[In the following excerpt, Barber and Wheeler maintain that the psychological pattern in Hamlet involves Hamlet's "struggle to cope with the desecration of his heritage." The critics stress that this turmoil is the social reality which enables the play's psychological constructs to be expressed and which ensures the historical relevancy of Hamlet.]

Piety, Outrage, and Theatrical Aggression in Hamlet

A psychological pattern is always an aspect of social life, an abstraction we make from observing an individual's way of coping with his relations to others. Hamlet is a play about disinheritance, experienced in its most drastic form, at the heart of a fully dramatized social world. It presents a hero who, though he should be the embodiment of the heritage—"The glass of fashion and the mould of form, / Th' observ'd of all observers"—is "blasted with ecstasy" (III.i.153-54, 160). Hamlet's struggle to cope with the desecration of heritage, his outrageousness in response to outrage, his piety in spite of it, his struggle for expression—it is these social realities and gestures that make the play's psychological configurations expressible, and that enable Hamlet to keep its relevance through changing historical situations.

Freud provided a bridge from individual to social development in observing that the individual conscience, the cultural heritage as reflected in one's system of values and sense of self, is formed through the child's internalization of the culturally shaped values of the parents.¹⁴ So too are individual attitudes toward and conceptions of the larger powers that sustain life. In a culture with an effectual religion, God is manifest in one's awareness of what validates and supports society, history, the universe. In a secularized culture, we still arrive, at maturity, at an awareness that the validating ground of individual life is larger than individuals. Acceptance of the parents' finitude and imperfection is part of the transfer of piety that recognizes the larger, culturally confirmed context as the source of the parents' being as well as the being of the child. A broader piety takes over from infantile dependence and, insofar as it does that, frees the child from the parents, permits him, in becoming a child of God, or a child of the times, to become a man.

Successful development permits the child to forgive the parents for not being gods; fixation along the road of development results in crippling investments of love and hate in idolatrous objects, parents or parent-substitutes. The deferred afflictions of the Oedipus complex, whether at the crisis of adolescence or erupting in later life, represent a crisis in the piety that normally sustains one's identity. In Hamlet, the father's return as a Ghost makes him the object of the son's idolatry. An idol is an inadequate image of the divine because it intervenes between the individual's worship and his awareness of the larger force in which he and his world are grounded. But his father's spirit is all that Prince Hamlet has. His lack of a stable, integrated image of the father at the core of himself makes the Ghost walk, creates the need to find him outside. And it allows filial piety to become an obsession. The Prince is trapped because his piety cannot get beyond the Ghost of his noble father, murdered by another father, ignoble, gross, revolting.

The Ghost, because it embodies the whole valid moral and social heritage, cuts off the protagonist (and to a large extent the play) from any wider allegiance. The nexus with what should be is almost entirely through Hamlet. Christian commentators, Roy Battenhouse, for instance, or Eleanor Prosser, point out that from a Christian point of view Hamlet embraces a sinful course in accepting the Ghost's charge to avenge his father's death, for "vengeance is mine, saith the Lord."¹⁵ Hamlet pursues his ghostly father's will in place of God's will. To see the play from this vantage point, however, is to let us, and Hamlet, out of the modern world that this play helps to usher in; it is to propose an alternative that simply is not present within the play's fable. The fact that Hamlet is the legitimate heir makes him, will he nill he, the final court of appeal and authority that should bring Claudius to justice. It is an appalling situation of aloneness, an appalling task.

Hamlet has to meet the dismaying isolation of his secret, which Shakespeare makes us realize as soon as the others rejoin him after the Ghost has gone:

I hold it fit that we shake hands and part,
You, as your business and desire shall point you,
For every man hath business and desire,
Such as it is, and for my own poor part,
I will go pray.

(I.v. 128-32)

Already there is the sense that nothing ordinary—"business and desire, / Such as it is"—matters. Hamlet's "and for my own poor part, / I will go pray," in its terrible sense of aloneness, edges on ironic recognition of his situation, in which the religious dimension, the supernatural beyond the Ghost, is already out of range. We see the intensity of his suffering and isolation through the eyes of Ophelia in the next scene, where she reports that he has come to her closet looking "As if he had been loosed out of hell" (II.i.80). We feel his isolation too in the false diagnosis of Polonius, in Ophelia's helplessness, in his situation of being spied on, both by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and by the King and Polonius—with Ophelia as bait. Hamlet's heroic identity, his greatness, is his power of maintaining himself in his relation to the Ghost and in the vision of the world's corruption that goes with it.

