Hamlet melancholy
Though it may seem that he is merely procrastinating before blundering into death, it is clear, in retrospect, that throughout the play Hamlet is hard at work dealing with the melancholia created by the loss of his father, his father’s world, and the place he expected to have in it. It is also clear that to deal with this melancholia he creates a ghost, ventriloquizes a revenge imperative, and puts on an antic disposition to suspend himself between opposed parental worlds. When this solution fails, stronger measures negate his mother’s initiatives, construct Claudius as a tyrant, use Ophelia’s suicide to cart off toxic waste, and, in the end, purge every woman and every man tainted by woman to create in Denmark a purified version of the patriarchal space he inherited from his father.
From the perspective of his father’s world these accomplishments are necessities, and Hamlet is a hero because, by purging Gertrude’s (alleged) contagious rottenness, he solves the problem of the life threatening “dram of eale” that has put himself if not his paternal world out of joint. From this perspective, in fact, the dead bodies Hamlet piles up at the end of the play write a brilliant comedy. Thus, to the question posed by the epigraph above of what the traveling player ought to do “had he the motive, and the cue for passion” Hamlet has, the answer, from this perspective, would be: Exactly what Hamlet does!
But if purging woman and purifying patriarchal space writes a comedy from the perspective of Hamlet’s father’s world, such actions write a tragedy from the perspective of Shakespeare. From this perspective, Hamlet’s actions, though regarded as necessities in an archaic past, are shown/seen to be present crimes. Hamlet is not a hero. His purge and purify option is tyranny. His use of Ophelia’s suicide is obscene. His destruction of his mother’s initiatives absents everything on stage that is truly alive. And, since bloody carnage and repetition of the past perfected are Hamlet’s only accomplishments, he is a colossal failure – in fact, he himself is the chief obstacle in the way of (he is the “dram of eale” that is poisoning) Denmark’s emerging future.
To the question then, of what the player should do “Had he the motive, and the cue for passion” Hamlet has, the answer from this perspective, is: Nothing that Hamlet does! (McDonald 1996) In other words, Shakespeare’s literary tragedy implicitly raises for its audience the question of what Hamlet would have had to do to generate an emergent comedy instead of a tragedy. Shakespeare Hamlet raises the question of what these six adolescents – Hamlet, Laertes, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, and Horatio – have to do if this play is to end with a Denmark full of vital, spontaneous people happily engaged in productive and pleasurable lives.
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