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.

Further Thoughts on Hamlet

I.  The Noble Mind.

     Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
     The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune .... (3.1.57)

     Take these again, for to the noble mind
     Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind. (3.1.100-101)

The italics are mine, of course.  The first quotation is from Hamlet's "to be or not to be" soliloquy, the second from Ophelia's discussion with Hamlet immediately following the soliloquy.  The repetition of phrasing is startling, and coincidence seems unlikely, given that we are dealing with the one writer who boasts the broadest vocabulary in the English-language tradition, a writer who seems to have taken great pains to craft most carefully every expression his characters utter, even if the texts we read from offer only a corrupt rendition of those expressions. 

Ophelia's speech would bear scanning, in its context.  Hamlet's words to Ophelia immediately preceding this speech are cold, cynical even ("No, not I, / I never gave you aught" -- 3.1.95-96).  His words to her immediately after it, however, are stinging, vitriolic, fraught unmistakeably with violent intent.  Is it possible that this speech -- this phrase, noble mind -- is a trigger to Hamlet, a sign that he has been betrayed? 

Who hears Hamlet's soliloquy, besides the prince himself and the audience?  Do the King and Claudius, onstage but withdrawn, hear him, as some productions would have it?  (One imagines them lurking up on the balcony of The Globe.)  Does Ophelia, who is supposed to be standing by with her nose in a book?  Imagine, if you will, a Hamlet who draws aside an arras at the end of his soliloquy, only to find the fair Ophelia there, and her nervous reply afterward.  A possibility, perhaps. 

Or is it that when Hamlet hears these words that so closely echo his own just-recently uttered sentiments, he knows then that she was there, and why she was there, thus provoking him to question her honesty.  The question -- "Ha, ha!  Are you honest?" (3.1.103) -- not only doubts Ophelia's chastity but also her loyalty, her trustfulness, and it echoes Hamlet's mocking, method-in-madness comments to Polonius in 2.2.174-186, which suggest a suspicion that Polonius will use his daughter as a tool in his campaign of espionage.  To Hamlet's mind, both Polonius and Ophelia are part of the apparatus that is against him.  Hamlet knows that Ophelia has, from his perspective, betrayed him. Perhaps, we reason, Ophelia is merely playing the obedient daughter here, but it matters not to Hamlet.  Perhaps father and daughter both are just following orders -- the councilor his king, the daughter her father -- but Hamlet judges guilt by people's actions and not by their intent (cf. the hapless Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and the seemingly harsh sentence Hamlet imposes upon them).

Ophelia's post-mortem on the encounter -- "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!" (3.1.150) -- aptly ties it all together thematically, but it misses the mark in judging the quality of Hamlet's mind,  Perhaps his mind is one that works all too well.

II.  The Process of Encountering Death.

(As foregrounding for this idea, it is worth considering Harold Bloom's claim, in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, that Yorick served as the young Prince Hamlet's surrogate father and was, perhaps, the inspiration for Hamlet's wit.)

Hamlet begins with one father figure and ends with another. There is at the beginning The Ghost, and at the end Yorick. We start with Hamlet's namesake, end with his father's fool. That Hamlet himself throughout the play resembles the latter rather than the former is the true source of the play's tension. It is only when Hamlet encounters Yorick's remains, though, that he is able to get past the anxiety of Yorick's influence and become his true father's son.

Each figure is a revenant, and each figure is an emblem of one facet of death: Old Hamlet being the afterlife of the soul, Yorick being a truer, more tangible presence: the aftermath of the body. One cannot be touched, the other can be caressed or tossed, kissed, smelt, and eventually put back down into the dirt.

This encounter with Yorick's mortal remains is a significant further step in a process that begins perhaps with Polonius' death and Hamlet's subsequent meditation upon the dead man's corpse, as though by studying the product of death -- a body devoid of its animating principle -- he could come closer to knowing its meaning and thereby settle his lingering questions about the nature of death and spur himself on to further action.  Setting aside the encounter with Prince Fortinbras, certainly an inspiration for Hamlet's eventually springing into action mode in Act V, this event is a turning point for Hamlet.  His leaping into Ophelia's grave is the culmination of the process, the last such event before we see a changed Hamlet in the final acts of the play, one who is ready to "let be" and face what he seems preternaturally to know will be his own imminent death.

