Blog 4: response to February 13th

Posted on February 13, 2007

To the extent that Hamlet is not completely insane (as Ophelia clearly is late in the play), the issue of whether he hallucinates in I.v is only important to the extent it helps explain that inexplicable plot detail: why does he delay in killing Claudius? T. S. Eliot and Stephen Greenblatt both note that in altering his sources on this point, Shakespeare bends, breaks, distorts a simple revenge story in such a way that a) the path of the story becomes convoluted (even at the end it isn't clear why Hamlet finally kills Claudius since he was unable to do so earlier) and b) the tension of the story shifts to Shakespeare's representation of what Greenblatt calls "tormented inwardness." As I noted in class today, this way of representing the tragic hero will become the hallmark of Shakespearean tragedy. A character like Jake in Chinatown might ultimately be tormented by guilt (certainly, the "catharsis" suggests that), but we don't see a that torment built into the story itself; it is really something we infer from the structure of the plot. And I should also observe again (I noted this in class as well) that while there are similarities between Shakespeare's depiction of character and Aristotle's notion of "ethos," Shakespeare does not attempt to convey character strictly in terms of the moral accountability that Aristotle imagines; Shakespeare's tragic heroes struggle with sanity, with deep mental conflict, but intelligible moral choice is usually only one small part of what Shakespeare aims to depict in his central characters. And Shakespeare typically embodies the mental struggle of his heroes in those famous soliloquies (like the "to be or not to be" speech; obviously, there's nothing equivalent in Chinatown). I would add as well that much of what Shakespeare depicts goes to unconscious drives, feelings, and needs as opposed to conscious and rational choices about how to conduct ourselves in the world. (Note, for example, that Hamlet's deep feelings of depression or disillusionment--whatever you want to call it--precede his encounter with the Ghost and therefore have little to do with the specific charge to avenge his father's murder: see I.ii and Greenblatt's discussion on pp. 306-07 of his essay "Speaking with the Dead.")

I noted today that the simplest answer to the question of why Hamlet delays (which isn't much of an answer) is that something more than revenge is involved here; that is, Shakespeare borrowed the plot structure of revenge-drama (very popular in the 1590s on the London stage), but in the end he produced a story who structuring motivation became something other than revenge, something that we might understand best through Psychoanalysis (grief, mourning, loss, perverse sexuality ... something). We considered Jones' Oedipal / sexual reading, a reading very much supported by the play and that, in turn, helps to explain much in the play (see Blog 3). Greenblatt and Robert Watson ("Giving up the Ghost" ... and we'll return to this reading the last class before Spring Break) agree that the torment of Hamlet--which is also the torment of Shakespeare--has something to do with the crisis of mourning that came upon Shakespeare in the wake of his son Hamnet's death in 1596 and in relation to the imminent death of John Shakespeare (our playwright's father). Watson eventually takes this argument in a new direction, but, like Greenblatt, Watson feels that the very writing of revenge-tragedy in Shakespeare's England was a kind of psycho-social attempt to supply an outlet for grief that had been shut off by the Reformation: suddently the Catholic "cult of the dead" (Greenblatt's term) which had helped maintain a sense of contact with the deceased loved one and to create a bridge between this world and the afterlife (and thus with some sense of our ultimate "purpose") was disbanded by the emergence of new Protestant ritual and theological habits. Certainly, Shakespeare's play is very concerned with what seems to be the maimed rites of mourning (Greenblatt refers to "damaged rituals"): Hamlet and Laertes both complain that what is provided as a way of commemorating the dead is insufficient (indeed, this is the explict reason that Hamlet is so angry with Gertrude: that in remarrying, she has failed in her obligation to mourn adequately; she has moved on from grief too quickly, and this anger precedes the Ghost's command to vengeance). Does Hamlet delay because he cannot see a clear relationship between mourning and murder? Certainly, he could honor his father by killing his father's killer, but is that the best way to remember the dead? to maintain contact with the dead? Hamlet never really avenges his father's murder (he seems to kill Claudius for different reasons), so we can imagine that he never feels that he can properly remember his father--mourn his father's passing--by killing (though, paradoxically, his resistance to killing his father's murderer leads directly to the deaths of seven other people: Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet himself ... and only Claudius as an extension of those other deaths). And the final irony is that in destroying the Danish Royal Court Hamlet unwittingly permits Fortinbras to take over (the son of King Hamlet's great enemy); in other words, by resisting the call to vengeance, Hamlet becomes the means of dishonoring the achievements of his father--his ends up remembering his father by dishonoring his legacy. Somewhere in there lie the seeds of tragedy.

One can read this play as a play more about a crisis of mourning disguised as a revenge story (mourning both at a personal level and at a social level). The torment over how to grieve, how to remember, blunts the plot drive for vengeance. In a sense, the play is more about a crisis of identity itself than about revenge. To put it another way, the loss of a cultural ritual of mourning leads to a self (Hamlet's self / Shakespeare's self) unprotected in grief, lost, isolated, unredeemed. Greenblatt's most direct statement of this situation is the following: "something interferes with the straightforward plan [for revenge, what we get in the sources], an interference whose emblem is the feigned madness that makes no sense in the plot" (318). And he concludes (320) that the sense of uncertainty in Hamlet the person and Hamlet the play and the feeling that Hamlet and Shakespeare are both groping for their story are "linked to a broader sense of doubt and disorientation in a play where the whole ritual structure for dealing with loss has been fatally damaged."

The compensation for this torment might have been the deepening of Shakespeare's artistic abililty to represent the complexities of states of mind at times of crisis: suffering goes inside the head. In this, as I suggested earlier, Shakespeare takes tragedy in a new direction: it now resides at the site of an interior struggle with the very nature of meaning in our lives, with unconscious forces that shape us. We have a supernatural figure in the Ghost, but Hamlet does not, on the surface, appear to be about fate in the same way that Greek tragedy often was (though Macbeth might represent a move back toward Greek religion). Despite the Ghost, the action of Hamlet mainly appears on a human plane, but the story is not morally rational in the way Aristotle thought a tragedy should be. And, broadly speaking, in Shakespearean tragedy, the conflict between rational and irrational thought, a condition of self-consciousness that is almost pathological (though beautifully expressed in the cadences of Shakepeare's poetry), takes center stage. For Shakespeare, tragedy is about the suffering that occurs in the mind of the protagonist yet bursts forth in poetic utterance.

Robert Watson has a related reading, but it takes the crisis of mourning as a sign of a sort of tragedy that returns us to the paganism of the ancient Greeks--as Nietzsche analyzes that in The Birth of Tragedy. We will come back to the reading on March 8th (I think).