{"id":699,"date":"2013-01-08T20:55:07","date_gmt":"2013-01-08T20:55:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/?page_id=699"},"modified":"2014-01-18T14:38:47","modified_gmt":"2014-01-18T14:38:47","slug":"hamlets-hard-boiled-ethics","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/issues\/current-issue\/hamlets-hard-boiled-ethics\/","title":{"rendered":"Hamlet’s Hard-Boiled Ethics"},"content":{"rendered":"

James A. Lewin,\u00a0Shepherd University\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Print as pdf<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

It was a cold, foggy midnight in Elsinore. \u00a0Evil lurked in every shadow.\u00a0 An emergency patrol on high-alert watched around the clock because of troop movements led by Young Fortinbras, son of an old enemy to the state.\u00a0 Not to mention: according to a Top-Secret report, filed by conscripts of the home-guard militia, an occult apparition had been seen stalking the battlements\u2014in the shape of the late king of Denmark, Old Hamlet.\u00a0 Generally, paranormal dangers would not be investigated, but the political nature of the sighting caused concern. Marcellus, a corporal, and Horatio, a civilian investigator, confirmed the report.\u00a0\u00a0 Circumventing the usual channels, they took their information to Young Hamlet, son of the dead king and a person of interest to the authorities.\u00a0 His first reaction to news of the ghost, was not indecisive.\u00a0 To quote: \u201cIf it assume my noble father\u2019s person, \/ I\u2019ll speak to it though hell itself should gape \/ And bid me hold my peace\u201d (1.2.244-246). He also abjured his associates to keep their contact with him secret, even if he adopted an \u201cantic disposition\u201d (1.5.180).\u00a0 Subsequently, flouting conventional ethics, Young Hamlet took the law into his own hands to follow his conscience.<\/span><\/p>\n

Popular tradition from Goethe and Coleridge to Freudian psychoanalysis has concentrated on Hamlet as an overly sensitive prince constitutionally unable to act. For example, in the voice-over introducing <\/ins>his 1948 film adaptation of Hamlet<\/em>, Laurence Olivier posits that Hamlet<\/em> is \u201cthe tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind\u201d (qtd. in Alexander v-vi).<\/span><\/p>\n

But Hamlet’s tragic flaw cannot be separated from the political background of his times and the uncompromising idealism of his ethics.\u00a0 In a book-length rebuttal to Olivier’s film, Peter Alexander has argued that, contrary to the Romantic\/Freudian stereotype of an indecisive prince, Shakespeare’s Hamlet has “many of the ingredients of the hard-boiled” private investigator in the film noir<\/em> tradition of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett (24).<\/span><\/p>\n

In an essay distinguishing his hard-boiled Private \u201cI\u201d from the old-fashioned classical detective, Raymond Chandler could be describing Hamlet:<\/span><\/p>\n

In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption.\u00a0 It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man\u2026. He is the hero, he is everything.\u00a0 He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man.\u00a0 He must be \u2026 a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability\u2026. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth. \u00a0(par. [35])<\/span><\/p>\n

Like the hard-boiled \u201cPrivate I,\u201d Hamlet lives by his own ethical code, based on a gut-feeling of what he means by himself\u2014which he interprets as the inner voice of his own sense of human conscience.\u00a0 His ethical choices may circumvent conventional norms.\u00a0 He is willing to defy the injustice of established authority.\u00a0 Yet, paradoxically, Hamlet defines secular authority and individual morality.<\/span><\/p>\n

Far from creating an indecisive and weak-willed Hamlet, Alexander argues:<\/span><\/p>\n

Shakespeare\u2026brings home to us the truth of what Mr. Chandler would say when he calls his hero \u201ca common man and yet an unusual man\u201d\u2026. Tragedy, Shakespeare had come to see when he was writing Hamlet<\/em>, is a kind of consecration of the common elements of man\u2019s moral life\u2026. The play dramatizes the perpetual struggle to which all civilization that is genuine is doomed.\u00a0 To live up to its own ideals it has to place itself at a disadvantage with the cunning and treacherous.\u00a0 The problem Mr. Chandler sets his hero is infinitely complicated in Hamlet<\/em>\u2014to be humane without loss of toughness. (182-185)<\/span><\/p>\n

A hard-boiled Hamlet would be valid in terms of Shakespeare\u2019s source materials from the Historica Danica <\/em>of Saxo Grammaticus and the genre of Elizabethan revenge tragedy.\u00a0 It could also be relevant to define the authority of individual conscience amidst the ambiguity and ambivalence in our own time.<\/span><\/p>\n

