Hamlet: A Tragedy in Photographs
I.
One might think the more prestigious the university the more luxurious would be its comforts. When
Hamlet first arrived at the University of Wittenberg he was taken aback by the spartan rigor — no, to speak the
truth, the downright shabbiness — of the rooms he was expected to inhabit, with their scanty and threadbare
furnishings. Rutted paths, either muddy or icy most of the year, crisscrossed the quadrangle where most of his
classes were held; the lecture halls and seminar rooms were poorly lit, ill heated, and draftier than he would
previously have thought possible. As he discovered over the years of his extended educational sojourn, for a
few days each fall the sun would break the gloom and the turning leaves would blaze gloriously; for another
brief moment in spring, aromas of buds and shoots would tantalize, sweetening everything, before humidity
settled in and the atmosphere hung heavy with odors far less pleasant. Hot weather exposed the primitive
nature of the plumbing and sewerage arrangements quite brutally.
Still, over the months, and then the years, of his residence, as he flitted from one potential major to
another, finally settling, in the spirit of half-hearted compromise, on a double major in philosophy and art
history, he grew accustomed to the place — grew to look upon it as something more than a refuge, if not quite a
home.
Sitting in the only remotely comfortable chair in the common room of the dormitory suite he shared with
Horatio, his best friend since early youth, and two other students, he reviewed the telegram in his hand yet
again. “King H. died suddenly two days past. Await your immediate return. — Uncle C.” That was it. No
details, no explanation, no elaboration. And written as if the royal family had to scrimp like commoners when it
came to paying per word. Prince Hamlet laid the telegram aside for the twentieth time and, for a corresponding
twentieth time, picked up the clipping he had made just a few weeks earlier, a photograph from the most recent
issue of Royalty Bi-Monthly. There was a brief caption identifying some of the lesser personages in the
photograph — of course, the royal family itself needed no identification — and a couple of sentences detailing
the occasion of the banquet shown in black and white. His father, the king, raised a magnificent leaded crystal
goblet in the act of toasting a visiting dignitary. In the photograph, one could make out roughly a dozen other
figures, of greater or lesser importance. All eyes, as befitted the occasion and his status, were fixed expectantly
on the king — all, that is, except those of the two people closest to the king: Hamlet’s mother, the queen, and
Hamlet’s uncle, the king’s brother. Gertrude and Claudius, seated on either side of the king, seem to have
caught each other’s eyes behind the king’s back, and Hamlet thought he detected a sly, almost lecherous,
glance, a shared and complicit look. That look — or whatever it was that passed, so it seemed to Hamlet, like
an oscillating current of improper intent between the two — was the reason Hamlet, otherwise unknowing, had
clipped the photograph.
II.
Hamlet had been home for several months. In the first hours and days after his return he had found
himself caught up in the great general public grief and turmoil surrounding the king’s death. But an insidious
numbness and disorientation almost immediately crept upon him, and he felt increasingly out of step with the
life that surrounded him at court. For a time, the suspicions — of what he did not precisely know — aroused by
the photograph, apparently the last to show his father alive — faded from his mind. Yet, amidst his growing
and general misgivings, that image lingered. Suspicion recollected became present suspicion; all Hamlet’s fond
and familial emotions were poisoned with doubts. Was his mother’s grief real or feigned? Was the growing
intimacy between his mother and his uncle truly loathsome, as his soul’s inner compass indicated, or was it, as
all the advisors and courtiers appeared to accept, not only convenient but actually a positive good?
He would grow inwardly furious with himself as he paced the quiet paths of the royal gardens, or traced
the labyrinth cobbled outside the king’s private chapel, desperate to rid himself of doubts and to be, in his heart,
the loving, trusting, and dutiful son he was now only pretending to be. These self-accusations, combined with
his inability to see clear of his doubts — in whom would it be safe to confide? — were making him
uncharacteristically moody. He alternated between states of hyper-vigilant anxiety and, at the other extreme,
torpor.
