Hamlet Essay Final Draft

8/2/2019 Hamlet Essay Final Draft

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Benjamin Q. Davidson

Annabel Davis-Goff

Shakespeares Tragedies

21st November, 2011

Draft 1

Medieval Tenets and the Renaissance Tragedy ofHamlet

Hamlet is a character about whom many scholars write, but few have

anything new to say. He is intriguing, engaging, mystifying, and beloved, making

him a target aimed at by as many as jump to defend him. Scholars split the hairs

on his head for fodder with which to glean a new incite, and few escape a formal

education without showing how they know his stops, and can pluck out the heart

of the Bards most famous mystery. In their attempts to rip from tragedy themes,

motifs and subtext, they blind themselves to the larger movements of the text.

While it is simplistic to insist that a play of such depth has a single theme of

greatest importance, it can be said that the action of the piece is pressured by the

society from which it emerged, and that the trends and themes of thought in

Shakespeares lifetime were made manifest in the rotten Danish state.

Hamletwas written near the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth. During

this time, European society underwent a myriad of drastic changes, which one can

see clearly in relation to the ideas of what constituted honor and virtue, as well as

what was expected and suitable behavior for a prince. In many respects, Hamlet is

portrayed as the ideal Renaissance prince. He is well educated, philosophical, well


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acquainted with sport and exceedingly intelligent. However, the action of the play

sees him thrust into a situation in which he is ill equipped. The enlightened student

from Wittenberg has no business in committing as abominable act as regicideat

least not when the action commences. But it can be seen that Hamlets character

changes from that of a nave youth, the paragon of the Renaissance prince, to that

of a common avenger, the damned medieval trope character. And through this

regression to a more primal state of man, Hamlet the Prince becomes Hamlet the

murderer, and then finally, Hamlet the Damned and takes his place among the

heroes of old, becoming little more than dust.

The question is often posed as to what sect of Christianity is portrayed in

the world ofHamlet. The Ghost and the purgatorial nature of his transition from

the world of the living to the undiscovered country seem to point the viewer to

think of Hamlets Denmark as the catholic world of the original source material.1

However, Hamlet is educated at the University of Wittenberg, the center of

Protestantism, and can thus be seen as a force combative to the superstitious

beliefs of the old faith. Many scholars have sought to argue for Hamlets

allegiance, each claiming that the other is shown to be knavish, misguided, or

inherently wrong for the plays construction. Howevera third argument, proposed

by Professor Paul Gottschalk, offers the possibility that Hamlets religious

1TheHistoriae Danicaefrom which Hamlets story came was written around the year

1200 CE by Saxo Grammaticus. (An interesting side note: the original Hamlet was

named Amleth, which in old Norse means dim-witted, [Watts 14])


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persuasions are of no consequence to the play. In fact, the character himself may

hold religious views as muddled as Englands at the time, struggling in a post-

Catholic world to redefine faith while many maintain a stolid sense of the old

superstitions.2

The thesis Gottschalk proposes is that the point is moot. As he says

so beautifully, It is the sound of the rending of the fabric that arrests us, not the

composition of the cloth, (Gottschalk 157).No matter what Hamlets religious

affiliation may have been, the fact remains that neither Catholicism nor

Protestantism condones revenge killings. Even if it were to be proven that Hamlet

were catholic or protestant, he would still be damned for following the Ghosts

command.

Likewise, it must be noted that the nature of Hamlets religions seems to be

kept purposefully ambiguous. It is difficult to imagine anyone postulating that

Shakespeare would have left such an important aspect of a characters personality

unintentionally unclear. Therefore, it can be safely assumed that Shakespeare

wanted Hamlet to remain unassociated with either Catholicism or Protestantism.

This may have served the purpose of creating a greater depth of character, as the

conflict of belief serves only to broaden our view of Hamlets character. Likewise,

the choice for an ambiguous religion may have helped to express the religious

2For an in-depth examination of the Protestant Reformation in England, read Success and

Failure During the First Century of the Reformation by Geoffrey Parker. In it, the author

goes into great detail of how the individual Englishman during the time of the

Reformation and in the one-hundred years that followed may have felt little to no changein the accepted attitude towards the superstitions that arose from the Catholic dogma of

the previous centuries.


