Hamlet's Charisma

World Academia Org Publication

Modern Journal of Language and Literature, Vol.1 , No.4/5 , December2011/January2012 ISSN : 2251-9656 © Word Academia Org. Publication, UK. London All rights reserved

Hamlet’s Charisma Induced by its Indeterminacies Sima Farshid Assistant Professor, English Department, Karaj Branch, Islamic Azad University, Iran [email protected]

Abstract At the dawn of the third millennium, Hamlet still asserts a kind of immortality on account of its inherent intricacies, ambiguities and indeterminacies. The opening question of the play, which sets forth its shadowy, enigmatic world, is followed by a stream of questions that pour into the readers‟ mind, urging them to delve into the deep layers of the obscure ocean of the play wherein we are still swimming, without the prospect of any shores of certainty and finality. Most of Hamlet‟s questions enchant us and make us contemplate on them as much as he does himself. Different aspects of the play, from Hamlet‟s paradoxical manner to problematic actions of other characters induce some gaps in the text which demand the active participation of readers to fill them in. Due to these gaps or the strong “aesthetic” “pole” of the text, in Iser‟s words, Hamlet has maintained its haunting power after four centuries.

Keywords: ambiguity, indeterminacy, paradox, gap, aesthetic pole 1. Introduction For more than four centuries, different kinds of people, ranging from common folk to intellectual elite, have read and watched Hamlet and responded to it in a variety of ways that have altered from time to time and person to person, yet something has never changed: its haunting power over its readers and audience. One can scarcely forget Hamlet and his plight after reading or watching the play. More than any other plays by Shakespeare, and perhaps more than any other masterpieces in the world literature, this contentious Renaissance tragedy has received applause, critique and interpretation – a process still onward, as if never coming to a concluding, terminating point. Bloom does not sound exaggerating when he asserts, “After Jesus, Hamlet is the most cited figure in Western consciousness” (xix). The charisma of the play is not confined to the West; many Eastern writers have been under the influence of Hamlet‟s words, and his famous soliloquy “To be or not to be” seems to be the most renowned literary piece all around the world. The cause of the power Hamlet exerts over its readers and audience should be traced in particular features of the text, including its confusing yet enchanting effects; the more we read and discuss it, the less we reach to a fixed, absolute meaning. Hamlet asserts itself as an ocean of not-yet-discovered meanings hidden in its deep layers. Every reading of it, instead of confirming the reader‟s expectations, leads them, in Iser‟s words, “in unexpected directions” (193) where they can discover the points that had escaped their eyes in former readings or the eyes of other readers. This feature makes Hamlet a “„writerly” (scriptible)” text, in Barthes‟ terms, “that turns the reader into a producer” (Selden 134), because there are many gaps in it which make its readers attempt to fill them in. It is a text that gives itself to different readings, and hence does not induce “any confirmative effect[s]” on the process of reading, therefore no fixed, eternal meanings come out of it. This quality seems to be the cause of its eminence that enchants and makes us continue reading it over and over again, because “any confirmative effect” engendered by a text, as Iser observes, “is a defect in a literary text. For the more a text …confirms an expectation it has initially aroused, the more aware we become of its didactic purpose… the very clarity of such

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texts will make us want to free ourselves from their clutches” (192). Since such “clarity” does not exist in Hamlet, and it never “confirms an expectation it has initially aroused”, it is “eternally written here and now” (Barthes 149) by every reader.

