The Ghosts of Hamlet
“Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery.” (III-ii-366)
One of the bonus rounds on a recent episode of University Challenge centered on Shakespeare’s “problem plays”. Hamlet is so called because it does not explicitly turn our thoughts in one particular direction. We know there is a moral problem that is central to the play - perhaps the ethics of revenge, of divine right, of incest, perhaps the impossibility of certainty or the nature of reality and illusion - but what this moral question is no one critic, reader, or audience member can be clear upon.
Hamlet certainly cannot reach any conclusions. C.S. Lewis said that Hamlet is a play “full of anxiety. The world of Hamlet is a world where one has lost one’s way”.
Uncertainty is an obvious theme both within and without the play. There are important ambiguities in the plot: whether Gertrude shares in Claudius’ guilt; whether Hamlet continues to love Ophelia even as he spurns her; whether Ophelia’s death is suicide or accident; whether the ghost is a projection of Hamlet or truth. But it is also ironic that a play as complex and ambiguous as Hamlet should also have severe textual difficulties, as though Shakespeare were trying to tie with words characters and themes that were just too mercurial for restraints.
Does the whole story turn upon the peculiar character of our hero? The question “What is the true state of Hamlet’s mind?” carries the implicit assumption that if we can just answer this question, we can understand the play, but this type of approach tends more and more to isolate the play from the theatre. In its extreme form it becomes this:
“We do not like to see our author’s plays acted and least of all Hamlet. There is no play that suffers so much in being transferred to the stage.”
- William Hazlitt
While responses to this become riddles worthy of Hamlet himself:
“Hamlet without Hamlet would be unthinkable, but Hamlet without Hamlet has been thought about all too much.”
- Harry Levin
Mostly this is all just philosophical distraction from the two essays on Prohibition and the Depression that I need to have finished by Monday and from the distressing realisation that my Oxford Entrance Exam is on Wednesday.
Perhaps a picture would serve as a simpler distraction:
Mmm, Prince "David 'The Doctor' Tennant" Hamlet on a Caspar Friedrich background. Now that is a distracting combination.