The ancient prototype for the Private \u201cI\u201d was Sophocles\u2019 King Oedipus investigating the death of the previous king.\u00a0 Using the detective techniques of his era, Oedipus turned to the Delphic Oracle\u2014who had previously warned Oedipus that he was fated to kill his father and marry his mother. Although Oedipus ran away, his Unconscious caught up with him at the place where the three-roads meet.\u00a0 Oedipus could solve the Riddle of the Sphinx.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet he remained blind to tragic insight.\u00a0 It took Oedipus years to discover the murderer in his own skin.\u00a0 Of course, the dirty little secret was that Sophocles made Oedipus a fall-guy, framed by the cosmic curse of his ancestors.\u00a0 Oedipus\u2019s guilt was his heroic quest for the truth.\u00a0 He was sucker enough to take seriously the Oracle\u2019s command to \u201cKnow Thyself.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Now, fast-forward to the confrontation with cosmic injustice in The Spanish Tragedy<\/em> by Thomas Kyd.\u00a0 Following the murder of his son, Hieronimo exclaims:<\/span><\/p>\n

O sacred heavens!\u00a0 If this unhallowed deed,<\/span>
\n If this inhuman and barbarous attempt,<\/span>
\n \u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026.<\/span>
\n Shall unrevealed and unrevenged pass,<\/span>
\n How should we term your dealings just,<\/span>
\n If you unjustly deal with those that in your justice trust? (3.2.5-11)<\/span><\/p>\n

In both The Spanish Tragedy <\/em>and Hamlet<\/em>, the central conflict of the drama turns on the ethical challenge of reconciling the \u201ctask of revenge and the universal mysteries of man\u2019s being\u201d (Jenkins 127).\u00a0\u00a0 For both Hieronimo and Hamlet, personal revenge becomes a cosmic quest: \u201cFor justice is exiled from the earth\u201d (Kyd 3.13.140).\u00a0 Both Hieronimo and Hamlet must use a detective\u2019s analysis of clues to verify the guilty culprit before bringing down the sword of execution.\u00a0 Both must employ deceit to deceive the deceiver and feign madness to conceal a quest for justice at any price.\u00a0 Yet their differences trump their similarities.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSomething is rotten in the state of Denmark,\u201d as Marcellus notes in the opening act (1.4.90).\u00a0 The ethical imperative of the Ghost of Old Hamlet represents the lost legitimacy of a sovereign authority become, in Claudius own words, \u201cdisjoint and out of frame\u201d (1.2.20).\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThe time is out of joint,\u201d and Young Hamlet, cursed with tragic awareness, has been \u201cborn to set it right\u201d (1.5.197).<\/span><\/p>\n

Going beyond Kyd, Shakespeare transformed the Senecan personification of Revenge as portrayed in The Spanish Tragedy<\/em>.\u00a0 In Hamlet<\/em>, the Ghost is not merely an outside observer serving as a kind of chorus on the action, but is \u201cinvested with a new dignity and endowed\u2026 with a new purpose,\u201d entering into the drama and communicating directly with the other characters Moorman (93, 95).\u00a0 Moreover, the Ghost in Hamlet<\/em> is \u201cno longer a Greco-Roman anachronism,\u201d but has become the uncanny visitation from \u201ca Christian, not a Hellenic afterworld\u201d (Reed 29).<\/span><\/p>\n

While Kyd portrays Revenge as a Nemesis of pre-destined fate, Shakespeare’s Ghost is a Christianized harbinger of conscience.\u00a0 Hieronimo effects \u201cthe fall of Babylon\u201d (4.1.195).\u00a0 In a gesture of anarchic defiance, Kyd\u2019s revenger brings down the empire of lies represented by the status quo, as Revenge drags them all off to \u201ctheir endless tragedy\u201d (4.5.48) in a pagan hell.\u00a0 For Hamlet, the tragic denouement is neither so neat nor so utterly nihilistic.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shakespeare did not need to develop his tragic vision from ancient sources such as Sophocles\u2019 Oedipus the King<\/em>.\u00a0 As detailed by Bernard Spivack in his Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil<\/em>, medieval drama provided Elizabethan theater an indigenous tradition of dramatic conflict both within the individual and within society, going back to the Psychomachia of earliest morality tradition and the popular Mummers plays which pitted Good against Evil in a battle for the soul.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shakespeare\u2019s tragic wisdom evolved in his cycle of history plays, which establishes that political drama is not merely a \u201cstruggle for power\u201d but always, crucially, also a \u201cstruggle for legitimacy\u201d (Lindenberger 160).\u00a0 The divine right legitimacy of Shakespeare\u2019s King Richard II is futile when confronted by the calculated clout of Bolingbroke.\u00a0 Yet the thrilling wickedness of the playwright\u2019s King Richard III cannot counterfeit legitimate authority for good.\u00a0 Only the combination of might-with-right can make a ruler credible and <\/em>effective.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Hamlet<\/em>, Claudius has not merely usurped the throne.\u00a0 He has displaced the source of authority, supplanting the sacred with the profane.\u00a0 In terms defined in Elizabethan times by Edmund Plowden and applied to literary analysis by Ernst Kantorowicz in The King\u2019s Two Bodies<\/em>, the \u201cbody-natural\u201d of Old Hamlet has been supplanted by Claudius without the sanction of the \u201cbody-politic\u201d:<\/span><\/p>\n

