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Reality and imagination in ´Hamlet´
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Stringbean, you do choose the most difficult of themes! I remember reading that something new is published on Hamlet every week (or was it every day?) and that this has been going on for at least 100 years. The chances of our saying something new and original are small indeed.
I think I understand you. Hamlet feels the passion, real and pretended, expressed around him, and is conscious that he has greater occasion for expressing passion himself, yet feels that he does not quite match it. So he says of the player King's tears "and all for nothing", because the player King acts his role.
"Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears..."
But paradoxically, Hamlet shows the emotion he feels others may simulate. So he says of Laertes,
"...the bravery of his grief did put me
Into a towering passion."
Hamlet's passion was as real (more real) than the histrionic grief expressed by Laertes, and yet he still feels that he lacks that manner of expression.
And of course many more examples ...
I have felt for a long time that one effect of giving Hamlet this characteristic (and I'm sure there are many effects) is that Hamlet becomes very real to a viewing audience watching the play. It is as if he is saying to the audience, "look, these other people you see up here on stage with me are merely acting, but I can't do that -- I'm not acting, my feelings are real." We forget that Hamlet (or rather the person playing Hamlet) is just an actor on stage. The player King grieving for Hecuba, or Laertes jumping into Ophelia's grave are acting their roles, but Hamlet is the real thing -- unlike them he is not acting.
Does that make sense?
Hi, gang! I'm Eric and I'm new to this group...Stringbean, it's interesting that you see that. I agree with Martin - Hamlet's emotions are real and everyone else is playing their parts. However, Hamlet's exisistential quandry ends up (not only doing him in) costing him every other emotion that makes him human.
One thing, though, is the time. This was a time of paranoia. I once wrote an essay on the parallels between the history of Hamlet and the War on Terror (under Bush). You've got a lot of things going on in the paranoia realm. Fortinbras has essentially gone through the same thing that Hamlet has and there's major concern as to when/where he will attack. Even the guards discuss naval build-ups. Of course, we know that Fortinbras does come through at the end.
You see Claudius is a puppet (much some people compared Bush to) and really, Polonius and the warlords are "pulling the strings". Had they conceived of it, there would definitely have been a color-coded threat level system.
Ericmays wrote: "Hi, gang! I'm Eric and I'm new to this group...Stringbean, it's interesting that you see that. I agree with Martin - Hamlet's emotions are real and everyone else is playing their parts. Howeve..."
When is Claudius pretending to be king? He is the one who tries to arrange the death of Hamlet. What am I missing here? I think we need to look at Hamlet in its time not through the eyes of our own political world.
I understand that Claudius is the appointed king. In that time a warlord council would have actually elected the king, in the event that the king's son (Hamlet) did not assume the throne. I understand that Claudius is working to arrange the death of Hamlet in the the end. Hamlet is also trying to out Claudius as his father's murderer.My point, I guess, and it's open to interpretation, is that someone is using Claudius as a tool for their own gain. The more I've read the play I've found lines to support Gertrude doing this, Polonius, and, yes, even Fortinbras. I think everyone reads something truly different with each and every reading.
Ericmays wrote: "My point, I guess, and it's open to interpretation, is that someone is using Claudius as a tool for their own gain. "If your thesis is correct, then it reduces Claudius, Hamlet and the play to little more than farcical absurdity. If Claudius is a "tool", then he cannot be the politically astute murderer, but a mere pawn. And Hamlet is reduced to a "tool" for revenging himself on a pawn instead of a king. And Hamlet's existential enlightenment is reduced to meaningless scapegoating.
If Gertrude was using Claudius, it makes Gertrude's death at the end more justified than ever. And pawns deserve to suffer as much as kings, even if they're seduced into murder. I've always found it hard to believe that Gertrude had no clue what was going on. I figured she was at the very least in on the murder.
I think, as in most royal family trees, conspiracies and cover-ups run deep. Gertrude, I agree, HAD to know about things. But, further, I think Polonius being the on the warlord counsel knew more than he was letting on.
