My annual Hamlet rant
Oh boy, am I glad to be shot of Hamlet for another year. Not Hamlet, mind - I do like the play, for all its manifold faults - but Hamlet himself. Today we were concentrating on Act 5, which shows the bratty prince acting badly from beginning to end. Viz
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1) He's been explaining that he's finally ready to give up the whole delaying thing for a couple of acts now! (e.g. in Act 4: 'From this time forth/ My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth' etc ad nauseam). All he's actually saying for most of this time is the hoary old cliche that dust hath closed Helen's eye, a commonplace since Lascaux, I'd imagine. That's okay, but he goes on and on and on, as if he's the first person ever to think of it.
2) Yes, R&G work for Claudius, who is their king - why shouldn't they? I don't see any evidence that they are 'betraying' Hamlet (e.g. that they knew the contents of the sealed letter they were taking to England). As for 'police state', yes I'm afraid that's Jan Kott talking. Show me the Renaissance court that wasn't a police state, in those loose terms. Certainly not Elizabeth's - and Shakespeare worked for her at times, so I guess that makes him a totalitarian puppet too!
6) Oh puh-leeze! Hamlet sparing someone else's feelings? Like he does with Ophelia, his mother, etc? No, I think not. All he needed to say to Laertes was that he was sorry for what he'd done. If he'd wanted to go into more detail (which might not have been wise with Claudius there) he might have added that it was a case of mistaken identity. Blaming it on his madness lets no one off the hook but himself.
7) Even in F, Hamlet fails to confront Claudius with his knowledge that he killed his father - and whoever's responsible for the corpses, the messiness of that last scene means that the centrality of his revenge to the action gets swamped in the general chaos.
8) There's no indication that Fortinbras's army is one of invasion, though, and one would hope that Denmark had a few soldiers about still, round about the palace! What makes Fortinbras a good candidate for king, I wonder? All we know about him is that he's a hothead who's been making trouble against Denmark, which the Norwegian king has to reprimand him for; and then that he's leading thousands of men to a futile war for a peace of land not worth the fighting, simply in order to soothe his bruised ego. Not a very impressive CV really, but Hamlet likes him because he's a man of action like his dad (and unlike Hamlet himself, or Claudius) - that's the long and short of it.
Oh, you can do better for yourself than Hamlet, gillo! Take Edmund or Richard III - charmers both! Yes, they have their faults, but at least they know they're the villains of the piece.
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Just on 1) - 'boring' for Denmark is a pretty harsh description of someone who's obsessively depressed, and with bloody good reason to be so. He's been betrayed by both his parents (and if he were a manipulative shit, by God he's learned it from the best in his father!), deprived of the opportunity to grieve for his father properly, and has nobody around who can give him the least bit of help in trying to keep it together.
It's very easy to pull out a quote to show he's lying about having been mad at any particular point, but you could do the same at other points to show those aren't any more reliable than his saying he is. I don't think he knows, because the play doesn't know. IMO the whole play is having - or possibly just IS - a psychotic break with reality. You're really going to blame Hamlet himself for having a skewed perspective and being a obsessively stuck in that position?
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Of course Hamlet is allowed to grieve, as he has been doing since his first appearance, though in this scene it doesn't make for great drama. (It's not quite true that he has no one to help him: he has Horatio, which is more than Laertes does.) Part of my problem is the way in which he and his 'insights' have been lauded over the centuries by critics, and that of course isn't really his fault, even if he is still a bore.
However, any sympathy I have for him on this score is more than wiped out by what he does to Laertes five minutes later. Laertes - who also has a father murdered, who also has not been allowed to grieve (remember how they hurried Polonius's funeral through 'hugger mugger'?), and now has a dead sister to boot, whom the priest is making nasty comments about - is allowed a total of thirteen lines to express his feelings before Hamlet leaps in, outraged at his excessive verbosity! There are gaping double standards at work here, both from Hamlet and his admirers over the years.
The quote I gave comes just a few lines after Hamlet kills Polonius: I didn't have to scour the play for it. Of course, we can say that Hamlet is not to be held responsible for any of his words or actions from the beginning of the play to the end, and that the play is a case study in psychosis rather than a tragedy as usually understood. I think we'd lose rather more than we'd gain through taking that view of it, but feel free to make the case!
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