At the start, Horatio et al. are unsure whether they’re deceived by the ghost. Are they hallucinating? Is it a spectre that simply appears to be the old king? August Wilhelm Schlegel: Hamlet ‘believes in the Ghost of his father as long as he sees it, but as soon as it has disappeared, it appears to him almost in the light of a deception.’ Or A. D. Nuttall: ‘is this “thing” strange because it is revealing a hidden truth—or because some power is trying to deceive me?’ This uncertainty is still present at the end of Act 2, Scene 2, when Hamlet wonders whether he is being deceived by the ghost and his own melancholy:
The spirit that I have seen May be a devil – and the devil hath power T’assume a pleasing shape. Yea, and perhaps, Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me. (II. ii. 551–56)
The way Claudius presents himself to his court is a deception of sorts. He wants to suggest that all is well (and of course intends to continue to cover up his crime). Hamlet refers later to his uncle’s ‘cozenage’ (V. ii. 67), i.e. deception. Claudius’s deception(s) are what motivate the ghost to appear.
Laertes warns Ophelia not to trust Hamlet as a suitor. In Act 3, Scene 1 she laments, ‘I was the more deceived’ (III. i. 118). But Hamlet responds by accusing her of deception: ‘God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another’ (III. i. 137–38). A. C. Bradley:
Hamlet does not, as the popular theory supposes, break with Ophelia directly after the Ghost appears to him; on the contrary, he tries to see her and sends letters to her (ii. i. 109). What really happens is that Ophelia suddenly repels his visits and letters. Now, we know that she is simply obeying her father’s order; but how would her action appear to Hamlet, already sick at heart because of his mother’s frailty, and now finding that, the moment fortune has turned against him, the woman who had welcomed his love turns against him too? Even if he divined (as his insults to Polonius suggest) that her father was concerned in this change, would he not still, in that morbid condition of mind, certainly suspect her of being less simple than she had appeared to him? […] There are signs that Hamlet was haunted by the horrible idea that he had been deceived in Ophelia as he had been in his mother; that she was shallow and artificial, and even that what had seemed simple and affectionate love might really have been something very different.
Polonius sends Reynaldo to spy on Laertes’ conduct in Paris. Similarly, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are recruited to spy on Hamlet, but it doesn’t take him long to see through the deception. Then Claudius and Polonius hide in order to spy on Hamlet.
The whole theme of madness can be related to deception – a mad mind deceives itself. But the play itself is deceptive on the question of Hamlet’s madness. Harold Bloom: ‘We rarely know when Hamlet is not acting-out a part he has devised for himself: if your intellect is limitless, how can you know when you are being sincere?’
Consider ‘The Mousetrap’ (III. ii. 216) – all theatre is a kind of deception, but this one has a specific secret purpose. And just as the play-within-the-play had a secret purpose, Claudius responds by sending Hamlet to England, and does so with a secret purpose.
Polonius again hides to spy on Hamlet, this time behind the arras. Janyce Marson: ‘Polonius’s predilection for deception ultimately causes him to become the agent of his own demise.’
Another deception: Claudius and Laertes conspire to orchestrate the fencing match.
In the final scene, Hamlet tells Horatio that he discovered the letter to the English king and replaced it with a forgery telling the king to have Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed instead. Another case of one deception being countered by another.
Shakespeare’s most important dramatic technique in Hamlet is the soliloquy, in which everyone is deceived as to real motives, except the speaker and the audience. People are capable of self-deception – ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’ (II. ii. 239–40) – and maybe in his soliloquies Hamlet works through his motives so as not to deceive himself. Stanley Wells writes, Hamlet ‘cannot both obey the Ghost and remain true to himself’; Harold Bloom that Hamlet’s ‘consciousness [is] infinite, unlimited, and at war with itself.’ Jean Brooks: ‘The large number [of Hamlet’s soliloquies] – seven – reflects the importance of Hamlet’s inner world as a touchstone of integrity set against the deception of Claudius’s corrupt public world.’
Charles R. Forker: ‘The very court of Denmark is like a stage upon which all the major characters except Horatio take parts, play roles, and practice to deceive. The irony is that Hamlet himself must adopt a pose in order to expose it in others.’
Meredith Anne Skura: ‘Hamlet’s refusal of the deceptive roles he finds himself forced to play is part of his recoil from all seeming in a world where hypocrisy taints even love and friendship, and where all human achievement is illusory.’
‘I have that within which passes show; / These but the trappings and the suits of woe’ (I. ii. 85–86). Brett Foster: ‘Already Hamlet sounds some of the play’s major preoccupations—what one knows and how one knows it, and how external signs deceive.’ Paul A. Cantor: ‘Characteristically his first speech in the play expresses his contempt for seeming and his suspicion that truth lies buried beneath layers of deception’.
Stephen Booth: ‘The theme of suicide, for all the inconstancy of its fluid moral and emotional value, is a constant and unifying factor in the play. So too is the theme of appearance and reality, deceit, pretense, disguise, acting, seeming, and cosmetics’.
Graham Bradshaw: ‘Hamlet is (or at any rate was) healthy, while the Court’s “life” is founded on deception, intrigue, murder and (less clearly, I think) incest.’
Jean Brooks on the ending: ‘Tragic exaltation lies in the heroic endeavour of a man who was never a soldier or a king to fulfil rightly the role life imposes on him in a deceptive world, with every part of the good-and-evil “nature” the Ghost appeals to, despite lapses caused by the “dram of evil” infecting his “noble substance”.’
Paul A. Cantor on Hamlet’s ‘How all occasions do inform against me’ speech (IV. iv. 32–66): we see Hamlet’s
refusal to accept heroic action at face value, his probing beneath the surface issues of epic warfare to reveal the triviality of the disputes at its base, his suspicion that the heroic warrior is merely deceiving himself and throwing away his life and many others for the sake of an empty ideal.