In dramatizing this heroic striving, Hamlet, more than any other play, invites identification with the hero and yet does not fully guide us in what we are to make of him. We identify with all the tragic protagonists, of course; but we also regularly feel horror, dismay, or even something like amusement:

LEAR: Dost thou call me fool, boy?

FOOL: All thy other titles thou hast given away, that thou wast born with.

(Lr. I.iv. 148-50)

We are aware, regularly, of more than the protagonist is, and this awareness balances the claims of the protagonist on us. But once Hamlet has seen the Ghost in the third scene, there is scarcely a moment in the action when anyone in the play, or in the audience, knows more than Hamlet knows. He even intimates that he sees through to the King's purposes in sending him to England: "I see a cherub that sees them" (IV.iii.48). Such judgments as are made on Hamlet are pointedly not to the point. We see through others with him, while the others are unable to see through him, to pluck out the heart of his mystery.

A curious impunity surrounds Hamlet. Although he is outrageous, insulting, impudent, people do not call him on it. After Hamlet has described the repulsiveness of old men to Polonius's face, the old man diverts indignation into objective observation: "Though this be madness, yet there is method in't" (II.ii.205-6). Or again with Ophelia:

HAMLET: I did love you once.

OPHELIA: Indeed, my lord, you made me believe so.

HAMLET: You should not have believ'd me, for virtue cannot so inoculate our old stock but we shall relish of it. I lov'd you not.

OPHELIA: I was the more deceiv'd.

(III.i.114-19)

The lack of direct response to Hamlet's outrageousness goes with the assumption that he is mad or deranged. Ophelia, who does not know how deeply his jilting has hurt her until she goes mad, says "O, help him, you sweet heavens!" and finally, "O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown!" (lines 133, 150).

Even the King holds himself almost entirely in check, not taking up Hamlet's insults and insinuations:

KING: How fares our cousin Hamlet?

HAMLET: Excellent, i' faith, of the chameleon's dish: I eat the air, promisecramm'd—you cannot feed capons so.

KING: I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet, these words are not mine.

(III.ii.92-97)

Part of the other characters' helplessness, of course, comes from the sudden, shifting, half-hidden wit with which Hamlet attacks, as here, where he takes the would-be agreeable "How fares our cousin," how do you do, as though it were how do you eat, and answers "I eat the air" (your promises), implying promises instead of the substance of the succession that you have taken from me. "You cannot feed [even] capons so"—and, by implication, I am no capon. No wonder the King can say no more than "I have nothing with this answer, Hamlet, these words are not mine."

Only the Queen, in the pitch of excitement after the play-within-the-play, sets about wholeheartedly to rebuke her son, and she gets back, at once, better than she gives, as Hamlet turns her phrase: "Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended." "Mother, you have my father much offended" (III.iv.9-10). When he has killed the man behind the arras, her natural humanity cries out: "O, what a rash and bloody deed is this!" only to be put down at once by "A bloody deed! almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king, and marry with his brother" (lines 27-29). Part of the tragedy, of course, is that his mother has forfeited the moral authority that might provide a vantage point from which to grieve for the "unseen good old man" (IV.i.12). There is thus no one to comment on the frightfulness with which Hamlet dismisses the death of Polonius when he discovers whom he has killed: "Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell! / I took thee for thy better" (III.iv.31-32). Instead, Hamlet immediately returns to upbraiding his mother: "Leave wringing of your hands. Peace, sit you down, / And let me wring your heart" (lines 34-35).

As we watch the play, or are swept along in reading it, we are not invited to pause over the cruelty of Hamlet's taunts. The killing of Polonius makes more real the violence pent up in Hamlet; there is relief that he has reached to action, even if only in unpremeditated response, together with regret that it is not, as for a moment he thinks possible, the King he has killed. Polonius has been exhibited as something of a fool in his own right, a dotard version of the father-figure. The lack of compunction Hamlet feels about a man dead functions for us as a measure of the intensity of his deep sense of outrage about the people who matter. Indeed, his ruthlessness is somehow a testimony to his all-absorbing, heroic commitment to feeling the outrage done to life by the murder of his father and by what he perceives as his mother's infidelity.

