Hackers prevented the use of italics or bold script when I first posted this essay. Kudos to the Shakespeare's Globe Production of "Love's Labour's Lost" at the Michael Schimmel Center, 3 Spruce Street, New York. December 9, 2009.
This is the perfect play for the holiday season. Get your tickets, if you can. The run is limited to two weeks.
This essay is for you, as always, with love and gratitude.
If the dull substance of my flesh were thought,
Injurious distance should not stop my way,
For then despite of space I would be brought,
From limits far remote, where thou dost stay.
No matter then although my foot did stand
Upon the farthest earth removed from thee;
For nimble thought can jump both sea and land,
As soon as think the place where he would be.
But, ah, thought kills me that I am not thought,
To leap large lengths of miles when thou art gone,
But that so much of earth and water wrought,
I must attend time's leisure with my moan,
Receiving nought by elements so slow
But heavy tears, badges of either's woe.
My discussion is based on the following sources:
The Works of William Shakespeare Complete (New York: Walter J. Black, Inc., 1947).
Harold Bloom, Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (New York: Penguin, 2003).
"William Shakespeare's Hamlet: A Kenneth Branagh Film" (Castle Rock Entertainment/Columbia Tristar Home Video, 1996), PG-13.
"Looking for Richard" (Fox Searchlight Films/Twentieth Century Fox, 1996), PG-13.
Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (New York: Random House, 2005).
Anthony Burgess, Shakespeare (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1970).
Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare After All (New York: Pantheon, 2004).
Germaine Greer, Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Anthony Holden, William Shakespeare (New York: Little & Brown, 1999).
Peter Holland, William Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
G.B. Harrison, Introducing Shakespeare (Baltimore: Penguin, 1963). ("Lucy Dark" as the Dark Lady.)
Frank Kermode, The Age of Shakespeare (New York: Modern Library, 2004).
Colin McGinn, Shakespeare's Philosophy (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006).
A.L. Rowse, William Shakespeare: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
Rene Weiss, Shakespeare Unbounded: Decoding a Hidden Life (New York: Henry Holt, 2007). (Inferring the biography from literary-forensic investigations of the writings. Magnificent in discussing recent scholarship dealing with the notorious Catholicism and sexual addiction issues as well as early brushes with the law.)
Ian Wilson, Shakespeare: The Evidence (London & New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993). (Discussion of authorship issue is highly recommended and definitive for me.)
For comparison, see:
Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (New York: Harper Collins, 1990).
Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988). (The best biography of Wilde.)
Phyllis Grosskurth, Byron: The Flawed Angel (New York & Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997). (Look past the psychobabble to the scholarship.)
Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1988). (Professor Kaplan's biography of Vidal, though premature, is pretty good.)
Claire Tomalin, Jane Austen (New York: Vintage, 1999). (Beautifully written, novelistic, scholarly biography.)
I am finishing Christopher Rush's novel Will (London: beautiful books, 2007). Get it. Read it.
Introduction.
My mother worked the late shift as a nurse's aid in a hospital in the city where I grew up. She slept during the day because she worked so hard at night. I was mostly on my own as a teenager. I went to school, played sports in the afternoons, and was alone in the evenings. My older sister was in her mysterious feminine world. We sometimes stayed up late together seeing old movies on television.
One night when I was fourteen years-old I saw a listing in T.V. Guide for "Hamlet" starring Laurence Olivier on the "Late, Late Show."
I am dating myself because, in the seventies before the age of cable when dinosaurs walked the earth, there were only three television networks in New York along with a few local stations. After midnight there were usually old movies available until around 3:00 A.M. when, gasp, the stations would go off the air AND THERE WAS NOTHING AT ALL ON T.V.!
Anyway, this one night "Hamlet" was on. I had heard of Shakespeare. He was some kind of writer or something. I was not too sure of much else about him except that he was supposed to be really good.
As my sister slept in her room I remember sitting in the living room of our dingy apartment experiencing a life-altering encounter with the greatest play ever written by the best writer in history.
I was simply not the same person after seeing "Hamlet."
I want to tell you about this experience, a little bit about Prince Hamlet and his creator (to some extent, Professor Harold Bloom suggests, he is your creator too), in order to approach the daunting topic of defending Shakespeare and the humanities at a time when both seem to be in urgent need of a defense. ("Guerrilla Aesthetics and the Lobotomizing of the American Mind.")
I hope to communicate with those young men and women who have been led to believe that "Shakespeare is not for you."
He is for you. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. In "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.," Oscar Wilde anticipates Freud by summarizing Shakespeare's "role" (irony intended) in our lives:
"We become lovers when we see Romeo and Juliet, and Hamlet makes us students. The blood of Duncan is upon our hands, with Timon we rage against the world, and when Lear wanders out upon the heath the terror of madness touches us. Ours is the white sinlessness of Desdemona, and ours also, the sin of Iago. Art, even the art of fullest scope and widest vision, can never really show us the external world. All that it shows us is our own soul, the one world of which we have any real cognizance. And the soul itself, the soul of each one of us, is to each one of us a mystery. It hides in the dark and broods, and consciousness cannot tell us of its workings. Consciousness, indeed, is quite inadequate to explain the contents of personality. It is Art, and Art only, that reveals us to ourselves."
Shakespeare's work is about all of us. His genius is for everyone.
Many people, including some who recognize Shakespeare's incomparable genius, argue that the attention devoted to his work and to other writings by "white males" in universities is excessive, especially in our new multicultural environment.
I disagree.