2. Critical trends Being an essentially open, “writerly” text whose meanings are “infinite”, Hamlet has given itself to different interpretations, while never confirming once and forever any comments. Most of these interpretations, in spite of their differences, have been in favor of Hamlet – attempting to justify his deeds. Writers of the Age of Reason, however, have trodden the other way round. A rationalistic thinker such as Voltaire could never approve of what appeared to him as “a vulgar and barbarous drama, which would not be tolerated by the vilest populace of France, or Italy”, since Hamlet, he argues, “responds” to the “nasty vulgarities” of other characters “in silliness no less disgusting” (“Dissertation sur la Tragedie” 1748, cit. Kinney 26). Even as a rationalist, however, he cannot disregard “some sublime passages, worthy of the greatest genius” in Hamlet, thus he concludes his argument by affirming, “It seems as though nature had mingled in the brain of Shakespeare the greatest conceivable strength and grandeur” (26). Nevertheless his rationalistic state on mind cannot refute the “grandeur” that exists in Shakespeare‟s drama. Most of Voltaire‟s contemporaries, either French or English, share his contemptuous views toward Shakespeare and Hamlet. To Francis Gentleman, Hamlet‟s character is a “heap of inconsistency… boastful in expression, undetermined in action” (The Dramatic Censor 1770, cit. Kinney 23), and Oliver Goldsmith considers “To be or not to be” soliloquy “a heap of absurdities” (“The Use of Metaphor” 1763, cit. Kinney 22). Lewis Theobald, “who issues the first charges against Shakespeare” in England, “attacks Hamlet‟s coarse and obscene language and manner” (Kinney 20), and George Steevens, “in the first edition of the Steevens-Johnson Shakespeare” regards Hamlet as a character with “immoral tendency” (24), because, he contends, Hamlet “deliberately procures the execution of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern….He is not less accountable for the distraction and death of Ophelia …. he kills the king at last to revenge himself, and not his father”(24). Even Samuel Johnson, the firm defender of Shakespeare‟s drama against the attacks of French classicists, affirms that “Hamlet is, through the whole piece, rather an instrument than an agent” (cit. Bradley 92). These readings of Hamlet do not startle or bother contemporary admirers of Shakespeare, because as postmodern readers who have read a good many books and essays about the grand narrative of the Enlightenment, they are quite aware of the fact that Hamlet‟s tragedy does not accord with most of major notions of that narrative. This is a play whose plot is constructed upon the claim and demand of an apparition whose very existence is questionable to a rationalistic state of mind. That way of thinking can neither find any justification or rationalization for Hamlet‟s statements or actions: a melancholy who suffers too much, and does not strive to smother the internal fire that is burning him; a student of philosophy who reflects too much, but comes to no definite solution for problems that obsess his mind; a proud orator who speaks too much in a kind of language that sounds bombastic, ambiguous and ambivalent to the ears of the men who asked for clarity of speech. The late eighteenth and the early and mid-nineteenth centuries, unlike the preceding age, witnessed the celebration of Hamlet in Europe whose thinkers and artists found it winning due to the very features their predecessors had considered “disgusting”. Unlike Steevens who observed “immoral tendency” in Hamlet‟s character, in Goethe‟s eyes, he is the man of “most moral nature”, as he confirms in his renowned Bildungsroman, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795- 96): A lovely, pure, noble, and most moral nature, without the strength of nerve which forms a hero, sinks beneath a burden which cannot bear and must not cast away. All duties are holy for him; the present is too hard. Impossibilities have been required of him; not in themselves impossibilities, but such for him. He winds, and turns, and torments himself; he advances and recoils; is ever put in mind, ever puts himself in mind; at last does all but lose his purpose from his thought; yet still without recovering his peace of mind. (cit. Kinney 27)


