So--theoretically-- if somebody whacked my beloved old man then
proceeded to wed and bed my mom I'd resolutely be set on the path to
complete, ultimate, and dare I venture--Biblical--revenge. The
revenge story is almost always a gripping read. William Shakespeare,
no slaggard at using whatever was lying around, employed this theme
in many fashions, as in Romeo’s hot-blooded slaying of Tybalt in
Romeo and Juliet and Prospero’s agonizing treatment of his brother
Antonio in The Tempest. However, nowhere in his esteemed canon does
revenge figure so dramatically as in Hamlet.
But there's a twist: unlike many other revenge procedurals where we
watch the protagonist embark on a nonstop program of retribution, our
woefully incapable prince dithers and procrastinates, dragging out
the patience of both his co-characters and his audience as he
struggles with the issue of intellectualism versus politics.
Basically, Hamlet’s problem is his ceaseless attempts to
rationalize what he has been taught at a very progressive university
against what he has been raised with: the traditionally violent
course of action. For many other characters whose near and dear were
ruthlessly murdered it might be a simple choice to enact revenge (one
need only look at Malcolm and Macduff), but for the troubled Prince
of Denmark, it is a tortuous and soul-searching process. Neither
Malcolm not Macduff (as far as we know) were the recipients of a
newfangled Enlightenment education stressing thought and rationality
over knee-jerk lethal retribution. I argue that, Hamlet's moral,
ethical, and political confusion, is his scholastic training that
renders the prince hamstrung and confused.
Shakespeare could have had Hamlet educated anywhere in western
Europe, (for instance, Hamburg) but he deliberately puts him at
Wittenberg. George Bernard Shaw wrote that “Hamlet as a prehistoric
Dane is morally bound to kill his uncle, politically as rightful heir
to the usurped throne, and filially as ‘the son of a dear father
murdered’ and a mother seduced by an incestuous adulterer”
(Wilson 79). Seems like a pretty sound reason for revenge, I’d say.
But the influence of Wittenberg’s neoclassical/Protestant training,
Hamlet finds himself totally incapable of reconciling what he feels
he must do to retain honor and salvage the future of Denmark—which
is kill Claudius and avenge his father’s murder—and the impulse
to constrain nature’s basest behavioral level through a rational,
modern, progressive mindset, not to mention coupled with the threat
of eternal damnation for murder.
To wit: Wittenberg was the home of Martin Luther, whose teachings
destroyed the homogenous rule of Roman Catholicism. As Luther reacted
so angrily to the excess and corruption that he found in Rome, so
also did his adherents attempt to prohibit similar faults in their
own religious lives, and instead of bowing to numerous intermediaries
between themselves and God, cut out the thousands of earthly
middlemen between themselves and their deity.
Shakespeare mirrors this rejection of excess and rejection through
Hamlet, who sees his uncle (named a regicide by a spirit in the shape
of his deceased father, but we'll get to that in a minute) carrying
on late into the night, drinking and carousing: “The King doth wake
tonight and takes his rouse/Keeps wassail and the swag’ring upscale
reels/And, as he drains his draughts of Rhenish down,/The kettledrum
and trumpet thus bray out/The triumph of his pledge” (Shakespeare
I.iv.9). Hamlet plainly sees a direct corollary to what Luther railed
against: the debauchment and moral diminishment of one who should
have been respected and revered.
It is important to note that Hamlet only objects to his uncle’s
(and now step-father’s) Bohemian habits and ignores—or is
hampered in his ability to denigrate—Claudius’s abilities as
king. In fact Claudius does indeed conduct himself quite ably as
Denmark’s monarch, especially hammering out solutions to tricky
situations such as hamstringing the impending attack of the Norwegian
hothead Fortinbras in act II, scene ii, and later on when he handles
Laertes deftly, both in act IV, scene v when Laertes comes to
Claudius looking for blood to match his father’s spilled blood (and
incidentally finds his beloved sister Ophelia gone mad from Hamlet's
coarse abandonment), and in act V, scene vii, when he puts the
grief-stricken youth in a position to “accidentally” kill Hamlet
through a rigged fencing match. Claudius' ability to judge and
negotiate a difficult situation and sway others to his point of view
makes him a man who should be in power. He's no dummy.
Hamlet's situation would be more than enough for most any other
victim to bear, and these others might not think twice about setting
the matter straight and immediately and without a second thoght
putting the usurper’s head on a stick. But Shakespeare set up his
Hobson’s Choice well: Although Claudius is utterly odious to
Hamlet, the Prince is held back from killing him by his newfound
Protestant religious beliefs which include both a more strict reading
of the Bible and the elimination of church intermediaries between the
supplicant and God, putting the supplicant face-to-face with the
Almighty. Both of these practices effectively serve to keep Hamlet
from enacting bloody revenge.
The Bible clearly states that “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” and even
though Hamlet ignores this in times of hot blood, causing the death
of Polonius, he does, I believe, bear the weight of this commandment
in mind throughout the play. It would be illogical for Hamlet, in
times of sobering thought, to ignore what is possibly the best-known
single line from the Bible, especially when he knows that being in a
one-to-one relationship with The Almighty leaves absolutely no wiggle
room. Hamlet has mused on the prohibition of wrongful death—in the
form of suicide—before, when he bemoans “Or that the Everlasting
had not fixed/His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!” (I.ii.135). This
commandment effectively prohibits the one course that Hamlet could
pursue to quell his moral outrage. (There's a reason why barbarians
don't go to college.)