Technically, when he handles Yorick's skull Hamlet is expressing disgust at the skull as a kind of metonym for all human remains – he is disgusted at the material dimensions of death and the decay of the human body.  What what can we make of the fact that we see the whole in terms of the Ghost – armed for battle, head to toe – while we see only a part with Yorick – his bare skull? Which provides the more accurate portrayal of death? The Ghost presents the spirit, while the skull presents the material reality of death.  Perhaps, then, the vision of death presented by Act I (that the soul lives on) is overruled by the the vision of death presented in Act V (that death is a kind of material fragmentation.  Parts of you enter the guts of a worm and so forth, while other parts linger in the dirt and are subsequently mistreated by the sexton some years later -- but the soul is nowhere to be found here.  Death cannot be comprehended in its entirely, with all life's armor still intact, but only in bits and pieces, missing a jawbone.  Just like the monsters in Beowulf can only be depicted through synecdoche, the reality of death in Hamlet can only be understood through its parts.

Earlier, Hamlet presents death as the “undiscovered country.”  Has he been there, now?  Has he explored that country now that he has held Yorick’s skull in his hands and leapt into his lover's grave? Do these experiences make death real to him?  The graveyard here is the very landscape of death itself, and it is worthy to note that 5.1 is one of only two scenes that take place outside the walls of Elsinore.

III. The Symmetrical Structure of the Play

In Acts I and V, Hamlet encounters his father figures, both as revenants.  It is ironic, then, that his encounter with the war-like Ghost inspires Hamlet to play the fool -- the man of wit and words -- and that the encounter with the fool inspires Hamlet to put foolish things away and to become the war-like man of action who will not only best his opponent, Laertes, in swordsmanship but also finally gain his revenge against his father's murderer.  It is also appropriate that, in keeping with the medieval tradition of castrating fools so that they are harmless around the women of the house and so that their jibes do not sting so much, Hamlet in fool mode is figuratively a castrato, impotent in his ability to maintain a healthy relationship with his lover and impotent as well in his ability to stir himself to action.  It is also worth noting that we can extrapolate backward from the beginning of Act I to King Hamlet's funeral, and that we can extrapolate forward from the end of Act V to Prince Hamlet's.

In Acts II and IV, Hamlet encounters his foils.  The first is the Player, a man of words and of gestures that typically bear no consequences in real life.  The second is Fortinbras, the consummate man of action of his generation -- as Hamlet's father was to his own.

Act III, then is the emotional core of the play: the famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy and the play-within-the-play.

Shakespeare and Kyd

It's inevitable that anyone who studies Hamlet will eventually encounter the scholarly discussion associating Shakespeare's play with that of one of his predecessors, Thomas Kyd, whose The Spanish Tragedy presents many themes that would work their way into Hamlet. Although I doubt that I am going to shine any new light on the points of comparison between the two plays here, I nonetheless wanted to put down in writing my observations after having read The Spanish Tragedy.

First of all, it's quite certain that Shakespeare would have been very familiar with The Spanish Tragedy. Written in the mid-1580s, the play was one of the most popular of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. Though many of the thematic elements of the play were popular ones at the time, the precise combination of themes from The Spanish Tragedy that are repeated in Hamlet makes it highly unlikely that mere coincidence is at work here.

Beyond the fact that both plays are revenge tragedies that feature a ghost and a play-within-a-play, the most pronounced point of similarity between the two plays is the suicidal impulses experienced by the tragic avengers of both plays.  These suicidal tendencies are the distillation of a deep-seated melancholy that springs from grief. This melancholy disposition represents a transformation of character both for Hieronimo in TST and for Hamlet.  Each bore a different persona, a different personality before murder intruded on the father-son relationship.  Does this thematic element -- the suicidal urge in response to profound grief -- have its origins somehow in Senecan tragedy? I am not familiar enough with Seneca to be able to say, but it would be worth an investigation.  Regardless, both plays treat the suicidal impulse as a natural response to the death of one who is loved so dearly, and both plays present this kind of deep melancholy as an impediment to action -- ironically, an impediment to vengeance.

Hieronimo first presents his death wish in a speech immediately after his son's murder, in Act 2, Scene 5. After a dramatic expression of his desire to cease living, Hieronimo concludes his speech, which is in Latin, by saying:

Let me die with thee; thus would I go into the shadows. But nonetheless I will avoid yielding too quickly to death lest then no vengeance should follow thy death.
(Translation courtesy of the 1951 Croft Classics edition of the play.)