For the King has in him two Bodies, viz., a Body natural, and a Body politic.\u00a0 His Body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a Body mortal\u2026. But his Body politic is a Body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of Policy and government, and constituted for the Direction of the People, and the Management of the Public weal\u2026. (Plowden qtd. in Kantorowicz 7)<\/span><\/p>\n

Kantorowicz demonstrates how the \u201clegal fiction\u201d of a body-politic was \u201ctransferred by the jurists from the theological sphere to that of the state the head of which is the king\u201d (16).\u00a0 The body-politic may be passed from one body natural to another through the death or \u201cDemise\u201d of the monarch, as when Bolingbroke replaces King Richard II.\u00a0 But, the body-politic itself \u201cnever dies\u201d (13).<\/span><\/p>\n

Thus, when Barnardo in the opening lines of Hamlet<\/em> answers his own existential query \u201cWho\u2019s there?\u201d with a password \u201cLong live the King!\u201d it would seem to be moot which body-natural of the King he is wishing longevity (1.1.1, 3).<\/span><\/p>\n

For his part, even after killing his brother to usurp the throne, Claudius blithely claims divine sanction when Laertes challenges his authority: \u201cThere\u2019s such divinity doth hedge a king \/ That treason can but peep to what it would, \/ Acts little of his will\u201d (4.3.123-125).<\/span><\/p>\n

In a world ruled by Claudius, there is no longer any distinction between the counterfeit and the genuine.\u00a0 He has supplanted the de jure<\/em> authority represented by the Ghost of Old Hamlet with the de facto<\/em> control of power politics.<\/span><\/p>\n

This transition from medieval theology to modern politics first begins, as portrayed by Shakespeare, when Bolingbroke claims the crown as King Henry IV.\u00a0 The rise of the House of Lancaster, followed by the accession of the House of York, enabled the secular state to identify with the mystical body-politic.\u00a0 To justify their legitimacy, the new de facto <\/em>rulers transferred the concept of divine right from ecclesiastical law to a quasi-sacred sovereign nation-state.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet when Hamlet\u2014after killing Polonius in a case of mistaken identity\u2014taunts Claudius with seemingly deranged double-talk, declaring that, \u201cThe body is with the king, but the king is not with the body\u201d (4.2.26-7), he is also reminding his uncle that \u201cthe king\u2019s body can be killed without impairing his kingship\u201d (Jenkins 526).<\/span><\/p>\n

By unintentionally killing Polonius, Hamlet becomes heaven\u2019s \u201cscourge and minister\u201d (3.4.177).\u00a0 He must adjust to the \u201cparadox of being\u2026both punisher and punished\u201d (Jenkins 523).\u00a0\u00a0 As a student of Renaissance humanism, Hamlet assumes the independent free-will attributed to the \u201csecond cause\u201d of historiography, subordinate but necessary to the hidden purposes of providence (Levy 287).\u00a0 Clearly, Hamlet implies, his destiny is to restore legitimacy with his own hand, following the dictates of his own conscience.\u00a0 The crucial question, after he has killed Polonius, becomes not whether he always does the right thing, but whether he always takes responsibility for his actions, even the unforgivable blunders.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Hamlet<\/em>, the wisdom of the oracle emerges as a platitude of the prattling Polonius:\u00a0 \u201cThis above all: to thine own self be true\u201d (1.3.78).\u00a0 That these words come from the mouth of the phoniest politician in Elsinore demonstrates the difference between spouting a truism and living for the truth.\u00a0\u00a0 Like Oedipus, Hamlet may try to escape his destiny but he cannot avoid the tragic insight: thine own self is divided in its depths, conditioned by social convention, limited by definition. The \u201cI\u201d is Incomplete, an Ideal that never was.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hamlet confronts what Norman Rabkin (transferring a term from quantum physics to literary analysis) has called the \u201ccomplementarity\u201d of an unresolvable complexity of life as life presents itself to the fullest human consciousness\u201d (26).\u00a0 Hamlet must \u201crecognize that in the providentially ordered even fatalistically determined, universe in which he lives all plans must fail.\u201d\u00a0 Humanistic reason may be his conscious ideal, but \u201conly the surrender to impulse can keep Hamlet from interposing his ego between himself and his destiny.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 The \u201cdialectic between conflicting ethical systems\u201d requires that Hamlet fulfill the honor code of revenge without renouncing monotheistic morality (Rabkin 5-6).<\/span><\/p>\n

