My academic education in letters, (as opposed to the sciences, which was excellent, and I willingly take the blame for my deficiencies) turned out to be of little use to me. In the 1950's the influence of psycho-analysis over literary interpretation was omnipresent and insidious. My understanding of Hamlet in particular had been jaundiced by Ernest Jones' intellectual embarrassment, "Hamlet and Oedipus " [19a,b] combining the basest pseudo-science with a near total ignorance of theater.
According to this perspective therefore, Hamlet is a case history. His "problem" is so deep that even he doesn't know what it is. He even admits as much in several places. At the same time, it behooved rank amateurs like yours truly to keep his "solutions" in a box in the attic. After all, Samuel Johnson, Schlegel, S. T. Coleridge, Goethe, Berlioz, Shaw, T.S. Eliot, Ernest Jones, James Joyce, Vladimir Pasternak, Jean-Louis Barrault, Laurence Olivier, C. D. Lewis, Freston Bowers, David Bevington, etc., etc ..... have already come up with widely divergent "solutions". What mere mortal dare joust with such adversaries as these!
Of course the play abounds in riddles, inconsistencies, ambiguities and multiple levels of interpretation. However the so-called "Hamlet Problem" can be simply stated in a short paragraph:
Hamlet has been placed under a strict feudal obligation to avenge his father's death by the murder of his uncle. Yet he finds it very difficult to rouse himself to the task. This wouldn't matter if his reservations were derived from objective considerations, either practical or religious .The problem is that he , too , doesn't understand his inability to act in this matter.
Although successful productions of Hamlet may cause one to feel the power of this internal conflict, it appears to be very difficult to put the experiencing of it into words. Because Hamlet doesn't seem to understand the reasons for his own behavior, it is up to audiences to figure them out , in some ( metaphorical ) sense to explain him to himself. One feels much the same way towards Hamlet that one feels towards Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's Catcher In The Rye. It is because Hamlet poses riddles which we are invited to solve, that the play has exerted such a fascination on audiences for centuries. Everyone comes away satisfied in his or her private "explanation".
" The playgoers are invited to participate in the same game as that which the characters are playing, which is to discover the objective truth about one another and about themselves. " [24 ,page 68 ]
Some people think that the answer must lie in his innate "nobility"; as Jean-Louis Barrault puts it, his "spiritual purity". Going all the way in the opposite direction, Salvador de Madriaga sees him as a monster of selfishness, and has convinced himself that all the mysteries become perfectly transparent once this assumption is made . [21] Others insist that he's nothing more than an immature brat tied to his mother's apron strings. Following the line of recent Hollywood productions, Hamlet is really just an old fashioned revenge play full of blood and guts with no deeper levels of meaning. Voltaire agreed: to him , Hamlet was evidence for the innate barbarism of British culture.
George Bernard Shaw submits the astounding hypothesis that Hamlet, the character, discovered Gandhian non-violence somewhere along the way without realizing it! Paralyzing astonishment at his mother's moral insensitivity is put forth as a hypothesis by Peter Mercer [10]. The double responsibility of serving as scourge and minister to the house of Denmark is the celebrated theory of Fredson Bowers. [8,9]
T.S. Eliot argues that Hamlet is searching for an 'objective correlative', an equivalent talionic action, that doesn't exist, even as romantics long for women existing only in their imaginations. [6] The thesis is worked out in admirable detail in Mercer's study. By a profound examination of Elizabethan revenge tragedy he persuades us that a traditional "rhetoric of revenge" is no longer available to a role incorporating Hamlet's Renaissance intelligence, scope and vision. What Mercer also implies, and I very much agree with him in this, is that William Shakespeare attempted to raise up a gigantic conception of human destiny on the foundations of a standard pot-boiler masterplot, the Elizabethan equivalent of today's B-movie. His failure to be totally successful in this attempt must be taken as a tribute to the cosmic power of his inspiration.
Other candidates for 'solutions' include Hamlet's fear of eternal damnation; a multi-dimensional grief combining physical with metaphysical elements; and a conception of Fate which Shakespeare inherited, via Seneca, from the ancient Greek playwrights, but which, even as he had modified the Petrarchan sonnet form, became adapted to his own uses.
There exists a thoroughly hackneyed argument which, according to Kitto, goes back to 1756, [ 20 , pg. 246 ] to the effect that Hamlet can't kill his uncle right away because then the play would be over in the second act. This is not so much incorrect as irrelevant: it is typical of all Elizabethan revenge tragedies that their plots abound in innumerable far-fetched contortions, the most fabulous to our knowledge being the knotted mishaps of poor Hieronymo in Thomas Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. [26,27,28]
Even accepting this hypothesis, one then is faced with the problem of explaining why the plot of Hamlet is so much more coherent than the similar works of Shakespeare's contemporaries. Examining the many versions of the story as it comes down to us through Saxo Grammaticus , Belleforest, Thomas Kyd's lost script, etc., what strikes us above all is the extent of the material that Shakespeare discarded as foreign to his intention. Had he committed himself to portraying the entire inventory of the Hamlet legend, the resulting play would have been twice as long,though not half as interesting.
