EXAMPLAR ESSAY ON TRUST IN HAMLET

Hamlet believes that his mother has betrayed his father for, having followed his body ‘like Niobe, all tears’, within a month she had leaped into ‘incestuous sheets’ with his uncle. When sought out by his ‘excellent good friends’ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet questions them with ‘Were you not sent for?’ and asserts they are instruments of his uncle.Trust, which is confidence and belief in the integrity and veracity of relationships both domestic and within the state, is presented and betrayed in the world of Elsinore with tragic consequences. However, though ‘rare’, trust is not entirely absent in the play; it is constant, for example in the friendship of Hamlet and Horatio. ‘Hamlet’ explores the tragic consequences of the absence and betrayal of trust on many levels: in the family, in sexual relations, in friendship, in the affairs of the state but also, in Hamlet’s doubt and questioning of fundamental aspects of his identity and existence.

The play opens with Bernardo’s ‘Who’s there?’ and this abrupt interrogative immediately creates an atmosphere of uncertainty and mistrust, dramatically symbolised in Olivier’s film of the play with swirling mists around the castle battlements. Horatio, the sceptical Renaissance scholar, does not trust the words of the soldiers (‘Tush, Tush, ‘Twill not appear’) but he quickly trusts the evidence of his eyes. Sagar argues that Shakespeare’s audience would have accepted the reality of the ghost but its provenance and significance, the truth of its words, cannot be trusted. Hamlet describes the ghost as of ‘questionable shape’; Greenblatt observes the ghost raises a paradox, ‘a young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperament, is haunted by a distinctly Catholic ghost.’ Is the ghost Hamlet’s ‘father’s spirit’ visiting from purgatory with a sincere message to tell of ‘murder most foul’ or, from a Protestant viewpoint, ‘a goblin damned’, what Clinton describes as a ‘diabolical manifestation on a mission to trick Hamlet into forfeiting his soul’? The presence of the ghost introduces a questioning, distrustful uncertainty and mistrust which pervades the play and its words, ‘Remember me’, haunt Hamlet and are central to his tragic descent from physical collapse (‘And you, my sinews, grow not instant old/But bear me stiffly up’) to mental turmoil in his ‘distracted globe’.

Polonius’s relationship with his family and with the state dramatise how trust is a rare commodity in the world of Hamlet. On a domestic level he distrusts his daughter, Ophelia, (and spies on Laertes too) seeing her as a ‘green girl’ likely to be seduced by the Prince thus losing her, and perhaps more importantly ‘his’, honour and rendering him a ‘fool’. Polonius subsequently ‘looses’ Ophelia to Hamlet, like a bait in trap, so he and Claudius can spy on Hamlet, extending the web of surveillance, duplicity and distrust in the play and, in this case, Ophelia’s ‘trust’ does seem to be a ‘commodity’ which can be traded and manipulated in the world of Elsinore. Polonius’s distrust of Ophelia and his using her to eavesdrop on Hamlet, fracturing their relationship, are crucial stage in the development towards Ophelia’s tragic death.

Polonius’s spying and, ultimately fatal, eavesdropping are powerful dramatic symbols of a wider political network of duplicity and mistrust in the play. As Hadfield argues, an Elizabethan audience may well have seen echoes here of the surveillance culture of the Court of Elizabeth overseen by Lord Burghley. Certainly, many modern critics and productions of the play have emphasised how Elsinore is presented as a ‘prison’, a place of spying, eavesdropping, duplicity and betrayal. Jan Kott in the 1960s saw the play as ‘a fable about totalitarian tyranny’ and in his 1996 film, Branagh uses the motif of mirrors to suggest the surveillance society and how the individual can trust neither personal relationships nor the operations of the state.

Claudius is central to the concept of trust on both a domestic and political level exemplified by his killing of his brother, King Hamlet, his ‘foul and most unnatural murder’ (my emphasis). He is guilty of fratricide and regicide and this act is the primary source of the tragic catastrophe. As Spurgeon observed, ‘Hamlet’ is informed by multiple images of corruption and disease (‘things rank and gross in nature,’ ‘kissing carrion’, ‘something is rotten’); this exudes from the ‘cursed hebona’ poured into King Hamlet’s ear’ by Claudius. Furthermore, Claudius is the duplicitous politician who manipulates trust. Shakespeare’s audience would observe the Machiavellian duplicity of Claudius’s speech in Act 1 Scene 2 and now we might note the clever manipulative skills of a spin doctor! This speech is a masterpiece of rhetoric:
‘Have we, as twere with a defeated joy,
With an auspicious and a dropping eye,
With mirth in funeral and with dirge in marriage’,

The command of parallelism, rhythmic patterning, contrast and metonym are the arts of the duplicitous political rhetorician trying to win trust. Arguably, the tragic outcome of the play purges this betrayal of trust whose source is in Claudius.

Hamlet extends the dramatisation of trust, or more accurately distrust, in the play. It
develops from the distrust of all his relationships, with the exception of Horatio, to a
self-distrust of his identity; unable to fulfil his destined role he questions who he is
and asserts he is ‘a dull and muddy-mettled rascal’. Furthermore, Hamlet experiences
metaphysical uncertainties about death and the after-life: ‘For in that sleep of death
what dreams may come’. This questioning doubt has been central to defining Hamlet’s
distinctiveness as a tragic hero, what Foakes identified as ‘Hamletism’, his procrastinating
intellect.

In this world the tragic consequences of the lack and betrayal of trust are played out – nine
major characters die and the state is overthrown. However, there are examples of trust
being either affirmed or restored.Hamlet trusts Horatio and praises him as the ideal friend;
his soul ‘sh’ath sealed thee for herself’. Horatio lives to present the Prince transcending the
corruption of the state: ‘Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight, sweet Prince’. We may also see the restoration of trust in the relationship between Hamlet and his mother as Gertrude disobeys Claudius in the duel scene to drink to her son: ‘I will, my lord.’ Hamlet is restored to a trust and belief in his own integrity and identity on his return from England; he confidently asserts ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane’ and his anagnorisis is achieved in his acceptance and trust in the will of God and his Providence: ‘There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow…The readiness is all'

It is a moot point as to whether Fortinbras restores trust in the state at the end of the play. He has Hamlet’s ‘voice’, has been praised by him as a ‘delicate and tender prince and can be seen in the tradition of other young men in Shakespeare’s tragedies who take the kingdom forward after the catastrophe: Cassio (‘Othello), Edgar (King Lear), Malcolm (Macbeth). However, some modern productions have presented Fortinbras as little more than a power seeking opportunist in what Bogdanov sees as a play about the ‘territorial imperative’; in Bogdanov’s 1980s National Theatre production Fortinbras’s soldiers enter the stage and seize power brandishing AK47s. As Gibson notes we are at best uncertain as to whether Fortinbras’s rule will be ‘benign or tyrannical’, whether the commodity of trust will be less rare in his Denmark.