Spoofing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his ethical truth seems relativistic: \u201c[T]here is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so\u201d (2.2.249-50).\u00a0\u00a0 But, assuming that Hamlet\u2019s ethical standards depend on the inner realization of a moral absolute, how can he know whether to trust the word of the Ghost?<\/span><\/p>\n

Following the precedents of Oedipus and Hieronimo, Hamlet must set the stage of private investigation.\u00a0 Using the classical detective method of induction, eliminating all possibilities other than the truth, he devises the play-within-the-play to \u201ccatch the conscience of the King\u201d (2.2.601).\u00a0\u00a0 The most unlikely aspect of the investigation is that Claudius, evidently, retains traces of a buried conscience.\u00a0 The fact that the guilty King interrupts the play-within-the-play does demonstrate that he feels remorse, a clue that Hamlet does not miss.\u00a0 Moreover, out of Hamlet\u2019s hearing, Claudius secretly confesses his crime of fratricide \u201cthe primal eldest curse\u201d (3.3.39).\u00a0 Thus, the audience knows with certainty what Hamlet can only assume based on his limited investigative methods.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet, following the classical detective model, as analyzed by Susan Baker, would merely confirm that \u201cShakespeare equals good taste equals social superiority equals intellectual superiority equals moral superiority\u201d (445).\u00a0 Instead, Hamlet and his audience need the world of film<\/em> noir <\/em>to allow for the \u201cpolitical position of the literary humanist, who <\/em>must acknowledge complicity with the social and political formations he or she critiques\u201d (Hedrick 39).<\/span><\/p>\n

According to the analysis of Linda Charnes, based on a definition of terms by Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, the distinction between the points of view of \u201cclassical and noir<\/em>\u201d detectives invokes \u201ccontradictory forms of symbolic authority.\u201d\u00a0 The old-school investigator, relying on his own intellect, \u201coffers a pragmatic or rationalist ethos\u201d of catching criminals and punishing them in the name of impartial legal authority.\u00a0 In contrast, what may be called the noir <\/em>detective \u201coffers a paranoiac<\/em> ethos\u201d that is not satisfied with identifying the culprit of a particular offense, but goes further \u201cto explain what has really gone wrong\u201d by focusing the investigation on \u201ca more pervasive social problem\u201d (29).\u00a0 In this sense: Hamlet<\/em> \u201coffers the first fully noir <\/em>text in western literature and prince Hamlet the first noir<\/em> detective\u201d (31).\u00a0 Hamlet, in other words, confronts the challenge of how to integrate the god-like potential for human greatness and the irrepressible urges of the human beast.<\/span><\/p>\n

Raymond Chandler has acknowledged Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s mastery in the creating the detective\u2019s detective, Sherlock Holmes, who bridges the worlds of Hamlet<\/em> and the hard-boiled Private \u201cI.\u201d\u00a0 Holmes outwitted master criminals, based on pure ratiocination of the investigator\u2019s sublime intellect. Yet Holmes also implicitly echoes Hamlet\u2019s first soliloquy: \u201cHow weary, stale, flat and unprofitable\/Seem to me all the uses of this world\u201d (1.2.133-4).\u00a0 In explaining his craving for cocaine as surrogate for solving crimes, Holmes mutters:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWas there ever such a dreary, dismal, unprofitable world?\u201d (Doyle 130).\u00a0 Like Hamlet, Holmes is an outsider, with a sense of alienation from conventional society.<\/span><\/p>\n

A similar attitude informs Dashiell Hammet\u2019s hard-boiled detective.<\/span><\/p>\n

In The Maltese Falcon<\/em>, Sam Spade tells the ethical tale of \u201ca man named Flitcraft\u201d who seemed to live rather profitably in the dreary, dismal, world:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHere\u2019s what happened to him.\u00a0 Going to lunch he passed an office-building that was being put up\u2014just the skeleton.\u00a0 A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him\u2026. He was scared stiff of course, he said, but he was more shocked than really frightened.\u00a0 He felt somebody had taken the lid off and let him look at the works.\u201d (Hammett 65-66)<\/span><\/p>\n

As Hammett\u2019s enigmatic protagonist explains, Flitcraft glimpsed a reality that conventional ethics chooses to ignore:<\/span><\/p>\n

The life he knew was a clean orderly sane responsible affair.\u00a0 Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things\u2026.\u00a0 It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock.\u00a0 What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life.\u201d (66)<\/span><\/p>\n

