Final Word on Hamlet

That is to say, my final word, for a while.

INTRODUCTION
Throughout the term, we have looked at a variety of different angles on Hamlet. We have seen Hamlet through the eyes of romantics like Coleridge and Goethe; Freudians like Ernst Jones; modernists like TS Eliot and James Joyce. One of the most intriguing theoretical projects of the last 30 years has been that of Rene Girard, a long-time professor of comparative literature at Stanford who has spent his career investigating the phenomena of sacrifice, scapegoating, religious violence, and how all this relates to the gospel story of Jesus. In this last lecture, I want to summarize Girard’s views on Hamlet (he has written a book on Shakespeare), and then offer a concluding interpretation of the play as a whole, drawing on some of Girard’s ideas.

GIRARD ON HAMLET
“Should our enormous critical literature on Hamlet fall someday into the hands of people otherwise ignorance or our mores,” Rene Girard writes in his Theater of Envy, “they could not fail to conclude that our academic tribe must have been a savage breed, indeed. After four centuries of controversies, Hamlet’s temporary reluctance to commit murder still looks so outlandish to us that more and more books are being written in an unsuccessful effort to solve that mystery. The only way to account for this curious body of literature is to suppose that back in the twentieth century no more was needed than the request of some ghost, and the average professor of literature would massacre his entire household without batting an eyelash.”

Girard argues that Hamlet, the greatest of the revenge tragedies, actually works against revenge. Even as Shakespeare works within the rules of the game of revenge tragedy on the surface of the play, he is subverting the rules at another level. He is “providing the crowd with the spectacle they demand while simultaneously writing between the lines, for all those who can read, a devastating critique of that same spectacle.” Because critics assume that Shakespeare naturally endorsed the revenge ethic required by the play, they have shifted the problem of the play from the real issue – Shakespeare’s treatment of revenge – to a non-issue – Hamlet’s hesitation in the face of revenge.

I want to offer a somewhat Girardian reading of the overall thrust of Hamlet, but before I get to that, let me summarize some of the main points of Girard’s own treatment of the play. First, Girard points out that revenge only works if the avenger is capable of forgetting the character of the victim, only if he is able, as Hamlet is, of idealizing the victim (his father) and demonizing his murderer (Claudius; Hamlet also demonizes and exaggerates the fault of Ophelia, as well as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern). The avenger “will not believe in his own cause unless he believes in the guilt of his intended victim. And the guilt of that intended victim entails in turn the innocence of that victim’s victim. If the victim’s victim is already a killed, and if the revenge seeker reflects a little too much on the circularity of revenge, his faith in vengeance must collapse.” In Hamlet, Girard suggests, the original victim is not innocent, but himself a murderer. Apparently Girard is thinking of Hamlet’s killing of Fortinbras. In any case, what prevents the young Hamlet from fully believing his cause is that he “cannot forget the context.” For Hamlet, “the crime of Claudius looks to him like one more link in an already long chain, and his own revenge will look like still another link, perfectly identical to all the other links.”

Second, overlaying the specific similarity of Claudius and Hamlet is the more general issue of the mythological use of brothers and twins. Brotherhood, Girard points out, is the “least differentiated relationship in most kinships systems”; unlike brother-sister relations, there is no sexual difference involved, and unlike parent-child relations there is no differentiation or order of age and experience. Brothers are well-suited to be identical twins, and in mythology “the status of a brother can become a mark of undifferentiation, a symbol of violent desymbolization, the sign paradoxically that there are no more signs and that a warring confusing tends to prevail everywhere.” In short, brothers are perfectly suited to become what Girard describes as mimetic rivals, twins in conflict over a common object of desire.

Hamlet spends a good deal of the play, in Girard’s view, trying to convince himself and others that there is a radical difference between his father and his uncle-father. “As Hyperion to a satyr,” he says in his first soliloquy, and to his mother he compares the gracious brow, the Hyperion curls, the Jove-like forehead, and the Martial eye of his father to Cladius, the “mildewed ear.” But Girard sees this as unsuccessful: “There would be no Hamlet ‘problem’ if the hero believed what he says.” His language betrays him: “two brothers,” “this was your husband . . . here is your husband.” Gertrude’s behavior also betrays him, for she slipped from the sheets of Hamlet to the sheets of Claudius without skipping a beat, suggesting that she hardly sees the dramatic contrast that Hamlet is describing. (It would be fun to stage Hamlet with Claudius and Hamlet, Sr., as identical twins.)

