Hamlet and His Problems

I know we haven't gotten to that good juicy reading of the plays yet, but I wanted to first explain as briefly as I can why I like Hamlet, and why I think that Hamlet is valuable or interesting enough to be used as an angle to look at all of Shakespeare.

First, I think that the language of Hamlet is peerless. It's just as beautifully and cleverly written a play as anything. Secondly, I like the play for a couple of the so-called problems with it that T. S. Eliot highlights in his essay "Hamlet and His Problems." In the essay, Eliot responds contrary to the current wave of criticism about Hamlet and goes on to declare Hamlet an artistic failure. He explains:

Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we search for this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to localize. You cannot point to it in the speeches; indeed, if you examine the two famous soliloquies you see the versification of Shakespeare, but a content which might be claimed by another, perhaps by the author of the Revenge of Bussy d' Ambois, Act v. sc. i. We find Shakespeare's Hamlet not in the action, not in any quotations that we might select, so much as in an unmistakable tone which is unmistakably not in the earlier play.

And that's what I like about Hamlet. I like that's its maddeningly difficult to pin down. I like that it's tonal. This isn't a failure, this is uniquely elevated above Shakespeare's other plays. In the essay Eliot goes on to stress that Hamlet is a play that is not contained. It is problematic and possibly without solution. He says,

We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii., Apologie de Raimond Sebond. We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.

This is, in short, one of my primary reasons for undertaking this project. I don't think we have to admit defeat, and I do think that if we poke at Hamlet hard enough that there are plenty of interesting insights still available. That's the beauty of the maddening problem of Hamlet. It keeps yielding interesting questions and incomplete answers.

So I hope that made sense. I'm going to return to the issue of Eliot's relationship with Shakespeare more than a few times I supsect. The Wasteland has about thirty Shakespeare references, mostly to Hamlet and the Tempest, and I just feel I would be totally remiss to not hammer at those a little bit. Finally, the more I think about "Hamlet and His Problems," the less sure I am that Eliot was even being sincere about what he said. After all, what's a more maddeningly un-self-contained work than The Wasteland?

Anyway, enough with Hamlet for now. I've started the Comedy of Errors and well into trying to remember how many movies or television episodes I've seen that ape the basic premise... which, itself, is apparently a blend of two Plautus plays. I guess there's nothing new under the sun.

Someone else say something so I don't seem like a crazy person talking to himself.