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conflict of contemporary English society. Some scholars even purport that this was

a deliberate choice by Shakespeare to show his adherence to the Catholic faith,

(Ward 292).But these opinions amount to little more than a range of criticism, as

varied as seemingly superfluous character traits tacked on to the protagonist to

outlandish fantasy, with little to no basis in historical fact. Critics of this ilk and

their opinions should be approached with care in analysis.

What seems the more logical conclusion to draw from Hamlets ambiguous

religion is that Shakespeare intended the play to be one in which both Catholics

and Protestants could engage. By including elements of both Christian trains of

thought, the viewer can see clearly the conflict between Hamlets quest for

revenge and the dilemma it entailsspecifically, by working only to damn

Claudiuss soul, Hamlet damns himself. Through such an orchestration, the ethics

of revenge and the very nature of virile honor receive close scrutiny. The

conflict seems to derive from the social obligation Hamlet has been charged with,

and the implications that such an undertaking entail.

Hamlets duality is a theme upon which countless scholars have elaborated.

Cedric Watts claims our Hamlet lurches between brutal, callous action and, in

contrast, sensitive introspection and civilized humanity, later claiming that the

play seems to be an inconsistency, and an attempt to modernize the primitive

materials Shakespeare was working with (Williams 14-15). Ernest Jones, famous


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for the Freudian analysis of the play which has so distorted its meaning for the last

century, said of the Prince:

One moment he pretends he is too cowardly to perform the deed, atanother he questions the truthfulness of the ghost, at anotherwhen

the opportunity presents itself in its naked formhe thinks the time

is unsuited, it would be better to wait till the King was at some evil

act and then to kill him and so on

When a man gives at different times a different reason for his

conduct it is safe to infer that, whether consciously or not, he is

concealing the true reason. (Jones 60-61)

What analyses like Wattssand Joness seem to not take into account is the

importance of this duality in the protagonistthe lurching of the enlightened

Renaissance prince towards barbarism. Far from being poorly crafted or deceitful,

Hamlet seems to be a man trapped between two worlds. It is clear that he feels

bound to a moral code that is basically medieval while his instincts clearly come

from the Renaissance. When viewed in this light, many of theplays

inconsistencies are seen for what they really are: a young man struggling to cope

with the sudden collapse of the life he knew and the unthinkable obligation to

commit regicide to avenge regicide.

Harry Levin claims that the doubt Hamlet feels over the legitimacy of

revenging his father and the doubt that he feels regarding his role as the avenger

extended even to the question of his identity. Levin writes:

Etymologically, the word [doubt] stems from dubitare, which

means precisely to hesitate in the face of two possibilities. The


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structure ofHamletseems, at every level, to have been determined

by this duality. (Levin 48)

If this is true, and Hamlets identity is lost in the chaos that comes after the

Ghosts appearance, then it seems clear that a connection may be drawn from the

newfound role he feels he must play and the idea of who he was that he held

before the play began. This is evident in even the most rudimentary of textual

analyses. The man who asks a question as filled with doubt as To be or not to be

is remarkably different from the youth who declared Seems, madame? Nay, it is.

I know not seems, (I.ii.76). The entrance of the Ghost and the revelatory nature

of his tale unhinge the confidence of the grieving Prince.

As Dover Wilson says, the Ghost is the linchpin of the play (Wilson 54-86).

But Old King Hamlet does not necessarily act in the manner Wilson prescribes, a

Catholic entity in a Protestant Kingdom. It seems possible that the Ghost functions

instead as a catalyst, and that his entrance into the world makes manifest the

darkness and ill ease of the State. By addressing Hamlet and charging him to seek

vengeance, the Ghost invokes an ancient expectation of sons to avenge their

fathers deaths. By eventually accepting the Ghosts story as truth, Hamlet ties his

fate to the Ghosts command. This relationship is reminiscent of Macbeth and the

Witches, that by accepting potentially evil council as truth, characters often seal

their own fates. By believing in the Ghost, Hamlet puts himself in league with the

spirit whose manifestation brought about the revelation of the rotten state of the


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country. Thereby, Hamlet, too, is caught up in that rottenness, and, as Gilbert

Murray gracefully said, although he is the slayer of Winter, Hamlet nevertheless

has the notes of the Winter about him, (Murray 24). In assuming the role of the

avenger and planning Claudiuss eternal damnation, Hamlet tacitly condemns

himself as well.

