This is one of four Exploring Shakespearean Tragedy synopses, each of which collects from the original publication the full argument leading to establishment of the thought-feeling dynamis of one of the four Great Tragedies—in this case Hamlet–into a single narrative. 

Hamlet

 from Ch. 3, Other Forms of Action

None of the three tragedies thus far considered truly emphasizes an Alternate human universe. But that brings us to Hamlet with a very strong emphasis on Alternate Universe, yet a very different kind of Alternate Universe from what we have considered in King Lear. The Alternate Universe of King Lear is inanimate. The Alternate Universe of Hamlet is entirely human and even societal. Fortinbras is in his own universe, contesting for land in Poland not worth five marks to farm. Horatio, close friend though he is to Hamlet and evidently aware of the general development of Hamlet’s affairs, is nevertheless a spectator. Horatio is a scholar and authenticator, not an “agonist,” proto- or otherwise. Similarly involved and yet evidently clueless about involving herself seems to be Ophelia.  Polonius seems to prefer to be in his own Universe of abstract principles (neither a borrower nor a lender be) disconnected with the affairs of the royal family he serves. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern seem to be boys from the country, bewildered by the court universe in which they can be at best pawns. And the Players are exactly that, players of some fantasy that may be useful at court but essentially uninvolved with the play’s life drama as they move from town to town and role to role.

Hamlet is not a Victim of himself. Gertrude and Claudius may be, but we see them more in opposition to Hamlet (an opposition that doesn’t breed sympathy, the unusual exception mentioned above). And all the other fatalities—Polonius, Ophelia, Laertes, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—are obviously victims of outside forces, whatever their personal failings may or may not be.

For our purposes, we don’t particularly need to consider a combination of Counters [other forms of action].  Social Alternate Universe is clearly the most distinctively emphasized Counter characteristic of Hamlet, Victim most in Lear, Self as Victim most consistently central in Othello, and Opponents most classically obvious in Macbeth from the Weird Sisters, to MacDuff, Malcolm and Donalbane, Edward the Confessor, and the Siwards.

For our argument ultimately leading to dynamis, we can here ignore the synthetic combination of Counter emphases, but for the record, in addition to Macbeth moving toward Pathetic Tension, we have Othello encouraging Pathos and Inner Tension, King Lear encouraging Pathos, Inner Tension, and Distance, and Hamlet encouraging Distance and Pathos, though the Pathos is largely limited to specific moments like the deaths of Polonius and Ophelia. 

In this sense, Hamlet is the most like Greek tragedy. Arguably, in many Greek tragedies, the Chorus acts as a distancing agent, somewhat analogously based in their not existing in the important-affairs realm that Aristotle posits as the realm of the tragedic hero. The final power over us of both Greek tragedy and Hamlet involves a deadening of emotion.

from Ch. 4, Special Language

In Hamlet, high points are normally flashes, short emphatic poetic moments. “To be or not to be” is typical except that it begins a fairly long speech (‘whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows….’)  It is ‘To be or not to be’ which is best remembered: 6 syllables, 6 words, utterly Apt, entirely unpretentious. Lengthening out the moment—To be or not to be: that is the question—only gets us up to 11 syllables, 10 words, and a deep Assessment linked to the Apt short form.

With this central clue, we can also remember:

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” (1, 4, 90) –Apt and Assessing;

“The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” (3, 2, 240)—Apt but also ironically Assessing

“The play’s the thing.” (3, 2, 604)—Apt and Assessing

“Good night, sweet Prince;

and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.” (5, 2, 369)—Apt and Assessing the whole

 

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” (1, 3, 75)—pretentiously Apt and Assessing like the rest of the speech

 

“For five marks, five, I would not farm it.” (4, 4, 20) —tersely apt condemnation of war greed, also Assessing

“Alas poor Yorrick.  I knew him” (5, 1, 292)—Apt for a graveyard in a tight community

 “Words, words, words” (2, 2, 210)—Apt in answer to what one is reading.

Hamlet is an ugly play about ugly realities.  Its rhetoric doesn’t soar.  But its rhetoric can etch its way into the vocabulary of nations, as most of the above lines attest.  And they etch themselves because they are exceedingly Apt and adaptable to an infinity of real-world settings in which artificial poetry would make little sense.  And they turn out to be Assessing in themselves and in being quoted, for example when someone exclaims, “Methinks she doth protest too much!”

Aptness and Assessment then are the hallmarks of Hamlet. They are minimally poetic, the Yorrick instance even being in prose.  Among other things, this makes Hamlet’s rhetoric the opposite of King Lear’s rhetoric of Eloquence and Elegance.  In that opposition, Shakespeare’s full command of his palette of special language is dramatically proven for all time.

