David Tennant and Patrick Stewart in the RSC’s 2009 production of the play for the BBC

The scene has an interesting frame structure, presenting the audience with Claudius, alone, visibly shaken by Hamlet’s theatrical subterfuge (i.e., The Mousetrap), soliloquizing about the irredeemable crime he committed, when Hamlet suddenly walks on stage just as his enemy is kneeling down to pray (III-3, 70), launches into a violent, hateful soliloquy of his own, yet somewhat surprisingly spare Claudius’s life and leaves, only for Claudius to resume his initial soliloquy with words of renunciation that give the whole scene a dramatically ironic twist. Somewhat paradoxically, the scene thus comes out as both an anticlimax and a turning point in the play, dramatizing as it does the “god-given” opportunity Hamlet has to fulfill his revenge, but which he fails to seize, for reasons that are essential to Shakespeare’s characterization of his hero and his treatment of the theme of revenge.

Claudius’s ambiguous villainy

The scene is the audience’s first and only opportunity to have unmediated access to Claudius’s thoughts, emotions and motives. Indeed, having been exclusively perceived from the perspective of its young hero, the audience had been led to share his hostility for the play’s obvious villain, though with no explicit confirmation of his guilt up until this scene. The paradox is that, while it does explicitly confirm this guilt for the first time, the scene grants the character unexpected depth, even dignity and gravitas. At the very least, Shakespeare keeps Claudius’s expression of moral struggle on the razor’s edge between remorse and self-interest, humanity and cynicism, sincerity and duplicity – or what Claudius himself refers to as “shuffling”. (III-3, 61)

Claudius’s own speech is fraught with expressions of division, making it read (or sound) like an internal dialogue, abounding with questionings (III-3, 44, 46, 47, 50, 52, 64, 65, 66), and alternating between seemingly sincere lyrical expressions of grief (III-3, 36, 51, 67, 68) and disillusioned even cynical admissions of his guilt. (Somewhat ironically, it may noted, this sense of internal division, the highly reflective mind that Claudius displays in this passage are reminiscent of the passion for moral and theological dilemmas that characterizes his ‘nemesis’, i.e., Hamlet).

All of Claudius’s soliloquy is dedicated to trying to convince himself – if not the audience – that praying for forgiveness will not be wholly fruitless, that his sin may be redeemable, forgiven or purified (notice the rich imagery of corruption and purification). How sincere his inner struggle is remains uncertain, but by deconstructing as he does the very process of prayer and the very notion of forgiveness, his is more a meta-confession or a meta-prayer than a confession or a prayer proper. Claudius’s posture should not be dismissed as mere hypocrisy, though. In a sense, he is acting upon a long tradition in Christian apologetics, which was famously conceptualized by Blaise Pascal in his Pensées: the idea that adopting the gestures, actions and postures of faith – purporting to repent, genuflecting, praying, even moving one’s lips automatically – could pave the way for true faith, that enacting rituals might actually foster revelation and belief.

Admittedly, Claudius’s Pascalian wager eventually fails, and any illusion he might have been under of finding forgiveness in prayer evaporates in the final two lines. (III-3, 97-98). The perfectly balanced heroic couplet signals that Claudius has regained control over himself, by contrast with the jerky, disjointed style that accompanied his expression of doubt, grief, perhaps remorse at the beginning of the scene. But his is of course not the peace of mind that stems from a believer’s fruitful prayer: it is the paradoxical peace of mind that comes from absolute disillusionment, acceptance of one’s damnation. (All of which positions Claudius as one of Shakespeare’s great self-aware villains, along with Macbeth and Richard III.) This final confession also adds dramatic irony to the whole scene as it escapes Hamlet and would have enraged him even more, but only to a certain degree, since the prince’s decision to spare his uncle’s life by no means singles that he is moved by the latter’s apparent display of remorse.