Third, throughout the play Hamlet is not only trying to convince himself that his father was innocent and his uncle a demon, but also searching for a model of sufficient force to lead him to fulfill his revenge. He is inspired by the First Player’s speech on Hecuba, but it doesn’t get him to the state of mind he wants to find. Fortinbras provides another possible mimetic model, his large army providing Hamlet with thousands of possible models, each marching off to find a quarrel in a straw since Honor’s at the stake. (Girard tellingly notes that Hamlet’s soliloquy shows that he is not really convinced of his own cause: “It would not impress Hamlet so much if the hero truly believed in the superiority and urgency of his cause. His words constantly betray him, here as in the scene with his mother. As a cue for passion, he revenge motif is no more compelling, really, than the cue of an actor on the stage. He too must ‘greatly . . . find quarrel in a straw,’ he too must stake everything ‘even for an eggshell.’”

Hamlet finally finds a mirror and model in Laertes, who acts according to all the conventions of an avenger, a son, and a brother to a beloved sister. Hamlet’s argument with Laertes over Ophelia is the key moment: “Hamlet watches Laertes leap into Ophelia’s grave, and the effect on him is electrifying. The reflective mood of the conversation with Horatio gives way to a wild imitation of the rival’s theatrical mourning. At this point he obviously decides that he, too, should act according to the demands of society, that he should become another Laertes in other words. He, too, as a result, must leap into the grave of one who has already died, even as he prepares more graves for those still alive . . . . In order to embrace the goal of revenge, Hamlet must enter the circle of mimetic desire and rivalry; this is what he has been unable to achieve so far, but here, thanks to Laertes, he finally reaches a hysterial pitch of that ‘pale and bloodless emulation’ that constitutes the terminal stage of the ontological disease.” Hamlet gets things exactly backward: Hamlet says that he sees the cause of Laertes in his own; what has actually happened is that he has come to see his own cause in the image of Laertes.

Finally, in his interpretation of Hamlet as elsewhere, Girard highlights the cen
tral importance of the gospels in undoing the whole mechanism of rivalry, scapegoating, violence, and revenge that he sees operating in all cultures. Shakespeare is also writing an anti-revenge revenge tragedy, but what Shakespeare gives is not, by Girard’s reading, a polemic against revenge. Revenge tragedy would be an inappropriate place for that polemic. Instead, Shakespeare is silent about revenge as such; in fact, moral objections about revenge, though common in Elizabethan moral writing and preaching, play little part in Hamlet’s meditations. Rather, Shakespeare’s play displays for us a world in the no man’s land between revenge and no revenge, the no man’s land of “sick revenge.” Here is Girard:

“Even at those later stages in our culture when physical revenge and blood feuds completely disappeared or were limited to such marginal milieu as the underworld, it would seem that no revenge play, not even a play of reluctant revenge, would strike a really deep chord in the modern psyche. In reality the question is never entirely settled, and the strange void at the center of Hamlet becomes a symbolic expression of the Western and modern malaise, no less powerful than the most brilliant attempts to define the problem, such as Dostoyevski’s underground revenge. Our ‘symptoms’ always resemble that unnamable paralysis of the will, that ineffable corruption of the spirit, that affect not only Hamlet but the other characters as well. The devious ways of these characters, the bizarre plots they hatch, their passing for watching without being watched, their propensity to voyeurism and spying, and the general disease of human relations make a good deal of sense as a description of the undifferentiated no-man’s-land between revenge and no revenge in which we ourselves are still living.”