It was on just such an unhappy and distracted stroll that Hamlet’s drifting attention was caught by a
piece of paper fluttering down to his feet. He stooped to pick it up, then turned his gaze skyward, just in time to
see an upper story window of the chapel tower being drawn closed. For an instant he thought he could make
out the face of a man behind the window — a face that looked like that of one of his father’s most trusted aides;
at that precise instant, the late afternoon sun came flooding through the opposite window straight through the
one from which, apparently, the piece of paper had been dropped. The light blinded him and left him doubtful
of whom, or what, he had seen. Circumspectly, he folded up the bit of paper, thrusting it into an inside pocket of
his cloak without so much as a peek.
When he felt somewhat more secure in the seclusion of his own chamber — not that he had felt entirely
safe at any moment, anywhere, since his father’s untimely death and his own return to the castle — he drew out
the paper, and unfolded and smoothed it. It was an indistinct photograph: blurry, grainy, dark. He could make
out the king’s private garden, with its bowers, terraced flower gardens, and ancient weeping willows and
beeches. And there was the padded bench where the king, especially as he aged, so often liked to nap on warm
afternoons. There, as Hamlet’s eyes and brain gradually learned the tricks of decoding the smudges and streaks
that comprised the image, his father in fact was, resting on his side, with both hands drawn up beneath his head,
like a little child. He had taken off his crown, which rested on a nearby tree root. Immediately to the right of
the king’s head was a dark, thick shadow. It was vertical, but its upper half inclined somewhat to the left,
almost as if bending over the dozing king. Hamlet first believed this shape to be the shadow of one of the
beech trees nearby, but as he gazed longer at the picture, he came to realize that this could not be. There were
no other shadows in the scene; and what was the surface upon which the shadow had come to rest? No — this
must be a silhouette, not a shadow. But a silhouette of what?
He found his magnifier in the top drawer of his bureau, and brought both the photograph and the lens to
his desk, where he turned on a bright lamp and began to study the image with even greater concentration.
Above all else he feared deceiving himself. From the instant in the garden when he perceived the piece of
paper fluttering in the air beside him he had been overcome by a vague but powerful feeling that his worst
suspicions regarding his mother and uncle were about to be confirmed. Yet, trained since youth, and even more
intensely in recent months at the university, in the wary ways of intellectual skepticism, and aware of just how
easily the human psyche can delude itself even in the best of times, let alone in such times as these, Hamlet
enjoined himself not to see phantoms where there were none; he vowed to weave no fanciful visions. As he
stared long minutes at the photograph, as though it were a rune to be riddled out, he could not help feeling that
the shape he saw might — must — be his uncle. It certainly looked, the more he stared, like the silhouette of a
man standing over his sleeping father. Something about the posture of the shadow had a familiar look. On one
hand, the shape was still indecipherable. But even through its vagueness, to his intuition the shape became
unmistakable. And what was that object, the shape in the seeming hand of the seeming man, the shape
seemingly poised over the seeming ear of his seeming father? If he let himself imagine it, Hamlet saw a tiny
vial with one tiny droplet hanging from its lip, but he distrusted his own imagination. How could he possibly
see that in a photograph so indistinct and indecipherable? Yet see it he did.
It was not until the next day that Hamlet had the presence of mind to wonder how the photograph had
come to be. He remembered a cryptic passage in a recent letter from his father, something about a new head of
security and updated methods. Had the king ordered surveillance cameras to be installed even in his innermost
sanctum? And if so, on whose advice and with what fear in mind?
Hamlet found, a few days later, an opportune moment to wander into his father’s private garden. By this
time he had decided to adopt a changed manner. He would abandon his heroic efforts at self-control, and would
instead behave more in keeping with the changing and horrible moods that rattled his soul as if it were a loose
casement in a storm. At the least, doing so might somewhat relieve the strain of pretence. But he also
calculated that those most closely connected with him might start to suspect his sanity. People make allowances
for those who have lost their senses: he recalled how the respectable burghers of Wittenberg shook their heads
disapprovingly of the few ranters and ravers who wandered the cobbled streets of the main square, but always
gave them a wide berth. Well comprehending the risks involved in this new course of his, Hamlet yet hoped
also to be able to undertake such antic actions as climbing the trees in the king’s retreat — where he might find
hidden cameras — without arousing any suspicions beyond those concerning his own mental competence —
that is, without raising a general alarm. And if his suspicions proved well founded, he would, after all, be far
beyond caring about the opinion of his uncle or, for that matter, of his mother the queen.