What else is Gertrude to do? Like Lady Macbeth she only connects to power through her marriage. Characters in Shakespeare are what they said or did, it is all revealed on stage, if they don't say it or don't act it, they don't know it.
But one of the greatest things about Shakespeare is the ambiguity and the nuance. You have to look at things that are implied or unsaid as well. This is a man who chose to just vaguely describe events that occur ON A PIRATE SHIP. He is ABDUCTED BY PIRATES offstage. Which is, I think a great metaphor for the amount that goes on that's hidden from our eyes or just implied.
Garrett wrote: "And pawns deserve to suffer as much as kings, even if they're seduced into murder."I am not talking about whether or not pawns and kings deserve to suffer in the same degree, but the significance and importance of the suffering. It has to do with the significance of the royal metaphor which Shakespeare knew and used quite extensively. Both a pawn and a king may deserve to suffer equally, but the suffering of the pawn is insignificant compared to the suffering of the king. In King Lear, Macbeth, the seven Henry plays, Richard II, King John, Richard III, Hamlet, and so many others, the king represents the nation. His suffering is the suffering of a nation represented through his personhood. Reduce Claudius to a pawn and you reduce the play to less than a shadow of its former self. Insist on a conspiracy theory involving Polonius and Gertrude and you take away from the focus and point of the play.
I was involved in a production of Romeo and Juliet where I was playing Mercutio, and the novice director was excited to inform me that she had "figured out" the entire backstory for Tybalt, Mercutio and Lady Capulet. She figured that because Lady Capulet cries so much over the death of Tybalt, she must have been having an affair with him. And the reason why Mercutio is such a "depressing guy" is due to the fact that he was a former lover of Lady Capulet and there is a bit of rivalry between he and Tybalt. I very politely explained that besides being utter nonsense and a gross misunderstanding of all the roles of the characters in the play - especially Mercutio - I simply informed her that the play was called Romeo and Juliet and NOT Lady Capulet Sleeps Around for a very good reason. Likewise, the play is called The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark and NOT The Machinations of Gertrude and Polonius for a very good reason as well.
I am not suggesting that there isn't any nuance or ambiguity, however, the nuance and ambiguity is woven into the central story at hand. Nor am I suggesting that one cannot have inspired ways of looking at the play - including conspiracy theories. For example, look at Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead - a brilliant and inspired piece of writing. However, one cannot use Stoppard's characterization of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Shakespeare's Hamlet any more than you can use Shakespeare's characterization of Hamlet in Stoppard's play. The tangential interpretations can serve for new creative works, but cannot assist in helping to understand the original work. There will be points of contact, but the divergent interpretation speaks more of the divergence than it does about its origin.
I love that every lover of Shakespeare (and the study of human nature) has spent at least some time ruminating over the whys and wherefores of all of his characters...but Garrett is right. What you SEE is what you get. Let Hamlet agonize over Gertrude and Polonius. It is all about Hamlet for us. It is enough that he is presented with this most egregious betrayal. Why is not so important for a son, I think.
Of course you can't find Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Hamlet, but what you can find is a climate of uncertainty and the play practically begs the reader and audience to try and make sense of the climate of uncertainty Hamlet lives in. Part of this uncertainty lies in the culpability of those around Hamlet. He is uncertain whether Ophelia loves or is baiting him, he is uncertain whether his father's ghost could actually charge him with revenge and he is uncertain whether Claudius is completely responsible. Culpability is highly mutable in this play and Shakespeare wants us to wonder about who did what. It's not clear cut at all. Part of the tragedy of Hamlet is that guilty and innocent alike get killed and all shades of guilt and innocence in between and as an audience we are left pondering whether life is truly fair. If the Claudius Hamlet kills is not a monster but a scapegoat, if anything that emphasizes this point.
Mod
I think the question of what is real and what is imagined is a wonderful one in the plays. I can't say I have an answer but just an odd thought or two.