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Hamlet magnetizes Romantics because of his nobility and purity, his tormenting pains, and the heavy load of the “burden” under which he “sinks”. He is also admired in the romantic era for his reflections and contemplations in which he ponders on human‟s existential questions that have always acted as the Muses of philosophers and artists. The German critic, G.F. Stedefeld compares “To be or not to be” soliloquy to “the riddle of the Sphinx”, and the most popular novelist of the period, Victor Hugo considers it “a contemplation of the infinite” (cit. Belsey 147). Keats compares himself to Hamlet in a letter to Fanny Brawne: “Hamlet‟s heart was full of such Misery as mine is …. I am sickened at the brute world which you are smiling with” (cit. Kinney 28). Coleridge attributes Hamlet‟s “inability to act … to imagination, the creative faculty of the poet”, and contends that Hamlet‟s “withdrawal into the world of his own perceptions is not inconsistent…with genius” (Farley-Hills 57). This identification of Hamlet‟s reflective mind with “the creative faculty of the poet” or the artist in general pervades most of the nineteenth century. It was not only Keats who saw himself as Hamlet; many other artists, namely Eugene Delacroix and Charles Baudelaire had the same feeling, as Belsey affirms “One of Delacroix‟s self-portraits, often dated 1824, shows the artist in an inky cloak and a doublet and hose of solemn black ... the gaze, mournful and reflective, like the custom … suggests Hamlet” (148 ). And Baudelaire who saw himself “as a latter-day Hamlet, covered the walls of his apartment with Delacroix‟s lithographs of the play” (149). What causes these poets and painters identify themselves with Hamlet is his brooding, contemplative nature – the essential characteristic of the artist and the root of their isolation and withdrawal from the world of realities, for in many cases they fail to retain a balance between that world and their imaginary world. Coleridge elaborates on “the overbalance” of the imaginary in Hamlet in the following passage: In Hamlet this balance is disturbed: his thoughts, and the image of his fancy, are far more vivid than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a color not naturally their own. Hence we see a great, an almost enormous, intellectual activity, and a proportionate aversion to real action …. The effect of this overbalance of the imaginative power is beautifully illustrated in the everlasting broodings and superfluous activities of Hamlet‟s mind, which … is constantly occupied with the world within, and abstracted from the world without … (cit. Kinney 30) This obsession with “the world within” is the most significant point of resemblance between Hamlet and the artist, as Hippolyte Taine, the founder of old historicism observes: You recognize in [Hamlet] a poet‟s soul, made not to act, but to dream, which is lost in contemplating the phantoms of its creation, which sees the imaginary world too clearly to play a part in the real world; an artist whom evil chance has made a prince, whom worse chance has made an avenger of crime, and who, destined by nature for genius, is condemned by fortune to madness and unhappiness. (340) Because of possessing a “poet‟s soul”, Hamlet is, Taine maintains, Shakespeare himself who “has painted himself in the most striking” (Taine 340) character he has ever created. Taine is not the only critic who observes Shakespeare‟s “soul” in Hamlet; the most notable Shakespeare critic of the early twentieth century, A.C. Bradley is of the same opinion, and argues that if “Hamlet‟s character is not only intricate, but unintelligible”, it is because “Shakespeare intended him to be so, because he himself was feeling strongly … what a mystery life is, and how impossible it is for us to understand it” (93). Hamlet‟s intricacy and unintelligibility are the most alluring features to us, postmodern readers who are mostly enthralled by those texts that do not block different processes of signification due to their inherent intricacies and complexities. Among all romantic readings of Hamlet, that of Leigh Hunt seems closest to ours; he admits failure in describing “the indescribable”, Hamlet … the gallant, the philosophical, the melancholy Hamlet, that amiable inconsistent, who talked when he should have acted and acted when he should not even have talked, who with a bosom


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wrung with sensibility was unfeeling, and in his very passion for justice unjust, who in his misery had leisure for ridicule and in his revenge for benevolence, who is the most melancholy abstraction never lost the graces of mind or the elegancies of manner, natural in the midst of error. But let me not attempt to describe the indescribable. (cit. Kinney 28) In a very subtle way, Hunt points out the confusing paradoxes that exist in Hamlet‟s character and conduct that I prefer to deal with in the next part. The most referred feature of Hamlet in Victorian readings of the play is Hamlet‟s “irresolution”; the tragic figure who stood on a pedestal as “the prince of speculators” (Hazilitt, cit. Kinney 31) in the eyes of Romantics, turns into a mere embodiment of doubts for Victorians. Arnold “links Hamlet with Faust as a representative of the doubt and discouragement of the modern temperament, as opposed to the monumental works of the Greeks” (Kinney 31). And Swinburne believes that Hamlet “will too surely remain to the majority of students … and all critics, the standing type and embodied emblem of irresolution, half-heartedness, and doubt” (cit. Kinney 32) [emphasis mine, pointing to the strong words a man of doubts uses to confirm irresolution!]. The remarkable point here, however, is how readily Hamlet gives itself to various discourses; every age sees some affinities between its prevailing discourse and Hamlet‟s utterances. The number of books and essays written on Shakespeare‟s canon in the twentieth century cannot be compared to that of any other preceding ages, therefore some other essays are needed to elaborate on various critical approaches to Shakespeare and Hamlet in that century. Nevertheless I dare claim that the most expanded, and simultaneously the most controversial, critical reading of Hamlet in the twentieth century has been the psychological one, extending from Freud‟s psychoanalytic arguments on Oedipus complex as the cause of Hamlet‟s procrastination to Lacan‟s commentary on the functioning of “desire” and “mourning” in the play. In spite of some sharp differences that exist among modern and postmodern interpretations of Hamlet, most of them, even feminist reading of the play, seem to be affectionate, if not approving, toward Hamlet – attempting to understand his predicament and justify his actions. Among rare disapproving modern comments I have encountered, those of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence are noteworthy. Although Eliot regards Hamlet as “the „Mona Lisa‟ of literature” (124) because of its complexities, he does not observe any appropriateness between Hamlet‟s emotions and the situations that incite them, as a result he refuses to approve of the play as an artistic success, for it lacks one of the characteristics of great art in Eliot‟s eyes, i.e. “objective correlative”. He contends that “Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear”, and maintains that argument by affirming: “Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her” (cit. Kinney 37). As far as the commentaries of creative minds on Shakespeare are concerned, Lawrence seems to be the only one who detests Hamlet. He expresses his revulsion in this way: I had always felt an aversion from Hamlet: a creeping, unclean thing he seems, on the stage …. His nasty poking and sniffing at his mother, his setting traps for the King, his conceited perversion with Ophelia make him always intolerable. The character is repulsive in its conception, based on self-dislike and a spirit of disintegration. (143- 44) [emphasis mine] Why he considers Hamlet an “intolerable”, “creeping, unclean thing” must be discussed somewhere else, but Lawrence‟s rebellious spirit that led him to express such abhorrence for a masterpiece is noteworthy! There are two points in his contemptuous statements, however, that I would deal with in the next part: Hamlet‟s “self-dislike” and the “spirit of disintegration” in him. 3. Prevalent indeterminacy of the text Hamlet begins with a question: „Who‟s there?‟ that is followed by other questions by rising which Shakespeare gets the mind of his readers and audience thoroughly engaged with the play, and prepares them to read and watch a play loaded with enigmas and mysteries. Except the first question,