In order to understand more fully how Hamlet condemns himself, one must

look at the Prayer Scene, in which Claudius is at prayer, and Hamlet chooses to

spare the king, lest his soul be sent to heaven. Hamlet says:

Up, sword, and know thou a more horrid hent,

When he is drunk asleep; or in his rage;

Or in th incestuous pleasure of his bed;

At gaming, swearing, or about some act

That has no relish of salvation int

Then trip him, that his heels may kick at heaven,

And that his soul may be as damnd and black

As hell, whereto it goes. My mother stays.

This physic but prolongs thy sickly days.

(III. iv. 88-96)

Hamlets explanation has long horrified scholars, who claim the prince could not

have meant what he said. In his famous gloss, Dr. Johnson raised the problem for

critics to come, This speech, in which Hamlet, represented as a virtuous

character, is not content with taking blood for blood, but contrives damnation for

the man that he would punish, is too horrible to be read or to be uttered, (Johnson

VII, 236). Most scholars insist that the speech is a mere mark of procrastination,


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some going so far as to insist that Hamlet is lying. William Richardson wrote in

1785 that, I will venture to affirm, that there are not his real sentiments. There is

nothing in the whole character of Hamlet that justifies such savage enormity,

(Richardson 159). Others have insisted that such primitive sentiments were par

for the course in Elizabethan drama, and that their primitiveness is merely to be

accepted, (Waldock 42). However, neither argument can truly be seen as valid. It

is doubtful that Shakespeare would have wasted twenty-four lines on intentionally

misleading the audience. Likewise, it seems arbitrary to dismiss the speech as

unrepresentative of the Princes true character. However, another theory has been

put forward by Professor Eleanor Prosser, in which she speculates that,

considering how Hamlets proposed vengeance is irreconcilable with Christian

teaching, and that those characters who propose to damn the souls of their victims

are almost always villains. In fact, she illustrates that they are oftentimes some of

the worst villains in Elizabethan literature: Nashes Cutwolfe, Tourneurs

Vendice, and Websters Lodovico, to name a few, (Prosser 261-275). With this

new theory it seems that Johnsons initial feelings were right: Hamlet utters words

too horrid to be read or to be uttered.

What is to be made of such an outlook on the normally well-favored

Prince? Hamlet is, by all Christian standards, a villain. He is chaos incarnate, and

wherever he goes, the world seems out of tune. He is one of the few

Shakespearean characters to consciously redefine their own identity, and he is far


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more aware of his identity and how it is reflected in the plays subplots than any

other protagonist in any other of Shakespeares plays. He varyingly seems to be in

complete control of himself, and moments later will commit an act or say lines

that the audience cannot help but see as mad, and vice versa. But, despite this, he

is beloved by those who watch the play. Why? It seems that Hamlet, by redefining

himself as he proceeds through the play, is able to convince us of his worthiness.

Even at his darkest moments he maintains his ability to redefine who and what he

is. Standing over the body of Polonius, he declares himself to be the villain in a

third-rate revenge play (Come, the croaking raven doth bellow for revenge (III.

ii. 264-65)); at another moment, he is the recorder that unskilled hands attempt to

play; at another, he is the chief player in a childrens game (Hide fox, and all

after (IV. ii. 31)), (Gottschalk 160). But, by the end of the play, he has changed

completely. At the close of the play, he is not the barbaric young avenger who

appears in the graveyard scene, but rather a mature man of composure and calm.

He has given himself wholly to Providence, and the audience loves him.

