L'ecriture humaine: Hamlet's pacifist subtext and the problem of the prince

I held off posting this because it seemed frivolous against the George Floyd killing, but the more I thought about it, the more I understood Shakespeare's meditation on the relationship between murder and power is relevant for our times. Floyd's killer had too  much power to kill with impunity. Floyd, like those Hamlet killed, was dehumanized. 

Hamlet as a character doesn't cohere in ways I would like.  

In Hamlet's character, Shakespeare created, on the one hand, an introspective, sensitive, and humane prince who deeply questions and critiques the revenge and war ethic. By doing so, Shakespeare played a double game in this play, writing a revenge tragedy that would satisfy his audience's desire for bloodlust while at the same time undermining the bloodlust ethic.

This Delacroix painting captures the reality of Polonius as a person.

Yet while Hamlet is his vehicle for critiquing violence, Hamlet turns into a heartless killer. Hamlet murders Polonius, mistaking him for Claudius as he hides behind a tapestry ("arras")  in Gertrude's room.  Later, Hamlet orchestrates the deaths of courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Why, one wonders, did Shakespeare turn revenge-averse Hamlet into a murderer?

Notably,  Hamlet does not have a problem killing people of lower rank. His hesitancy comes into play only when it is a matter of killing a person of his own status.

Hamlet is callous towards both Polonius and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. In terms of Polonius's murder, it is possible that Hamlet, who has most likely hallucinated, rather than actually seen, Claudius' ghost in Gertrude's room, is half mad at the moment he strikes, hardly knowing what he is doing.

Yet even the calmer Hamlet disparages rather than shows compassion for the dead courier. In Act three, scene 4, he says to Gertrude:

I’ll lug the guts into the neighbor room. ... Indeed this counselor... was in life a foolish prating knave.

Hamlet contrasts Polonius' still serenity in death to his foolish chatter in life. By doing so,  Hamlet implies Polonius is better off dead. He also, at this moment, implies he will deal harshly and cold-bloodedly towards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are accompanying him to England--even though he notes they are childhood companions, individuals he knows and for whom one might imagine he would feel some empathy. He states, however, that he plans to punish them for being the willing tools of Claudius, hoisting them with their own petard:

For ’tis the sport to have the engineer/Hoist with his own petard. And ’t shall go hard

In Act V, scene 2, having returned from his off scene trip, he explains to Horatio how he tricked the two courtiers. He opened and read the letter Claudius sent with them in their pouch. In the letter, unbeknownst to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Claudius called for Hamlet to be immediately beheaded upon landing on English soil. Hamlet, who has his father's royal signet ring with him, rewrites the letter to turn the tables: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to be killed, without even time to "shrive" or repent of their sins, but be put to "sudden death."

In ruminating about this, Hamlet says that the two courtiers are "not near my conscience." They deserve what they get, he says, because they "made love" to their profession. Essentially, he is indifferent to their deaths. He argues that they brought it on themselves:

Their defeat /Does by their own insinuation grow.

He states that when "baser" natures come between "mighty opposites" they get what they deserve. 

Ironically, this images affirms the humanity of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, something Hamlet cannot do. 

In having Hamlet say that he and Claudius are mighty opposites amid baser people, Shakespeare highlights the problems and psychopathy of princedom, as well as the strong identity Hamlet feels with Claudius that his conscious mind wants to deny. Hamlet might hesitate to kill someone as royal as he is--and he might hesitate to sacrifice an army to gain a small conquest--but he shows his ruthless belief in his royal prerogative to kill when it comes to the little people around him.

Why would Shakespeare do this? One argument might be that  he wants to show that Hamlet is deteriorating as the play goes on. Hamlet moves from passion killing to coldblooded murder, plotted as Claudius might have done, because the disease and corruption of the Danish court has started to infect him. 

But another, more compelling answer is suggested by Tolstoy, who, writing not about Shakespeare but the artist in general, asserts in Anna Karenina that the true artist is:

inspired directly by what is within the soul, without caring whether what is painted [or written] will belong to any recognized school [genre].

Shakespeare did clearly care about genre. But he went deeper than genre, as Tolstoy did, telling the truth as he saw it. A truth he knew--and makes clear in many of his plays--is that princes are inherently dangerous. Shakespeare uses Hamlet the prince to articulate what is within his writer's soul--a distaste for revenge and violence and a belief that the powerful, buttressed by ideologies of bloodlines and far too much power, are inherently dangerous. In Hamlet, Shakespeare leaves us with a dilemma: those with the most power to end the violence plaguing humankind are those most hardwired to justify their own use of violence. In this ragged, brilliant play, Shakespeare makes us uneasy by raising more questions than answers.