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the other ones are related to the wandering apparition that comes and goes, yet the sentinels are not sure whether they should believe their eyes or not; it might be a mere illusion, as Barnardo pronounces: “Is not this something more than fantasy?” (l.52) [emphasis mine]. Hence a sense of uncertainty and indeterminacy is engendered at the very beginning of the play that pervades the whole text, making it “something of a puzzle”, as Belsey suggests (135). After beginning his play with questions concerning the existence of the Ghost and dramatizing how the questions haunt the mind of the guards, Shakespeare continues playing with other pieces of his “puzzle” by getting Hamlet‟s mind obsessed with the rightness of the Ghost‟s assertions and even with its origin: Angels and ministers of grace defend us! Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damned, Bring with thee airs from heaven or blasts from hell, Be thy intents wicked or charitable, Thou comest in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee. (II. iv. 39-44) Here we see Hamlet‟s uncertainty about the Ghost‟s origin; whether it has come from heaven or hell is not clear to him, and this doubt preoccupies his mind up to Act 3 where he gets convinced of his uncle‟s crime, and as a result the correctness of the Ghost‟s claim, due to Claudius‟s reaction after watching the Murder of Gonzago – rising, calling for lights, and leaving the place (III. ii. 253-58). Hamlet‟s questions and doubts about the rightness of the Ghost‟s claim arouse other questions in his mind, and consequently in the mind of readers and audience – eternal, existential questions, concerning human‟s paradoxical nature, corruption of the world, function of conscience, moral values, taking the life of oneself or another person, etc. The incessant process of questioning in Hamlet is not ceased by getting sure about Claudius‟s crime; it is terminated only by Hamlet‟s death – pointing out that merely our extinction concludes our eternal questions, some left unanswered even when we perish. This lasting preoccupation of Hamlet‟s and, consequently, reader‟s mind with those essential, existential questions seems to me the cause of undeviating fascination of Hamlet; it “continues to speak to us existentially”, as Brotton states (161), hence permanently demands careful listening and participating in Hamlet‟s endeavor to solve “the Sphinx‟s riddle”. This active participation of ours for solving that “riddle” or, in Iser‟s words, “for filling in the gaps left by the text” (193) is what Iser calls the “aesthetic” “pole” of a literary work. He believes that a “literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic, and the aesthetic: the artistic refers to the text created by the author, and the aesthetic to the realization accomplished by the reader” (189). A literary work does not come “into existence”, he argues, till it is not “realized” by the reader: “The work is more than the text, for the text only takes on life when it is realized …. The convergence of text and reader brings the literary work into existence” (189). Although Iser is not talking about Hamlet in particular, and his argument embraces all great literary works that do not produce “any confirmative effect” (192), thus their “aesthetic pole” is as strong as the “artistic” one, what he says about the “convergence of text and reader” is exactly applicable to the process of reading Hamlet that needs our “creative participation” (190). What makes Hamlet‟s “aesthetic pole” so strong is not only Hamlet‟s enigmatic questions, but his paradoxical character and manner as well; he is “constantly surprising us by exhibiting new qualities and attitudes that do not cohere easily within a single personality and sometimes even seem to be contradictory”, as Levin argues (217). These “contradictory” aspects of Hamlet‟s behavior and “the extraordinary complexity of [his] personality” (216 ) have induced the attack of rationalistic writers such as Gentleman, the confusion of romantic thinkers such as Hunt and the bitter resentment of a modern novelist, Lawrence, while a Victorian poet, Arnold, considers him “a representative of … the modern temperament”. The basic contradictions in Hamlet‟s conduct have been heeded by several critics, either foes or friends, and many of those friends have made efforts to justify his paradoxical manner, yet there is still a big question mark in our mind and many gaps in the text that require our active participation to fill them in. One of the major questions of all of us is why Hamlet delays to take the revenge of his late father whom he admires so much, as observed in the following lines – addressed to his mother in the „closet scene‟, referring to his father‟s portrait:


