BY M. KALIDASU, B.L. (Advocate, Bapatla)
No literary production can make a lasting
impression unless it touches something basic and fundamental in human nature.
In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the motif of this universal appeal is the
character of the Prince of Denmark. Eminent critics like Coleridge, Goethe and
Bradley have differed in the analysis of Hamlet’s nature. These divergences are
undoubtedly due to differing emphasis on the multiple facets of a complex
personality.
When Hamlet makes his first appearance in the
drama, he had almost completed his education at the University of Wittenburg.
He appears to have been a brilliant student and a popular figure among his
fellow students. He developed a more than common skill in the use of language.
Thoughtful by nature and idealistic by temperament, education naturally
sharpened these tendencies. The son of a king, he was protected, during the
formative period of his life, from hard realities like want and the struggle
for existence. He had already out-stripped adolescence and developed into a
lover. It was in this atmosphere that he was faced with the double shock of the
mysterious death of his father, and the hasty and unaccountable marriage of his
mother with a far inferior man like Claudius. The suspicion as to the manner of
his father’s death by foul means was confirmed by the revelations of his
father’s Ghost: A practical young man like Laertes would have taken swift
revenge on the murderer. But in the case of Hamlet, the first reaction was one
of nervous and moral stupefaction. Unable to take his bearings, he made up his
mind to gain time by affecting madness. Presently a sense of super fairness
inspired a doubt as to the truth of the Ghost’s revelations regarding the
murder. Stupefaction was reinforced by this added indecision. The suppressed
feeling of frustration began to vent itself out in free phraseology and useless
irony in his conversations with Claudius and the Queen.
The moral tension which already held Hamlet in pincers
was heightened by the levity exhibited by his mother in regard to his father’s
death. Immediately after speaking to the Queen, Hamlet seriously begins to
discuss the ethics of suicide. A further shock to Hamlet’s moral sensibility
was heaped upon him by the discovery that his own beloved Ophelia was spying
upon him. As if this was not enough, two of his fellow-students at the
university, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, lend themselves to a plot against his
life. Fate could not have woven the web of a more poisonous atmosphere to
anaesthetize a fine moral and idealistic temperament such as nature bestowed on
Hamlet. The will to action is sapped in this manner, and his high intellectual
gifts found vent in a psychological analysis of his own inaction and mental
make-up. It is not merely the idealistic nature of Hamlet that produced
inaction in him, as Coleridge supposed; but it is the shocks which a cruel fate
repeatedly and in quick succession imposed upon an idealistic temperament, that
properly explain Hamlet’s inaction in the drama. Human nature craves for what
it does not possess, and the tribute which Hamlet paid to Horatio’s character
is subconsciously more revealing as to the real reason of Hamlet’s inaction
than the self-conscious and mutually inconsistent probings in which he
indulges: -
“For thou hast been
As one, in suffering all, that suffers nothing,
A man that fortune’s buffets and rewards has taken
with equal thanks—
And blest are those whose blood and judgment are so
well commingled,
That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger,
To sound what stop she please.”
It is well known that while Macbeth and Lear
are tragedies arising out of an inherent moral defect in the principal
characters, Othello and Hamlet, are tragedies of environment. In
the case of Hamlet, tragedy results from a succession of uncongenial events
thrust upon a fine human character by a cruel and unrelenting fate and
paralysing the will to act. A world in which cruelty, the clash of ambition,
passion, and uncongenial contexts predominate, gives rise to tragedies, just as
inherent defects in a man’s nature may bring about the same result. Why this
should be so has not so far found a solution satisfactory to mankind in
general. One of Shakespeare’s characters suggests: “As flies are to wanton
boys, so are we to the Gods. They kill us for their sport.” Hamlet himself
suggests a different explanation, “The times are out of joint; O, cursed spite
that I was born to set it right!” Again, “There is a divinity that shapes our
ends, rough-hew them how we will. It is generally supposed that Shakespeare’s
final answer to the problem is given through the mouth of Prospero towards the
close of The Tempest. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our
little lives are rounded with a sleep.” This is hardly a solution; it is but an
opiate. Shakespeare, however, suggests two rules for human conduct: “The rarer
action is in justice than in vengeance; they being the sole drift of my action,
my purpose extends not a frown further”. “Now I want spirits to enforce, not to
enchant, and my ending is despair, unless I be relieved by prayer, which
pierces so that it assaults mercy itself and frees all faults.” The final
advice is, therefore that a man should place implicit faith in God and accustom
himself to prayer in all humility.
The theory favoured by Bradley and richly decorated
by Shucking, that Shakespeare portrayed in Hamlet’s character the melancholic
temperament familiar to Elizabethan literature, does not bear examination. That
Shakespeare was familiar with, and made use of, this type is clear from the
character of Jacques in As You Like It. But Shakespeare’s Hamlet is as
unlike the melancholic individual as Othello is to King Lear. The man of
melancholic temperament is a highbrow, a cynic, a pessimist and a person who
holds in contempt both the problems of life and those who seek to face them by
action. He is an “imaginative, brooding intellectualist with morbid traits”.
(Shucking). Does Shakespeare’s Hamlet come anywhere near this type? The man who
breaks loose from those who seek to prevent him from following his father’s
Ghost with the words, “Unhand me, gentlemen, or I will make a ghost of him,
that lets me”; the man who deliberately arranges a plot to find proofs for the
guilt of Claudius; the man who unmasks Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in a trice;
the man who easily detects the plot to kill him on his voyage to England, and
outwits and kills the conspirator; the man who stabs an eaves-dropper under the
mistaken impression that he was the King; the man who would not brook the idea
that Laertes loved his sister more than himself; the man who recklessly accepts
the invitation for a fencing match from his enemy and, at the end, indulges in
an orgy of killing; and, above all, the man who was so anxious to secure the
good opinion of his fellow-beings that, with his last breath, he requests his
friend Horatio to put his reputation right with the word,–such a man is neither
a man of melancholy nor a man unfitted for action by too much of idealism or
too much of thinking.
In addition to being a young man of culture, Hamlet
excelled in all the pastimes of the age. Ophelia pictures him in the following
lines: –
“O, What a noble mind is here overthrown!
The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s eye, tongue,
sword;
The expectancy and rose of the fair state,
The glass of fashion and the mould of form,
The observers of all observers….”
Though something of this appreciation may be
ascribed to the idolisation of a young girl in love, there can be no doubt that
the portrait is substantially just. Laertes refers to him as ‘sweet Prince’. In
the final scene, Horatio mourns his death as the ‘cracking of a noble heart’,
and Fortinbras gives funeral directions for Hamlet’s corpse in the following
lines—
“Let four captains bear Hamlet, like a soldier, to
the stage;
For he was likely, had he been put on,
To have proved most royally.”
Hamlet is at once an artist and an intellectual. As
Bradley points out, the world does not present itself to Hamlet the
conventional appearance which habit and familiarity develop in most of us. The
atmosphere surrounding the earth is a ‘canopy’ to him, and the firmament ‘a
majestical roof fretted with golden fire’. And then, “what a piece of work is
man! How noble in reason! How infinite in faculty! In form and moving, how
express and admirable! In action, how like an angel! In apprehension, how like
a God! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!” As a lover, Hamlet
shows himself both passionate and sincere: -
“Doubt that the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.”
Again, in the Graveyard Scene: “I loved Ophelia; forty thousand brothers
could not, with all their quantity of love, make up my sum.”
Hamlet is an artist with phrases and repartee. His
hits at the King and Queen are as good examples of irony and quick repartee as
can be found anywhere else in English literature. When, as the result of
soul-searing pictures painted by Hamlet for the benefit of his mother, she exclaims;
“O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain”, Hamlet’s quick rejoinder is–“O,
throwaway the worse part of it, and live the purer with the other half.” It
would be no exaggeration to say that the most gifted literary artist among the
characters created by Shakespeare is Hamlet.
Hamlet is a shrewd judge of character and a
penetrating literary critic. His quick appraisal and unmasking of the real
purpose of the visit of his fellow-students, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
reveal his insight into human nature and intrigue. Hamlet has a strong
philosophical bent of mind. Not only does he attempt to probe into the reality
of events and thoughts, but he frequently tends to generalize from them. A few
examples are enough to show this. “There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” “Use every man after his
desert and who should escape whipping?” The famous soliloquy beginning with the
line “To be or not to be; that is the question” is of course a classical example.
“What is a man,
If the chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? A beast, no more.
Sure, He that made us with such large discourse
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and Godlike reason
To fust in us unused”.
His hypercritical comments in the Graveyard Scene
are also well-known. His advice to the actors who visited the Court as to the
manner to be adopted in playing dramas continues to be a guide for all time.
That a prince, so deserving and, so richly endowed
should not only die young but be tortured by the events of his time and his own
imagined failings and deficiencies, is enough tragedy to wring pity from us.
But that an innocent young girl like Ophelia should become mad and commit
suicide; and that Hamlet should, though unwillingly, murder her father and kill
her brother, adds to the poignancy of the drama.