Hamlet inhabits a similar mental state, of course, when we first encounter him.  (It's also worth noting the parallels here to Romeo and Juliet and to the Pyramus and Thisbe parody in A Midsummer Night's Dream.)  Hamlet's first soliloquy -- "O that this too, too sullied flesh would melt" -- expresses his attitude, which might seem, to a modern audience, to display an unusual and extreme form of grief.  Considered as a response to Kyd's play, however, Hamlet's  suicidal despair makes more sense. 

It is tempting, then, in terms of this theme, to see Hamlet as a case of the anxiety of influence, that influence being limited not to Kyd but perhaps to other revenge tragedies of the time, which employed similar plot points and character features.  If we choose to see the play this way, we have to consider that as Shakespeare composed the play he consciously or subconsciously strived to one-up Kyd and other revenge tragedy writers at every step.  Shakespeare knew, as he drafted this play, that the story would remind audiences of Hieronimo. Dazed by grief, beset by confusion regarding the nature of his son's murder, Hieronimo delays in his pursuit of revenge.  Hamlet's delay, then, must be more pronounced in order to trump Hieronimo's.  Hamlet's morbid nature, his suicidal disposition, his antic behavior, all must seem more intense than Hieronimo's for the play to work.  Shakespeare could take it for granted that play-going audiences would be familiar with the generic conventions of revenge tragedy.  The masterstroke of the revenge tragedy genre is the delay, the period of feigned madness that comes perilously close to the real thing -- and in Hamlet seems to become quite actually the real thing.

In TST, however, Kyd ultimately gives us the perfect avenger in Hieronimo.  Hamlet, by contrast, is a reluctant avenger who, it seems, would rather return to his studies in Germany.  Vengeance is Hieronimo's only motive, the only thing that holds him upright after his son's death, the only thing that animates his flesh.  His delay is initially a practical matter -- he does not know who has killed his son.  Next, he suspects but does not know for sure; he is worried he is being tricked.  Hieronimo doubts the letter that Bel-Imperia sends to him -- written grotesquely with her own blood -- suspecting it may be entrapment.  He seeks to verify the information contained in it just as Hamlet will seek to verify the Ghost's word as genuine.  When Hieronimo finally knows with certainty, he has to face the task of seeking vengeance upon some very important members of the royal court, people above his station, just as Hamlet has to venge himself upon his King and uncle.  Hieronimo devises his plan; then he follows it out to the very letter.  To be sure, Hamlet, by contrast, stumbles somewhat into vengeance in his own Act 5.  He is perhaps merely fulfilling the fate that is ordained to him, but there is no pronounced plan at work when Hamlet finally swashbuckles his way to Claudius' death -- and Hamlet's own.  Does Hamlet know that the fate of the revenger also entails the avenger's own destruction?  (He certainly seems to: "The readiness is all," he claims, and we suspect that he knows he is facing more than mere sport in what awaits.)  If so, perhaps it is because he, too, an avid theatregoer, is aware of what happens to Hieronimo.

Hamlet's delay, in the context of Hieronimo's delay, and in the context of the ruination that is the result of Hieronimo's finally revenging the murder, is both more understandable and more curious.  Hamlet has to delay because Hieronimo delays, and he has to delay more profoundly.  But why else should Hamlet delay?  Hamlet doubts the nature of the task, doubts himself, doubts the nature of all that he perceives, and, as I said, would rather resume his studies at the university, where he is learning to be a modern skeptic rather than the medieval prince who would be his father's son.  A mere precautionary measure and a matter of mere strategy to Hieronimo become to Hamlet representations of the qualities of his character.  He endlessly questions just about everything.  Through Shakespeare's pen, this quality in Hamlet gives his character depth, and it generates a sense of ambiguity.  It gives us time to see the reluctance in Hamlet's character.  (Hamlet's eventual springing into action mode in Act 5, then, makes him, in a Kantian way, all the more the hero because he has, against his nature, summoned up the courage to act.)  Hamlet presents to us a very different kind of avenger than the one we have with Hieronimo, whose delay occupies only about a third of TST, while Hamlet's occupies nearly the entirety of the play that bears his name.  It may well be that Hamlet's delay is primarily plot-driven: Shakespeare needed a five-act play, and vengeance automatic is not going to supply acts two to four.  But still, the result is the same: we are left to make sense of acts two through four.  If Shakespeare's strategy here is merely to fill up the acts, he succeeds beyond the measure of his ambition, and the material he creates is so convincing and compelling that we have to treat it as though there were more to it.  The relationship between structure and theme is so tight here that it may be impossible to separate the two.