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See what a grace was seated on this brow, Hyperion‟s curls, the front of Jove himself, An eye like Mars to threaten and command, A station like the herald Mercury New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill, A combination and a form indeed Where every god did seem to set his seal To give the world assurance of a man. This was your husband. (III. iv. 55-63) Why does not he obey the command of this god-like father? Various answers have been given to fill in this gap, from pointing out Hamlet‟s doubts about hellish or heavenly origin of the Ghost to tracing it in his unconscious Oedipal desires. But to me, the inclination to detect the cause of Hamlet‟s delay in his meditative nature sounds more convincing. As a Renaissance or, as it is said nowadays, early modern intellectual, he is a “transitive figure, torn between the demand and the values of the Middle Ages and those of the modern world” (Guerin 47), therefore in spite of being “aware of the gentlemanly code that demands satisfaction for a wrong, [he is] too much the student of philosophy and the Christian religion to believe in the morality or the logic of revenge” (47). Hamlet himself reflects on this problem by affirming, “conscience does make cowards of us all” (III. i. 82) [emphasis mine]. This statement depicts his internal conflict. On the one hand, he is dissatisfied with himself as a “coward” who has not performed his duty. The same attitude is observed in his soliloquy in Act 2, beginning with “O, what a rouge and peasant slave am I!” (ii. 544). On the other hand, he knows that the cause of his inability to kill Claudius is his „conscience‟ or moral values. The word „all‟ shows that it is not only his problem, as an intellectual, but that of all people who have conscience. The same idea has been elaborated on by John Casey in Pagan Virtue. He contends that he and other people who live in western societies have “inherit[ed] a confused system of values; that when we think most rigorously and realistically we are „pagans‟ in ethics, but that our Christian inheritance only allows a fitful sincerity about this” (225-6). Consequently western societies admire pagan features such as “pride …a sense of the noble, a certain valuing of courage and ambition” (212) simultaneously sticking to Christian values such as love, pity and modesty. The abovementioned passage from the “closet scene” can be considered a confirmation of Casey‟s claim: talking “rigorously” about his father, Hamlet compares him to Mars, Hyperion and Jove, while Christian notions that condemn violence, aggression, ambition and murder obsess his mind, and hence run through the whole play. He has inherited a “confused system of values” that tortures him because, as a man of thought, he is “too much in the sun”; he is so much conscious of the divergence of those opposite systems of thought ( reigning his mind simultaneously) that he cannot act according to one set of values that demands ignoring the other one. Here I would like to draw your attention to another discrepancy in the play. While Hamlet is portrayed as a contemplative person, his name, like the name of Brutus, another brooding figure in Shakespeare‟s canon, “curiously enough, translate as „stupid”‟ (Pearlman74)! It is because of Hamlet‟s brooding nature and his turbulent mentality that Lawrence observes a “spirit of disintegration” and “self-dislike” in him. He cannot act since his mind is confused and disintegrated, thus he despises himself, and this contempt is traceable in different parts of the play, including the soliloquy I have referred to in previous paragraphs: O, what a rouge and peasant slave am I! … … Am I a coward? … … I, the son of a dear father murder‟d, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must like a whore unpack my heart with words And fall a-cursing like a very drab, A scullion! Fie upon‟t! (II. ii. 544-83)