The sickening of revenge works like this: So long as revenge is accepted, there is a certain recognizable reciprocal structure to human conduct: “The opponents can anticipate each other’s moves. In order to act effectively, each one must surprise the other, throw him off balance by doing something the reciprocity does not call for or, on the contrary, he must do what the reciprocity does call for once again, he must make the move now discounted as too obvious by the other side, the move, therefore, that has become the least predictable once more.” Strategy thus becomes more and more subtle, and involves less and less action, more and more calculation. Finally, “it becomes difficult to distinguish strategy from procrastination.” Revenge can be postponed indefinitely without ever being renounced – it’s just not the right time – and in this situation it becomes impossible to define action: “All actions and motivations are their own opposites as well as themselves. When Hamlet does not seize the opportunity to kill Claudius during his prayer, it could be a failure of will or a supreme calculation; it could be instinctive humanness or a refinement of cruelty. Hamlet himself does not know.” In this way, the crisis of degree – the dissolution of all cultural boundaries and hierarchies – “has reached the most intimate recesses of the individual consciousness.”

Girard suggests that this no man’s land is especially apparent in international affairs (he was writing during the latter part of the Cold War), where “we are poised on the fence between total revenge and no revenge at all, unable to make up our mind, unable to take revenge and yet unable to renounce it.” If our technologies, the product of human ingenuity, threaten humanity, it is “the human spirit of revenge, which is not completely extinct with us” that is to blame. To accept the gospel would be to renounce revenge forever; but the modern world is unwilling to do that. Yet, the modern world is also unwilling to return to redemption-by-revenge that dominated the past. Hamlet thus stands as an emblem of modern man.

TYING THREADS TOGETHER
As always, Girard is brilliant, provocative, and almost persuasive. As usual, however, Girard also seems to be somewhat loosely rooted in the text (which is not the same as being un-rooted in the text; much of what Girard sees is there, though he is reading it through his paradigm). I want to use some of Girard’s ideas for my own concluding remarks on the play, but to show how they fit, I need to back up and resolve some questions we have discussed but have left hanging in the air.

First, the Ghost: Is this a Purgatorial ghost, or an infernal one? When all is said and done, it seems most likely to me that the ghost is from hell, and that the ghost is doing just what Hamlet feared, tempting him toward a mortal sin that would damn him. The fact that the ghost tells the truth is interesting but not decisive; Macbeth’s witches tell the truth too, precisely to trap him (so does Melville’s Fedallah). Contextually, despite the complexities of the Elizabethan religious situation, it seems most plausible that Shakespeare would not assume the reality of purgatory on stage.

Second, revenge: If the ghost is from hell, then his call to revenge is a seduction to evil. Again, contextually, as Prosser argues, both in Elizabethan religious/moral writing and on the Elizabethan stage, the “wild justice” of revenge is either condemned or shown to be destructive rather than redemptive. Hamlet takes the ghost’s instruction as his duty, but that is just to say that he succumbs to temptation, though the temptation takes time to seep in.

Third, as the play progresses, Hamlet’s self-control and the rational checks on his lust for blood are gradually undermined. As Alex Newell points out, the soliloquies trace the gradual triumph of revenge in his mind, the transformation of thought into “bloody thought.” For Shakespeare, those who do nothing but meditate on blood are sub-human, whether their thoughts are filled with war or with revenge. Hamlet’s godlike reason, his infinity of faculties, his angelic action, his admirable movements are being undermined by the ghost’s seduction. This is not a complete overthrow by any means; Hamlet never becomes a beast, as Macbeth does. Girard is right that Hamlet sits on the fence between revenge and no revenge.

Fourth, we have several times examined the question of “honor” and the basis for human action that runs through the play. Hamlet’s soliloquies not only trace the progress of the infection of revenge as it sickens Hamlet’s mind, but also shows the eventual triumph of an ethic of honor. In the “To be or not to be” speech, Hamlet convinces himself that it’s nobler to take action even if it costs him his life rather than wait patiently for things some divinity to shape his end, and even more dramatically, Hamlet seeks to mimic the nobility of Fortinbras who would quarrel over a straw and assemble thousands to conquer an eggshell if it had the merest whiff of honor in it.

Finally, there is the condition of the world as Hamlet sees it. One of the most appealing things about Hamlet is that he clearly sees through the pretense, disguise, and play-acting that surround him on all sides. He is not mad, but he has the insight of a Shakespearean madman – of mad Lear on the heath, of Ophelia. He knows that the times are out of joint, that the world is a fallen garden, that the serpent wears the crown. The question the play poses is whether this world is put to rights by vengeance, by the ritual shedding of blood, by killing the serpent king. Or, is that way of putting things right, of setting time back on its course, just another link in an endless chain of killings? Here Girard is right on the money: Hamlet does not depict a world that can be put right by the mechanisms of scapegoating and revenge.

