Atchley, Clinton P. E. “Reconsidering the Ghost
in Hamlet: Cohesion or Coercion?” The Philological Review
28.2 (Fall 2002): 5-20.
GHOST / HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS / THEOLOGICAL
This essay focuses “on some puzzling aspects of
the Ghost’s nature and look[s] at some possibilities of what the Ghost
may mean and how it functions in the play” (5). The “religious
atmosphere in Elizabethan England and how this may have affected
Shakespeare’s audience” (5) are considered, particularly the differing
Catholic and Protestant “beliefs concerning ghosts and the supernatural”
(8). Instead of defining “the true nature of ghosts for his audiences,”
Shakespeare “incorporates within his play both Catholic and Protestant
views of the Ghost and also presents a third perspective on the Ghost,
one steeped in folkloric tradition” (10). He “expects his audience to
perceive the Ghost for what it is, a diabolical manifestation on a
mission to trick Hamlet into forfeiting his soul” (12); the play’s
devastating/destructive conclusion “supports this interpretation” (12).
In “exhorting Hamlet to commit murder through an act of revenge, the
Ghost plays most foully for Hamlet’s soul” (14). The counter argument is
that “the Ghost tells the truth surrounding the circumstances of old
Hamlet’s death,” as corroborated by Claudius’ private “confession of
guilt”; but “a devil is capable of telling the truth if it enables him
to achieve his goal” (14). The question then becomes, once the Ghost has
accomplished his goal by motivating Hamlet to commit revenge (and,
hence, to loose his soul), why does it appear later in the closet scene
and in its nightgown? The answer is to perform two functions (14):
first, to prevent Hamlet’s convincing of Gertrude to repent; the Ghost’s
appearing only to Hamlet “intensifies Hamlet’s apparent madness such
that Gertrude attributes Hamlet’s accusations to his insanity. Her
moment of grace has passed” (16). Second, by appearing in the wife’s bed
chamber, wearing a nightgown, the Ghost “ reactivates the domestic
values that Hamlet keenly feels he has lost” (17), and evokes cherished
familial memories in Hamlet (18). “The ‘piteous action’ that the Ghost
makes is directed [. . .] at Hamlet, to wring his emotions and drive him
to distraction to make Gertrude think him mad. And it succeeds” (18).
[ top ]

Barker, Walter L. “‘The heart of my
mystery’: Emblematic Revelation in the Hamlet Play Scene.”
Upstart Crow 15 (1995): 75-98.
ART / HISTORY OF IDEAS / MOUSETRAP
In an effort to “explicate the coherence of the Hamlet
play scene and the function of The Murther of Gonzago,”
this essay proposes “a description of the scene in the context
of emblematic theatre” (75). Artistically, an emblem “both
represents some phenomena or human experience and interprets it in the
context of Neoplatonic truths, patterns, principles, etc., which the
Elizabethans in general held to be universal” (75). By inserting
an emblem (e.g., masque), Shakespeare “exploits” the “interplay
of limited and omniscient points of view” in order “to provide
his theatrical audience with an interpretive context for the stage audience’s
behavior in both the play scene and the drama as a whole” (76).
Hamlet’s discussions on theater with Polonius, Horatio, Rosencrantz,
Guildenstern, and the players prepare theatergoers for (and alert them
to) the emblematic presentation in the play scene. The dumb-show “represents
and interprets stage audience behavior by delineating a psychomachia
model of human nature which compels the interplay of value oriented
and passion driven responses to lost love in all human beings”
(86). In comparison, the dialogue of the Player-King and Player-King
provides “voices for the conflicting principles through which
transcendental Love shapes the Psychomachia responses to lost
love in human nature” (91). The Murther of Gonzago, as
“a figurative mirror of macrocosmic principle and microcosmic
human nature,” “delineates the variable pattern of moral
reductiveness, ‘passionate actions,’ and slanderous misreadings
in which all human beings, individually and collectively, act out blind
and poisoning responses to lost love” (91). Aside from the various
emotional, spiritual, and mental poisonings in Hamlet, the
final scene stages “a dance macabre of literal poisonings—by
sword and cup, by intent and mischance, feigned and overt, forced and
accidental, single and double—in which the characters complete
their tragic destruction of each other” (96). “Seen historically,
Shakespeare’s use of The Murther of Gonzago masque demonstrates
that he thought and wrote in the modes of emblematic and Neoplatonic
discourse that dominated Elizabethan art and sensibilities, and that
he was very good at it” (96).
[ top ]

Baumlin, James S., and Tita French Baumlin. “Chronos, Kairos, Aion:
Failures of Decorum, Right-Timing, and Revenge in Shakespeare’s
Hamlet.” Rhetoric and Kairos: Essays in History, Theory and
Praxis. Ed. Phillip Sipiora. Albany: State U of New York P, 2002.
165-86.
HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS
This reading contends that Shakespeare’s Prince
“presents a study in the failure of prudential, and, thus,
stands as a critical test of Humanist educational, ethical, political,
rhetorical theory. The fact that Hamlet [. . .] fails the test
reveals a crisis lying at the play’s thematic center, a crisis
concerning the age’s optimism toward the powers of human reason (and
action) and the Humanist aspiration to master worldly fortune” (165).
Analysis of three interwoven themes guides the exploration: “first, the
nature of Hamlet’s Humanist decorum; second, the Prince’s bungled
attempts at blood revenge; and, third, the play’s philosophical
exploration of competing temporalities and notions of ‘right-timing,’
particularly as reflected in the iconographic symbolisms surrounding
Prudence and Fortune, Time and Eternity” (165-66). But when Hamlet
ultimately concludes “Let be” (5.2.22), his “earlier wrestling with ‘to
be, or not to be’ (3.1.57) resolves into ‘be’ and ‘is’—into an eternal
present tense” (180). Upon death, Hamlet transcends “the niceties of
princely decorum, human language, and worldly time to enter the higher,
purer, timeless silence of ‘be’ (in which state, questions of Providence
are rendered moot, kairos meaningless, and prudentia
irrelevant)” (181).
[ top ]