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A noble prince considers himself “rouge”, “peasant”, “slave”, and worse than that “whore”, “scullion” and “drab”, because instead of acting like his father, a Mars-like figure, or the heroes of the Trojan war, he just “unpack[s] [his] heart with words”, therefore he “contemptuously applies chauvinist insults to himself, as Marsh argues, “for using words instead of taking action. By implication, he believes that men act and women curse” (77). Here we see one of the fundamental binary oppositions of patriarchal culture: activity/passivity; men stand against their foes and fight with them, while women merely “curse”; men are doers and warriors, women are passive observers. This notion has been the basis of some arguments about Hamlet‟s “feminine nature” as the cause of his inability to act. The first writer who propounded this idea was Edward P. Vinning who elaborated on it in The Mystery of Hamlet: An Attempt to Solve an Old Problem (1881). He begins his argument by proposing this question: “As Hamlet lacks the energy, the conscious strength, the readiness for action that inhere in the perfect manly character, how comes it that humanity still admires him?” (cit. Kinney 32), then answers it this way: There is not only a masculine type of human perfection, but also a feminine type; and when it becomes evident that Hamlet was born lacking in many of the elements of virility, there grew up in him, as compensation, many of the perfections of character more properly the crown of the better half of the human race. … The depths of human nature which Shakespeare touched in him have been felt by all, but it has scarcely been recognized that the charms of Hamlet‟s mind are essentially feminine in nature. (cit. Kinney 33) Returning to my argument about Hamlet‟s “confused system of values” that somehow justifies his inability to act, another inconsistency in his manner, however, attracts the reader‟s attention. Up to the “closet scene” (III. iv.) Hamlet‟s mind is quite obsessed with the Christian view of taking the life of oneself or another person as a deadly sin and, further, with the Catholic belief that human soul would not be redeemed if confession of sins and repentance are not accomplished before death – hence abhorring Claudius more for not letting Old Hamlet undergo such sacraments, and also avoiding to kill him when he is praying. Paradoxically, however, when he spontaneously stabs Polonius, taking him as Claudius, in his mother‟s closet, he does not feel any regret for committing such a crime – a ruthless, unjust punishment for Polonius‟s eavesdrop- ping. And afterward he does not express any remorse for sending Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their death. How can we justify this paradoxical attitude again? Foaks has attempted to answer this question in his remarkable essay, “Hamlet‟s Neglect of Revenge” by regarding Polonius‟s murder as a “rite of passage” (98). He argues that Hamlet‟s deed is not a “premediated murder, or a crime passionel” (93) because when he goes to his mother‟s closet, his mind is entirely concerned with convincing Gertrude of her wrong doing and thus on his “verbal attack on” her, consequently his “reaction to the discovery that he has killed Polonius is callous, since all his attention is concentrated on forcing Gertrude to share his disgust with her marriage to Claudius” (93). Therefore when he hears a voice from behind the arras, he reacts without any reflection, and this is “the first time” in the play that “he has not paused to reflect” (93) and it is his “primal act of violence” (94). Since it had happened incidentally, he associates it with Providence: .... But heaven hath pleased it so To punish me with this and this with me, That I must be their scourge and minister. (III. iv. 173-5) By presuming himself the “scourge and minister” of “heaven”, he appeases himself and “abandons all of his earlier wrestling with conscience and with the biblical injunction against killing. He casually pushes responsibility away from himself with no remorse”, Foaks suggests (95). After this “sudden act of violence”, Hamlet‟s “attitude to the idea of killing and death changes rapidly, the biblical commandments are forgotten, and he openly promises that Claudius will soon follow Polonius” (95), for now he considers himself “an agent of providence” (96). Because of this great change of manner and state of mind that has taken place in him by killing Polonius, Foaks calls it a “rite of passage”. Hamlet passes from “wrestling with [his] conscience” to a “sardonic acceptance of the idea of death” and getting “ready to accept his own death” (96).


