L'Ecriture Humaine: Hamlet's pacifist subtext

For a society in desperate need of rediscovering its moral center, Shakespeare stands out as a key articulator of human decency.  Yet though Shakespeare's humanity sometimes leaps from his work,  sometimes it is obscured. Hamlet, for example, a highly jagged, problematic play, veils its critique of revenge and war. The long version we have--four and half hours performed in its entirety--reflects Shakespeare's struggles, never-resolved, with this play's contradictions.

Hamlet is ripped apart as the play opens with grief over his father's death, angered and stunned at his mother's quick remarriage, and thrown into horror by his father's ghost's revelations.  In an overt reading, Hamlet enacts justice when he finally kills his father's --and mother's--cold-blooded murderer. Yet alternative ideas about revenge can be found  through the stories embedded within Hamlet that take us winding into the classical world in a way that undermines an overt reading. 

Two stories alluded to in the play highlight two possible responses to vengeance. In the first, in Act II, scene ii, Hamlet chats with the players who arrive at the castle. He starts a speech given about Pyrrhus, Achilles' son. Pyrrhus, entering the Trojan horse as part of the ploy to defeat Troy, is out for vengeance anyway he can get it, and his description in Hamlet lives up to his bloodthirsty reputation. 

European paintings heroize Pyrrhus, though modern readers often speculate that he was literature's first psychopath. Here, in a detail from an urn that is called "Pyrrhus kills Priam" we see the slaughter of Trojan women and children that was part of Pyrrhus' murderous rampage. I have not found, however, an image of him coated in bloody  gore baked onto his body or with blazing red eyes.  

Pyrrhus has coated himself in the thick, congealed blood of the dead: fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons. Further, he has lit fires in the streets to bake and paste the thick layer of blood to his flesh. He is "roasted in wrath and fire." He has been made larger with the bloody gore he has pasted to himself, and his eyes burn like red stones. This is a terrifying and dehumanized picture of rage and bloodlust:

Now is he total gules, horridly tricked/With blood of fathers, mothers, daughters, sons, /Baked and impasted with the parching streets, /That lend a tyrannous and damnèd light, /And thus o'ersizèd with coagulate gore, /With eyes like carbuncles, the hellish Pyrrhus /Old grandsire Priam seeks.

The First Player then picks up the story and describes  how the merciless "tyrant" Pyrrhus, driven by fury, hacks the hapless Priam to death, dishonoring his body:

Pyrrhus at Priam drives, in rage strikes wide, /But with the whiff and wind of his fell swordThe unnerved father falls. Then senseless Ilium, /Seeming to feel this blow, with flaming top /Stoops to his base, and with a hideous crash
 /Takes prisoner Pyrrhus' ear. For, lo, his sword, /Which was declining on the milky head /Of reverend Priam, seemed i' th' air to stick. /So as a painted tyrant Pyrrhus stood ...

This is a picture of mad revenge. 

The second allusion to revenge comes when Hamlet asks Polonius in Act III scene 2, as they are getting ready to watch the Mousetrap play, if he has ever acted. Polonius says that as a university student:  “I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’the capitol/Brutus killed me.” This foreshadows Polonius' death at the hands of Hamlet. But it also brings to mind Brutus’s father. This elder Brutus was murdered despite having been promised safe passage after surrendering to Pompey. The younger Brutus, the friend of Caesar,  never avenges his father’s death. He believes it would be better for Rome to let revenge go and put the needs of his country ahead of of the "dishonor" of his private domestic situation. 

Since Hamlet will later enact the role of Brutus in killing Polonius, he is explicitly identified with Brutus--a figure who does not enact revenge. 

Hamlet looks beyond the arras to see the body of Polonius, who he has just accidentally killed. 

Hamlet himself is a problematic character. Critics have often depicted him as the figure of indecision, while others, such as Rene Girard in The Theater of Envy, defend Hamlet for his humanity in thinking carefully and seeking confirmation before killing a man on the basis of the words of a ghost. As Girard notes in "Hamlet's Dull Revenge:"

Should our enormous critical literature on Hamlet someday fall into the hands of people otherwise ignorant of our mores, they could not fail to conclude that our academic tribe must have been a savage breed, indeed. After four centuries of controversies, Hamlet’s temporary reluctance to commit murder still looks so outlandish to us that more and more books are being written in an unsuccessful effort to solve the mystery. The only  way to account for this curious body of literature is to suppose that back in the 20^th century no more was needed than the request of some ghost, and the average professor of literature would massacre his entire household without batting an eyelash.

