Hamlet: Between Pagan and Christian
Hamlet explores the borders between madness and sanity. It is also located, like King Lear, in a frontier area between a pagan revenge ethic and Christian compassion, and between a ruthless, power-hungry adult world and a younger generation with gentler and more conciliatory aspirations. Hamlet's father, who now torments him, was himself a sinner, otherwise he would not have to return to earth as a ghost, demanding revenge. Hamlet is well aware of his father's crimes (III.3.81). Inviting his son to avenge his death is tantamount to turning the clock back, thereby perpetuating a pagan code of honour that seems outdated in Hamlet's own time. For - in contrast to Lear - Hamlet is a Christian of sorts, a fact that hampers rather than helps him in his mission. His Christianity is one of several reasons why he hesitates to carry out the ghost's instructions - and why, in the most famous of his seven soliloquies, he refrains from turning his weapon on himself. He worries that the spirit he has seen may be a devil. Obviously Christian in its origin is Hamlet's considered resolve not to kill Claudius in III.3, for fear that killing him while he is at prayer may avenge his father according to the logic of paganism, but will coincidentally dispatch the murderer to heaven according to the teachings of the Church. This is only one aspect of a wider question that the drama asks: how can a man put right a wrong, without committing an even greater wrong in the process? It will be recalled that in the second half of the play, Hamlet becomes a man hunted for the very offence which he himself set out to avenge - 'Hamlet is to Laertes what Claudius is to Hamlet' (W. Hutchings, Critical Quarterly 20, 1978). In the end we must ask, how can a man avenge a murder, given that no victim can be brought back to life again? But there are many other considerations that affect Hamlet's behaviour, not least the problem of how Claudius' demise would affect his mother. And as if that were not enough, Shakespeare chose to place more questions of a general nature in Hamlet's mouth than in any other play. Hamlet has thus become a cipher for the figure of the speculator who ponders every issue without ever reaching a decision. His thoughts range from suicide, virtue, sex, and the difference (or lack of) between man and beast. But he goes further, and repeatedly asks about the value of man himself ('What a 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 [...]'; II.2.303-6). Click here for 'tv star psychologist' Dr Anthony Clare's recent assessment of Hamlet's character
Hamlet is not only a son bent on vengeance; he is a student, a scholar, a fledgling philosopher. Modern productions (Peter Brook) have shown him wrapped in a college scarf, as if on his way to a tutorial. So multifaceted is his character that many nations have claimed him as their own. There are German scholars who claimed that Hamlet was the quintessence of the German character and that Shakespeare had been born in England 'by mistake'; equally, there have been Jewish scholars who say that Hamlet is emblematic of their ethnicity (Meisels' Judenhamlet). Perhaps we are wrong to read it as a character-study at all. It is no more and no less than a piece of (supremely) well-functioning drama. The play, through its hero, cries out for answers to a host of diverse questions ('Understanding Hamlet is the greatest of all literary problems', Dover Wilson); and yet it offers, in the end, only silence. Therein, perhaps, lies the distinctive quality of its tragedy.
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