A Note on Shakespeare's “Hamlet” and his “Dozen or Sixteen Lines”

A Note on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and his “Dozen or Sixteen Lines”

Hamlet tells the first player in Act II, Scene ii, that he will add some dozen or sixteen lines to the play “Murder of Ganzago” which he asks the players to present before the royal court at Elsinore. Several critics tried their best to identify the passage. From a careful analysis of the speeches of the players in the play scene (Act III, Scene II). Mr and Mrs Cowden Clerks, Furnivall and Seeley consider lines 178 to 203 from the Player King’s speech (“purpose is that the slave to memory.....Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own”) as constituting Hamlet’s addition to the ‘play within the play.’ Sievers and Malleson contend that lines 243-248 (“Thoughts black usurp immediately”) are part of Hamlet’s addition to the play. (For details of this discussion I refer the reader to the New Variorum Edition of Furness.) Dr Ingelby bolds a third view: “The Court Play” is but a part of Hamlet, that Hamlet writes no speech at all whether of six, twelve or sixteen lines....Shakespeare simply wrote the entire play, not writing any additions in persona Hamleti, still less writing an addition to a play which he had previously written in the character of an Italian morality. To trace into its issues every suggestion in the play, so that the event should justify the hint, is “to comider too curiously”.....Nor to suppose that Shakespeare in composing Hamlet followed out the exact course that a real living prince would have followed is to impute to him a lack of the simplest art of the playwright.

If I could show that Shakespeare specifically wanted his attentive audience to notice the passage which the prince should be taken to have added, I would have answered all the arguments of Dr Ingelby.

I think the lines added by Hamlet to the Murder of Gonzago comprise the speech of the Player Queen­–
P. Queen:        Oh confound the rest!
Such love must needs lie treason in my breast;
In second husband let me be accused
None wed the second but who klll’d the first.
The instances that second marriage move
Are base respects of thrift, but none of love;
A second time I kill my husband dead
When second husband kisses me in bed.

The most direct proof I can cite for my contention is that Hamlet subsequently owns that these were his words. In the closet scene, when Hamlet kills Polonius, the following conversation ensues:

Queen:             O What a rash and bloody deed is this!

Hamlet:           A bloody deed almost as bad, good mother,
As kill a king, and marry with his brother.

Queen:             As kill a King!

The Queen’s surprise revealed in her question has been recognised as proof of her innocence regarding the murder of Senior Hamlet. But I suggest that besides this shock and surprise, the Queen is connecting the words of her son “As kill a King, and marry with his brother” rather vaguely at first, with the words which she clearly remembers the Player Queen to have spoken:

“Such love must needs be treason in my breast
None wed the second but who killed the first

A second time I kill my husband dead
When second husband kisses me in bed.”

And Hamlet notices her vague feeling of recognition of these lines which he inserted in the “play within the play” and assures her promptly.
“Ay, lady, it was my word.”

I find further confirmation in Hamlet’s aside “Wormwood, wormwood!” coming immediately after the Player Queen’s words, “None wed the second but who killed the first.” Evidently Hamlet is jubilant at the effectiveness of his addition to the play. I suggest that the king first “blenches” on hearing this speech of the Player Queen. For this line is quite Hamletian for its double-edge. On one side it pricks the queen; for she has figuratively killed her first husband in wedding a second husband and the king winces too; he too literally killed the first husband of Gertrude and married her. The King’s wincing became vocal when he asks, “Have you heard the argument? Is there no offence in it?” And Hamlet replies. “They do but jest, poison in jest.” Later he tells Horatio that the King blenched “upon the talk of poisoning.” Claudius did not blench on hearing Lucianus’s speech “Thoughts black...” He waits for a more suitable occasion to call off the play, in order to veil the eyes of his unsuspecting courtiers. He waits for Hamlet to say, “This is one Lucianus, nephew to the King” and “you shall see anon how the murderer gets the love of Gonzaga’s wife.” And Hamlet’s second reference to poisoning just preceding this statement. “He poisons him i’ the garden for his estate” is the second “tooth” of the famous “double-tooth theory” advanced by earlier critics.

The passage I have herein suggested to be Hamlet’s addition to “The Murder of Gonzago” cannot be dismissed as not being such on the grounds that it entirely refers to Gertrude’s second marriage. I have sufficiently stressed the fact that the line “None wed the second but who killed the first” refers to Claudius too. Nor can it be objected that the passage is only six or seven lines in length and not “dozen or sixteen.” It is probable that the lines “Thoughts black........,” six in number are the rest of the lines that Hamlet should be taken to have added to the play.

It has been suggested by some that as the main incident of poisoning in “The Murder of Gonzago” is sufficient “to catch the conscience of the King,” Hamlet meant to probe the queen for her complicity in the murder. This is out of the question as the Ghost itself had emphatically told Hamlet that he need not harbour any malice against his mother. It would be much more proper to suppose that Hamlet was preparing the queen to know the awful secret of the murder of Senior Hamlet. He is trying to get the Ghost’s wish fulfilled, the wish expressed in its words:
“....leave her to heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her   .....”

Hamlet is thus planting the thorns in her bosom; he strengthens them in the “closet scene.” After the death of Polonius, he says to his mother­–

“Leave wringing of your hands, peace, sit you down,
And let me wring your heart.......”

“But why does he not leave the matter to heaven?” I shall be asked. I answer, “For the queen, by herself, would never have felt the thorns in her bosom;” for in the closet she asks Hamlet,

“.......Ay me, what act,
That roars so loud the thunders in the index?”

At last he accomplishes his late father’s wish when the queen acknowledges it­–

“O Hamlet speak so more.
Thou turn’st my eyes into my very soul,
And there I see such black and grained spots
As will not leave their tinct.”

As though to acknowledge this pan of Hamlet’s accomplishment, the Ghost appears to him and further whets his “almost blunted purpose.”

“But,” one might ask, “did not the Ghost tell Hamlet to ‘step between her and her fighting soul’?” What could that mean? For an answer we must look to what Hamlet finally said to her in the subsequent lines of the scene. What he tells her can be summed up in these lines­
“......Confess yourself to heaven;
Repent for what’s past, avoid what is to come
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
And either master the devil, or throw him out
With wondrous potency.”

How completely Hamlet succeeded in his object can be seen in her assurance– ­
“Be thou assured, If words be made of breath
And breath of life, I have no life to breathe
What thou halt said to me.”
The need to trace the course of action in Hamlet up to this part of the “closet scene” is, I hope, clear by now. Only this can confirm and corroborate my views on the “dozen or sixteen” lines that Hamlet should be taken to have added to “The Murdcr of Gonzago’ and what his object was in writing those lines.