Critical essay about hamlet

Critical essay about hamlet

 

Revenge and Hamlet's delay

Within Hamlet, the stories of five murdered father's sons are told: Hamlet, Laertes, Fortinbras, Pyrrhus, and Brutus. Each of them faces the question of revenge in a different way. For example, Laertes moves quickly to be "avenged most throughly of [his] father", while Fortinbras attacks Poland, rather than the guilty Denmark. Pyrrhus only stays his hand momentarily before avenging his father, Achilles, but Brutus never takes any action in his situation. Hamlet is a perfect balance in the midst of these stories, neither acting quickly nor being completely inactive.
Hamlet struggles to turn his desire for revenge into action, and spends a large portion of the play waiting rather than doing. Scholars have proposed numerous theories as to why he waits so long to kill Claudius. Some say that Hamlet feels for his victim, fearing to strike because he believes that if he kills Claudius he will be no better than him. The story of Pyrrhus, told by one of the acting troupe, for example, shows Hamlet the darker side of revenge, something he does not wish for. Hamlet frequently admires those who are swift to act, such as Laertes, who comes to avenge his father's death, but at the same time fears them for their passion, intensity, and lack of logical thought
Hamlet's speech in act three, where he chooses not to kill Claudius in the midst of prayer, has taken a central spot in this debate. Scholars have wondered whether Hamlet is being totally honest in this scene, or whether he is rationalizing his inaction to himself. Critics of the Romantic era decided that Hamlet was merely a procrastinator, in order to avoid the belief that he truly desired Claudius' spiritual demise. Later scholars suggested that he refused to kill an unarmed man, or that he felt guilt in this moment, seeing himself as a mirror of the man he wanted to destroy. Historical discoveries, however, assert that Elizabethan ideas of revenge required spiritual and physical destruction for complete justice. Thus, for Hamlet to truly keep the oath he made to his father, he must wait for the right moment, as he explains.^[42] The physical image of Hamlet stabbing to death an unarmed man at prayer, from behind, would have been shocking to any theatre audience. Similarly, the question of "delay" must be seen in the context of a stage play - Hamlet's "delay" between learning of the murder and avenging it would be about three hours at most - hardly a delay at all.
The play is also full of constraint imagery. Hamlet describes Denmark as a prison, and himself as being caught in birdlime. He mocks the ability of man to bring about his own ends, and points out that some divine force molds men's aims into something other than what they intend. Other characters also speak of constraint, such as Polonius, who orders his daughter to lock herself from Hamlet's pursuit, and describes her as being tethered. This adds to the play's description of Hamlet's inability to act out his revenge.

Madness

Hamlet has been compared to the Earl of Essex, who was executed for leading a rebellion against Queen Elizabeth. Essex's situation has been analyzed by scholars for its revelations into Elizabethan ideas of madness in connection with treason as they connect with Hamlet. Essex was largely seen as out of his mind by Elizabethans, and admitted to insanity on the scaffold before his death. Seen in the same context, Hamlet is quite possibly as mad as he is pretending to be, at least in an Elizabethan sense.

Protestantism

Hamlet was a student at Wittenberg or so is thought. Wittenberg is "one of only two universities that Shakespeare ever mentions by name," and "was famous in the early sixteenth century for its teaching of ... Luther's new doctrine of salvation."^[31] Furthermore, Hamlet's reference to "a politic convocation of worms" has been read as cryptic allusion to Luther's famous theological confrontation with the Holy Roman Emperor at the Diet of Worms in 1521.
However, the more influential Reformer in early seventeenth century England was John Calvin, a strong advocate of predestination; many critics have found traces of Calvin's predestinarian theology in Shakespeare's play. Calvin explained the doctrine of predestination by comparing it to a stage, or a theater, in which the script is written for the characters by God, and they cannot deviate from it. God, in this light, sets up a script and a stage for each of his creations, and decrees the end from the beginning, as Calvin said: "After the world had been created, man was placed in it, as in a theater, that he, beholding above him and beneath the wonderful work of God, might reverently adore their Author." Scholars have made comparisons between this explanation of Calvin's and the frequent references made to the theatre in Hamlet, suggesting that these may also take reference to the doctrine of predestination, as the play must always end in its tragic way, according to the script.
Rulers and religious leaders feared that the doctrine of predestination would lead people to excuse the most traitorous of actions, with the excuse, "God made me do it." English Puritans, for example, believed that conscience was a more powerful force than the law, due to the new ideas at the time that conscience came not from religious or government leaders, but from God directly to the individual. Many leaders at the time condemned the doctrine, as: "unfit 'to keepe subjects in obedience to their sovereigns" as people might "openly maintayne that God hath as well pre-destinated men to be trayters as to be kings."^[46] King James, as well, often wrote about his dislike of Protestant leader's taste for standing up to kings, seeing it as a dangerous trouble to society.^[47] In Hamlet's final decision to join the sword-game of Laertes, and thus enter his tragic final scene, he says to the fearful Horatio:

"There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet will it come—the readiness is all. Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't to leave betimes, let be."^[48]

In itself, this line lays the final capstone on Hamlet's decision. The line appears to base this decision on his believed predestination as the killer of the king, no matter what he may do. The potential allusion to predestinarian theology is even stronger in the first published version of Hamlet, Quarto 1, where this same line reads: "There's a predestinate providence in the fall of a sparrow." Scholars have wondered whether Shakespeare was censored, as the word "predestined" appears in this one Quarto of Hamlet, but not in others, and as censoring of plays was far from unusual at the time.

Feminist

Ophelia, distracted by grief (4.5). Feminist critics have explored her descent into madness in her defense.

