Wednesday, October 26, 2016

What flaw causes Hamlet and Laertes to end up dead, while Fortinbras succeeds?

This is a very broad question and could be answered in a multitude of different and lengthy ways; not for nothing is Hamlet the most analyzed and interpreted character in Western literature! But since Hamlet is, in the critic Harold Bloom's words, "an experimental thinker rather more than he is Shakespeare's thought experiment," I propose that we try to respond to the question in the spirit of the prince himself, which is to say experimentally, to try to see and think outside the question rather than to accept as legitimate the premises we are given.


For me, part of the experimentalism of Hamlet lies in its dissolution of the traditional definition of "tragedy," which mandates that the great and mighty must be undone by their own flaws. Shakespeare's other tragedies can be said to fit that general definition in a variety of complex manifestations, but I don't really think it adequately explains Hamlet. Does the prince have "flaws?" Absolutely. Perhaps his most objectionable qualities, to my way of thinking, are the toxic misogyny created in him by his disgust at his mother's swift remarriage (which causes him to so cruelly mistreat Ophelia), and his inability to fully free himself from the system of martial values exemplified by his father, the warrior-king, to whose standard he painfully, fruitlessly compares himself--values which hold his mind partly captive even though Hamlet himself is plainly an artist in spirit and temperament, rather than a soldier (despite the cluelessly bitter irony of Fortinbras's concluding lines).


These flaws, which can be said to be the cursed inheritance of Hamlet's mother and father respectively (or even of the male and female principles in general), torment the prince throughout the play and drive many of his fatal errors of morality and judgment. But they are not Hamlet's most salient characteristics, and even they don't seem sufficient to explain, in the most profound and total sense, "why" Hamlet dies. Even less adequate is Hamlet's own brutal self-assessment, in which he ascribes to himself the faults he would like to have: "I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in." This description is exactly, utterly, even comically antithetical to the truth. Hamlet attributes to himself all the flaws that traditionally destroy "tragic heroes" (pride, vengeance, ambition). And indeed, each of these descriptions can be applied to the hot-headed Laertes, Hamlet's mirror image, who fulfills the arc of the tragic hero to a tee: his completely straightforward and identifiable desire to avenge the deaths of his father and sister cause him to rashly make a deal with the devil, one which leads to his destruction. But these recognizably "tragic" traits are lacking in Hamlet; in fact, the prince has nothing but "thoughts, imagination, and time." Time, that commodity and lie which is his great burden, and everyone's, keeps him from his appointed task by giving too much free play to his thought and imagination. It is only when he suddenly finds himself without time, that brief interval in which he knows with certainty that he is minutes from death, that he is able to act decisively and kill his uncle.


People will try to tell you that Hamlet's "tragic flaw" is his indecisiveness, or his desire for revenge, or his passivity, or any number of things. But the experimental genius of Hamlet is that it proposes a new, existential definition of tragedy: this new tragic hero is not a man ruined by his flaws, but one who suffers in tragic awareness of humanity's flaw, of Creation's flaw. Hamlet's "flaw" is simply that he is too sensitive to the tragic nature of reality. His "flaw" is his genius, which renders him incapable of enacting the prescribed roles of soldier, lover, prince, dutiful son, all of which he perceives deep down to be hollow and ephemeral. Shakespeare radically reinvents the nature of tragedy by imbuing his hero with tragic consciousness. Fortinbras, the consummate soldier, has no such consciousness. He is a much truer heir to King Hamlet than is the prince himself, and so he is able to prevail, at least within the little scope of time encompassed by the play, and to the extent that successfully occupying a castle full of dead nobles can be considered "prevailing." In a tragic universe, all victories are provisional, whether the victor realizes it or not. As in Faulkner's Hamlet-infused The Sound and the Fury, "No battle is ever won... they are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools."

No comments:

Post a Comment

How does the choice of details set the tone of the sermon?

Edwards is remembered for his choice of details, particularly in this classic sermon. His goal was not to tell people about his beliefs; he ...