http://www.ulg.ac.be/libnet/germa/hamleteng.htm
| Themes |
| Dilemma and Indecision |
| Hamlet and Metaphysical Doubt |
| Hamlet and Madness |
| Hamlet and Oedipus |
| Hamlet and Ghosts |
Hamlet and Theatre |
|---|
One could read Hamlet simply, simplistically even, as a revenge tragedy. Hamlet’s
father, the king of Denmark, is killed by his brother, Claudius, who, overriding the
rights of succession, appropriates both the crown and the wife of Hamlet’s father.
The ghost of the father reveals everything to his son, and all the elements of the revenge
tragedy are in place: Hamlet has an obligation to avenge the murder, the usurpation, and
the adultery. This he does by killing Claudius at the end of the play.
However it is clear that the theme of vengeance is merely a
vehicle used by Shakespeare in order to articulate a whole series of themes central to
humanity:
All these themes, as well as others, are found in Hamlet. However, it is important to
remember that Hamlet himself is at the centre of everything, and it is on him that all the
great themes are focused. There is no other character in literature so rich, so complex,
so enigmatic, at once so opaque and transparent.
Readings of Hamlet are innumerable and vary according to the
personality of the reader, director, or actor. Hamlet is someone who both imposes himself
on us through the complexity and mysterious nature of his character, which is to an extent
almost indecipherable.
Laurence Olivier said that he could have played Hamlet for a
hundred years and still found something new in him on each performance; the character is
ambiguous, almost impossible to grasp, as is the language of the play. Instead of
impoverishing the play this ambiguity makes it all the more rich and textured. It is
precisely this mystery which allows each reader and actor to engage in a personal and
intimate reading of the character, and to share his complexity. Hamlet is himself, you,
me, he is all of us; being all of us he is universal, the myth which each of us, in our
own individuality, tries to understand and comes to recognise in our own nature.
What are the main characteristics of this fascinating and,
hence, unforgettable character? Interpretations are legion and only the main ones are
cited here.
If the heroes of the great classical tragedies are all confronted by choices, it is
because they are all obliged to resolve them in one manner or another: once the decision
is taken, everything else follows, accompanied by acts of majestic nobility or, at the
other extreme, of abject decay and ruin. For Hamlet nothing is simple, everything raises
questions. His dilemma is not about what decisions he should take but rather whether he
will be able to make any decisions at all. According to some interpretations, Hamlet makes
no decisions and instead projects the image of an indecisive, inactive and passive
individual, a romantic incapable of action who is in some ways snivelling and pathetic; he
is nothing but a compulsive talker taking pleasure in his own words. Jean-Louis Barrault
said of him that he is ‘the hero of unparalleled hesitation’. He astonishes us
with soliloquies of unequalled beauty, his emotions are of stunning force, but he does not
evolve beyond them. This is why T.S. Eliot regarded Hamlet as a failure and said
that it presented a character ‘dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible because
it exceeds the events that occur’. Why so much emotion and so little action?
That is his nature, say some critics: this is what he is, the absolute opposite of
Macbeth. Others see him as stunted by an Oedipus complex which has turned him into a
belated adolescent, somewhat mad, mired in sterile existentialist ponderings (this alone
would disqualify him as king!). Others still see him as suffering from an overdose of
chastity. Others go further: is he not simply a puritan or a homosexual? A drunkard, even?
Could he be the unfortunate hero, the hero-victim for whom life holds nothing but
frustration and disillusionment? The murder of his father and the revelation that his own
brother was his assassin (who then throws himself on the widow, Hamlet’s mother!),
the betrayals by Gertrude, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, even Laertes: it is not
only the state of Denmark which is rotten, it is the entire world. The celebrated French
critic Henri Fluchère, who sees Hamlet as ‘the first Shakespearean drama
which can lay claim to both extremes in personality and universality’, interprets the
play as a symbolic representation of the battle between man and his destiny, his
temptations and contradictions.
