To Hamlet, hell is real: he takes seriously the prospect of an eternity of torture, unendurable yet inescapable, as punishment for one’s sins. That’s why, when he finds his father’s murderer at prayer he holds back from taking his revenge:

A villain kills my father, and for that
I, his sole son, do this same villain send
To heaven.
Why, this is hire and salary, not revenge.
’A took my father grossly, full of bread,
With all his crimes broad blown, as flush as May;
And how his audit stands, who knows save heaven?
But in our circumstance and course of thought,
’Tis heavy with him. And am I then revenged,
To take him in the purging of his soul,
When he is fit and seasoned for his passage?
No. (III.iii.76–87)

Hamlet’s impulse to revenge will not be satisfied if he merely kills the king: he needs to ensure his damnation too.

When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in th’incestuous pleasure of his bed,
At game, a-swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in’t — 
Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,
And that his soul may be as damned and black
As hell, whereto it goes. (III.iii.89–95)

Ironically, the audience, unlike Hamlet, knows that Claudius has not been cleansed of his sin: he is unable to repent, since that would mean giving up what he has gained by his sinful actions.

… But, O, what form of prayer
Can serve my turn? “Forgive me my foul murder?”
That cannot be, since I am still possessed
Of those effects for which I did the murder,
My crown, mine own ambition, and my Queen.
May one be pardoned and retain th’offence? (III.iii.51–56)

If Hamlet is alive to the possibility (and, as far as he is concerned, desirablilty) of eternal damnation for Claudius, he must also be conscious of the peril in which he is placing his own soul. He recognizes that “The spirit that I have seen | May be a devil” (II.ii.596–7), so when he attempts to “catch the conscience of the King” (II.ii.603) he is testing that spirit’s veracity just as much as the king’s guilt. As he tells Horatio:

There is a play tonight before the King.
One scene of it comes near the circumstance,
Which I have told thee, of my father’s death.
I prithee, when thou seest that act afoot,
Even with the very comment of thy soul
Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt
Do not iteself unkennel in one speech,
It is a damnnèd ghost that we have seen,
And my imaginations are as foul
As Vulcan’s stithy. (III.ii.85–94)

If Claudius is innocent, the ghost has been lying to Hamlet and therefore must be an evil spirit whose function is to trap the prince into condemning himself. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to have occurred to Hamlet yet that the converse is not necessarily true. It doesn’t follow that, because the ghost has been telling the truth about how old Hamlet met his death, it really is what it claims to be: the late king’s ghost demanding revenge. As Banquo says in Macbeth:

… oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
In deepest consequence. (Macbeth I.iii.135–8)

The ghost turns out to be truthful, at least as to the present king’s murder of his brother and predecessor, but does that mean that it should be trusted? It says of itself:

I am thy father’s spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away. (I.v.9–13)

A few lines earlier, it has said:

     My hour is almost come,
When I to sulpherous and tormenting flames
Must render up myself. (i.v.2–4)

Here, the ghost seems to palter with Hamlet in a double sense. Its language implies that its present circumstances are limited in time: “for a certain term to walk the night” and “Till the foul crimes … Are burnt and purged away”. But, presumably by design, it does not expressly assert what the words imply: that its torment will eventually end. If the ghost is in hell, as the “fires” and “sulpherous and tormenting flames” suggest, then the foul crimes will never be burnt and purged away, so it can say that it is confined “Till” an event that will never happen, without literal untruth.

In the play’s best known soliloquy, Hamlet describes death as

The undiscovered country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns (III.i.79–80)

If this is what Hamlet believes, it ought to be incompatible with an acceptance of the existence of ghosts and revenants. Strictly speaking, I admit, it could be claimed that the ghost has not come back to life, but merely assumed, temporarily, an intangible form to deliver a message. Even so, it has clearly given Hamlet plenty of reason to doubt its bona fides.

So now Hamlet is caught in the worst of both worlds: he’s morally convinced of Claudius’s guilt but he can’t be sure that he himself isn’t being manipulated by a devil. And it has to be said that, if the “ghost” is not a malevolent tempter, it must have missed its vocation, for by the end of the play it’s hard to see how Hamlet can avoid hell. His casual slaughter of Polonius is followed by an attempt to impede his burial; he has sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern unsuspecting to their deaths and played a large part in driving Ophelia to suicide. In the forged instructions concerning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, he has ordered that they be “put to sudden death, | Not shriving time allowed” (V.ii.46–7). Again, Hamlet is not satisfied with sending his enemies to the grave: he wants them to go to hell. He shows little sign of repenting any of these actions. Horatio’s farewell to the dying protagonist is therefore ironic:

Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet Prince,
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest! (V.ii.353–4)

The point of the irony is to bring home to the audience the gulf between their sympathetic view of Hamlet’s predicament and the reality of his situation. Horatio immediately reinforces the point when he addresses the newly arrived Fortinbras:

… So shall you hear
Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,
Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,
Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,
And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on th’inventors’ heads. (V.ii.374–9)

In her 1979 Introduction to the New Penguin Shakespeare edition, Anne Barton wrote of this speech:

As an account of The Spanish Tragedy, The Revenger’s Tragedy, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta — or The Murder of Gonzago — it is (just) acceptable. As a description of Shakespeare’s Hamlet it is not. Horatio astonishes us by leaving out everything that seems important, reducing all that is distinctive about this play to a plot stereotype. Although his tale is, on one level, accurate enough, it is certainly not Hamlet’s “story”. (p. 52)

But it is not true that Horatio leaves out everything of importance. The murders of two successive kings of Denmark, the death by poison of the queen to both of them: these are events of great significance, the more so as they result in the state’s falling under Norwegian rule; and they are certainly “carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts”. Horatio’s reframing of the play’s story, startling as it is, is a reality check.

