A Commentary on Hamlet: Part 2

Ophelia, Madness, and the Supernatural

Another area of critical exploration in Hamlet is the character of Ophelia. Max Patrick presents an interesting thesis concerning her: he argues that Ophelia is actually pregnant with Hamlet’s child. In his 1953 article “The Problem of Ophelia,” Patrick builds this case on various references to chastity and unchastity that exist in the play, including some made by Ophelia herself (in the songs of 4.5, for example). In 2.2, Hamlet (in a state of feigned madness) is speaking to Polonius about his daughter, Ophelia. Hamlet asserts that because the sun can “breed maggots in a dead dog” (2.2.181), Polonius should not let Ophelia “walk i’ th’ sun. Conception is a blessing, but as your daughter may conceive, friend, look to’t” (2.2.184-86). Since this statement is so out of place and comes from Ophelia’s lover, it is conceivable that Hamlet’s statement is something more than mere mad ravings. In contrast to Patrick, I read this passage as a reference to the vitality associated with the sun and the deathliness associated with the moon: “Bizarre as the assertion is, it does serve to set up the sun in association with fertility, as a bringer of life and new beginnings, which is especially interesting when we remember that the moon heralded the approach of King Hamlet’s ghost earlier in the play. Thus the moon can be seen as an image of death, the spirit world, and lunacy, while the sun becomes and image of life and fertility” (Larson 6). The mere presence of the references Patrick points out do not form a strong enough foundation to make claims with any certainty, and Patrick says as much (141).

The character of Ophelia and her tragic fate raises another issue: the question of madness. Much of the play centers around the binary of reason vs. madness. We have not only Hamlet’s feigned madness and Ophelia’s real madness, but also many different references to the intellect and its corruption. One early example comes from Hamlet’s first encounter with the ghost, during which Horatio warns Hamlet that it might “deprive your sovereignty of reason, / And draw you into madness” (1.4.73).

Hamlet himself laments the loss of reason in humans in 4.4.36-39: “Sure he that made us with such large discourse / …Gave us not / That capability and godlike reason / to fust in us unus’d” (4.4.36-39). Similarly, in 2.2.303-05, Hamlet says, “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties.” Hamlet is continuously fascinated by the character of human nature, especially the intellect, and the ways it can be misused. Commenting on the above speech, G.K. Chesterton writes in “The Orthodoxy of Hamlet,” published posthumously in 1958, that the speech is “perhaps, the most optimistic passage in all human literature. It is the absolute expression…of the faith of Hamlet; his faith that, although he cannot see the world is good, yet certainly it is good…Many fine optimists have praised man when they felt like praising him. Only Hamlet has praised man when he felt like kicking him as a monkey of the mud.” I find Chesterton’s approach to be insightful and profound. Hamlet is often cast as a skeptic and a deep melancholic, so it is refreshing to hear an alternative perspective. Hamlet is astounded at the depths to which man can fall—including the corruption of the intellect in madness—but nonetheless he recognizes the potential for greatness in human nature.

Of even greater importance in the play, however, is the theme of death and the supernatural. In my reader response to the play, I wrote of the opening, “Another…purpose of this scene is the introduction of the spiritual dimension of the play. Shakespeare wastes no time and does not dance around the issue: there really is a ghost out there, and the three men really are facing the unknown—a concept that will return later in the play” (2). Indeed, I would argue that the unknown is a concept absolutely central to the play. As C.S Lewis says, “The Hamlet formula, so to speak, is not ‘a man who has to avenge his father’, but ‘a man who has been given a task by a ghost’” (12). Here, Lewis hits upon that unique character of the play: it is a play in which “the appearance of the spectre means a breaking down of the walls of the world and the germination of thoughts that cannot really be thought: chaos is come again” (Lewis 13).

It is this constant dealing with the unknown, the things that are so great and so nearly beyond mankind’s comprehension that forms much of the heart of the work. In his 1936 book What Happens in Hamlet, Dover Wilson argues that Shakespeare implies doubt in Hamlet’s mind surrounding the exact identity of the ghost he encounters. He writes, “At the end of the first act, the Elizabethan audience could no more be certain of the honesty of the Ghost and of the truth of the story he had related, than the perplexed hero himself” (84). According to Wilson, the politics of Shakespereare’s time may have led him to include this uncertainty in Hamlet’s character. Protestant audiences would have disagreed with the Ghost’s description of the afterlife and therefore viewed him as a deceiving demon, while Catholics would have approved and taken him as genuine. Wilson writes, “It paid [Shakespeare] dramatically to have all three schools of thought [Catholic, Protestant, and non-religious] have their views considered” (84). This is just one example of Wilson’s examination of how historical forces help to shape the play and our understanding of it.

Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” speech is largely about the unknown factor of death, which goes hand in hand with the appearance of ghosts and the backdrop of heaven and hell that pervades the work. As I put it in my reader response, “Heaven (and hell) is in the background of every scene because all of the action and drama has spiritual and eternal consequences in the world of the play” (9). One of those consequences is death itself, “the undiscover’d country” (3.1.77). Lewis goes so far as to say that Hamlet is a play about death and being dead: “In Hamlet we are kept thinking about it all the time, whether in terms of the soul’s destiny or of the body’s. Purgatory, Hell, Heaven, the wounded name, the rights—or wrongs—of Ophelia’s burial, and the staying-power of a tanner’s corpse…beyond all Christian and all Pagan maps of the hereafter, comes a curious groping…about ‘what dreams may come’ ” (14). That is perhaps one thing that critics can agree on: the play is full of death and contemplations on death. The whole of 5.1, for example, is really a series of various contemplations of death. In this way, Hamlet becomes not merely a play with death in it, but a play about death. One might call it a morbid play, but it is morbid in a very thoughtful way, and it touches something within all of us without being too heavy-handed.

In 2008, The Telegraph surveyed more than 300 actors, writers, directors, and producers, asking them to vote on which of Shakespeare’s plays is the greatest. Hamlet won this distinction. Whether or not these Shakespearean experts are correct (and I’m inclined to think they are), this survey reveals the play’s enduring popularity. Indeed, a quick Google search confirms that Hamlet is champion of nearly every list or poll of Shakespeare’s greatest works. The question that I am led to ask then, is Why? Why is Hamlet so universally appealing? What is it about the play that raises it, as it were, into a league of its own, above all the rest of the world’s greatest drama? In a word, what makes Hamlet so incredibly good? I would argue that the play is so successful and such a great work of art because it is not merely the story of a prince trying to avenge his father, it is not merely a well-crafted work of poetry, nor even a powerful drama about revenge and justice, but rather because it is a supreme examination and portrayal of what it means to be human. There are few themes more universal than that and few works of literature that have so powerfully engaged with it. In a sense, Hamlet contains a quality all its own, something not attributable to either its characters, or to its plot, or to its poetry individually, but conjured up somehow from their combination, the quality of a vision or a dream in which Denmark becomes all the world and all the ages and Prince Hamlet becomes all of us and each of us, struggling in the dark against doubt and fear, struck by wonder and love, trembling before the supernatural and the “undiscover’d country” of death (3.1.77.), surrounded by mysterious tragedy and more mysterious triumph. Contrary to the skeptics like T.S. Eliot who famously said in “Hamlet and His Problems” that “the play is most certainly an artistic failure” (90), I contend that it is one of Shakespeare’s crowning achievements, and indeed one of the finest jewels in all of literature.

Works Cited

Boys, Richard, Edward Hooker, and H.T. Swedenberg, J.R. editors. Some Remarks on the

Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Written by Mr. William Shakespeare. 1736. eBook ed., The Augustan Reprint Society, 1947. Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14899.

Chesterton, G.K. “The Orthodoxy of Hamlet.” Chesterton.Org. American Chesterton Society. http://www.chesterton.org/orthodoxy-of-hamlet/.

Eliot, T.S. “Hamlet and His Problems.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. Methuen, 1920. Archive.org. https://archive.org/details/sacredwoodessays00eliorich, pp. 87-94. Accessed 18 Mar. 2017.

Foakes, R.A. “From Coleridge on Shakespeare.” Hamlet: Critical Essays, edited by Joseph G. Price, Garland, 1986, pp. 201-206.

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. 3rd. ed., translated by A. A. Brill, Macmillan, 1913. Bartleby.com, 2010. www.bartleby.com/285/.

Hastings, Chris. “Shakespeare: Best to Worst.” The Telegraph, 23 Nov. 2008. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/3563537/Shakespeare-best-to-worst.html

Hazlit, William. Characters of Shakespeare’s Plays. 1817. University of Adelaide, 2014, eBook edition. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/h/hazlitt/william/characters-of-shakespeares-plays/index.html.

Larson, Walker. “Shakespeare Project Part 1: Reader Response: Hamlet.” Winona State University, Feb. 8 2017.

Lewis, C.S. Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?:Annual Shakespeare Lecture of the British Academy, 1942. Humphrey Milford Amen House, 1942. eBook edition, 2016. Faded Page. http://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20160701.

Patrick, J. Marx. “The Problem of Ophelia.” Studies in Shakespeare, vol. 1, 1953, pp. 139-144. https://medd.minitex.umn.edu/getdocument.aspx.   

Ritson, Joseph. “The God of His Idolatry.” Joseph Ritson: Scholar at Arms, edited by Bertrand Bronson, vol. 2, University of California Press, 1938. Google Books.  https://books.google.com/booksid=5t88zLVFcigC&pg=PA402&lpg=PA402&dq=joseph+ritson+hamlet&source=bl&ots=EcEUytoITf&sig=X-xhFSeId0Uc9tDISv0YYGg _ICw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjilOjB6eDSAhWky4MKHc0ABHUQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q&f=false. Accessed 18 March 2017.

Shakespeare, William. “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.” The Riverside Shakespeare, edited by G. Blakemore Evans, Tobin, Houghton Mifflin, 1997, pp. 1183-1245.

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