The Hamlet of A. Macleish
Hamlet of A. Macleish, The,blank-verse poem by MacLeish, published in 1928.
Reinterpreting Hamlet as spiritual questioning and pessimism in the modern world, the poet sees the dead king as the consciousness of evil urging revenge; Claudius as “the jay jeer of the sun in the ear of our pain”; Gertrude as the mother force reproducing pain and evil; Ophelia as temptation; and Hamlet as the poet himself, melancholy and despairing. Science and philosophy lead nowhere, man has lost significance by divorcing himself from the earth and tradition, and even death has become “a gesture away from us,” and artistic expression a “hoarse grief …shouted at the narrow stars.” He accepts the challenge of Laertes, resigning himself to “the staged encounter and the game-pit rules” of life, in which he hopes to “Cancel this bloody feud, revoke All tears, all pain….”
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