Hamlet. Revision Sheet.

‘The time is out of Joint’

Hamlet dramatizes the anxieties caused by the encounter of two incompatible worlds. Hamlet is caught between the modern renaissance world of rationality and humanism, represented by Horatio and the university at Wittenberg, and the medieval world of combat, duty, and superstition, represented by Elsinore and his father’s ghost. What is often called Hamlet’s ‘madness’ can be read as the effects of irreconcilable tensions brought about by filial demands to revenge on the one hand, and intellectual concerns about the nature of self, the after-life and the worth of the codes that govern Danish society. Hamlet’s madness exists at the centre of these oppositions.

Medieval Renaissance

Old Hamlet HAMLET Horatio

Superstition alienation Scholarship

Duty displacement Self-doubt

Action uncertainty Procrastination

Social bonds Individualism

Images of the interruption of continual temporal flow permeate the play. The ghost, for example, is a perfect image of anachronistic apparition, appear in a time where it does not belong. Ghosts disrupt temporality. They come from the past, appear in the present, and, in this case, insist that something occurs in the future. Not only is Hamlet symbolically caught between the old world of Denmark, and the new, attractive world of university, but he is literally caught in the middle of a rupture in time. This play appeared on the cusp of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its apocalyptic anxiety is clear to see. Hamlet could be said to be ‘untimely’.

Revenge

Hamlet is a ‘Revenge Tragedy’. The genre was extremely popular in the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, the formula of style and content being largely defined in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1592). Revenge tragedies require the completion of an act of violence in response to an original affront. According to the laws of revenge tragedy, all those who kill must in turn be killed. This is why Hamlet dies even if we feel he doesn’t deserve to. He has the blood of Polonius on his hands and that crime must be accounted for. Revenge tragedy rises to prominence at around the time that the state began to insist more on its centralized authority and judicial system. Rather than exacting a kind of frontier justice of their own, citizens were required to hand felons over to the state’s legal system. This characterises the state as an impartial and just magistrate, able to deal with matters of crime and punishment in an objective and rational manner, thus reinforcing the perception of its authority as the state appropriates the edict of God: Mihi vindicta, ego Retribuam, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay’. Revenge tragedy is therefore somewhat nostalgic, and looks back to a time when a man might take instant and immediate revenge against someone who had wronged him, rather than the clinical ‘revenge by proxy’ that the state offered. Also, revenge tragedy tries to make some sense of death. Generally speaking, everyone who dies in a play of this kind dies for a palpable reason. Those that remain can easily identify that reason and attack it. In the universe of revenge tragedy, people don’t die for no reason, or randomly and unfairly as they do in life. Even if it is heinously criminal, murder gives death some meaning. Another aspect of revenge tragedy is that is has quite specific generic demands (those who kill are killed and so on), and its characters often seem to be at least partially aware of them. Sometimes, as in Hamlet, there is a sense that principal characters acknowledge they are in a play, simply waiting until their time to act as the genre demands of them.

Representational Paradigms, Meta-theatricality

Hamlet contains significant discussion about the nature of representation and the reliability of representations. Doubt about the reliability of Old Hamlet’s ghost constitutes a significant part of Hamlet’s procrastination, while another form of representation, a play, is used as a means to discover the guilt of Claudius. Hamlet features scenes in which acting styles are discussed, favouring verisimilitudinous acting styles over old-fashioned ones. Similarly, the skull of the old clown Yorrick discovered in the cemetery, offers both an opportunity for a meditation on death and the passing of old-fashioned entertainments and performing styles. Hamlet is extremely knowledgeable about the theatre, compares himself often to an actor, and ‘puts on’ an antic disposition. Even though he dissimulates, he is continually insisting that he is the only one who shows his ‘true’, ‘genuine’ feelings Overall, the play and its characters seem continually aware of themselves as a fiction, and seems to possess a discrete knowledge about their roles as actors.

Self-Doubt, Internal Dialogue, Individualism

The most important word in the ‘To be or not to be’ speech is ‘or’. ‘Or’ is the balancing beam of personal choice, of self-determination, of autonomy, of decision making. ‘Or’ is perhaps the most important word in the play, as Shakespeare offers us an unwilling revenger, someone who doesn’t want to do what the genre demands of them because they feel themselves more ‘modern’ in an intellectual sense. ‘Or’ is symbolic of Hamlet’s nascent individualism. Hamlet is not individuated to the extent that we are, as the cultural structures of bourgeois individualism are not yet in place historically, but his doubt, his questioning, and, most importantly, his soliloquising, are representative of a consciousness that experiences itself as an individual entity, outside of, and able to look into, prefabricated expectations of cultural and filial obligation. Hamlet gestates modern subjectivities.

Hamlet’s ‘Conversion’

After Hamlet’s return from England, and his capture by pirates, Hamlet appears to be reconciled to his fate. Why has this suddenly happened? On the one hand, it could be said that the battle with the pirates has forced him to act, and he sees that action is not as difficult as he had presumed it to be. On the other, it could be that we have now entered act five, and if the play is to conclude, Hamlet must take the action the genre demands. Whatever the reason, the Hamlet of the last act of the play finally becomes a revenger, and finally acts in accordance with the demands of his role. This is a retrograde step in some respects, but it demonstrates that genre outweighs character in English drama at this time.