III.
Hamlet had loved Ophelia for as long as he could remember — first with the innocent love of childhood,
as they played the games of toddlers, and later with the sort of love that prompted him to speak of marriage. The
two of them shared an understanding. During his years of study, his separation from his beloved was like a
thorn in his side — and, like all pains that have a positive source, it made him feel alive. The strength and
steadfastness of his love for Ophelia was also one source of his aloofness from some of the other fellows at
university, those who teased him, called him an innocent, and mocked his unwillingness to participate in some
of their “revels” in the less respectable quarters of Wittenberg. Of course, the taunts of his fellow students
were, mostly, good-natured. Still, Hamlet was galled, and tried to keep his love private and safe from idle
jokes. He carried a photograph of Ophelia in a small locket that he kept in an inside pocket of his vest; he
would open it only when he was sure of not being observed. Then, he might stare at it for a length of time that
was without measure: the image of Ophelia plucked him from the flowing river of time.
But now, the limits of love were pressing on Hamlet as the horrible weeks passed: now, he felt himself
drowning in that same river, Time. Hamlet — he who had long dreamt of sheltering and protecting Ophelia —
how could he share his awful fears with her? Then, too, he had a sort of revulsion against himself — his
lineage, his very flesh: as suspicion hardened into conviction he began to see his entire family as in some dark
manner accursed, polluted, and unnatural. It would be more loving of him to thrust his beloved away from
himself than to tie her forever to his own dark fate.
And then, naturally, he also grew to hate her a little. His behavior to her was strange — calculated, as
much as he could stand, to repel her. But one must be an angel to renounce in complete purity. Perhaps
inevitably, Hamlet began to blame Ophelia for her failure to guess the contents of his soul. She pitied him; that
much was clear. And pity without understanding is useless, he told himself. Maybe worse. She still loved him
— which, given his own growing self-loathing, struck him as a sign of imbecility, or at least bad taste. What
was proving hardest was the way she invited Hamlet to confide in her, to unburden himself. At such moments
of entreaty, he feared that he truly would go mad: to confide in her was precisely what he had promised
solemnly to himself never to do.
Now, when he opened the locket and gazed upon Ophelia’s face, he thought he saw traces of his
mother’s eyes, her expression as he remembered it as a boy, when she was still very young and beautiful. There
was one particular photograph which best captured that feeling, though he couldn’t say quite what it was about
that picture . . . . Even now, at court with Gertrude and Claudius, he sometimes imagined that he saw the face
he trusted and loved. It was a face from which he had become estranged the instant he saw that look pass
between his uncle and his mother in the photograph of the banquet, the picture he had clipped back in
Wittenberg. Or had the breach come earlier?
And, once Hamlet realized that his feelings for Ophelia reminded him of his own completely trusting
love of his mother, another feeling stole upon him, or, rather, a suspicion: that Ophelia had already betrayed his
love. Even now, his mother often looked at him with the same innocent and loving maternal eyes he
remembered from infancy, and he felt that he might — if not for a note of entreaty in her present looks, a note
in which he discerned his mother’s complicity, even if unwitting, in the murder of a king, a father — if not for
that note, he might still fall under this spell, believing in the bonds of the family, believing even in love, even
while hating the queen for what he knew with no doubt whatsoever — that she had shamed the memory of the
king by remarrying his brother so quickly — and also hating her for what he still only suspected. As his
feelings for his mother grew increasingly tormented, Hamlet could hardly be with Ophelia for a moment before
he wished to flee. At times, his own actions seemed opaque and perversely misguided or contrary to him: the
course he had taken out of love for Ophelia had gotten tangled up with his growing suspicion of love itself.
IV.