Aptness and Assessment synthetically are Forceful language and together also are the language of Julius Caesar.  This is the language of “men of affairs” as Hardin Craig phrased it in his introduction to the play[i], primarily interested in doing rather than saying, interested in staying alive and making the right decision through careful thought.

from Ch. 5, Tragedic Spirit

Fire is anti-emblematic for a Spirit of Hamlet. There is less argument in favor of fire than in any of the other Great Tragedies. Rot on the other hand. is emblematic without question for Hamlet over all the other tragedies. And, of course, Rot is announced early in the play— “There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark” becoming a household phrase ever since.

Everything, it seems, is rotten in the state of Denmark. The Queen’s love for husband has evidently been entirely eaten out from within.  Claudius’ love for his brother and loyalty to his family and place in Denmark have all the more the look of rot about them, hollowed out impostures substituted for the original, holding the form and lacking all the substance.

Polonius, the “loyal” servant of one king and equally “loyal” servant of the usurper rings hollow and rotten. Polonius thinks he talks a good fight, especially in his immortal speech for prudent conduct for his son. The son, of course, is itching to get out of Polonius’ presence and evidently has no intention of letting the speech’s superficial propriety inform his conduct. Presumably the advice has always guided Polonius’ conduct, a guidance to be prudent and self-protective, essentially on-the-make. Polonius’ name itself suggests a hollowness—he is evidently not a Dane but rather from Poland, a man making his way in the world as a political condottiere, far from home and distant from all native loyalties.

Ophelia seems and, for our analysis can remain, simply the innocent maiden caught and destroyed by the rot all around her. It is often claimed that Ophelia’s name is opaque and can tell us nothing about the play. But that’s not typical of Shakespeare elsewhere. If ‘twere true then ‘twere well we ignore that Orlando in As You Like it is named after Roland, the most famous, tragically fated knight of Charlemagne, and  if  ‘twere true, we need not notice that the two servants running madly about through Comedy of Errors are both named “Racetrack.” Ophelia, in fact, has a fine Greek etymology: “Advantage” or “Profit.” It suggests a rather hollowed-out sense of female value appropriate to a royal marriage, and the kind of rot Polonius has evidently been long heir to.

Hamlet himself is not rotten, nor seemingly is Horatio or the soldiers on the wall of Elsinore. One can only hope that Fortinbras is not infected and, as a new king of a new dynasty, can stop the rot that has infected Denmark from the head downward.  That is for the future to determine. On stage, what we see is time elapsing with only spasmodic and ill-advised outbursts of activity in Hamlet.  Mainly he procrastinates, he lets time grow, and time is the great prerequisite for thorough rot.

Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies have always been recognized for their immense breadth of tragedic perception. Corresponding to that breadth is a similar breadth of varied Spirits. Macbeth breaths the Spirit of Poison, Othello melts under the Spirit of Fire, King Lear reeks with the Spirit of Cancer beyond cure, and Hamlet trembles amidst a Spirit of pervasive Rot that has hollowed out every regal reality.

from Ch. 7, Tragedic Dynamis

Hamlet is the longest of the Great Tragedies and arguably the most profound. If the superficial dynamis of tragedic art is the most like everyday reactions to life’s tragic realities, Hamlet’s dynamis is likely to be at the profound extreme of tragedic dynamis, for Hamlet’s dilemma(s) are not the stuff that ordinary life is made of or that ordinary thought contemplates: an heir-apparent student prince confronted by a ghost with the ill tidings that his uncle has gotten the throne and his brother’s queen by poisoning murder.

Hamlet’s world is the world of paradox.  He has been given a direct command by his ghost father. Indubitably, his father rightfully expects obedience. But then—but then, what if his father’s ghost isn’t his father at all but a demon from hell?  Hellish commands are indubitably to be ignored and opposed.

Hamlet’s college buddies have come to court. He certainly should be glad to see them. But then—but then, what if they aren’t what they seem either? What if they are simply henchmen of the usurping king? 

Hamlet catches the king unarmed and at prayer, an easy target for revenge. But then—but then, what if his prayers are a return to grace, a free confession of his sin and a free gift of pardon in exchange? In that case, Hamlet’s killing the king is hardly revenge; it is much more the king’s passport to heaven.

And so it goes from one paradox to another. And by and large, Hamlet procrastinates in the face of these paradoxes. When he doesn’t procrastinate, he acts impulsively and foolishly, as in his killing Polonius, possibly also in his spurning Ophelia, indirectly causing her death as well, possibly also in accepting a sporting duel with Ophelia’s brother, resulting in both Hamlet’s and Laertes’ deaths. The demands of the moment seem to involve Hamlet in possibly one murder after another.

Prudent thought leads to procrastination and a rational attempt to solve the paradox by clever stratagems like Hamlet’s employment of the itinerant players.  But prudent thought involves temporizing, and temporizing is not the way to checkmate brazen corruption.