To this is opposed another reading. First of all it has to
be said that Hamlet, loquacious as he is, is nevertheless extremely active, although it is
true that the impulse for his actions is imposed on him by other characters or by events.
He listens to the ghost (which his friends refuse to do), he adopts a coarse attitude
verging on insubordination vis-à-vis the king, he violently rejects Ophelia, he
thwarts one after the other plots aimed at revealing his plans, he stages for the court a
show which is nothing but a trap in which he hopes to catch the king, he confronts his
mother in a scene of extreme violence, and he fights Laertes. Engaging further in pure
physical violence he kills Polonius, sends his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to
their deaths, kills the king, and is indirectly responsible for the death of Laertes. Not
bad for someone who, for some, doesn’t know the meaning of the word action.
It is possible, even probable, that in his particular
fashion Shakespeare wanted to disrupt the conventions of classical tragedy, which he may
have seen as too heavily laden with stereotypes. His Macbeth, his Othello, his Brutus,
even his King Lear, are, from the first act, so imprisoned in conventional attitudes that
they become perfectly predictable: the mechanisms of the plot evolve through cause and
effect, the outcome becomes ineluctable. None of that in Hamlet; Shakespeare
surprises us at each turn, it is the unpredictable which dominates, and even the scene of
the final slaughter has only tenuous connections with the elements provided by the first
act. True, Hamlet does kill the king, but he does so because the latter has just
inadvertently killed Gertrude, and it is particularly striking that at this moment Hamlet
utters not one word concerning the assassination of his father, just as it is curious that
no-one at the Danish court seems disturbed by the monstrous carnage which has, in the
space of a few seconds, done away with the most important individuals of the kingdom.
Maybe Shakespeare, merely simulating the grand themes of classical tragedy (vengeance,
madness, the struggle for power, etc.), wanted to shake the established certainties
flooding each of these themes and chose, in the final analysis, to present the only themes
which for him had any fundamental importance: doubt and uncertainty. In this, he could
have been a precursor of the theatre of the twentieth century: he may, in 1601, have
anticipated the theatre of the absurd.
A vast tragedy, negating any attempt at a single interpretation, Hamlet is before anything else the drama of a man who does not hesitate to confront his own imperfections and who refuses illusions and idealised appearances:
‘What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me...’ (Act Two, Scene Two, Arden)
The tragedy, Fluchère tells us, takes place above all in Hamlet’s consciousness, as
all the events which form the play’s framework are reduced to a symbolic
representation, to an internal unrest which no action will resolve, and no decision will
quell. The deepest theme, masked by that of vengeance, is none other than human nature
itself, confronted by the metaphysical and moral problems it is moulded by: love, time,
death, perhaps even the principle of identity and quality, not to say ‘being and
nothingness’. The shock Hamlet receives on the death of his father, and on the
remarriage of his mother, triggers disquieting interrogations about the peace of the soul,
and the revelation of the ghost triggers vicious responses to these. The world changes its
colour, life its significance, love is stripped of its spirituality, woman of her
prestige, the state of its stability, the earth and the air of their appeal. It is a
sudden eruption of wickedness, a reduction of the world to the absurd, of peace to
bitterness, of reason to madness. A contagious disease which spreads from man to the
kingdom, from the kingdom to the celestial vault’:
‘[A]nd indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth
seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave
o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it
appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.’
Fluchère’s reading situates Hamlet’s drama within the ruptures of an isolated and bruised subjectivity. According to this interpretation, which places the accent on the dissolving of identity and on a Sartrean problematic of being and nothingness, Hamlet’s tragedy appears as the quintessence of a moral and metaphysical instability which some associate with the experience of modernity. Hamlet’s decline and bitterness indeed match his extraordinary lucidity. The tragedy of Hamlet, nevertheless, clearly exceeds the boundaries of the tormented consciousness of its protagonist.
