Structuralist Shakespearean Analyses: Hamlet

Hamlet First Impressions

            I have long said that Hamlet is my favorite of Shakespeare’s works, and this re-reading of it certainly confirmed as much. It was particularly illuminating to read it after the rest of the plays in this collection of responses as it, at least to me, seemed to incorporate themes that I’ve mentioned from each of the previous works. These included Hamlet’s madness echoing strains of the “wise fool” trope, for some of the play’s most profound insights (most notably his “To be or not to be” soliloquy) come in moments of his supposed insanity. Polonius realizes as much when he says, “How / pregnant sometimes his replies are! A happiness / that often madness hits on, which reason and / sanity could not so prosperously be delivered of (II.ii.226-229).” In his first sentence here, Polonius explicitly says that Hamlet is signifying something meaningful in his apparent ramblings, and in the second, he says that whatever insights Hamlet conveys in this state are arrived at precisely because of his madness – a perfect encapsulation of the “wise fool” archetype.

            The epistemological insights rife throughout the play, which most frequently come up whenever Shakespeare mentions articulation and the voice, also have implications in the “mad king” trope I discussed in The Winter’s Tale. This theme is particularly evident in the ghost of King Hamlet’s hesitancy to speak and the fact that the same drug killed him as Socrates, whom Shakespeare might have metaphorically seen as one of the progenitors of logic. Furthermore, Claudius poured it into his ear, which is the seat of predication, meaning we symbolically interpret sound/words and, by extension, logic and reality through the ear. This action is significant because, after the death of this sovereign figure, Hamlet plunges into one of the most profound melancholies in all of literature. His sadness is so deep that when we are first introduced to him, he says in his famous first soliloquy, “O, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt, / Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew” (I.ii.133-134). Through expressing this, Shakespeare is implying that the death of the king, which, in the mad king schema, represents predication/understanding, is what results in the dissolution of Hamlet’s very sense of self and, by extension, reason.

            Additionally, like in Richard III, morality and the ultimate consequences of murder are heavy themes throughout Hamlet. Shakespeare most explicitly deals with this in Act III, scene iii, when Claudius reflects on what he's done to seize the crown. Like Macbeth when he says, "Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine" (II.ii.78-80), he says, "What if this cursèd hand / Were thicker than itself with brother's blood? / Is there not rain enough in the sweet heavens / To wash it white as snow?" (III.iii.47-50). Here, like Macbeth and Richard III, he's saying that there isn't enough water in all the world to wash his hands of the blood he's spilled in his quest to occupy the throne. As is so often the case in Shakespeare, whether it be in the aforementioned plays or Othello, the consequences of Claudius' actions eventually catch up with him, though, as does Hamlet's, resulting in both of their deaths in the final scene. Or, as Horatio says so beautifully and succinctly says, "So shall you hear / Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts… / And, in this upshot, purposes mistook / Fall'n on th' inventors' heads (V.ii.422-427).

In analyzing Hamlet's relationship with Ophelia, I think it's impossible to comment on it without first acknowledging perhaps the starkest theme throughout the play: the breakdown of reason and, by extension, distinction. This theme is addressed in practically every scene – whether it be the question of the corporeal existence of King Hamlet's specter, Hamlet's (arguably) feigned madness, Ophelia's insanity, and eventual suicide, or the death of all of the main characters by the end of the play. All of these plot points entail the breakdown of reality, thought, or intrapsychic discrimination. Because this is such a heavy theme throughout the work, many narratives that undergird different characterizations seem comingled and intentionally difficult to understand. One particularly stark way this plays out is in Hamlet's seemingly inscrutable feelings towards Ophelia.

When Shakespeare first introduces the audience to Ophelia, we learn that Hamlet has previously professed his love to her. However, Laertes warns her that his overtures are "Forward, not permanent, sweet, not lasting, / The perfume and suppliance of a minute, / No more" (I.iii.9-11). As the audience will come to find, this is true and is even a microcosm for one of the play's messages: that life is ephemeral and finite. Laertes' quasi-prophecy then comes true in Act III, scene i, when Hamlet turns on Ophelia, after giving his "To be or not to be" soliloquy while wandering the halls, talking to himself. In doing so, he decries all women, stemming from his anger towards his mother for marrying his father's killer. All of these actions are rife with a lack of distinction, whether it be signifiers, in the case of Hamlet's supposed madness, life and death in his famous soliloquy, or objects, as with Ophelia and Gertrude. Consequently, it is incredibly difficult to come to a decisive answer about Hamlet's feelings towards Ophelia.