However, he still must die. Hamlet is a tragic hero, and has committed

grievous sins. But, in the minutes of life that follow the fencing match, it becomes

clear that Hamlet, in giving way to Fate, has been redeemed. There is room for

debate on whether this redemption is merely an earthly one (the reclamation of his

good name by Fortinbras would certainly support such an idea), or if it is a true

redemption of his soul (the fact that he is given shriving time, and a chance to


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confess, through Horatio, what hed done, may support this possibility). But, what

can be said with certainty is that the tension created by the juxtaposition of the

moral requirements for the medieval situation Hamlet finds himself in and the

instincts and intellect that are his by nature stemming from the Renaissance help to

build one of the greatest pieces of dramatic work ever written.


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Works Cited/ Works Referenced:

*All references to Hamlet are made to The Norton Shakespeare ed., based on the

Oxford Edition, edited by Stephen Greenblatt*

Belsey, Cather ine . "The Case of Hamlet ' s Conscience ."

Studies in Phi lo logy. 76 .2 (1979) : 127-148. Pr in t .

Goldberg , Jonathan. "Hamlet ' s Hand." Shakespeare Quarter ly .

39 .3 (1988) : 307-327. Pr in t .

Got tschalk , Paul . "Hamlet and the Scanning of Revenge."

Shakespeare Quarter ly . 24 .2 (1973) : 155-170. Pr in t .

Johnson, Samuel . The Plays of Wil l iam Shakespeare . 7 .

London: 1765. Pr in t .

Jones , Ernes t . Hamlet and Oedipus . Anchor Books ed . Garden

City: Anchor Books , 1954. Pr in t .

Knowles , Ronald . "Hamlet and Counter-Humanism."

Renaissance Quarter ly . 52 .4 (1999) : 1046-1069. Pr in t .

Hooper , Wal ter , ed . Selec ted Li t erary Essays . 1s t ed .

Cambridge: Cambridge Univers i ty Press , 1969. 205 -

218. Pr in t .

Levin , Harry . The Ques t ion o f "Hamlet" . 3rd ed . New York:

BRNS Ltd . , 1959. Pr in t .


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Matheson, Mark. "Hamlet and "A Matter Tender and

Dangerous"." Shakespeare Quarter ly . 46 .4 (1995) : 383-

397. Pr in t .

Murray, Gi lber t . "Hamlet and Ores tes ." Br i t i sh Academy

Annual Shakespeare Lecture . (1914) : 24 . Pr in t .

Parker , Geoffrey . "Success and Fai lure dur ing the Firs t

Century of the Reformat ion." Past & Present . 136.

(1992) : 43-82. Pr in t .

Parker , T .M. The Engl i sh Reformat ion to 1558 . 2nd ed .

Oxford: Oxford Univers i ty Press , 1973. Pr in t .

Powicke, Maurice . The Reformat ion in England. 2nd ed .

Oxford: Oxford Univers i ty Press , 1973. Pr in t .

Prosser , Eleanor Al ice . Hamlet and Revenge . 2nd ed . Stanford

Univers i ty Press , 1967. Pr in t .

Richardson, Wil l iam. "Hamlet ." Essays on Shakespeare ' s

Dramat ic Characters . Ed. Richardson. 1s t ed . London:

1785. 159. Pr in t .

Waldock, A. J . A. Hamlet , A Study in Cri t i cal Method.

Cambridge: Cambridge Univers i ty Press , 1931. Pr in t .

Ward, David . "The King and "Hamlet" ." Shakespeare

Quarter ly . 43 .3 (1992) : 280-302. Pr in t .


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Watson, El izabeth S . "Old King, New King, Ecl ipsed Sons ,

and Abandoned Altars in "Hamlet" ." Six teenth Century

Journal . 35 .2 (2004) : 475-491. Pr in t .

Wat ts , Cedr ic . In t roduct ion to "Hamlet" . 2nd ed . Ware ,

Her t fordshire : Wordsworth Edi t ions Limited , 1992.

Pr in t .

Wilson, John Dover . What Happens in Hamlet . Cambridge:

1935. Pr in t .

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Hamlet Essay Final Draft