Hieronimo does in fact possess a depth of character, as well, even if it is not so deeply pronounced as Hamlet's.  Part of TST's emotional resonance comes from the fact that its hero cannot speak of what he believes to be true, especially not to Lorenzo, the chief villain of the play.  Hieronimo says, "My grief no heart, my thoughts no tongue can tell" (Act 3, Scene 2).  Hamlet says nearly the same: "But break, my heart, for I must hold my tongue" (Act 1, Scene 2).  The suffering that each hero bears, audible only to the audience, is a clear point of comparison between the two plays.  Furthermore, both characters take on a madness that is partly feigned and partly real.  Compare Hieronimo's clever disguise -- "my simplicity may make them think / That ignorantly I will let all slip" (Act 4, Scene 6) -- with Hamlet's -- "As I perchance hereafter shall think meet / To put an antic disposition on" (Act 1, Scene 5).  Both heroes must not be themselves in order ultimately to be themselves.

Finally, in comparing these two, we have the fact that both protagonists are playwrights.  Hieronimo is a playwright by circumstance.  The plan to perform a drama is a mechanism by which he will exact vengeance on his son's killers.  Hamlet, by contrast, is a playwright and dramaturge by nature.  It just so happens that the play he directs presents the opportunity to catch his father's killer through the study of physiognomy. 

In both plays, the suicidal impulse must also extend beyond the tragic heroes.  In TST, it reaches Isabella, Hieronimo's wife, who succumbs to her suicidal yearnings late in the play but before revenge is acted out.  In Hamlet, it destroys Ophelia, whose "self-slaughter," to borrow, out of context, a term from Hamlet, seems to be both an accident and an event with very clear antecedents.  And of course, in both plays the body counts only mount from the points of these deaths onward.

Some further differences that must be noted include the inversion of father-son relationships (in terms of who is to be avenged and who is to seek the vengeance) and the frankly pagan attitude of the Kyd play, which boldly and unequivocally takes place in a universe in which the geography of classical mythology is valid, thus providing a pronounced contrast to the obsession with Christian religious themes that we see in Hamlet.  Christian values are frequently cited as reasons for what not to do in Hamlet (reason not to commit suicide, reason not to kill a murderer who is, theoretically, praying, but, oddly enough, not reason to follow the Bible's advice ["Vengeance is mine ... saith the Lord"] and forebear seeking revenge), but we rarely see actions performed on the basis of the core Christian principals of faith, hope, and charity, or any other Christian value, for that matter.  Still, the play inhabits a universe in which Christian beliefs provide context.

Would it be fair to say that if there were no Spanish Tragedy there would be no Hamlet?  In such cases, it is always impossible to claim much of anything with certainty, but at the very least Hamlet would doubtless have been a very different thing if not for Kyd's play.  The Spanish Tragedy does have a certain flair to it -- though melodramatic at times and a bit pedestrian in its language, it is a highly readable play, one that is almost flawlessly strucutred and designed, one that features well-drawn and compelling characters.  Shakespeare's play, by contrast, is at times a glorious mess, which is no doubt partly due to the fact that the text was likely never prepared for publication by its author, but also perhaps due to something else at work in Shakespeare -- in all of his works, not just the one in question here.  So many things are going at so many different levels.  Shakespeare's language is dynamic and, when he wants it to be, sophisticated; with every word and phrase he grasps for something distinctive.  But he also creates some scattershot imagery at times, as in the "To be or not to be" soliloquy with that business of "slings and arrows" and other military-style references mixing it up with a "sea of troubles."  This kind of mixed metaphor is not an isolated incident in Shakespeare.  Yet, all told, the speech is movingly profound, and the play digs more deeply into our consciousness -- and into that of the play's protagonist -- than The Spanish Tragedy ever does.  I say this not to diminish the significance of Kyd's work, but to say that all the patter about Shakespeare over the centuries is a legitimately warranted phenomenon.  It is hard to pin down exactly what it is about Shakespeare that makes him superior to a Kyd or a Marlowe, but superior he is.  Perhaps it is exactly this quality -- that it is hard to get a handle on things in Shakespeare -- that makes him so great.  We know that the words are powerful, but we have a hard time figuring out what exactly it is that they mean.

Claudius Reconsidered

Taking a cue from Harold Bloom, I'd always thought of Claudius as a weak villain. It's true that Claudius is certainly no Iago, but it's not Iago that this play needs.* Claudius' gift as a villain is his wit and, as Hamlet points out in 1.5, his charm: "one may smile, and smile, and be a villain." Hamlet, of course, can see through the false charm, the false mourning of Claudius' opening speech in 1.2, but the rest of Denmark does not -- and Hamlet's mother does not. As such, Claudius is a perfectly fitting villain to oppose Hamlet. Claudius boasts the power to manipulate language, to make falseness seem genuine, while Hamlet himself has "that within which passeth show." False words, false personas: these are antithetical to Hamlet.

