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ALI SALAMI1
Introduction
The baffling diversity of responses to Hamlet, tainted by philosophy,
psychology, religion, politics, history and ethics, only conduces to the
ever-increasing complications of the play. In Hamlet, the imagination runs
wild and travels far beyond the text, to the extent that the reader perceives
things that stand not within but utterly without the text. In reading the
play, the reader finds in themselves hidden meanings and pent-up feelings
and relates them to the play. In the process of reading Hamlet, the reader’s
imagination fails to grasp the logic of events. Therefore, instead of relating
the events to their world, the reader relates their own world to the text. As
a result, the world perceived by the reader is not Hamlet’s but the reader’s.
In other words, every reader brings their own world to the play. This study
seeks to show how the reader can detach themselves from Hamlet and let
their imagination run free. It also shows that the reality achieved by the
reader in the course of reading the play is only the reality that dwells in the
innermost recesses of their own mind.
1
Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures, University of Tehran.
Ali Salami 163
why Hamlet is the most fascinating character, and the most inexhaustible,
in all imaginative literature. What else should he be, if the world’s greatest
poet … put his own soul straight into this creation, and when he wrote
Hamlet’s speeches wrote down his own heart?
(Ibid., 357)
Until the early twentieth century, critics and scholars alike showed
favourable responses to the character, viewing him as an ideal person. Yet,
with the burgeoning of modernism and the development of
psychoanalysis, critics tended to analyse the character in light of what they
presumed could help unravel the mystery behind his procrastination.
A most aggressive reaction to the play came from T. S. Eliot, who
argued that: “Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is
inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the
supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that
Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings
is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic
problem” (1997). T. S. Eliot decided that Hamlet was a:
164 The Psychological Province of the Reader in Hamlet
1
Apart from Eliot’s judgment that Hamlet is an artistic failure, one of the strangest
commentaries comes from W. H. Auden in his Ibsen essay, Genius and Apostle,
which contrasts Hamlet as a mere actor to Don Quixote as the antithesis of an
actor. He says that Hamlet does not have any “faith in God and in himself. So, he
must define his existence in terms of others, e.g., ‘I am the man whose mother
married his uncle who murdered his father.’ He would like to become what the
Greek tragic hero is, a creature of situation. Hence his inability to act, for he can
only ‘act,’ i.e., play at possibilities” (Bloom 1989, 62).
Ali Salami 165
Remember thee!
Ay, thou poor Ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee!
166 The Psychological Province of the Reader in Hamlet
At this point, the reader acquires the conviction that Hamlet will sweep
to his revenge with speedy wings as he has promised the Ghost. Soon after
the disappearance of the Ghost, Hamlet tells Horatio that, “it is an honest
Ghost” (1.5: 138). By now, the reader has come to believe the existence of
the Ghost and the truth of his words on the testimony of Hamlet. In other
words, Shakespeare has succeeded in giving credibility to the Ghost.
Hamlet puts on an antic disposition in order to ascertain beyond question
the guilt of his uncle and exact his revenge.
Yet, the rupture in the interplay between the text and the reader
emerges after the play-within-the-play, which is intended to “catch the
conscience of the king” (2.2: 558). He actually does catch the conscience
of the King, who goes to pray in remorse for what he has done. The play
actually proves the guilt of his uncle, and Hamlet, who is now
overwhelmed with ecstasy over his discovery, should rush to take revenge,
as he says, “I'll take the Ghost's word for a thousand pound” (3.2: 260–1).
Now that certainty as to the crime is achieved, Hamlet should no longer
hesitate. Yet, no real revenge happens. No action takes place. He takes the
knife, goes to his room, finds him praying and thinks to himself:
Now the question, which arises in the mind of the reader, is: If Hamlet is
so firm a believer, why does he justify the charge to revenge? After all,
Hamlet will send his own soul to hell if he commits murder. Besides,
Claudius does not really repent. True repentance, theologians argue,
involves a change of heart and of mind. There is a change of heart in
Claudius but there is no change of mind, as he does not vow to take steps
Ali Salami 167
1
For Leggatt, “Claudius attempting to pray, and Hamlet watching him kneeling,
both accept for the moment an orthodox scheme of damnation and salvation,
contradicting the uncertainty of the famous soliloquy. The result is that Claudius,
knowing he does not meet the conditions for forgiveness, fails to pray, and Hamlet,
thinking he does, fails to kill him. Each man enters the scene determined on an
action, and does nothing. For Claudius it is again a problem of language: “My
words fly up, my thoughts remain below./ Words without thoughts never to heaven
go” (3.3: 97–8). When Polonius asks what he is reading Hamlet replies, “Words,
words, words” (2.2: 192), separating them from thought, draining them of
meaning” (2005, 65).
