On Hamlet

Art by Elliot Skow

One does not simply walk into Mordor. The same might be said of Hamlet criticism. But in my naive, Hobbit-like way, I read Nicholas Brooke’s essay on Hamlet, and only that.¹

Like a shady contractor, Brooke complains that the last guy did the baseboards and appliances all wrong, but he’d be happy to tear it all out and do it right, for a few extra grand. Many critics have been convinced “that Hamlet offers us profound philosophical thinking,” but—but!—while the To be or not to be soliloquy certainly “challenges the central values of life,” still,

regarded primarily as thought, it is the nearest thing to incoherent. It is not...philosophical exploration, it is imaginative exploration; reasonable and intelligent certainly, but not philosophy.

Well I’ll be the judge of that. I too admire profound philosophical thinking most when it is coherent, but coherence is hardly a requirement. Nietzsche’s work isn’t exactly full of deductively valid arguments, but he’s been thought both profound and philosophical by a few people. (Admittedly, when I try him, I find myself flipping through the phone book looking for someone who will tear it all out and do it right.) As Bob Dylan said, philosophy begins in wonder; and the articulating of a philosophical question, and the suggesting of a possible answer to that question—those can be huge contributions to philosophy, even if unaccompanied by many inferences drawn according to modus ponens.

Brooke’s assertion is all the more ironic when, many pages later, one reads his interpretation of the speech’s upshot:

Nobility of suffering is, in the result, indistinguishably from cowardice. [T]he action dictated by conscience is the same as the action dictated by cowardice—no difference is visible.

If that’s not a piece of philosophy, I don’t know what is.

“Hamlet suffered from the Oedipus Complex”: a vague idea that English majors sort of soak up, wrapped in the disclaimer that by now it’s a bit passé. But the whole interpretation, elaborated in all its glorious detail, is...well, I like how Brooke puts it: it has a “wonderful neatness”:

Hamlet ... wants to murder his uncle-father, to be cruel to his mother, to abuse his girl-friend; all this emerges in hysteria and sex-disgust. Why?

The Oedipus complex works with a wonderful neatness: Hamlet responds to his father as simultaneously a benevolent patriarch and the hated rival in love for his mother. So he has always wanted and not wanted to murder his father. Claudius does murder him, and marries his mother—and thus doubly projects himself into Hamlet’s psychological conflict: he becomes Hamlet’s father, but solely in the hated sense, so Hamlet can now separate the father figures, the dead one becomes wholly benevolent while the living is now wholly the hated rival; but simultaneously Claudius becomes identified as the figure who has acted both Hamlet’s repressed desires ... So Claudius becomes identified with both Hamlet’s father and Hamlet’s self: a new conflict develops...overlaying the old, and the result is an intolerable strain which leads to paralysis of the will, hysteric self-disgust, sex-disgust, uncontrollable outbursts.

But no newly-installed Freudian pump in the basement of Hamlet’s psychology is needed to explain why he wants to kill Claudius. Already on hand for the job is his father’s ghost ordering him to revenge his father’s murder. Anyway, Hamlet has something to say about the human condition, not just about Hamlet’s condition; the Freudian interpretation ignores the first and addresses only the second: