This final act sees action. It opens with the gravediggers talking about Ophelia and if she deserves a Christian burial due to the suspicion surrounding her death. Hamlet enters the graveyard and muses that all intelligence, wit, and action all comes to death, all comes to nothing. The universe is an accident. Life has no meaning. So why do anything in life if it all ends in the nothingness of death? Hamlet is exposing the nihilism of the modern age. Hamlet has sunk to his lowest. A funeral procession enters the graveyard. Hamlet learns that Ophelia has died. He is moved. Something stirs in him. He begins to come to his senses. He loved her. Remember too that Ophelia is the barometer of the mental state of Hamlet. Her innocence speaks to him even from the grave. Hamlet now has full charge of his senses; he knows what he must do. He must clean up the corruption in the court of Denmark. He must kill King Claudius who has killed his father, made a whore of his mother and taken his rightful crown from him. Hamlet is about to become a man of action. His life now has meaning.
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice is the second of the four great tragedies of Shakespeare (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth.) These are the first great tragedies since the Greeks. Only a man faced with conflict and doubt with the skill to write could write them. Shakespeare was in his dark and troubled time of life when he wrote these plays. Tragedy is a drama in which the principle conflict is between the hero and the metaphysical powers, the universe itself. The metaphysical forces win. The hero is broken, crushed, destroyed, through his own doing. The fall of the hero is not just a personal loss: when the hero falls, many fall with him. The tragedy of the individual becomes large. The warnings are these: if a great man can fall, so can we. We can also be crushed by someone else’s bad choice. Othello is a love tragedy. It is a story about disorder destroying order, about abject evil and its ravages in the world, the misuse of free will. Othello is the hero and Iago the villain. Both are destroyed. The essential thing to understand the play: a man and women in marriage become one flesh.
The link between Hamlet and Ophelia is central to understanding the play. Beginning, with his letters to her while studying at Wittenberg University, everything revolves around her. As he slowly looses his mind, Ophelia is the barometer of Hamlet’s mental health. At the end of his soliloquy in Act Four, Hamlet is training all his thoughts on blood to act blood. In the very next scene, Ophelia has gone mad, just as Hamlet has gone mad. Her innocence is affected by those around her, and she in turn, affects them. Even through Ophelia’s madness Gertrude confesses her own guilt. Hamlet is the one play where Shakespeare is in danger of loosing his balance. He has so much uncertainty he himself could have toppled. If he had not written anything past Hamlet, that would be it. What saved Shakespeare (and Hamlet) from loosing it completely? Shakespeare can still comprehend the balance of innocence, virtuousness, something slightly sacrificial that restores a glimmer of the good in Denmark. It is the creation of Ophelia that saves him, the innocent heroine. In Othello, the innocent heroine takes a more active role in the form of Desdemona. Shakespeare further explores this saving grace in his next play.
In this enlightening lecture, Dr. White comments on how the modern adaptations of The Merchant of Venice turn a beautiful comedy into a tragedy of Shylock, thus ruining the play’s comedic purpose and message. He sets about refuting this false view and showing the audience what Shylock’s real place in the play is, disclosing his true role as the villain or problem of the play, and how he comes to be in that position to begin with. He discusses the role of outsiders in Shakespeare’s great comedies in relation to Shylock, and refutes the charge of racism leveled against the playwright, pointing out among other things that there were hardly enough Jews in England in Shakespeare’s time for him to conceive a driving hatred of them. An exposition of Shylock’s intense hate of Antonio and all he stands for leads into a brilliant discussion of the problem of usury within the context of the play and the fundamental disorderedness of usury in general.
The most famous speech in the play, perhaps in all of English literature, appears in Act Three. The question is about suicide. Hamlet’s pattern of thought now brings him to this. In the first act when he speaks of suicide, he decides not, it is against God’s law. Now he considers the act. Now dealing with an abstract question. There is nothing that is good or bad but only thinking makes it so. There is no pattern to life, only fortune, whimsy, and change. Hamlet cannot act because he believes in nothing. Hamlet gives voice to the turmoil in Shakespeare’s own life. He himself was overwhelmed, full of doubt, was not sure what to believe. He was on the verge of loosing balance. This is the playwright working it out in art. When Hamlet rebukes Ophelia, he severs his last link with sanity. Shakespeare used virtuous women in his tragedies for the spiritual health of the men. Hamlet’s treatment of her is the mark of how far he has fallen. This act is the center of the play, where the climax takes place. For the fist half of the play, there is thought without action. Now there is action without thought.
That an unknown spirit asks Hamlet to commit murder is evidence that this is an evil spirit. Hamlet himself is not sure, questions the ghost as to who he is. Doubt. Hamlet is not thinking with a clear mind. He is pushed to the edge. There is a parallel structure in keeping an eye on the young men in the play: Laertes is being watched to see that he is not drinking, gambling, fencing, or acquainting himself with wanton women. Hamlet is watched to discover what he is thinking. Fortinbras is watched for his political activities. These are typical behaviors of young men that must be watched over by the adults. Hamlet is not ready to follow the order of the ghost. He is not ready to act. He is still bound in a world of thought. With rejection by Ophelia as well, he has lost his final source of stability. Life is becoming an awful burden for him. There is nothing left to hold onto in this world. He talks of death; not of the kings, but of his own.
