BRYAN VALE'S NEWSLETTER, ISSUE #2:
“HAMLET THOUGHTS (OR, IF YOU’LL INDULGE ME: AGAINST THE OBJECTIVE CORRELATIVE)”
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
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People assume the ghost in Hamlet is telling the truth. Not even Hamlet made that assumption. “The spirit that I have seen may be the devil,” he said. Continuing:
And the devil hath power
T’assume a pleasing shape, yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me. I’ll have grounds
More relative than this.
He will, he goes on to say, witness Claudius’s reaction to a play in which a king's brother murders and usurps the king in order to confirm Claudius’s guilt.
If we assume the ghost is telling the truth, then the question is, why bother? Why waste time confirming Claudius’s guilt, instead of going ahead with vengeance?
This conditional becomes actual because we are moderns watching or reading a play, and an older play at that. Of course, we think, within this play written by primitives, ghosts are real, and truthful. Plus we've all heard of Hamlet. We need no “grounds more relative.” Everyone in the English-speaking world knows Claudius killed Hamlet's father, just as surely as they know that Scar killed Mufasa.
But Hamlet does not.
Hamlet does not know what happened to his father. He begins the play knowing that his father died suddenly. He is angry because his uncle took the crown and his mother consented to marry his uncle, to his mind, far too quickly. “The funeral bak’d meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” And so on.
He does not, however, know or suspect that Claudius killed Hamlet, Sr. In fact he is shocked by the idea when the ghost presents it to him. “Murder!” he exclaims, not “I knew it!” or “Of course!”
Port the setup of the plot of Hamlet to today and this becomes obvious. We do not, in modern times, tolerate revenge killings. We hardly tolerate killings in self-defense. Imagine a murderer who justifies his murder by testifying that a ghost told him that the victim murdered his, the murderer's, father. The suspect would be quickly diagnosed as schizophrenic, not found innocent of the crime.
“Did anyone else see the ghost?” we might ask.
“Yes, some friends of mine did, in the middle of a foggy night,” the murderer replies.
“Did the ghost speak to them as well?” we ask.
“No, only to me,” the murderer replies.
“Did you have any other proof before carrying out the killing?”
“No...”
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Hamlet is not schizophrenic, so while he almost believes the ghost, he wants more proof, more grounds, before proceeding to kill his uncle.
But this is medieval Denmark. There is no such thing as forensic evidence. Hamlet cannot perform an autopsy, take a blood sample, or check the security footage. Witnesses, if there were any, would be impossible to secure. Claudius, if guilty, can simply lop off the heads of any who are extant. The play is, therefore, the thing. Hamlet has to confirm perhaps the most pertinent fact to his own life and safety - whether or not his uncle killed his father (and by extension might be willing and able to kill Hamlet) - based on his subjective perception of his uncle's subjective reaction to an artistic performance. Even when the play is successful at getting a rise out of Claudius, Hamlet turns to his friend Horatio for confirmation. “Am I reading this situation right?” Hamlet asks. Sorry, no, he asks, “Didst perceive?”
By now Hamlet has his vision of a ghost - a ghost which, in a later scene, no one else can see but him - and Claudius's emotional reaction to a play to go on. He then has to decide if this is enough evidence for him to kill - the king?!
It is easy to forget the larger context because the play has only a few speaking characters. But these people are supposed to be running an entire country - a country where the stability of the central government is by no means secure. They are about to be at war with Norway. And killing a king leaves a power vacuum. Succession in those days was almost never clear cut. Shakespeare wrote about a dozen plays in which the plot revolved around competing claims to the royal throne. Hamlet does not turn into one of those plays. But it lives on that edge. People forget about that because they don't like reading Henry VI, Parts 1 Through 3.
If Claudius killed the king with poison, someone helped him get the poison. That implies at least a small conspiracy. And his quick move to assume the throne and take the queen as his wife implies the possible existence of a much larger conspiracy. A conspiracy that may include Polonius, the king's adviser, and possibly Polonius's children, including Ophelia. A conspiracy that may even include the queen herself, Hamlet's mother.
Hamlet knows all this, although he does not say it in so many words. He is too imaginative, too snarky, for that. He is continually implying it. He also knows that to say any of it outright might be - if it is true - a death sentence for him.
So is he really hesitating?
He is surrounded by relatives, members of the court, and friends who may all be lying to him - who may in fact be conspiring to exile or kill him. (Not “may” - are. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern make a real attempt to escort Hamlet to his execution in England.) Is it any wonder he conceals his true thoughts and feelings beneath an intentionally phony display of madness? Is it any wonder he is not sure how to proceed, or what to do next? Not only does he have insufficient information, but the actual taking of a perhaps-unjustified revenge might plunge his entire country into civil war, or result in his own immediate death.
Hamlet is full of puzzles and imperfections. These puzzles and imperfections are the handholds by which we can climb into the play's psychology, its ambiguity and mistrust and madness. Hamlet is, above all, an external presentation of the internal human condition: doubt and danger and loneliness and anger. Levied by humor.
But the ghost of Hamlet's father might not have really been Hamlet's father, and either way it might not have been telling the truth. If I were “confin’d to fast in fires” all day, I might be inclined to misremember things.
Hamlet's confusion, angst, and lack of action are the most sensical things about the play. Our insistence that he kill Claudius NOW is the most nonsensical.
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ORIGINALLY PRINTED 8-21-26
©2026 Bryan Vale
This is a sample of my direct-mail newsletter, which is otherwise exclusively print-only.