I could be bounded in a nutshell, Shakespeare’s genius in three cryptic phrases

In one sense, Hamlet spins out the statement in a play of words, not intended to have any logical meaning, but to confuse his audience, hiding his real thoughts beneath the mask of insanity.  In another, it contains the meaning of the entire play and Macbeth besides.

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, Act II

Hamlet speaks these seemingly cryptic lines to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Act II of the immortal play.  The pair had recently arrived at Elsinore, sometime after the funeral of Hamlet’s father and the wedding of his mother to his uncle, Claudius.  The three had been friends at college, but Hamlet suspects they are in league with Claudius at this point and treats them as such throughout their reunion, revealing none of his true thoughts and ultimately sending them to their deaths at the hands of the English.  Earlier, Hamlet told his friend, Horatio, that he would put on an “antic disposition,” feigning madness to deceive his uncle and his advisors while he plots his revenge for the murder of his father.  In that sense, the statement is a classic non sequitur, a bit of doggerel Hamlet spins out purely in a play of words, not intended to have any logical meaning, but to confuse his audience, hiding his real thoughts beneath the mask of insanity.  He’d done the same much right before with Claudius’ advisor Polonius, expounding that “if the sun breed maggots in a dead dog, being a god kissing carrion” and asking if he has a daughter, warning she may become pregnant, even though Hamlet is well aware his daughter is his former lover, Ophelia, and that if she became pregnant, it would be his child.  Polonius himself remarks during this exchange that Hamlet is “far gone, far gone,” but there “is a method in’t,” suggesting that Hamlet’s words can be taken both literally and figuratively, a few universal truths shining through the cloud of confusion he is intentionally crafting.  This is made more plausible when you consider that a few lines earlier in the scene with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet compared Denmark and then the entire world to a “prison.”  In this context, Hamlet can be said to be bound in Elsinore, the equivalent of a nutshell, even though escape is possible if he truly desired it.  He adds, however, “that there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” opening up another interpretation to both the statement and the play as a whole.  We are all bound within our mortal brains with a skull for a shell, but within that domain we possess the capacity to reach for the infinite with our minds.  He expands upon this notion later in the same scene, telling his former friends, “What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals.  And yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no, nor Woman neither.”

On a more figurative level, we can it to mean that humanity’s capacity would be endless were it not for the troubles we bring upon ourselves, or more accurately create for ourselves in our own heads.  We are the masters of our own minds, but those minds are polluted, debased, subject to bad dreams. Later, however, Shakespeare raises the question of how much control we have over what passes through our minds and how accountable we can be for our own thoughts.  Hamlet provides a script for the players to perform for Claudius, hoping to observe his guilt when the story cuts too close to his murder of Hamlet’s father.  The Player King closes a lengthy soliloquy by noting “Our wills and fates do so contrary run That our devices still are overthrown; Our thoughts are ours, their ends none of our own,” indicating that Hamlet, though he may believe he is feigning madness intentionally, actually has little control over where his mind wanders and could become mad in truth without really knowing it.  Indeed, some critics have insisted exactly that, believing Hamlet to have truly gone mad at some point, possibly before the play even begins.  Likewise, many have also remarked that Hamlet can be seen as an actor in search of the right role.  Throughout the play, he is unsure whether to be the prince, the son, the student, the friend, the lover, or the avenger and so he tries them all, wearing each temporarily as a figurative mask, only to be dissatisfied with the limitations of any specific aspect of the human condition, rapidly moving on to something new right up until his death.  In a sense, these are different ways of saying the same thing:  Hamlet’s thoughts exceed his grasp, whether he is mad, confused, faking it at times, believing it others, or a combination of everything, one thing is clear:  He never stops thinking and his thoughts never stop changing, evolving, giving birth to new ones, killing off old ones, veering into inescapable tangents, honing in as close as a human can get to the truth.  His mind is a whirlwind, bounded in an eggshell but open to the infinite.  As the late great literary critic Harold Bloom described it, “The largest mistake we can make about the play, Hamlet, is to think that it is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind because (presumably) he thinks too much…. The fundamental fact about Hamlet is not that he thinks too much, but that he thinks too well.” This is another way of saying that the entire play can be seen as an exploration of the nature of thought itself.  Where our thoughts come from, what if anything they mean, whether or not we have any control of them, and how they are transformed into action – or rather if they are transformed into action.

Hamlet, after all, believes his cause is righteous.  In principle, he wants revenge upon his uncle for killing his father and corrupting his mother.  In practice, however, he spends the entire play thinking about it rather than doing it.  The “To be or not to be” speech is revealing in that regard.  While contemplating suicide, Hamlet considers what happens to our thoughts after death, “To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub: For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.” The speech ends with a remark about how our thoughts often serve to prevent action rather than cause it, “Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all, And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action.”  Critics have proposed a thousand and one reasons why Hamlet refuses to act – everything from him not truly believing the ghost is really his father to him being too Christian to murder a man in cold blood.  Hamlet himself cautions Ophelia about his state of mind and the endless stream of consciousness that plagues him,  “I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all – believe none of us.”  Whatever the case, the precise reason for his inaction is irrelevant.  It could be one or all of them, even a near random combination depending on his mood.  The fact is we all have thoughts big and small that we fail to act on, and in many cases we never know why, much less where they come from in the first place.  Bloom has also described Hamlet as a “poem unlimited,” meaning we can find almost every aspect of the human experience contained in some 4,000 lines.  Hamlet is in this sense a true everyman, a mirror to us all.  Most of us are not Danish princes with a murdered father and an incestuous mother, but each of us makes choices based on thoughts and circumstances we cannot control.  We should not be surprised that Hamlet is the same, writ much larger and purer, carried forward by events rather than creating them for himself and only achieving his just revenge at the close of the play largely by accident.  Hamlet returns from England a changed man, but that change is largely one of resignation and readiness for what is to come, rather than the will to act.  He does not transform into some avenging angel, leading an army to unseat his uncle.  He returns instead to confront his own demons as much as anything else, seemingly unconcerned about whether he lives or dies, literally meditating on the nature of death in a graveyard.  He says as much himself to Horatio, “If it be now, ‘tis not to come: if it be not to come, it will be now: if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.”  Hamlet does ultimately kill his uncle and avenge the death of his father, but not because of his own actions.  Success, if you can call it that, is achieved only because Claudius arranges a fencing match wherein he seeks to kill Hamlet himself with a poisoned blade.  The final tragic scene is the result of Claudius’ own machinations gone horribly awry rather than any plan of Hamlet’s and it is only when he recognizes that he has been poisoned by Claudius that he finds the will to kill him.

