First Player
The First Player is the catalyst for Hamlet's most important piece of active scheming — the play-within-the-play — and the occasion for Hamlet's most painful soliloquy. His performance of genuine emotion in service of fiction throws Hamlet's paralysis into sharpest relief: here is a man who can weep for Hecuba, while Hamlet cannot avenge a murdered father.
Appears In
Biography
The First Player is the leader of the acting company that arrives at Elsinore in Act II Scene 2 — travelling players whom Hamlet greets with genuine, unguarded warmth, the most open and uncomplicated pleasure he shows anywhere in the play. His immediate willingness to perform a speech from an old play at Hamlet's request — the fall of Troy, Priam's death, Hecuba's grief — reveals both a professional's readiness and a command of his art that Hamlet observes with something close to envy.
The speech about Hecuba is the scene's pivot. The First Player delivers it with such feeling that Polonius wants to stop him, and his emotion — genuine tears for a fictional queen — prompts Hamlet's searing soliloquy afterwards: 'What's he to Hecuba, or Hecuba to him, that he should weep for her?' The actor's capacity for emotion in service of a fiction makes Hamlet's inability to act on a real grief feel all the more damning.
His practical value to Hamlet is as the instrument of 'The Mousetrap' — the play-within-the-play designed to catch Claudius's conscience. He is entrusted with the play's staging and given Hamlet's addition of 'some dozen or sixteen lines' to insert into the text. His compliance is total and professional: he is a craftsman, and the use to which his craft is put is his employer's business.
Motivation
The First Player is motivated by his craft and his profession. He performs what is asked of him with skill and commitment, without apparent interest in the political uses to which his performance will be put. He is the play's purest representative of art as a force independent of the intentions behind it.
Personality
The First Player is defined by the quality of his art — the ability to summon genuine feeling for a fictional situation on demand. He takes his craft seriously enough to move himself to tears for Hecuba, and he takes Hamlet's commission seriously enough to accommodate the new lines without question. He is neither cynical nor naive; he is a professional artist who knows what theatre can do.