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:
We [the readers] become familiar with a figure [Hamlet] who is at once noble and irresponsible, sensitive and cruel...as a response to the world of the play. But we are not invited to probe into the psychological springs of this so much as into the nature of human life which will thus distract and all but ruin a fine man.
Hamlet’s delay: a well-worn topic. A standard story says that his hyper-intellectualism caused anxious indecisiveness; and his delaying his revenge means that, when finally taken, it’s a bloodbath and his own tragic death. Hamlet does accuse himself of delay, as does the ghost, when it appears before him the second time. But then again, for the first half of the play Hamlet isn’t even sure he can trust the ghost, and wouldn’t you want more evidence too? Brooke comes at this a bit sideways, and he’s surely onto something when he says that delay, if it is a feature of Hamlet’s behavior, is also a salient feature of the play itself. The play displays
a continual sense of not getting on with it, simultaneous with its continual sense of urgent action ... this characteristic of (seeming) irrelevance and delay belongs to the play as a whole. [T]he effect, as it seems to me, is to weaken the logic of cause and effect which is normally characteristic of this kind of tragic drama. We are made to feel continually that each jolt forward in the action has a large measure of accident in it. The result is that we have a double sense about the development of the action: on the one hand it is a purposive dramatic chain of events leading from the murder to the revenge and the restoration of order; on the other hand it is a succession of muddles and accidents leading to an apparently unnecessary holocaust.
The big picture, according to Brooke:
The play, as I see it, grows out of contrasted worlds; one of order, a pattern of human life that is honourable, active, patient, creative, and the other the negation of that in a bewildering experience of disorder in world and personality, where life is a chaotic disease whose result is destruction.
This is connected, I think, to the metaphysics of Hamlet. Metaphysics begins with the distinction between appearance and reality, between seems and is, and the play constantly plays with this distinction, and with the adjacent distinction between pretense and reality. Right from the beginning, scene ii finds Hamlet telling his mother “I know not ‘seems,’” that the “customary suits of solemn black” of mourning cannot “denote me truly”; such things are all “actions that a man might play.” Often one of the two worlds Brooke mentions is a thin layer of pretense hiding the other: Claudius’s calm tones and regal bearing, hiding a murdering criminal; Hamlet’s feigned madness, distracting from his plans to avenge his father. It’s only fitting, therefore, that the play ends with a fencing match, an episode of orderly, ritualized pretend-fighting behind which a real assassination attempt hides and then bursts into the open, unleashing more muddles and accidents that kill them all.
Shakespeare’s Early Tragedies, 1968.
I concede that Shakespeare's characters are usually doing something other than Philosophy, but the To Be/Not soliloquy is an odd one for Brooke to call unphilosophic, since it clearly argues something like:
P1. Life is suffering.
P2. The only responses to suffering are to endure it, to destroy its causes ["take arms against a sea of troubles"] or to kill oneself.
P3. Enduring suffering doesn't solve it.
P4. Destroying suffering's causes seems hopeless. [the sea is pretty big!]
P5. Suicide may open oneself to further, possibly worse suffering ["what dreams may come"].
______________
C. Life is suffering without a good solution.
Hamlet's "solution", in the Action that follows, is to hedge his bets and take all three options. He draggingly endures the suffering, then embarks on a suicide mission against all that's rotten in Denmark.
Hamlet's argument against suicide reminds me of that argument at the heart of Buddhism, that Life's suffering can't be stopped by death since we're bound to a cycle of repeating life & death.
Great piece! (The problem with the Oedipus interpretation is that he doesn’t love his mother. I think Bloom points this out.)