Hamlet and Metaphysical Doubt
A vast tragedy, negating any attempt at a single interpretation, Hamlet is before anything else the drama of a man who does not hesitate to confront his own imperfections and who refuses illusions and idealised appearances:
'What piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, 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-and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me...' (Act Two, Scene Two, Arden)
The tragedy, Fluchère tells us, takes place above all in Hamlet's consciousness, as
all the events which form the play's framework are reduced to a symbolic representation, to an internal unrest which no action will resolve, and no decision will quell. The deepest theme, masked by that of vengeance, is none other than human nature itself, confronted by the metaphysical and moral problems it is moulded by: love, time, death, perhaps even the principle of identity and quality, not to say 'being and nothingness'. The shock Hamlet receives on the death of his father, and on the remarriage of his mother, triggers disquieting interrogations about the peace of the soul, and the revelation of the ghost triggers vicious responses to these. The world changes its colour, life its significance, love is stripped of its spirituality, woman of her prestige, the state of its stability, the earth and the air of their appeal. It is a sudden eruption of wickedness, a reduction of the world to the absurd, of peace to bitterness, of reason to madness. A contagious disease which spreads from man to the kingdom, from the kingdom to the celestial vault':
'[A]nd indeed it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame the earth seems to me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy the air, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.'
Fluchère's reading situates Hamlet's drama within the ruptures of an isolated and bruised subjectivity. According to this interpretation, which places the accent on the dissolving of identity and on a Sartrean problematic of being and nothingness, Hamlet's tragedy appears as the quintessence of a moral and metaphysical instability which some associate with the experience of modernity. Hamlet's decline and bitterness indeed match his extraordinary lucidity. The tragedy of Hamlet, nevertheless, clearly exceeds the boundaries of the tormented consciousness of its protagonist
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