Claudius does not initially see that thing
s are out of joint. He attributes that belief to Fortinbras, who believes that Denmark is “disjoint and out of frame.” Machiavellian Claudius can manage, manage image to make things appear stable, manage Hamlet to keep the kingdom in order, manage his guilt so that it seems mere gilt. As time moves on, however, Claudius realizes that he is not going to be able to manage Hamlet, and with the play scene, he begins to feel the instability and disorder of the world almost as profoundly as Hamlet. Unlike Hamlet, he has a clear idea of how to fix it: He determines that Hamlet’s death will cure Denmark; he determines to make Hamlet the banished scapegoat whose blood will revive his kingdom.

Dodsworth notes that “The King’s guilt leads him to see himself as suffering from a ‘foul diseas,’ one which has grown ‘desperate’; he is well on the way to smelling too. Indeed, he smells already: ‘O, my offence is rank, it smells to heaven . . . .’ His concern for Polonius’ body need not be seen exclusively as an attempt to anticipate and placate the wrath of Laertes but as something more, a concern to deal with the bad smell of his own life by acting in a Christian manner . . . . Just as he sees Hamlet as the ‘hectic’ in his blood, putting on to his nephew the blame for his troubles which properly belongs to himself, so, by a similar process of displacement, the burial of Polonius is to be a burial of his ‘offence.’ The body of Polonius . . . is also symbolically for the King the ‘body of sin.’” He wants to bury his foul deeds; he does not know or does not believe that “foul deeds will rise,” even though that is the very process he has been witnessing.

But does Hamlet hint at any other way for the world to be put right? Or, is the order of Fortinbras the best we can hope for – the order of the original vengeful son, the order of honor and quarrel, the order established by the conqueror of eggshells? To answer those questions, we need to take some time to examine Act 5.

ACT 5
We will examine scene 1, and scene 2 through line 202. Act 5 begins not with Hamlet, nor with Claudius and Gertrude. The scene is not located at the court, but at a graveyard, where two “clowns” are busy clowning and grave-digging. Before we hear them begin to speak, we realize that this scene is a fitting one. Death, decay, rotting have been common themes from the beginning. When we see a grave in the middle of the stage, we immediately think back to the “commonness of death,” the canon ‘gainst self-slaughter, the convocation of politic worms, Alexander stopping a bung hole. We have heard of one murder, and have seen another, and when gravediggers appear we are alerted, if we weren’t already, to expect more. But then they speak, and the potentially sinister opening scene dissipates into comedy. (Shakespeare achieves a similar effect with the clown that delivers the asp to Cleopatra.) The very appearance of talking clowns in a play elsewhere mainly populated by princes, kings, queens, courtiers, and their agents, is subversive. And so are their words: Diggers, not princes and kings, are the true heirs of Father Adam; gentlemen and gentlewomen have the advantage of getting Christian burial that their inferiors do not – though this social criticism is subverted by the gravedigger’s pity for the nobility, since this amounts to greater freedom for suicide.

When Hamlet appears on the stage, he is calm, a different Hamlet from the frenzied traveler to England. The last time we saw him, he was soliloquizing himself to bloody thoughts, but here is he, relaxed and exchanging jokes and observations with Horatio. He has changed, and many critics have suggested it is a change for the better. Dover Wilson suggests that Shakespeare was forced to this by the dramatic necessity helping the audience regain sympathy for his hero. Granville-Barker says that Hamlet is “fit at last for his take.” He now has “nerve to deal with that enemy himself.” To be sure, this has involved some hardening of his mind, but “his spirit is still not debased.” His “nobility” is evident in his apology to Laertes. He can be at peace, and he has become “the better a man for his ordeal.” Others have suggested that he displays “the composure of a man who has at least seen death, his own, and that of all mankind, in true perspective,” finally the philosopher that critics have wanted him to be. Never, according to another critic, has Hamlet ever been so “princely.”

Dodsworth will have none of this. He claims that Hamlet’s meditations on death at the graveside are abstract, since Hamlet is considering death as such, death-as-common, not death in particular. Hamlet’s is “the speech of someone who will not let bygones be bygones, who will not let the dead bury the dead, and who will not, either, take stock of the living in relation to the dead and in particular his own responsibility for the grave above which he stands.” He is contemptuous toward the “ass” and “knave” of a politician whose skull he sees, and is sentimental in his recollections of Yorick.