The play is blind to Hamlet's faults except insofar as they are expressed by Hamlet himself. To insist on them, to go beyond Hamlet's own perceptions in dwelling on his destructiveness, his egotism, his ineffectualness and irresponsibility, is in a curious way discourteous, doing violence to an alliance with the sweet prince that audiences enjoy. When Hamlet plays hide-and-seek with those sent to find where he has hidden the body of Polonius, we enjoy his exhilarated fun in baffling everybody:

ROSENCRANTZ: What have you done, my lord, with the dead body?

HAMLET: Compounded it with dust, whereto 'tis kin.

(IV.ii.5-6)

There is a curious beauty about Hamlet's answer: it puts the death in the context of last things, suggesting a vision of mortality that makes life scarcely matter. But at such a moment, what an evasion, and how arrogant, how upstaging! That this is Hamlet's intention is manifest in the sequel about the sponge and the son of a king. And yet we are with Hamlet here as he puts the little eager terriers in their place.

We are with him even more, of course, when at last he is brought in, guarded, face to face with the King, who has seen the play, so that the chips are down between them:

KING: NOW, Hamlet, where's Polonius?

HAMLET: At supper.

KING: At supper? where?

HAMLET: Not where he eats, but where 'a is eaten; a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots; your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table—that's the end.

(IV.iii. 16-25)

This is the high point in the antics of Hamlet's madness and worth pausing over as a marvelous example of the way he keeps everyone else off balance by the displacements of wit: "At supper." "At supper? where?" The King, who should be on top, is maneuvered into the position of fall-guy. This technique of setting up the loaded leading question is of course standard with the Shakespearean clown or fool, and the discipline of writing such parts lay behind Shakespeare's handling of Hamlet's antic disposition. In effect, the Prince plays the fool's part as well as the hero's; his assumed madness gives him the equivalent of the court fool's license, which Shakespeare had recently exploited as a dramatic resource in As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Part of the fool's stock in trade was the pithy sententious generalization, suddenly brought home by fitting it to present company. Hamlet turns Polonius into a supper for politic worms, with as much relish as disgust—leaving behind all question of his own particular responsibility for the old man's death as he rises to sweeping statement: "we fat all creatures else to fat us." And meanwhile his invisible fool's-bladder keeps bobbing the King, showing him "how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar" (lines 30-31). His direct access to aggressive action against the King blocked, Hamlet plays the fool to enable himself to maintain the integrity of his hatred.

If we stop to add up Hamlet's actions and inactions, we find a catalogue of outrage and failure. But the play does not situate us to stop, does not provide anyone to help in the process of evaluation. No one in the play observes that Hamlet fails Ophelia. We see her and can collect from the fragments of her madness an idea of her profound shock from the cruel disappointment of maiden ardor, along with her grief for the father Hamlet killed. Her loss of Hamlet, indeed, is partly expressed through grief for her father. But Hamlet is off at sea; he is not brought to confront anything of how he has failed her. On the contrary, at her grave he is able to say, without any environing irony:

I lov'd Ophelia. Forty thousand brothers
Could not with all their quantity of love
Make up my sum.

(V.i.269-71)

Hamlet arranges for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to be "put to sudden death, / Not shriving time allow'd" (V.ii.46-47). "So Guildenstern and Rosencrantz go to't" (line 56) is the only comment, from Horatio, on the drastic expedience with which Hamlet deals with what are, after all, only ignorant agents. Again, no one comments on his complete lack of a viable plan of practical action, even after his return from England. The nearest thing to such a comment is Horatio's practical reminder, while Hamlet rails against the King, that time is passing: "It must be shortly known to him from England / What is the issue of the business there" (V.ii.71-72). Hamlet's response—"It will be short; the interim's mine, / And a man's life's no more than to say 'one'" (lines 73-74)—is one of the great, heroic moments of the play. The current of resolution, so long diffused and roiled, sweeps deep and silent through the magical word "interim," as that word opens up after the strong monosyllables. But the fact remains that he does not make any plan, accepting instead the initiative of the King and Laertes, with the result that it is not the King alone who dies, but also the Queen, Laertes, and Hamlet himself

