A Play Within a Play: Hamlet and Second Shepherd’s Play

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The famous plays, Hamlet and Second Shepherd’s Play, involve a unique styptic device “a play within a play”. In both plays it supports the plot development and helps readers to understand significance and importance of the heroes’ actions.

Thesis In both plays, “a play within a play” reflects events and actions of the characters thus, in Hamlet it unveils previous events (murder of the Old Hamlet) while in Second Shepherd’s Play it readers to distinguish between reality and illusions.

In Hamlet, The Murder of Gonzago is a play within a play performed by traveling actions and Hamlet. Critics admit that like the death writ, The Murder of Gonzago mousetrap play also is and is not evidence because Hamlet manipulates this inner play just enough to create something like “evidence” and, at the same time, to destroy the validity of any “evidence” so created. In other words, the mousetrap play has to convict the king, and yet it can’t actually convict the king.

Two instances follow (Nigel 43). Apparently Hamlet either rewrites The Murder of Gonzago so that it is the Player King’s nephew, not his brother, who pours poison in the Player King’s ear, or, alternatively, he chooses this play from the players’ repertoire because of this difference. Thus Claudius, watching a nephew pouring poison in an uncle’s ear, would have to be a very secure king not to take such a scene as a threat of assassination given that this inner play is produced by his nephew (Herman 41). Nor does it help that while the players are performing The Murder of Gonzago Hamlet meddles with what he sets up as a disinterested experiment by interpolating asides of his own between the players’ speeches.

There is a play to-night before the king, One scene of it comes near the circumstance Which I have told you of my father’s death (3.2.120-123).

One of these consists of lines Claudius would also find difficult not to take as possibly prefacing a plot to kill him:

In Second Shepherd’s Play ‘a play within a play’ is performed as mise-en-scene which creates a sense of illusion and unreal. In contrast to Hamlet, the role of ‘a play within a play’ is to underline onstage and offstage characters and their qualities. In this context readers consider three allegedly solid bits of evidence critics and performances have long handed Mak and his wife Gill, and in doing so have massively simplified this complex, play by reducing his action to tedious procrastination in the face of obvious knowledge based on indisputable evidence. In the first story, Mak says:

I must go home, by your leave, to Gill as I thought.

I pray you look my sleeve, that I steal nought:

I am loth you to grieve, or from you take aught (Anonymous)

Hamlet gets no evidence from The Murder of Gonzago. More to the point, he has no intention of getting any, since to do so would prove his hunch correct and force him to do what he does not want to do–act according to his father’s and against his mother’s desire. Hamlet stirs up the king by doing what he knows would stir up any king, and like the death writ, this stirring up proves (1) that Claudius is a treacherous murderer, (2) that Claudius is an above average good king with problems to solve, and (3) that it is impossible to choose between these two possibilities. There is at least one other reason why Hamlet both stages and undermines the play-within-the-play.

Observe my uncle — if his occulted guilt Do not itself unkennel in one speech, It is a damnéd ghost that we have seen (3.2.340-244).

Though part of him wants to celebrate the older marital values and loyalties figured forth in this antique pageant, part of him also hates this pageant, its out-of-date values and its equally out-of-date poetry (Robinson 29).

In Second Shepherd’s Play ‘a play within a play functions as a separate story while in Hamlet it si a part of the narration. In Second Shepherd’s Play, readers need this evidence, and they need the heroes to accept it as evidence, but they also needs to undermine it as evidence, so the author couches his telling of it in such a way that will push it just beyond even his only capacity to believe in it, with those capable of testifying to the contrary dead. ‘A play within a play functions as shadow of events creating an illusion. Readers believe without question what the author tells: since by doing so readers remove the lack of knowledge that creates dilemma and generates his various solutions to this dilemma.

One problem Hamlet wants to solve by producing this inner play is, of course, his lack of hard evidence. And evidence is a problem not only because Hamlet doesn’t have any, and can’t do without any, but also because he can’t really get any, since, were he to get solid evidence of Claudius’s treachery, he would have to side with his father, act his father’s revenge desire, and, as a consequence, destroy his mother by destroying her happiness, since revenge would kill her lover and thus her (Garber 42).

However, if Hamlet does not get something very much like evidence, he will have to side with his mother, act the good son desire of his mother, and abandon his father to oblivion since there is not a lot left in Hamlet’s mind of the actual Hamlet Sr. for Hamlet to hold on to except the vindictive rage and the punitive blood-for-blood code that surfaces in the Hamlet-ghost scene (Calderwood 41). “Begin murderer, leave thy damnable faces and begin.

Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge” (3.2.230-32), Still, Claudius does rise, and says, “Give me some light, away” (3.2.247), so it is necessary to realize that, in the minds of those who have no reason to suspect anything, there are at least three reasons why Claudius would rise and speak in this situation. So, desiring to do both and neither, Hamlet has to get and cannot ever get such evidence, which means that he has to destroy whatever “evidence” he creates, just as eventually he destroys the ghost he creates. As Hamlet well knows, his mousetrap play would produce viable evidence of Claudius’s guilt only if it provoked Claudius into making a full confession of his crime before his court and queen, and this it obviously does not do (Barber 54).

More about Hamlet

What are Hamlet’s last words?

4.5

2065

Which excerpt from Hamlet, act 1, scene 1 is a stage direction?

1377

Why does Polonius think Hamlet is mad?

2943

If Shakespeare kills the character of Hamlet, what dramatic convention would he be using?

1178

In contrast to Hamlet, In Second Shepherd’s Play retelling the Angel’s announcement is used as an opposition to the first narration. It is seems that the author underlines an opposition between good and evil, dark and light so important for all human beings. The angel declares:

Rise, hired-men, heynd,[188] for now is he born

Tht shall take from the fiend, that Adam had lorn (Anonumous).

This story proves the value and importance of goodness and that the defense must put thefts on trial, and to do this it must learn and use the tactics worked out by those persons radically excluded from and disempowered by their position in a social order who learned to put this system of power itself on trial, and who won significant victories against it (Calderwood 56).

In sum, “a play within a play” plays a different function in both plays but helps the authors to support plot development and attracts readers attention to contrasts and oppositions. In Hamlet, this technique reflects the main tragedy of the play while in Second Shepherd’s Play it is used as an opposition to the main plot.

Works Cited

Anonymous, Second Shepherd’s Play (edt.) L. Beer Branden Books, 1997.
Alexander Nigel. Poison, Play, and Duel: A Study in “Hamlet.” London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971.
Barber C. S., and Richard P. Wheeler. The Whole journey: Shakespeare’s Power of Development. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.
Calderwood James. To Be and Not to Be: Negation and Metadrama in Hamlet. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.
Garber Marjorie Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality. New York: Methuen, 1987.
Herman, V. Dramatic Discourse: Dialogue as Interaction in Plays. Taylor & Francis, 2007.
Robinson, J. W. (1991). Studies in Fifteenth-century Stagecraft. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University.
Shakespeare, W. Hamlet. Dover Publications; 1992.

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A Play Within a Play: Hamlet and Second Shepherd’s Play

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