The real challenges to understanding Hamlet lie not, indeed, its extent, but its brevity: a night of spiritual torment squeezed into a 3-minute break between acts [31]; the eloquent portrayal of unfathomable grief by the mute presence, at the pageantry of an inaugural court reception, of a figure clothed in the black robes of an earlier century [ 11 ] ; the death of Ophelia, among the most heart-rending moments in all theater, conveyed through Gertrude's short recitation; the short time from Hamlet's encounter with the King praying in the chapel to the murder of a person in his mother's bedchamber whom he believes to be the king, etc.
Simply stated, Hamlet is long only because Shakespeare had an enormous amount of ground to cover. As it is, much of its content exists only in the form of suggestions that must be unearthed from indicationswhich only careful and repeated readings can offer up. For example, the complaint that the existential soliloquy is out of place, is not due to the fact that too many things are going on at once. The problem is that for many interpreters it appears far too grand for its surroundings. This was indeed the kind of problem that Shakespeare had to resolve. Racine might have experienced similar difficulties had he been forced to work with a plot adapted from a novel by Mickey Spillane .
Most sensible interpreters, such as Roland Frye [ 11 ] , Peter Mercer [10 ] , Fredson Bowers [ 8, 9 ] , David Bevington [ 3,5,6,7 ] , T.S. Eliot, [ 6 ] C.S. Lewis [ 6 ] , Granville-Barker[ 22 ] , Gordon Craig [ 13 ] , H.D. Kitto [ 20 ] , Tillyard [ 17 , 18 ] and others, ( among whom , unfortunately, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, Voltaire , Schlegel, Goethe, Hugo, Ernest Jones, or G.B. Shaw cannot be numbered ) , have agreed that one ought first to inquire into the way in which the concept of 'action' was understood by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. The metaphorical implications of the witless " murder of Claudius" are false , shallow, ultimately unacceptable equivalents to "effective action" in the imagination of Shakespeare's day, from both ends of the spectrum: on the one hand its tormented religious scruples and, on the other , the shocking depravity of cruel and unusual punishments as they were employed at the time.
For anyone else who enjoys fiction, a first reading is best done uncritically. It is not so much that the attitude of " I don't know anything about art but I know what I like "is wrong . The problem is that most people don't understand the value of going beyond this lazy attitude. At first, I , too, freely indulged myself in fantasies that Hamlet was indeed a real person , with a character , complete with motivations , past history, secrets, goals, drives, intentions, conscious decision-making combined with unconscious inhibitions, blind spots, guilts, loves, fancies, and so on. For some reason, William Shakespeare's 'characters', even the minor ones, are , in most cases, more than mere person-substitutes which one can idly visualize as the real thing : Lear, Othello, Iago, Richard of Gloucester, Macbeth, Hamlet . They come to us already infested with complexes , obsessions, mysteries, neuroses, psychoses, dilemmae and other psychological peculiarities, which we fancy ourselves clever enough to diagnose, prognose and even at times to remedy:
" Now, if Othello had only listened to me .. "
"Goneril should have realized that .. "
" He may be Thane of Cawdor and Thane of Glamis, but he ought to have recognized by now what those witches are doing to him! ..."
William Shakespeare is, in the world canon of writers, uniquely skillful in casting this kind of illusion. Thus, Hamlet as character is, in turn, depressed, thoughtful, enraged, confused, antic, bullying, sensitive, callous, randy, prudish, guilty, rash, conceited, self-deprecating, haughty, thoroughly lost, sensitive, crude, brilliant, dull to the point of stupidity, sublime, base, giddy, desperate, worried, serene, happy, miserable.....
He does, indeed, eat of " the chameleon's dish,promise crammed"! With each irrational, well nigh outrageous, twist of mood in his protagonist, Shakespeare always successfully maintains the illusion that what we are witnessing is the conduct of a real human being. That the psychic expense account doesn't balance at the end of the play only gradually becomes apparent.Ultimately we recognize that "Hamlet", in his totality, cannot be, or have, a real "character".
Yet should he, after all? The play, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was devised by its author as a vehicle for making a statement which he believed to be of the highest importance. Its audiences have agreed with him for 4 centuries; one feels confident that they will continue to do so. Shakespeare's genius enabled him to make this fictive human being thoroughly credible with each encounter, even though the illusion of a coherent personality becomes increasingly untenable as the play progresses . Shakespeare's customary methods of working up his raw materials virtually insured that the characters of his protagonists would be plagued by inconsistencies. Nowhere is this more true than in Hamlet. Virtually every device, character and plot component of this play has been lifted from someone else's works: several standard Elizabethan revenge tragedies, including The Spanish Tragedy, Antonio's Revenge, Kyd's Ur-Hamlet ; Seneca's Thyestes ; Saxo Grammaticus , Belleforest ; Machiavelli's Prince ; and other French, Italian, Classical and Nordic sources .[ 7,8,11,24, 25, 26, 28 ]
All the basic elements in the drama were in place long before Shakespeare put his hand to them: a vengeful Ghost; a lecherous usurper ; crises of conscience in the protagonist , accompanied by depression; self-rebuke for being dilatory in the execution of the obligation to revenge the death or violation of loved ones; madness both real and feigned; a philosophical discourse on suicide; a play within a play; internal conflicts between the revenge motive and religious scruples; a wicked mother and a spurned sweetheart; exile to a foreign land with an unexpected return; meditation on a skull; death of the hero in the execution of his task ; and so forth.
