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hamlet and his problems

Few critics have even admitted that Hamlet is the main problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character had a particular temptation for the most dangerous type of criticism: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the order of creation, but which by some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their artistic achievement. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther, and such has Coleridge, who made the hamlet to Coleridge, and probably none of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and will both their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution of their own Hamlet-Shakespeare's which their creative gift effects. We must be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this part.

Two recent writers, Mr. JM Robertson and Professor Stoll of the University of Minnesota, published of small books, which can be rented for moving in the opposite direction. Mr. Stoll performs a service in recalling to our attention the work of criticism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 1 observing that they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but they were closer in the spirit of art Shakespeare, and, as they stressed the importance of the effect of the whole rather than on the importance of the main character, they were closest to their way to the former, the secret of dramatic art in general.

Qua work of art, the work art can be interpreted, there is nothing to interpret, we can only criticize the appropriate standard, in comparison to other works art, and "reading" the main task is the presentation of relevant historical facts that the reader is not expected to know. Mr. Robertson said, quite rightly, how the critics have failed in their "interpretation" of Hamlet by ignoring what needs to be very clear: that Hamlet is a stratification, it represents the efforts of a series of men, each doing what he could about the work of his predecessors. The Hamlet of Shakespeare appear very different if, instead of treating the whole action of the play as being due to the design of Shakespeare, we perceive his Hamlet to be superposed on a much coarser material which persists even in its final form.

We know that there an old play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordinary dramatic (if it is not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of two plays so dissimilar as the Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham, and what this room was as you can guess from three indices: the Spanish Tragedy itself, from the story on which Hamlet Belleforest Kyd must have been founded, and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare's life which bears strong evidence of having been adapted from the first, not the side to play. Of these three sources, it is clear that in the game sooner the motive was a revenge-motive simply that the action or delay is caused, as in the Spanish tragedy, only the difficulty of the assassination of a monarch surrounded by guards, and that the "madness" of Hamlet was feigned in order to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the last play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a pattern that is more important than revenge, and which explicitly "blunts this last, the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or desirability and effect of "madness" is not asleep, but to arouse the suspicions of the king. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be convincing. In addition, there are parallels word so close to the Spanish tragedy to leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was merely revising the text of Kyd. And finally there are scenes unexplained-the Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes, for which there is really no excuse these scenes are not in verse style of Kyd, and not beyond doubt in the style of Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson believes the scenes of the original play of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman, before Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes with the screening of very strong reason that the original play of Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays, in two parts of five acts each. The result of the examination of Mr. Robertson is, we believe, irrefutable: that Shakespeare's Hamlet, to the extent it is Shakespeare, is a play dealing with the effect of the guilt of a mother to her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this pattern successfully in the "rebel" of the old-fashioned material

The rigidity can be no doubt. Thus far to be Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is certainly an artistic failure. In many ways the game is confusing and disturbing like no other. Of all the parts, it is the longest and perhaps the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains, and yet he has left in unnecessary and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines like

Watch the morning, wearing his coat russet

Walks o'er the dew Yon high eastern hill,

are Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The lines of the Act ie sc. ii.,

Mr. President, in my heart there was some kind of fight

It would not let me sleep …

Up from my cabin,

My dress scarf'd sea around me in the dark

I Grop'd ie: has my desire;

Finger'd their packages;

are entirely of his maturity. Both manufacturing and thought are in an unstable state. We are certainly entitled to award the room with that other profoundly interesting Play "intractable" material and astonishing versification, measure for measure, a period crisis, after the success following the tragic result in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may be not as "interesting" as Hamlet, but it is, with antony and cleopatra, Shakespeare's most assured artistic success. And people have thought Hamlet probably more a work of art because they found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the "Mona Lisa" of literature.

The reasons for the failure of Hamlet are not immediately obvious. Mr. Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that emotion essential part is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother:

your] [Hamlet is that of one who has been tortured the score of the degradation of his mother .... The guilt of a mother is an almost intolerable motive for drama, but it should be maintained and strengthened to provide a psychological solution, or rather an index of one.

This, however, is not the whole story. It not only the guilt of a mother "who can not be handled as Shakespeare handled the suspicion of Othello, the infatuation Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus. The subject could possibly have developed in a tragedy of this kind, intelligible, self-complete in the sunlight. Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of things that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate in art. And when looking for that feeling, we find, as in the sonnets, very difficult to locate. You can not point to it in the speech Indeed, if you look at the two famous monologues you see the versification of Shakespeare, but content that might be claimed by another, perhaps by the author of the revenge of Bussy d 'Amboise, c. Act Sc. i. We find Shakespeare's Hamlet is not in action, not in the quotations that we could choose, as well as in a unique style that is unquestionably not in the previous room.

The only way to express emotion the form of art is to find a corresponding "objective", in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events to be the formula of that particular emotion, such that when the external facts, which should put an end to the sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you look at one of the tragedies of Shakespeare's more successful, you will find this exact equivalence, you will see that the spirit of Lady macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of the death of his wife strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event of the series. The artistic "inevitability" lies in this complete adequacy of the external to emotion, and that is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is beyond the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that the perplexity Hamlet is no equivalent to the objective of his feelings is a prolongation of the perplexity of its creator to deal with it Art. Hamlet is faced with the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but his mother is not an appropriate equivalent she, his disgust and upper envelope. There is a feeling that he can not understand, he can not objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and impede the action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it, and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it should be noted that the nature even the data of the problem precludes objective equivalence. To have increased the crime Gertrude were to provide the formula a totally different emotion in Hamlet, it is simply because his character is so negative and insignificant that it arouses in Hamlet the feeling that she is unable to represent.

The "madness" of Hamlet was to Shakespeare's hand in the first play a simple trick and at the end, presumably, understood as a ruse by the public. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned. Lightness Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the character Hamlet is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action, the playwright, it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he can not express in art. The intense feeling ecstatic or terrible, irrelevant or exceeding its object is something each person with a known sensitivity, it is probably a study to pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or his sense versions to fit the business world, the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent, the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and apology. We simply must admit that Shakespeare here addressed a problem which proved too strong for him. Why he attempted at all is an insoluble puzzle, under compulsion of what experience he tried to express the inexpressible horrible, we can never know. We need many facts of his biography, and we would like to know if and when, and after or simultaneously with that personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii., Apology of Raimond Sebond. We should have, finally, know something which is, by definition, unknowable, because we assume it is an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand.

About the Author

The author Anna Petrescu has academic writing experience of over 5 years. She holds a PHD in education from Cambridge. She has been assisting students in writing professional academic papers including thesis, dissertations, research papers and term papers. bestessayscenter.com

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