sometimes so better do it that way. Gravediggers in Hamlet. Shows the profound knowledge of the human heart." [Hades] "Necessity is that in virtue of which it is impossible that one can be otherwise. Argal, one hat is one hat." [Scylla]

Hamlet arrives with Horatio, and ponders the skulls that have been unearthed.

"Then he was aware of them bodies before of them coloured. How? By knocking his sconce against them, sure." [Proteus] "One day in the national library we had a discussion. Shakes. After. His lub back: I followed. I gall his kibe." [Scylla] "He returns after a life of absence to that spot of earth where he was born, where he has always been, man and boy, a silent witness... Gravediggers bury Hamlet père and Hamlet fils." [Scylla] "--Yes, Mr Best said youngly, I feel Hamlet quite young." [Scylla]

Hamlet asks the gravedigger about decay, and the skull of Yorick the jester.

"Turning green and pink, decomposing. Rot quick in damp earth. The lean old ones tougher. Then a kind of a tallowy kind of a cheesy. Then begin to get black, black treacle oozing out of them. Then dried up." [Hades]

The court arrives for Ophelia's funeral, so Hamlet and Horatio hide.

"A sterling good daughter was Gerty just like a second mother in the house, a ministering angel too with a little heart worth its weight in gold." [Nausikaa] "Sings too: Down among the dead men. Appropriate. Kidney pie. Sweets to the." [Sirens]

Laertes leaps into the open grave and curses Hamlet, so Hamlet leaps down too and they wrestle.

Bartlett's: Argal, he that is not guilty of his own death shortens not his own life. But is this law? Ay, marry, is't; crowner's quest law. --- There is no ancient gentlemen but gardeners. --- Cudgel thy brains no more about it. --- Has this fellow no feeling of his business? --- Custom hath made it in him a property of easiness. --- The hand of little employment hath the daintier sense. --- A politician... one that would circumvent God. --- Why may not that be the skull of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities now, his quillets, his cases, his tenures, and his tricks? --- One that was a woman, sir; but, rest her soul, she's dead. --- How absolute the knave is! we must speak by the card, or equivocation will undo us. --- The age is grown so picked that the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier, he galls his kibe. --- Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! my gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now; your gambols, your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning? Quite chap-fallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come. --- To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till we find it stopping a bung-hole? --- 'twere to consider too curiously, to consider so. --- Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. --- Lay her i' the earth: And from her fair and unpolluted flesh May violets spring! --- A ministering angel shall my sister be. --- Sweets to the sweet: farewell! --- I thought thy bride-bed to have deck'd, sweet maid, And not have strew'd thy grave. --- Though I am not splenitive and rash, Yet have I something in me dangerous. --- Forty thousand brothers Could not, with all their quantity of love, Make up my sum. --- Nay, an thou'lt mouth, I'll rant as well as thou. --- Let Hercules himself do what he may, The cat will mew and dog will have his day.

Hamlet explains to Horatio how, on the ship, he peeked at the letter ordering his death and substituted one ordering R&G's death.

"in spite of his having forgotten to take up his rather soapsuddy handkerchief after it had done yeoman service in the shaving line..." [Eumeus] "she was simply in a towering rage though she hid it" [Nausikaa]

A courtier arrives proposing Hamlet fence with Laertes.

"You flew. Whereto? Newhaven-Dieppe, steerage passenger. Paris and back. Lapwing. Icarus." [Scylla]

Horatio warns Hamlet not to fight, but Hamlet's view is fatalistic. The court arrives and Hamlet apologises to Laertes, pleading temporary insanity; Laertes tentatively accepts but the match goes on.

Gertrude unknowingly drinks the poison cup, Hamlet is mortally wounded with the poison rapier, but Laertes is as well. When Gertrude dies, Hamlet understands the plot and kills Claudius. Laertes and Hamlet then die.

"Usurper." [Telem] "Nine lives are taken off for his father's one. Our Father who art in purgatory. Khaki Hamlets don't hesitate to shoot. The bloodboltered shambles in act five is a forecast of the concentration camp sung by Mr Swinburne." [Scylla]

Messengers announce the deaths of R&G, and Fortinbras arrives to take the throne (since everyone else is dead).

deathtoll: King Hamlet, Polonius, Ophelia, Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, Hamlet, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern

Bartlett's: There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will. --- I once did hold it, as our statists do, A baseness to write fair. --- It did me yeoman's service. --- The bravery of his grief did put me Into a towering passion. --- What imports the nomination of this gentleman? --- The phrase would be more german to the matter, if we could carry cannon by our sides. --- 'Tis the breathing time of day with me. --- There's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all. Since no man has aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? --- I have shot mine arrow o'er the house, And hurt my brother. --- Now the king drinks to Hamlet. --- A hit, a very palpable hit. --- This fell sergeant, death, Is strict in his arrest. --- Report me and my cause aright. --- I am more an antique Roman than a Dane. --- Absent thee from felicity awhile. --- The rest is silence.

"--I read a theological interpretation of it somewhere, he said bemused. The Father and the Son idea. The Son striving to be atoned with the Father." [Telem]

--Have you found those six brave medicals, John Eglinton asked with elder's gall, to write Paradise Lost at your dictation? ...I feel you would need one more for Hamlet. Seven is dear to the mystic mind." [Scylla]

"--All these questions are purely academic, Russell oracled out of his shadow. I mean, whether Hamlet is Shakespeare or James I or Essex." [Scylla]

"--But Hamlet is so personal, isn't it? Mr Best pleaded. I mean, a kind of private paper, don't you know, of his private life." [Scylla]

"I hear that an actress played Hamlet for the fourhundredandeighth time last night in Dublin. Vining held that the prince was a woman." [Scylla]

"All events brought grist to his mill... Hamlet and Macbeth with the coming to the throne of a Scotch philosophaster with a turn for witchroasting." [Scylla]

"Dowden believes there is some mystery in Hamlet but will say no more." [Scylla]

"or it's the big question of our national poet over again, who precisely wrote them, like Hamlet and Bacon, as you who know your Shakespeare infinitely better than I, of course I needn't tell you." [Eumeus]

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