Consequently, like Polonius advises Laertes to be in Act I, scene iii when he says, "Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice," I am somewhat agnostic when it comes to Hamlet's feelings for Ophelia. However, it's important to note that another one of the themes throughout the play is that Hamlet's emotions are too great for him to bear or even comprehend. For instance, in the scene where he turns on Ophelia, he says, "I am / very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses / at my beck than I have thoughts to put them / in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act / them in" (III.i.134-138). This feeling is one that he recapitulates after Ophelia's death in the famous “gravedigger's scene,” when he says to Laertes, "Forty thousand brothers Could not with all their quantity of love Make up my sum" (V.i.285-287). Here, and in his ensuing exchange, he again says his feelings are boundless and defy his predication. This dynamic could explain the seeming capriciousness of his attitude towards Ophelia. Aside from making him unsure about who his emotions are directed at (specifically Gertrude or Ophelia), said feelings would also vacillate between the polar ends of his emotional spectrum, given that he can't contain or distinguish between them.

Additionally, though it's difficult to tell what exactly Shakespeare intends to convey in it, Hamlet's desire to seek retribution for the murder of his father leads him to kill Ophelia's father, which drives her insane and then causes her brother (who also dies in the process) to kill Hamlet. I immediately thought of Othello and The Winter's Tale when reading how this played out, in that her madness is seemingly also brought about by being completely isolated (though, unlike the “protagonists” in the other plays, hers is not a consequence of her own actions).

At the time that Hamlet kills Polonius, Ophelia’s brother has left her, and Hamlet has both shunned her and been sent away to England. Consequently, she is left abjectly alone, cannot bear the suffering of this, and her sense of reason dissembles, much like Hamlet's loss of his father and apparent betrayal by his mother does him. I also think that all of the conflation of the characters I've mentioned here is somewhat the point of the play. Not only does the work's thematic saturation mirror the madness that besets Hamlet and Ophelia, but it also results in the audience feeling exactly what Hamlet describes. Namely, in depicting the wanton and fleeting nature of the action, the audience becomes "not a pipe for / Fortune's finger To sound what stop she please" (III.ii.75-76). In other words, we stay connected to the play and find appreciation in the ultimate insignificance and arbitrariness of the misery that besets the characters and, by implication, ourselves.

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Gertrude and Hamlet: An analysis through the lens of developmental psychology and Ancient Roman literature

            As with Hamlet's relationship with Ophelia, the dynamic at play between him and his mother, Gertrude, is an unbelievably complex one that consequently resists univariate summation. However, a few key scenes reveal important themes at play between them, the first being that in which Shakespeare introduces the two -- Act I, scene ii. And the second, surprisingly, is the scene in which Hamlet delivers his famous Act II, scene ii soliloquy. In both instances, Shakespeare subtly works in references to classical literature that, when explored, reveal that Hamlet and Gertrude's dynamic is a microcosm for essential themes of the play at large. Specifically, their characterizations give insights into how we, as self-conscious beings, deal with profound loss and the role of reason/signification in mediating our experience of this. 

            When describing the circumstances surrounding his father's death in Act, scene ii, Hamlet says of Gertrude that she was "like Niobe, all tears" (I.ii.153), indicating that her sadness at the loss of King Hamlet was, like Hamlet's, all-consuming. Niobe was a classical embodiment of bereavement, most notably depicted in Book VI of Ovid's Metamorphosis. According to his telling of the story, after blaspheming the gods, Niobe's fourteen children were murdered by Diana and Apollo. In the translation that Shakespeare would have been familiar with, Ovid writes, "Then downe she sate / Bereft of all hir children quite… / Hir armes to stir, hir feete to go, all powre forwent as now, / And into stone hir very wombe and bowels also bind. / But yet she wept... / There upon a mountaines top / She weepeth still in stone" (Ovid, 6.382-395). In these lines, Ovid is saying that the scope of Niobe's sadness at the death of her children was enough to permeate every fiber of her being and render her immobile, cursed to re-experience her sorrow for all eternity, metaphorically transforming her to stone. In equating Gertrude with Niobe, Hamlet indicates that he is confused and angry that the former’s loss is seemingly not indelibly etched in her soul like the latter’s.

            In sharing his attitude towards Gertrude with the audience, Hamlet remarks on the disjunction between the way he and his mother grieve over the king's death. To this effect, he says, "O God, a beast that wants discourse of reason / Would have mourned longer!” (I.ii.154-155). In other words, he cannot fathom how, if her sadness appeared to be just as great as his, she was able to get over it so quickly and proceed to marry her brother-in-law. In this exchange, Shakespeare introduces the loss of the "other," something that comes up in Hamlet’s relationship with his father, Gertrude with her husband, and Hamlet with Gertrude. In the latter's case, this loss comes when Hamlet realizes that he and his mother are not the same, just as the infant does when they emerge from the pre-symbolic stage of development. It’s also important to note that in the process of self-differentiation that this entails, the child also gains the capacity for signification, which, by extension, gives them the capacity for reason and renders their emotions finite, unlike those that Hamlet describes experiencing (Winnicott 1).