For over three centuries hundreds of experts have turned their attention to the problem
of Hamlet’s madness. Hundreds of articles have been written, and dozens of
controversial theories have been put forward and countered. The characters of
Shakespeare’s play are themselves desperate to discover the origins of the affliction
which mars the prince of Denmark. Whilst Polonius sees Hamlet’s conduct as the result
of disappointed love, Ophelia can only see the symptoms of pure madness. For Rosencrantz
and Guildenstern it is ambition and frustration which are gnawing away at the young heir
to the throne. Finally, for Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother, who in this joins most
critics, at the root of it is a warped reaction, including rejection, to the death of his
father and her own hasty remarriage. This interpretation does indeed play an essential
role in the play. Hamlet himself never ceases speculating not only about the overt or
covert motivations of other characters but also about the uses and abuses of power, the
faults of passion, action and inaction, the significance of ancestral customs as well as
the question of suicide. Most of the characters observing Hamlet’s behaviour
can’t agree whether it is fake and calculating or whether the prince really is
suffering from a mental illness threatening the ‘noble, sovereign reason’ which
separates men from beasts (Claudius). Claudius himself is conscious of the fact
that the conduct and words of his nephew are at one and the same time completely
irrational and absolutely coherent. Basing his judgement on the theories of
ancient medicine, he attributes the ambiguities of the deranged speeches to the workings
of a harmful temperament provoking a state of deep melancholia. In this respect a
parallel can be traced between the ‘methodical madness’ of Hamlet and that of
Ophelia. In effect, whilst everyone agrees that ‘their words have no sense’,
their words and actions are still the object of an exceptional curiosity on the part of
their entourage. Each character tries to decipher the madness of Ophelia and Hamlet
because the ambiguities of their deranged discourses seem to reveal a terrible sickness
capable not only of threatening the psychological equilibrium of the individual but of
infecting the kingdom as well as the world beyond.
However, Hamlet’s madness has not only the effect of
disturbing those around him, it also allows him the freedom to transgress the court’s
rules of etiquette and obedience without incurring immediate punishment. Hamlet, under
cover of madness, takes on the role of a critical and sardonic commentator on the schemes
of other characters, and in this he succeeds Yorick, the king’s late fool, whose fate
is the subject of a full discussion in the fifth and final act. Amongst Hamlet’s
principal targets are his mother’s infidelity, Rosencrantz’s servitude and the
devouring ambition of his uncle whom he reminds, by means of a riddle, that all are equal
before death.
Forced to play a role which brings him nothing but misfortune and alienation, Hamlet envies those who, unlike him, do not allow themselves to be tormented by ‘the scruples of conscience’.
So, what is the answer to the central question: is Hamlet mad? Is he mad partly because his pain and metaphysical doubt are beyond him? Is his madness a strategy for better observing and manipulating others, and furthermore to protect himself? Or does he take cover under an artificial madness which absolves him from all responsibility and allows him to find comfort in inaction, to split himself in some way, to be at once an actor in and a spectator of the staging of life, of his life? Or is he, all things considered, just insane? Each of us has to decide, according to taste and temperament.
The critical applications of the famous theory of the Oedipus complex to the tragedy of Hamlet are innumerable. It was Freud himself who, in an essay published in 1905, was the first to try and resolve in psychoanalytical terms the enigma offered by Hamlet’s behaviour. According to Freud, the personal crisis undergone by Hamlet awakens his repressed incestuous and parricidal desires. The disgust which the remarriage of his mother arouses in him, as well as the violent behaviour during their confrontation in the queen’s bedroom, are signs of the jealousy which he constantly experiences, even if unconsciously. Hamlet is absolutely horrified by the thought that his mother could feel desire for Claudius, whom he describes as a ‘murderer and villain,/ A slave that is not twentieth part the tithe/ Of your precedent lord’.
A little after, the ghost of Hamlet’s father suddenly appears in order to
assuage the anger of his son and implore him to take pity on his mother’s great
distress.