If you hate Shakespeare, or if you think that, say, Agatha Christie is just as good as he was in his day, or if you think that Shakespeare is a plot by "White European and American Males and Females" (let us not forget to be "politically correct" or "inclusive") to oppress you then I hope to persuade you that you are mistaken at least as to Shakespeare.
Forget what you may have been told about Shakespeare by your teachers, whether you've heard good or bad things about him, forget the politics, forget that you have been made to read his writings in school, and just listen to these words, speak them silently to yourself, as you read them:
HAMLET: " ... What is a man
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? -- A beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and God-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event --
A thought which, quartered, hath but one part
wisdom
And ever three parts coward -- I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do,'
Since I have cause, and will, and strength and
means,
To do't. Examples gross as nature exalt me,
Witness this army of such mass and charge,
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puffed
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare,
Even for an eggshell. ..."
Hamlet, 4. 4, 33-57.
I feel a chill and renewed sense of inspiration whenever I read these words or hear them spoken. They express an unapologetic belief (which I share) in the importance and value of humanity -- in your dignity -- at a time and in a Renaissance world that still deemed the ethical concerns of persons to be fundamentally important giving every person a majesty that may be impossible for us to appreciate today.
You matter in Shakespeare's universe as does your suffering and the human search for meaning.
You are not a "thing" to be manipulated. You are not only an animal. You are free, for Shakespeare, and (hence), inescapably, a moral subject.
Whoever you are, whether you are black, brown or white, male or female, YOU are Hamlet.
Humanism -- from any writer -- now provokes angry contempt from some people. We may have gained some knowledge concerning the realities of the human condition with the adoption of recent and very popular forms of nihilism, but at what cost? ("The Wanderer and His Shadow.")
I fear that we pay too great a price for our new-found worldliness.
Whether we respect one another has a lot to do with whether we accept or reject our traditions, our standards of beauty, as opposed to destroying the monuments of our civilization which are the symbols and sources of strength that we need to make ourselves better. ("Looking for Richard.")
It is unclear whether in the aftermath of the horrors of the twentieth century the continuing popularity of cynicism about human motives (it is all about power, money or sex, we are told), the refusal to grant respect to people is a cause or an effect of the nightmare of history.
If you reduce members of the opposite sex to body parts, or if any attempt to examine ethical values or aesthetic aspirations is immediately greeted with hostility and derision, then you will only achieve a diminished capacity for development, happiness, or fulfillment. ("Carlos Fuentes and Multiculturalism" and "Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
As a woman you will not be a very happy person if you think of yourself as "tits" and "ass" (forget what other people think for now), even if you have all sorts of nice new gadgets and lots of money in the bank as a result of male "admiration."
You will not be happy with a nice suit of clothes and a fashionable address unless you also have some glimmer of what is possible for all of us with love and hope.
As a man your self-worth should not be linked to the size of your paycheck, the car you drive, or how much weight you can lift at the gym.
What is most important about you (any of us) is not what you look like or what things you have.
What is most important about you is your infinite potential for transformation and capacity for love, especially if you can bring those two things together. In commenting on Shakespeare's ethics Germaine Greer says:
"It was not essential to have studied Plato in order to believe and feel that what was real about human beings was not how they looked or dressed, or how they spoke and what they said, but resided in what was eternal and indestructible about them, their souls."
Shakespeare, p. 49.
We do not think highly enough of ourselves. We think too highly of money and things, commercial products. It is considered quaint to regard one's full humanity or selfhood as something to be achieved.
Well, the self (or an identity) is indeed something to be achieved. And it can only be achieved Shakespeare tells us -- especially in "Hamlet" -- by asking difficult questions, seeking our own answers (with the help of others), and facing life's misfortunes and vicissitudes with courage and a smile.
Kenneth Branagh chose to play the "to be or not to be" speech while facing a mirror. This was brilliant. For this most famous of all poetic texts may be seen as Shakespeare's discovery of the inner monologue that is constitutive of identity in the modern world.
Shakespeare discovers the dialogue of ego and id thereby making the first aesthetic and moral move in the intellectual conversation that leads to Freud and psychoanalysis only a few centuries later. Professor Bloom explains that Shakespeare's great characters "overhear" themselves as we all do now.
Shakespeare insists that we have some regard for ourselves, for our humanity, by reminding us that life simply is Hamlet's quest for purpose.
Shakespeare simply will not let you off the hook with easy answers or bullshit.
Shakespeare forces you to confront yourself, confront evil, pain, ugliness, failure, loss and despair, never surrender or abandon your ideals and never submit without a struggle.
When the final moment comes, when physical destruction or other unavoidable sufferings come our way, we may always choose how we will greet them, whether we will accept them and invite them to stay, facing our troubles with dignity, affirming our humanity in the Promethean gesture of creative effort and defiance:
"Let us," Albert Camus insists, "shake our fists at the gods."
Scientific revelations concerning the humble corner of the universe occupied by our small planet, our lowly origin as a species and the finality of death, not to mention the alleged subjection of the conscious to the subconscious mind, or recent doubts concerning the reality of freedom, may well deprive us of a Shakespeare for our times.
We cannot produce great art (or philosophy) if human beings are seen as trivial and insignificant, no more worthy of respect than any other species that infests the surface of an undistinguished planet in a dark corner of the universe. ("The Return of Metaphysics.")
In trying to fathom how it is possible for a Jewish person to become a Mengele-like monster -- only a generation after the Holocaust -- there may be no better text to consult than "The Merchant of Venice." ("What is it like to be tortured?" and "Terry Tuchin, Diana Lisa Riccioli, and New Jersey's Agency of Torture.")
By accepting a dismissive view of human dignity we make it more likely that persons will become the victims of social injustice and/or that they will be seduced by cruelty or malice.