Campbell, Dowling G. “The Double
Dichotomy and Paradox of Honor in Hamlet: With Possible Imagery
and Rhetorical Sources for the Soliloquies.” Hamlet Studies
23 (2001): 13-49.
HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS / RHETORICAL
In addition to proposing “some important source
considerations” of publications on honor (19) and exploring how
some critics (e.g., Watson, Desai) have come so close (but failed) to
identifying the key dichotomy in Hamlet, this essay suggests
that “Shakespeare uses the vengeance convention to dramatize a
paradox, one that is difficult to decipher because of language limitations:
the inherently and tragically violent virtue/vengeance dichotomy within
the honor code” (13). To avoid linguistic confusion with a single
English word that signals diverse/conflicting meanings, this article
utilizes the Spanish terms honor and honra: honor
“refers to humility and forgiveness and expanded, private, internal
goodness, whereas honra signifies pride and vengeance, public
‘satisfaction’ or retribution” (22). Honra
seems the primary tenet of everyone in Denmark—except the Prince:
honor “is instinctive and implicit in Hamlet’s
nature” (13-14). But he also wants to believe that he shares the
same principles, assumptions, and beliefs (and social constructs) as
everyone else (24). “It is Hamlet’s simultaneous and continuos
struggle with both sides of the dichotomy that constitutes his superlative
characterization . . .”, his “depth of feeling, his passion”
(24). The “devastating tug of war between private and public behaviors
and values occurs in Hamlet’s soul, as the soliloquies confirm,
and explains the hesitance or delay or dilemma” (14). Shakespeare
infuses Hamlet’s soliloquies “with the dichotomy, starting
with no blame, working into self-blame, and ending with a futile pledge
of bloody vengeance. It is the failure of vengeance to uproot Hamlet’s
sense of virtue which causes the underlying intensity” (37). Nothing
can shake “an innate virtuous sensibility and spur Hamlet into
killing,” not the “disgusting elemental considerations”
in the graveyard (36-37), and not “the shock of Ophelia’s
death” (35). “Claudius has to trick Hamlet into so much
as drawing his sword” (35). But even then, “Virtue rules”
(35): Hamlet is “apologetic” to Laertes, causing the conspirator
to “feel sorry” and to lament the lethal plan “in
an aside” (35). The “split within the honor code, complete
with devastating paradox, is what troubles Hamlet and Shakespeare”
(23). Shakespeare seems to be striving “to articulate the hypocrisy
of the honor code itself throughout his canon” (43-44).
In Hamlet (and Hamlet), he creates “a major theme with
the honor/honra paradox, even if he lacks those two
little terms” (46).
[ top ]

Cefalu, Paul A. “‘Damned
Custom . . . Habits Devil’: Shakespeare’s Hamlet,
Anti-Dualism, and the Early Modern Philosophy of Mind.” ELH
67 (2000): 399-431. <wysiwyg://31/http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elh/vo67/67.2cefalu.html>
8 May 2001.
HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS / PHILOSOPHICAL
This essay briefly examines “some modern and pre-modern
theories of the mind—those of Gilbert Ryle, Putnam, Augustine,
Pomponazzi, and Jeremy Taylor—in order to suggest first that Renaissance
philosophy and theology held theories of the mind that resemble modern-day
anti-dualistic accounts of behaviorism and functionalism, and second
that Shakespeare’s Hamlet is implicated in this behaviorist-functionalist
tradition rather than in the innatist tradition into which it has usually
been placed” (400). Too often critics mistakenly conflate “third-person
statements about Hamlet’s mental states with Hamlet’s first-person
reports, reports which aim to understand the role of behavior, habit,
and custom in knowing and acting, rather than to explore any Cartesian
theater of the mind” (400). In actuality, “for most of the
play Hamlet is a radical Rylean behaviorist, inasmuch as he believes
mental phenomena and predicates gain meaning only when they are identified
in a one-to-one relationship with behavioral predicates” (400).
Shaping Hamlet’s behaviorism “is the early modern assimilation
of the Augustine-Protestant theory of the ineradicability of vicious
habits” (400). “Hamlet’s understanding of the theological
construal of habit helps to explain both his irresolution . . . and
his sense that personal identity or subjective states are identical
with customary behavioral dispositions” (400-01). In reifying
and objectifying habits, he “imagines persons to be constituted
by behavior, custom, and dispositional states all the way down, so that
they are unendowed with what Derek Parfit would describe as any further
facts to their psychological identity, such as disembodied minds or
thoughts” (401). “Hamlet inherits a widely-held Augustine-Protestant
preoccupation with the tortured relationship among habit, sin, and action.
If there is any incredible objective correlative operating in the play,
it describes Hamlet’s over-indulgence in, and misconstrual of,
this tradition, which recognized the utility of retaining virtuous patterns
of conduct as correctives to customary sin” (428).
[ top ]

Champion, Larry S. A springe to catch
woodcocks: Proverbs, Characterization, and Political Ideology
in Hamlet. Hamlet Studies 15 (1993): 24-39.
HISTORY OF IDEAS / NEW HISTORICISM / PROVERBS / RHETORICAL
This article analyzes Shakespeares conscious use of proverbs
to develop and enhance characterization and also to lend emotional
and intellectual credibility to an ideological leitmotif that foregrounds
political issues of concern to the Elizabethan spectator (26).
The proverbs spoken by Polonius, Laertes, and Ophelia reflect
an intellectual shallowness; Claudius proverbs suggest
something sinister and Machiavellian about his character; and
Hamlets proverbs (as well as the ones others use to describe the
Prince) reveal something of the complexity of the man (28).
Aside from helping to develop characters, Shakespeares application
of proverbs also forces the spectators attention to political
issues that underlie the major action (32), such as the struggle
for power and concern for legitimacy. Given the political climate of
the Elizabethan period, Shakespeares audience was interested in
these political matters. The playwright uses proverbs to generate
a high degree of interest in oppositional politics by depicting diverse
ideologies that compete on stage in recreated Denmark and in the minds
of the English spectators (34).
[ top ]
Cleaves, David. To Thine Own
Self be False: Polonius as a Danish Seneca. Shakespeare Yearbook
3 (1992): 45-61.
HISTORY OF IDEAS / POLONIUS
This article proposes that Polonius invites comparison to Senecanot
to the tragedies or essays, but rather to the biography of Seneca himself
(45). Regardless of current research on Seneca, Renaissance publications,
as well as John Marstons The Malcontent, reflect negative
opinions of the Roman. In this historical context, Seneca and Polonius
share several characteristics: both are hypocrites, flatters, and ministers
to tyrants (Nero and Claudius, respectively). Although Polonius appears
as an imitation of Seneca, he also mocks the Senecan philosophy; but
perhaps parody is a necessary choice for the playwright trying to avoid
the unfashionable style of Senecan imitation. Fluctuating between derision
and concurrence, Shakespeare reveals his familiarity with Thomas Nashes
criticism of Senecan imitations through subtle clues within the play.
According to this article, Shakespeare found the advice of Nashe
and of Nashes supporters to be worth not only ridicule but obedience
(57).
[ top ]

