Critical Analysis of Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Hamlet Act 1 scene 5

In the end of Act 1, scene 5 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the Ghost of Hamlet’s father, who has silently appeared before to Marcellus, Barnardo, and Horatio, confronts Hamlet in a forest clearing and reveals his “most foul and unnatural murder" by his brother, the newly-crowned Claudius. The Ghost is “doomed to a certain time to walk the night” because King Hamlet was murdered before being given formal Christian last rites, so for his “foul crimes” during his life he must have his sins burned away, to "fast in fires” of Purgatory. The Ghost extols Hamlet to revenge his murder, which he repeats was “foul, strange, and unnatural,” the repetition of which highlights the contrasting theme Shakespeare explores between natural and unnatural, and the pairing of lust and violence—themes which return throughout the play. Shakespeare uses diction and imagery to great effect in this scene, where the main conflict is first revealed, guiding the development of the plot from here on, and branding a fiery resolution into the heart of Hamlet to revenge his beloved father’s murder.

When Hamlet first hears that Claudius committed the murder—contrary to the official story that a “serpent” while sleeping in his orchard stung his father—Hamlet’s horrified and surprised response is “Oh my prophetic soul! My uncle!” suggesting that Hamlet garnered suspicions all along about his uncle’s involvement to usurp the crown. The Ghost has brought Hamlet to this clearing to prompt him to revenge, but the Ghost here pauses in a furious side reflection to damn the characters of both Claudius and his wife, Gertrude, whom Claudius swiftly married—that thrift whose “funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables” and a long-suffering source of Hamlet’s recent despair. It is in this pause that Shakespeare has the Ghost contrast himself with his lesser brother. The Ghost uses the “serpent” element of the official story to refer to Claudius as that “serpent that did sting thy father’s life now wears his crown.” Besides the obvious allusion to the Garden of Eden, whose glory and goodness infuses the Ghost’s description of life and love in Elsinore, Claudius as “serpent” begins a litany of imagery and diction portraying the contrasting theme of natural and unnatural, lust and violence. Claudius is “that incestuous, adulterous beast” using “witchcraft in his wit” and “traitorous gifts,” “wicked,” that “have the power so to seduce!” These all suggest that which is not only unnatural, but powerfully so. True virtue will never falter, even if threatened by a deceiving “lewdness” in “the shape of heaven.” There was a “falling off” from their true marriage

whose love was of that dignity
That it went hand in hand even with the vow
I made to her in marriage…

Falling—like Lucifer, to continue the Garden of Eden allusion—according to the Ghost, into lustful vice which infected Gertrude, “that radiant angel linked” and on the “celestial bed” both the fallen “prey on garbage.” The genuine love we later see expressed between Claudius and Gertrude was rather “shameful lust.” The Ghost implores Hamlet not to let the “royal bed of Denmark,” be turned into “a couch of luxury and damned incest.” Soon after these raging reflections on lust's seductive power, the Ghost outlines his horrible, most horrible foul and unnatural violent murder: lust and violence paired.

We see further the contrasting theme of natural and unnatural when the Ghost, after purging his resentment, scents the morning air and reveals to Hamlet the scene of the murder. Shakespeare’s diction here compares the unnatural to disease and defilement. The poison is described as “leprous” and like a quick acting disease battles the “blood of man” and “swift as quicksilver…courses through the natural gates and alleys of the body.” The natural health of the body, its "gates and alleys" is being attacked in a most violent way--but a violence that seemingly went undetected by the whole of Denmark until the Ghost appeared to Hamlet. This unnatural poison curds in the “wholesome blood” like “eager droppings into milk”. The leper imagery continues as the king falls into death, his skin riddled with sores and scabs, and where in life he resided within a “smooth body” in his death throes he is imprisoned within “a vile and loathsome crust.” The evil deed of Claudius is here given a dramatic effect in all its ugliness in the way the king was “dispatched/Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin” with all of his “imperfections” fresh for the fire.

Two ironies appear in this scene, one of which Hamlet seems unaware of, the other of which the Ghost seems unaware: first, both before he is told of the Ghost’s appearing at several midnights previous, in his first soliloquy when he laments his own empty despair and his mother’s marriage in scene ii. When he confronts his mother in Act 3, sc. iv, Hamlet nearly deifies his father’s great worth and virtue compared to Claudius, “so excellent a king, that was to this Hyperion to a satyr….” Indeed, his father’s virtue hovers like ghostly ideal over the whole play, summoned when Hamlet needs courage. However, for all this, Hamlet seems not to have heard (or doesn’t remember, or cannot admit) that his father’s confinement to “fast in fires” was because of “foul crimes done in my days of nature.” His murder was “foul and unnatural,” but what were these foul crimes done when alive? All we know of King Hamlet before the play was his killing of the elder Fortinbras; all we know of the previous king was that he fought handily in wars and won the lands where Elsinore resides. He was evidently a man of violence, as any warrior must be. One can imagine the younger Claudius watching in seething envy yet spiked with ambition his older brother rage in warring violence, and bathing in the blood of victorious spoils. Claudius was also a soldier at one time, as he battled alongside the French as he reports to Laertes, but was also probably compared not favorably with the beloved King, as Hamlet remarks on the irony later in the play that those in the court were wont to "make mouths" at him, yet now he is respected as King. Envy, resentment, and ambition...these we can easily see inflaming an impassioned Claudius to take what he wants, as his older heralded brother probably did. Hamlet never refers to any of this. One wonders how Hamlet thought of his uncle before his father was untimely "stung."