Before his encounter with the “ghost” Hamlet has been in a depression brought about by his father’s sudden death and the oppressive atmosphere of the court. After that encounter, he is in a bind: of the various actions that might appear to be open to him, there is none that can be justified, yet to do nothing is no more acceptable. A large part of his problem is that, as well as being his father, old Hamlet was king, and his killer has been crowned in his place. As a son, he may feel an obligation to avenge the murder, but as a prince without any official governmental role, he has absolutely no right to attack the present king, murderer though the latter may be. Hamlet is merely a student who has returned from Wittenberg for his father’s funeral.

Within 50 years England would be preoccupied with questions as to what to do about a bad king. Different parties held a variety of conflicting theories, but it was widely held that even a usurper or a tyrant could be deposed only by an “inferior magistrate”, never by ordinary subjects. Claudius is confident that his position as king protects him: when an angry Laertes, out to avenge the death of Polonius, looks as if he might attack, the king reassures his queen:

Let him go, Gertrude. Do not fear our person.
There’s such divinity doth hedge a king
That treason can but peep to what it would,
Acts little of his will. (IV.v.124–7)

It isn’t clear exactly how Claudius was chosen to succeed his brother but there’s no doubt his succession was valid and legally effective. Hamlet says that he

Popped in between th’election and my hopes (V.ii.65)

As Hamlet is dying, conscious of the fact that in killing Claudius he has left the throne vacant, he says:

… I do prophesy th’election lights
On Fortinbras. He has my dying voice. (V.ii.349–50)

He might well have added <span class=“language”>faute de mieux. Fortinbras is not an ideal candidate for the Danish monarchy. When first we hear of him, he is taking advantage of King Hamlet’s death to try to recover his father’s former lands which the elder Fortinbras had, “by a sealed compact | Well ratified by law and heraldry” (I.i.86–7), transferred to the Danish king. He wants to undo what his father had previously agreed. To be fair to Fortinbras, when his uncle, the king of Norway, tells him (at Claudius’s instance) to knock it off, he obeys. He then turns his attention to Poland and sets off to conquer “a little patch of ground | That hath in it no profit but the name” (IV.iv.18–19).

So in the end the combined effect of Claudius’s and Hamlet’s machinations is to put Denmark’s government into the hands of a young man “Of unimprovèd mettle hot and full” (I.i.96), and a foreigner to boot.

In the play’s final scene Hamlet, knowing that his uncle has twice plotted to end his life, first in the letter he sent to England and then in his conspiracy with Laertes, and himself now facing inevitable death from Laertes’s wound, is at last able to kill his father’s murderer. Till this point, he has been restrained in part by his uncle’s royal status, and partly by his doubts as to the nature of the ghost. When he kills Claudius, he knows that his own death is imminent and that he has no time left to save his own soul.

As well as the considerations that have held Hamlet back, though, there have been forces pushing him in the opposite direction. Quite apart from the son’s natural unwillingness to see his father’s murder go unpunished, there is the question of his oath. Shakespeare doesn’t explicitly tell us just what it is that Hamlet swears. At first the ghost tells him he is “bound” to revenge “when thou shalt hear” (I.v.6–7). Then, it exhorts Hamlet to “Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder” (I.v.25) but before it has told him who the murderer is. Finally, having identified the villain, the ghost goes on:

Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
But howsomever thou pursues this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once
The glow-worm shows the matin to be near
And ’gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me. (I.v.82–91)

Hamlet, still addressing the ghost after it has left the stage, declares that

… thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven! (I.v.102–4)

Hamlet then writes something and then says:

So, uncle, there you are. Now to my word:
It is “Adieu, adieu, remember me”.
I have sworn’t. (I.v.110–2)

What has he sworn: to avenge his father or merely to remember him? To kill his uncle or to take some vaguer action? Oaths and the binding obligations they give rise to were taken extremely seriously in this period and earlier. (I have touched on this before when writing about The Revenger’s Tragedy.) An oath committing oneself to kill a king or to murder anybody would not of course be binding, but would presumably be considered sinful and wicked in itself. Hamlet would probably consider himself bound in “honour”, if not morally, to do what he had sworn to do. So, one way or the other, it is clear that Hamlet is caught between conflicting obligations: that’s what I meant when I said above that he is in a bind. It’s a conundrum that he can resolve only when he is on the point of death.

There are things I wanted to say about Hamlet’s (first feigned, then real) madness, and about the reasons for the misogyny he shows towards both his mother and Ophelia, but I’m afraid I haven’t left myself enough time to deal with these topics adequately today. I may write at a later date about madness as a theme in several plays from about this time, obviously including this one, and also Othello, King Lear, The Changeling (Middleton and Rowley) and probably Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (though I haven’t seen my copy of this last one for years). I don’t know when (or if) I’ll write that post but I look forward to it.