In Hamlet, Shakespeare has Hamlet raise profound and important questions about a revenge and violence ethic.

Painters gravitate to the same scenes from Hamlet, such as this one in which Hamlet, in the graveyard, looks at Yorick's skull. At this point, Hamlet has begun to feel at peace about his destiny. 

Hamlet, from the start, in his heart of hearts doesn't want to to kill Claudius. He doesn't like Claudius, but that doesn't equate to a desire to murder him. In fact, the ghost's revelations only intensify Hamlet's suicidal ideation, turning his aggressions inward. His reluctance to mirror the bloodthirsty killing behavior of his uncle continues even into Act IV.

In Act IV, scene 4, while he is waiting with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to board a ship to England, Hamlet meets one of Fortinbras' captains and asks him what is going on. Fortinbras has been threatening since the play began to march on Denmark in revenge for perceived wrongs done against his own father. The captain tells Hamlet bluntly that Fortinbras is asking for safe passage so he can march an army across to Denmark to reclaim a worthless strip of land:

We go to gain a little patch of ground
That hath in it no profit but the name.
To pay five ducats, five, I would not farm it.

Hamlet wonders about this, and yet attempts to use Fortinbras as a role model to motivate himself to avenge his father's death. He castigates himself for his indecision, calling himself a coward for overthinking the act of revenge. But the more he tries to hold up Fortinbras as a model, the more his words show that he, at least subconsciously, thinks his counterpart is a monster. Hamlet says that Fortinbras is risking many lives for what is no more substantial than an "eggshell:" 

 Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death, and danger dare/Even for an eggshell. 

Hamlet then defines being "great"  in the conventional terms of his society, but as he does so, he inadvertently speaks a double language. Hamlet defines greatness as  to quarrel over nothing --"a straw"-- for the sake of "honor." This idea of greatness is palpably absurd: 

... greatly to find quarrel in a straw/When honor’s at the stake.

Hamlet nevertheless continues to try to bury his doubts about violence by comparing himself to Fortinbras and wondering how he, Hamlet, can continue to "sleep:" 

How stand I then, /That have a father killed, a mother stained, /Excitements of my reason and my blood, /And let all sleep ...

Hamlet once again uses language that reveals that he thinks it is ridiculous to gamble with the deaths of 20,000 men for a "fantasy." He states that the number of lives Fortinbras is risking are more than could be buried on the land they are being asked to take, underscoring the absurdity of his rival's  quest:

 The imminent death of twenty thousand men, /That for a fantasy and trick of fame /Go to their graves like beds, /fight for a plot /Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, /Which is not tomb enough and continent/To hide the slain?

Using Fortinbras as a template, Hamlet decides he will stick to "bloody" thoughts. Tellingly, however, he does not break from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, his powerless courtier companions, to return to the castle and immediately kill Claudius. Instead, he boards a ship to England, putting a sea between himself and Claudius--an astonishing negation of all he has  just declared in his soliloquy.

Hamlet doesn't come to "peace" with himself until he arrives in England. As Girard notes, he caught between a Christian and a pagan ethic in a culture where the two rest uneasily side by side. Girard is wrong, however, in seeing Hamlet as simply an imitator of other vengeful sons around him: Hamlet is not slavishly following the model of Laertes--or Fortinbras--in seeking revenge. Hamlet is his own person.

As he so often does (see, eg, Henry V, act four, scene 1) Shakespeare uses the bloodthirsty imagery of heroic language to undercut and point out the barbarism of his culture's notions of heroism. In weaving into Hamlet the story of monstrous Pyrrhus--and waving red flags at this story with a long quote from it--and by including a long soliloquy in which Hamlet cluelessly lays bare the barbarism of the very honor code he vows (but fails) to uphold--Shakespeare critiques the conventional ethics of the "great." He even goes so far as to gesture toward a figure in the pagan world--Brutus--who defines honor in a way that defies the revenge and violence ethic.

This will bring us to the next blog. For all his anguish over revenge, is distaste for violence, and a thoughtful, sensitive nature, Hamlet is also a prince--and this leads him to kill.  High rank mars this most introspective of characters.