Toward Thought Within Dynamis: In earlier chapters, we established that Alternate Universe in tragedic Form, Aptness in Special Language, and Rot in Spirit are emphasized throughout Hamlet.

Alternate Universe is an appropriate vehicle for thought about Paradox in part at least because the Alternate Universe, as a sharp contrast, simply doesn’t concern itself with the Paradox at all and seems no worse for that ignorance.  Why can’t Hamlet, for example, simply ignore the paradoxes around him and imitate Horatio, or Fortinbras, or the itinerant players? Of course, he can’t, but the Alternate Universes of all three make the paradoxical all the more central to Hamlet himself.

Aptness is an appropriate vehicle for thought about Paradox in the indirect sense that being caught in profound Paradox, finding the fitting for the moment and on the surface of things seems like one of the few ways of procrastinating, postponing facing one horn or other of the dilemma.

Rot is an appropriate vehicle for thought about Paradox because refusing to deal with the Paradox may get one on to the next day but it may also supply another day to rot and another day to make any decision less tenable. Queen Gertrude seems to symbolize this kind of Rot, evidently caught in her own Paradox and now so far delayed in facing realities that she isn’t very sure what those realities, in fact, have been. Thinking about Paradox is thus strongly reinforced by technical emphases of Alternate Universe in Form, Aptness in rhetoric, and Rot in Spirit.

Adding Feeling to Thought: Moving over to the feeling side, the form of Alternate Universe is intrinsically a distancing agent.  And in Hamlet, we have an extraordinary number of Alternate Universes, one beginning the play, as ordinary soldiers on guard duty exchange fears with one another and another ending the play, Fortinbras returning to be a king in Denmark when he had been seeking to prosecute an inherently vainglorious and imprudent war in Poland.  Each time a new Alternate Universe like the itinerant players intrudes into the action, we as audience, in trying to consider them, lose intimate closeness and intensity which might have been achieved for Hamlet facing the unsolvable quandaries before him.

The language emphasis on Aptness emphasizes finding just the right word, just the right turn of expression for what is clearly real and in need of articulation. As such, Aptness emphasizes the need for measured observation And measured observation is typically also distanced, disinterested thinking.

The Spirit of Rot emphasizes the reality of insidious and undetected weakening, especially weakening simply by the elapse of time without a change in ambient realities which have caused the Rot to date.

So, technical elements promote distance, a sense of the need for careful, disinterested thought, and a sense of insidious decay. In many senses these seem contradictory to one another, but if there is a oneness about them, it is perhaps best described as perplexed and perplexing. The need for careful thought is reinforced by the sense of necessary decay, but the two are balanced off against a strong sense of standing back and maintaining distance. It explains procrastination at the same time that it demands a solution, and works around to a strained stasis.  Call it Perplexing.

So the thought-feeling of Hamlet is Perplexing Paradox.

Paradox doesn’t have to be perplexing.  For the alternate universes of Hamlet and for us as we work our way through mundane reality, paradox can often be kept at bay. But mundane reality is at a far extreme from Hamlet and its power over us.

Other possible combinations with Paradox are jeering and even joy.  There are people who find the presence of Paradox in life an upper which expresses itself as jeering defiance of the Paradox itself. And there are others (especially in the Christian Critics of Comedy like Nathan Scott, Jr. (“The Bias of Comedy and the Narrow Escape into Faith”), Nelvin Vos (For God’s Sake, Laugh!), and Fr. William Lynch (Christ and Apollo)) who find Paradox bracing and joyful in anticipation of final resolution,

And if all these are possible, then in the terms of this study, in addition to the possibility of Perplexing Paradox there should be possibilities (not exhibited in the Great Tragedies with any particular emphasis) for Piercing, Excruciating, and Ennobling Paradox.

It should be by now abundantly clear (which means light is now becoming much more available in the dark room of criticism) that the technically-derived dynamic variant of Hamlet, Perplexing Paradox, is quite awkward for Macbeth, Othello, or King Lear, and that their particular variants—Piercing Ambiguity, Excruciating Incompatibility, and Ennobling Inevitability—are all less than adequate for Hamlet.

We have already posited a short definition of the Shakespearean tragedic dynamis in general:

A cautionary admiration of man’s natural glory, encompassed by tragic processes of nature: poison, fire, rot, and cancerous growth.

Now we can customize that dynamic for any one of the Great Tragedies in particular. For example, for Hamlet, we have derived the following particular dynamic or power over us as audience:

A cautionary admiration of man’s natural glory, encompassed by the tragic processes of nature, particularly the distanced insidious processes of Rot, with an emphasis on the Perplexingly Paradoxical and its potential to wreak havoc in human affairs.