The entire aside is unnecessary purely in terms of the plot, but Hamlet remains about far more than that. Perhaps, it is best seen as a vessel for ideas, where they come from, how they evolve, and where they go, and the beings that carry them.
The eminent literary critic and scholar Harold Bloom once claimed that Hamlet’s chief challenge wasn’t that he thought too much, but that he thought too well. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than the climax of the eponymous play, when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern bring the Danish prince before his uncle, King Claudius, after he’s accidently killed Polonius in his mother’s bedchamber. The King, emotionally reeling upon being confronted by a recreation of his own murder of Hamlet’s father in the play within a play, asks a simple question: Where’s Polonius? Hamlet replies, cryptically, “At supper” and then uses those three syllables to illuminate the whole of the human condition as mortal beings, simultaneously taunting his uncle and revealing universal truths. Perhaps needless to say, Claudius is confused at first by the seeming non sequitur, stuttering, “At supper where?” Hamlet replies first by informing him that Polonius is dead, albeit somewhat cryptically, before summarizing the cycle of life for rich and poor, beggars and kings:
Not where he eats, but where he is eaten. A
certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at
him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We
fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves
for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is
but variable service—two dishes but to one table.
That’s the end.
Like so much else in the play, we can read this both in context and as a general statement, switching between the two like an optical illusion that alters itself based on your perspective. In context, Hamlet has just killed Polonius, but that death is largely incidental. The play itself was set in motion when Claudius killed Hamlet’s father, a king who has literally been fed upon by worms throughout all of the events on stage, making the aside something of a reflection on his father and how little he matters now compared to the living. The murder of his father, of course, prompts Hamlet to swear revenge against his uncle, making the statement, “That’s the end,” something of a direct threat, as in this is your end and, despite your grandiose title and self aggrandizement as king, it will be the same as a beggar’s. As a general philosophical statement, one is hard pressed to better sum up both the circle of life and the futility of our existence, capturing the irony of how all our efforts are ultimately wasted. The irony, as everything else in the speech, is two fold. First, we “fat all creatures else to fat us,” which literally means we are farmers and ranchers, growing food for our own purposes, but more figuratively can be read as all of the various things humans do for our own improvement or anticipated benefit that other creatures don’t. We fat our bodies, but also our minds, our homes, our jobs, our very lives. Second, these efforts are ultimately useless. However we husband our resources, fill our bodies or minds, we will end up as food for worms. Death will come to us all, prompting Hamlet to elevate the lowly worm or maggot to a superior status, a “convocation,” they are “politic,” emperors for diet. At the same time, they also represent the faceless inevitability of forces of nature, treating kings and beggars the same like an earthquake or flood. Lastly, it’s hard not to believe that someone with Hamlet’s intellect isn’t talking about his own future. Hamlet has already made his move against this uncle, the play was the thing to catch the conscience of the king, but it backfired, and now he’s held captive by a man he knows has no compunction about murdering a family member for power. While he might not be aware of how he will meet his end at this point, that an end is coming certainly seems to be on his mind, transforming this into another reflection of his own mortality, only this time there is no undiscovered country, only a hole in the ground, where all his aspirations are food for worms and maggots.
