In “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot asserts “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,” a line that is saturated with irony in that Hamlet was the worst possible prince: not even Prince Hamlet was meant to be Prince Hamlet, that is the source of tragedy in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. While Shakespeare kept Fortinbras off-stage for almost the entirety of Hamlet, Shakespeare still presented Fortinbras as an excellent prince and Hamlet as a degenerate failure.
Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600, well after Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1532. But rarely do we ask our students to consider them together. For example, the end of Hamlet where–spoilers!–Fortinbras of Norway just casually annexes Denmark without anybody being the least put-out by it seems perhaps a bit awkward unless one recalls Machiavelli’s observation that:
…when cities or countries are accustomed to live under a prince, and his family is exterminated, they, being on the one hand accustomed to obey and on the other hand not having the old prince, cannot agree in making one from amongst themselves, and they do not know how to govern themselves. For this reason they are very slow to take up arms, and a prince can gain them to himself and secure them much more easily. (p. 25)
By Machiavelli’s reasoning, it would make perfect sense for Fortinbras to wander in at the end of Hamlet–after Hamlet does the dirty work of exterminating his family–to annex Denmark.
But there’s a bit more going on here with the comparison between the princely qualities of Hamlet and Fortinbras. See, the core piece of advice that Machiavelli really wants an up-and-coming prince to take to heart is this:
A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline; for this is the sole art that belongs to him who rules, and it is of such force that it not only upholds those who are born princes, but it often enables men to rise from a private station to that rank. And, on the contrary, it is seen that when princes have thought more of ease than of arms they have lost their states. And the first cause of your losing it is to neglect this art; and what enables you to acquire a state is to be master of the art. (p. 55)
Claudius, as king, has some clue that he should be armed for war to defend against, as Horatio describes it, “young Fortinbras of unimproved mettle hot and full” and his “shark’d up… lawless resolutes” intending to “recover of us, by strong hand and terms compuslatory, those foresaid lands so by his [slain-in-combat] father lost” (Act 1, scene 1), which is a mark of quality for Claudius. Hamlet contrasts poorly with this when, in transit from Elsinore to the port, he encounters Fortinbras’s army moving to supposedly attack a worthless scrap of Poland and thinks it is astonishingly inspirational that an army would be squandered in such a way (Act 4, scene 4) instead of realizing that Fortinbras is setting up his army to be within striking distance of Elsinore.
Hamlet is, in fact, never good at reading the proverbial room. He regards Fortinbras as a “delicate and tender prince” (Act 4, scene 4) even though every peasant knows that Fortinbras’s father was slain the day Hamlet was born such that Hamlet and Fortinbras are roughly the same age (Act 5, scene 1); he is “very sorry, good Horatio, That to Laertes I forgot myself” (Act 5, scene 2) while ignoring how he slaughtered Laertes’s father and the possibility that Laertes might be upset about that rather than a breach of decorum; he casually and unnecessarily sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths on the grounds that “they did make love to this employment” (Act 5, scene 2) when they were merely following the King’s orders; he doesn’t grasp that when he has the actors perform The Murder of Gonzago, the murder is committed by the “nephew to the King” which better describes his relationship to Claudius than Claudius’s relationship with old King Hamlet (Act 3, scene 2) such that Claudius may be reacting to him because of the play he chose rather than the play itself. Hamlet is routinely terrible at interpersonal relations throughout Hamlet, even leaving his treatment of both his mother and Ophelia aside.
Hamlet’s encounter with Fortinbras reveals another gap in Hamlet’s princely capabilities: Machiavelli explains that a good prince needs to be out in the field to ensure they will
learns something of the nature of localities, and gets to find out how the mountains rise, how the valleys open out, how the plains lie, and to understand the nature of rivers and marshes, and in all this to take the greatest care [… and …] the prince that lacks this skill lacks the essential which it is desirable that a captain should possess, for it teaches him to surprise his enemy, to select quarters, to lead armies, to array the battle, to besiege towns to advantage. (p 56)
The very explicit point of contrast in Fortinbras’s and Hamlet’s cross-over in Act 4 shows Fortinbras building the essential skills of a prince–and/by positioning his army to march on Elsinore–while Hamlet is completely unaware as to what is coming next for anybody involved, as further demonstrated by his subsequent surprise that Claudius’s instructions to England are to have him executed (Act 5, scene 2). Put another way: Fortinbras is playing chess, Claudius is playing checkers, Hamlet is playing Candyland.
Hamlet’s ineptitude is perhaps the result of his auspicious birth: born on the day when his successful father slew a neighboring king/warlord in a story that every peasant knows (Act 5, scene 1) such that Hamlet is unwarrantedly blessed by–as Claudius describes to Laertes–the “great love the general gender bear him; Who, dipping all his faults in their affection, Would, like the spring that turneth wood to stone, Convert his gyves to graces” (Act 4, scene 7) or, more simply, “He’s loved of the distracted multitude, Who like not in their judgment, but their eyes” (Act 4, scene 3). And so while Fortinbras is harrying the lands prompting Claudius to build up defenses (Act 1, scene 1), Hamlet does not request to lead soldiers in defense of Denmark as Machiavelli–and common sense–would recommend of a proper prince but instead to go back to college in Wittenberg (Act 1, scene 2). While the mortal failure of Fortinbras’s father may well have hung like a shadow over Fortinbras’s whole life, conditioning him to struggle and endure and to settle for taking umbrage in anticipation of revenge, the success of Hamlet’s father in maintaining the Danish empire may well have rendered Hamlet’s life too easy and Hamlet ill-disciplined at statecraft.
