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Essay / "Complex thought: Paralyzed Prince in Hamlet
"If Hamlet is far from himself, say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get Original Essay And when he does not harm Laertes, then Hamlet does not, Hamlet denies it. Who then is his madness? If this is so, Hamlet is of the wrong faction; his madness is that of poor Hamlet. enemy." (V.ii.230-235) Hamlet's self-description in his apology to Laertes, spoken in the suitably distanced and divided third person, explicitly points the finger at the greatest antagonist of playful consciousness. The The obligatory cultural baggage that accompanies Hamlet pays little attention to the incestuous Claudius, while focusing entirely on the dark Dane's legendary melancholy and resulting delays in revenge. As Laurence Olivier presented his 1948 film version. , “It is the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind.” Following the leitmotif of “thought” throughout the play, I will examine the conflicts that prevent Hamlet from making unified decisions. leading to action. Shakespeare is not, however, content with the simple notion of thought as a simple signifier of the battle between mind and body. The real clash is a conflict of consciousness, of Hamlet's oscillations between infinite abstraction and. chained solipsism, between recognition of the heroic ideal and its limited means, between the methodical hodgepodge of reason and the total chaos of madness. I repeat "between" not only for anaphoric effect, but also to suggest Shakespeare's conception of thought; that is to say, a set of realities with fragmented perspectives which can only be resolutely amalgamated, for better or for worse, by the mediating hand of action. Any discussion of Hamlet, a work full of contradictions and doubles, requires questioning the passages concerning the opposition to thought, particularly those of the corporeal. And since Shakespeare engages his audience's imagination primarily through metaphor, I will use "thought" as a catapult to critique sections that are relevant to my argument. The main definition of "thought" revolves around the basic concept of mental process: "The action or process of thinking; mental action or activity in general, especially that of the intellect; exercise of the mental faculty; the formation and arrangement of ideas in the mind” (OED, 1a). Another subset of definitions can be cataloged within a Manichean view of positive and negative and which also applies to Hamlet's central consideration of conscience being a blessing or a curse. The emphasis is on the potentiality of thought, which corresponds to Hamlet's obsession with the infinitude of man: “Conception, imagination, fancy” (OED, 4c). But then comes the negative view of thought as quasi-action, a direct link to Hamlet's stalling tactic: “The maintenance of a plan in the mind; the idea or notion of doing something, as contemplated or entertained in the mind; intention, goal, design; especially an imperfect or half-formed intention; with a negative character expressed or implied = not the slightest intention or notion of doing anything" (OED, 4d). Likewise, the neutral past meaning of "Remembrance, spirit" (OED, 5e) is countered by the connotation of negative anticipation of: “Anxiety or mental distress; sorrow, sorrow, trouble, worry, vexation” (OED, 5a). , one of Shakespeare's most ambiguous texts. Hamlet's problems lie in the gulf between God.of man, or at least in what is divine and what is bestial in man. . His distaste for man's "pig" (I.iv.19) temperament is evident in his denunciation of all things corporeal and his elevation of the divine. His self-destructive impulses are verbalized in the opening lines of his first soliloquy: “Oh that this flesh too, too defiled, melts, / Thaws and dissolves into dew” (I.ii.129-130). Harold Jenkins, in the ArdenHamlet proposes that "to become dew is to die" (187), but the dew, with its seemingly magical overnight birth and lack of history, embodies the negation of the past for which Hamlet is so desperate. While some editors choose "solid" rather than "defiled", either word is applicable, emphasizing Hamlet's debasement of the palpable or dirty body with the Elizabethan convention of reduplication of "also", which suggests here the numerous doubles of the members of the body, of the eyes. , etc. and foreshadows the duality to come in the next two lines: “Or that the Lord had not repaired / His canon against self-mutilation.” O God! God ! (I.iv.132) While Hamlet here invokes the name of God as a cry to providential reason, the juxtaposition with the human body opens the way for a later elaboration on man's obligation to use his potentiality: “What is a man / If his main good and market of his time / Be only to sleep and eat? A beast, no more / Of course, he who made us with such great speech, / Looking before and after, did not give us / This divine ability and reason to break in. we unused” (IV.iv.35-39). The word “discourse” is not chosen accidentally; the notion of fluidity is what animates Hamlet's mind and blocks his action. This almost perfectly echoes his lament in his first monologue about his mother's rapid remarriage: "O God, a beast that wants a discourse on reason / would have cried longer" (I.ii.150-151). The roots of this bipolar