Doing evil seems not very significant, after all, since we are not very significant. It is not far from this view of humanity to Auschwitz and the Gulag, or to Pavlov's dogs and Abu Ghraib, or the events of 9/11. ("Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
Why should people matter more than any other animals? Why should they matter at all?
For one thing, I am not in love with a moose or an avocado (except on really lonely Saturday nights).
My feelings about a few people tell me that persons are more interesting and complex, in most cases, than hamsters or centipedes. Human feelings and speculations about the universe and the awareness of suffering and death make persons both hungry for beauty and anxious to comfort one another.
We love other people because of their frailty, because we know that (like us) they are doomed. In a Shakespearean moment W.B. Yeats said:
"Human beings are in love, and they are in love with what vanishes."
Shakespeare figured out all of the ways in which people try to cope with this burden of consciousness, with the need for love and meaning, at a time when the world was changing more rapidly than it had before, when much that had seemed certain was doubted and vanishing. ("Is it possible to lie to yourself?")
The same revolutionary change is taking place today as old values and beliefs collapse. We wonder whether anything matters. For a few unfortunate persons nothing matters except themselves.
Such a lack of awe before the miracle of human achievement or merely at the presence of consciousness in the universe seems bizarre to me.
I believe that all of life -- especially human life -- is worthy of awe and respect, attention and concern. I share Shakespeare's humanism insisting that his artistic achievements ennoble all of us. The mystery of humanity is overwhelmingly important to the mystery of the universe.
Studying Shakespeare's wisdom makes it clear that we are all subjects of infinite moral worth, never only animals or things. We matter to ourselves; that's enough. We should respect one another, listen to one another, treat one another with some consideration and reverence. Any person who is emotionally aware will find that Shakespeare's work is not just interesting, but that it is a kind of universal biography of the species.
Shakespeare's universality or his importance and meaning is especially evident in "Hamlet."
I. Shakespeare's Mystery.
No one is going to answer the question of Shakespeare's identity. He remains a mystery because, as Borges said "he is everyone and no one."
I do not mean the authorship question, but the issue of who Shakespeare was, morally and psychologically, a man who lived, loved and died. Clearly, the Stratford man wrote those magnificent texts which could never have been written by an aristocrat: "When in disgrace with fortune ..." the Earl of Oxford could not have written those words.
Shakespeare's dates are 1564 to 1616. "Hamlet" dates from around 1600 or 1601. The greatest poet in the English language was the son of a glover who served as a minor political figure in his native Stratford, and whose life was drawing to a close as Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet."
Towards the end of his life Shakespeare's father experienced financial and other difficulties, possibly related to his alleged Catholic sympathies.
Some scholars believe that these Catholic sympathies were shared by Shakespeare.
I doubt it.
Shakespeare is clearly a skeptic at best -- probably an atheist -- though he could not have said so in his day.
Shakespeare received a grammar school education in the classics which today is probably the equivalent of a college degree, at least, given the recent decline in standards.
There are some missing early years leading to speculation about whether Shakespeare worked for lawyers and might have trained for the bar. If he did, then lawyers should not be too thrilled about it. Shakespeare was hardly an admirer of the legal profession. ("First thing we do we kill all the lawyers ...")
There are surprising parallels between the early lives of Dickens and Shakespeare. Shakespeare may have traveled also, probably to Italy, which enjoys a special status in the English imagination from the Elizabethan era down to E.M. Forster and Evelyn Waugh in the twentieth century.
Shakespeare came to know some fancy people, but his real friends -- like Ben Johnson -- would have been artists and intellectuals, prostitutes and criminals, aristocrats of the mind and philosophers. Shakespeare always identified with outsiders.
Although Shakespeare was always described as "polite" or "gentle," it is doubtful that he was very forthcoming or self-revealing, except in his plays. The plays, in keeping with Shakespeare's paradoxical nature, tell us everything and nothing.
The great sexual passion of his life is the "Dark Lady" of the sonnets. Shakespeare has great fun in the plays and in his poetry with images of light (himself) and dark (herself) alternating the association between these qualities with the masculine and feminine natures of lovers.
He was betrayed or misunderstood the emotions of this lady who slept with the beloved friend providing the episode that also serves as a subject of the powerful drama of the sonnets.
Shakespeare never fully recovers from this double betrayal, I think, and there is a loss of joy in the later works: "Oh how I faint when I of you do write ..."
The two women who mattered in Shakespeare's life were Ann Hathaway, his wife, and the mysterious Dark Lady, sometimes identified as Emilia Lanier (A.L. Rowse) or as the beguiling African and English London prostitute Lucy Dark (G.B. Harrison and others, myself included).
Other candidates have been mentioned, but are far less plausible for the key role in Shakespeare's erotic life. I am pretty sure that it was one of these two ladies who stole Shakespeare's heart and captured his erotic imagination. Certainly, there are gestures towards both women in the sonnets as well as "comments" on others desired and not "known" as well as metaphorical allusions to a few lovers of both or indeterminate gender. ("God is Texting Me!" and "Twelfth Night.")
My guess, as I say, is that Professor Harrison is correct in naming Lucy Dark as the object of Shakespeare's intense passion and concern.
No doubt Emilia Lanier and many others were also subjects of "passion" and sexual partners. ("The expense of spirit in a waste of shame ...")
Self-proclaimed "wits" speak of the Bard's "erratic" erotic imagination.
There is nothing "erratic" about Shakespeare. ("Ann" or "Anne" are equally acceptable, by the way, since the late Mrs. Shakespeare used both spellings, or others did, since she was illiterate.)
