Hamlet: the emotional burden: 'I am sick at heart'

TS Eliot's 'Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock' is about an individual who longs to do something meaningful about his life in general and his love-life in particular. Yet, although asserting that "there will be time" for taking positive action, his inhibitions deprive him of "the strength to force the moment to its its crisis".

Instead the time at his disposal gets taken up with "a hundred indecisions and a hundred visions and revisions." "Do I dare disturb the universe?" he asks himself, and concludes "No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be."

It is significant that Eliot gets the ineffectual, indecisive subject of his poem to compare himself unfavourably with Hamlet the character. This is the first of many occasions when Eliot in his poetry contrasts a tawdry figure or situation of the present with its grander or nobler counterpart of the past of literature.

The implication is that while Prufrock is anything but a hero, Hamlet is, with a stature unthinkable for the former. Thus, if Hamlet for all his own hesitations and indecisions seems to stand out as such, a tragic hero in fact, the tragedy of 'Hamlet' must be at least something of an artistic success. But this is what Eliot's essay claims it is not!

Mona Lisa

That is not, of course, a conclusive way of disproving Eliot's contention. Yet it does serve to impress upon us that the seemingly excessive emotional content of the play that Eliot alleges has never diminshed its dramatic appeal and its main character of his dramatic stature. It is precisely what Eliot draws upon to make his point about Prufrock. It encourages us to believe that there must, after all, be an adequate objective correlative for Hamlet's state of mind. Let us review the main thrust of Eliot's argument against there being such a correlative:

"Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear...Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings...Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him...under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know."

In the first place, it should be said that literature is replete with emotional states that seem to be 'in excess of the facts as they appear." The 'inexpressibly horrible' way in which he has behaved is what seems to have finally dawned on Kurtz when he whispers with his last breath, 'The horror! The horror!" in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'. We are absolutely convinced although we are not in full possession of the facts. In Eliot's own play, 'The Cocktail Party', the heroine Celia Coplestone suffers from an indefinable 'sense of sin'. She clarifies that it has nothing to do with her having been immoral, and her confidant, Sir Henry Harcourt Reilly, acknowledges that 'this is most unusual'.

Yet he arranges a remedial course of action with an ultimately tragic outcome for her that seems entirely right, even if the state of mind which has led her to it seems inexplicable. And another young woman's irrational, and eventually destructive, melancholy is the motivating force of Francoise Sagan's most successful novel, 'Bonjour Tristesse' or Good Morning Sadness. In none of these works do we question the lack of adequate objective reality.

Of course, these are relatively modern works, and disillusionment over the horror and the emptiness of modern civilization is an emotion commonly expressed in modern literature. We remember that Eliot actually refers to 'Heart of Darkness' in the superscription of 'The Hollow Men', and has referred elsewhere to 'the boredom, the horror, the glory' that the modern artist has to work with. The poetry of Philip Larkin is yet another example. And it may well be that Hamlet is the precursor of the modern hero, if not actually the first such hero.

After all, the time of its writing was itself a new era. The Renaissance and the Reformation had fostered a spirit of individualism but this often resulted, in the excessive exercising of it, in disillusionment. The weltschmerz or tristesse du monde so prevalent in the literature of the modern era might therefore be said to have its roots in that of Hamlet.

But all this may seem like an attempt to justify the lack of objective correlation for Hamlet's state of mind as charged by Eliot. And the first point to be made in connection with this charge is that the sense of doom or disaffection is far from being the monopoly of Hamlet.

It is suggested from the very start of the play, long before Hamlet has made his first appearance. And that too by minor characters. Not even five minutes or ten lines into the play we have Francisco, the soldier on sentry duty, saying, "Tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart."

And still in Act 1, even before the Ghost has made its revelation, the famous line, 'Something is rotten in the state of Denmark", is spoken not by Hamlet, not even by Horatio, but by the attendant officer Marcellus.

No doubt the preliminary appearances of the Ghost have influenced such observations, but there is another contributory reality revealed in this first Act: the state of military preparedness required of the soldiery against a possible invasion from Norway as contrasted with the excessive revelry practiced at court, the carousing that would be better "honoured in the breach than the observance." Thus Shakespeare is at pains to set the tone and the context for Hamlet's first soliloquy in which he denounces both uncle and mother and voices the death-wish: "O, that this too too solid flesh would melt.."

Nor is his disgust with his mother the sole cause of Hamlet's despair. Consider the welter of factors that weighs on his mind. To start with he is disappointed with his mother's hasty remarriage, This not only does dishonour to his father, it suggests both lustfulness and ambition to continue as queen consort. In the process she as well as his uncle has deprived him if his right to succeed his father.

When he learns from the Ghost of the real cause of his father's death, his resentfulness of his uncle naturally turns to rage and hatred while his attitude towards his mother deepens into sheer disgust. So unnatural does her conduct seem to him that he can only infer that it is in the nature of womankind to be disloyal - "Frailty, thy name is woman!" This in turn begins to affect his attitude to his true-love, Ophelia, whose own steadfastness he now begins to doubt. Hence his harshness to her under the guise of feigned madness: "Get thee to a nunnery, to a nunnery go!", the word 'nunnery' having at the time the additional slangy connotation of 'brothel'.

But there are further complications. There is the religious belief, common then but rare now, that ghostly appearances are the work of evil spirits bent on misleading humans and causing mischief. Against his loyalty to his father and his grief at his loss, he has to consider this fearful possibility. Even if he can prove otherwise through the ploy of the play, there is the equally fearful prospect of overturning the status quo as established by his uncle and accepted by the majority despite the deplorable manner of its establishment.

And the almost unbearably weighty responsibility, in so doing, of representing a divine order which calls for justice to be done. "The time is out of joint; O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!"

Yet over and above this comes the realisation that vengeance is forbidden to man and is to be left in the hands of God to execute. To add to it all, he has to cope with the counter-plotting of his uncle, aided and abetted by the sycophantic Polonius, father of Ophelia, and his childhood friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, all three of whom seem to be in the know of his uncle's villainy. Finally, an already tormented conscience is further burdened by his unintended slaying of Polonius and the suicide of the spurned and orphaned Ophelia.

In the light of the above it is surely simplistic to contend that Hamlet's emotional condition is predicated purely upon his feelings about his mother. If that were the case, then his reactions and actions and inactions would certainly lack the conviction of objective reality. As it is, however, these are traceable to almost innumerable issues. Hamlet's complaint about having "to take arms against a sea of troubles' is therefore not only rhetorically but factually meaningful.

We have addressed the issue of Hamlet's emotion but there remains to be dealt with that of his procrastination. And to search for the true source of objective correlatives in the actual language of the play. We hope to do this is the final article on 'Hamlet' when, it is also hoped, the full and unintended significance of Eliot's characterisation of the play as 'the Mona Lisa of literature' will become clear.