vision go back to Hamlet's paternal doubles, his Sun god (the Sun also being the royal emblem), his biological father and his animal stepfather: "Such an excellent king, it was for this / Hyperion for a satyr" (I.ii.139-140).Hamlet creates metaphors of infinitude to further his God/man separation, but Shakespeare plants them as subtle allusions to Hamlet's own efforts to achieve abstraction but leading to solipsism. This is evidenced by Hamlet's series of laudatory sentences: "What a work a man is, / How noble his reason, how infinite his faculties" (II.ii.303-304); “His other virtues, let them be as pure as grace, / As infinite as man can endure them” (I.iv.33-34); “O God, I could be limited in a word and consider myself a king of infinite space” (II.ii.254-255). The final quote, alluding to the cosmos, also brings Hamlet into the scientific realm. When the play was written at the turn of the 17th century, the relatively new Copernican heliocentric system of De Revolutionibus was still contested (Harvard continued to teach the obsolete Ptolemaic geocentric system for several years after its opening in 1638) by intellectuals and laymen alike. The theory captured the imagination of metaphysical poets, notably John Donne, who added the poetic layer of the macrocosm to the pre-existing microcosm and geocosm. Marjorie Nicolson, in "The Breaking of the Circle", argues that the new cosmology failed to convince the Elizabethans, and she cites King Lear as an example of Shakespeare's fascination with astrology rather than astronomy . However, I believe that there is ample evidence in Hamlet which indicates that Shakespeare admits the possibility of a heliocentric universe, and that onecould in fact argue that the entire piece is an extended metaphor for the spatial confusion that has afflicted the West. world between De Revolutionibus and Galileo's visual evidence in Sidereus Nuncius. Without deviating too much from our reflection, I will simply cite two examples of this cosmological crisis. The first is found in Hamlet's love letter to Ophelia, which requires little explanation: "Doubt that the stars are fire, / Doubt that the sun moves" (II.ii.115-116). The second example relies on a triple play on words as Hamlet bids farewell to the Ghost: “Do you remember yourself? Yes, poor ghost, while memory holds a seat / In this distracted globe” (Iv95-97). The globe as head, earth, and theater merges the chaos of Hamlet's microcosm, geocosm, and macrocosm (theater as imaginative universe) and his inability to ground his thoughts in a single realm. But even if Hamlet's position is unclear, there remains a schism between his limitless thought and his earthly soul, caused by the visit of the Ghost who "shakes our temper / With thoughts beyond the reach of our souls" (I. iv.55-56). Hamlet's thoughts are never in agreement with any other part of his being; what he appreciates most in man, his mental range, not only eclipses the banality of the body, but is even elevated beyond the height of the soul, supposed to be the only infinite and eternal vestige of the man in Platonic philosophy. In simpler terms, Hamlet is too smart for his own good. But even with his vast reserves of lyricism, intellectuality and curiosity, he is hampered by his princely duties and the rigid mindset they dictate. If I Henry IV is a play about the making of a king, as Marjorie Garber asserts, then Hamlet is about the destruction of a prince, the revelation of Hamlet's vulnerabilities that stifle his kingship. Indeed, there is no mention of the political process that allowed Claudius to seize the throne in favor of the prince; we must assume Hamlet's impotence in this matter. The name of Hamlet's double, Fortinbras (French for "strength of arms"), resonates in Claudius's admonitions with Hamlet to end his melancholy: "It shows a most incorrect will in heaven, / A heart unfortified...And we beseech you you lean to stay/Here, in the joy and comfort of our eyes.../This sweet, unconstrained agreement of Hamlet/Sits smiling to my heart” ( I.ii.95-6, 115-116, 123-124) (emphasis mine). It is this lack of strength and will, this "unforced agreement", which torments Hamlet, and Claudius does not hesitate to identify the problem: "...to persevere / In stubborn condolence.../ ... it is unworthy sorrow” (I.ii.92, 94). Without calling Hamlet a woman, the suave politician humiliates the prince by denying castration, and it is this gender gap that crushes Hamlet's self-esteem and draws him into his soliloquies. The ingredients of Hamlet's "too precise thought on the event" (IV.iv.41) are described as follows: "A thought which, divided into four, has only one part of wisdom / And always three parts of a coward” (IV.iv.42-43). Besides the idea of particularization reflected in Hamlet's own compartmentalization of thought patterns, "discarded" takes on various meanings that confirm Hamlet's views of Claudius as a traitor," the body of a person, particularly a traitor or a criminal. " (OED, 1b) and as a royal rapist: "Placing or bearing (charges or coats of arms) quarterly on a shield; adding (another's mantle) to his hereditary arms; 3a). The military implications, particularly those of accommodation, presage Hamlet's "shame" at seeing "the imminent death of twenty thousand men" who "go to their graves like beds, fighting