There were several parts in the play that confused the Tiv. The way that Hamlet’s father’s ghost was not the way he was supposed to be. The Tiv thought the ghost was an omen sent by a witch. This confused Bohannan and she probably thought these people were stupid, but in fact they were just brought up to believe in witches and omens and not in ghosts. Bohannan said “In our country the son is next to the father.” She proved that not everyone did the same things everywhere in the world. Bohannan said, “ She had to teach the Tiv that in America it was different.” In saying that, she made herself closer to the truth that different cultures interpret things differently.
The Tiv thought the marriage with Gertrude and Claudius’ was right and that Gertrude shouldn’t have waited at least two years to marry since she was a widow. They thought he should get more wives and that Hamlet was old enough to take care of her mom anyways. Bohannan tried to tell them that men in her country only had one wife. Also the fact why Hamlet couldn’t marry Ophelia perplexed the Tiv. Bohannan said that Ophelia’s father didn’t let Hamlet see her because if Hamlet made love to her, it would be difficult to find a man for her because she had made love to another. The Tiv thought this was silly and said that “presents and patronage” would make up more than the difference.
Hamlet had turned mad. Bohannan thought that the Tiv would understand a person being angry and mad if he couldn’t marry Ophelia but she was wrong again. The Tiv thought that Hamlet went mad because of witchcraft and curses. It didn’t sound rational to them the idea that a man going crazy for a woman. The Tiv just had different set of beliefs and customs. They couldn’t understand something that they had never experienced before. It was like humans understanding four dimensions. The human doesn’t have the mental capacity and hasn’t seen four dimensions to understand it.
Hamlet found out that Claudius did in fact kill his father. He found out from his father’s ghost. He went to find Claudius to kill him and thought he was behind a curtain so he stuck the sword in the curtain and found out he had killed Ophelia’s father, Polonius! The Tiv thought that no one should try to kill an elder himself. Hamlet should have gone to his father’s friends to plot revenge. Ophelia became so disturbed from finding out that her love had killed her father that she drowned herself. A person dying from water was common in the modern societies where pools, oceans and bathtubs existed. The people of the tiv didn’t have those things and probably had a river that was only a few feet deep. They believed that only witches could make people die from water. Water was the nectar of the gods. It could not hurt you.
In the end there was a duel between Hamlet and Laertes. To make sure that Hamlet would lose, Claudius put poison on the sword so he could die even with a small wound. Claudius wanted to really make sure that Hamlet would die so he poisoned his wine too. Both of them got injured and died. Hamlet’s mom accidentally drank the poisoned wine and died. The Tiv thought that the wine wasn’t meant for only Hamlet but for Laertes too because Laertes knew too much about King Hamlet’s plot. This was an interesting point that could have sounded logical and intelligent. Bohannan had never thought of that. The Tiv were taking all sides of the story and it made them look very intelligent.
The modern societies and the Tiv had different interpretations of the Hamlet story. Bohannan thought there was all to know about the story but learned that different cultures have different views on it. Shakespeare had visions and morals in the story that could easily be understood by his same culture. Literature is so broad and doesn’t have a definite meaning. Its not like math where 1+1=2 all the time. The beauty of Bohannan’s trip was that she finally learned that its not intelligence that makes people understand it. A person could be a rocket scientist in Germany and understand the story in his own way, while a peasant in Antarctica would interpret the story in another way. The tiv might have thought that modern societies were wrong for doing some things such as trying to kill your elders. Modern societies would think that the people in the Tiv were not refined and would never really understand the true meanings of Shakespeare’s plays because they weren’t smart. They wouldn’t understand the story the way Shakespeare viewed it, that’s all. They would understand it their own way that still gave them meaning. The story didn’t need intelligence to be understood. If the person wanted to really understand the play the way it looked in Shakespeare’s eyes, they would have to be Shakespeare, or at least live in the same era, have his same morals, and know of his culture.
Bohannan was wrong about humans. Humans aren’t all the same. The English language also didn’t translate exactly to the Tiv’s language. “One could one can easily misinterpret the universal by misunderstanding the particular.” Bohannan did misunderstand the particular. She didn’t understand that culture plays a bigger role in understanding a story than intelligence does. One could say that intelligence is the sign of experience. In that way, both the tiv and Bohannan gained intelligence from the conversation about Hamlet. To finally understand culture, Bohannan would need a storyteller to visit her from a foreign place. She would then see that she was smart and it didn’t have anything to do with the fact that she didn’t understand the story. She just interpreted the story differently based on her culture.