My turn-around in assessing Claudius is inspired by Marjorie Garber, who, in her Hamlet chapter in Shakespeare After All, says of Claudius that "he is in control of language, making it jump through hoops, cease to mean what it should," citing his initial speech in 1.2 as evidence. Garber makes Claudius' use of language analogous to his use of poison: "the dangerous poison of words, words, words." The serial poisoner uses guile, secrecy, charm, and wit to work his vile purposes, and it is fitting that in the end he is done in, in part at least, by poison.

Hamlet may see right through Claudius, but that does not mean that Hamlet can easily and handily dispatch the villain without consequences. It is true, ultimately, that Hamlet is far more clever and more skilled than Claudius is, but to kill a king, even a false one, is no simple task, and Claudius' particular strength, his underhanded control of appearances, is to Hamlet what Kryptonite is to Superman. And certainly Hamlet does have his own issues to work out before he can rid the world of his foe.
-----------------------------------------
* One might wonder what a Hamlet v. Iago showdown might look like. I'd lay my money on Hamlet, who seems unlikely to fall prey to the kind of schemes that laid Othello low. Hamlet, for instance, knows how to discern a true friend (Horatio) from false ones (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern).

Bloom on Satan and Hamlet

Harold Bloom hinted at this in his Shakespeare book, and it's hard not to see the point here, which he has elaborated on in his new book:

"It does not matter that Satan is an obsessed theist and Hamlet is not .... Two angelic intellects inhabit a common abyss: the post-Enlightenment ever-augmenting inner self, of which Hamlet is a precursor ...."

--from The Anatomy of Influence, as quoted in the New York Times Book Review

What Bloom might add here is that Montaigne is the to some extent the real-life antecedent to both of these characters.

It is easy, perhaps, to dismiss Bloom as pompous and bombastic, but it is not easy to dismiss the pull of his ideas, and I cannot help but feel that more often than not there is the ring of something valid in what he has to say.

Hamlet and Identity

Hamlet is one or more of the following:

A university-trained scholar.

A scientific rationalist.

A follower of stoic philosophy.

Montaignean skeptic.

Clinically depressed son/son-in-law/nephew.

A paltry lover.

Actor/dramaturge.

A Christian prince.

A pagan warrior.

Machiavellian killer.

A tricky fool, more fit to be son of the late king's jester than son of the late king himself.

"To thine own self be true": to which of these selves ought he be true? All of them, apparently, at one point or another.

Hamlet tries out the different roles until he finds the one that is most dramatically expedient. The play is like a maze, a game that Hamlet plays until he finds his way out--which is to say that he finds his fate, which is death.

The identity Hamlet creates for himself in Act 5 is a result of his experiences in Act 4, Scene 4, and in Act 5, Scene 1: the only two scenes in the play that take place outside of Elsinore. Hamlet has to get outside, get a bit of fresh air, observe Fortinbras, and dig about in the dirt a little to figure out his motivation. The graveyard scene is perhaps most apt: Hamlet fears death; he muses on the fate of the body, and then he viacariously encounters that fate in the most direct of fashions. He even ends up inside of a grave for a while, wrestling with Laertes. Finally, death is no longer a thought but a reality. Hamlet learns something from the gravedigger as well: that death is something one can grow accustomed to in such a way that the jokes can lose their sting. What is death to the gravedigger? A business opportunity, and that is all.

It is the intersection of all of the above identities that Hamlet stands upon in Act 5, Scene 2. Hamlet's allusion to scripture, his belief in the "special providence in the fall of a sparrow," is less a full-fledged Christian precept than it is a representation of the intersection of Christianity and stoicism, where the two modes of living arc together on the Venn diagram. Hamlet summarizes his acceptance of fate in two words: "Let be." He knows the role he is supposed to play, and he plays it. And in doing so, he robs death of its glory, which is and always has been merely the fear of it.

Hamlet and Montaigne

Montaigne establishes one of his essays upon a quotation from Cicero: "To Philosophie is no other thing, than for a man to prepare himself for death."