fora plot / Whereupon numbers cannot judge the cause” (IV. iv.59-60, 62-63). Despite his problems, Hamlet can always return to his warm castle and he invariably does so, in his thoughts. A soliloquy which begins with the intensely solipsistic "How all occasions inform against me" (IV.iv.32) and moves quickly to abstract meditations on thought, then to his reflections on soldiers but only to the extent that this affords him another opportunity. deplore one's own fate. This is the general trope of his soliloquies, from bitter lament to philosophical reflections and back to an unresolved conclusion. What appears to be a convincing ending in this soliloquy is yet another clever use of "thought" by Shakespeare: "O, from now on / My thoughts be bloody or worth nothing" (IV.iv.65-66 ). Thoughts, no matter how bloody, are still just thoughts” and “is more appropriate here than “or”. The double placement of "to be" also continues the tense motif of the passive verb, most famously used (again, doubly, and with the conjunctive "or") in Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy, who is less concerned with the advantages and disadvantages of existence than with the collapse of the heroic ideal. Hamlet prefaces the question with "Is it nobler in the mind to suffer" (III.i.56-57), linking his twin obsessions with nobility and mentality with his Buddhist beliefs that "life is suffering" ( I don't think, for a moment, pretend that Hamlet conveys a hidden Buddhist message, especially since Hamlet ultimately triumphs through vengeance and not through detachment). As Jenkins points out, the following oft-quoted lines are just as often misinterpreted: "The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or take arms against a sea of troubles / And in opposing them, y put an end” (III.i.58-60). Jenkins states that the utter impossibility of defeating the sea's awesome natural power calls into question Hamlet's motivations: "The absurd futility of the contest is what Shakespeare's much-abused metaphor of taking up arms against a sea suggests most clearly. ... It is precisely because the heroic gesture is necessarily disastrous that discussion becomes possible on its nobility” (490-491). My only amendment to Jenkins's comments is that he bases much of his reading on the controversial word "slings," which he admits might originally have been "stings" (278). In this case, “stings” transforms the reading of “To be or not to be” into an apian pun and reinforces the thread of passivity through the image of being beaten, whether by darts, slings or arrows. Hamlet concludes, as he usually does, with an iteration of his original idea: "Thus conscience makes cowards of us all, / And thus the native tint of resolution / Is sick with the pallor of thought" (III . i.83-85). Shakespeare changes the meaning of “thought” beyond the colorless to a representation of it as a half-formed intention via the meaning of “cast” which gives form to form: “Casting metal, etc.” ; mold; model” (OED, 1. IX). Yet this evidence only denotes Hamlet's lack of manliness (which is not necessarily a flaw); Where does Coleridge find support for his claim that Hamlet suffers from a preponderance of effeminacy? To do this, we must look at Hamlet's relationships with the only women in the play, Ophelia and Gertrude, and his assertion of a gender division in consciousness. When Hamlet facetiously and cruelly retorts to Ophelia that "nothing" is "a good idea to be between the legs of the maids" (III.ii.117), Jenkins explains that "nothing” brings many sexual puns to the table, namely Ophelia's virginity and the yonic imagery of the O figure (295). Furthermore, “thing” can include a phallic allusion; therefore, women's sexual organs present themselves as sterile, half-formed "thoughts" that require male rigidity to be structured and complete. Hamlet's abuse of Ophelia can be attributed to his misanthropy, in which he includes himself: "We are all real knaves, believe me. none of us” (III.i.129-130). A more striking piece of evidence comes from the Player King's longest speech, which some critics say consists of the "dozen or sixteen lines" that Hamlet inserts into the text. Speaking of the opposition between "will and destiny" (III.ii.206), the Gambler King expresses Hamlet's contempt for Gertrude's infidelity: "Our thoughts are our own, their ends belong not to us . / So think that you will not take a second husband. , / But die thy thoughts when thy first lord is dead" (III.ii.208-210). The intention of the thought is distinct from the result of the action and, assuming these to be Hamlet's lines ( and even if this is not the case), women have particularly little control over carrying out and following through on plans. This is very ironic, since Hamlet has the least perseverance and constancy of thought among all the characters. . Thus, his whims towards Ophelia are a consequence of his underlying fickle feminine disposition. This may help to further explain how Hamlet's feigned "antique disposition" (Iv180) is similar to d's true madness. 