SARAH:  We mentioned earlier that Polonius is quick in this scene to interpret Hamlet’s visit to Ophelia as the madness brought on by his love.

RALPH:  However hasty Polonius’s interpretation may be, we as readers have no choice but to follow suit.  The other characters in the play, as well as Shakespeare’s audience members and readers, all share a common problem: we must try to make sense of what Hamlet is doing, which isn’t always very easy to do.

SARAH:  Some critics have supported Polonius’s assessment of Hamlet’s visit — that he truly is heartbroken because Ophelia has obeyed her father’s command to stop seeing him.

RALPH:  A. C. Bradley, the Shakespeare scholar, had a different opinion. He thought that Hamlet isn’t heartbroken at all — that’s he’s thinking only about his revenge plan.  Hamlet’s main goal in visiting Ophelia is therefore to convince everyone, through her, that his insanity is due to heartbreak, instead of something else. In this way, he hopes to avoid suspicion from the King.

SARAH:  You see, if Claudius suspects that Hamlet knows something about the murder, then Hamlet will lose the element of surprise, and have a formidable opponent on his hands.  A heartsick lover won’t seem like a threat in Claudius’s mind.

RALPH:  In other words, for Bradley, Ophelia does exactly what Hamlet hopes she will do — she goes to tell her father, who then goes to tell the King.

SARAH:  Another well-known Shakespeare scholar of the early 20th century, John Dover Wilson, disagreed with both these explanations — he thought that Hamlet was really becoming mentally unbalanced, and not from a broken heart.

RALPH:  Wilson was the chief editor of the Cambridge edition of Shakespeare’s plays, and his 1935 book, What Happens in Hamlet, is an extremely influential, and highly opinionated, study of this play.

SARAH:  Wilson argues that a heartbroken Hamlet wouldn’t have been pale and trembling, his knees knocking together.  That’s what you’d look like after you’ve seen a ghost, especially if you were already depressed and grieving.

RALPH:  Wilson says that Hamlet’s description matches “the after-effects of some terrible dream or overpowering delirium, such as was known to attach melancholic subjects.”

SARAH:  The point, then, in Wilson’s mind, is that Hamlet is having a mental breakdown.  Wilson writes ”the mental instability obvious in the Ghost scene, far from being temporary, has grown more intense.”

RALPH:  Wilson was quite confident in his ability to determine the correct interpretation of  Shakespeare’s words. In his own edition of Hamlet, you’ll find wording and stage directions that had never appeared in any previous publication of the play. Wilson had apparently made these modifications, convinced that his brilliant scholarship had uncovered what Shakespeare had actually written, or perhaps intended to write!

SARAH:  Like Polonius, perhaps Wilson moved a bit too quickly on his assumptions.

RALPH:  So we’ve heard three different interpretations of Hamlet’s behavior so far: first, that he is heartbroken; then, that he is trying to throw off the King’s suspicions while preparing his revenge, and finally that Hamlet is in fact having a breakdown of some kind. Which seems most plausible to you?

SARAH:  Or perhaps you think we’re supposed to be unsure, that we’re not supposed to know exactly what Hamlet’s up to. You see, earlier critics like Wilson and Bradley treat Hamlet like a detective story — if we carefully consider all the clues Shakespeare has given us throughout the play, we can deduce the right interpretation, the correct answer, as it were, that rationally explains the Hamlet’s statements and actions.

RALPH:  But later critics are less positive that such a definitive interpretation of Hamlet’s behavior is possible or useful. To these critics, one of the most powerful characteristics of this play is its ambiguity, its mystery.

SARAH:  Hamlet is hard to pin down — he is brilliant and constantly changing his strategy, and we, just like Polonius and the rest of the royal court, are struggling to keep up with him. That’s why people love reading and rereading this play.  No matter how well you think you know Hamlet, the play or the character, you keep discovering different aspects, new dimensions, surprising possibilities

RALPH:  But Sarah, I have some sympathy for the interpretations of critics like Bradley and Wilson:  after all, they’re just trying to answer the same questions that anyone watching the play would be asking, the same questions you’d have to answer if you were an actor performing on stage Hamlet or Ophelia. Does Hamlet really love Ophelia? Is he crazy, or just pretending to be? And if he is faking it, why?

SARAH:  And one final question before we wrap up this section:  this ambiguity we feel about Hamlet’s motivations at this point in the play — is this intentional on Shakespeare’s part? Did he want us to be uncertain about the Hamlet character, or does he want us instead to be like Polonius, and to have adopted, rightly or wrongly, a particular explanation for his behavior? Will Shakespeare clear up this ambiguity by the end of the play?