Far from a tragic protagonist, Flitcraft resolves his existential parable by gradually returning to the everyday conventional existence he chose to abandon.\u00a0 \u201cBut that\u2019s the part of it I always like,\u201d Sam Spade allows himself to conclude.\u00a0 \u201cHe adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling\u201d (67).<\/span><\/p>\n

For Sam Spade, the world in which beams never fall is the world of conventional unreality.\u00a0 The Private \u201cI,\u201d in contrast, chooses to live in awareness of the dangers of \u201cblind chance\u201d (66) and the inevitable \u201cday of reckoning\u201d (184).\u00a0 In Act 1, Hamlet is foundering in the world of Flitcraft.\u00a0 The death of his father falls like a beam, followed by the shock of the marriage of his mother and Claudius, who biffs him out of the throne.\u00a0 Hamlet faces his first test\u2014despair.\u00a0 He resists the temptation of \u201cself-slaughter\u201d only because suicide is prohibited by the \u201ccanon\u201d of the \u201cEverlasting\u201d (1.2.131-2).\u00a0 Hamlet\u2019s next challenge is the suspicion aroused by the ghost of his father\u2014or is it the devil in disguise?<\/span><\/p>\n

If Hamlet is a noir<\/em> protagonist from his first appearance in Act One, he still must evolve into a hard-boiled, tough-minded Private \u201cI.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 For Hamlet, the decisive shift from the classical detective into the hard-boiled consciousness is the result of a misidentification, killing Polonius instead of Claudius.\u00a0 Hamlet can no longer wear white-gloves and claim purity of intent.\u00a0 He has blood on his hands, and he must recognize his own complicity in the corruption of Elsinore.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why, then, did Hamlet fail to finish off the guilty King Claudius when he catches him in a pose of prayer?<\/span>
\n Now might I do it pat, now a is a-praying.<\/span>
\n And now I\u2019ll do\u2019t. [Draws his sword<\/em>]<\/span>
\n And so a goes to heaven<\/span>
\n \u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
\n No.<\/span>
\n Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent:<\/span>
\n When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,<\/span>
\n Or in th\u2019incestuous pleasure of his bed,<\/span>
\n At game a-swearing, or about some act<\/span>
\n That has no relish of salvation in\u2019t,<\/span>
\n Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven<\/span>
\n And that his soul may be as damn\u2019d and black<\/span>
\n As hell, whereto it goes. (3.3.73-95)<\/span><\/p>\n

Since Hazlitt, critics including Coleridge, Bradley, and Sigmund Freud, have seen Hamlet\u2019s hesitation as \u201conly an excuse for his want of resolution\u201d (Hazlitt qtd. in Jenkins 513).\u00a0 But the desire to cause not only the death but also the eternal damnation of his enemy would have been unquestioned in the revenge code of Elizabethan theater.\u00a0 Perhaps Hamlet is rationalizing because he recognizes Claudius as the embodiment of his own repressed Oedipal complex.\u00a0 Yet, at the same time, it might be that Hamlet\u2019s rage for revenge still needs to be cooled by the hard-boiled wisdom of experience\u2014which he attains only in Act 5.<\/span><\/p>\n

By the end of the drama, civil order is restored to Elsinore only after Hamlet sacrifices his own body-natural in the name of a justice that eludes reality. Thus, the problem of the play is not contained within the inner-struggle of the protagonist.\u00a0 As a secular martyr, Hamlet devotes his life to a truth that is beyond revenge or the punishment of law, a messianic striving for absolute justice\u2014not in a world-to-come of eternal Being but in the present-time of endless Becoming.<\/span><\/p>\n

As in his English history plays, Shakespeare represents the \u201ccomplementarity\u201d of pragmatic politics and providential design.\u00a0 Machiavellian strategy is required in a world of realpolitik<\/em>, but demands a conscience with humanity to integrate the fragments of mortal strife.\u00a0 While Shakespeare is frequently invoked as a cultural authority, Hamlet is a subversive non-conformist, dedicated to exposing the hypocrisy and injustice of the reigning establishment.<\/span><\/p>\n

According to Margreta de Grazia, the literary history of Shakespeare\u2019s Hamlet<\/em> traces the evolution of modernity.\u00a0 For the Romantics, Hamlet \u201cinverted Aristotle\u2019s stress on the primacy of action over character \u201d (254).\u00a0 To Hegel, Hamlet embodied the quest for \u201cself-consciousness\u2026and self-determination\u201d (255).\u00a0 The famous early twentieth century critic A.C. Bradley followed Hegel to formulate his \u201ckey principle of Shakespearean tragedy: \u2018action is essentially the expression of character\u2019\u201d (257).\u00a0 But psychoanalysis trumped self-consciousness, claiming that only the Freudian Unconscious \u201ccan account for why a character distinguished by self-reflection cannot know his own motives\u201d (260).\u00a0 Expanding on Freud, Jacques Lacan redefined Hamlet\u2014and modern awareness\u2014no longer reading the text as a tragedy merely of repressed desire but as a tragedy of \u201cmourning for what it has had to give up\u201d (261).<\/span><\/p>\n