Leslie said, "Characters in Shakespeare are what they said or did, it is all revealed on stage, if they don't say it or don't act it, they don't know it. "
You know...before I checked in here thi morning I just spent an awful long time writing an e-mail to a friend and I used Hamlet as an example of sorts...about "talk therapy"...
We watch Hamlet learn about what he feels and thinks as he talks. In fact, even hamlet seems to learn such. I think maybe the format of soliloquy is representative than humans find out what is real by talking about things. It's bigger than the results...the path...the journey of talking itself is how we find out what we think.
How can I know what I think till I see what I say? E. M. Forster
From here:
'Another distinguished critic has agreed with Gide--that old lady in
the anecdote who was accused by her niece of being illogical. For some time she could not be brought to understand what logic was, and when she grasped its true nature she was not so much angry as contemptuous. "Logic! Good gracious! What rubbish!" she exclaimed. "How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?" Her nieces, educated young women, thought that she was passée; she was really more up-to-date than they were.'
source: page 101, Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster, Harvest
Books, 1956 edition, read using "Search Inside" on Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/...
And I guess this relates to Socrates (? I hope ha ha) "the unexamined life is not worth living"
I feel like we have to use our reasoning to also examine our feelings yet in hamlet or many shakespeare plays...this struggle to find out what someone (or ourselves) really thnks nd feels is a beautiful metaphor with what is real and what is imagined.
I don't know....just thinking out loud...you all have such great post I don't want to "bring them down" ha ha...I am responding purely with a feeling for the topic a this moment kind of instinct rather than knowing.
...as an audience we are left pondering whether life is truly fair. If the Claudius Hamlet kills is not a monster but a scapegoat, if anything that emphasizes this point."If the purpose of Hamlet is to leave with a sense of "life is not fair", then we could leave before the end of Act I, Scene ii right after Hamlet's "O that this too too solid flesh would melt..." soliloquy. His dad is dead, his mom just married his uncle and he has been passed over as king in favour of his incestuous uncle. Life can't get any more unfair for this prince it would seem. To reduce Hamlet to giving us a sense of a "life is not fair" feeling is to miss Hamlet's apotheosis and the entire purpose of the play, as well as its relevance to our own existential misgivings. This is exactly why Claudius cannot be reduced to a duped pawn in an attempt to reinforce the limited theme of "life is not fair".
I'm just thinking out loud, as well...I think that if you look at literature as a whole, there are plenty of examples of great lit being a sum of "life is not fair" stories. I do think that HAMLET is one of these, Chris. The one thing that separates it, though, is that Shakespeare brings it all home. He doesn't stop at Act One. He takes us on a journey of dysfunction. He shows us how it all unfolds.
Ericmays wrote: "I think that if you look at literature as a whole, there are plenty of examples of great lit being a sum of "life is not fair" stories."I'm going to have to disagree. Great literature is great precisely because it rises far above such simplistic platitudes and observations. I also feel that Hamlet starts from a much darker outlook on life: that life is vile, corrupt, and that we as humans are both members and contributors of this vile corruption. This is why Hamlet wishes his flesh to melt away. Hamlet is not whining about life not being fair; he is in the darkest depths of existential angst and he is disgusted with himself and with the world. His journey is to come to an acceptance of this position; to try and come to terms with it; to try and reconcile it within himself and understand and accept his own role; to try and shed light on meaning and purpose. Allegorically, it resembles the journey from dark to light in Plato's Cave, the stock quest myth that underscores the Christian Bible and much of Western literature, and even has points of contact with Arjuna's coming to terms with his life and responsibility in the Bhagavad Gita. What makes Hamlet transcend even these other great characters, is that he does it himself, and that even though he is a prince, in a very real way Shakespeare presents him as an everyman and not some divine or semi-divine figure. I cannot be a philosopher king, a messiah, or a mighty prince-warrior who is a deity incarnation. But then again, neither can Hamlet. Hamlet is us and we are Hamlet.
Sorry, but you will never convince me that the character of Hamlet and the play can be reduced to the easily observed reflection of "life is not fair."
