Some argue that he doesn’t want to take revenge and uses madness as a vehicle of evasion because he wants to disassociate himself from reality- admits to himself that he is a weak coward in Act II Scene II line 585. Hamlet, I believe is not mad or insane. He constantly reminds us that he adopts this ‘anticdisposition’. He tells this to Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, his mother and Horatio. Still the number of betrayals he falls victim to emotionally strains him: Claudius, Gertrude, Rosencrantz, Gulderstern, and Ophilia all betray him. Every close relationship that he had fell apart, but he is still quite sane. Every action is done with a purpose. Even when he goes through the ‘would you play me like a pipe’ scene the logic is still quite intact. One student once told me that they believed that, “Upon Hamlet’s shoulder’s rests the weight of a new consciousness. The way that I see it is that he has, in his state of creative melancholia, been allowed such a glimpse into the nature of reality and human experience that this young Whittenburg scholar is cast into a state bordering closely on madness bringing in waves of self-doubt resulting in violently conflicting emotions. While he institutes his plan that includes feigned madness, it soon spins out of control because his emotions come into conflict with his reasoning. The source of this conflict may be his desire to be a good son and avenge his father. So he is in a state of temporary paralysis until he awakens from his fever, as he says in Act v to Horatio, to ‘a kind of fighting/ that would not let me sleep’. A.W. Schlegel said in respect to Hamlet’s character: “I cannot, as I understand the poet’s views, pronounce altogether so favourable a sentence upon it as Goethe does. He is, it is true, a highly cultivated mind, a prince of royal manners…he acts the part of madness with unrivalled power, convincing the persons who are sent to examine into his supposed loss of reason, merely telling them unwelcomed truths’
One critic said “Shakespeare has denied Hamlet of literary genius- as we know from his letters to Ophilia, Hamlet is not much of a writer.” Even if this is true, in every other aspect he dazzles. He can out-talk, out-think and out-feel anyone on stage, and that is precisely what he spends most of his days doing. So enamoured is Shakespeare of his creation that he seems willing to forgive him for anything- even the repeated destruction of innocent lives. Think of how many people Hamlet kills. He is directly or indirectly responsible for six of the play’s eight deaths, and some of his victims are guilty of nothing but incomprehension. Is there any other play in which the hero kills so many innocent people and yet retains our sympathy and admiration? An uncomfortable point but true. Another example, I believe, of Hamlet displaying traits of being a poet is in his production of the play-within-the-play. This is the true climax in the play. The play and Claudius’ reaction to it is ‘ground more relative than this’. From this point forward, the play takes on a sprint of action. A very good description of a climax is the point of decision, of inevitability and no return. The high point of conflict and tension. Once he discovers Claudius’ guilt, there is no turning back…his father’s murder will be avenged. That is now inevitable. But why did Hamlet have to put on the play? Why did he not just trust the Ghost? I believe Hamlet to be like an actor who refuses to take a line reading from his director- the reading may be accurate but it isn’t his; he didn’t discover it for himself; to mimic would be false, inauthentic and cowardly. Why else does he stage the play scene if not to find out for himself whether or not his father was murdered by his uncle? The ghost told him the story, but hamlet cannot take anything in faith. This may be regarded as being an argument to backup the idea that character of Hamlet was a sensitive poet, unable to endure the cruel pressures of the world. Ha cannot distinguish between seeming and being.
My favourite moments in the play are those scenes in which Hamlet’s clever word play allows him to completely deceive his listener, while he enjoys the ‘private double meaning’ (and sometimes triple meaning) which the carefully chosen words contain. The most obvious examples come in his scenes with Polonius, where he manages to insult his to his face, all the while keeping up the façade that his dialogue is merely babbling nonsense. Other similar moments come when he speaks to Rosencrantz and Guildenstein, and Ophelia, and both Ophelia and Gertrude (before the play-within-the-play). The poetry is of course wonderful. The imagery of the language is powerful, and thought-provoking. However, it is these moments of ‘private enjoyment’ where only Hamlet (and the audience) are aware of the ‘depth’ which the language has that Hamlet could be viewed as a poet unable to put up with the pains of society, as the other characters on stage believe Hamlet to be mad.