"Other suspects [for the role of Dark Lady] have included Lucy Negro" -- known as Lucy Dark -- "notorious, dark-skinned Clerkenwell prostitute -- not to be confused with Lucy Morgan, one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting, later a brothel-keeper." (Holden, p. 121.)
African-born persons feature in Shakespeare's plays as real human beings who are every bit as complex, intelligent, subtle and powerful as anyone else. Shakespeare's warnings about slavery should be borne in mind. There are no stereotypes or racist depictions in Shakespeare. Much the same goes for his women. They are shrewd and tough as well as resourceful. (See "Julius Ceasar" and "Cleopatra" then "MacBeth" and "The Taming of the Shrew.")
To say that Shakespeare was way ahead of his century is an understatement.
Shakespeare's poetry is the work of someone able to imagine or project himself into the life of others especially those with the most interesting lives in the world that he knew who, obviously, were the titled and powerful aristocrats.
The author of those great plays was not idealistic about human nature and did not particularly admire the aristocrats, but he liked the common people even less. Take a good look at "Coriolanus" for a disturbing sense of Shakespeare's concerns about democracy, also for a glance at his own "issues" with his mother.
Somehow, Shakespeare came to forgive everything and everyone, to accept the way things are because of the way we are.
Shakespeare abandons even his art (Prospero says, "I shall abjure magic") in the end by welcoming death as a "gentleman."
The status of "gentleman," complete with coat of arms and property, obsessed Shakespeare. However, this was only until he had obtained it. This status gave Shakespeare the independence that he equated with freedom.
Shakespeare saw through social pretensions and the absurdities of class. Shakespeare's achievement of this "gentlemanly" status may have had to do with his own Hamlet-like "issues" regarding his father's social pretensions.
Shakespeare's capacity for love is boundless. He was terribly hurt in his emotional life, flirted with madness and self-destruction; his sexual appetite was powerful and was essentially heterosexual. He was masculine and feminine, cultivated, yet with a fondness for wit and low humor, unassuming and yet proud. All of Shakespeare's clowns are himself. He sees all of us as clowns, in fact, and as much more besides. Hamlet's true father, Professor Bloom suggests, is "Yorick." This is perceptive and true. Shakespeare's world is a deeply sad and absurd comedy without redemption except for love.
Shakespeare is a much more profound and talented Elizabethan version of Samuel Beckett.
Shakespeare's deepest insight in the graveyard scene is that God has a sense of humor and so must we. "He that made us" is a jester. This refers both to God and Shakespeare, for it is the only explanation for what we are. We are not only "fortune's fools," but also God's playthings.
Shakespeare has decided to make us and himself the butt of his wicked humor. As we laugh we notice a tear in his eyes and begin to feel our own.
Shakespeare knows that we are all fools, cosmic fools, foolish children, doing our best to laugh and be brave, hurting one another and accumulating wealth (or power) in our stupidity and blindness, so as not to take a good hard look at that skull that we will soon become. Shakespeare takes that look for us, then he invited his audiences to do the same, while giving them the option of being merely entertained.
This is something for film makers to bear in mind today -- options for audiences are always welcome. ("'Inception': A Movie Review.")
As "Hamlet" draws to a close we are given Shakespeare's answers: We are all going to die. There is no moment in any human life, including those moments of our greatest distractions and joys, when we are entirely unaware of this fact.
We must behave morally, as a matter of our own dignity and as a way of going to our deaths with equanimity and poise. Hamlet reminds us that "... the readiness is all."
"Readiness" is a matter of daily preparation because it is what earns us the right to love in affirmation of life.
I will discuss, in a very cursory way, Hamlet's "philosophy" by pondering some of his remarks concerning freedom, love, and death. These are the great issues, for me, in every human life. But the most important of these mysteries is love.
I saw "Hamlet," in June, 2008, at "Shakespeare in the Park," Delacorte Theater, Central Park, Manhattan. I especially admired Margaret Colin's erotically charged and powerful Gertrude; Lauren Ambrose's very American "Ophelia," boots and all; Andre Braugher's excellent "Claudius" makes you long to see Mr. Braugher play "Othello." This Ophelia might have stepped out of "Girl Interrupted" or been transformed into Elizabeth Wurtzel. The best Ophelia on-screen (for me) is Kate Winslet's intense interpretation in Kenneth Branagh's magnificent filmed version of the play. Helena Bonham-Carter is on the same level as Ms. Winslet in Mel Gibson brave effort to play the 'Black Prince."
II. Freedom, Love, and Death in Hamlet.
A. Hamlet's Freedom.
Hamlet begins his conversation with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern with comments that are revealing of his view of freedom:
HAMLET: "... What have you, my good friends, deserved at the hands of Fortune that she sends you to prison hither?"
GUILDENSTERN: "Prison, my Lord?"
HAMLET: "Denmark's a prison."
ROSENCRANTZ: "Then is the world one."
HAMLET: "A goodly one, in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one of the worst."
ROSENCRANTZ: "We think not so, my Lord."
HAMLET: "Why then 'tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison."
ROSENCRANTZ: "Why then your ambition makes it one. 'Tis too narrow for your mind."
HAMLET: "O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams."
Hamlet, 2.2, 236-259.
Hamlet's freedom is metaphysical. It is spiritual and not primarily political. Bounded in a nutshell, in the prison of Denmark (or even the world), Hamlet is absolutely free in his thoughts and questioning, yet capable of absolute confinement within his misery. He is free in his moral striving. His doubting, in fact, even of whether to go on with his life ("to be or not to be") is liberating.
Hamlet is that creature who questions his purpose and meaning. He is the first existentialist. Hamlet is Dasein. Hamlet's freedom is both blessing and curse, so is yours.