            The audience gains additional insights into self-differentiation and its implications in Hamlet’s relationship with Gertrude after Hamlet’s Act II “speech to the actors.” Said insights come in the form of another reference to Ancient Roman literature, this time likely to Virgil’s depiction of Dido and Aeneas in the Aeneid. In the scene at hand, a troupe of actors comes to Elsinore and puts on an excerpt of a stage adaptation of the story of Dido that significantly affects Hamlet. He says in his famous soliloquy afterward in response to one of the actors’ performances, “What would he do / Had he the motive and the cue for passion / That I have? He would drown the stage with tears / And cleave the general ear with horrid speech… and amaze indeed / The very faculties of eyes and ears” (II.ii.587-593). Here, like in the previous scene under discussion, Hamlet is reflecting on how people express sorrow -- in this case, how this actor seemed to conjure it from nothing. He’s saying that if he were able to manifest his feelings (specifically those that the story of Niobe signifies) as well as this actor did his, he would turn the very world on its head. This sentiment is another instance of Hamlet not differentiating between himself and his environment, as he’s saying he would project his emotional landscape onto the world, and the former would become as confounding and awesome as the latter. However, this moment has further implications for Hamlet’s relationship with Gertrude in that this profound aesthetic experience comes up in the context of the story of Dido and Aeneas.

            In the Aeneid, Dido flees her murderous brother and goes on to found her own country, Carthage – immediately conjuring the figure of Claudius, a similarly homicidal brother/ruler to whom, rather than run away, Gertrude seemingly acquiesces. However, like Gertrude supposedly does, Dido falls in love with someone who causes her to feel a great sense of guilt (Nappa 301). Gertrude gives voice to this feeling in the astounding “confrontation scene” with Hamlet when she says, “Thou turn’st my eyes into my very soul, / And there I see such black and grainèd spots / As will not leave their tinct” (III.iv.100-102). This sense of guilt that both Dido and Gertrude feel as a result of their affections results in the apparent breakdown of their faculties of reason, which the authors of both stories in the course of dialogue indicate by reference to these characters as beastly. Hamlet does so in the aforementioned quote from Act I, and Dido, at one point, says to herself, “You were not allowed to live without a marriage, without guilt; to live like a wild animal, and not to touch such cares” (Nappa 302). Not only does this imagery mirror Hamlet’s characterization of his mother, but this line could very well come from Gertrude’s mouth since she proceeds to regret her decision to marry Claudius.

            Like Niobe's sadness, the guilt that Gertrude and Dido feel proves to be too much for them to bear, and they consequently kill themselves (Nappa 301). It is important to note, though, that while Shakespeare does not directly state that Gertrude's death is an act of self-sacrifice, he does allude to it when she collapses from the poison, whereupon she immediately says, "The drink, the drink! I am poisoned" (V.ii.341). She makes this statement as the court is still trying to figure out what's going on, leading one to believe that she knew beforehand that Claudius' chalice was poisoned and that, like Dido, she would rather fall on her sword in repentance than let her son die. Perhaps in the process, she finally absolves herself of whatever guilt she might feel for marrying the murderer of her former husband. However, it also bears mentioning that Gertrude is, along with Ophelia, one of the only characters whose remorse and subsequent death is not really warranted, as neither attempt to murder anyone in the course of the play, unlike Hamlet, Claudius, and Laertes.

As is evident, Gertrude's feelings towards Hamlet and vice-versa are incredibly elaborate. When one views them through the lens of developmental psychology, one sees that Hamlet's anger towards his mother is a consequence of his feeling abandoned, much as the child feels when their sense of self-consciousness starts to blossom (a dynamic that is further reflected in his Act II, scene ii soliloquy). Furthermore, this sense is exacerbated by the depth of his sorrow at the loss of his father, as embodied by the figure of Niobe. Whether Hamlet's anger towards Gertrude is well-founded is a matter worth further exploration, but when one interprets Gertrude's response through the lens of the story of Dido, it becomes clear that she believes Hamlet's anger warrants her metaphorical self-immolation. Regardless, it is ironic that in Hamlet’s despair at his inability to manifest the feelings that these dynamics bring up in him, he does precisely what he wishes to do. That is, "cleave the general ear… and amaze indeed / The very faculties of eyes and ears" (II.ii.590-593); the testament to which, as history has shown so far, will last, like Niobe's sadness, as long as there are humans to perceive it.

Works Cited

Nappa, Chirstopher. “Unmarried Dido: Aeneid 4.550-52.” Hermes, vol. 135, no. 3, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2007, pp. 301–313, https://doi.org/http://www.jstor.org/stable/40379128.

Publius Ovidius Naso. “Book VI.” Shakespeare's Ovid : Being Arthur Golding's Translation of the Metamorphoses, edited by W. H. D. Rouse, Litt.D, translated by Arthur Golding, De La More Press, London, 1904, https://archive.org/stream/shakespearesovid00oviduoft/shakespearesovid00oviduoft_djvu.txt. Accessed 5 Jan. 2022.

Shakespeare, William. “Hamlet.” The Folger Shakespeare, Folger Shakespeare Library, 9 July 2021, https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/hamlet/.

Winnicott, Donald Woods. “Mirror-Role of Mother and Family in Child Development.” Playing and Reality, Tavistock Publications, 1971, p. 1, web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/winnicott2.pdf.