As Hamlet withdrew more and more from the daily life of the court — laughable under these
circumstances to say the “normal” life of the court, though Claudius and Gertrude insisted precisely, absurdly,
on that absurdity — he seemed to live more in the world of phantom images, of photographs. He spent hours
looking through family albums, unsure whether he was searching for clues or confirmations or merely avoiding
the inevitable: confronting the actual, the here and now, and deciding what course of action to take. The more
he looked at these pictures the less sure he became of their meaning. He was fascinated, as he had been for as
long as he could remember, by the pictures from the early years of his parents’ marriage, the years preceding his
birth. History, he remembered a professor saying rather archly, is simply everything that happened before you
were born. Hamlet could remember the moment when, still more or less a child, and while looking at some of
these photographs, he experienced a kind of existential horror, realizing how contingent his life was, how easy it
would have been not to have become at all. Still, apart from that horror — which is, after all, just the
foreknowledge of death — the rest of what he had found in the photographs had seemed so much an extension
of the normal life he knew and of the comforting love of his parents that it was beyond judgement, true beyond
“truth.” Now, these same photographs sucked him into a vortex of doubt. Had anything ever been true? Could
one ever possess certainty about anything? Of course, he was used to confronting questions like these: he was,
after all, studying philosophy. But, as he now began to realize, there was a wide gulf between asking such
questions in the abstract, in the realm of ideas, and feeling the gnawing insistence of such questions posed about
the central facts of his own existence.
He began to note subtle ways in which the family photographs might have been stage-managed. And he
began to think about who was in the photographs, and who was behind the lens. It was, more often than not, his
uncle, Hamlet began to remember, who took these photographs. Nothing strange about that: in this way, the
nuclear unit, as if enchanted, could appear in the photographs together. Of course his father, being the king, had
always had access to the latest technology: the pictures could have been taken with a camera equipped with a
self-timer and mounted on a tripod. But Hamlet recalled that, except for one or two experiments in this
direction, it was his uncle who, time after time, had snapped the shutter. Well, what of it? When he was a
child, Claudius had seemed to him something of a buffoon, and his enthusiasm for this childish hobby, “shutterbugging,” as King Hamlet teasingly called it, seemed of a piece with this overall impression. What had
Claudius been seeing — desiring, plotting, planning — all those “innocent” moments when he tripped the
shutter? Had he felt shut out, excluded from the picture? Had he felt superior, like a hunter capturing prey?
Did he love all three of them in a natural way, with the natural love of a brother, an uncle?
And there was a tiny voice in Hamlet’s head wondering whether his own father, the king, had been, in
some way, deficient. Where were the photographs he imagined his father would have wished to have taken of
his wife, Gertrude? Did the king’s brother love Gertrude more than did the king? Or did the king merely have
no need for photographs, not when his wife was, after all, always there by his side?
Hamlet felt sure that his uncle had killed his father. But that certainty was not enough. He felt
compelled to find a way to put his uncle’s motives on the dock, to X-ray Claudius’s conscience — if he had
one. If he could extract a confession — no matter how unwitting or unpremeditated —then, perhaps, things
would become clear. If his uncle were innocent, how horrible it would be to kill him! But even if, as Hamlet
was nearly sure, his uncle had killed the king, it was almost as horrible to imagine killing Claudius, even in
righteous vengeance, if he remained un-confessed and unrepentant. Somehow, the thought of this made Hamlet
sick in his soul, made him feel as though such an act of vengeance on his part would still leave his father’s spirit
unappeased.
On one of the rare days when Hamlet forced himself to appear at court and to behave more or less
normally — or, as he said to himself, abnormally — he found the lords and ladies all abuzz with news that a
very fashionable photographer who fancied himself an artist, and who was developing a reputation as a clever
artificer of tableaux vivants, in which members of the nobility assumed various mythological guises and
identities — was somewhere in the vicinity, and would soon be paying a visit to the court. None of the lords
and ladies seemed to be thinking of anything but which god or goddess it would be most fitting they should
impersonate.