Coyle, Martin. Hamlet, Gertrude and the Ghost:
The Punishment of Women in Renaissance Drama. Q/W/E/R/T/Y 6
(Oct. 1996): 29-38.
HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS / NEW HISTORICISM
By presenting Hamlet in the context of the Renaissance drama
canon, this essay argues that Hamlets difficulties over
Gertrude are not so much psychological as political, or, more accurately
perhaps, ideological (29). A survey of Renaissance revenge tragedies
(e.g., A Woman Killed with Kindness, Othello,
The Changeling, Tis Pity Shes a Whore,
The Revengers Tragedy) reveals the key codes of disciplining
an adulteress: the male has a duty to punish the female (and perhaps
to rescue her soul) (31); the punishment is a reclaiming
of rights over her body and control of her will (33); any physical
violence must be within the boundaries of propriety (e.g., suffocation)
(33); and only husbands or lovers are permitted to kill the woman (34).
This brief study also highlights the importance of the marital bed as
a symbol. Hamlets protagonist repeatedly stresses Gertrudes
soiled bed, revealing a primary concern to restore the royal bed
to its former status as a symbol of chaste marriage, fidelity, loyalty,
innocence (37). In the closet scene, the son breaks with the Ghost
by attempting to punish (and to save) the adulteress with verbal violence,
but Gertrude can only be saved by her true husband, Old
Hamlet, who, of course, cannot help or harm her (36); her
destiny is sealed by sexual codes that lie outside their [the
Ghosts and Hamlets] control and, indeed, outside the control
of the text (36). In the final scene, Hamlet acts in his
own right to avenge his mother and himself rather than as an agent of
his father (35). By moving away from the tradition of the Oedipus
Complex, this interpretation shows how different Hamlet
is from the play modern psychological criticism had given us (37).
[ top ]

Deans, Thomas. “Writing,
Revision, and Agency in Hamlet.” Exemplaria 15.1 (Spring
2003): 223-43.
HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS / TEXTS
This article argues “that acts of writing and
rewriting in Hamlet not only reveal key dimensions of Hamlet’s
character but also showcase humanistic literacy practices associated
with the Renaissance commonplace book” (223). Hamlet initially responds
“to the commandment of his father in act 1 by fearfully copying words
verbatim into his commonplace notebook” (228). But the words only
represent “a stray fragment, recorded in his notebook but not recruited
for use in a larger purpose” because Hamlet “has not yet learned how to
translate this commandment into conduct” (236). His 16-line addition to
the original Mousetrap script is “the first time in the play
Hamlet demonstrates a creative facility with reading and writing, and as
a direct consequence of his crafty revision he exposes Claudius and
discovers a means to act in the world as both an avenging son and an
assertive prince”; “here, as elsewhere in the play, we observe Hamlet’s
personal agency emerge in direct relationship to a material act of
writing—through revising a text and observing its effect on an audience”
(238). When Hamlet rewrites Claudius’s execution order to England, he
“creatively revises a text and by means of that revision finds a way to
act effectively in the world”; “using writing (or rather, rewriting) to
both subvert and assume Claudius’s regal power,” the Prince “takes
control of his life only as he takes control of written discourse”
(239). “He re-envisions his own agency by means of revising written
text” (241), reflecting his development “into a writer of humanistic
sensibilities for whom creatively appropriating existing texts is more
important than inventing wholly original texts” (240). “Even though he
ultimately develops the capacity to revise and reframe his father’s
commandment, he is still compelled by conscience and paternal authority
to obey its central imperative” (242). Hamlet also “does not have
absolute power to script the ending of his choice” due to the play’s
“conventions of tragedy” and its “interactive arena where characters act
and react in relation to one another” (242). “Hamlet’s capacity to read
and revise text, as it emerges in the course of the play, confirms at
least a measure of personal agency made possible by writing and suggests
the pivotal role that writing can play not only in developing character
[. . .] but also in setting right a world out of joint” (242-43).
[ top ]

DiMatteo, Anthony. “Hamlet
as Fable: Reconstructing a Lost Code of Meaning.” Connotations
6.2 (1996/1997): 158-79.
HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS / MYTHIC CRITICISM / OPHELIA
This article explores how the “nexus” of
Hamlet and mythic heroes “links with another analogy between fable
and history that involves an unsettling convergence of spirits”
(159), how Shakespeare’s audience perceived “the myths’
cognitive potential . . . to have great speculative power” (159-60),
as well as how myths are “enlisted but also deeply called into
question by Hamlet” (160). A comparison of terminology,
imagery, and plot between mythology and the play identifies parallels
between Hamlet / Adonis / Orpheus / Vulcan / Aeneas / Hercules and Ophelia
/ Venus / Dido. While “classical points of contact” suggest
a “symbolic coding and an implied range of meanings,” they
also locate Hamlet “in a relationship to a specific audience
or readership trained in academic recital and exegesis of Ovid and Virgil”
(164). Due to the “hermeneutical traditions as they had come to
evolve in the late Renaissance,” one must “read myth allusions
in Hamlet not archetypically but stenographically” (165).
For example, the “acquired double potential of myth allowing it
to serve simultaneously as examples of human virtue and vice complexly
connects in the play with Hamlet’s anxiety not only about his
father’s apparition but also his own thoughts” (165). Is
the Ghost a reliable source or “Vulcan (a daimon) forging his
son (or a soul) into an agent of evil” (167)? Are Hamlet’s
“imaginings” merely “misconceptions” or “the
results of a moral contamination” (166)? The analogies between
Hamlet’s experience and that of his mythic predecessors “indicate
how Hamlet in plot, terms and phrases lingers over a whole
range of ancient concerns through which late Renaissance culture both
couched and covered over its own ambition and fears” (167-68).
“Arguably,” Hamlet “stages the death not
only of Hamlet but of the typically Renaissance belief in eloquence
as some ultimate civilizing or enlightening process” (172). “The
implied cleft between the miraculous possibilities posited in fable
and the brute mortality of historical events in Denmark can also be
sensed in the play if we consider the contrary influences of Ovid and
Virgil upon the myths that the play takes up” (173): Hamlet seems
“caught between the Virgilian sublime and Ovidian mutability”
(173-74), and “Virgil’s permanent order and Ovid’s
flux seem to vie for influence over the play” (174). “By
bringing these parallelisms with figures from epic and fable to bear
upon the history of Hamlet, the play acts out the tragic pathos
that results when history and myth are implicitly revealed to be irreconcilable”
(175). “The conflict of myth and history and of art and life is
densely articulated through symbolic shorthand in Hamlet” (175).
[
top ]