One way to work our way through these opening lines is to examine them in the light of the later conversation between Horatio and Hamlet. He tells Horatio the surprising story of his hair-breadth escape, how several impossible pieces fell into place so that he could return to Denmark. In this pattern, he discerns the hand of providence. Even when “deep plots do pall,” still “there’s a divinity that shapes our ends,/ Rough-hew them how we may.” All his plottings and tricks and traps are now seen as failures, rough pieces of timber that providence shapes and polishes so that all the pieces fit. In his “To be or not to be” soliloquy, Hamlet recognizes that action against will likely end in death (3.1). He takes action, trapping the king’s conscience; Claudius, as expected, responds murderously, yet, Hamlet survives. And it is this unlikely survival that leads to Hamlet’s sense that there is a providence in the fall of a sparrow, the apparently Christian stoicism of the last act. He expresses the same confidence further on, contemplating his fight with Laertes, when Hamlet again appeals to provide, citing Jesus’ assurance about the Father’s care for a sparrow to conclude that death is unavoidable but its time unknown. Death will come, and the readiness is all. There is time, there is time; Hamlet can wait for things to come to him, and for the opportunity to present itself.

Seen in the light, the opening dialogue with the gravedigger and Horatio about death show that Hamlet has come round to be reconciled with the inevitability of death. Death is common, and it will come, whatever Hamlet intends to do. And that might suggest that he has come round to an essentially Christian position that he can rest in providence, knowing that death is out of his hands and in God’s.

If this is Hamlet’s position, then the concluding scenes might work like this: Claudius has arranged things so that Hamlet is the scapegoat for his murder. By eliminating Hamlet order can be restored in Denmark. Hamlet meets this murderous intention with faith, calm in the knowledge that death comes when death may. By operating with a faith in providence, Hamlet places himself in a position where he is attacked first, and his eventual killing of Claudius can be seen as an act of self-defense – not as a revenge for his father’s murder but as revenge for his own. It is striking that the serpent king and the prince who overcomes him die together, and through their conjoint deaths Denmark is restored. That is to say, in Girardian terms, that Claudius is the scapegoating king, but Hamlet undoes the whole
scapegoating mechanism by volunteering as scapegoat. Denmark does not achieve “redemption,” but it is reordered at the end of the play.

A number of critics have emphasized Hamlet’s submission to Providence in the final act of the play. In a 1979 article on proverbs in Hamlet in Shakespeare Survey, Joan Larsen Klein suggests that the play dramatizes the limitations of reason, a theme that reaches a climax in Hamlet’s discourse on death in 5.1, which reduces “the greatest examples of human heroism to absurdity” and “reinforces Hamlet’s new understanding of the inability of reason to question that providence which is beyond human reason when he makes the primarily exponent of reason in the graveyard not Hamlet, but rather the foolish and forgetful gravedigger.” The limits of reason are “defined tangibly and spatially by bones in a grave.” After his encounter with the gravedigger, Hamlet no longer questions the nature of man. Rather than “anatomizing” man, rather than speaking in terms of human wisdom of proverbs, “Hamlet’s diction is explicitly theological and his proverbial fragment is biblical.” Hamlet comes to the point where he “affirms being,” the being he questions in Act 3, but at the same time “he denies to man the capacity to know truly anything here on earth.” Hamlet thus renounces scholarly and philosophical reason and instead “has willed himself to accept on faith the belief that providence will guide him to that final vengeance which is the Lord’s.” This surrender to providence makes it possible for Hamlet to act “with divine justice.”

