Note: This is an essay I wrote for a class on Shakespeare, which is now over.
If one is to look closely at that infamous sketch of Shakespeare, it is
easy to see that his face is in fact a mask. While this may be a hint that
Shakespeare wanted to hide his true identity, it also accentuates the theme of
appearance versus reality that transcends every one of his works. The play Hamlet offers up numerous instances of
this trickster theme, but there is also something much deeper in this
story-within-a-story, told and manipulated by the supposedly all-around
good-guy Horatio; as Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “There is no truth; there
is only perspective.” In addition to the evidence in the play, many critics
assert that the putting up of appearances penetrates the human psyche portrayed
in Hamlet much deeper than it seems
at a quick glance.
As an example of the overriding theme of appearance versus reality, the
authenticity of Hamlet’s madness has been disputed for centuries. Hamlet tells
Horatio and Marcellus that he plans “to put on an antic disposition,” but there
are many instances in the play where his soliloquized motivations do not seem
to come from a sane mind (Act I.5, line 175). In many of Hamlet’s speeches “the
emotional and intellectual sources of speeches are not self-evident, and to
understand these [one is] forced to hypothesize a continuous inner life for the
characters of which [one sees] only the phenomenal outgrowths. In sequences of
this sort, [one assumes] that the characters themselves are speaking out of
some part of their beings that [one does] not see” (Schell). To Polonius,
Hamlet’s insanity seems to be very real, and he interprets it quite wrongly to
be caused by an obsession with his daughter Ophelia; but Hamlet intended his
insanity to be an appearance, to put on a show in order to trick the King
Claudius so as to avenge the death of his father. Polonius and Claudius put up
their own appearances as well, hiding their true malicious intentions from
their family and the court. Hamlet’s Mousetrap,
in addition to his ambiguous mental health, is a play-within-a-play, an
appearance in itself that dramatizes the truth.
This theme of appearance versus reality resonates throughout the play,
but upon further analysis it is revealed that the characters of Horatio and
Fortinbras are the only two left alive at the end of the play, meaning that Hamlet is in actuality a
story-within-a-story. Hamlet’s last words are to Horatio: “So tell him
[Fortinbras], with th’ occurents, more and less, which have solicited — the
rest is silence” (Act V.2, lines 340-341). These lines reveal that the entire
play that had just been performed upon the stage had been told from the
perspective of Horatio, told to the character Fortinbras, and that “it is not
always clear who the speaker of certain lines may be presumed to be” (Schell).
While it appears that the character of Horatio is an unbiased narrator,
loved by all other characters and best friend to Hamlet, who suspects that he
will tell Hamlet’s story as honestly as he can, Horatio is in truth the most
infamously unreliable narrator in fiction. Hamlet’s last words in the play have
been analyzed under scrutiny by many a critic, and John Russell Brown even
offers five distinct interpretations of Hamlet’s final words. His final
analysis is that “the rest is silence” is in fact Shakespeare speaking to the
audience through the character Hamlet, saying “he, the dramatist, would not, or
could not, go a word further in the presentation of this, his most verbally
brilliant and baffling hero. The author is going to hide like a fox, leaving
all of us standing at a cold scent” (Brown). If one is to read this
interpretation under the assumption that it is Horatio telling Hamlet’s story,
not Shakespeare, who is in actuality telling Horatio’s story rather than
Hamlet’s, then perhaps one can see that Shakespeare is saying “he… could not go
a word further in the presentation” of Horatio rather than Hamlet.
Because Hamlet is told from
the perspective of Horatio, it is probable that Horatio skewed the events of
Hamlet’s story for his own benefit. The events of the play are not what
actually happened; Horatio has manipulated the story to cover up his own crime.
While this contrived manner of storytelling may boggle the minds of readers,
viewers, and critics, it only goes to reassert the theme of appearance versus
reality in the play. It sheds a new light on Schell’s claim of the characters
revealing their “inner lives” through their speech: that these “inner lives”
are principally Horatio’s doing in order to give his manipulated story more
credibility. One could go even further and claim that it is in fact Fortinbras
who is telling this story, told to him by Horatio, making Hamlet an even more nested and manipulated account of one man’s
attempt to uncover and avenge his father’s death, Shakespeare’s trickiest game
of medieval telephone.
The critic Alfred Barkov argues that there are more instances in the
play that indicate a presence of a narrator besides Hamlet. He analyzes the age
of Hamlet throughout the play, as well as the family ties between King Hamlet,
King Claudius, and King Fortinbras, claiming that these discrepancies in plot
can be attributed to the mind of the manipulative narrator. This narrator is
“the main object at whom Shakespeare’s satire is aimed. The hidden intention of
that character is the most important composition of Hamlet” (Barkov). This
“hidden intention” could perhaps be a crime that Horatio committed, one which
he attempts to cover up utilizing Hamlet’s story.
Barkov’s assertion that Hamlet is
a satire is entirely plausible, though it is not a satire aimed at exposing and
mocking the “hidden intentions” of storytellers; but it is aimed at exposing
the fact that storytellers do in fact have
“hidden intentions.” For instance, Hamlet conducted the play-within-a-play The Mousetrap with the intention of
exposing King Claudius’ crime, and though his manipulation was much more
transparent and obvious to the audience and the characters in the play than
Horatio’s and Shakespeare’s intentions, it accentuates the theme of appearance
versus reality in the play.
The intention of a storyteller differs from one to another, obviously,
as each individual has a different story to tell, and in exposing the unnamed intention
of Horatio, Shakespeare is in turn explicitly telling his audience that he the
author has his own intention by writing this play, as well as all of his other
works. However, besides exposing the trickster nature of storytellers,
Shakespeare’s own objective remains hidden; though, perhaps his intention was
not to portray a message about the human psyche but instead to put on a show of
genius that would puzzle audiences for centuries: one enormously complex “Look
what I can do!”
To play the character Hamlet is considered the greatest honor, the peak
of an actor’s career, and countless interpretations of the character have been
performed, from manipulative misogynist to Oedipal manifestation to whiny,
depressive teen; however, Horatio still remains in the front row of an
audience, laughing at the hidden meaning in his story; and then there is
Shakespeare, standing behind him, wearing
his goofy, knowing mask. The fact that Shakespeare’s identity continues to
remain a mystery goes to show the true genius of the individual who wrote these
plays; the trickster saw beneath the facades that people put up to attempt to
hide their true selves and wove intricate stories to peel away the layers of
human motivation until he could reveal that deep reality is either incredibly
inexplicable, or just a big joke. Even if the identity of the Shakespeare
beneath the mask is ever revealed, there are sure to be more layers to the
genius, and to life, that appear impossible to peel away.
Works Cited
Barkov, Alfred. “Hamlet: A Tragedy of Errors or the Tragical Fate of
Shakespeare?”
Brown, John Russell. “Multiplicity of Meaning in the Last Moments of Hamlet.” Connotations 2.1
(1992): 16-33.
(1992): 16-33.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet.
The Pelican Shakespeare, Penguin Books Inc. New York, NY: 2001.
Schell, E. T. “Who Said That: Hamlet or Hamlet?” Shakespeare
Quarterly, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Spring,
1973) pp. 135-146.
1973) pp. 135-146.