Dunn, Leslie C. “Ophelia’s
Song’s in Hamlet: Music, Madness, and the Feminine.”
Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western
Culture. Ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones. New Perspectives
in Music History and Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994. 50-64.
FEMINISM / HISTORY OF IDEAS / MUSIC / OPHELIA
This essay argues “that the representation of Ophelia’s
madness involves a mapping of her sexual and psychological difference
onto the discursive ‘difference’ of music” and that
“this dramatic use of music reflects the broader discourse of
music in early modern English culture, with its persistent associations
between music, excess and the feminine” (52). Early modern British
writers contend with “the conflicting ideologies of music inherited
from Platonic and Christian thought”: music represents “the
earthly embodiment of divine order,” but it also introduces “sensuous
immediacy” and “semantic indeterminacy” (56). While
Pythagorean harmony “is music in its positive or ‘masculine’
aspect,” music also possesses the capability of “cultural
dissonance” in its “negative or ‘feminine’ aspect”
(58). In Hamlet, singing allows Ophelia to become “both
the literal and the figurative ‘dissonance’ that ‘expresses
marginalities’” (59). Her representation “draws on
gender stereotypes of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage” and
simultaneously dislocates them (60): “If Ophelia’s singing
lets ‘the woman’ out, then, it does so in such a way as
to problematize cultural constructions of women’s song, even while
containing her within their re-presentation”; but her “disruptive
feminine energy must be reabsorbed into both the social and the discursive
orders of the play” (62). Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s
drowning “re-appropriates Ophelia’s music” and “aestheticizes
her madness, makes it ‘pretty’” (63). Rather than
dismiss Ophelia’s singing “as a conventional sign of madness,”
critics should “acknowledge its significance” by “making
her singing our subject” (64).
[ top ]

Hamana, Emi. “Whose Body Is
It, Anyway?—A re-Reading of Ophelia.” Hamlet and Japan.
Ed. Yoshiko Uéno. Hamlet Collection 2. New York: AMS,
1995. 143-54.
FEMINISM / HISTORY OF IDEAS / OPHELIA
According to this article, although Hamlet “treats
the question of the female body through masculine ideologies and fantasies,”
the text is “not a closed, monolithic structure,” as is
demonstrated by the contradictions discussed in this essay (143). A
brief examination of Christian tradition and Cartesian dualism explains
the Elizabethan tendencies towards misogyny and somatophobia (143).
In Hamlet, Gertrude’s sinful lust is punished by the
objectification and de-sexualization of the body, but the innocent and
puppet-like Ophelia also “suffers a series of patriarchal oppressions”
(145). While the mad scene follows the “Renaissance theatrical
convention” and “the masculine assumption” of “mad
women as erotomaniacs,” it also “has a subversive dimension”:
“It invites us to rethink the conceptualization and representation
of the female body” with contradictions that “question patriarchal
ideology” (146). Ophelia’s madness disrupts the play’s
dynamics (146), and “grants her autonomy as a subject” (147);
most importantly, it shows “the dualism of mind and body,”
not as binary opposites but as “inseparably related” (147-148).
This “embodying of the mind” (149) contrasts sharply with
Hamlet’s aspirations of “separating the masculine mind (reason)
from the feminine body” (148). In the drowning report, the similar
merger of “mind/body and subject/object” “represents
a different kind of female body: not a fixed entity but a mutable structure”
(151). Ophelia “revolts against those forces that shape her textual
boundary,” “destabilizes patriarchal control, and resists
masculine fantasy of order and universalization” (152).
[ top ]

Hart, Jeffrey. “Hamlet’s
Great Song.” Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward
the Revival of Higher Education. By Hart. New Haven: Yale UP, 2001.
169-86.
HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS / PHILOSOPHICAL
While continuing the monograph’s argument that the
Renaissance was marked by “the intellectual availability of various
and often incompatible ways of looking at the world” (e.g., Christianity,
Machiavellism) (181), this chapter contends that, in Hamlet, Shakespeare
“clearly decided to express a wide range of poetic possibilities
and make him the epitome of his age”—the artistic product
is “a credible human being and even a credible genius” (175).
Hamlet fully engages “most or even all of the contradictory possibilities
of the Renaissance, from the lofty aspirations of Pico della Mirandola
to bottomless skepticism, from the ideals of humanism to recurrent thoughts
of suicide, from the intellectual reaches of Wittenberg to mocking cynicism
and an awareness of the yawning grave” (178). “The stature
of Prince Hamlet as a great tragic hero rests upon the fact that though
in all practical terms he was a catastrophe—those bodies all over
the stage—he nevertheless gave himself to and fully articulated
the cosmos available to him in all of its splendor, horror, and multiple
contradiction” (182). What Hamlet “says becomes the core
of the play. It is his voice, not his deeds, that dominates the stage
. . .” (169). “The great loss, the terror, we feel at the
end of the play comes from the realization that his voice, that great
song, is now stilled and that nothing like it will be heard again”
(169).
[ top ]