There has been much critical application given to Freud’s theory of the Oedipus complex in the tragedy of Hamlet. Freud believed that the personal crisis that Hamlet has endured awakened his suppressed desires. That his disgust of his mother’s hasty remarriage, as well as the violent behaviour during Gertrude’s and Hamlet’s confrontation in the Queen’s chamber’s, arouses him and are a sign of his jealousy he constantly suffers. The chamber scene is sometimes seen to be an upturn of Hamlet’s repugnance to sexuality, which is more often than not is associated with vulgarity and sickness. Ernest Jones shares the idea that Hamlet suffers from an Oedipus complex (loves his mother and is sexually attracted to her). The thoughts of Hamlet is anguished by the thoughts of his father being replaced in his mother’s affections by somebody else, as if his devotion to his mother had made him incredibly jealous for her affection, that he found this a difficult enough task when his father was alive let alone when his mother’s affections have been converted to another man. This could be an interpretation of Hamlet being a man who is driven by sexual desire for his mother. Nevertheless I disagree with this view. On speaking to a Psychology student about the idea of the Oedipus complex their response was. “I really appreciate these questions about hamlet and the Oedipus complex. You cannot think about the Oedipus complex only as a lust for the mother and hate for the father. This happens only in childhood, when the boy is about 4-6 years old. Oedipus complex is much more “complex“ than this. It involves not only the lust for the mother, but also the fear of retaliation by the father. It also involves also guilt feeling, not only for the incestuous desire, but also for the death’s desire against the father. In addition, the “lust-for-the-mother” is latent, and cannot be observed by the “manifest” speech of a person. “ Unless you can read the text searching for the latent desire, you will find nothing in the text that says that Hamlet has an Oedipus complex. We must never forget that Hamlet is just a character in a play and so cannot be psychoanalysed. Also in the play Hamlet is a man of thirty years old and so should have shaken off any sort of hormonal lust for his mother.
Another argument against the idea of the Oedipus complex in Hamlet is the fact that Hamlet feels contempt for his mother for marrying and sleeping wither ex-husband’s murderer. From this experience hamlet develops a general loathing for womankind “frailty, thy name is woman”. Hamlet’s contempt for his mother can be clearly viewed in Act III Scene IV. Hamlet makes Gertrude feel guilty for her actions. However, Hamlet, despite his father’s instructions to “Taint not thy mind nor let thy soul contrive/ Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven”( Act I Scene V lines 85-86) , wishes to pain his mother but does not hold off when mother pleads him “O speak to me no more/ These words are like daggers enter my ears/ No more, sweet Hamlet” (Act III Scene IV lines 94-96) when he graphically and disgustingly describes his mother’s and uncle’s sexual acts as ‘spread the compost on the weeds/to make them grow ranker’ and ‘but to live/ in the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,/ stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love/ over the nasty sty!’
Hamlet is disturbed by Gertrude’s welcoming Claudius into her “incestuous sheets” and he is even more upset when he learns that his mother has having an affair with is uncle before his father was murdered. Hamlet betrays his mother in Act II scene IV but no worse than he maligns Polonius and inexplicably Ophelia. Although the Ghost explicitly instructs hamlet not to seek revenge upon Gertrude but to ‘leave her to heaven’ instead. We do not gain the sense that Hamlet wishes to kill his mother. Hamlet does not think of Gertrude as actively ‘evil’, but, instead, as passive and, above all, ‘weak’. Thus he finally declares “Frailty, thy name is woman” (Act I, scene II). As this statement suggests Hamlet attributes his mother’s weakness to her gender rather than her particular person.