Relativists take a special delight in this exchange pointing to Hamlet's comment that only "thinking makes it so" often failing to realize that the subject here is freedom and not ethics.
Hamlet's point, in this conversation and elsewhere in the play is that we cannot avoid thinking that we are free because we have to be, not that our thoughts are neither right nor wrong. The morality of his mission to do justice and set the world right implies the "real" existence of a transcendent moral order. Not only is there such a thing as the right thing to do, but once we know what it is, we must do it. Long before Kant, Hamlet knows that "ought implies can."
When we first encounter Hamlet, he is without purpose, listless, apathetic. His mission -- which is provided by the ghost of the dead King Hamlet, his father -- awakens him to the task of self-understanding and struggling for justice.
Loved-ones who die, or those who are missing physically in our lives, are rarely fully absent from them, not if they matter to us. Every ghost story is about the lingering presence of a physically departed person whose importance and meaning in our lives is unresolved and necessary for us. Prince Hamlet is called "The Black Prince" because of his "inked cloak," that is, black garments that signal his mourning for his father and also sadness, despair, pain. Hamlet's world is a dark place. ("What you will ... ")
No one can take from me the persons that I need in order to live because my mind will supply them to me if they are sufficiently vital to my existence. I will find a way to soothe the pain of their absence.
Perhaps this is a lesson to draw from "Hamlet." A woman I love, for instance, will be with me despite geographical and other separations. I will keep her with me always so long as I can dream.
Prince Hamlet is also a creature of duty. He must avenge his father's murder, but only in the manner that seems right to him. The murder of Claudius is easily arranged. That is not enough for Hamlet. The moral order is broken and Hamlet must fix it. Something has gone terribly wrong in his life and loving. The time is out of joint ... "Oh, cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right."
He rebels against his duty, but Hamlet cannot "escape" his freedom.
Eric Fromm says that the oppressive burden of freedom is exceeded only by pain from denials of freedom.
The comparison to Christ's mission is obvious at several key points in the play. Mr. Branagh understands this analogy best among modern interpreters of the work.
This is to note the universality of the story. To reject his mission is also, for Hamlet, to make a choice. The cup cannot pass from his lips.
Hamlet has discovered the condition of the modern subject who is trapped in an ambiguous freedom and, hence, bound by morality. Hamlet anticipates Kant, as I say, but also Sartre.
Hamlet suffers from a condition of division, he is schizoid. He is R.D. Laing's "ontologically divided" person which helps to explain his wildly oscillating nature. Hamlet is one thing to the world, another to himself; Hamlet is an actor, whose part is written by himself. Hamlet fears "petrifaction" (R.D. Laing). He dreads the thought of being swallowed up in another's image of him, that is, in the gaze of the other:
"You would play me like a pipe ..."
He says this in a cold rage. His freedom is his cross. Freedom is not negotiable, for Hamlet, like his love because these qualities are his identity.
Hamlet will be (and in the end is) his freedom. You must be your freedom.
Hamlet's love is freely chosen; you must choose your love.
I have suggested that Hamlet is an actor. Any Renaissance prince was a celebrity, famous and/or a "star" in the way that cinema personalities are today. Hamlet's "issues" include the problem of fame and the mirage of charisma or power of personality.
Like Andrew Lloyd Weber's "Evita" Hamlet dazzles with a little bit of "star quality."
The encounter between Hamlet and Polonius is the meeting of the tortoise and hare, of the literal and ironic minds. Hamlet will "be," he will endure his freedom, no matter what the cost of that freedom may be.
I believe that it was Lord Mansfield who said: "Do justice though the heavens fall."
Hamlet agrees. In fact, Hamlet insists upon it: "From this time forth, my thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth."
Hamlet is divided because he is free. He desires this division and uncertainty, not always consciously. Hamlet is both man of action, swordsman, debater, wit, lover, avenger; even as he is also a man of words, intellectual, artist, author.
Hamlet is creator and created, playwright and actor. He is Renaissance man asserting his authority to define himself even against the will of God and an indifferent nature.
Only Hamlet can or must decide whether to live or die, regardless of what God's law commands, even escaping Shakespeare's pen in the end in order to become an archetype inhabiting the collective subconscious of the human species.
You must be the creator of your identity. You must write yourself "for" others.
I suggest that you turn from "Hamlet" to Shakespeare's "Sonnets." This is Shakespeare's inner "Elsinore." The characters in the drama of the "Sonnets" will be found in veiled forms in the late plays. The theme of treachery that is more hurtful than "a serpent's sting" in King Lear is incomprehensible without a knowledge of the "Sonnets."
Horatio is both alter-ego for Hamlet and for Shakespeare. Some have interpreted the play as Horatio's distorted and hero-worshiping account of his friend's exploits. Hamlet, like Christ, embodies the hero's journey. And this bookish hero's "resurrection" can be seen on every stage in which this greatest of all tragedies (which is also very funny) can be seen and heard, in every language, nearly every day. Mr. Branagh was wise to play the great speech before a mirror because all of us are reflected in that mirror. In the words of Professor Bloom:
"If everything that will ever happen to you is only a mirror of your own character, then holding the mirror up to nature becomes rather a dark activity: all of us are the fools of time, victims of an unfolding we cannot effect. I do not think that this is Shakespeare's own vision, nor will it be Hamlet's, in Act V, yet it is evidently Hamlet's ground of despair in the life he has endured before his return from the sea. When we see him in the graveyard, in Act V, he will have been resurrected."
Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, pp. 48-49.