168 The Psychological Province of the Reader in Hamlet
The reader knows that King Hamlet has been dead for less than two
months. In Act 3, Scene 2, we see Hamlet talking to Ophelia: “Look you
how cheerfully my mother looks,/ And my father died within these two
hours” (3.2: 112–13). Ophelia corrects him: “Nay, ’tis twice two months,
my lord.” (3.2: 130).
So, four months have passed since the death of King Hamlet. In other
words, there has been an interval of two months between his death and the
appearance of the Ghost, and in that time Hamlet has done nothing.
In the closet scene, the Ghost appears to him only to chide his son: “Do
not forget: this visitation/ Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose” (3.4:
110–11).
Crucial to the play and our understanding of the personality of Hamlet,
I believe, is the closet scene where the Ghost reappears to chide him and
warn him against hurting his mother, when Hamlet has just failed to carry
out his father’s command. Curiously, the reader finds the Ghost repeating
his warning to Hamlet about his mother. This is crucial to the play because
this is the scene where the reader begins to doubt if the Ghost is but the
product of Hamlet’s imagination, as it is only visible to him.
Hamlet:
Do you see nothing there?
Queen Gertrude:
Nothing at all; yet all that is I see.
(3.4: 132–3)
him? If he has the power to kill a man without knowing who he really is,1
what is it that stymies his will to kill the man who has killed his father?
Claudius is not actually repenting, and accordingly his soul will not go to
Heaven, as Hamlet suggests. There should be another reason. The reader
can visualise that, in the closet scene, when Hamlet steps in he harbours
the forethought of killing Gertrude. For this reason, she becomes so
terrified that she cries for help. In a sudden act of violence, Hamlet slays
Polonius by way of venting his anger at his mother, who is to him a
personification of human degeneration. In other words, Hamlet satisfies
his blood lust by dispatching Polonius. An ingenious reader will not find it
hard to see that killing Claudius is a mere afterthought. Polonius becomes
a substitute not for the King but for the Queen. Besides, in the two main
scenes in Acts 1 and 3 where the Ghost appears to Hamlet, he orders him
to revenge his murder but warns him against hurting his mother. The way
Hamlet talks to his mother in the closet scene is to be metaphorically
interpreted as plunging a dagger of words into her heart. This idea is well
understood in Gertrude’s words: “These words, like daggers, enter in mine
ears;/ No more, sweet Hamlet!” (3.4: 95–6).
After the death of Polonius, the reader will notice a radical change in
Hamlet’s attitude to the idea of killing. He even openly vows that he will
kill Claudius. Hamlet neglects revenge not because, as Foakes has pointed
out, “the heroic code he associates with his father urges him to action,
while the Christian code that is given lip-service in Claudius’s Denmark
condemns revenge and inhibits him from murder so foul” (in Kinny 2002,
96), but because he is reluctant to take revenge. Shakespeare has created a
rebellious character who flies in the face of all forms of authority. He can
be considered, “a precociously self-alienated Modernist” (Cefalu 2004, 2),
or hailed as "the Western hero of consciousness” (Bloom 2005, 63).
Hugh Grady aptly specifies Hamlet’s position in the history of modern
intellectuality:
Hamlet, who came into being as a carrier of the new form of malleable,
protean subjectivity identified by Hegel and Burckhardt as the hallmark of
modernity, and who served centrally as the emblem and signifier of art and
subjectivity throughout the classical bourgeois era, now emerges into a
new century re-newed, uncannily ourselves, yet once more challenging our
own understandings of our world, its past, and its uncertain future.
(2009, 18)
1
When he kills Polonius, Gertrude asks him: “O me, what hast thou done?” (3.4:
25), and he answers: “Nay, I know not: Is it the king?” (3.4: 26).