In creating the role of Hamlet, Shakespeare, exploiting fully the resources of the new theater, could define a new position with respect to heritage, expressing loss of heritage with all its doubts, uncertainty, loathing of self and life, but also exhibiting a hero with strength to protect integrity against acquiescence in the corrupt world, on one side, or acquiescence in self-loathing, on the other. Hamlet is a potentially great man protecting his greatness, the greatness of the demand he makes on life, even as life fails or betrays that demand. What Hamlet has to meet this challenge, to master the enormously disruptive energies it releases in him, is his power of expression. He must save himself from suicide, and he does this in part by expressing his need for it, both directly and in violent self-contempt. It is also essential that he turn aggression outward, affirming the reality of corruption and violence. His power of expression works to prevent or divert him from taking direct action even as it gives theatrical release, assertive and ironic in the terms he establishes, to his aggression; but without it Hamlet could not maintain his wounded identity at all.

It is Hamlet's need for expression that lightens his spirits as soon as he hears that the players are coming. He uses them at once, calling for a speech that serves to identify what is working inside him. As in 1 Henry IV, where we have a "play extempore" about a son's confrontation with his royal father, here we have a speech extempore, part of which Hamlet has by heart, about the destruction of a revered, aged king by a figure who is not restrained from action by any scruples whatever, "rugged Pyrrhus." It is a speech that, in its poised ambiguity, objectifies both Hamlet's feelings of grief and outrage "for a king, / Upon whose property and most dear life / A damn'd defeat was made," and Hamlet's wish that he could "make oppression bitter" by fattening "all the region kites / With this slave's offal" (II.ii.569-71, 578-80). We and Hamlet can experience both the horror of the killing of good old Priam and the terrible zest of it. It even swings around a moment of delay when Illium "stoops to his base," and Pyrrhus, distracted by the hideous crash, "like a neutral to his will and matter, / Did nothing" (lines 476, 481-82).

In developing Hamlet's preoccupation with the players, Shakespeare makes much of the use and abuse of expression and of its inadequacy as an answer to his protagonist's whole need. Hamlet's comments on acting rigorously subordinate the actors' need for expression to "the purpose of the playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure" (III.ii.20-24). Self is to be wholly absorbed in the discipline of playing as it looks beyond itself. Hamlet's whole discussion notably leaves out the personal motives, the need for self-preservation or reduplication, that animate the playing: "for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness" (III.ii.5-8). The individual's acting must fulfill, not disrupt, the team enterprise: no "necessary question of the play" (lines 42-43) must be neglected.

It is striking how fully Hamlet dramatizes the personal need for playing and formal theatrical action that is left out of Hamlet's account of the process as a professional discipline. Hamlet has "that within which passes show," but he is preoccupied by "actions that a man might play" (I.ii.85, 84). He feels the pressure toward theatrical violence that Kyd played on in The Spanish Tragedy, and he will often "tear a passion to tatters" (III.ii.9-10) in response to it. Dismayed by his own inaction, Hamlet laments:

Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing.

(II.ii.566-69)

But in fact, of course, he is carried away in a torrent of words:

Am I a coward?
Who calls me villain, breaks my pate across,
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face,
Tweaks me by the nose, gives me the lie Γ th' throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?
Hah, 'swounds, I should take it.

(lines 571-76)

Hamlet, as usual, is the only one who sees the irony about Hamlet. And, as usual, unaffected by it, he proceeds at once to a further use of expression:

I'll have these players
Play something like the murther of my father
Before mine uncle. I'll observe his looks,
I'll tent him to the quick. If 'a do blench,
I know my course.

(lines 594-98)

"The Murder of Gonzago" is intended by Hamlet to move acting to action by making the King proclaim his guilt. When it comes to the test, however, Shakespeare has Hamlet himself interrupt the necessary business of the play by aggressively summarizing its action instead of waiting for it to have its full effect on Claudius:

'A poisons him i' th' garden for his estate. His name's Gonzago, the story is extant, and written in very choice Italian. You shall see anon how the murtherer gets the love of Gonzago's wife.

OPHELIA: The King rises.