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Foaks‟s elaboration is an attempt to prove that Hamlet is not a paralyzed figure, unable to do anything. In Hamlet versus Lear, he contends that Romantics have endorsed such an image of a paralyzed Hamlet in their appraisals of the play: The Romantics freed Hamlet the character from the play into an independent existence as a figure embodying nobility, or at least good intentions, but disabled from action by a sense of inadequacy, or a diseased consciousness capable of seeing the world as possessed by things rank and gross in nature, and hence a failure. Hamletism gained currency as a term to describe not only individuals, but the failings of intellectuals …. As the idea of Hamletism prospered, so it came to affect the way the play was seen, and the most widely accepted critical readings of it have for a long time presented us with a version of Shakespeare‟s play reinfected … with the virus of Hamletism, and seen in its totality as a vision of failure in modern man or even in Man himself. (44) Whether we accept or reject Foaks‟s ideas, there are many paradoxes in Hamlet, and other scholars might find other ways to fill in its gaps. It is a great work of art that is “eternally written here and now”, but unlike Barthes who announces the “death of the author”, I would like to take sides with Bradley by approving of his assertion that it was Shakespeare‟s intention to leave “inconsistencies in his exhibition of the character which must prevent us from being certain of his ultimate meaning” (93).

4. Conclusion Shakespeare owes his survival to many things, including the great tragedies he has created. Among his tragedies, Hamlet seems to be the most fascinating one thanks to various things, from Hamlet‟s paradoxical manner to the problematic actions of other characters, which altogether induce some gaps in the text which demand the active participation of readers to fill them in. Due to these gaps or the strong “aesthetic” “pole” of the text, in Iser‟s words, Hamlet has maintained its haunting power after four centuries, and Hamlet still asks us ardently to listen to his profound, complex statements.

References Barthes, Roland. (2000). “The death of the author”. Modern criticism and theory. 2nd ed. Eds. David Lodge and Nigel Wood. Harlow: Pearson. 145-50. Belsey, Catherine. (2002). „“Was Hamlet a man or a woman?‟: The prince in the graveyard, 1800-1920”. Hamlet: New critical essays. Ed. Arthur F. Kinney. New York: Routledge. 135- 58. Bloom, Harold. (1999). Shakespeare: The invention of the human. London: Fourth Estate. Bradley, A.C. (1904). Shakespearean tragedy: Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth. London: Macmillan. Brotton, Jerry. (2002). „Ways of seeing Hamlet‟. Hamlet: New critical essays. Ed. Kinney. 161- 76. Casey, John. (1990). Pagan virtues: An essay in ethics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Coddon, Karin S. (1998).„“ Such strange design‟: Madness, subjectivity, and treason in Hamlet and Elizabethan culture”. Shakespeare‟s tragedies. Ed. Susan Zimmerman. London: Macmillan. 84- 108. Eliot, T.S. (1932). “Hamlet and his problem”. Selected essays: 1917-1932. New York: Harcourt & Brace. 121- 126. Farley-Hills, David, ed. (1996). Critical responses to Hamlet 1600-1900. Vol.2: 1790-1838. New York: AMS Press. Foaks, R.A. (2002). “Hamlet‟s neglect of revenge”. Hamlet: New critical essays. Ed. Kinney. 85- 99. Foakes, R. A. (1993). Hamlet versus Lear: Cultural politics and Shakespeare‟s art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guerin, Wilfred L. et al. (1987). A handbook of critical approaches to literature. 2nd ed. New York: Harper& Row Publishers. Iser, Wolfgang. (2000). “The reading process: a phenomenological approach”. Modern criticism and theory. 2nd ed. Eds. David Lodge and Nigel Wood. Harlow: Pearson. 188- 205. Kinney, Arthur F., ed. (2002). Hamlet: New critical essays. New York: Routledge. Lawrence, D.H. (1997). Twilight in Italy and other essays. London: Penguin. Levin, Richard. (2002). “Hamlet, Laertes, and the Dramatic Functions of Foils”. Hamlet: New critical essays. Ed. Kinney. 21530. Marsh, Nicholas. (1998). Shakespeare: The Tragedies. New York: Palgrave. Pearlman, E. (2002). “Shakespeare at work: The invention of the ghost”. Hamlet: New critical essays. Ed. Kinney. 71-84. Selden, Raman and Peter Widdowson. (1993). A reader‟s guide to contemporary literary theory. 3rd ed. Hertfordshire: Harvester. Shakespeare, William. (1602). The Tragedy of Hamlet, prince of Denmark. The complete works. Gen. Eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. (1988). New York: Oxford University Press. Taine, H.A. (1871). History of English literature. Trans. H. van Laun. Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas. Taylor, Cary. (1999). “The Incredible shrinking bard”. Shakespeare and appropriation. Ed. Christy Desmet and Robert Sawyer. London: Routledge. 197- 205.


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Hamlet's Charisma

Hamlet's Charisma

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