I

We want desperately to know the customs of Denmark, and much of the power of Hamlet derives from the fact that we never do. Custom is mentioned more times in Hamlet than in any other Shakespeare play, and given a full range of meanings, but specific customs are often shrouded in mystery, making it difficult to project how Danes should behave. "Is it a custom?" asks Horatio in the fourth scene, after Hamlet explains how the king revels, but to what does Horatio refer? The king's drinking, his excessive drinking, or his drinking late at night? The kettledrum and trumpet "triumph" that follows each draught? Or—perhaps most logically—the disconcerting discharge of artillery, about which Horatio first asks, "What does this mean, my lord?" Hamlet answers directly—"it is a custom"—but pursues his own line of thought, never clarifying the custom (Hamlet 1.4.15). Eventually he gives Horatio a moral discourse about the effect of drunkenness on the national character. From this swirl of uncertainties, some meaning emerges: there is a royal Danish tradition of reveling to the point even of cannon fire that Hamlet's father had demurred from observing.

Despite this seeming clarity, cloudiness prevails in Denmark. The most ambiguous element in this midnight conversation is Hamlet's concession that he is "native here / And to the manner born." His saying "but to my mind, though I am native here" implies that he disagrees with his country's custom, that he approves of breaching it—"it is a custom / More honor'd in the breach than the observance" (Hamlet 1.4.15-16). But if Hamlet agrees with this breach, this battering of the wall of custom, his "though" is unnecessary. For the concessive suggests that Hamlet opposes even that custom he has witnessed, when not in Wittenburg, during the thirty years of his life—the time of his father's reign. He should say, "But to my mind, and I am a native here / And to the manner born," we don't usually do this sort of thing, although there is an old out-of-date tradition for it. A copulative would serve, but it

would also provide a definite statement of what the custom has been.

Such precision the play avoids here and everywhere. Certainly Danish drunkenness has never gone out of style, or Hamlet could not complain that his country is "traduc'd and tax'd of other nations." But the nature of the drunkenness oscillates. Drinking in Denmark is both excessive—"they clip us drunkards"—and minimal, important in its unimportance, a "vicious mole," "defect," or "dram of eale" whose corrupting influence is out of proportion to its size (Hamlet 1.4.18-36). We may say that Hamlet objects to the sign of the drinking, not the drinking itself. Rather than condemning the vice in his ensuing speech, Hamlet complains about how foreigners perceive Danish drunkenness. But if he is indeed meditating on the corrupting influence of Claudius, it is a corruption that at this point, before the appearance of his father's ghost, only he can see. His literal objection, this early in the play, would then be not to the stain of Claudius but to his uncle's Machiavellian exploitation of a popular Danish pastime to ingratiate himself with the people. For if all Danes drink, then Claudius is merely one of the boys, so to speak, and cannot infect the state. This logic supports the normal reading, that the custom to which Hamlet objects is the loud ceremony that accompanies and calls attention to the drinking. This is the custom one usually honors by breaching it, by not observing it. The custom of this custom is that it is not a custom—the custom is out of fashion.

The anxieties of a culture caught in a moment of painful transition shape the patterns of customary behavior in Hamlet that form and un-form before our eyes. Within the castle walls at Elsinore, codes of behavior have been lost or no longer obtain. The resulting social crisis has been obscured by debates about Hamlet's character or strictly ontological issues such as whether the ghost is really a demon, or whether an injunction to revenge is morally valid or was considered morally valid by Shakespeare's original audience. Hamlet's actions have been treated as a problem of individuality and identity. But that Shakespeare hides the mores of Denmark does not mean that such issues are aspects of Hamlet's or Gertrude's or the ghost's character and status. Instead, the play is

about our struggle to make sense of patterns, codes, and ideals of conduct that have suddenly become important to a man living through a social transition.