Feminist critics have focused on the gender system of Early Modern England. For example, they point to the common classification of women as maid, wife or widow, with only whores outside this trilogy. Using this analysis, the problem of Hamlet becomes the central character's identification of his mother as a whore due to her failure to remain faithful to Old Hamlet, in consequence of which he loses his faith in all women, treating Ophelia as if she were a whore also.
Carolyn Heilbrun published an essay on Hamlet in 1957 entitled "Hamlet's Mother". In it, she defended Gertrude, arguing that the text never hints that Gertrude knew of Claudius poisoning King Hamlet. This view has been championed by many feminists Heilbrun argued that the men who had interpreted the play over the centuries had completely misinterpreted Gertrude, believing what Hamlet said about her rather than the actual text of the play. In this view, no clear evidence suggests that Gertrude was an adulteress. She was merely adapting to the circumstances of her husband's death for the good of the kingdom.
Ophelia, also, has been defended by feminists, most notably by Elaine ShowalterOphelia is surrounded by powerful men: her father, brother, and Hamlet. All three disappear: Laertes leaves, Hamlet abandons her, and Polonius dies. Conventional theories had argued that without these three powerful men making decisions for her, Ophelia was driven into madness.^[54] Feminist theorists argue that she goes mad with guilt because, when Hamlet kills her father, he has fulfilled her sexual desire to have Hamlet kill her father so they can be together. Showalter points out that Ophelia has become the symbol of the distraught and hysterical woman in modern culture, a symbol which may not be entirely accurate nor healthy for women.
Since this theory, the 'closet scene' in which Hamlet confronts his mother in her private quarters has been portrayed in a sexual light in several performances. Hamlet is played as scolding his mother for having sex with Claudius while simultaneously wishing (unconsciously) that he could take Claudius' place; adultery and incest is what he simultaneously loves and hates about his mother. Ophelia's madness after her father's death may be read through the Freudian lens as a reaction to the death of her hoped-for lover, her father. Her unrequited love for him suddenly slain is too much for her and she drifts into insanity.
In addition to the brief psychoanalysis of Hamlet, Freud offers a correlation with Shakespeare's own life: Hamlet was written in the wake of the death of his father (in 1601), which revived his own repressed childhood wishes; Freud also points to the identity of Shakespeare's dead son Hamnet and the name 'Hamlet'. "Just as Hamlet deals with the relation of a son to his parents", Freud concludes, "so Macbeth (written at approximately the same period) is concerned with the subject of childlessness." Having made these suggestions, however, Freud offers a caveat: he has unpacked only one of the many motives and impulses operating in the author's mind, albeit, Freud claims, one that operates from "the deepest layer"
Later in the same book, having used psychoanalysis to explain Hamlet, Freud uses Hamlet to explain the nature of dreams: in disguising himself as a madman and adopting the license of the fool, Hamlet "was behaving just as dreams do in reality [...] concealing the true circumstances under a cloak of wit and unintelligibility". When we sleep, each of us adopts an "antic disposition"

Gothic

Hamlet contains many elements that would later show up in Gothic Literature. From the growing madness of Prince Hamlet, to the violent ending to the constant reminders of death, to, even, more subtly, the notions of humankind and its structures and the viewpoints on women, Hamlet evokes many things that would recur in what is widely regarded as the first piece of Gothic literature, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, and in other Gothic works.^[60] Walpole himself even wrote, in his second preference to Otranto:
That great master of nature, Shakespeare, was the model I copied. Let me ask if his tragedies of Hamlet and Julius Cæsar would not lose a considerable share of their spirit and wonderful beauties, if the humour of the grave- diggers, the fooleries of Polonius, and the clumsy jests of the Roman citizens, were omitted, or vested in heroics?

Heroic

Paul Cantor, in his short text called simply Hamlet, formulates a compelling theory of the play that places the prince at the center of the Renaissance conflict between Ancient and Christian notions of heroism. Cantor says that the Renaissance signified a "rebirth of classical antiquity within a Christian culture".^[62] But such a rebirth brought with it a deep contradiction: Christ's teachings of humility and meekness ("whoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also"^[63]) are in direct conflict with the ancient ethos that is best represented by Achilles' violent action in the Iliad ("I wish only that my spirit and fury would drive me to hack your meat away and eat it raw for the things that you have done to me"
For Cantor, the character of Hamlet exists exactly where these two worlds collide. He is in one sense drawn towards the active side of heroism by his father's legacy ("He smote the sledded Polaks on the ice"^[65]) and the need for revenge ("now could I drink hot blood. And do such bitter business as the day/ Would quake to look on"^[66]). Simultaneously though, he is pulled towards a religious existence ("for in that sleep of death what dreams may come"^[67]) and in some sense sees his father's return as a ghost as justification for just such a belief.
The conflict is perhaps most evident in 3.3 when Hamlet has the opportunity to kill the praying Claudius. He restrains himself though, justifying his further hesitation with the following lines: "Now might I do it pat, now ‘a is a-praying;/ And now I’ll do it- and so ‘a goes to heaven,/ And so am I reveng’d. That would be scann’d:/ A villain kills my father, and for that/ I, his sole son, do this same villain send/ To heaven.".^[68] At this moment it is clear that the prince's single mind and body are being torn apart by these two powerful ideologies.
Even in the famous 3.1 soliloquy, Hamlet gives voice to the conflict. When he asks if it is "nobler in the mind to suffer",^[69] Cantor believes that Shakespeare is alluding to the Christian sense of suffering. When he presents the alternative, "to take arms against a sea of troubles",^[70] Cantor takes this as an ancient formulation of goodness.
Cantor points out that most interpretations of Hamlet (such as the Psychoanalytic or Existentialist) see "the problem of Hamlet as somehow rooted in his individual soul" whereas Cantor himself believes that his Heroic theory mirrors "a more fundamental tension in the Renaissance culture in which he lives".^[71]