Characters in Hamlet are leaping into and out of graves as well as beds. These things -- bed (love) and grave (death) -- are equated in this work.
In the Public Theater's production in 2008 a rose is placed before a fire at the outset of the story symbolizing the entanglement of eros and thanatos. When the two are brought together (flower and flame) the result is an orgasm. This play is a literary orgasm, a "small death." ("'The English Patient': A Movie Review" and "'The Reader': A Movie Review.")
Hamlet must determine when to fulfill his "almost blunted purpose." He must forgive and accept his mother's carnality and his own. He must avenge his father's murder by "re-enacting" it by way of a surrogate Claudius.
Hamlet must come to terms with his own faults and the sins of others through the chosen confrontation with a much greater and more monstrous evil -- evil which is left as a mystery, a nothingness, a "banality" by Shakespeare: the evil of his uncle, Claudius. ("Smiling, damned villain ...")
Evil, then, is seen as a possibility for all of us, for the good Prince too, for all except Horatio. Goodness -- in the form of Horatio -- is, as goodness always must be, bland, solid, and dull.
An important and often overlooked aspect of Hamlet's expiation and achievement of justice has to do with his love for Ophelia.
B. Hamlet's Love.
The romance between Hamlet and Ophelia is vital to the understanding of this work. These two characters are mirror-images because each reflects the other's predicament by suffering the ultimate agony of this tragedy with and through the other, by which I mean not only a self-chosen death, but the unbearable recognition of love lost in life that leads to madness.
In his first scene of confrontation with Ophelia, Hamlet is fresh from his meditation on death and the need to find reasons to live: "... to be or not to be ..."
Love is the only answer to this questioning. Hamlet cannot realize this just yet. He is consumed by anger and the unresolved relationship with a dead father who has entrusted him with the mission of restoring the moral order, doing justice, a burden that Hamlet -- or any person -- may be unable to fulfill.
Hamlet wonders how he will do this awesome justice, failing to realize until much later, that only through loving can anyone restore the moral order. Again, think of the Christian allegory.
Notice that it is only after being charged with "unmanly grief" that Hamlet utters the famous line "frailty, thy name is woman."
An important lesson that Hamlet will learn is concerned with the strength of women and the "manliness" of grief, also of other emotions. It may be useful to compare two key sections of the text in which the relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia is set forth:
OPHELIA: "Good my lord. How does your honor for this many a day?"
HAMLET: "I humbly thank you; well, well, well."
OPHELIA: "My lord I have remembrances of yours,
That I have longed long to redeliver.
I pray you, now receive them."
HAMLET: "No, not I. I never gave you aught."
Hamlet, 3.1, 92-111.
Why does Hamlet claim that he never gave Ophelia "aught"?
Because the Hamlet who gave her those items was another man. He was untroubled by the need to set the world right after the murder of his father. He was a child as a matter of fact. Hamlet has been transformed by the encounter with his father's ghost. Death and the problem of meaning have changed Hamlet. What is more he has learned something about human fallibility, but has not yet learned forgiveness and resignation, something that will come later in his story.
Hamlet undergoes more than one transformation in this work.
Hamlet thinks of his mother's sexual appetite as somehow explaining her complicity in murder. He associates eros not only with women, but with the feminine side of himself, romantic feeling. But he must now call on the warrior inside himself. Hamlet must walk away from romance and the possible treachery and pain of love in order to do battle. He fails to realize that the deepest wisdom, for him, consists in doing the opposite. He will learn that loving is a kind of battling (struggle), a fight against our basest impulses. ("Friedrich Nietzsche on Self-Realization" and "What a Man's Gotta Do.")
Hamlet must journey inward in order to find the core of himself that will not be moved in the confrontation with evil. He assumes that this core is exclusively masculine, that he can spare no time for sweetness and romance, for his own powerful femininity. Yet his quiet resignation at the end ("we defy augury") is an acceptance of gentleness and grace.
Hamlet achieves a woman's bravery. Hamlet's "womanly" side, paradoxically, loves Ophelia, providing him with feminine wisdom and courage to add to his masculine effort, in the final battle, after he accepts Ophelia's suffering and loss. (See "'Holy Smoke': A Movie Review" and "Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
Notice Hamlet's comment to Horatio:
HAMLET: "... But thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about my heart; but it is no matter."
HORATIO: "Nay, good my lord --"
HAMLET: "It is but foolery, but it is such a kind of gaingiving as would perhaps trouble a WOMAN."
Hamlet, 5.2, 211-214. (emphasis added)
Early on, Hamlet says to Ophelia:
HAMLET: "... be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, farewell. Or, if thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool, for wise men know what monsters you make of them. To a nunnery go, and quickly too. Farewell."
OPHELIA: "Heavenly powers, restore him!"
The next lines are really directed at Queen Gertrude:
HAMLET: "I have heard of your paintings too, well enough. God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. You jig, you amble, and you lisp, you nickname God's creatures, and you make your wantonness your ignorance. Go to, I'll no more on't; it hath made me mad. I say we will have no more marriage. Those that are already married -- all but one -- shall live. The rest shall keep as they are. To a nunnery go."
Hamlet, 3.1, 130-150.
These words fall into the category of "you can't live with them, you can't live without them" kinds of male folklore. Curiously, one has the sense that they are directed by Hamlet not only to Ophelia and to his mother -- who stands behind her, as it were -- but also to that mirror-image of himself that is feminine as much as masculine.
Shakespeare goes to great pains to protect the innocence and moral purity of both Ophelia and Desdemona. Both characters are sheltered from moral blame which the poet sees (quite rightly) as primarily the responsibility of men in his world, and perhaps this is still true in our own world.