Most recently, Jacques Derrida identifies the Ghost of Hamlet with the Marxian \u201cspectre\u201d haunting Europe in the first line of the Communist Manifesto<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 In this deconstructionist reading, Hamlet represents \u201c\u2018a certain emancipatory and messianic<\/em> affirmation\u2019\u201d (qtd. in de Grazia 264), implying an absolute justice \u201cbeyond the logic of vengeance\u201d existing in a non-linear \u201cdeferred time\u201d (265).<\/span><\/p>\n

Hamlet struggles within himself, beginning in his first soliloquy in which he contemplates suicide:\u00a0 \u201cO that this too solid flesh\u2026.\u201d (1.2.129).\u00a0\u00a0 He is still wrestling with his identity in his last soliloquy, expressing his frustration as Fortinbras marches off to conquer \u201ca little patch of ground \/ That hath in it no profit but the name\u201d (4.4.18-19):\u00a0 \u201cHow all occasions do inform against me\u2026.\u201d(4.4.32).\u00a0\u00a0 But a funny thing happens to Hamlet on the way to England.\u00a0 It is like the last beam falling for Flitcraft.<\/span><\/p>\n

The change begins with insomnia, and the same old inner conflict: \u201c\u2026in my heart there was a kind of fighting \/ That would not let me sleep\u201d\u00a0 (5.2.4-5).\u00a0 Suddenly, like a prisoner breaking the shackles of his mind, Hamlet acts: \u201cRashly\u2014\u00a0 \/And prais\u2019d be rashness for it\u2026.\u201d\u00a0 On a hunch, he pilfers the \u201cgrand commission\u201d entrusted to his companions Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.\u00a0 In the purloined letter, Hamlet discovers his own death warrant (5.2.6-7, 18). In a flash, Hamlet realizes the complementarity of impulse and destiny: \u201c\u2026and that should learn us \/ There\u2019s a divinity that shapes our ends, \/ Rough-hew them how we will\u201d (5.2.9-11). With mirthless irony, Hamlet tells Horatio how he employed diplomatic jargon replete with \u201c\u2018as\u2019es of great charge\u201d to revise the original order of summary execution, replacing his own name with those of his false friends (5.2.43).\u00a0 Confirmation of a hidden-hand of providence is provided by Old Hamlet\u2019s \u201csignet\u201d with which Young Hamlet seals his \u201cchangeling\u201d letter (5.2.49, 53).<\/span><\/p>\n

Hamlet\u2019s hard-boiled ethics allows for no remorse.\u00a0 Forget about Rosencrantz and Guildernstern!\u00a0 \u201cThey are not near my conscience\u201d (5.2.58).<\/span><\/p>\n

The next day, still on the ship to England, Hamlet proves in trial-by-battle that his inner conflict has been resolved.\u00a0 Forced by \u201ca pirate of very warlike appointment\u201d to a \u201ccompelled valour,\u201d he takes the lead \u201cin the grapple\u201d (4.6.14-17)\u00a0 As related in his letter to Horatio, he \u201calone\u201d boards the pirate ship (4.6.18).\u00a0 \u201cOn the instant\u201d as the pirates withdraw, however, Hamlet finds himself a prisoner (4.7.14ff).\u00a0 Nevertheless, the pirates turn out to be \u201cthieves of mercy\u201d (4.6.19).\u00a0 In their company, Hamlet finally integrates his own role as outsider and true prince. When he returns to Denmark, Hamlet has experienced an inner conversion to a faith in the hidden purpose of random chance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hamlet rhetorically asks Horatio, \u201cis\u2019t not perfect conscience\u201d to kill Claudius to prevent \u201cfurther evil\u201d (5.2.67, 70)?\u00a0 Hamlet\u2019s usage of \u201cconscience\u201d in this sense may be found in the Oxford English Dictionary as not only according to \u201cright and law\u201d but also \u201cequity\u201d in terms of a higher justice (754).\u00a0 No longer alienated from himself, Hamlet has become a hard-boiled Private \u201cI.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He makes his self-discovery explicit when he leaps into the grave of Ophelia:\u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThis is I \/ Hamlet the Dane\u201d (5.1.250-51).\u00a0 It is finally clear that Ophelia was Hamlet\u2019s tragic soul-mate.\u00a0 Her death signals the death of innocence.<\/span><\/p>\n