The bedroom scene is one example amongst many of Hamlet’s aversion to sexuality,
which he more often than not associates with vulgarity and sickness. Despite his violent
reactions, he is nonetheless fundamentally incapable of acting, Freud tells us, because he
cannot bring himself to avenge himself on the man who has killed his father and taken his
place at the side of his mother. Given that Claudius does no more than reproduce the
repressed fantasies of childhood, the hatred Hamlet feels for him is progressively
replaced by a feeling of guilt which constantly reminds him that he is no better than the
man he is supposed to punish.
Contrary to Freud the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan thinks that the real psychological
dimension of the play lies not in Hamlet’s behaviour but in his language. In his
famous essay, entitled ‘Desire and the interpretation of desire in Hamlet’,
he holds that the most striking characteristic of Hamlet’s language is its ambiguity.
Everything he says is transmitted, in various degrees, through metaphor, simile and, above
all, wordplay. His utterances, in other words, have a hidden and latent meaning which
often surpasses the apparent meaning. They have, therefore, enormous affinities with the
language of the unconscious which proceeds equally by various forms of distortion and
alterations in meaning, notably through slips of the tongue, dreams, double entendres,
and wordplay. Hamlet is himself aware of the ambiguous nature of his own speeches as well
as of the feelings which drive them. Concerned by the dialectic between reality and
appearance, and surface and depth, he is conscious that whatever happens to him is deeper
and stranger than that which is displayed by the superficial symptoms of mourning:
THE QUEEN: If it be,
Why seems it so particular with thee?
Hamlet: Seems, madam? Nay, it is. I know not ‘seems’
’Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forc’d breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected haviour of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play;
But I have that within which passes show,
These but the trappings and the suits of woe. (Act One, Scene Two)
Three other Shakespeare plays have ghosts as characters: Julius Caesar (Brutus
is visited by the ghost of Caesar), Macbeth (Banquo’s ghost interrupts
Macbeth’s banquet) and Richard III (the king is haunted by the ghosts of his
victims). In Hamlet, the role of the ghost, who appears as early as the first
scene, is to trigger the action by revealing Claudius’ crime and by demanding
vengeance. For the celebrated English critic John Dover Wilson (1881-1969), the ghost of
Hamlet’s father is thus ‘both a revenge-ghost and a prologue-ghost’.
‘It is one of Shakespeare’s glories’, he continues, ‘that he took the
conventional puppet, humanised it, christianised it, and made it a figure that the
spectators would recognise as real, as something which might be encountered in any
lonely graveyard at midnight . . . The Ghost in Hamlet comes, not from a mythical
Tartarus, but from the place of departed spirits in which post-medieval England, despite a
veneer of Protestantism, still believed at the end of the sixteenth century’. What
Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p.52.
One should note Horatio’s scepticism: at first he
refuses to believe spirits can assume material form. Then, disconcerted on seeing the
ghost, he nonetheless tries to communicate with it by persuading it to speak ‘in the
name of heaven’. In the end he gives some credence to the ghost whom he feels to be
an omen of some strange catastrophe for the kingdom.
More than any of his other plays, Shakespeare’s Hamlet is pure theatre, a theatre cascading through three or four layers, like Russian dolls.
With Hamlet Shakespeare has bequeathed us a supreme gift. It is a testament in which the creative genius of its author shines out, demonstrating his knowledge of the human spirit, his mastery of plot, and the unbelievable wealth of his language. But there is too much theatre within theatre in this play for us not to see that through a sustained engagement with this theme Shakespeare wanted to discover and to make known a truth rarely grasped, or even perhaps to tell us that there is no truth, save for that truth given existence by a genius through theatrical devices, representation, illusion and art. This is what Tom Stoppard understood very well, when, in his play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, he took the two most insignificant characters in Hamlet, turned them into heroes, and reproduced entire passages from Shakespeare's play. This is theatre in its purest form which self reflexively claims itself as such. That idea was already present in Hamlet.