For Fredson Bowers, Hamlet comes to an “assured feeling that he is only an instrument in the hands of God,” and this “sustains him against the ominous portent of disaster that seizes on his heart.” Bowers concludes: “From the Elizabethan point of view, divine providence works out the catastrophe with justice. The plotters are hoist by their own villainous schemes; and then, triumphantly, the opportunity is given Hamlet to kill Claudius in circumstances which relieve him from immortal penalty for blood. By stage doctrine he must die for the slaying of Polonius, and, more doubtfully, for that of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern perhaps, the first in which he was inadvertently and the second consciously a scourge; and that penalty is being exacted. Since he cannot now ascend the throne over Claudius’ body, all possible self-interest is removed. He has not plotted Claudius’ death in cold blood, but seized an opportunity which under no circumstances he could have contrived by blood-revenge, to kill as a dying act of public justice a manifest and open murderer, exposed by the death of Gertrude, while himself suffering the pangs of death as his victim . . . . Shakespeare takes great pains to remove the blood guilty from Hamlet by the expiation of his own death, and to indicate that the open killing was a ministerial act of public justice accomplished under the only possible circumstances. Hamlet’s death is sufficient to expiate that of Polonius in the past and of Laertes in the present. With Christian charity Hamlet accepts Laertes’ repentance . . . . Horatio’s blessing . . . are words of benediction for a minister of providence who died through anticipating heavenly justice but, like Samson, was never wholly cast off for his tragic fault and in the end was honored by fulfilling the divine plan in expiatory death.”

In his study of honor in Shakespeare’s plays, Norman Council suggests that the graveyard scene shows Hamlet accepting the limitations of human knowledge: “He sees that man’s understanding is so limited that he cannot discover if any valid bases for action exist, either in this world or the next, but he also sees that avoiding that dilemma by subjectively assigning a value, such as honour, in order to provide a basis for action is self-defeating.” As he explains his disposal of R&G to Horatio, Hamlet claims that he was a not entirely willing agent of some larger power. His acted “rashly” but also in self-defense, and besides R&G had made their choices by making love to their employment by the king. In his “we defy augury” speech, “Shakespeare brings Hamlet’s quest among the inscrutable values of his world to its logical conclusion.” To find a basis for action in any but the most limited context is impossible: The world is inscrutable, and “the conventional forms of behaviour required by obedience, honour, and love are untrustworthy guides in this world,” the only thing that remains is “the fatalistic ‘readiness’ to meet whatever circumstance ‘outrageous fortune’ or ‘the divine that shapes our ends’ might provide.” The play thus suggests that there might well be a permanent system of values that would provide the basis of action, but that we have only the slightest knowledge of that system.

That is an attractive hypothesis, but it fails in a couple of ways. First, it detaches Hamlet’s return to Denmark for his earlier soliloquies, where he is recurrently concerned with charting the most “honorable” or “noble” course of action. In his “To be or not to be” soliloquy, as I’ve said, Hamlet concludes that acting, even at the risk of passage into the unknown land of sleep and possible dreams, is nobler than suffering the slings and arrows that the world throws at him. Hamlet’s very return to Denmark is thus an act of nobility, an act of honor. His appearance in the graveyard is a sign that he has decided to take arms against the sea of troubles, oppose, and end them. He does that, but not by offering himself as a voluntary scapegoat and sacrifice for the sins of his Cain-like uncle-father. He opposes and ends troubles by killing his father.

Second, it is important to see that Hamlet discerns providential shaping in a series of events that end with the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, deaths that are not near his conscience. He is dismissive of his two school friends, as nothing more than “baser natures” that have had the misfortune to step between Claudius and himself. These are not the words of a self-sacrificing scapegoat.

What do we say then about Hamlet’s “change” and his stoic calm in the final act? It is an act of nobility, infused with a half-Christian sense of providence. He is ready, ready to kill Claudius when the opportunity presents itself, ready to die in the attempt. If Claudius has determined that Hamlet will be the scapegoat, Hamlet has determined the same for Claudius. The possibility of renouncing revenge does not appear to cross his mind, and the result is unsurprisingly bloody.

CONCLUSION
Does the play then hint at any proper resolution to the disorder of Denmark? Perhaps, but only by options that are left untried. No one in the play is able to pull himself out of the honor-revenge mentality, with its associated pathologies of mimetic rivalry, scapegoating, and redemptive violence. Hamlet does not; Claudius does not; Fortinbras inherits Denmark, but he’s just as puffed with ambition as any honorable prince; Laertes is so perfect an exemplar of honor that he seems almost a parody. Claudius does recognize a way of cure – seeking forgiveness from God, combined with renunciation of all the benefits he received from his sin. But he is incapable of taking the path this offers.