What Hamlet reveals about the interior self
A literary journey centred around the values and pitfalls of emotional honesty
Next to King Lear, Hamlet is the contender for the title of Shakespeare’s ‘Greatest Tragedy’. Given the Bard’s excellence, no choice is definitely right. Personal preference hinges on everything, ranging from someone’s personality to their relative life experience. For myself, I confess to being marginally more fond of Hamlet than, say, Macbeth or Othello. Why? Because I love myself a mystery. And there are few better than the one where a great mind unravels in heartrending soliloquies that bring a reader as close as possible to the heights of mental agony without revealing their innermost cause.
Playgoers in Shakespeare’s time were similarly fond of Hamlet, a work that a contemporary described as being popular ‘with the wiser sort’. Hamlet is thought, writes Sid Smith, arts critic for The Chicago Tribune. And one cannot help but continuously ponder while trying to understand the multiple questions thrown up by the plot.
There’s my favourite, who or what is the Ghost? Supposed to be Hamlet’s father, there is an aura of mystery that shrouds the figure. The sentries, Marcellus, Barnardo and Francisco as well as Hamlet’s friend, Horatio, are the only ones apart from him who can see the apparition. Later on, Hamlet is considered mad partly for ‘talking to himself’, his mother Gertrude being unable to see her husband when Hamlet talks of him being present during their conversation.
Born and raised Catholic with the mindset that the majority of so called ghosts are actually demons from hell, I was inclined to favour this interpretation. Given the fact that the supposed former king urges his son to kill and take revenge on his behalf, the idea that this was a soul in purgatory, as Catholics could also argue, seemed moot. Which soul hoping to enter heaven would condone murder?
I was also stumped by the question why the Ghost would choose to appear to seemingly unrelated people while remaining invisible to both its former wife and brother. Shouldn’t people more directly involved in the king’s fate, like Claudius, have been haunted? A Quora theory on that gave me some level of satisfaction. The author argued that the so called spirit may very well have been a dressed up figure in armour. He could have been sent by the Norwegians as a means to politically destabilize the kingdom of Denmark. And because this was a ploy to cause political upheaval, the ghost does not appear again, Hamlet’s subsequent vision a phantom conjured by his slowly disintegrating mind.
After reading an academic book on Shakespeare, I even found room to contemplate a question I’d not even considered-why does Hamlet give credence to the ghost’s words? He is described as having studied at the University of Wittgenstein. This is Martin Luther’s alma mater. And, given that Protestant link, the idea of returning souls should have been anathema to him, it being a Catholic idea from the get-go. Does that mean he knew a demon was urging him on and chose to destroy himself?
Going from this long-winded series of speculations, you can probably guess why Hamlet is described as ‘thought’.
Stanley Wells calls the peripatetic doubter ‘the raw nerve of the court of Denmark’ in his book William Shakespeare. He relates how Hamlet is the only one who sees the truth behind his mother’s betrayal and his stepfather’s duplicity, shattering internally over time due to the knowledge afforded him as well as the loneliness it engenders. Wells points out how the at times ‘tortured syntax, short exclamations interrupting the sentence structure and the concreteness of the imagery’ showcases Hamlet’s emotional resonance, the unstudied nature of his responses being a far cry from the artificial, polished manner of the courtiers surrounding him.
This state of affairs is what makes an audience feel close to the character, given the fact that he does not unburden himself to his friends, family or the woman he loves but speaks his thoughts to us, the invisible audience, in his famous soliloquies. With the Ghost prompting Hamlet to discover the truth for himself, he finds himself thrown into internal frenzy, agonised over any possible action he could or should take.
That is, if you will forgive my assertion, a very modern response. In an age where societal dictums on freedom and the right to self expression wrangle with the contradictory force of universal tolerance and loneliness has become the prime disease that dares not speak its name, the insecurity over own choices can prove debilitating.
What renders the play profound is that, in all this, it does not excuse Hamlet. Yes, he struggles to find and expose the truth, a truly noble aim. He intensely questions himself with regards to his own responsibilities as well as the nature and meaning of life and death where he could be content to let matters rest until he is king himself, whiling the time away with Horatio and romancing Ophelia. Hamlet probes the canker at the heart of Denmark and goes mad by refusing to look away. In this, he inspires sympathy but not approval. His scrutiny leads him to see shadows everywhere-in the eyes of the woman he loves and in the love and concern his friends bear for him. It is a doubt that will lead to suicide and murder and despair, one that has him inflict needless suffering on the people that surround him, leading to the death of his love Ophelia, her brother Laertes and their father, Polonius.
Yet Ophelia is not just a tragic reminder of Hamlet’s failings. She is also his touchstone, the one person that humanises him. Where before he can agonise about his own death and castigate himself over an inability to instantly strike at Claudius, seeing her dead galvanises him into action. Jumping into her grave, he declares that he loved her-for a character whose feelings and motivations remain opaque throughout his short yet eventful life, that is no small thing. Afterwards, he kills Claudius and can feel himself morally justified in doing so. ‘There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all’, Hamlet can say towards the end. Is it not profoundly moving to see a man who despairs of love being true actually put aside that fear as well as his own hope of survival in quest of defending the previously scorned sentiment?
In this, Hamlet seems to teach us that suffering can and does have meaning-if it but moves and does not break us.