Hamlet wants to achieve two gaols with respect to Gertrude. One is to ex[press his anger against her, which he harbours for essentially the same reasons that he had it for Ophelia. Two is to somehow induce her to stop loving Claudius. This latter development would eliminate the possibility that Hamlet might feel some estrangement from motherly love in attempting to kill or from succeeding in killing Claudius. After all, in killing Claudius, hamlet would not be killing the man his beloved mother loves. Gertrude would also not condemn Hamlet for killing or attempting to kill Claudius if she did not love the king
Hamlet achieves one goal by treating Gertrude angrily, as his feigned insanity permits him to do so. However, goal two is lightly more difficult to fulfil. One means of achieving it would be for Hamlet to kill his mother or make her go insane, which he has licence to do thanks to his feigned insanity. Thus she would stop loving Claudius. However, he cannot do so as he harbours a basic psychological inhibition against destroying his own mother. Also he needs his mother’s love more than he needs Ophelia’s. Some would state that the evidence for this arbitrary reliance on his mother’s love comes from his father’s and Claudius both professing their powerful need for Gertrude’s love and approval. Hamlet being their blood relative, will likely feel the same. But to destroy is mother, would be an attack on his own identity. Thus, since Hamlet cannot induce his mother to stop loving Claudius by killing her or attempting to drive her insane, as he did with Ophelia, he must now somehow bring about this stoppage while leaving her alive and sane. He attempts to do this by confronting his mother wt the premises of Claudius’ crime, in the hopes that she will somehow think about them, realise that Claudius is guilty, and thus stop loving the king, without thinking that Hamlet believes these premises on the inside. Ultimately , even this attempt fails. Gertrude fails to respond to these premises with recognition of them and a subsequent conclusion that she no longer loves Claudius. At this point Hamlet now could have killed Claudius while feigning insanity. Thus he would escape estrangement, because his people would blame his action on his insanity, not on malicious intent. He does not do this, however, because he is subconsciously inhibited from deliberately killing the man his beloved mother loves.
Perhaps Hamlet is jealous of Claudius’ and Gertrude’s love affair as Hamlet holds so much contempt for his mother because Claudius has denied Hamlet of his love affair with Ophelia.
Hamlet may have a lust for mother or is it just jealousy that he has offended Ophelia, knows that she is not really suitable for him-
- WHAT PURPOSE DOES THE CHARACTER OF OPHILIA SERVE
- TARGET FOR ALL OF THE ANGER AND FRUSTRATION WITH HAMLET FEELS FOR HIS MOTHER. ASIDE FROM THE CHAMBER SECENE, HAMLET RE-BUKES GERTRUDE COMPARITIVLY LITTLE. HOWEVER, HE IS MAKING REFERENCES TO HIS DISPLEASURE WITH HER IN HIS ASIDES
- THINK HAMLET DID REALLY LOVE HER BECAUSE OF THE GRAVEYARD SCENE- NEVER STOPPED LOVING HER- REALISES THAT OPHILIA CANNOT WILLINGLY DISOBEY HER FATHER. SHE WAS ONE MORE SOLID GOOD RELATIONSHIP THAT CLAUDIUS WAS ABLE TO TAKE AWAY
- SERVE TO BE ONE MORE THING THAT BETRAYS HIM- ONE MORE THING THAT ISN’T AS ITSEEMS.- OPHILIA IS ONE MORE RELATIONSHIP THAT HAMLET NEEDS BUT IS DENIED FOR CIRCUMSTNCES BEYOND HIS CONTROL. SHE IS SOMEONE HE SHOULD BE ABLE TO TRUST. SHE IS SOMEONE WHO LOVES HIM. PERHAPS HETHOUGHT THAT WITH HER HE COULD FEEL SAFE. BUT THEN HE SEES THAT SHE IS UNDER THE CONTROL OF HER FATHER WHO IS UNDER THE CONTROL OF CLAUDIUS.
- THE SUDDENSURPRISE OF OPHILIAS FUNERAL UNHINGES HIM ONCE AGAIN AND PASSION (WHICH HE THOUGHT HE WAS ABLE TO CONTROL) TAKES OVER.