(III.ii.261-65)

That the poisoner is the "nephew to the king" (line 244), as Hamlet blurts out at his entrance, makes what is acted, while replicating the crime of Claudius, simultaneously present a figure in Hamlet's relationship to Claudius reenacting the murder, as though to fit the crime exactly to the punishment, to "re-venge by re-presentation."¹⁶

The enormous poetic and dramatic creativity achieved in Hamlet depends in good part on this pressure to turn speech and acting into action. The need to channel aggression through verbal and theatrical expression in turn depends on the initial, given situation of the two powerful fathers, one murdered by the other, with Hamlet identified with both. Hamlet asserts himself by loathing Claudius; he asserts his father by loathing himself, including the repressed part of himself identified with Claudius's double crime of murder and incest. The constant discharge of cruelty at others is Hamlet's relief from the hideous suffering of his aggression toward himself. Release reaches manic proportions in the rhapsody of elation that follows the play-within-the-play. But the deep movement of the aggression that occupies Hamlet looks toward death, so that by the fifth act the universalizing of death in the graveyard is lyric release. The final havoc carries out the death-directed wish in action.

But whatever our conclusions when we add up Hamlet's actions, we are left with a sense of Hamlet as a moral hero in defeat, a sense of tragic loss, not just the sensational excitement of a revel in a blood bath. Why should this be so? Part of our high sense of Hamlet in death is Shakespeare's skillful manipulation. In the previous scene, the satiric-lyrical universals of the graveyard have opened the floodgates, and the burial of Ophelia has given occasion for a new sort of self-affirmation. Then in the last scene Hamlet's gracious, sociable self is recovered and brought home to us at moments—with Osric for foil, for example—together with the resolution born of the acceptance of death:

If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.

(V.ii.220-22)

There is a staginess about some of it: Hamlet's apology to Laertes, for example, and Laertes' to Hamlet. But there is also Hamlet's concern, as he dies, about the succession, and about his "story," which Horatio must tell: "Report me and my cause aright / To the unsatisfied" (lines 339-40). And we do feel, through these gestures, the abortive effort of a younger generation to renew society, a striving toward health.

Yet the tragic dignity and loss must be more than these final heroics—must be something earned, on the basis of a deeper striving. It must be something beyond the meaning we get if we simply reduce Hamlet's problem to the Oedipus complex—and yet it must be consistent with the presence of that complex, for the Freudian explanation clearly works. T. S. Eliot puts us on the way to part of an answer, I think, in his famous criticism of the play as "an artistic failure."¹⁷ Eliot observed that "Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem" (p. 125). Eliot, responding to his own deepest preoccupations, as manifest later in his dramatic version of the Orestes-Hamlet theme, The Family Reunion, concluded that "Shakespeare's Hamlet, in so far as it is Shakespeare's [and not an adaptation of a lost earlier version, probably by Kyd], is a play dealing with the effect of a mother's guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the 'intractable material' of the old play" (p. 123). Hamlet's disgust for his mother "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" (p. 125).

What Eliot ignores, focusing only on Hamlet's disgust in response to his guilty mother, is Hamlet's own sense of guilt—what the Freudian explanation makes central. Hamlet's guilt refers to his father not his mother; more accurately, it refers to his parricidal wish. It is this that cannot be given objective expression. The "possible action" that would correspond to this wish is not accessible, because the Ghost is a ghost. Hamlet cannot kill a ghost. Nor can he realize that the destructive force of his effort to serve the Ghost, to retrieve the heritage of his lost father, has its roots in the filial bond he struggles to keep intact by making it the entirety of his life. The given situation, Claudius's murder of the elder Hamlet, demands absolute loyalty to the memory of the idealized father and permits the diversion of the son's murderous wish from father to uncle. But since this repressed wish is unconsciously tied to the assumption that its enactment means death, Hamlet's hatred cannot be directed at Claudius without being deflected back onto himself as well. In the end, Hamlet is able to accept his destiny only when he has accepted death; he finally kills Claudius only when he himself has already received his death blow. It is Hamlet's "bafflement" in this situation that extends into the play the problem confronting its creator.

