Hamlet's inertia mirrored in Fortinbras

Usually for the first Act of Hamlet, I dock my iPod at the front of the class and play an audio version while the students follow along in their texts. Hearing the actors speak the lines helps the students get accustomed to the poetry of Shakespeare’s language.

However, this past week, my misplaced iPod remained somewhere at home, and the first Act required a different approach.

I recalled my own English teacher, Mr. X. Lee, who, almost oblivious of the 30 students before him, held a shut copy of Hamlet and, eyes on the back wall, recited the play while we followed along in our texts.

I cannot recite the play. Not yet. But someday…

I chose instead to read Act 1 aloud with my students following along.

While I won’t burden my students with these thoughts, this latest re-reading has led me to ponder the character of Fortinbras for a change. I have been told, in the past, that Fortinbras is a character with whom the audience should contrast Hamlet (much like Laertes). But after reading Act I aloud to my Grade 12 class, Fortinbras and Hamlet seem almost identical. As shadows or reflections of each other.

Obviously there is the similarity in their circumstances: each the son of a dead king and still without any throne. In Act I Scene ii, lines 32,37, Claudius himself makes it clear that Fortinbras’ uncle, Old Norway, has slipped onto the throne ahead of his nephew. But I think too that there is a similarity in the nature of the Princes’ characters.

Rather than being the man of action that I had been previously led to believe of him, it is apparent that Fortinbras has been waiting 30 years to get the revenge he seeks (see the Grave-digger’s calculation in V,i,164). (Thirty years! Hamlet would actually appear positively speedy by comparison!) Of course, Claudius scoffs at the idea that Fortinbras has waited until Denmark is “disjoint and out of frame” (I,ii,20), but the king is wrong and both Hamlet and Fortinbras accurately recognize that there is “some strange eruption to the state” (I,i,80), that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” (I,iv,99), and that “the time is out of joint” (I,v,206).

I believe the Prince of Norway is as wildly popular there as Hamlet is in Denmark. We are told of Hamlet about “the great love the general gender bear him” (IV,vii,20) and about Fortinbras that he is able to, in secret and illegally, raise an army of outlaws, “a list of lawless resolutes” (I,i,109). However, Fortinbras is easily distracted. When Claudius writes a letter to Old Norway, Fortinbras recycles his Danish scheme as a Polish expedition.

Ultimately, of course, it is Hamlet’s actions that litter the stage with corpses and allow Fortinbras to slide onto a vacant throne. Still, Hamlet has recognized in Fortinbras a kindred spirit, and ‘gives him his dying voice’ (V,ii,375), approving of Fortinbras ruling in Denmark. For his part, Fortinbras requites Hamlet’s praise and says of the dead Danish prince, “For he was likely, had he been put on, / To have proved most royally” (V,ii,421).

Indeed that should be Fortinbras’ hope: for he is incapable of governing in any manner different from Hamlet; they are simply too identical, and Fortinbras should hope that it is a royal disposition he himself possesses.