The reader is not totally at ease in William Shakespeare’s tragic drama Macbeth. The play contains numerous instances which lack clear import or meaning. Let’s examine these in this paper.
In his book, On the Design of Shakespearean Tragedy, H. S. Wilson comments on the ambiguities surrounding the Weird Sisters:
Scholars have been much exercised to determine the status of the Weird Sisters; but again theirs seems to be a case like that of the Ghost of Hamlet’s father: the ambiguities concerning these creatures are deliberate and meant to enhance our sense of their mystery without determining just what they are. They are something like the Norse fates in Holinshed, a good deal like ordinary English witches, and suggestive, besides, of a projection of Macbeth’s ambition and his consequent fears [. . .]. (72-73)
In Everybody’s Shakespeare: Reflections Chiefly on the Tragedies, Maynard Mack comments on the purposeful obscurity in which Shakespeare keeps the three Witches:
The obscurity with which Shakespeare envelops their nature and powers is very probably deliberate, since he seems to intend them to body forth, in a physical presence on stage, precisely the mystery, the ambiguity, the question mark (psychological as well as metaphysical) that lies at the root of human wrong-doing, which is always both local and explicable, universal and inexplicable, like these very figures. (185-86)
In “Macbeth as the Imitation of an Action” Francis Fergusson explains the irrational nature of the actions of Macbeth and his wife – a cause of ambiguity:
I do not need to remind you of the great scenes preceding the murder, in which Macbeth and his Lady pull themselves together for their desperate effort. If you think over these scenes, you will notice that the Macbeths understand the action which begins here as a competition and a stunt, against reason and against nature. Lady Macbeth fears her husband’s human nature, as well as her own female nature, and therefore she fears the light of reason and the common daylight world. As for Macbeth, he knows from the first that he is engaged in an irrational stunt: “I have no spur / To prick the sides of my intent, but only / Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself / And falls on the other.” In this sequence there is also the theme of outwitting or transcending time, an aspect of nature’s order as we know it: catching up the consequences, jumping the life to come, and the like.
The Ambiguity of Shakespeare’s Ambiguous Hamlet
Ambiguity of Hamlet
In Shakespeare’s dramatic tragedy Hamlet, the reader finds ambiguity of one type and another here and there throughout the play. The protagonist himself is an especially ambiguous character is his own rite.
Harold Bloom in the Introduction to Modern Critical Interpretations: Hamlet expounds on the ambiguity and mysterious conduct of the hero during the final act:
When Horatio responds that Claudius will hear shortly from, presumably that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been executed, Hamlet rather ambiguously [my italics] makes what might be read as a final vow of revenge:
It will be short. The interim is mine.
And a man’s life’s no more than to say “one.” (2)
The play begins with the changing of the sentinels on a guard platform of the castle of Elsinore in Denmark. Recently the spectral likeness of dead King Hamlet has appeared to the sentinels for no definite purpose. Tonight the ghost appears again, for no apparent reason, to Barnardo, Marcellus and Horatio, a very close friend of Hamlet. Horatio and Marcellus exit the ramparts of Elsinore intending to enlist the aid of Hamlet, who is home from school, dejected by the “o’erhasty marriage” of his mother to his uncle less than two months after the funeral of Hamlet’s father (Gordon 128). There is a social gathering of the court, where Claudius pays tribute to the memory of his deceased brother, the former king, and then, along with Queen Gertrude, conducts some items of business, for example dispatching Cornelius and Voltemand to Norway to settle the Fortinbras affair, addressing Polonius and Laertes on the subject of the latter’s return to school abroad.
Hamlet is present at the court gat…
… middle of paper …
…est Young Aristocrat.” Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Masks of Hamlet. Newark, NJ: Univ. of Delaware P., 1992.
Shakespeare, William. The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1995. http://www.chemicool.com/Shakespeare/hamlet/full.html No line nos.
West, Rebecca. “A Court and World Infected by the Disease of Corruption.” Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Court and the Castle. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957.
Wright, Louis B. and Virginia A. LaMar. “Hamlet: A Man Who Thinks Before He Acts.” Readings on Hamlet. Ed. Don Nardo. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar. N. p.: Pocket Books, 1958.