Shakespeare's life, works, and literary legacy

¶ … Role?

King or Madman? The Art of the drama in Shakespeare's drama of Henry IV, Part I Henry IV and Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Shakespeare is of course a dramatist, that is, he was an author of plays with fictional characters in them, portrayed by real people known as actors. Yet quite often Shakespeare's fictional characters are themselves 'actors' in their own life stories, creating personas that they play in addition to acting out their true, 'real life' struggles of the plot as defined by the author. For instance, Prince Hal, of Henry IV, Part I and Hamlet are two such individuals -- the first pretends to be a rouge, even though he is really a skillful prince and politician destined to be a king, the second is an avenging son who assumes madness as a truth-telling device, and also as protection for his eccentric actions and behavior in a fraught Danish court. But when Henry IV's son pretends to be an ungrateful, good-for-nothing lad about town, playing tricks upon Falstaff with his thuggish mate Poins, he does so in a highly calculated manner, with a clear political and self-oriented objective. In contrast, Prince Hamlet pretends to be mad in a much more haphazard fashion in an attempt to revenge his father 'correctly,' although he initially says he puts on a seeming image of madness in an effort of determining if his father's ghost is true or not in its tales. This justification of the mad Hamlet persona seems specious, however, by the end of the play. Thus, the persona or part that Hal assumes is primarily to fulfill a political and pragmatic function, to enhance his position at court from the distance of the countryside as a future king, while Hamlet's assumed role is primarily a protective, psychological function -- he pretends to be mad, to avoid going mad in truth.

This means Hamlet's madness has an added psychological capacity for the hero that Hal's does not. While Hal pretends to be a rogue with little leadership ability, he does so not under duress, but even before the audience is formerly introduced to him. In contrast, Hamlet's madness is put on before the audience after a scene of excruciating horror for the young man, namely his conflict with his father's ghost upon the balustrades of the castle.

This contrast can be clearly seen in a close reading of the scenes where Hal and Hamlet first assume their personas. In Henry IV, Part I, Hal is first seen in company with his bad friends, then alone. He turns to the audience, and coolly, candidly states to the groundlings of the Elizabethan audience, whom would be of Poins' class, regarding his friends: "I know you all, and will awhile uphold / The unyok'd humor of your idleness: / Yet herein will I imitate the sun, / Who doth permit the base contagious clouds / To smother up his beauty from the world, / That when he please again to be himself, / Being wanted, he may be more wonder'd at, / By breaking through the foul and ugly mists / Of vapors that did seem to strangle him. / If all the year were playing holidays, / To sport would be as tedious as to work; (I.2.68-72)

Like many a politician, Hal knows that there is no better story than that of a drunken and dissolute young man who pulls himself up from his own bootstraps and emulates a more worthy, but duller father in the end. What could be more politically profitable from a public relations standpoint? As a result of his simulation, Hal suggests, he will seem more exciting than his father, and enjoy himself mightily until then, as part of political pretensions and power gathering. He will also rally support from the common people, and unlike Hotspur, seem like a better warrior because he seemed so base before.

In Act 1, Scene 5 of Hamlet Prince of Denmark, Hamlet warns his friend Horatio, not the audience, to be surprised at any assumption of madness Horatio witnesses. But the first reaction to the ghost and speech the audience is privy to, as said by Hamlet after the exit of his father, is "O all you host of heaven! O. earth! What else? / And shall I couple hell? O. fie! Hold, hold, my heart! / And you, my sinews, grow not instant old / But bear me stiffly up! Remember thee!" (I.5.97-100) Until the arrival of his friend, and his explanation for his eccentric behavior, Hamlet speaks in fits and starts, as if he were indeed mad. Later, he admits that the devil has a power to assume a pleasing shape, and to seduce those who have weak wits, and "out of my weakness and my melancholy," the ghost of his father may prey upon his mind even more than it might an otherwise normal individual. (II.II.463) In contrast, the audience meets Hal first in the words of his own father, lamenting his unthrifty son and praising the great warrior Hostpur -- exactly as Prince Hal states he hopes his father will!

Because the audience sees Hamlet attempting to assume his persona, with middling success, the audience knows that Hamlet is all too aware that although he may play at being mad, as with Polonius when he uses the guise of madness to accuse the old man of prostituting his daughter much like a fishmonger might sell a fish (and fishmonger was slang for a pimp), and use his madness to vent his frustrations at Claudius, Gertrude, and Ophelia, he is hardly in a strong frame of mind. His behavior after the ghost is ample evidence of this. Even his plot to expose the king through the play seems confused, and when given the opportunity to kill Claudius afterwards, he invents an elaborate rationalization not to do so, saying that it would be wrong to kill Claudius and send him to heaven.

Even the ghostly presence of Old Hamlet seems to see his son's unstable mind -- whether the ghost be true or not, he intervenes during Gertrude's closet scene to make sure that the young man does not commit matricide. Hal, on the other hand, also has a scene where he orchestrates a play, but he engineers this scene like a director, rather than reacts to it as a spectator, as Hamlet does with interjections. Hal openly inserts himself into the scene as a political actor upon the stage, at first as himself, and then, when he dislikes the direction that Falstaff assumes, he unseats Falstaff and assumes the role of the usurper Henry himself. "Dost thou speak like a king? Do thou stand for me, and I'll play my father." (II.IV.168) Hal dislikes hearing Falstaff praise himself, and put down Prince Harry, because this does not fit with his political plan of assuming authority. In contrast, rather than winning Hamlet favors or protection, as does Hal's assumption of insanity, all Hamlet can do is use his madness as a cloak for his actions when he apologizes to Laertes. "Was't Hamlet wrong'd Laertes? Never Hamlet." (V.II.157)