Hamlet was nauseated by the superficial chatter and vanity. But, as he absented himself, he hatched a
plan. He would travel to the neighboring realm, where the photographer-cum-artiste was rumored to be, on
some pretext. He would describe the surveillance photograph, the image he believed showed his uncle pouring
poison into his father’s ear, to this photographer, and would ask the photographer to create a persuasive
photographic recreation of the scene, one substituting crystal clear details for the murky suggestions of the
photograph extracted from grainy video footage taken by a camera mounted in a beech tree directly opposite the
king’s bench. Then, after the photographer had been at the court of Gertrude and Claudius for long enough to
perpetrate more examples of his artistry, he and Hamlet would conspire to slip this accusatory image into the
inevitable exhibit of the tableaux taken of all the vain lords and ladies. And he, Hamlet — then he would study
the living faces of his uncle and his mother, study their reactions to this counterfeit. Their faces paled in his
imagination.
V.
Hamlet and Horatio walked, under leaden skies, to the graveyard where Ophelia was being buried. As
they reached the outskirts of the cemetery, they came upon a section that was unfamiliar to both of them. Here,
in the center of each headstone, was inset a sort of ceramic medallion. As they inspected the headstones more
closely, it became evident that these each of these medallions was merely the carrier of a photograph. Most of
these weather-proof photographs showed the dearly departed in the bloom of health; even the headstones of
those who had died at very advanced ages sported youthful likenesses.
A caretaker of the cemetery, seeing the prince and the nobleman crouched near the gravestones,
approached. He paused a moment, then spoke: “It was the fashion, my good prince and my lord, about ten
years ago, for all the headstones to carry these photographs. The process was just perfected then. Now, the
fashion has passed.”
“Indeed,” said Horatio.
The caretaker respectfully withdrew, after pointing Hamlet and Horatio in the direction of Ophelia’s
gravesite. The two friends, delaying the inevitable, decided to explore a bit further. “Your father’s jester,
Yorrick, died at just about that time,” said Horatio. “Perhaps we can find his headstone. I remember, we were
both at boarding school then, so missed the funeral. I have a feeling that he arranged something a little different
from all these” — he motioned to the other headstones — “maybe something with a bit of zing.” Hamlet and
Horatio began to hunt around, starting from opposite corners of the forlorn little outlying plot of the cemetery.
After several searching minutes, Hamlet heard an amused snort from his friend. He walked up beside Horatio,
and saw the photograph on the jester’s headstone: Yorrick as very young man, but done up most magnificently
as a corpse and laid out, vampire-fashion, in a coffin.
“Fitting,” said Hamlet, “completely fitting. Dying — or, rather, pretending to have died, was one of
Yorrick’s greatest stunts. You wouldn’t think he could have pulled it off more than once, but, as sure as I’m a
pretty honest fellow, I can remember at least five occasions when he convinced us all — against our better
judgement and only after we had yelled in his ears, given him a few good kicks, called in the doctor for
confirmation of his demise, all so as not to be made fools of again — yes, he managed to make fools of us
again and convince us to cry over his poor dead body. The natural pallor of his complexion was one asset, but
that alone would never have been enough. He possessed an extraordinary ability to quiet his breathing and his
pulse — and, when you consider the great joke he was having on us, it astounds me that he didn’t just burst out
laughing. On top of all that, he must have been more than commonly impervious to pain. At the least, he was
capable of enduring an awful lot of abuse just for a bit of fun — for, small as I was, my little shoes had sharp
metal toes, and I remember putting all my might into some of those kicks.”
“Do you suppose,” asked Horatio, “that he meant this photograph as a kind of joke on himself — or do
you imagine that his coffin is actually empty, and, perhaps even now, he’s sitting in a tree somewhere behind
us, laughing?” At that instant, we both turned around. I thought I heard a muffled click.
VI.
I still don’t know whether, in my heart of hearts, I am thanking or cursing Hamlet for extracting that
promise from me: the promise to live to tell his tale. I shared Hamlet’s doubts about the world to come, but that
is not what has stayed my hand against myself. Just as Hamlet was willingly rash in those last moments, so also
was I prepared, and did I hunger, to be rash. And I would still like to be rash and to test what is beyond the
bourne of this mortal life, but temptation barely glimmers for me, since there is not the slightest chance that I
might escape my fate.