'Ophelia. As Polonius remarks of Hamlet's verbal leaps: "Though it be madness, yet there is a method / in't" (II.ii. 205-206). agreement, citing the sexual undercurrent that runs through Hamlet's seemingly disjunctive comments on the doting father about Ophelia. If Hamlet has the intuitive ability to so accurately mimic the chaos of madness, it follows that his normal mental state is also fractured. Without making it a postmodern critique of Hamlet, I would now like to quote Fredric Jameson's explanation of Lacanian schizophrenia: ...meaning is not a univocal relationship between signifier and signified, between the materiality of language, between a word or noun, and its referent or concept. According to the new view, meaning is generated by the movement from signifier to signifier. What we generally call the signified, the meaning or the conceptual content of an utterance, must now rather be seen as an effect of meaning, as this objective mirage of meaning generated and projected by the relationship of signifiers between them. When this relationship breaks down, when the links in the signifying chain break, we then have schizophrenia in the form of a debris of distinct and unrelated signifiers. Part of Hamlet's enduring appeal lies in the broad spectrum of interpretation that Hamlet offers its actor. Indeed, at the simplest level, Hamlet himself is an actor (and a playwright, at least a dozen lines long). His instructions to the acting troupe clearly stem from his experience on and off stage, and his machinations are only possible because of his ability to chameleon their interactions when necessary. Actor too, to rely on speech, on multiple “Words, words, words” (II.ii.192) and not on action. To complete Lacan's rubble, I cite Franco Moretti's description of polyphony as it applies to Eliot's The Wasteland and Joyce's Ulysses: Fragments as Symptoms of Contemporary Disorder, in Brief. But if the fragments are symptoms, then they are no less fully motivated: they are indeed the “expressive form” of modern indecision. ThereThe polyphony they create may present local difficulties, as may stream-of-consciousness: but the form as such would have a clear reason for being. I propose that Hamlet's ancient disposition is a packed stream of consciousness, and his fragments encompass both Lacan's schizophrenic identity and Moretti's indecision. Hamlet's description of his madness in my opening quote is the same condition that afflicts Ophelia: "Separated from herself and her right judgment, / Without which we are images, or mere beasts" (IV. v.85-86). The animal analogy is clear enough, but the “images,” which Jenkins defines as “soulless exterior forms” (352), seem to me to fit Moretti's theory of fragments. Just as madness breeds a disjointed inner narrative, paintings rarely string together a coherent narrative the way words can. It was only with Eisenstein's theories of juxtaposition and montage that films "made sense", and in Shakespeare's time, three centuries before the advent of cinema, the narrative link between images was even more tenuous. But back to the words. A spectator describes Ophélie's behavior: “[She] says questionable things / Which only make half sense. His speech is nothing, / Yet his formless use drives listeners to collection. They aim at him, / And botch the words. adapted to their own thoughts” (IV.v.7-10). The words “unshaped” again follow one of the definitions of thought as unformed action, but more pertinently serve as fragments of consciousness, just as Hamlet's self-imposed schizophrenia decimates his personality. Shakespeare capitalizes on the controlled madness behind the stream of consciousness when Ophelia distributes symbolic flowers at court: “And there are thoughts, it is for thoughts” (Iv.v.174-175). Jenkins notes the French pun on thoughts (538), and the effect here is that of Ophelia's linguistic fragmentation, not a simple Shakespearean pun. Shakespeare further examines the transformation of thought into words under less crazy conditions. Polonius warns Laertes to “Give no tongue to thy thoughts / Nor any thought disproportionate to his deed” (I.iii.59-60). The balance he pushes him to achieve is embodied in Claudius's opening speech, a model of political formulation that displays his serenity through contradictions that mark him less as a Janus face and more as capable, unlike Hamlet , to reconcile opposing emotions (although false, in his case): "With an auspicious and sinking eye, / With gaiety at funerals and with dirge in marriage, / On an equal scale weighing pleasure and dole” (I.ii.11-13). The contrasting imagery of “auspicious” and “fall” is refined by the transposition of “joy” and “dirge” with “funeral” and “marriage”; even the internal rhyme of "joy" and "dirge" and the simple alliteration of "delight and punishment" harmonize the emotional atonality of Denmark, thrice granted in the three lines by Claudius' unifying "and." Subtle repetition also facilitates Claudius' patterns, such as referring to Gertrude as "the imperial consort of this warlike state" (I.ii.9), then assessing "the state as disjointed and outside the frame" (I. ii.19). ), implying that under its new leadership it will thrive again. The process of articulating Hamlet is more complicated since, although given to the lyrical turns of phrase that led Helen Vendler to call Hamlet the greatest poem of the millennium, he laments the deception of words. He is either too modest or ashamed of his own verbal expertise, as he writes to Ophelia: “I am sick of these numbers. I don't have the art of counting my moans",, 1982).