The impression that Shakespeare had invented any of these devices with the intention of forging powerful psychological metaphors is clearly erroneous. The ways in which the Hamlet legend evolved through the Middle Ages had shaped it much in the same way that folk ballads like Barbara Allen or The Twa Corbies were formed into the masterpieces we recognize them for. Its "wisdom" is accordingly a dense residue of folk wisdom. Conflicts of feudal honor with religious morality, of domestic strife with national politics, of sexual desire with moral obligation, of present ambition with the fear of damnation, were already latent in the story. It is in his treatment of this overload of stock situations that we see the emergence of Shakespeare's supreme craft.
What we refer to as the Psychologist's Fallacy is the assumption that Hamlet has a character, rather than being a character in a play. This point of view that argues that his strange gyrations around the world of the stage exemplify an identifiable pathology, ( such as manic- depression or its modern equivalent, 'bi-polar disorder' ) , rather than functioning as a dramatic artifact to convey the intent of the playwright. Hamlet may very well suffer from something one might label as 'manic depression' , even as Hemingway's protagonist in The Sun Also Rises is afflicted with impotence, or Prince Mishkin in Dostoyevsky's The Idiot suffers from epilepsy, or Oswald Alving in Ibsen's Ghosts succumbs to syphilis. Within these limitations such an assumption is perfectly compatible with the larger view that 'Hamlet' is an artifact, that his 'disease', such as it is, functions as one item among many others designed to convey the great themes which animate the play [ 15]
C.S. Lewis [15] reminds us that Hamlet should be ranged with the great epic poems , Gilgamesh , The Iliad, Odyssey , Tristan and Isolde , or the New Testament.Despite the claims of literal-minded interpreters, their themes are not rooted in the 'personalities' or 'characters' of their protagonists, which only serve as instruments for the conveyance of a greater message. It is their function in Hamlet to bear aloft a prolonged, unwavering, high meditation on death, disillusion, the infection of reason by lust, and the futility of the works of man.
C.S. Lewis asserts that " death " is the principal theme of Hamlet. Unless one takes the point of view that all literature is about death, in which case the statement is a triviality, one must admit that there are other themes in the play of comparable stature. One of these is certainly incest; the psychologists are not entirely off base .The moral and practical paradoxes of vengeance as motive and mode of action, certainly must be included among these.
Another is the art of observation. Shakespeare has written a treatises on the uses and abuses of scientific method every bit as profound as Francis Bacon's "Advancement of Learning" [ 41 ] . In order to test Claudius Hamlet sets up an experiment, the re-enactment of the murder of Gonzago. It barely succeeds, and then only because Hamlet forces it to its conclusion. Horatio strikes at the Ghost with his partisan, only to find that "it is as the air invulnerable". Polonius also arranges a series of foolish conceived experiments to test Hamlet. His meddling with the social, political and cosmic order quickly leads to his death.
Only the Ghost is everywhere, witnessing everything : omnipresence is his sounding tocsin , inscrutable and inexorable as Fate. In the wild hysteria of Act I, v, 155-190 he shows that he is able to appear in many places at once . In Act III, iv, 105, he strides into his widow's bedchamber to sabotage Hamlet's credibility. One can readily picture him hovering over the lobby of Act III, i , participant in the brutality of the lovers' quarrel between Hamlet and Ophelia. One even catches a glimpse of him in the 'mountebank' who sold the fatal 'unction' to Laertes :
Recall that both Hamlet and Macbeth say, 'Conscience doth make cowards of us all. " One does not thereby conclude that they knew each other, or that one of them had read the play about the other! Claudius the villain discourses knowledgeably on heavenly justice. The doltish Polonius will be clever when the action requires it: 'loosing his daughter' in the lobby does indeed dredge up the 'carp of truth', (though not the one he expected to find ). In the depths of her madness, Ophelia delivers a reflection as profound as ' Lord we know what we are, but not what we may be. '( Act IV, v, 43 ) ; which finds its perfect echo in Hamlet's comment:
"If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now;
if it be not now, yet will it come, The readiness is all.
(Act V,ii ,218 )
The energizing themes of a major play will not be lodged in individual characters but are the common property of all . Not only do ideas, rhetorical devices, even individual words and phrases pass freely from person to person, but, moods, psychological dispositions and a general emotional atmosphere linked to attitudes and behavior also envelop all its characters in the manner of winds, clouds or sunlight. One thinks of a symphony in which each instrument has its characteristic timbre , yet in which all of them play in Adagio, D minor, and pianissimo.