twelfth night

Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution - of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s - which their creative gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.

T.S. Eliot

I don’t know who Walter Pater is, but if I were him I’d hate getting pwned by T.S. Eliot like that.

It’s true that Hamlet seems to draw an inordinate amount of fervent literary critique from creative minds–or, as T.S. Eliot would say, otherwise creative minds–that have been distracted by an overwhelming urge to tear the play’s main character to pieces. Granted, Hamlet is probably the most famous play in the English language, so it’s bound to get attention. But what is it about Hamlet the Dane that seems to fuel literary critics’ urge to destroy or remake the character of Hamlet? It’s almost as if they’re addicted to the feeling of schadenfreude gleaned from spitting in the face of this giant of a literary figure. Is it the same feeling we get when we make insulting jokes about Bill Gates or Microsoft? Is it all about taking the biggest fish in the pond down a notch? Even T.S. Eliot, after writing the paragraph above, continued on to call Hamlet an artistic failure. Is it? Apparently the Internet agrees.

Fine. So we all think Hamlet could be much, much better. It goes on for a long time, it’s a bit choppy, Hamlet’s character is never clearly defined (hence the infinite number of scholarly man-hours that have been spent defining him), and the motivations driving the characters are mercurial at best.

And yet.

What do we love so much about this play? Why do I keep watching Ken Branagh recite the Act IV Scene 4 soliloquy over and over again on YouTube?

Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honor’s at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father killed, a mother stained,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep, while to my shame I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men
That for a fantasy and trick of fame
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
(Ham.IV.4.53-66)

Hamlet, I think, is unique among its Shakespearean peers. While Will usually cares most about his words and not his characters or plots–just as The Beatles cared more about their music than their lyrics, not to say that their lyrics were bad–in Hamlet it’s obvious that he did care about his main character, very much. So much that he was never written to be an easily pegged, quantifiable, two-dimensional archetype, but rather a full human being with all his imperfections, inefficiencies, hesitations, missteps, mood swings, changes of heart, inconstancies of mind, and bad habits like second-guessing himself that do not lend themselves to good storytelling. Prince Hamlet was all too real for the stage. And somewhere, deep down, we who read or watch the play realize that.

So what is it that causes this schadenfreude to bubble up in our hearts? Why do we want to see the character of Hamlet finally understood and packaged neatly next to the Falstaffs and Malvolios of Will’s other works? My personal theory is that we are intimidated by the final outcome of Hamlet’s will: his follow-through with revenge upon the King for his father’s murder. Hamlet is so real that we compare ourselves to him, asking, would I have the strength to do what he did? And when we don’t like the answer, we strike out with rationalizations.

So I say, change that. I say, become like Hamlet, don’t make him become like you. Find the strength to take arms against a sea of troubles. Be… but don’t not be, if you have cause and will and strength and means to do what needs doing. And when the time comes to face death or face the shame of never doing what your soul was supposed to see done before it left this Earth, just as Hamlet’s needed to take revenge upon his father’s killer… well, then, let your thoughts be bloody. Or be nothing worth.

Photo by Unhindered by Reason.