But Hamlet is, as Eliot said, a "puzzling" play, and "disquieting as is none of the others."¹⁸ It is a play in which something gets out of hand. In it Shakespeare poses—and leaves open—the problem of control that later tragedies will master by an ironic balance. Fully achieved tragedy shows us, typically, a heroic protagonist rich in human values and commanding sympathy, but ultimately destructive. The action, in leading the protagonist to his death, moves us toward ironic awareness of his role in necessitating the tragic outcome. Poised against the hero's aggressive self-assertion, and shaping our understanding of it, irony is the aggressive assertion of a vantage point on the protagonist by means of the dramatist's control over the whole action. Ironic awareness enables us to see, from the outside, the limitations and the destructive force of a figure who, like King Lear, is simultaneously the object of our full sympathy. In Hamlet we are invited to identify with the hero at the expense of comprehensive ironic perspective; there is no adequate basis for an outside, controlling perspective. The single-sided attitude it creates toward its hero is one of the striking differences between Hamlet and the ensuing tragedies. What the play does not provide is ruthless awareness of Hamlet, such awareness as we are to get of Othello, Lear, Macbeth, Antony, Coriolanus.

The play's failure to situate us to see its protagonist from any vantage point beyond that which Hamlet provides on himself extends Hamlet's failure to see past the Ghost, to develop a perspective on his majestic father beyond his immediate and absolute dedication of himself to identification with the Ghost. We said earlier that the Ghost gives theatrical embodiment to the overwhelming pressure of a potentially disabling predicament. The Ghost is theatrical in the straightforward sense that it is the enactment of a fantasy possible only in the theater. The fantasy comes in answer to the wish Hamlet has earlier recognized as beyond fulfillment in remembering his father: "'A was a man, take him for all in all, / I shall not look upon his like again" (I.ii. 188-89). But with the appearance of the Ghost to him, Hamlet is subjected, as we are with him, to a devastating theatrical power. The creation of the Ghost is an experiment in theatrical aggression that forecloses the possibility of ironic control. Shakespeare mimes omnipotence of mind to transform an impossible fantasy into theatrical actuality, unleashing the profoundly disruptive powers of the new theater in an open-ended way to engage and unsettle the audience as well as those who, within the play, encounter this "dreaded sight" beyond the reach of any controlling perspective.

The harrowing force of the Ghost's presence is registered fully, first in the responses of Horatio and the sentinels in the magnificent opening scene, then in Hamlet's agonized questions on the battlements:

What may this mean,
That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel
Revisits thus the glimpses of the moon,
Making night hideous, and we fools of nature
So horridly to shake our disposition
With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls?
Say why is this? wherefore? what should we do?

(I.iv.51-57)

As the Ghost departs Hamlet thinks he can participate in this power, which answers to a deep need within himself:

My fate cries out
And makes each petty artere in this body
As hardy as the Nemean lion's nerve.
Still am I call'd.

(lines 81-84)

But despite the Prince's conviction here that the Ghost beckons to him with the call of enabling fate, and despite his subsequent absolute commitment to avenging his father's death, for Hamlet the Ghost's appearance puts out of reach the solution it seems at first to provide.

In Hamlet's confrontation with the spirit of his dead father, the overpowering pressure that Shakespeare copes with by creating the Ghost becomes the situation the protagonist must cope with within the play. Hamlet's means of coping is his use of theatrical aggression to engage and unsettle his audience within the play. In taking on a theatrical role like that of the licensed fool and adding to it the special heroic dimension of his extraordinary power to generalize skepticism and disillusion, Hamlet can keep his enemies at a distance while maintaining himself in the face of a potentially self-destructive predicament in which the inhibitions blocking direct action are insurmountable. And by using the players to stage "something like the murther of my father / Before mine uncle" (II.ii.595-96), he can give aggressive theatrical embodiment to the traumatic event revealed to him by the Ghost, releasing himself from its paralyzing force, at least momentarily, by directing it against Claudius.

