Hamlet (Vol. 44) | Joanna Montgomery Byles (essay date 1994)
Joanna Montgomery Byles (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: "'Tragic Alternatives: Eros and Superego Revenge in Hamlet'," in The Hamlet Collection: New Essays on Hamlet, edited by Mark Thornton Burnett and John Manning, AMS Press, 1994, pp. 117-34.
[In the following essay, Byles examines the psychological origins of revenge in Hamlet, arguing that for Hamlet, the demands of his ego and superego conflict, leaving him ashamed of his father's command to revenge as well as ashamed of his inability to fulfill his father's command.]
Hamlet tells us, he has 'that within which passes show' (I. ii. 85). We become intensely aware of Hamlet's inner life through his soliloquies, which externalize and dramatize his inner conflicts so powerfully. How to denote these inner tensions, and his all-pervasive feelings of powerlessness and rage, and to express them truly is Hamlet's problem throughout the play.
In this essay I should like to...
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