So it is his intellectuality that ultimately stops him from killing
Claudius outright, and here lies another paradox that tortures the
prince. Wittenberg, considered a radical university for its time,
taught neoclassicism. It is this neoclassicism that fills Hamlet with
florid tales of antiquity, many of them overflowing with murder and
revenge. If Hamlet was not confused before, he receives no help here.
These sanguinely gushing tales seal the fate of the prince, who was
(by his tendency to lean away from bloodshed in the first place)
obviously of a nonviolent nature to begin with, by allowing him to
avoid the realm of physical action and dwell solely in the realm of
the intellect.
Neoclassicism, like Lutheranism, lays down strict rules. Accented are
structure, reasoning, and a focus on humankind; art should be a
mirror to the image of man. Shakespeare clearly illustrates this
through Hamlet’s exhortations to the players:
“For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose
end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as t’were, the
mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own
image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure”
(III.ii.20-26).
In modern terms...don't ham it up.
Hamlet’s classical training would have instilled in him the idea
that literature was an art perfected by the Greeks and Romans and
could only be achieved by prolonged study—a philosophical
indoctrination. Hamlet’s adherence to this mode of thought further
crippled his ability to “think on his feet”, or be able to act
with relative quickness and surety. His slowness to action
exacerbates the already tense situation, driving everyone around him
nuts, and when he hamfistedly does break into quick action, people
drop like flies, as evidenced by the impassioned slaying of Polonius
and the “brilliant idea" of forging the letter that get
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern killed.
As mentioned above, the other side of the Classical paradox is the
subject material to which Hamlet would have been exposed, one that
Shakespeare himself mined throughout his career for all it was worth.
Many are the tales of murder and revenge that Hamlet would have
encountered, especially those of ancients such as Homer and Seneca.
Seneca figures importantly in Hamlet because Shakespeare modeled
Hamlet—directly or indirectly—on Senecan tragedy, emphasizing
melodrama, bloodshed and revenge. Particularly Senecan is the use of
a wronged ghost to introduce the vengeance theme. It is obvious that
Hamlet has absorbed the writings of the ancients because at nearly
every instance he invokes their literature and mythologies. By my
count, there are no less than 38 instances of conjuring up the worlds
of the Greeks and Romans—most notably in the speech about Pyhrrus
and Priam. He also frequently invokes the Christian god, seemingly
without any more intent than dramatic effect. This attests to the
prince’s confusion between reality and theory; if he cannot
separate the two theologies in thought or speech, how much weight
does he give to either?
Hamlet’s hamartia is his inability to decide between his duty and
his philosophy. C.J. Sisson writes that Hamlet is “a man of urbane
intellectuality and immune from...crude passions” (Sisson 53). In
the 1948 Laurence Olivier-directed movie of Hamlet, Olivier subtitles
the film “The Prince Who Couldn’t Make Up His Mind.” Both are
correct. Hamlet is a man of the mind; thus neither kingship nor any
other physical, ruthless vocation is for him.
And as if all this weren’t confusing enough for the poor kid,
Shakespeare further turns up the paradox theme by introducing the
father-ghost. Given the doctrine of Protestantism, which denies
Purgatory and effectively closes out any transportation to or from
either Heaven or Hell, it is therefore impossible that the ghost
should be able to appear at all. Hamlet himself acknowledges this
when he admits that death is “The undiscovered country from whose
bourn no traveler returns” (Shakespeare III.i.87). So how can the
ghost of his father appear to him when liturgical teachings
absolutely forswear this phenomenon? The only other possibility is
that the apparition is a demon sent by the devil to bring wrack and
ruin to Hamlet and Denmark. The ghost is real, remember: Horatio,
Bernardo, and Marcellus have also witnessed it.
But this is Shakespeare again messing with not only Hamlet’s, but
the audience’s minds as well (which is ultimately the playwright’s
job). It is not ultimately important whether the ghost is the real
thing because the play deals not with the ghost's legitimacy but
Hamlet’s subsequent journey to decision. In any event, the ghost’s
accusation is eventually proven correct by Claudius’s own
confession in the chapel, thereby validating at least the original
impetus for Hamlet’s troubles.
In the end, Hamlet never really does decide what to do. He constantly
waffles among laying traps, playing insane, spreading disinformation,
and blustering through ragings promising blood. At one point he asks
himself, “Am I a coward?”, and at another he claims to be
“Heaven’s scourge and minister.” What it takes to make Hamlet
act is a series of events that push him along towards an inevitable
conclusion. Shaw writes:
“He finds to his bewilderment that he cannot kill his uncle
deliberately. In a sudden flash of rage he can and does stab at him
through the arras, only to find that he has killed poor old Polonius
by mistake. In a later transport, when the unlucky uncle poisons not
only Hamlet’s mother, but his own accomplice and Hamlet himself,
Hamlet actually does at last kill his enemy on the spur of the
moment” (Wilson 80).
Shaw then goes on to add that “This is no solution to the problem:
it cuts the Gordian knot instead of untying it” (80). Shakespeare
knew his audiences and their taste for action and shed blood, so
ending the play this way was most likely more satisfying than just
offing Claudius (especially after five whole acts). The Bard's
instincts were wholly on target, creating possibly the most famous
work for stage until, say, oh...Hamilton?
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Pocket Books. 1992.
New York
Sisson, C.J. Shakespeare’s Tragic Justice. Metheun and Co. Ltd.
London, England.
Wilson, Edwin. Shaw on Shakespeare: An Anthology of Bernard Shaw’s
Writings on the Plays and Production of Shakespeare. E.P. Dutton and
Co. Ed. Edwin Wilson. 1961. New York.
Young, Karl. The Shakespeare Skeptics. The Century Co. 1925. New York
