Hamlet

Shakespeare’s Hamlet is without question one of the most famous, controversial and disputed plays in the Western World. An exploration of complex psychological profile of our eponymous protagonist, Shakespeare expertly moulds his construction, content and language to explore his own social and cultural realities. However, it is undoubtedly Shakespeare’s dramatic treatment of the tragic hero’s complex psychological struggle with vengeance and his disillusionment with both his interior and exterior worlds that imbue the play with a timeless universality. In the light of my critical study, it has become apparent that Hamlet is not so much a play about the action of ‘revenge’, but rather depicts a psychological and moral quandary and the implications this has on the human psyche through its examination of morality, appearance vs. reality, deception and the role of women. Shakespeare characterises Hamlet as in the midst of an internal and eternal struggle between action and inaction, however, the underlying cause of this is due to the inherent conflict between revenge and morality. Shakespeare has adopted Greek and Roman dramatic conventions such as the unities of time, action and place but readily adapted them to suit his own cultural reality and offered Elizabethan audiences a humanist exploration of personality as well as a tale of justifiable vengeance in response to a usurper’s act of regicide. Hamlet’s soliloquies illuminate to the audience the true nature of revenge and its effects on the human psyche. In his soliloquy at the end of Act 2, Hamlet ruminates on the fact that he is “prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell”; his revenge is a dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. On one hand, the Ghost has bestowed upon him his fate: he must avenge his father’s “most foul and unnatural murder”. Hamlet’s first soliloquy allows the audience to gain a direct understanding of the significance of the events that have surpassed through the mythological comparisons with Hernia, an “unweeded garden” which has turned “rank and gross” all things natural; the motif of decay and disease indicating to the audience that something “is rotten in the state of Denmark”, exacerbating these “unnatural” turn of events and the overthrow of the Great Chain of Being. On the other hand, the “unweeded garden” could also symbolise Hamlet’s moral strife in that his mind is overloaded with immoral thoughts of the deeds he must fulfil. Although Hamlet is demanded to accept the value of filial duty, the Ghost’s repetition of ‘adieu’, rich in etymological implications (literally meaning ‘to god’) reminds the audience of God’s laws: Hamlet cannot simultaneously hold the ideals of religion and filial duty, whilst he questions the morality of revenge. Throughout the play Hamlet grapples with the notion of murdering Claudius; I have come to understand his ‘delay’ as symbolising his incapability and unwillingness to commit himself to this abhorrent action shown most clearly in Act 3 when he chooses not to murder Claudius during prayer, making the excuse that he wishes Claudius to remain in purgatory as his father was condemned too. Hamlet thus leads the audience, whether Elizabethan or contemporary, to question their own ideas and ask themselves; what is justice' On the other hand, throughout his struggle to determine the ‘right’ course of action, it is evident that Hamlet becomes disillusioned with himself, as his conscience grapples with his love for his father and his humanist morals and philosophy. His soliloquies, contrary to typical revenge-tragedy conventions, give the audience an innate understanding of Hamlet’s internal struggle. In his soliloquy after seeing the player perform Hecuba, Hamlet berates himself for not being able to rise to this same level of emotion and passion, he questions his own person (“am I a coward'”) and uses histrionic allusions (“cue for passion” “drown the stage with tears”) to allude to his inability to act. On the other hand, he continually doubts his own cause due to the supernatural precursors to his fate (“the spirit that I have seen may be a devil”). Hamlet is disillusioned with his own indecision; his intellectual mindset render’s him an over-analyser, the ruminating academic. The tenuous balance between appearance and reality is one of the central problems for Hamlet. Throughout the play, Hamlet grapples with the impossibility of determining the identity and objectives of those around him in a world of “seeming”. Hamlet is keenly conscious of the discrepancy between appearance and reality with the repetition of seems (“Seems madam' Nay it is. I know not ‘seems’”), with the clothing motif (“suits of solemn black”, “inky cloak”, “cast thy nighted colour off”) reinforcing the idea that emotions can be easily