Hamlet: The Art of Illusion

Over the course of a rather hectic week between snow storms and a 4-day weekend, I worked in some time to read through Act III of Hamlet, which essentially consisted of Hamlet destroying all bonds of affection between himself and Ophelia, the performance of the play which mimics Claudius’s killing his brother the king, Hamlet’s scathing remarks to his mother and in his rage killing Polonius, and finally Claudius and his futile attempt to pray to God to forgive his sins. While there are obviously several different places to pick apart the key analytical points of the four scenes and bring out a “so what” toward the overall meaning of Shakespeare’s work, I wanted to focus on the continued motif of the play and the stage in this Act, found in Scene 2 where Hamlet is lecturing one of the players about the execution of his upcoming performance. By observing Hamlet’s criticism of what it means to “seem” the role of a player upon the stage, there is subtle insight into the protagonist’s own mind as he struggles to fight off his inner demons and carry out his own performance of madness for Ophelia, Gertrude, and everyone else he comes into contact with. He begins his criticism by telling the player to “o’erstep not the modesty of nature” (III.ii.20-21). While ‘nature’ most often finds its context in either describing the outside world, here it takes on two other refreshingly different meanings, and while Hamlet gives these instructions to someone else, they actually better reflect the young Prince himself. Here, ‘nature’ can be better connoted to mean a combination of qualities that make up the identity of a human being. With this new understanding, Hamlet seems to be telling the player to not overstep his own boundaries as a person, something that reflects on Hamlet, who also finds himself as a player over the course of the play. It seems here that Hamlet is inadvertently attempting to tell himself how he needs to be careful in his own acting, as to not go over the line in which he loses sense of who he is. Perhaps he partially feels himself losing control of this aspect, having just harshly condemned his past lover Ophelia to a nunnery, he must struggle to keep his own self in check. ‘Nature’ also has a theological connotation, dealing with a state of being in which there is a lack of grace. Again, this idea can applied to Hamlet’s situation as in his act of “seeming” to be someone that he really isn’t, he must be wary to not cross any religious lines with himself. We have seen this before, with God being the only thing that holds Hamlet back from killing himself, and we see it later in scene 3, where Hamlet has the opportunity to strike down Claudius when he appears to be praying, but refuses “to take him in the purging of his soul” (III.iii.90). In this way, Hamlet reveals how he rather difficultly continues to maintain his own personal moral compass in his act of illusion. In final thought, Hamlet’s instruction to the player is layered with an insight onto the purpose of acting itself, which he describes by saying, “from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her [own] feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (III.ii.21-26). Hamlet entreats the player to what he believes to be the very point and purpose to what both of them are taking part in, which is to use illusion to both criticize and reflect upon the current state of reality. What is perceived to be false can mirrored and reflected to reveal truth. Here Hamlet inadvertently reminds the audience why he is doing what he is doing, not just with the play conducted by the players, but the entire façade of madness that Hamlet has been acting out since his interaction with the ghost. Hamlet has the desire to take the essential elements of the world that is around him (nature) and remind everyone what it really is. It is somewhat of a ‘fight fire with fire’ mentality, casting off the illusions of what reality is by creating an alternate one, but it serves the point to reflect a true state of being. That is what Hamlet’s goal is with the play-within-a play about to be put on, and it is also what his goal is with his own personal illusion of madness.