Summary: Act I, scene ii
The morning after Horatio and the guardsmen see the ghost,
King Claudius gives a speech to his courtiers, explaining his recent
marriage to Gertrude, his brother’s widow and the mother of Prince Hamlet.
Claudius says that he mourns his brother but has chosen to balance
Denmark’s mourning with the delight of his marriage. He mentions
that young Fortinbras has written to him, rashly demanding the surrender
of the lands King Hamlet won from Fortinbras’s father, and dispatches
Cornelius and Voltimand with a message for the King of Norway, Fortinbras’s
elderly uncle.
His speech concluded, Claudius turns to Laertes, the son
of the Lord Chamberlain, Polonius. Laertes expresses his desire
to return to France, where he was staying before his return to Denmark
for Claudius’s coronation. Polonius gives his son permission, and
Claudius jovially grants Laertes his consent as well.
Turning to Prince Hamlet, Claudius asks why “the clouds
still hang” upon him, as Hamlet is still wearing black mourning
clothes (I.ii.66). Gertrude urges him to
cast off his “nightly colour,” but he replies bitterly that his
inner sorrow is so great that his dour appearance is merely a poor
mirror of it (I.ii.68). Affecting a tone
of fatherly advice, Claudius declares that all fathers die, and
all sons must lose their fathers. When a son loses a father,
he is duty-bound to mourn, but to mourn for too long is unmanly
and inappropriate. Claudius urges Hamlet to think of him as a father,
reminding the prince that he stands in line to succeed to the throne
upon Claudius’s death.
With this in mind, Claudius says that he does not wish
for Hamlet to return to school at Wittenberg (where he had been
studying before his father’s death), as Hamlet has asked to do.
Gertrude echoes her husband, professing a desire for Hamlet to remain
close to her. Hamlet stiffly agrees to obey her. Claudius
claims to be so pleased by Hamlet’s decision to stay that he will
celebrate with festivities and cannon fire, an old custom called
“the king’s rouse.” Ordering Gertrude to follow him, he escorts
her from the room, and the court follows.
Alone, Hamlet exclaims that he wishes he could die, that
he could evaporate and cease to exist. He wishes bitterly that God
had not made suicide a sin. Anguished, he laments his father’s death
and his mother’s hasty marriage to his uncle. He remembers how deeply in
love his parents seemed, and he curses the thought that now, not yet
two month after his father’s death, his mother has married his father’s
far inferior brother.