changed and hidden. The technique of the ‘play within a play’ is the culmination of this blurred line between truth and deception, as Hamlet, in true Freudian fashion, projects onto the players his own failure to establish a correlation between word and action. The Mousetrap is a suspension of reality in that its scenes allows Hamlet to usurp not only the King’s authority, but also Polonius’ normal patrol over the rebels by acting as director, co-author and chorus, while using this usurped authority to present a ritual mimicry that both depicts uncrowning and enacts it as well, driving Claudius from his throne. Hamlet’s own view of reality is via players and via acting; as the world in which he resides is filled with conceit, rotten and decaying. He paradoxically views the play world as a preferable mimesis to the world of Elsinore. Hamlet is about accessing the hermeneutic possibilities of the play; its circles within circles of overt and covert interpreters, of theatre audiences displacing truth along the lines of multiple and multiplying perspectives. Using the play within the play to deflect the hermeneutic onslaught, Hamlet mobilises his own interpretive strategies in order to make sense of the world of illusions and deception. In this world of deceptions, facades and uncertainty, where one may “smile and smile” and still be a “damned villain”, Hamlet questions the validity of words and expression. Hamlet is disillusioned with language and words as a capacity for the deception and treachery that is rotting and decaying the state of Denmark. Claudius, our Machiavellian antagonist, uses words as a method of deceit; in public he is the quintessential statesman and speaks with authoritative confidence when dealing with the threat of Fortinbras (“So much for him”) and when expressing his ‘sorrow’ for the death of his brother using the lexical chain “dear”, “hearts”, “grief”, “woe”. His attempts to unify mutually exclusive concepts such as “with mirth in funeral and dirge in marriage” and “one dropping and one auspicious eye” illuminate his creation of ‘carefully balanced appearances’. The beginning of Act 2 is the culmination of Polonius’ position as the dithering sennex, excessively using rhetorical devices from tautology (“thus it remains, and the remainder thus”) to contradictory occupatio (“I swear I use no art at all”) to chiasmic clauses (“tis true, ‘tis pity, ‘tis true”) showing his sententious nature and rendering his words devoid of meaning and substance. From Hamlet’s condemnation of “words, words, words” to the use of the dumb show, the silent play opening the Mousetrap, it is evident that Hamlet struggles with the tenuous balance between the signifier and the signified, wanting identity to be fixed and concrete. In utilising iterate and quibbling discourse such as “S’blood, easier to be played” Hamlet is able to enunciate those hidden meanings within the world of deception of the Danish Court. Thus, Hamlet instructs the audience to act in a more moral fashion than those who use words for deceiving purposes. Hamlet not only analyses and scrutinises the actions, or lack thereof, of men, but discusses the role of women of the time. Specifically, Shakespeare establishes a whore/virgin dichotomy between Gertrude and Ophelia, establishing from the onset of the play an association between female sexuality and corruption (“frailty, thy name is woman!”). The character of Gertrude, although minor, offers insights into the nature of Hamlet and his treatment of Ophelia. The central protagonist’s identification of his mother as synonymous with ‘whore’ due to her adulterous betrayal of Old Hamlet (“in the rank sweat of an unseamed bed”), embarking on an incestuous relationship with Claudius, leads Hamlet to grow disillusioned with women as a whole, causing him to seemingly without reason treat the dutiful and innocent Ophelia (“I shall obey my lord”) as if she were a whore as well. The ‘closet’ scene is the key scene in regards to Hamlet’s interaction with his mother and is central to Freud’s theory of the oedipal complex that Hamlet is acting out “the repressed wishes of his childhood realised”: to kill and take his father’s place. However, Hamlet’s somewhat loquacious and overtly emotional attempt to save his mother can be interpreted as another deliberate delay, presenting us with insight into his psychological state and struggle with his inner turmoil. Hamlet thus explores the struggle inherent in the conflict between revenge and morality; through our eponymous protagonist’s problems with appearance vs. reality, deception and women alluding to his disillusionment with his exterior world. At the same time, it is his inner turmoil which gives us true insight into his character rather than his action, which gives the play its timeless universality.