UPDATE: The blog has now moved: https://commonreader.substack.com/
O God I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space —were it not that I have bad dreams.
This line is as close to one line explanation of Hamlet as you will get, other than Polonius’ phrase, ‘poem unlimited.’
The first thing to remember about Hamlet it that he lies. His ‘antic disposition’ makes him unreliable. This line is a speculative metaphor which could give different impressions to different hearers. That is the core of Hamlet’s irony: how you interpret him determines how liable you are to misunderstand him.
He is talking to Rozencrantz and Guildenstern, sent by the king to find out if he is mad. They are irritating former acquaintances, who insist on making banter with him. In the middle of laddish banter Hamlet asks them this:
What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of fortune that she sends you to prison hither?
They ask him what he means and he says Denmark is a prison.
Is he still joking? It would be normal for young men joking about strumpets and their student life to refer to their parental home as prison.
They try and tell him it isn’t a prison (after all, there are his parents’ spies).
All of this could still be banter, but it feels uneasy. Hamlet comes up with the Satanic explanation, ‘ there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.’
This could be delivered as a moody rebuttal or a triumphant witticism. It is ideally read as both: ambiguous, moody. They key is that he is at the centre of it: ‘to me it is a prison.’ This is not about reality: it is about Hamlet defining the world as he likes.
Rozencrantz responds: ‘Why then, your ambition makes it one. ‘Tis too narrow for your mind.’
What a polite way of telling someone they are being a but of a prick. If that’s how you feel, maybe you are the prison?
And that’s when the all important line comes in. Hamlet replies: ‘O God I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space —were it not that I have bad dreams.’
Is ‘O God’ joshing or despairing? Is he carrying on the banter or lashing out in frustration?
It seems like this is when the mood finally turns; he is exasperated with the sycophancy and the inveigling of these spies from the king. He decides to run rings around them.
He continues his theme that everything that matters is in the mind, somewhat accepting Rozencrantz’s rebuttal. It is not that Denmark feels small because he is ambitious; it feels small because of his mind. He would think himself ‘king of infinite space’ even in the smallest space. But his ‘dreams’ prevent him.
For Hamlet, the world exists primarily in his imagination. As far as he is concerned he is the rightful king. He can imagine that he is. We start to see his antic disposition as a form of power delusion. He is dreaming and living out the delusion of his dream.
This is as close to an admission that we get that he is questing for revenge out of a sense of his own delusion, rather than the moral cause he was given by his dead father. He is too complex to be seen in one dimension. Bloom is right, the play, and thus Hamlet, is a kaleidoscope.
Guildenstern takes up the reply, saying ‘Which dreams indeed are ambition, for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.’
They are testing him to get him to confess his ambition to the throne.
‘The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.’ This is a subtle way of trying to catch Hamlet out. It rephrases his earlier statements to show that his ‘bad dreams’ could be the basis of ambitions in the world, which make him dissatisfied with Denmark. It is a prison, they imply, because he cannot enact his dreams there yet, not just because he thinks it is a prison.
Hamlet knows what they are up to. In the next section he turns the chase back onto them.
HAMLET: A dream itself is but a shadow.
Hamlet tries to deny what Guildenstern says: ambitions do not come from dreams, the way shadows come from light; dreams are shadows of the world. He is showing them that their argument is circular.
ROSENCRANTZ: Truly, and I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow’s shadow.
This is an attempt to double bluff Hamlet. Ambitions are so dreamy in their quality that they can be the shadow of a shadow. He is repeating the same point, one degree removed.
HAMLET: Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretched heroes the beggars’ shadows. Shall we to the court? for, by my fay, I cannot reason.
He takes this logic to mean that if beggars were the bodies (the thing giving off the shadow) then king and heroes (the equivalent of ambitions in his analogy) are beggars’ shadows, thus showing the absurdity of the argument as it does not correspond to the world. He is frustrated with their poor wits and their attempt to trap him. He is also being snide about the court, a place where it will not matter that they have poor logic and ‘cannot reason.’
ROSENCRANTZ GUILDENSTERN: We’ll wait upon you.
HAMLET: No such matter: I will not sort you with the rest of my servants, for, to speak to you like an honest man, I am most dreadfully attended. But, in the beaten way of friendship, what make you at Elsinore?
ROSENCRANTZ: To visit you, my lord; no other occasion.
HAMLET: Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks; but I thank you: and sure, dear friends, my thanks are too dear a halfpenny. Were you not sent for? Is it
your own inclining? Is it a free visitation? Come, deal justly with me: come, come; nay, speak.
Two interesting points here. First the phrase, ‘I am most dreadfully attended’, which clearly refers not just to his servants, but to his dreams. He is haunted by his imagination, his power quest. Notice his politicians’ phrase ‘to speak to you like an honest man’. He then compares himself to a beggar, which he only just used as an analogy for the substances that makes a shadow of a king. In the topsy-turvy world of Hamlet’s mind he can become the beggar that is really the king.
Look again at that line:
O God I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space —were it not that I have bad dreams.
Hamlet is a tortured soul. His problems are self-imposed. He is crying out for help here confessing his play acting, his secrecy, his ambition. By pretending to be mad he has somewhat lost sight of where the line is. Once we see the whole play in these terms – Hamlet is a liar, ambitious, unstable and somewhat prone to believing his own BS – the complexities start to make more sense. Like Falstaff he invents himself endlessly. But he does so for sinister mysterious reasons.
There is a scene where Hamlet disdains the music and dancing at the court. It reminds me of this line from The Merchant of Venice.
The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;
The motions of his spirit are dull as night,
And his affections dark as Erebus.
Let no such man be trusted.
Hamlet is too confined to his nutshell, his dreams, his imagination. He is unmoved by the music of the world. He is as dangerous as all the villains he fights against.
In a nutshell, he cannot be trusted.
It's only chemo 