I wouldn't dare say it's just about how life is unfair, but this is not Dante's Commedia. Things are not perfectly ordered or perfectly clear cut. It's about a person's quest for sense in a world that makes none. A person can attain higher wisdom and make their way toward sense while still living in a world without order. You cannot say that everything that occurs in Hamlet is just regardless of what has happened in Hamlet himself.
Garrett wrote: "...this is not Dante's Commedia. Things are not perfectly ordered or perfectly clear cut."I didn't say it was the Commedia nor did I say it was perfectly ordered or clear cut. They both have an underlying quest myth but Dante the poet and his Commedia are not everyman and everyman's quest. I feel Hamlet and his quest is.
Garrett wrote: "You cannot say that everything that occurs in Hamlet is just regardless of what has happened in Hamlet himself."
I am not. The reason why Hamlet is everyman - or perhaps the model for everyman - is that he learns about himself through interacting with other people. He then analyzes his own actions and behaviour towards other people, and learns about himself because he recognizes "otherness" in other people. He chastises himself for being an "ass" when he encounters the Player King; he recognizes Laertes' position and similar situation of a murdered father and he admits his own role in creating that situation; he admits his own role in regards to Ophelia and deeply laments her loss; he gets genuinely sidetracked when contemplating the friendship and goodness of Horatio; he recognizes how all occasions do inform against him when he sees Fortinbras go to war over a small patch of land; and dozens more through interactions with all the characters of the play. But Hamlet needs no Virgil or Beatrice nor any other divine inspiration to lead the way - he journeys the road alone and works it out for himself as we all must.
Why then does it matter whether everyone he perceives as culpable is completely culpable? I don't think it damages the archetypal core of the story if Claudius is not the only one responsible for Denmark becoming an unweeded garden. His perceptions do not need to be completely accurate for the play to work. For example, it works to a certain degree if he is actually mad. If he is actually mad, then his perceptions are unreliable and the perspective he has on his world is skewed. Just as it would be skewed if he were to incorrectly perceive the guilt and innocence of those around him, which he does rather often anyway. Look at his opinion of Ophelia, for example.
Garrett wrote: "Why then does it matter whether everyone he perceives as culpable is completely culpable? I don't think it damages the archetypal core of the story if Claudius is not the only one responsible for Denmark becoming an unweeded garden."I am not arguing that Clauius is the only one responsible for Denmark becoming an unweeded garden nor am I arguing that the play can only be interpreted through Hamlet's perceptions. In fact, I have tried to argue that Hamlet's perceptions grow and change. What I have been trying to argue is that what is left unsaid by Shakespeare (and most dramatists) is not necessary for the dramatic action. One does not need to invent what the dramatist did not articulate. This is not a novel. I read in another post (in The Winter's Tale thread) very accurately describing that Leontes' basis for jealousy is not explained, nor is Macbeth's basis for ambition. Correct. The stories are not about how Leontes became a jealous man, or how Macbeth became an ambitious man, but the EFFECTS of Leontes' jealousy and Macbeth's ambition. Once you start building up an elaborate backstory or sub-plot to Hamlet, The Winter's Tale, or Macbeth you are no longer in the dramatic world of those plays but creating your own. Fair enough...riff away...write fan fiction, another play, a poem, a pantomime...fill your boots. None of it has anything to do with the dramatic action of the original story because such elaborate information would have distracted from the original story. Mercutio in R&J will never be more than a developing character in that story. Sure, he is a rounded character in his own story, but R&J is not HIS story. Gertrude and Polonius and ultimately Claudius will never be more than developing characters in Hamlet's story, because there is only one rounded character in Hamlet and his journey is the story at hand. Theories which help to make Gertrude and Polonius more rounded characters do nothing to Hamlet's characterization except to distract and lower it. It also makes Claudius move from a developing character to a static duped pawn stock character.
These are but a few samples and Hamlet is not the only character to substitute certain realities (take Claudius pretending to be king as an example). I wonder what the other Shakespeare fans have to say, whether there is agreement that the authenticity of feelings are not so important to Hamlet, or whether it is the reverse. We could start a little debate.