In The Spanish Tragedy<\/em>, the femme fatale<\/em> Bel Imperia aids and enables Hieronimo in his mad devotion to individual, social, and political destruction.\u00a0 Although she entices her three lovers\u2014Andrea, Horatio and Balthazar\u2014down the path to doom, Bel Imperia proves herself to be the soul-mate of Heironimo.\u00a0 She supplies Heironimo with the clue he needs to identify who murdered his son, following Hieronimo\u2019s appeal to providence (3.2.24).\u00a0 She also participates actively in Heironimo\u2019s plan, despite the strictures imposed by a patriarchal society and a Machiavellian brother, killing Balthazar with her own hand before committing suicide in the macabre finale of the play-within-the play.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ophelia, in contrast, plays the bland and seemingly-safe foil to the dangerous woman of the noir<\/em> world.\u00a0 She renounces her love for Hamlet when her father and brother tell her to, against the mandate of her own heart. She reports on Hamlet\u2019s behavior in private, surrenders the love letters and poems he has written for her, and allows herself to be co-opted by Polonius and Claudius.\u00a0 No wonder Hamlet\u2019s love turns to misogynistic contempt after Ophelia obediently lets her father \u201cloose\u201d her to him as the honey-trap in a spy set-up (2.2.162).<\/span><\/p>\n

Clearly, Hamlet cannot trust Ophelia, although he does not sound convincing when he denies his own love for her:<\/span><\/p>\n

HAMLET: \u2026I did love you once.<\/span>
\n OPHELIA: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.<\/span>
\n HAMLET: You should not have believed me; for virtue cannot so<\/span>
\n inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it.\u00a0 I loved you not.<\/span>
\n OPHELIA: I was the more deceived.<\/span>
\n HAMLET:\u00a0 Get thee to a nunnery\u2026. Or if thou wilt needs marry,<\/span>
\n marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.\u00a0 To a nunnery go\u2014and quickly too.\u00a0\u00a0 Farewell.\u00a0 (3.1.115-142)<\/span><\/p>\n

Hamlet\u2019s attitude is echoed by Sam Spade to Brigid O\u2019Shaughnessy: \u201cI don\u2019t care who loves who.\u00a0 I\u2019m not going to play the sap for you\u201d (Hammett 225).<\/span><\/p>\n

Ophelia shares Hamlet\u2019s alienation and anguish.\u00a0 But she lacks the defense mechanisms to turn her loss of sanity into a form of camouflage.\u00a0 Hamlet plays crazy in order to conceal how mad he really is.\u00a0 Ophelia never learns to hide her love or her broken heart.\u00a0 She is good to a fault, and that is her tragic flaw.\u00a0 Unfortunately, Ophelia suffers in silence until her former lover kills her father. Then, her mind snaps.\u00a0 Hamlet denies his love, yet he also pays the tragic price.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the final duel with Laertes, Hamlet reminds us of Chandler\u2019s warning that the Private \u201cI\u201d \u201cis a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him\u201d (Chandler [par. 35]):\u00a0 \u201cFor though I am not splenative and rash, \/ Yet I have in me something dangerous, \/ Which let thy wiseness fear\u201d (5.1.254-56).\u00a0 In Act 5, Hamlet transcends passivity.\u00a0\u00a0 He is non-attached.\u00a0 He has learned acceptance of the world and himself, ready to play his role and fulfill his tragic destiny.\u00a0 Claudius needs to be killed.\u00a0 If Hamlet does not kill him, who will?<\/span><\/p>\n

And yet\u2014Hamlet never decides to kill the king.\u00a0 He accepts his destiny without trying to determine circumstances beyond his control.\u00a0 Knowing, as Horatio points out, that his time is short, Hamlet lives only in the here-and-now: \u201cIt will be short.\u00a0 The interim is mine. \/ And a man\u2019s life no more than to say \u2018one\u2019\u201d (5.2.73-4). \u00a0He recognizes his faults and accepts the consequences of his actions.\u00a0 He neither calculates nor manipulates.\u00a0 He does nothing<\/em>.\u00a0 He goes with the flow.\u00a0 He has attained what Nietzsche calls \u201cthe rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence\u201d (qtd. in Bloom 38). Although not religious in a conventional sense, Hamlet invokes Scripture: \u201cWe defy augury.\u00a0 There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.\u00a0 If it be now, \u2018tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.\u00a0 The readiness is all\u201d (5.2.215-18).\u00a0 After he accepts the duel with Laertes, Hamlet lets events take their course.\u00a0 In the end, he does not take revenge on Claudius.\u00a0 He kills the king in self-defense.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fortinbras gives Hamlet a soldier\u2019s burial and claims the crown for himself.\u00a0 Although Hamlet has avenged his father\u2019s honor, the legitimacy of the mystical body politic remains an unrealized ideal:\u00a0 The King is Dead; Long Live the King!<\/span><\/p>\n