Iwasaki, Soji. “Hamlet
and Melancholy: An Iconographical Approach.” Hamlet and Japan.
Ed. Yoshiko Uéno. Hamlet Collection 2. New York: AMS,
1995. 37-55.
ART / HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS
This argument interprets Hamlet as Shakespeare’s
“play of Saturn in that the Saturnine atmosphere of melancholy
and death, initially brought by the ghost of the dead King Hamlet in
the opening scene, is dominant throughout” (37). The play’s
combinations of doomsday/prelapsarian paradise, light/darkness, mirth/mourning,
time/timeless (38), uncle/father, aunt/mother, appearance/reality, (40),
and order/chaos cause Hamlet to slip into melancholy and to suffer from
“disillusionment and doubt” (41). His posture of melancholy
replicates that of “the classical Saturn on which is based the
icon of melancholy in Renaissance art”: a figure who is “supposed
to be of a melancholy humour, sinister, fond of solitude and to dislike
women” (39). But Hamlet matures. After experiencing “God
while at sea,” Hamlet “is now ready to accept whatever should
come” (44). Although the final scene “is a dramatic version
of the Triumph of Death,” Hamlet perceives that “this scene
of so many deaths is neither the triumph of Death nor that of Fortune”
(45). Because of his “readiness,” Hamlet “finally
transcends the life of meditation to attain a higher ideal—meditation
and action synthesized” (46). Hamlet achieves the ideal of the
Renaissance, but the real tragedy is that his life “is so brief”
(47).
[ top ]

Kawai, Shoichiro. “Hamlet’s
Imagination.” Hamlet and Japan. Ed. Yoshiko Uéno.
Hamlet Collection 2. New York: AMS, 1995. 73-85.
HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS
The thesis of this article is that “Imagination
is closely related to both passion and reason, and it is through his
imagination that he [Hamlet] regains his composure in the last Act”
(74). Notable philosophers (e.g., Bacon, Plato, Burton, Wright, Donne)
have long considered imagination as “the intermediary between
sense and reason”: the senses perceive information to create a
“phantasma” or image of an object that the reason judges
(74). Hamlet does not have an overactive or problematic imagination;
for example, he sees the same ghost that others witness (76), but his
awareness of potentially interfering passions motivates him to test
his judgement, ergo The Mousetrap. Because “passion betrays
itself and brings forth a misconceived action” (e.g., Polonius’
murder), Hamlet continuously “tries to control his emotions”
(78). As the arguments surrounding Sir James Hales’ suicide and
the three branches of action show, “one has to have some emotions
and impulses aroused by imagination” in order to complete an act
(80). Unfortunately, Hamlet’s “imagination works in such
a way that it weakens his resolution instead of strengthening it”
(81). After his voyage, Hamlet’s imagination helps him to realize
that he was not “born to set things right,” nor is he Hercules
facing a “most difficult task” (83): “if he is to
be the heaven’s ‘scourge and minister’ (III.iv.175),
it is not through his own will, but heaven’s” (83-84).
[ top ]
Kim, Jong-Hwan. “Waiting for Justice:
Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Elizabethan Ethics of Revenge.”
English Language and Literature 43 (1997): 781-97.
AUDIENCE RESPONSE / HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS
“This study focuses on the Elizabethan ethics concerning
revenge and the meaning of Hamlet’s waiting for justice or delaying
for revenge and its meaning will be discussed with reference to the
Elizabethan ethics of revenge” (782). Shakespeare endows the Ghost
with ambiguity, mixing “personal vindictiveness” with a
“concern for Gertrude” (782), and Elizabethan audiences
“regarded the ghost which keeps on urging to revenge as a devil”
(783). Naturally, Hamlet has suspicions “about the nature of the
Ghost as Elizabethans did, and it is natural that he waits for revenge
until he confirms the credibility of the Ghost’s statements”
(782). While The Mousetrap elicits proof of the Ghost’s
accusations, the “command to revenge still contains ethical problems
in terms of the Elizabethan ethics” (784): “All Elizabethan
orthodoxy condemned and punished personal revenge” (785). But
Shakespeare’s contemporary audience was still influenced by a
residual pagan revenge ethic which commanded a person to avenge the
murder of a family member. Perhaps Shakespeare “hoped to appeal
to audiences’ instinct” by presenting an individual’s
“struggle against ruthless revenge and his reluctance to be the
conventional revenger” (788). Fortunately, the “contradiction
between the official code of the Elizabethan ethics of revenge and the
popular code of revenge is resolved” in the final scene of the
play (794). Hamlet appears as “an agent to practice the public
revenge or justice through the hand of Providence, when Claudius’
crime was exposed to public. Through this device, Shakespeare made the
Elizabethan audiences sympathize strongly with Hamlet’s final
action; he abstains from ruthless vengeance. His action might have had
their emotional approval and not disturbed their moral judgement”
(788). “Hamlet’s action of waiting for justice and delaying
injustice, the core of his action, may be admired from either the Christian
point of view or the view point of the Elizabethan ethics” (795).
[ top ]

Knowles, Ronald. “Hamlet
and Counter-Humanism.” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999):
1046-69).
HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS
This essay reexamines “the question of subjectivity
in Hamlet by reappraising the significance of the Renaissance
revival of philosophic skepticism; the continued debate between medieval
views of the misery of man’s life and the Renaissance celebration
of existence; the particular importance of the commonplace in the theory
and practice of dialectical and rhetorical topics” (1066). “In
the anguish of grief and loathing Hamlet’s subjectivity is realized
in a consciousness which rejects the wisdom of tradition for the unique
selfhood of the individual” (1066). Yet culture “is as much
within as without the mind and Hamlet is forced to submit to the plot
and history, albeit in a series of burlesque roles, but for a moment
he has stood seemingly, ‘Looking before and after’ (4.4.37),
back to antiquity and forward to our own age . . . in which ‘identity
crisis’ has become a commonplace expression” (1066-67).
[ top ]