This perhaps reveals why Claudius was made King instead of the heir-apparent Hamlet: as Claudius explains, “young Fortinbras, Holding a weak supposal of our worth, Or thinking by our late dear brother’s death Our state to be disjoint and out of frame, Colleagued with the dream of his advantage…” (Act 1, scene 2). If Fortinbras moved to war against Denmark while Denmark was transferring power to the inexperienced Prince Hamlet–who was away at college in Wittenberg at the time–then Denmark would surely be in trouble. By transferring power to Claudius, who may have had some field experience during old King Hamlet’s campaigns, the nobles of Denmark made an unpopular choice for the sake of security. Sadly for them, there was no correct solution to this situation: the ongoing power and privilege Hamlet was allowed to retain and ineptly wield as the beloved prince of their departed king puts Denmark in a Kobayashi Fuck-You scenario where its fate is written on the cover of the script: it’s a tragedy.
Some armchair sociologists may speculate that Hamlet’s auspicious childhood and ruinous adulthood form a pattern that can be at least somewhat heard even at generational levels starting with the Baby Boomers. This is more of a stretch than I am willing to make into multicausal territory.
The far easier speculation to make is that after their paths crossed, Fortinbras realized that that Hamlet leaving Denmark was not acceptable: Hamlet had to be present in Denmark to be defeated–or, in Machiavelli’s terms, “exterminated”–according to Fortinbras’s plan. So, while it is possible that Hamlet’s ship was overtaken attacked by “very warlike” pirates who took him and him alone captive before departing and then releasing him in exchange for nothing but the promise of a “good turn for them” (Act 4, scene 6) instead of holding him for a prince’s ransom, it seems much more plausible that Fortinbras sent a spy to to follow Hamlet to the port and then paid–as is appropriate in the profession–a Norway-aligned privateer to very specifically hunt down Hamlet’s ship and return Hamlet to Denmark where Fortinbras would be able to publicly depose him. Since nobody knew that Claudius was sending a directive to have England execute Hamlet on arrival, Fortinbras’s reactionary maneuver would have been intended to prevent Hamlet from becoming an exilarch in England when Fortinbras seized Elsinore. While this speculation has no secondary support from the script, Hamlet’s failure to seriously consider the pirates’ motives is entirely in-character for him and how he is routinely terrible at interpersonal relations and leaves space in the drama for their motives to be inferred even if we do not get to really see it.
What I should very much like to see, however, is a follow-on to The Great Gatsby. In the source material, Tom and Daisy Buchanan have a daughter–Pammy–and Daisy wishes simply that Pammy will be “a beautiful little fool.” I would be amused to see the sequel to The Great Gatsby follow Pammy’s lackadaisical Sex-and-the-City-esque life as she slowly fritters her parents’ fortune away, never realizing that Gatsby had an heir–the offspring from a European affair during the war–who is cunningly deploying her own inheritance with vengeful purpose against the family that apparently had her estranged father killed. In the end, Pammy would not be able to realize why she had been targeted or even fully appreciate the sustained viciousness of the attacks made against her–a point that that would frustrate the righteously-embittered, slightly sadistic Gatsby heir.
This would, of course, have a call-back irony to Tom Buchanan’s notable racism in The Great Gatsby. See, despite the (worrisomely enduring) popularity of eugenics as a concept, enforced “natural” selection hasn’t been effective in humans. Early eugenicist, mathematician, and cousin of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton actually followed up on eugenic experiments and “discovered the phenomenon now called regression to the mean. His data left no doubt that it was real. … Excellence doesn’t persist; time passes, and mediocrity asserts itself” (Ellenberg, 2014, p. 301). This is easy to understand: while somebody may seem to have a favorable disposition towards a certain quality, there are other environmental and cultural effects–to say nothing of random happenstance–that will either augment or diminish the tangible outcomes. Thus characters like Hamlet or Pammy may expect that their lives will be peachy-keen based on the success of their parents and then be faced with the brutal reality that what their parents experienced and–certainly in the case of Hamlet’s not even considering going to war–shielded them from was actually an important contributor to the parents’ success.
In the end what we really learn by comparing Hamlet’s failure with Fortinbras’s success is that the worst for a parent to do is to allow their child to lead an unchallenged life. And yet it’s entirely natural for a parent to protect their child from challenges, either out of natural concern, or a desire for the child to have the best life the parent can provide, or because the parent wants the child to bypass the challenges that appear small and irrelevant to the adult. While we can guess at what motivated King Hamlet, who was so protective of his family that “he might not beteem the winds of heaven Visit [Queen Gertrude’s] face too roughly” (Act 1, scene 2), what we know for certain is that he was already dead when the play started and unable to protect his family any longer: it was instead time for Prince Hamlet to stand up to a challenge that he was tragically ill-equipped to face.
References
Eliot, T. S. (1915). The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock
Ellenberg, J. (2014) How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking. Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Machiavelli, N. (1523). The Prince. Public domain. Kindle Edition.
Shakespeare, W. (~1600). The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Retrieved from http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/full.html