We can imagine the aftermath.\u00a0 Fortinbras\u2019 district attorney hauls Horatio downtown for an all-night interrogation, accusing him of being an accessory before and after the crime.\u00a0 The press has a field day, with sensational stories about Hamlet\u2019s past.\u00a0 But Horatio sticks to his story: \u201cAs one, in suff\u2019ring all, that suffers nothing, \/ A man that Fortune\u2019s buffets and rewards \/ Has ta\u2019en with equal thanks\u2026\u201d\u00a0 (3.2.66-68).\u00a0 More the hard-boiled Private \u201cI\u201d than Hamlet ever was, Horatio keeps his cool.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0Works Cited<\/span><\/p>\n

Alexander, Peter.\u00a0 Hamlet Father and Son: The Lord Northcliffe Lectures University College<\/em>, London 1953<\/em>.\u00a0 Oxford: Clarendon, 1953. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Baker, Susan.\u00a0 \u201cShakespearean Authority in the Classic Detective Story.\u201d\u00a0 Shakespeare Quarterly<\/em> 46.4 (1995): 424-448. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chandler, Raymond.\u00a0 \u201cThe Simple Art of Murder (1950)\u201d. http:\/\/www.en.utexas.edu\/amlit\/amlitprivate\/scans\/chandlerart.html<\/span><\/p>\n

Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Second Edition<\/em>. Oxford: Clarendon, 1994. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Charnes, Linda.\u00a0 Hamlet\u2019s Heirs: Shakespeare and the Politics of a New Millennium<\/em>.<\/span>\u00a0 New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

De Grazia, Margreta.\u00a0 \u201cTeleology, Delay, and the \u2018Old Mole\u2019\u201d.\u00a0 Shakespeare Quarterly<\/em> 50.3 (1999):\u00a0 251-267. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Derrida, Jacques.\u00a0 Specters of Marx<\/em>. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Doyle, Arthur Conan.\u00a0 Sherlock Holmes: the Complete Novels and Stories<\/em>.\u00a0 Bantam Classic. Vol. I.\u00a0 New York: Bantam Dell, 1982. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hammett, Dashiell.\u00a0 The Maltese Falcon<\/em>. 1929.\u00a0 New York: Vintage, 1972. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hedrick, Donald. \u201cThe Bard of Enron: from Shakespace to Noir Humanism.\u201d\u00a0 College Literature<\/em>.\u00a0 31.4 (2004): 19-43. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Jenkins, Harold.\u00a0 Introduction.\u00a0 Hamlet<\/em>.\u00a0 Arden ed. London: Methuen, 1982. 1-164. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kantorowicz, Ernst H. The King\u2019s Two Bodies: A Study in Meieval Political Theology<\/em>.\u00a0 Princeton: Princeton UP, 1957. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Kyd, Thomas.\u00a0 The Spanish<\/em>Tragedy<\/em>. Ed. J.R. Mulryne. New Mermaids ed. New York: Norton, 1989.<\/span><\/p>\n

Levy, F.J. Tudor Historical Thought<\/em>.\u00a0 San Marino: Huntington, 1967. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Lindenberger, Herbert. Historical Drama: The Relation of Literature and Reality<\/em>. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Moorman, F.W. \u201cThe Pre-Shakespearean Ghost.\u201d\u00a0 The Modern Language Review <\/em>1.2 (1906): 85-95. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy<\/em>. Major Literary Characters: Hamlet<\/em>. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1990.\u00a0 38-39. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rabkin, Norman .\u00a0 Shakespeare and the Common Understanding<\/em>. New York: Free Press, 1967. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Reed, Robert Rentoul Jr.\u00a0 The Occult on the Tudor and Stuart Stage<\/em>.\u00a0 Boston: Christopher, 1965.\u00a0 Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Spivack, Bernard.\u00a0 Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains<\/em>.\u00a0 New York: Columbia UP, 1958. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Shakespeare, William. Hamlet<\/em>. Ed. Harold Jenkins. Arden ed. London: Methuen, 1982. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek, Slavoj.\u00a0 Enjoy Your Symptom!\u00a0 Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out<\/em>.\u00a0 New Yorl: Routledge, 1992. Print.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

James A. Lewin,\u00a0Shepherd University\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1384,"featured_media":0,"parent":51,"menu_order":5,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"full-width-page.php","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-699","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=699"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1934,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/699\/revisions\/1934"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/51"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/ovsc\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}