Landau, Aaron. “‘Let
me not burst in ignorance’: Skepticism and Anxiety in Hamlet.”
English Studies 82.3 (June 2001): 218-30.
GHOST / HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS / NEW HISTORICISM / PHILOSOPHICAL
/ THEOLOGICAL
This essay proposes that, by considering Hamlet “within
the context of the Reformation and the concurrent skeptical crisis,
the distinctly epistemological making of Hamlet’s ineffectuality
takes on an intriguing historical dimension: it suggests the utter ineffectuality
of human knowledge as this ineffectuality was advocated by contemporary
skeptics” (218). The opening scene presents “the debacle
of human knowledge” (219), the “mixed, inconsistent, confused,
and tentative versions of human understanding” through the “uselessness”
of Horatio’s learning to communicate with the Ghost and the in-conclusiveness
of Bernardo’s “Christian narrative” to explain the
spirit (220). This “contradistinction with standard versions of
early modern skepticism, which vindicate and embrace human ignorance
as against the violent pressures of early modern religious dogmatism,”
suggests Shakespeare “to be anxious about uncertainty and its
discontents in a way that Greek and humanist skeptics never are”
(220). Hamlet’s direct echoing “of contemporary thinkers
as diverse as Montaigne and Bruno only strengthens the impression that
the play, far from representing a systematic or even coherent line of
thought, virtually subsumes the intellectual confusion of the age”
(221). “The ghost functions as the very emblem of such confusion”
(221), withholding “the type of knowledge most crucial to early
modern minds: religious knowledge” (220). The “very issues
that are associated, in the Gospels, with the defeat of skeptical anxiety,
had become, during the Reformation, axes of debate, rekindling skeptical
anxiety rather than abating it” (223). In this context, the Ghost
appears “as an implicit, or inverted, revelation” (222),
“a grotesque, parodic version of Christ resurrected” (223):
instead of “elevating Hamlet to a truly novel and unprecedented
level of knowledge” (224), the Ghost “leaves Hamlet with
nothing but ignorance” (222). Hamlet claims to believe the Ghost
after The Mousetrap, but his ensuing “blunders”
“debunk the sense of certainty that he pretends to have established”
(227). The problem seems the “inescapably political” world
of Denmark, where “errors, partial judgements, and theological
(mis)conceptions are never only academic, they cost people their lives
and cannot, therefore, be dismissed as unavoidable and innocuous imperfections
or indifferent trifles,” as Montaigne and Pyrrhonist believe (228).
[ top ]

Levy, Eric P. “‘Defeated joy’:
Melancholy and Eudaemonia in Hamlet.” Upstart
Crow 18 (1998): 95-109.
HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS / PHILOSOPHICAL
Approaching Hamlet’s melancholy in terms of “eudaemonia
or the classical idea of happiness,” this article explores how
Hamlet’s “pain is eventually linked with a distinctly tragic
doctrine of eudaemonia according to which unhappiness or dysdaemonia
can fulfill a purpose higher than eudaemonia” (95). In
a classical context, happiness “is not merely a state but the
ultimate goal or telos of life,” “directed by virtue”
and achieved by “the appropriate use of an aptitude or
capacity” (96). Unfortunately, the Ghost’s call for revenge
“launches Hamlet on a dramatically ambivalent ‘course of
thought’ (III.iii.83) concerning the proper exercise of his own
thinking” (97), making him “eudaemonistically challenged”
(98). “Hamlet’s antithetical pronouncements on the proper
exercise of reason reflect—and to some extent epitomize—the
great antipodes of Renaissance moral doctrine: Stoicism and opportunism”
(98). “According to Stoicism, happiness or eudaemonia
requires emotionless acceptance of circumstance over which the individual
has no final control”; “But according to opportunism, happiness
or eudaemonia results from the deft exploitation of circumstance”
(105). The Murder of Gonzago emphasizes the “conflict
between these opponent interpretations of fortune”: “the
impromptu staging of that play exemplifies shrewd opportunism,”
but the Player-King stoically articulates “the fragility of human
‘enterprises’ (III.i.86)” (105). “The disjunction
between Stoicism and opportunism—acceptance of universal scheme
or exploitation of immediate circumstance—achieves ‘reconcilement’
(V.ii.243) in the notion of the drama, Hamlet, as subsuming
design unfolded through the singular actions of character” (106).
For example, Hamlet opportunistically rewrites his own death warrant
but “is acutely aware of a higher power directing his destiny.
Hence, the notion of ‘play’ or drama not only becomes a
metaphor for the encompassing design of end-shaping divinity, but also
underscores Hamlet’s own status as the eponymous hero of the tragedy
concerning him” (106).
[ top ]

Levy, Eric. “The Problematic Relation
Between Reason and Emotion in Hamlet.” Renascence
53.2 (Winter 2001): 83-95.
HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS
This article suggests that, “though Hamlet is filled
with references to the need for rational control of emotion, the play
probes much deeper into the relation between reason and emotion—particularly
with respect to the role of reason in provoking as opposed
to controlling emotion” (84). According to “the
classical definition,” “man” is “the rational
animal whose reason has the ethical task of rationally ordering the
passions or emotional disturbances of what is formally termed the sensitive
appetite” (83). But the Aristotelian-Thomist notion of sorrow
holds that “reason not only controls emotion but also
provokes it,” as “inward pain is perceived by the mind”—“a
mental event” that cannot exist without thought (88).
The Aristotelian-Thomist synthesis proposes that “inward pain
seeks relief through outward expression” (90). Yet such a purging
of inner pain “can subject its audience to tremendous strain,”
as the play demonstrates, for example, through the effects that Hamlet’s
destructive guise of madness have on Ophelia (90). Instead of relief
through outer expression, the play suggests that inward pain can be
escaped by recognition/understanding of how thought contributes to it
and by “modification of the mode of thought creating that pain”
(89). For example, Claudius advises Hamlet to end his prolonged mourning
by accepting the “inevitability of death” (89); and Hamlet
soothes his “misgiving” prior to the duel by shifting his
focus to providence (90). Interestingly, his embracing of providence
allows Hamlet to convert, what the Aristotelian-Thomist doctrine terms
as the “anxiety” and “perplexity” induced by
“unforeseen circumstance” into “emotional peace”
through “mental awareness (91-92)—“Let be” (5.2.220).
While Aristotelian-Thomist synthesis perceives the role of reason as
controlling emotion, through moderation, Hamlet uses his thinking to
transform emotion (93)—“there is nothing either good or
bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2.249-50). “The highest
task of conscience in Hamlet concerns the moral evaluation
not only of the objects of thought or apprehension, but also of the
act of thinking about those objects,” for “There remains
the responsibility of thought to recognize the emotional consequences
of its own activity” (94).
[ top ]