Shakespeare knew Cicero. Shakespeare also certainly read Montaigne, or at least some Montaigne, later in his career; we have passages from The Tempest that mimic Montaigne's "Of the Caniballes" as proof. Shakespeare was reportedly a friend of John Florio, Montaigne's first English translator, and may have read early translations before they were published in 1603.

Hamlet was written some two or three years before the publication of Montaigne's essays in English, but it is thrilling to think that there may be some link between the two. Certainly, there is a likeness in sensibility. Hamlet seems an enactment of a principle asserted by Montaigne:

So have I learned this custome or lesson, to have alwaies death, not only in my imagination but continually in my mouth. And there is nothing I desire more to be informed of, than of the death of men; that is to say, what words, what countenance, and what face they shew at their death. (Book I, XIX)

Montaigne writes: "You have seene many who have found good in death, ending thereby many many miseries" (Book I, XIX). This is the very lesson Hamlet seems to have learned by Act V.

Hamlet represents a revolution in drama, a new mode not only for Shakespeare but for all literature. The intense inwardness of the title character was previously unknown to the stage, to poetry, even. The soliloquys are unprecedented in their depth of expression, in their complexity. Rank biographical speculation bears little fruit, I believe, but here is a plum: what if Shakespeare's reading of Montaigne prompted this revolution?--prompted Hamlet?

We can never know the extent to which Montaigne influenced Shakespeare. Regardless, the two operate so much in parallel that they are rightly acknowledged as co-founders of the modern sensibility, giving us, among other things, the vision of the fragmented self and a modern attitude toward death that, despite the real or supposed Christianity of both authors, is founded ultimately upon a secular humanist attitude, one borne of much reflective thought.

Wherefore Hamlet?

One of the challenges of reading Hamlet is to figure out what the fuss is all about.

To wit, Hamlet's most famous soliloquy, "To be or not to be ..." Some of the most famous lines in the English language.

Why? Most of us do not walk around in a suicidal depression on a day to day basis.

But we do possess an awareness of our own mortality, and Hamlet dealt with that awareness on a level more profound than anyone before and perhaps since. And we do, each of us, have to find a way to live in this world, which is to endure the suffering that it presents to us. And in the modern world, with a multiplicity of viewpoints beyond the received truth of the medieval church, this challenge takes on further complications.

Hamlet wanted to know the meaning of death. He questioned it bluntly and boldly and with a degree of thoughtfulness previously impossible. A by-product of the Reformation, Hamlet inhabits a world that is not fully Catholic or Protestant; he is in a sense the first post-Christian figure in literature because conventional religious sensibility is insufficient to him in answering questions about death. This does not necessarily make Hamlet an atheist, but it does make him agnostic or at least a doubter. No one could have gotten away with a public expression of doubt in those old Church of England days except for a character on stage; the law wouldn't have allowed it. But certainly people were thinking it: with Catholics and Protestant splitting each other to bits all across Europe, it might lead a sensible person to doubt the validity of the enterprise altogether. But one couldn't say so except on a stage.

Then there's the matter of two value systems in conflict: the Christian one that forbids suicide as a mortal sin and the classical-stoical one that condones it under certain circumstances. Hamlet grapples with stoical precepts throughout the play, but he cannot free himself from his passions, from his own depth of feeling. If stoicism is about the denial of feeling in order to endure the "slings and arrows" that come automatically with living in this world, then Hamlet is not a stoic, because Hamlet is nothing if not two things: thoughtful and full of feeling. It is above all his capacity for emotional depth and not his critical thinking skills that make him admirable. And it is depth of feeling that an audience expects to see when they see Hamlet.

Hamlet and Meaning

I.
Either meaning is transcendentally signified, or it is not. In Hamlet, it is not. Thus Hamlet's predicament: there are no set principles upon which to act, so he must define them himself. No mean task, that.

A. D. Nuttall uses the word "vertiginous" to describe Hamlet's famous line "there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so." Indeed, the entire play could be described as vertiginous. Hamlet's vertigo, then, is the consequence of understanding that things are only what you define them to be, that you are only what your mind defines yourself to be. Here is the power of mind, which is both a creative force and a destructive force at once. Out of it, Hamlet must invent a self. He has less than four acts left to do it. How?

II.
Polonius offers us the stoic commonplace, so often quoted out of context, "to thine own self be true." To determine the utility of this advice, we must not only look at the character who speaks these words (at best, a doddering fool; at worst, right-hand to a fratricidal murderer) but also consider how they might apply to Hamlet himself were the advice given to him: to what self ought he to be true? Hamlet begins the play a mopey undergrad and ends as something entirely different, not quite a warrior, but someone who can play the role of the warrior to good effect. In between (that is, for the vast bulk of the play), he is nebulously defined. Vertigo is his only identity.

