The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [391]
The significant point, of course, is not just that every one of these schemes is egocentrically motivated but that almost all of them end up producing a result exactly opposite to that intended. As the tragedy darkens, their outcomes become more and more fatal to the plotters themselves. The eavesdropping Polonius is stabbed to death. When Rosencrantz and Guildenstern reach England, thanks to Hamlet's deft footwork, it is they who are executed. It is Gertrude, not Hamlet, who drinks the poisoned cup. Laertes dies poisoned by his own sword. Everything goes exactly as wrong as it could, until finally Claudius and Hamlet are themselves destroyed by the chain of events their own plotting has set in motion. And how keen Shakespeare is to underline this for us as a central key to what the play is really about. It is no accident that we get from Hamlet that most familiar phrase about the way in which, when people set out to deceive others, their devious plans have a habit of rebounding on them: `the enginer hoist with his own petard'. Again and again, right up to the final curtain, we hear this point being hammered home: how Laertes admits he has been caught `as a woodock to mine own springe', how `purposes mistook fall on their inventors' heads', how `our wills and fates so contrary run, that our devices still are overthrown'.
What Shakespeare is showing us, more searchingly than in any other of his plays, is a human world in which everyone is caught up in the fog of self-deceiving egotism. Everyone is trying to trick someone else. Everyone is in some way pretending to be something other than what they really are. Everyone is hiding from the world behind a false mask, not least Hamlet himself in pretending he is mad. Almost no one in the play is really being true to his or her inmost self. As Polonius himself puts it, `to thine own self be true', and `thou cans't not then be false to any man'. If this could only be taken literally, and not just as one of a string of sententious cliches uttered by a pompous old fool, it embodies precisely the truth no one in Hamlet is capable of living up to. And what Shakespeare is really telling us is that this is not just a problem affecting one little group of people in Elsinore. It is a problem which is well-nigh universal. The dark side of human nature ordains that people may conceal their egotism behind such masks all their lives, until they end up, like Yorick, as no more than a skull and bones.
What Shakespeare is concerned with here is the infinite capacity of human beings to put on a false front to the world, the seemingly sociable persona behind which they conceal their unremitting egotism. And no passage in the play is more telling in this respect than the churchyard scene, where Hamlet swaps badinage with the gravedigger at the start of the final act. Surrounded with the grisly evidence of how every human being ends up, Hamlet singles out examples of the types of people who most obviously rely on the self-deceiving vanity of the persona. One skull, he suggests, may be that of a politician, someone so false and self-seeking that he `would circumvent God. Another could be that of a lawyer. Where now is all that high-flown legal jargon with which he self-importantly protected himself from the human reality of the world? Where now is the courtier, with all his empty flatteries ('Good morrow, sweet lord. How dost thou, sweet lord?')? He is simply the property of `Lady Worm'. As for all those women who put on a deceiving front