Nojima, Hidekatsu. “The Mirror
of Hamlet.” Hamlet and Japan. Ed. Yoshiko Uéno.
Hamlet Collection 2. New York: AMS, 1995. 21-35.
ART / HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS / NEW HISTORICISM
This article approaches Hamlet as a play reflective
of the Renaissance’s “discovery of perspective” (21).
A survey of innovations in visual and literary arts shows that “the
discovery of an individual point of view necessarily brings about a
subjective or relativistic perception of the world” (24). In Hamlet,
the Prince, “after his mother’s re-marriage, becomes a prisoner
of ‘the curious perspective’ in which ‘everything
seems double’” (28): “The ‘conscience’
(consciousness) of Hamlet caught in the collusion of these double-images
[e.g., reality/dream, waking/sleeping, action/inaction, reason/madness]
is imprisoned in a labyrinth of mirrors” (28-29). In the curious
perspective, the revenging hero (by feigning madness) doubles as the
fool; hence, Hamlet’s motives for revenge are “undermined
by the complicity of the Fool with the Hero which necessarily reduces
all to absurdity or nothing” (30). The “‘good’
or ‘bad’ is nothing but an anamorphosis reflected in the
curious perspective of Hamlet’s inner world” (30). The structure
of this play “is likewise a labyrinth of mirrors. Various themes
echo with one another like images reflected between mirrors” (31).
Examples include the multiple models of the father/son relationship
and the revenge theme. In addition, “Almost all the characters
are spies in Hamlet,” further suggesting the curious
perspective; the recurrent poison theme also seems “reflected
in the mirror” (32). All of the plotting characters become ensnared
in their own traps, because “reflexives of plotting and plotter
are nothing but an image in the reflector” (33). Adding to the
complexity, the dramatic genre leaves Hamlet “to the
liberty and responsibility of an actor’s or an audience’s
or a reader’s several curious perspective” (34).
[ top ]

Nyberg, Lennart. "Hamlet, Student,
Stoic-Stooge?" Cultural Exchange Between European Nations During
the Renaissance: Proceedings of the Symposium Arranged in Uppsala by
the Forum for Renaissance Studies of the English Department of Uppsala
University, 5-7 June 1993. Ed. Gunnar Sorelius and Michael
Srigley. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia
86. Uppsala: Uppsala U, 1994. 123-32.
CLAUDIUS / HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS
Attempting "a synthesis of what has been discovered
about the intellectual and theatrical nature of the play," this
study approaches Hamlet "from the point of view of the
idea of role-playing, as it is explored in the play and reflected in
the intellectual background, especially in the Italian sources of Castiglione
and Machiavelli" (125). The very "idea of role-playing, which
in many of the comedies is explored with a sense of joy and liberation,
is in Hamlet more often than not viewed with disgust"
(127). For example, Hamlet spends much of the play not only trying out
roles for himself but making the masks of others slip (128-29). Castiglione
considers an individuals mask "affectation" (127). Hamlet
has the "skill to read the deceptive masks of others," as
the nunnery scene proves (129). But he never really succeeds in unmasking
Claudius with The Mousetrap. The problem is that the King "is
as skillful a role-player as Hamlet himself" (129). Both share
striking characteristics of Machiavellism (130) and of an adeptness
with improvisation (129). Even their "expressions for a belief
in providence" are eerily similar (130). Together, Claudius and
Hamlet suggest the play's conflicting assessments of role-playing: "On
the one hand the role-playing capacity of man is celebrated but, on
the other hand, the immoral purposes it can be employed for give it
a dark tinge" (131).
[ top ]

Sadowski, Piotr. "The 'Dog's day' in Hamlet:
A Forgotten Aspect of the Revenge Theme." Shakespeare and His
Contemporaries: Eastern and Central European Studies. Ed. Jerzy
Liman and Jay L. Halio. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1993. 159-68.
HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS
Focusing primary on Hamlet's words to Laertes-"The
cat will mew, and dog will have his day" (5.1.292)-this essay proposes
that many of Hamlet's "cryptic statements" have a "profound
significance and point to a complex of ideas existing outside of Shakespeare's
text in the sources and traditions to which Hamlet's story originally
belonged" (159). For example, possible Hamlet sources
(e.g., Historia Danica, History of Rome, Ambales
saga, Shahname) consistently contain "the identification
of the heroes with dogs or wolves in their role of fierce avengers and
rectifiers of their wrongs" (161). These "canine allusions"
"refer to a well-defined complex of cultural ideas and rituals,
particularly characteristic of pre-Christian Scandinavia, in which canine
symbolism played a dominant role" (161). Hamlet's "barbaric,
'canine' soul" ultimately awakens in the play's final scene, doing
justice to "the vast and old heroic tradition of pagan Scandinavia"
(166).
[ top ]