Hamlet is merely an amalgam of words, always shifting, disappearing. He wishes the body to "resolve itself into a dew," but it is only identity that proves itself vaporous, not the body for which Hamlet has so much disdain. Either he possesses no self to which to be true or the self to which he ought be true is no self that's going to get him anywhere he wants to be. Hamlet is a modern character because he faces the same predicament we face in the modern world: he must invent the idea of that self that he hopes to become, and he must then struggle to become it. Easier said than done, even for a character whose only existence is words on a page (or drifting to the heavens from the stage).

III.
Thus Hamlet's preoccupation with drama, which is also Prospero's preoccupation with drama, which also must certainly be Shakespeare's obsession with drama. It is through drama that Hamlet hopes to discover truth. One philosophy of Polonius that is actionable: "by indirections find directions out." Reality--that is, certainty--can be mined by sifting carefully the grains of illusion.

It has been observed that Hamlet is out of place in his own play, a tricksy fool miscast in the part of the prince. Hamlet needs to learn his part, and once he does the actions will define him.

IV.
Harold Bloom says that Hamlet is no more obsessed with death than any other Shakespeare play, but that can't be right. A play that not only contemplates life and death but hinges on suicidal impulse must be said to explore the meaning of death from a singular perspective. The core of the play is the "To be or not to be" soliloquy, and in this speech Hamlet identifies the uncertainty of death--"the undiscovered country"--as that which "puzzles the will." Hamlet does not know if death is something he ought to embrace or something he ought to flee from. He accuses himself of cowardice, but if this is so it is a cowardice in need of qualification: a metaphysical cowardice--looking over the edge of the abyss and not knowing where to place your foot--and no mere knocking of the knees with fright.

Hamlet's core problem is that he does not understand the meaning of death.  Once he figures that out, he can learn how to live, even if to do so means to proceed posthaste toward his own certain death.  Thus, as Montaigne, quoting Cicero, has it: "To philosophize is to learn how to die."  Hamlet confronts the uncertainty of death until he finds certainty: and the certainty is that of the grave. This knowledge becomes bedrock for him in Act 5.

V.
The experience upon which Hamlet forges an identity--the experience upon which he rights himself and overcomes his vertigo--is the direct confrontation with death. More than Fortinbras, more then the gravedigger or even Yorick, it is the soil itself--the desolate patch of ground that Fortinbras sends an army to its potential doom to gain, the muck of Yorick's grave, the fresh dirt of Ophelia's--the soil that he will relentlessly become, that gives Hamlet certain knowledge of death. Once he knows it--once he has prepped for his part, practiced the method--then he knows he can play the part. "The readiness is all": Hamlet decides to determine his being through his actions and not through his death. He decides to accept his fate and not to defy it. He will face the uncertainty, which has become a certainty: that the "quintessence of dust" is indeed just that, just so many skulls in the dirt.

VI.
Ultimately, Hamlet goes beyond good and evil, beyond God, beyond character as it is traditionally understood, to a secular mode of being that is on its own level, framed in the mind. There is a relativism at work here, both ethical and epistemological, and it is true that Hamlet--like every other Shakespeare play--offers no moral truths. In fact, it is predicated on the assumption that there are no hard and fast moral truths as we wish to understand them.  That is, there are no transcendentally signified moral truths.  The only values that matter are the ones that Hamlet himself resolves to believe in.

One cannot disavow relativism simply because it bears the potential to present unpleasant consequences. Hamlet gives us those unpleasant consequences--and, in its final act, a way to get past them. It is the power of the mind that causes trouble for Hamlet--more so than his uncle, a middling sort of villain for Shakespeare--but it is also the power of the mind that renders to Hamlet a sense of self, forged from experience.

Freud and Hamlet

When I read Hamlet, I can't help but think of Sigmund Freud -- probably not for the reasons you're thinking, though.