The theatrical logic of Hamlet’s delayed revenge

Why Hamlet is tempted to kill Claudius right there, actually unsheathes his sword (III-3, 74), but suddenly holds back his weapon (III-3, 87), has divided readers and critics. [1] Many have interpreted Hamlet’s procrastination as evidence that he does not have the willpower to enact his revenge and/or that it is repugnant to him. It is true that, in this scene as in previous ones, Hamlet seems overwhelmed by his philosophizing disposition, his arm being stopped, as it were, by the consciousness of the moral repercussions of his action – thus appearing to confirm that his overly intellectual and ethical temperament might well be his tragic flaw.

Yet, such speculations tend to disregard the motives that Hamlet explicitly formulates in this scene – i.e., his desire not just to kill his foe, but to utterly destroy him, and damn his soul – which are part and parcel of the conventions of the Elizabethan revenge tragedy. Moreover, Hamlet’s reluctance to act may also be interpreted as part of his antic nature (as opposed to the ‘antic disposition‘ by which he feigns madness), i.e., his proneness to theatricality. As Richard A. Lanham writes in ‘Superposed Plays: Hamlet’, ‘Hamlet cannot act because he cannot find a way to dramatize his revenge. Chances he has, but, as when he surprises Claudius praying, they are not dramatic. Claudius is alone. To fall upon him and kill him would not be revenge, as he says, not because Claudius will die shriven but because he will not see it coming, because nobody is watching.’ From a meta-dramatic perspective, one may also suggest that Hamlet refuses to execute Claudius right there, not just because it would make him a murderer like his uncle, but because that murder would involve the same sort of stealth which he despises in Claudius, and lack the dramatic panache that he is so keen on.

Moreover, Hamlet’s justification for his change of heart by his desire not to send him to ‘heaven’ (III-3, 74), is a perfectly valid theological argument in the Elizabethan context. A man dying while sincerely repenting for his sins would indeed have been expected to be saved, regardless of his sins, though especially among Catholics; likewise, a man’s inability to receive the extreme unction would have threatened to lead him to Purgatory, which appears to have been the case with Hamlet’s father. Furthermore, to the Elizabethans, wanting to actively effect one’s enemy’s damnation would have been perfectly legitimate too: indeed, Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have deemed it only fair to expect sinners and heretics to deserve spiritual destruction.

Hamlet’s will to destroy Claudius is expressed with strikingly candid brutality, even savageness, which, from Dr Johnson to Samuel T. Coleridge, has horrified many a critic as overstepping the bounds of Christian morality. No doubt there is something manic, even disturbing, in Hamlet’s desire to vilify his uncle: witness the farcical cynicism with which he imagines Claudius being made to tumble down into hell head first (III-3, 93), or in his fantasies about punishing his uncle while he wallows in the vices (gluttony, drunkenness, sloth, anger, gambling, sex and adultery: 89-91) for which, it has to be noticed, he despises him from the very beginning of the play, even before he learns about his crime from the Ghost of his father. [2] These punitive yearnings climax with the graphic image of Hamlet fantasizing about executing his uncle while he is sleeping with his mother (III-3, 90), which betrays yet again the prince’s ambivalent feelings about her, and his irrepressible urge to punish her, if only indirectly, and though the Ghost of his father has forbidden him to do so.

The savageness of Hamlet’s desire for vengeance is also testament to the moral honesty with which Shakespeare addresses the central theme of violence in his play. How ought one to respond to violence? Is there legitimate, just violence? Can violence restore order? Do hatred and violence not corrode, and ultimately morally disqualify those whose actions they drive, regardless of how morally, or even theologically justified they may be?

[1] In Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation, the scene is staged in a confessional, Hamlet slipping inside the priest’s compartment, threatening to stab Claudius in the head, even imagining he does, through the grid between the two compartments.

[2] Though interestingly his name is never spoken by any character in the play, Claudius was named after the Emperor Claudius – the father of Nero and husband of Agrippina – and who was considered an archetype of the evil, debauched ruler in Shakespeare’s time.