Hamlet and Modernity

Harold Bloom called Hamlet the most modern of Shakespeare's plays.  It is, but it is distinctive also for its hero's ultimate disavowal of modernity.

Hamlet is a modern prince, not a medieval one, a university scholar and a skeptic, one who dares to question religious authority in his private thoughts, in which he questions what happens to us after death instead of taking it as a given that either heaven or hell is at stake.  Hamlet looks back to Stoicism, but to do so is in context an Early Modern gesture.  To espouse classical ideas in a classical era is not modern; to embrace them in the Renaissance is.  Hamlet is charged with the task of the medieval warrior -- to enact vengeance on his father's murderer -- and it is no surprise that the sweet prince balks at the command.

Hamlet's father, by contrast, is a medieval warrior, right out of Icelandic saga, as Bloom puts it.  He's Beowulf, more or less, too busy making war to make love or any other nicety.  (No wonder then that slick-talker Claudius moves in on the Queen.)  The play itself spans historical eras.  At the beginning we have the Ghost, banished to Purgatory and thus a Catholic presence prefiguring the Reformation.  As the Ghost generally recedes we proceed through the Protestant era and by the end find ourselves in a post-Christian landscape, one in which the Prince, forced to choose between a Stoicism that condones suicide in certain conditions and a Christianity that forbids it as mortal sin, embraces parts of each philosophy but neither one entirely.  Hamlet makes a separate peace with fate, on his own terms. 

Shakespeare is perhaps the Colossus of the Early Modern era.  He has one foot solidly in the old world of antiquity, one in the modern era.  It is a curious choice then that, by finally enacting revenge against Claudius, Hamlet ultimately chooses the warrior code of his father and lands himself firmly on the side of traditions that were perhaps already in the process of becoming obsolete.  Modern he may have been, but Shakespeare, likewise, ultimately found his truest values in the classical tradition.