I don't care much for Oedipal interpretations of the play; there's nothing in it, in my reading, that lends credence to the notion that Hamlet wants to get with Gertrude himself, that that is why he hesitates in his quest for revenge -- nor does it make sense that an admixture of rage (for his father's murder) and jealousy (because he himself wanted to be the one to supplant his father) would give him pause -- rather, all the more reason to kill the dirty bastard who stands in his way. There are plenty of other explanations for Hamlet's pause -- the conflict between the warrior's desire for revenge and the Christian's desire for mercy and God's judgment; the uncertainty over the true nature of the ghost; the fact that Claudius appears to be praying when Hamlet comes upon him, ready to do the deed, and Hamlet's understanding that revenge at such a moment, were Claudius really praying, might send his enemy directly to heaven while his murdered father languishes in purgatory -- all of this in addition to the primary fact that Hamlet is himself a man of thought, not a man of action, and that for him "the native hue of resolution / Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought."

Rather, Freud serves other purposes in relation to Hamlet. It may seem easy these days to dismiss Freud as a misguided, coke-snorting fantasist from a by-gone era, but to do so would be to overlook the powerful impact that he made on modern consciousness -- and his take on modern consciousness certainly involves that earliest of moderns: Hamlet, who is, as Harold Bloom puts it, Shakespeare's "least archaic" character.

Once you strip away the fancy details of Freud's theories, you're left with two essential ideas. One is that human consciousness is fragmented. More than anyone else, Freud, who trafficked in the language of myths, is responsible for destroying that falsest of myths: that the mind is a single, unified entity. Descartes' mind-body duality is the predecessor for this idea, but also a dead end in its inability to fully understand the relationship between mind and body. Freud's understanding of the fractured mind is the true mark of the modern; Freud may not have invented this notion, but he popularized it. Of the Renaissance writers I know, only Montaigne and Shakespeare seem to articulate a notion on par with the modern view of the fragmented consciousness. With Montaigne, such an understanding quietly underscores the whole of his essays. With Shakespeare, this understanding is the prominent characteristic of his most famous hero. Shakespeare and Freud both understood that it is very much a human quality of mind to hold simultaneously multiple conflicting desires -- to want to do something and not want to do it, to wish for something and know that we shouldn't have it, to weigh both sides of a matter and feel compelling qualities on either -- to feel ourselves ripped to shreds by the centrifugal forces of our own minds. The specifics of id, ego, and superego are less relevant than the fact that there are varied aspects of the mind representing various influences. We take such an understanding for granted now -- the ambiguity of character, the complexity of mind -- but this is the revolutionary quality that Hamlet stood for, a quality that Freud explicated most successfully in prose. Such an understanding of the complexity of character gives the lie to Polonius' stoical maxim that if you are true "to thine own self ... Thou canst not then be false to any man." To which self must one be true? Hamlet is perhaps the first character in all of literature to be so untethered to any solid notion of self. He's a free agent of thought. When stoical maxims fall short, as they do in his famous soliloquy on suicide, Hamlet ranges off into undiscovered territories of thought. He cannot be true to himself, because he has no central core to which he might be true. His only self is limitless thought, and in this context the idea that "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so" takes on not only a proto-Romantic aspect but also a vertiginous quality as well, the quality of existential nausea. (I may be riffing off of A. D. Nuttall here; he introduced me to the notion of stoicism in Hamlet in Shakespeare the Thinker.)

When Hamlet does find himself -- or rather creates himself -- it is after his encounter with a Player who teaches him to act out an emotion and another encounter with a rival prince who teaches him how to act out a deed. In the meantime, Hamlet talks, and here we see the precursor of Freud's other significant idea: that it is in talk that we discover ourselves. The Freudian notion is of course famous in caricature for enacting several generations of New Yorker cartoon characters who take to the long leather couch to speak to their shrink. Psychoanalysis has been writ on a larger mass-market scale, though, for more up-to-date audiences. First the talking cure graduated (via the middle school of Phil Donahue) to the Oprah Winfrey Show: instead of taking it to your shrink, you could take it to a television audience of millions. Now, we can take it to our blogs, as well -- no reservations for the production studio required. Hamlet didn't have the Viennese doctor -- nor Oprah, nor the entire membership directory of Facebook -- to hear him; instead, he had us -- that audience whom he addresses so directly in his final speech, but whom he has really been talking to all along in his many famous soliloquys. The art of the soliloquy is the art of self discovery and self-invention, and is that not what Freud wanted his patients to do? To lie down on the couch and soliloquize, to invent their own tragic personas ....

And in the case of Hamlet, the talking cure works. In Act V, he is ready to face his destiny, whatever that may be: "the readiness is all." It may well be that Hamlet didn't have a destiny until he had talked it all out.

I'm sure that many lives have been needlessly complicated by the bombasticism of primitive psychoanalysis. But who could resist the lure of seeing themselves cast as Elektra, as Oedipus ... as Hamlet?