In presenting the play-within-the-play, Hamlet is preoccupied with a motive and a cue for passion that come not from the fiction and the rhythm of an integrated dramatic performance but from within, and from offstage. To look at the place of Hamlet in Shakespeare's development is to consider how the cue for the whole play comes from Shakespeare, as the cue for the play-within-the-play comes from Hamlet. In Hamlet we can see the shift from the earlier work, with its base in a cherishing, parental sensibility that avoids full confrontation with fathers, to the confrontations with authority and heritage, grounded in relationship to the father, that characterize the great tragedies. The next section will take up the matter of how the hostility toward a good father not dealt with in Hamlet can be seen in what animates Iago in his enterprise of bringing out the weakness of a martial hero rather like Hamlet's father. Iago uses only what is potentially within his victim to make Othello destroy himself in the belief that he had been betrayed by his wife, as King Hamlet was betrayed. The naked parricidal motive against a gracious figure, in the attempt to become "no less than all" (Lr. III.iii.24), only finally gets physical enactment in the dagger that so horrifies Macbeth as he makes his way toward the murder of Duncan. In Hamlet, both Hamlet and Shakespeare understand as wholly separate objects of idolatry and hatred the single figure of a father who engenders the divided response of enduring loyalty and deadly opposition.

But if Hamlet's situation in the play reflects Shakespeare's predicament in constructing it, the play, in following out the destructive consequences of Hamlet's filial distress, also dramatizes the heroic and potentially paralyzing dimensions of a recurring cultural crisis that has its roots in Shakespeare's age and reaches into our own. Hamlet situates its hero, and its audience, at the node of despair and revolutionary protest, both of which draw perennially on heroic expectations whose roots are in infancy but whose definition is itself a heritage of culture:

See what a grace was seated on this brow:
Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself,
An eye like Mars, to threaten and command,
A station like the herald Mercury
New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill,
A combination and a form indeed,
Where every god did seem to set his seal
To give the world assurance of a man.
This was your husband. Look you now what follows:
Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear,
Blasting his wholesome brother.

(III.iv.55-65)

To vindicate the one, the other must be destroyed. Because in the almost four hundred years since Hamlet was written, Western men have repeatedly found themselves in predicaments akin to its hero's, the play's open-ended structure has taken up into itself unresolved energies of commitment and protest in successive generations. As Hazlitt put it, "It is we who are Hamlet. The play has a prophetic truth, which is above that of history."¹⁹ This is a great destiny for a work of art, though there is a further kind of power in fully achieved tragedy.

In considering the radically disruptive, potentially revolutionary energies in Hamlet, it is crucial to recognize, however, that neither the hero nor the play envisages any alternative society. Marx pointed out how revolutionary groups have ennobled their goals by dressing themselves in the borrowed robes of earlier epochs, the English Puritans as Old Testament prophets, the French revolutionaries as Roman Republicans.²⁰ In Shakespeare's own time the revolutionary appeal of the Reformation to the primitive church was being urged by the radical religious minority—for example, in the Marprelate tracts.²¹ The revolutionary impulse to think of innovation as the restoration of a pristine integrity clearly reflects psychological roots similar to those which animate Hamlet's expressions of disgust, protest, and the need for vindication. But there is no suggestion whatever in Hamlet of any alternative to established social forms, despite the Prince's drastic expression of their corruption and their limitations: "Then are our beggars bodies, and our monarchs and outstretch'd heroes the beggars' shadows" (II.ii.263-64).

The hero's criticism of society is shaped by the tradition of Christian disillusion, de contemptu mundi, rather than Protestant protest:

HAMLET: A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

CLAUDIUS: What dost thou mean by this?

HAMLET: Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

(IV.iii.27-31)

The Christian discipline of contemplation, as in, say, a representation of the Dance of Death, used such recognitions to turn the heart away from the world to allegiance to Christ.²² One response to Hamlet's predicament would be to turn from the world to religious objects—the response that Eliot dramatized in The Family Reunion, or "Follow the Furies," as that play was first titled.

But Hamlet does not move from loss to the promise of resurrection in Christ, as the Burial of the Dead invites mourners to do. Part of the tremendous originality of Hamlet is to present what might have been a religious problem without a religious solution: in other words, a potentially revolutionary situation. For Hamlet, however, there is neither the hope of resolution of later centuries focused on revolutionary change, nor the traditional Christian hope of resolution through participation in Christ's sacrifice. Hamlet is a hero because he maintains the core of his commitment, even though he confronts the revolutionary potential of the Oedipal predicament without any way to know what it is, without benefit of clergy, so to speak. Instead, the Ghost provides a father in some ways godlike, in which the hero invests something like worship, while the hero, in going about his father's business, invites our participation in his involuntary and imperfect sacrifice.