Hamlet did me one favor, which was to give my life as clear a purpose as anyone could have. With his
dying wish, Hamlet reinvented me. Whether or not it was against my will is a meaningless question: if
friendship, loyalty, and valor are to mean anything to me, I cannot even contemplate disobeying Hamlet’s dying
instructions. Thus did Hamlet solve my existential problems, even as he imposed upon me an unwanted
existence. He mooted my doubts, and made my living, suffering self the laughable result of a tragic equation: “I
am a loyal friend, therefore I am.” There is, for me, no further need to ponder, nor have I been given the
latitude to do so.
The dark side of Hamlet’s gift is this: with it, he has condemned me to continually relive the most
agonizing moment of my life, and Denmark darkest hour. The Horatio that I was has become a cipher to me.
For all I know, I may still possess, somewhere deep inside myself, all my former qualities, those insights,
desires, and dreams of younger days. Whether this is true or not I cannot say; to ask me about any of that would
be like asking a stranger to tell you all about your inmost self. Those past things may be in me, but they have
been exiled from my awareness. Every atom of my current consciousness is devoted to remembering and
embodying the spark of noble humanity that endured to the last in one whose life was otherwise entirely
blasted: ambitions thwarted, loves distorted, trust rendered impossible, laughable.
While I have thus been spared the agony of doubts and misgivings that came to define Hamlet, I have
not been spared constant agonizing pain — though I don’t wish to get melodramatic about it.
We humans build shrines and tabernacles, kindle eternal candles, chisel inscriptions, erect obelisks and
name city squares, all in hopes of immortalizing valor, courage, and sacrifice. We harness the force of light
with clever lenses, capture and fix living images on sheets of paper; we treat the images with chemicals in hopes
they might not fade, nor the paper on which they sit turn yellow, curl, and crumble to dust. We put these
photographs in albums and stack them in boxes, one piled upon another, and we file other records in row upon
row of steel drawers.
All in vain, all vanity. Either we lock our keepsakes in the dark for safe-keeping, where no one can see
them and where they will soon be forgotten, or we leave them out for all to see, where they are prey to the
forces of nature. And even were we able to stop decay, to make monuments that could weather the beating suns
and winds of endless days with undimmed lustre, unless we could also stop time and prevent new history from
being enacted, the meanings of those monuments, no matter how physically pristine, would soon enough
dissolve, or become transmuted into something quite other.
Hamlet was through with all that. The trials of those last months had burned all vanity right out of him,
leaving only his sense of duty and honor. He wanted no “permanent” markers of his life, knowing that such a
wish would be vain in all senses of the word. At the end, all he believed in was living human friendship, and I
was that one friend. All he asked of me was that I protect his name by remembering the truth, and by sharing it
with all who expressed wonder at what had come to pass in the royal court of the Danes. He asked me to do
this for the rest of my natural days, so here I am, fulfilling his wishes.
The only other request he made was that I might keep others from making more lasting records: no
ballads, no post-mortem photographs or death masks, and no ex post facto dramatizations of his life, whether in
verse or in prose. When the truth dies with me, nothing, neither truth nor lies, will remain.
Many who knew Hamlet thought him melancholy. But when he most actively sought the meaning of
life – as when he studied philosophy in Wittenberg, for example – he was not melancholy at all. In a strangely
serious way he was, indeed, almost merry. But his uncle Claudius was the type who said that only depressives
search for the meaning of life, and that anyone who goes looking for answers to the really big questions must be
at least a little bit crazy. It wasn’t life that depressed noble Hamlet; it was types like Claudius who got him
down, jerks who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, respect this urge for understanding, this urgent need to rend holes in the
superficial fabric of reality and dig for something deeper. In the end, Claudius and Hamlet were like matter and
anti-matter. Perhaps it was inevitable that they destroy each other.