Unmasking

Abstract

Hamlet’s action, such as it is, is now under way. It is on his instructions that the players will perform ‘The Murder of Gonzago’ before the King. However, if Claudius is unsuspecting about the proposed entertainment, urging Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to encourage his nephew in ‘these delights’, he is more deeply suspicious than ever about the true cause of Hamlet’s madness. As ever in this play, the antic disposition has not only failed to avert the villain’s hostile attention but has actually alerted and concentrated it. Claudius is alarmed at such ‘turbulent and dangerous lunacy’, wants urgently to know why Hamlet ‘puts on this confusion’. The elaborate performance simply does not convince: even Guildenstern suspects it is a ‘crafty madness’. No doubt Hamlet has somewhat overplayed the part, has used it to wound as well as obscure, but the device fails here essentially for the same reason that the equally indispensable rhetoric of passion fails — against the dense reality of the play’s world it stands out as evidently unreal; it looks, quite literally, artificial. In The Spanish Tragedy Hieronimo’s fantastic actions and ferocious threats aroused neither suspicion nor fear; even Lorenzo professed to think him only ‘a silly man, distract in mind’. When Marston’s Antonio hid behind the mask of a capering fool, the improbable deception convinced everyone.