170 The Psychological Province of the Reader in Hamlet
What makes Hamlet a hero in the eyes of the reader is not his mission to
kill the King and thus revenge his father’s murder, but his rebellious
nature. In fact, he is “a conspicuous example of a character standing
outside traditions, habits, rituals and supposedly natural human impulses”
(Mousley 2007, 33). According to Barbara Everett: “The Prince never
does revenge his father; he does something more natural and perhaps more
terrible, he becomes his father” (1989, 126). He is made to kill the King
only by force of circumstances, and not in a calculated plan, only when he
realises that he has betrayed him. Similarly, he sends Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern to their doom only to save himself. Therefore, he is capable
of killing but he only kills when he wants to, rather than when he is
dictated to do so. Rebelliousness in Hamlet makes him likeable and the
reader finds this characteristic much to his taste. The quality of rebellion is
enough to make him a hero of a different kind—one who observes,
analyses, and decides. Hamlet immortalises himself by being rebellious.
This idea gains even more momentum as time passes. His rebellious nature
creates in him a sour sense of separateness. His dying wish to, “report me
and my cause aright/ To the unsatisfied” (5.2: 344–5), “registers his own
sense of his separateness from others, since all other characters
misinterpret him. No one knows the cause of his melancholy, if it is
melancholy, and all the reasons they give for it—unsatisfied love for
Ophelia (Polonius), his mother’s hasty marriage (Gertrude), unfulfilled
ambition (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and perhaps suspected by
Claudius)—are partial at best” (Zamir 2006, 174).
Hamlet’s personality undergoes a drastic change in his brief sojourn
with the pirates, who abduct him from the ship transporting him from
Elsinore to England after he slays Polonius. He discovers Claudius's letter
ordering his summary execution, and turns it against its bearers,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In a terse letter, he reveals to Horatio that
an unexpected stroke of luck has saved his life. The ship he sailed on was
attacked by pirates, who took him prisoner but let the others continue.
Since Hamlet had discovered the treachery in Claudius's letter and
replaced it with one requesting the execution of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern instead, the two have sailed to certain death. In return for the
promise of ransom, Hamlet is released by the pirates on the Danish coast.
He mentions that, “I am to do a good turn for them” (4.6: 18). Yet, it is not
clear what Hamlet has really promised the pirates. We are left with many
gaps to fill. Hamlet is a completely new man after his short voyage. Such a
quick change should strike the readers as odd because a complicated
personality like Hamlet cannot possibly change so quickly and suddenly.
Ali Salami 171
The idea is further complicated by the fact that Hamlet is not in the
least struck by pangs of conscience for sending Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern to their doom—“They are not near my conscience” (5.2:
58)—when we consider the fact that they were both ignorant of the content
of the letter. This is not in fact the first time in the play that Hamlet is left
without compunction for directly or indirectly causing the deaths of
people. This incident should be enough to create aversion in the reader for
Hamlet. To Goethe, the great romantic German poet, it was clear that
Shakespeare intended to exhibit the effect of the sense of a great duty
imposed upon a soul unable to perform it: an oak tree is planted in a china
vase, proper only to receive the most delicate flowers; the roots strike out,
and the vase flies to pieces.
A pure, noble, highly moral disposition, but without the energy of soul
which constitutes the hero, sinks under a load which it can neither support
nor resolve to abandon. All his obligations are sacred to him, but this alone
is above his powers. An impossibility is required at his hands—not an
impossibility in itself, but that which is so to him
(in Shakespeare and Cornwall 1864, 9).
Hamlet’s soul is sick. Hamlet’s soul is sick to death—and yet there was
one thing left that might have saved him. In the deserts of his mind, void
with the utter vacuity of the knowledge of death—death of his father, death
of his mother’s faith—was yet one flower, his love of Ophelia. He takes a
devilish joy in cruelty towards the end of the play. So we should be equally
prepared to adopt the point of view of the other side of human Claudius
against inhuman Hamlet.
(2001, 21, 29)
1
Here Hamlet becomes ready to reconcile with his situation. He resigns himself to
the, “powerlessness of being authored; there is only so much rough hewing he can
do, only so much he can know. Indeed, he is ready and knows that ‘no man, of
aught he leaves, knows aught.’ By accepting the paradox of acting—to be and not
to be?—Hamlet can be ready for the paradox of being (and dying)” (Platt 2009,
164).
Ali Salami 173
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174 The Psychological Province of the Reader in Hamlet