Hamlet is not, I think, a fully achieved tragedy, but rather a heroic-prophetic play with a "tragical" ending—in its vastly more complex and meaningful way, a play like Tamburlaine. It differs from Tamburlaine in presenting, not heroic outrage by direct assault upon tradition, but a crisis in the transmission of heritage that leads to heroic outrage. In its concern with inheritance, and in its focus on desperation—on the need for revenge as the core of a need for expression and vindication, on passive vulnerability struggling to become active, on language of magical expectation contorted into distraction, wit, or madness—Hamlet is remarkably like the one early play outside Marlowe's work that is both seminal and in its own right great, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy. Both plays call for an identification with the hero's alienation that excludes critical perspective. As with Hieronimo's dedication to avenging his son's death, Hamlet's tie to the Ghost of his father is so total, with no one there except him to evaluate it, that the play cannot dramatize an understanding of Hamlet's destructiveness from a tragic perspective larger than his own. My own feeling is that Hamlet is not fully under control, just because, as Eliot said, too much of the author is in the Prince—though its very open-endedness is what, pace Eliot, makes the play's distinctive greatness. But to bring under full artistic control what Shakespeare was dealing with, there was unfinished business, notably the business of seeing through the ideal father.

Notes

¹⁴ In New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, Freud writes: "The child's super-ego is in fact constructed on the model not of its parents but of its parents' super-ego; the contents which fill it are the same and it becomes the vehicle of tradition and of all the time-resisting judgements of value which have propagated themselves in this manner from generation to generation" (Standard Edition, vol. 22, p. 67).

¹⁵ For Battenhouse, "Hamlet's inability to discriminate this fact [that the Ghost is a "damned spirit"] is at the core of his tragedy, . . . a tragedy inseparable from his own decayed faith" (Roy Battenhouse, "The Ghost in Hamlet: A Catholic 'Linchpin'?" Studies in Philology 48 [1951]: 192). See also chap. 4 of his Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), pp. 204-66. On the basis of extensive readings in both Protestant and Catholic writings on ghosts, Prosser finds a "definitive test": "No matter how convincing a spirit might be in every other respect, if it urged any action or made any statement that violated the teachings of the Church, it was an agent of the Devil" (Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967], p. 111).

¹⁶ David Willbern, from whose work in progress this phrase is borrowed, observes that the need to do this is deeply grounded in the psychology of revenge and is a consistent feature of the revenge-play form, with its plays-(and audiences)-within-plays.

¹⁷ T. S. Eliot, "Hamlet and His Problems," Selected Essays, new ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1950), p. 123.

¹⁸ Ibid. In considering Hamlet in relation to Shakespeare's power of development, it is well to recall Ella Freeman Sharpe's telling distinction: "The poet is not Hamlet. Hamlet is what he might have been if he had not written the play of Hamlet" (Collected Papers on Psycho-Analysis, ed. Marjorie Brierly [London: Hogarth Press, 1950], p. 205).

¹⁹ William Hazlitt, Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817), ed. Ernest Rhys (London: Everyman's Library, n.d.), p. 79.

²⁰ Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), pp. 15-17. Marx distinguished such self-sanctioning by identification with a heroic past from his own call for a proletarian revolution: "The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the future" (p. 18). In "The Resurrected Romans" (The Tradition of the New [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965]), Harold Rosenberg turns Marx's observation back against the revolutionary optimism it was designed to serve: "The true image of the historical drama would be less The Communist Manifesto, with its symmetrical human movements, than Hamlet, in which those on stage are exposed at all times to the never-quieted dead" (p. 168). That Hamlet is no longer regarded as Shakespeare's preeminent masterpiece, as it was in the age of romantic and revolutionary enthusiasm, may be partly because we are more aware of the problematic character of revolutionary hopes.

²¹ Some of the common players, in the period when Shakespeare was starting in the theater, ventured to enter the Marprelate controversy on the establishment side, and after initial encouragement, were told firmly to leave religious matters alone. The Anglican establishment, under Archbishop Whitgift, was savagely repressing the radicals, resisting any further development of the reformation tendency. See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), vol. 1, pp. 261, 295.

²² Theodore Spencer explored Christian attitudes toward death in relation to the drama in Death and Elizabethan Tragedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936).