Inside Shakespeare’s mind:

Horatio, Hamlet’s trusted friend

Horatio - ‘Now, cracks a noble heart.... Good night sweet Prince;

And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’ ....

Heard or read this quote before? President J R Jayewardene in his oration to Dudley Senanayake before his pyre was lit, said so. I have inscribed those words on my husband’s (the former Minister of Foreign Affairs) on his tombstone in the churchyard of St Stephen’s. And in a moving farewell, Horatio uttered them to his dying friend, Hamlet.

He was beside Hamlet throughout the play and appear from the start even to confront King Hamlet’s ghost before he appeared to his son.

When Hamlet started mistrusting one and all down to his own mother.... and Ophelia whom he spurns for no reason of hers, Horatio was there like his shadow. He stood to the end until Hamlet died in his arms.

Shakespeare made this tragedy so immensely poignant an explosive that no other play even by another, could parallel. Shakespeare is at his brilliance. He picks up momentum as the story moves to its climax, remaining faithful to the plot.

Synopsis

Written in 1601-2 and sited in Denmark, I always ask the same question. Why did Shakespeare call Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark and not the Prince of England? Many of his plays placed in foreign land though he had never travelled outside England… In Hamlet, he credits a court but not a real Danish court and used only two Danish characters, Rosencransz and Guildenstern.

Horatio is around his age about a thirty years and they see everything eye to eye that strengthens their relationship as the play proceeds. Where it matters, Horatio leaves Hamlet alone when conflicting with others which he does throughout the play using some of the magnificent dialogue that was ever written, leave alone by Shakespeare. Even Horatio is brilliantly dialogued.

Horatio to dying Hamlet; ‘Good night sweet Prince; And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’.....

Hamlet confronts his father’s ghost in the battlement of the castle where he (the ghost) wishes to speak to him alone without the presence of Horatio; (A remote part of the platform)

Hamlet – Where ill thou lead me
Ghost – Mark me
H – I will

G My hour is almost come, when I do sulfurous and tormenting flames must render myself

H – Alas, poor ghost
G – Pity me not but lend thy serious hearing to what I shall unfold.
H – Speak, I am bound to hear.
G – So thou art to revenge when thou shall hear.
H – What
G – I am thy father’s spirit; doomed for a certain term to walk the night....

ACT.1 Sce. V

After which Hamlet gets Horatio to swear keep this meet with the ghost a secret. The ghost too swears to secrecy and disappears. Hamlet makes plans to see the reactions of the King and his mother by getting a street company to perform before them with Horatio’s help.

Laertes also to avenge his sister’s death by a duel, cleverly manipulated by the King to kill him with a poisoned rapier. All the while, his ever faithful Horatio is by his side. Before the duel starts, the King puts the hand of Laertes into that of Hamlet and he turns around to address the King, ‘Give me your pardon, Sir; I’ve done you wrong.’

In the contest both Hamlet and Laertes are mortally wounded by the poison in Laertes’s rapier. Laertes dies first but he confesses first after the truth dawns on him.

Laertes – (the King too dies). He is justly served. It is a poison tempered by himself. Exchange forgiveness with me, noble Hamlet. Mine and my father’s death come not upon thee, nor thine on me (he dies).

Hamlet – Heaven make thee free (turns to Horatio)

I am dead. Thou livest, report me and my cause aright to the unsatisfied.

Horatio plans to kill himself with the left over poison but acedes to Hamlet’s wish not to do so but live and clear his name, reveal the truth.

Hamlet. O’ I die Horatio. The potent poison quiet ove’r-crows my spirit

I cannot live to hear the news from England....

ACT V Sce II

In performance

No play has seen the stage as Hamlet, no play has been dialogued into such supremacy and no play has had such powerful characters. When ever Hamlet was performed, the audience has been so captivated, it reached immortality. Hamlet has been immortalised as no other character was or is. No play has been so acted or more stringently analysed.

A full scale production in the theatre is the longest of all Shakespeare plays. Hamlet moves forward in sequences of astonishments. The Hamlet/Horatio colloquy is a celebration of supremacy in English dialogue. This Hamlet the Dane is a challenge even to a veteran Thespian. It is as though in every man there is a trace of Hamlet; sanctity of love, arrogance, righteousness, wisdom and humility. I find these qualities in some one I know and revere.

Hamlet cannot be pigeonholed by any actor for he is the soldier seeking the truth, and later avenging one and all including his mother. So strong is a mind that only an actor in the calibre of Sir Lawrence Olivier or Richard Burton could don on the mantle. Hundreds of Hamlets have seen the day ever since it was written n 1601.

Mark Rylance played Hamlet over 400 times at Stratford in 1988-9. Every theatre around the world has staged the play, every leading actor has played the role and every director deemed it his ardour to mount it. UK filmed it in 1948, Russia in 1964 with music especially written by Shostakovich, New York in 1857 and so on, and no surprise because every dialogue can be fitted into a mosaic of effects from myriad English Hamlets to others of different nationalities.

Credits

*Hamlet – The all-time great prince born to right the wrong and Shakespeare used his wit to do so in 1,530 lines from the uncut text. Unkind to the trusting Ophelia and drove her to suicide.

*Claudius – Though suave and regal, he is murderer, seducer and drunkard.

*Gertude – Queen to King Hamlet and later to Claudius. Mother to Hamlet, foolish, naïve.

*Polonius – Elder statesman to the king and father to Laertes and Ophelia

*Ophelia – The trusting innocent love of Hamlet. Has seen only two men in her life, her father and brother. Unable to bear Hamlet’s scorn, commits suicide.

*Horatio – Personification of loyalty. Loved Hamlet to the end and around his age of about 30. Hamlet died in his arms.

*Laertes – Brother to Ophelia. Hamlet tells him that he loved Ophelia forty thousand times more than brothers would.