Hamlet’s mind cannot simply stop there, however. Claudius, still rather confused, interjects with “Alas, alas!” while Hamlet keeps pushing the idea forward to its next logical step. This time, we’re treated to another one of Shakespeare’s single syllable sentences, the sort of thing that could in principle be spoken by a child, but in practice says more than the most enlightened philosopher aspires to. “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm,” he remarks, realizing what may happen to the worm and expanding the cycle of life from humans to all of nature. If worms feed on decomposing humans and fish feed on worms, then anyone can feed on a king by catching a fish. While few would go so far as to call this revised take uplifting, there is a more positive sense to the broadened perspective. The finality of “That’s the end” has been replaced by a far more endless cycle, we live, we die, we decompose, but we also provide sustenance for the next generation. Should this chain be broken, life would cease to exist. We die so that others, humans and our fellow creatures, can live, but Claudius isn’t the thinker that Hamlet is, either in context or more thematically. He is closer to Hamlet’s opposite, a man defined by his appetites from a lust to power to women, food, and drink. Earlier in the play, Hamlet describes him deep into a night of drinking, “The King doth wake tonight and takes his rouse,” claiming he “drains his draughts of Rhenish down” while basking in the glory of his position, delighting in how the “kettledrum and trumpet” that “bray out” his triumph, what may see now as Hamlet believing he’s fattening himself. Regardless, it’s not surprising that he can’t follow Hamlet’s train of thought, asking him, “What dost thou mean by this?” At this point, it’s unclear whether he’s still referring to what happened to Polonius, but Hamlet takes him literally, replying with what amounts to finishing his own non sequitur, returning us to where we began while further expanding on the previous ideas, “Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.” Once again, Hamlet is saying several things at once, far too many than a single sentence should hold. In fact, the statement itself is now a circle: The dead are food for worms which are food for fish which are food for humans, equalizing both the low and the mighty, metaphorically completing the cycle of life. The possibility that Hamlet is making a threat has returned, as in this king, Claudius, will make a “progress” through the guts of a beggar, obviously playing on the term “procession.” Opening with “Nothing,” however, references both Hamlet’s own sense of the futility of existence, the lack of meaning in everything and anything, and his grim sense of his own future.
Claudius continues to be confused, however, returning to this original question, “Where is Polonius?” Hamlet answers more directly this time, at least a bit, “In heaven,” but still cannot resist continuing to play on words, urging him to send a messenger to see, and if he finds “him not there, seek him i’ th’ other place yourself,” another subtle threat. Only then does he deign to answer the question, telling Claudius where he hid the body. Even so, he jests in the face of death that if they don’t find Polonius in a month, the body will be stinking so badly, they will smell him “as you go up the stairs into the lobby.” Immediately afterwards, Claudius informs him that he’s been banished to England, but Hamlet persists in taunting his uncle, calling him “mother” instead of “father” because “Father and mother is man and wife, Man and wife is one flesh.” We cannot escape the connection that Gertrude was once one flesh with Hamlet’s biological father, and has severed some part of her being, tragically and irrevocably, a wound that will ultimately lead to her own death. With that, Hamlet departs to England, only to return in the fifth and final act a somewhat changed man after consigning Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their own deaths as the bodies begin to multiply like the ideas Hamlet espouses, coming one upon the other, faster and faster. In his final lengthy scene with Horatio, his only true friend, he returns to the idea of both death and the cycle of life, albeit in a more philosophical fashion. After he agrees to fence Laertes for sport, Horatio urges him to trust his instincts if he feels something is wrong, sensing this may be a trap. Hamlet replies by claiming he defies the fates, “augury,” and then illuminates the nature of time and space as eternal, once again in single syllables, “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 perspective is different, a God’s eye view rather than one from the guts of a beggar, but there are parallels of meaning. If we are here now, we will be gone some day and not return. If it will not happen in the future, it is happening in the present and or has already happened. If it hasn’t happened, it will happen. The cycle of life has become a cycle of time, where all things come and go in their course, appearing for a moment and then disappearing forever. He closes this thought by returning again to contemplating death, his own and others, only this time he is more resigned, finding something freeing instead of threatening immediately before his own demise, “The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be,” and for perhaps the first time in his short life, he does just that.
At times, the audience may find Hamlet as maddening as his uncle. The entire aside about a king through the guts of a beggar is unnecessary purely in terms of the plot, but Hamlet as a play remains about far more than that. The plot, to a large extent, is the most insignificant thing about the work, so much so that Shakespeare himself interrupted it for an extended play within a play. Perhaps, it is best seen as a vessel for ideas, where they come from, how they evolve, and where they go. Because humans are vessels for ideas themselves, bounded in a nutshell yet kings of infinite space as Hamlet described it earlier, indeed the only known vessel for ideas, it hinges on our own fate as well. From that perspective, a single sentence, “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm,” means everything – and nothing, when we all come to naught.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 