Shakespeare's Counsel: Power, Deception, and Desire in Hamlet

A Woman's Agency and Courtly Constraint

Good my lord, what is this advice you offer concerning the Prince and his love for me? At one moment you tell me that my favour is like a beefsteak and the Prince a hungry lion—I must not dangle it too near, for fear of provoking his appetite past the constraints of politeness. But the next moment my favour is a handshake and the Prince a business associate; I must give him what he expects, give him what is customary. Is it possible, my lord, that you have misunderstood what the Prince might want of me?

There is something between a man's lust and a man's obligations of circumstance. Women provoke reactions other than rape and indifference. You tell me a man is a Prince and he may not choose whom he loves—all the more reason to warn a girl that such a man may love all the more strongly. You tell me to lock my beauty away and keep my distance from a man whose lust may be seductive but whose marriage must be an affair of state, and one that will pay me no notice at all.

Yet history tells all too many stories of princes swayed by a woman of low birth or inconvenient parentage. When Henry strayed from Eleanor of Aquitaine, he did so for fair Rosamund, a mere merchant's daughter. And the problem that Mark Antony found with Cleopatra was not low birth, but the Roman Republic's distaste for female monarchs. These were kings and princes to be feared, and in both cases it was the man's desire, and not the woman's, that overturned the social expectation. Love exists to frustrate expectations.

Indirection as Information Strategy

In Hamlet, Polonius advises his paid informant on the art of covert surveillance with these words: "And thus do we of wisdom and of reach, / With windlasses and with assays of bias, / By indirections find directions out" (II.1.64–66). In the context of the play, Polonius has hired a spy to gather information on his son. This might sound like a slightly despicable thing to do—and obviously Polonius is eager not to get caught. Thus he micromanages his paid informant by giving him instructions on how to obtain the desired information without detection.

If you ask too directly, the target of surveillance will suddenly realize he is being used as a source of information and will become more careful about what he discloses. These lines sum up the undetectably light hand which Polonius is recommending—they could be the motto of a private detective firm, although the slightly archaic vocabulary might leave some people confused. "Windlasses" are actually mechanical devices like cranes for lifting an item at some remove, and the passage's overall meaning rests on metaphor: approach your subject obliquely, as one would use mechanical leverage to move a heavy object indirectly rather than by direct force.

Yet the basic idea still has currency today. "By indirections find directions out" is advice to learn an opponent's strategy in advance while keeping one's own a secret. Polonius may be long-winded and he may frequently ignore his own hackneyed advice, but clearly he has some talent for information-gathering if the King keeps him close. In terms of twenty-first century information dynamics, it is entirely possible to see the wisdom of Polonius' advice: do not attract attention to yourself, approach a subject obliquely, lest you betray your purposes. It is advice for a spy, and it could work as the motto for a set of cybersecurity professionals or a private hacking or security firm.

Later in the play, Hamlet offers a different kind of counsel, one concerned not with obtaining information but with moral action. He declares: "Use every man after his desert, and who should 'scape whipping? / Use them after your own honour and dignity: the less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty" (II.2.491–495). We need to clarify the meaning of one word here—this is not "desert" like the Sahara, but a homophone that gives us the phrase "just deserts," meaning what a person deserves.

Human Desert and the Ethics of Mercy

If you give every man what he deserves, Hamlet says, then everybody would deserve a public beating for criminality. This is, in some sense, Hamlet's version of the idea of Original Sin—all humanity deserves to be treated no better than with punitive whipping. Instead, Hamlet suggests that you define yourself by how you treat others regardless of what they deserve. Indeed, the less a person actually deserves, the greater the moral achievement of extending them mercy and dignity. This is an ethics not of judgment but of self-creation: you become who you are through the generosity you exhibit toward those who have no claim upon it.

The third key passage concerns the power of consciousness itself. Hamlet muses: "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams" (II.2.243–244). This is a great way of explaining how the human imagination can change the perception of actual circumstances. A nutshell is as close and confining a small space as we can readily point to—it is like saying that your new apartment is approximately the size of a postage stamp or a thimble; it is exaggerating for effect while also indicating a small size.

Conclusion: Shakespeare's Enduring Insights