Indirections (Appearance and Reality) Flashcards
“What art thou that usurp’st this time of night, / Together with that fair and warlike form / In which the majesty of buried Denmark / Did sometimes march?” (1.1.46-49)
In Horatio’s speech the word “usurp’st” emphasizes the ghostly quality of the Ghost. To “usurp” is to take a place that rightfully belongs to another. Horatio’s general feeling is that the dead should stay in the grave. Instead the Ghost has brought horror to the peaceful night in which there was “not a mouse stirring,” and the Ghost has wrongfully usurped the “form” of an admired king.
“Foul deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes” (1.2.256-257)
In this scene-ending couplet, Hamlet, who has just heard the news of the Ghost’s appearance, already suspects “foul play,” and he believes that the truth will come out
Hamlet asks the Ghost to tell him “Why thy canonized bones, hearsed in death, / Have burst their cerements” (1.4.47-48).
As Horatio was, Hamlet is horrified by his first sight of the Ghost. The Ghost appears in armor, but in Hamlet’s imagination there is a Halloween scene: the “ponderous and marble jaws” of the sepulchre (a stone coffin) rise, and out comes the dead one, trailing strips of white cloth (the cerements). We often depict Frankenstein’s monster this way, but this spirit looks like Hamlet’s father.
“And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, / With windlasses and with assays of bias, / By indirections find directions out” (2.1.61-63),
says Polonius, boasting of his ability to discover the real truth about his son’s behavior in France.
Speaking of Hamlet, the King tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern “To draw him on to pleasures, and to gather, / So much as from occasion you may glean, / Whether aught, to us unknown, afflicts him thus” (2.2.14-17).
The King is being crafty. He needs to know if Hamlet suspects the truth about King Hamlet’s death, but he tells Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that whatever it is that’s wrong with Hamlet, it must be something other than his father’s death, something “to us unknown.” Also, the King wants Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to conceal their real intentions. They are not supposed to just ask Hamlet what’s wrong, but hang out with him, and “draw him on to pleasures,” and see what they can pick up without Hamlet actually knowing that they’re trying to pick up anything
“Were you not sent for?” (2.2.274).
Hamlet asks this of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to their surprise and consternation. They were supposed to probe his mind, but he has turned the tables on them, and somehow understands that they are spies for the king
“‘The rugged Pyrrhus . . . / When he lay couched in the ominous horse’” (2.2.452-454).
Thus begins Hamlet’s recitation of “Aeneas’ tale to Dido, . . . especially when he speaks of Priam’s slaughter.” Pyrrhus comes out of the horse and kills “old grandsire Priam.”
“For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak / With most miraculous organ,” (2.2. 593-594)
says Hamlet, as he makes his plans to probe the King’s soul. He will “have these players / Play something like the murder of my father /Before mine uncle: I’ll observe his looks . . . .”
Polonius says, “with devotion’s visage / And pious action we do sugar o’er / The devil himself” (3.1. 46-48), as he gives Ophelia a book, so that she can pretend to be at her devotions when Hamlet finds her.
as he gives Ophelia a book, so that she can pretend to be at her devotions when Hamlet finds her. The King hears what Polonius says and has an attack of conscience, in which he reflects on the difference between his “deed” and his “word.” Then the King and Polonius hide behind a curtain so they can discover what’s really wrong with Hamlet, but Hamlet turns the tables on them and intuits that they are behind the curtain. In short, the whole scene is full of “indirections.”
“Observe mine uncle, Hamlet asks Horatio, just before the performance of The Murder of Gonzago.
They are going to look for the moment when the King’s “occulted guilt . . . itself unkennel” (3.2.80-81). “Occulted” means hidden. “Unkennel” means to come into the open
“How now! a rat? Dead, for a ducat, dead!” (3.4.24),
cries Hamlet as he stabs through the arras at what’s hidden behind it.
“Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul; / And there I see such black and grained spots / As will not leave their tinct” (3.4.89-91)
Gertrude to Hamlet’s abuse after his murder of Polonius
Almost as soon as she says this, the Ghost appears out of nowhere. When the Ghost is gone, Hamlet warns his mother against flattering herself that the problem is his madness, not her guilt. Such a thought, he says, will be “rank corruption, mining all within” (3.4.148). At the end of the scene, Hamlet boasts that he will beat Rosencrantz and Guildenstern at their own game, he “will delve one yard below their mines, / And blow them at the moon” (3.4.208-209). Thus, throughout the scene, hidden things figure strongly in both what we see and what we hear.
“I see a cherub that sees them” (4.3.48),
“I see a cherub that sees them” (4.3.48),
says Hamlet to the King. This is just before Hamlet leaves for England, and what the cherub sees is the King’s real purpose in sending Hamlet to England. At the end of the scene, when he is alone, the King states his purpose – to send Hamlet to his death
“This is the imposthume of much wealth and peace, / That inward breaks, and shows no cause without / Why the man dies” (4.4.27-29),
says Hamlet of Fortinbras’ attack on Poland for a worthless little piece of ground. An “imposthume” is an abscess, and so once again disease or poison is imagined as working below the surface, unseen, until it becomes deadly.