POLITICAL REGIME
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THE CHARACTER OF CLAUDIUS IS A SLICK-TONGUED POLITICIAN AND IS PROBABLY QUITE POPULAR WITH THE PEOPLE. VIEW HOW HE HANDLES THE ENRAGED LAERTES IN ACT IV (I THINK). CLAUDIUS IS CALM, REASONABLE, AND DIPLOMATIC. HE KNOWS HOW TO GOVERN HIS COUNTRY. THEREFORE IT WOULD BE WRONG FOR HAMLET TO WALK IN AND KILL CLAUDIUS IN ORDER TO GAIN THE THRONE OF DENMARK. THE PRINCE WOULD BE SEEN AS A USURPER, NOT A CONQUERING HERO, AND WOULD HAVE PROBABLY BEEN PUT TO DEATH. HAMLET’S TASK IS TO KILL THE KING, BUT IN ORDER TO DO SO AND OBTAIN THE THRONE OF DENMARK HE MUST AT FIRST CONVINCE THE GENERAL PUBLIC THAT CLAUDIUS IS A VILLAIN. THE PLAY IS ONE WAY THAT HAMLET TRIES TO ACCOMPLISH THIS, HE HOPES THAT SEEING CLAUDIUS’ REACTION WILL MAKE IMPORTANT PEOPLE START TO ASK SOME VERY PROBING QUESTIONS. SO NOW HAMLET BECOMES A CAREFULLY CALCULATED STALING MATCH BETWEEN HAMLET AND CLAUDIUS. THE TWO ARE CIRCLING ONE ANOTHER, WITH THE THRONE OF DENMARK AT THE CENTRE OF THE STRUGGLE.
- HAMLET WAS INCREDIBLY POPULAR WITH THE PEOPLE , AND CLAUDIUS WASN’T. WE LEARN JUST HOW UNPOPULAR WHEN LAERTES RISES THE PEOPLE IN ABORTED REVOLT AGAINST CLAUDIUS. HAMLET COULD HAVE DONE THE EXACT SAME THING AS LAERTES, AND HE WOULDN’T HAVE BEEN MANIPULATED BY CLAUDIUS LIKE LAERTES WAS.
- FORTINBRAS, ONE OF HAMLET’S FOILS IN THE PLAY, MARCHES ON DENAMRK WITH AN ARMY TO AVENGE HIS FATHER’S DEATH. HAMLET WILES AWAY THE TIME, PLAYING MAD AND DECEIVING PEOPLE, BUT CCOMPLISHING NOTHING.
- THE DANES WERE SPECIAL IN THAT THEIR MONARCHY WAS NOT ONE OF PRIMOGENTOR BVUT RATHER ONE IN WHICH THE KING COULD CHOOSE A SUCCESSOR (WHO WAS OFTEN TIMES HS SON) AND THEN THIS SUCCESSOR COULD THEN BE APPROVED OR DISAPROVED OF BY THE LORDS AND LEADING FAMILIES. SIMILARLY, IF A MORE SUITABLE LEADER COULD BE FOUND, THERE WERE LEGITIMATE ROADS LORDS COULD TAKE TO INSTATE THIS INDIVIDUAL AS KING…SO WHEN THE PEOPLE CRY ‘LAEERTES SHALL BE KING!’ IT IS A REAL THREAT TO CLAUDIUS. HAMLET, IF HE WAS TO TAKE REVENGE FOR HIS FATHER’S MURDER EFFECTIVELY, SHOULD HAVE TRIED TOR OUSE SUPPORT IN A SIMILAR FASHION RATHER THAN PUT ON AN ‘ANTIC DISPOSITION’
- THE BELIEF IN THE LEX TALIONAS (‘EYE FOR AN EYE, AND TOOTH FOR A TOOTH’) IS ON ITS WAY OUT BY THIS POINT IN HISTORY. CHRISTIANITY HAS REACHED THE DANES BY THIS POINT BRINGING WITH IT CHANGED MORALITY.
- THE MORAL ORDER IN DENMARK IS UPSET, CHAOTIC AND SUBVERTED: CLAUDIUS, THE KING, HAS MURDERED HAMLET’S FATHER, THE PREVIOUS KING, USURPED HIS POSITION, AND MARRIED HAMLET’S MOTHER INCESTUOUSLY (THE LAW IN LEVICTICUS PUTS A BAN ON INCESTUOUS MARRIAGE) ALSO IT IS OVER HASTY. HAMLET’S FATHER APPEARS TO HAMLET AND TELLS HAMLET OF A “MURDER MOST FOUL” AND HE MUST “REVENGE” IT. THE HEAVY BURDEN ON HIS REFINED INTELLECT IS TOO ACCUTE. THIS IS COMPARISON TO LAERTES, AN INSENSITIVE, FIREY AND PASSIONATE MAN WHO IS READY TO KILL HAMLET IMMEDIATELY TO REVENGE THE DEATH OF THIS FATH, POLONIUS.