A comparison with another of Shakespeare’s timeless and timelessly interesting characters is illuminating.  Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in the year following the completion of Hamlet, and in many ways, Macbeth is Hamlet’s tragic mirror, the prior play told in negative relief.  If Hamlet is about thought, Macbeth is about action.  Hamlet believes his cause is just and he has every reason to act, openly lamenting that he has failed to take that action.  In Act IV, he proclaims “How stand I then, That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d, Excitements of my reason and my blood,  And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men, That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,  Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot  Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, Which is not tomb enough and continent To hide the slain? O, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!”  Despite these protestations, he still cannot bring himself to do the deed, cannot force his thoughts to remain bloody, much less actually carry out his revenge.  A few minutes earlier, in fact, he encountered Claudius alone, confessing his sins, an easy target for his blade, but found yet another excuse to let him live.  Macbeth, meanwhile, is of an entirely different sort.  He doubts the righteousness of his actions from the very beginning, knows that it is not just to kill his sleeping king for power, but does so anyway.  While plotting Duncan’s murder, he remarks that a deed so foul will likely return to haunt him, saying he would “jump the life to come” if he knew he could do so without repercussion, that a single blow “Might be the be-all and the end-all here.”  In this world, however, “Bloody instructions, which, being taught, return To plague th’ inventor.”  Immediately prior to the murder, he has a vision of a bloody dagger before him, remarking that it’s “A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? I see thee yet, in form as palpable As this which now I draw. Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going; And such an instrument I was to use. Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses.”  Macbeth’s will to act therefore overwhelms his thoughts, causing him to hallucinate; like Hamlet, he cannot control what’s in his mind, but for him, thought is subservient to action regardless of the consequences, even when the darkness that will be unleashed takes over his senses.

In this view, Hamlet is doomed by his inability to act; Macbeth by his need to act.  Both are bounded in the same nutshell, but Hamlet might have truly been the king of his own infinite space under different circumstances.  Macbeth, however, as a man of action, has an insatiable need to exert power outside his own mind, and his restless spirit would likely have compelled him either to greatness or a similar tragedy regardless of the circumstances.  Where does that leave us?  We are all bounded in the same nutshell, of course, but should hope we are not equally doomed.  Shakespeare himself provides no easy answer, offers no middle ground between these two tragic heroes.  He does, however, suggest an alternative.  As Hamlet lays dying in his only true friend, Horatio’s arms, he begins what appears to be a typically convoluted monologue.  He informs the gathered crowd, “You, that look pale and tremble at this chance That are but mutes or audience to this act, Had I but time – as this fell sergeant, Death I strict in his arrest – oh, I could tell you…”  But for perhaps the first time in his life – certainly the first in the play – Hamlet doesn’t continue.  He says instead “But let it be. Horatio, I am dead,” and then urges Horatio to speak well of him after he is gone.  It is in these final moments that – unlike Macbeth – Hamlet appears to have achieved a clarity of thought and purpose denied him previously.  “Things standing thus unknown, shall I leave behind me…tell my story,” he begs Horatio before claiming “the rest is silence.”  Thus, Hamlet lets go of his obsessions and dies at peace by acknowledging his own limitations.  His clarity is that there is no clarity, and that is finally acceptable to him.  What matters now is not what he thinks, but what others think of him and he wants them to do so kindly.  Fortinbras arrives immediately afterward to stake his claim to Denmark and orders his men to provide Hamlet with a military burial, saying he would have “proved most royally.”  Macbeth, however, has no such redemption.  He dies raging against his fate, insisting he “will not yield,” “I will try to the last.  Before my body, I throw my warlike shield.”  After he is killed by Macduff, the new king Malcom refuses to even speak Macbeth’s name, describing him as a “dead butcher” and his wife a “fiend-like queen.”  Once again, the comparison is illustrative:  Hamlet is a tragic figure who causes unnecessary bloodshed, but achieved peace and something like redemption at the end by accepting the unknown and unknowable.  Macbeth is far more of a villain, who refuses anything of the sort, and is known after only as a butcher.

Shakespeare’s genius contains and connected the two, and it can be found in even the simplest, somewhat whimsical phrases, where one might least expect.  As all of his work is connected by the human experience and the different aspects he chose to explore, many of his phrases are connected beneath the surface to the greater whole. He was bounded in the same nutshell himself, but was able to capture some of the infinite within us, writing it down for eternity to ponder.

Note from the author: The original version of this post noted that Hamlet told Ophelia he would put on an antic disposition. The line was actually said to Horatio after meeting the ghost of his father. This version has been corrected.