Taylor, James O. The Influence of Rapier
Fencing on Hamlet. Forum for Modern Language Studies
29.3 (1993): 203-15.
DUEL / HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS
This article contends that Hamlets transformation in the last
act of the play, Rosencrantz and Guildensterns execution, as well
as the slayings of Claudius and Laertes are best understood if
seen in the context of fencing, the imagery of which informs and illuminates
the play (203). A brief survey of Elizabethan fencing trends and
of Vincentio Saviolos guidance to duelers provides an informative
backdrop for the argument based on the relationship between the
rapier as an effective weapon and the word as a rapieran
even more effective weapon (205). Throughout Hamlet,
fencing and language are related because Hamlets metaphorical
sharpening and focusing of language mirrors the duelists
need to keep his weapon honed and his skill exercised so that
he will be ready to counter any attack (206). For example, Hamlets
words in 2.2 moves toward the satiric tradition in which words
are wielded as whips and lances and daggers; the Prince turns
to Juvenal for instruction in their [words] use because
he has not yet fully mastered their power (208); Hamlets
meeting with the players marks the moment when the satirist and
avenger coalesce in Hamlet, as he grasps the potential of
language to strip pretence from the hypocrites and cut deceit from corrupt
statesmen (209); with Gertrude and Ophelia, Hamlets speech
becomes pointed and rapier-edged: he is as menacing and
relentless as the aggressive swordsman who presses every advantage in
the fray (212). With the death order for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
Hamlet heeds Saviolos warning that the duellist could not
afford the luxury of merely wounding or disabling his opponent. The
duel was an all-or-nothing venture (213). Saviolos wisdom
is also obeyed when Hamlet launches a proper frontal assault on Claudius
in the final scene. Although hardened by his duel with evil and
his futile attempts to avenge his fathers murder, Hamlet of the
final act has maintained his humanity (214).
[ top ]

Terry, Reta A. “‘Vows
to the blackest death’: Hamlet and the Evolving Code
of Honor in Early Modern England.” Renaissance Quarterly
52 (1999): 1070-86.
HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS
This article attests that “analysis of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, and in particular its characters’ use of promise,
provides new and revealing insights into evolving Renaissance codes
of honor” (1070). Historical documents show that the Renaissance
period marked a “transition in the evolution of the code of honor”:
the medieval “external code” (e.g., lineage, deeds, loyalty
to a lord) “coexisted and overlapped” with “an internalized
concept” (e.g., conscience, godliness, political allegiance) (1071).
But, for all of the changes, “the concept of promise did not diminish”
(1074). In Hamlet, the major characters “represent different
stages in the evolution of a changing code of honor” (1076). For
example, Horatio, “utterly loyal and obedient” to Hamlet,
“represents the chivalric, medieval concept of honor” (1077);
and Claudius, manipulator of loyal courtiers, epitomizes “the
way in which a system of honor that is entirely politicized can be perverted”
(1082). In comparison, Hamlet appears “as a transitional character
in the changing code of honor” (1079): his initial oath commits
him to kill Claudius based on “familial loyalty,” while
his later vows are voiced “in terms of Christian images”
(e.g., “Sblod” [2.2.336], “God’s bodkin”
[2.2.485]); also, he voices the first oath privately, in a soliloquy
but converts it “to a public form of oath” in discussion
with Horatio (1.5.140-41) (1080-81). By medieval standards, Hamlet must
avenge his father’s murder; but to kill a king, “God’s
anointed ruler” and “an elected king,” is to go against
the new honor of conscience (1081). Interestingly, Hamlet “exacts
revenge for his father’s murder only after Claudius’s treachery
has been publicly revealed by both Gertrude and Laertes,” allowing
him to fulfill the initial vow of vengeance and to retain his political/theological
honor (1082). But Hamlet’s effort to find a balance in the shifting
honor codes “contributes not only to his own tragic death, but
to the deaths of several others as well” (1084). Through Hamlet’s
characters and their promises, Shakespeare “takes a conventional
stance in a period of change” (1084).
[ top ]

Tkacz, Catherine Brown. “The Wheel of Fortune,
the Wheel of State, and Moral Choice in Hamlet.” South
Atlantic Review 57.4 (Nov. 1992): 21-38.
CLAUDIUS / HAMLET / HISTORY OF IDEAS
This essay explores the importance and ramifications of the prayer
scene. Themes of duty and kingship, as well as motifs of the wheel
and decent, prepare the audience for this crucial scene. The player’s
Hecuba speech also anticipates the prayer scene because it provides
an intriguing description of a hesitant Pyrrhus, who parallels Hamlet
and Claudius. As Hamlet hesitates to avenge and Claudius hesitates
to repent, “these two kinsmen who will at last kill each other
are here fatally alike” (27). The key difference is that Claudius
remains unchanged, while Hamlet develops a “new viciousness”
“that makes this scene the moral center of the play” (28).
After leaving Claudius to pray, Hamlet “strikes the blow that
kills Polonius, he orders the deaths of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,
and his cruelty to Ophelia, orphaned at his hands, leads at least
indirectly to her drowning” (31). But were Claudius apprehended,
imprisoned, or slain before/during the pivotal prayer scene, these
deaths and those of the final scene would be completely avoided (31).
In the prayer scene, “at the center of the play, Hamlet’s
subjection to Fortune shows itself most crucially; by being passion’s
slave, he subjects the wheel of state to the wheel of Fortune”
(35).
Usher, Peter. “Advances in the
Hamlet Cosmic Allegory.” Oxfordian 4 (Fall 2001):
25-49.
HISTORY OF IDEAS / PHILOSOPHICAL
By asserting “that Hamlet contains a cosmic
allegory,” this article suggests that Shakespeare “was well
aware of the astronomical revolutions of his time, and by dramatizing
the triumph of heliocentricism and the infinite universe as a subtext
of his great play, he celebrated what is in essence the basis for the
modern world view” (27). The play appears imbued with allusions
to the astronomical debate based on linguistic references to the contemporary
scientific terms (e.g., retrograde [1.2.114], infinite
space [2.2.259]) and character names borrowed from actual scientists
(e.g., Claudius Ptolemy, Marcellus Palingenius Stellatus). Even the
plot seems charged, as Shakespeare departs from Historia Danica
in the final scene to recognize that “the English cosmological
contribution is an outgrowth of the Polish contribution”: Fortinbras
goes “first to Poland, to pay homage to the grave of Copernicus,
and then upon his return to salute the English ambassadors. Thus the
two models favored by Shakespeare, the Polish and the English, are triumphant
following the demise of geocentricism,” which Claudius and his
followers represent (33-34). Aside from discerning meaning in the “opaque”
dialogue between Hamlet, Horatio, and Osric in act five, scene two (42),
this cosmological interpretation of Hamlet also uncovers the
scientific basis for Hamlet’s “nutshell” (2.2.258).
[ top ]
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All information Copyright © 2002-2007 Harmonie Blankenship
Contact the author at
h.blankenship@hamlethaven.com