Hamlet, Prince of Denmark:

‘It is the ‘MONA LISA’ of literature’

TS Eliot's judgment of 'Hamlet' as an artistic failure had a revolutionary impact on the critical view of 'Hamlet'. After all it was, and continues to be, Shakespeare's most famous play - the most famous play, in fact, in the English language; the most performed theatrically and cinematically, the most translated and the most often adapted to the contemporary period. It is also the longest of Shakespeare's plays, the most quoted and the greatest single source of expressions that have become a permanent part of English idiom.

The play also feature the most famous dramatic character of all time in the form of Hamlet himself. There is no more enigmatic character in all literature, nor has any literary figure been the subject of so much critical exegesis, as Hamlet.

This is actually the root cause of Eliot's complaint about the play; the fact that the focus of criticism has been on the character of Hamlet rather than on the play as an artistic whole. Consequently critics have failed to realise that the emotional intensity and interest generated by its central figure has no 'objective correlative' in the dramatic realities of the play itself.

As Eliot puts it, 'Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.'

Hamlet tries to show his mother Gertrude his father’s ghost (artist: Nicolai A. Abildgaard ca. 1778).

Eliot suggests that the inadequate objectivity, or excessive subjectivity, of Shakespeare's portrayal of Hamlet has encouraged critics to engage in the questionable critical practice of self-projection. “These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther (the highly intellectual hero of his semi-auto-biographical novel); and such a mind had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge.'

We find this self-expressive trend in criticism continuing into the twentieth century. John Middleton Murry, for instance, presents a Hamlet who seems to be more a product of his own imagination than Shakespeare's. And his friend DH Lawrence, needless to say, finds in Hamlet yet another occasion to mount his hobby -horse. He sees in Hamlet's revulsion towards his mother over her hurried remarriage to his father's brother as the incipient domination, in the Anglo-Saxon psyche, of 'the 'instinctive-intuitive consciousness' by 'the spiritual-mental consciousness'.

Lawrence also differentiates between the Hamlet of Shakespearean tragedy and the Oedipus of Greek tragedy. According to him the heroic struggle of Aeschylus' Oedipus is against destiny while the heroic struggle of Hamlet is against sexuality - 'sex carrying with it a wild and nameless terror.'

But it is interesting that whereas Lawrence emphasised the difference between the two heroes, Freud had actually postulated their similarity.

For it is on the personality of Hamlet that he drew to illustrate his theory of the Oedipus complex. Hamlet thereby became the subject of the most famous case-study to-date in the history of psycho-analysis.

Freud appears also to have anticipated and even influenced Eliot in his criticism of Hamlet. Consider Freud's opinion that 'the play is built upon Hamlet's hesitations over fulfilling the task of revenge that is assigned to him; but its text offers no reasons or motives for these hesitations”.

This is surely comparable with that of Eliot. The latter notes that in the earlier version of Hamlet on which Shakespeare must have based his own, the delay in carrying out the revenge motive was simply the difficulty in assassinating a well-guarded monarch. He continues, “In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and...the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency.” This more important motive is 'the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son' but 'Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully.'

Freud, of course, proffered his own well known explanation of the delay which, however, is as irrelevant to its artistic consideration as Lawrence's.

The character-focused and generally adulatory criticism of Hamlet culminated with the work of AC Bradley. He calls Hamlet 'this most marvellous of Shakespeare's creations.” In his view Hamlet is not a tragedy of passion but of thought, and the main character is neither evil nor foolish as Shakespeare's other great tragic heroes are. Bradley suggests that Hamlet's 'unintelligibility' was intended by Shakespeare because of his own sense of perplexity about life.

'Hamlet brings home to us at once the sense of the soul's infinity, and the sense of doom which not only circumscribes that infinity but appears to be its offspring.'

In referring to 'Hamlet' as a tragedy of thought, Bradley was really elaborating on Coleridge's personalised and philosophical explanation of Hamlet's hesitation. Among the latter's extensive notes on 'Hamlet' we find this revealing statement: 'If there be an overbalance in the contemplative faculty, man becomes the creature of meditation, and loses the power of action....Hamlet, though brave and careless of death, had contracted a morbid sensibility from this overbalancing of the mind, producing the lingering and vacillating delays of procrastination; and wasting in the energy of resolving, the energy of acting.'

Following Eliot's critical bombshell the generally positive appraisal of Hamlet as a character began to change. The two Knights were particularly harsh on him, even suggesting that he was the real villain of the piece. G. Wilson Knight wrote of Hamlet as “a spirit of penetrating intellect and cynicism and misery, without faith in himself or anyone else, murdering his love of Ophelia, on the brink of insanity, taking delight in cruelty, torturing Claudius, wringing his mother's heart, a poison in the midst of the healthy bustle of the court.'

And according to LC Knights Hamlet is an immature young man who lacks ' a ready responsiveness to life', but is forced by his father's ghost to undertake an evil, death-dealing project.

More recently the balance has been redressed somewhat. Harold Bloom, one of the present day's most influential critics, is of the view that the subject of Hamlet is 'neither revenge nor bereavement but Hamlet's consciousness of his own consciousness, infinite, unlimited, and at war with itself... Shakespeare cannot control this most temperamentally capricious and preternaturally intelligent of all his creations.'

Such has been drift of 'Hamlet' criticism from the Romantic period to the present. Throughout we see that the emphasis has been on the personality of Hamlet the character rather than on the artistry of Hamlet the play, even when the attitude to the former has veered from favourable to unfavourable and then become more balanced. Eliot's complaint seems to have done little to halt the trend. This is not surprising as Eliot himself seems, in Hamlet's words, to be 'hoist with his own petard.'

For, in censuring the excessive critical concern with the character of Hamlet, Eliot is unwittingly guilty of the same lapse. To be at pains to stress the lack of a convincing motive for Hamlet's procrastination is surely to continue to be preoccupied with the character of Hamlet.

His essay is famous for its theory of the objective correlative, but inadequate evidence is presented to support its argument that the play is deficient in this. This is what we hope to examine in the next article.

To have embarked forthwith on such an examination would have been immodest without considering, at least to the above limited extent, the vast amount of distinguished criticism that has been brought to bear on the subject.

After all, the predisposition of extant criticism towards the character of Hamlet is what has primarily given rise to the saying, “Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark”, to indicate something that is presented without its most essential component.

And it is this fascination with the identity of the subject of a work of art rather than in the quality of its artistry that prompted Eliot to say of 'Hamlet', in his famous essay, that “it is the 'Mona Lisa' of literature.”