In the graveyard scene, however, we see that Hamlet has learned much about what really matters and what is at the center of his being, his love for Ophelia, which is restored to the present tense. This is one important lesson that his creator sought to instill in him, but in light of his stubbornness Hamlet had to learn it the hard way.
It is at this point in the narrative, I believe, that Hamlet chooses a course of action that he knows will result in his own death -- a death to match Ophelia's suicide that is also a gesture of atonement and a possible reunification.
Trendy "lit crit types" will immediately refer to Ian McEwen's Atonement. Perhaps Martin Amis's The Information may be a more apt comparison. These two novels by contemporary British writers should be placed next to Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince as works that, among other things, engage with the legacy of Shakespeare's great play and the responsibilities of all literature.
The press hysteria about Amis targeting his friend Julian Barnes in creating a character who is a failed novelist in The Information seems absurd (to me) because the book really takes on Hamlet and Horatio. Amis is both of his writers in that book.
The loss of love, for Hamlet, leaves the field open to death. Death takes its bounty, gleefully, in the last act of this tragedy.
Another title for this play, anticipating Sigmund Freud, is "Love and Death."
Without love, life is pointless for Prince Hamlet. It has taken all of his madness and wanderings for him to learn and then accept this truth.
The loss of Ophelia closes the door on the possibility of love leaving Hamlet only with a cold justice -- with murder and death as his reason for being. Here is Hamlet at the graveside:
HAMLET: "I loved Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum. What wilt thou do for her?
KING: O, he is mad, Laertes.
QUEEN: For love of God, forbear him.
HAMLET: 'Swounds, show me what thou'lt do.
Woo't weep? Woo't fight? Woo't fast? Woo't tear thyself?
Woo't drink up eisel? Eat a crocodile?
I'll do it. Dost come here to whine?
To outface me with leaping in her grave?
Be buried with her, and so will I.
And if thou prate of mountains, let them throw
Millions of acres on us, till our ground,
Singeing his pate against the burning zone,
Make Ossa like a wart! Nay, ... thoul't mouth,
I'll rant as well as thou."
Hamlet, 5.1, 270-286.
Shakespeare is saying: know and speak your love before it is too late. If you love her, tell her today. Shout it from the rooftops. Like Orlando in "As You Like It" write poems for her and nail them to the trees in the Forest of Arden. Tell the world that you love her.
You may even create a blog and write about Shakespeare as a way of speaking what you feel.
There is no pretense any longer of the "I never gave you aught" sort. No more ego gets in the way of what is felt. Hamlet has grown up. He accepts both his wounded state and what matters: loving Ophelia and other flawed human beings, coming to terms with the death of fathers (a task shared with Laertes and Fortinbras), and doing justice.
Hamlet has accepted his substantial burden of guilt and pain. He knows that the scales will be set right, but that the price will be his life.
It is this dismal recognition of the burden and cost of justice which leads, finally, to his famous achievement of transcendence.
C. Hamlet's Death.
In the graveyard scene, Hamlet comes upon a skull:
HAMLET: "... Why may not that be the skull
of a lawyer? Where be his quiddities, his cases, his quillities,
his tenures, and his tricks? Why does he suffer
this mad knave now to knock him about the sconce with a dirty shovel,
and will not tell him of his
action of battery? Hum, this fellow might be in 's time
a great buyer of land, with his statutes, his recognizances,
his fines, his double vouchers, his recoveries.
Is this the fine of his fines and the recovery
of his recoveries, to have his fine pate full of fine dirt? Will
his vouchers vouch for him no more of his purchases, and
double ones too, than the length and breadth of a pair of indentures?
The very conveyances of his lands
will scarcely lie in this box, and must th' inheritor himself
have no more, ha?"
Hamlet, 5.1, 98-111.
Shakespeare is reminding those who seek to evade the confrontation with our ultimate fate by accumulating either wealth or power, or both, that the effort is foolish because death will come even to the mighty as they lay hidden behind titles of office in their golden palaces surrounded by security guards.
The rewards of this life can be obtained fraudulently, most things can be fixed, powerful men can be bribed, not death. Death's questions cannot be avoided:
"What has your life been about? Has it meant something beyond mere animal satisfactions? What have you given of yourself to others? How will you be remembered and by whom?"
Pointing to the things that you have accumulated will have little effect during those grim final moments. In the long scope of history all names are forgotten or made a lesson for bored schoolchildren, all wealth lost or dispersed, all power dissipated, everything turned to dust in the wind. ("'Westworld': A Review of the HBO TV Series.")
Hamlet's answers then resurface: love and morality, beauty and goodness are what we know, together with some courage and dignity as we head towards our final destruction. These are the things that matter about us -- any of us -- and they provide the only possible "defeat" of death.
HAMLET: "... Alas, poor Yorick!
I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of
most excellent fancy. He hath bore me on his back a
thousand times, and now how abhorred in my imagination it is!
My gorge rises at it. Here hung those lips
that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your
gibes now? Your gambols, your songs, your flashes
of merriment that were wont to set the table on a roar?
Not one now to mock your own grinning? Quite
chopfallen? Now get you to my lady's chamber and tell her, let her
paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come.
Make her laugh at that. ..."
Hamlet, 5.1, 181-194.
Hamlet is much too clever not to figure out the plot by his uncle to murder him. Aware of what must come he nevertheless accepts the wager and makes his preparations embracing the death which he foresees with serenity and "feminine" grace.
HORATIO: "If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will
forestall their repair hither and say you are not fit."
HAMLET: "Not a whit, we defy augury. 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
it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man has aught of
what he leaves, what is 't to leave betimes?
