Hamlet

The design passes the subtractive test: three sons of murdered fathers, Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras, and a fourth in the Player’s Pyrrhus. Without Laertes the end has no instrument; without Fortinbras no one inherits “the election” (5.2). Hamlet names the method: “by the image of my cause I see / The portraiture of his” (5.2). What holds the axis at 8.6 is the matter around the design: Reynaldo, the embassy, a dumb show that tells the Mousetrap before it is played, pirates who exist to bring Hamlet home, Osric. The conflation adds 2,061 words found in only one early printing. On the work alone, two tenths higher.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: the self exceeds every sign of it, so it cannot be known from outside, nor act cleanly on what it knows. “I have that within which passeth show; / These but the trappings and the suits of woe” (1.2). Knowing unmakes doing: “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all” (3.1). A court that cannot see inward spies instead (2.1, 3.1), and “Offence’s gilded hand may shove by justice” (3.3). Held off the top by its own unanswered question, “I do not know / Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do;’” (4.4), and by a disgust at Gertrude larger than anything the play shows her doing.

Score: 9.6 / 10

Height near the ceiling; frequency high but broken. Terror opens the play, “Who’s there?” (1.1), and peaks in “I could a tale unfold whose lightest word / Would harrow up thy soul” (1.5). Grandeur turns to ash in “What a piece of work is man!” and “what is this quintessence of dust?” (2.2). Then the meditation of 3.1, the Ghost in the closet (3.4), the willow (4.7), Yorick (5.1), “the readiness is all” and “flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!” (5.2). Held below King Lear on frequency: the stretches at ground level are longer and more numerous — Reynaldo, the embassy, the boy players, 4.1–4.3, Osric.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Myth built, in two structures that carry weight. The first is the Fall: the murder is done in a garden, by a “serpent”, through the ear, “’Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, / A serpent stung me” (1.5), and leaves “an unweeded garden” (1.2). The murderer names his crime as Cain’s, “It hath the primal eldest curse upon’t” (3.3). The second is Pyrrhus, who over Priam “like a neutral to his will and matter, / Did nothing” (2.2), as Hamlet stands over the kneeling King (3.3). Held below the summit: the ghost and the feigned madness are revenge-play convention as much as myth, and Jephthah, Niobe and Hercules are evoked, not built.

Score: 9.3 / 10

The sources are Saxo Grammaticus’s Amleth, of about 1200, Belleforest’s retelling of 1570, and a lost English Hamlet on the stage by about 1589; Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy had already set the ghost, the delay, the madness and the play within the play. In Saxo and Belleforest the madness is policy, and Amleth succeeds and rules. Here the revenger doubts the ghost, “The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil” (2.2), kills the wrong man first, and kills the King only when dying, by the King’s own device; the soliloquy becomes thought. Held low on the stake: story and form were proven, and with the old play lost the turn from it cannot be measured.

Score: 9.1 / 10

Change the form and the play loses what it knows. Its subject, the gap between being and seeming, is staged through acting: the Player weeps “For Hecuba?” (2.2); the Mousetrap tests guilt by performance, “the play’s the thing / Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king” (2.2); Hamlet plays mad. The arithmetical centre falls in 3.2, on “show”. The soliloquy becomes the shape of a mind, and Hamlet speaks 39.2 per cent of the play: only verse in Act I, 73.1 per cent prose in Act II. Held below the top by sprawl and by the unit: this text places a seventh soliloquy (4.4) after the killing of Polonius, where the Folio has none after 3.3.

Score: 9.5 / 10

Evidence rather than promise, in a critical record as large as any work’s: Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795–96), Coleridge (1811–12), Hazlitt (1817), Turgenev (1860), Nietzsche (1872), Freud (1900), Bradley (1904), Eliot (1919), Dover Wilson (1935), Greenblatt (2001), and the single-text editions that reopened the play itself. The yield is in the text. Whether the Ghost is “an honest ghost” (1.5) or “the devil” (2.2) is never settled; nor whether Gertrude knew, “As kill a king!” (3.4); nor whether Ophelia fell or chose, “her death was doubtful” (5.1); nor whether Hamlet is “mad in craft” (3.4). Held a tenth off the top because some of the yield is the conflation’s: no early printing gives this play.

Score: 9.9 / 10

A published work, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together. The force is great: revenge tragedy turned against itself; the soliloquy made the stage form of thinking; a play that examines playing, whose end is “to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature” (3.2); a hero whose action is consciousness. Unlike King Lear’s, the reach was not delayed by a rewriting that held the stage. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the redirection is immediate and continuous, through the Romantic hero of Goethe and Coleridge, Turgenev, Freud’s Oedipus complex, worked out partly on this play, Chekhov’s The Seagull, Joyce’s Ulysses, Stoppard (1966) and Müller’s Hamletmachine (1977).

Score: 9.7 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over four centuries: the play has held the stage continuously apart from the closure of 1642–60, and no rewriting displaced it. The surface is Elizabethan in places: the boy players, “an aery of children, little eyases” (2.2), the theatre quarrel of 1600–01; Wittenberg, and a Ghost from purgatory; the Danish drinking (1.4); the wager, “he hath laid on twelve for nine” (5.2); Osric’s jargon. None of it is needed to follow the play. The cost has been the stage’s long habit of cutting it, Fortinbras most often, and the text has survived that. The depth pays nothing for its moment; the slightly heavier topical surface costs a step.

Score: 9.7 / 10

Judged on Shakespeare’s English, with no translation between. The range of registers is as wide as any in drama: Claudius balancing opposites, “With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage” (1.2); a first line that is a pun, “A little more than kin, and less than kind!” (1.2); the Pyrrhus speech in an older, heavier style, “Now is he total gules; horridly trick’d” (2.2); the Mousetrap’s couplets, Ophelia’s ballads, the gravedigger’s “argal”; Osric mocked in his own idiom, “to divide him inventorially would dizzy the arithmetic of memory” (5.2). Held below the top by construction: the pirates, a signet that happens to be in Hamlet’s purse, a rising reported, a drowning narrated.

Score: 9.6 / 10

The tonal range runs from the clowns to the Ghost, and one law holds across it. The gravedigger’s riddle, “the houses he makes last till doomsday” (5.1), and the Ghost’s purgatory obey one physics: rot beneath a surface, “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (1.4), and a death that levels it. The plot is less strict: Hamlet is a student bound for Wittenberg (1.2) and thirty by the sexton’s count (5.1); “But two months dead” (1.2) becomes “twice two months” (3.2); “The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn / No traveller returns” (3.1) comes after the Ghost has returned. In this text 4.5 brings on Horatio and gives the lines to a Gentleman: the seam shows.

Score: 9.2 / 10

The orders are many, held by one condition, a rot no one can see whole: consciousness; two families broken in parallel; the state in succession, “Popp’d in between the election and my hopes” (5.2), in rebellion, “Laertes shall be king!” (4.5), and at war over “a little patch of ground” (4.4); law, labour and class in the graveyard, “the toe of the peasant comes so near the heel of the courtier” (5.1); the theatre as a trade (2.2); the sacred, from purgatory to a prayer that fails (3.3). Integrated, not listed: the worm makes king and beggar “two dishes, but to one table” (4.3). Nature is held weakly, “a sterile promontory” (2.2), a frame, not a force.

Score: 9.5 / 10