Let be."
Hamlet, 5.2, 214-222.
There is a Christ-like peace in this passage along with a universal resolution of the human predicament: "Let be."
We learn to love and suffer for it. We give of ourselves, until there is nothing left to give. We do our best to achieve justice, or we strive for it until the end, then we accept what must be with a measure of stoicism and pride.
We can say that we were here, for a little while anyway, and may have mattered to a few people.
We tried to do some good, to leave something of ourselves behind. The rest is "silence."
III. Shakespeare Matters Because You Matter.
All of this amounts to affirming the dignity of every human life since only the lives of persons inspire such poetry and grandeur.
Since you are human these reflections are about and belong to you as much as they do to anyone else. Your fate is no less significant than Yorick's, Alexander's, or Hamlet's. This is true regardless of race or gender, ethnicity, or sexual-orientation.
Humanism seems "corny" or "inflated" to young people today because we live in the aftermath of great horrors like the Holocaust. Human beings by the millions have been destroyed in the twentieth century and beyond in the way that cars are built on an assembly line and without poetry or reflections at a graveside. The victims' teeth are counted and their hair is made into wigs while such burial as they receive is comparable to the piling of refuse in a dump.
We still live in a time when people are killed by the millions -- nearly 70-to-100 million persons murdered in the twentieth century by some counts and the new century may exceed these numbers -- without fanfare or significance of any kind.
Wearing the wrong jacket or expensive sneakers can get you killed in some neighborhoods (including mine) in New York.
Nobody cares. People just walk away or step over you on their way to work. None of this would have surprised Shakespeare.
Shakespeare lived in a world which was not all that different from yours. He was poor in London, which was a very dangerous place then. People have never been much better or worse, sadly, than they are right now.
Shakespeare lived in a time when words mattered and meant something without the electronic noise that fills our lives with meaningless phrases. He was still able to pause long enough to try to get people to notice where they were and what would become of them.
Shakespeare considered the beauty around him and succeeded in capturing that beauty in language.
In Shakespeare's descriptions of his predicament (and yours) he achieves and invites you to join in a kind of community (humanity) that is, especially, LIVING in the English and/or any human language or languages. ("The Forest of Arden" and "Frank Kermode and the Man in the Macintosh.")
Shakespeare reminds you that, despite all the obstacles and all the people telling you that you cannot do much and that you do not matter at all, you do matter and you can save the world -- people do it every day -- merely by loving one another and striving to live decently (and bravely) no matter how foolish this may seem to others or how difficult it may be to do so.
As I write this essay I am in great emotional pain. Hackers may destroy or prevent the posting of this essay.
Vandalism and further violations of the text are almost certain.
Shakespeare understood that oh-so human pain. His sonnets are concerned with that pain and with the mystery of evil. I will reach for them when I stop typing.
Shakespeare left words that may help me to cope with my portion of suffering today. I would rather reach for those poems than for some medication to ease the pain. I will, nevertheless, choose my pain because it is the price of my loves. I will deposit both my pain and love in a book at whatever level I manage to write it for the benefit of others including those trying to prevent me from writing it.
In "Hamlet" Shakespeare does the same for you. He gives you beauty to help with the pain. With Shakespeare's poetry I may get through today and maybe I will make it until tomorrow.
Without Shakespeare's poetry and other beautiful things I doubt that I could survive this episode in my life and find the strength to continue struggling for justice.
A lesson to learn from Shakespeare's work is that suffering is terrible, but it is much worse to be the sort of person who causes or ENJOYS the suffering of others -- someone like Iago -- than to suffer ourselves at the hands of such monsters.
Miguel Unamuno says "suffering is what tells us that we are alive."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who equated love with suffering in parables of Christianity, was inspired to respond to Descartes and tip his hat to Shakespeare: "I love; therefore, I am."
Do not allow anyone to tell you that Shakespeare is not for you or that he does not matter anymore.
Shakespeare will live for as long as there are human beings to read or listen to his magical words.
Shakespeare's voice will come alive from stages all over the world for as long as there are human beings on Earth.
You do not have to be a graduate of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts or one of the great English universities to speak these words and relish this uniquely gifted poet's achievement.
Shakespeare's verses are like great Opera arias, some sad and others joyful. They are your life in immortal stanzas.
HAMLET: "... If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story. ..."
Hamlet, 5.2, 343-355.
I have tried to do something for Shakespeare. Not because he needs it, but because I do.
After you read Hamlet, especially if you are a young minority person, you should try to do the same for Shakespeare: Write an e-mail to Shakespeare telling him what you thought of the play.
Maybe this is a way of doing a little bit for Prince Hamlet and for yourself. Read and speak the words from "Hamlet" that I first quoted in this essay. Listen to them. Let the sound of the delicious words echo in your mind. See if you can come up with a hip-hop verse, rap, or poem that Prince Hamlet might speak today. ("'History is What Hurts': An Encomium For James.")
Suppose that Hamlet lives in a dangerous neighborhood as the "prince" of your city? What would Hamlet say to his rival, Fortinbras? Or to his love, Ophelia? How would you express the meaning of the "to be or not to be" speech in hip-hop terms?
Shakespeare's language is part of what you are, now, and of what you always will be.
Shakespeare's words have shaped the music of your language.
James Earl Jones recalled listening to Shakespeare's words as a worker in the fields. Men who were nearly illiterate had memorized speeches from the great plays and sang them as they worked.
You were born having read "Hamlet." No one can take that language from you. No one can take your beauty and pride from you. No one can take Shakespeare from you.
Please hold on to Shakespeare's great poetry because you will need it. All of us do.
