Abstract
What are Hamlet’s problems? Why does he delay? Is he uncertain about the right course of action, unsure of the ghost, afraid of damnation, traumatized by the disillusionment, excessively introspective, or paralyzed by inhibitions of which he himself is not wholly aware? Ernest Jones argued that Hamlet’s difficulties center in reality “about a sexual problem,” the manifestations of which “are transferred on to more tolerable and permissible topics, such as anxiety ... about immortality and the salvation of the soul, philosophical considerations about the value of life, the future of the world, and so on” (1954, 67). Although I do not feel Hamlet’s problems to be primarily sexual, I agree with Jones that his philosophical concerns are psychologically determined. I agree also, however, with Paul Gottschalk’s objections to the generality of Jones’s explanation and its failure to analyze the conscious material of the play:
After all, the play takes place largely on the conscious level, and its philosophical, religious, and political content is considerable ... we cannot fully appreciate the play, even from the psychoanalytic point of view, without understanding how Hamlet’s inner problem ... finds expression in these ... ideas that body forth the deeper workings of the mind. To my knowledge, such an interpretation has not been done. (1972, 101)
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Notes
There have been, of course, many fine psychological studies of Hamlet. See Holland 1966 and Noland 1974 for surveys of criticism. For bibliographies, see Holland 1966 and Schwartz and Kahn 1980, which updates Holland. Among the more relevant recent studies are Leverenz 1978, Kahn 1981, Kirsch 1981, and Erickson 1985.
I am using, with a few exceptions, the Hardin Craig text of Hamlet. I prefer “solid” to “sullied” in act 1, scene 2, line 129; and I read act 3, scene 4, line 149 as “curb the devil.”.
Psychological considerations aside, I do not believe that the play’s structure encourages us to see Hamlet’s decision not to kill Claudius at this point as further procrastination. The whole situation is so ordered as to produce powerful ironies that would be lost if we did not take Hamlet’s reasons at face value. The Mousetrap achieves what Hamlet intended: it conclusively reveals Claudius’s guilt and releases Hamlet’s bloodthirsty aggression. Because Hamlet has caught the conscience of the king, however, Claudius is now praying. This at once gives Hamlet the opportunity to take him unguarded and prevents him from using it, since he is afraid that Claudius’s soul will go to heaven if he dies in a state of purgation. We discover as soon as Hamlet leaves that Claudius’s effort at prayer has failed: “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below;/ Words without thoughts never to heaven go” (III, iii). This would have been a good time to kill him, after all. It is difficult to reconcile the contention that we are meant to see Hamlet as delaying with this striving for ironic effects.
The flow of the action makes it appear that Hamlet went directly from the prayer scene to his mother’s chamber. If he did, he must have known that the person behind the arras could not have been the king, and we need, then, a psychological explanation of why he acts as though it might have been. Other evidence suggests that it could have been the king and that Hamlet did, in fact, take Polonius for his better. When Claudius hears of the murder, he says, “It had been so with us, had we been there” (IV, i). At the end of the closet scene, Hamlet displays his knowledge of Claudius’s plan to send him to England in the company of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “There’s letters seal’d: and my two schoolfellows,/ Whom I will trust as adders fang’d,/ They bear the mandate” (III, iv). Although Claudius first thought of sending Hamlet to England after overhearing his tirade to Ophelia, he does not give Rosencrantz and Guildenstern their commission until after the play, in a scene that culminates with his attempt to pray (III, ii). This indicates that there is an interval between the prayer scene and Hamlet’s arrival at the Queen’s chamber during which he learns of Claudius’s plan. There would have been time, then, for the King to have gone to the Queen’s closet and to have concealed himself there. In the absence of clear stage directions, there is no way of arguing this point conclusively. Each interpreter (and director) must make his own choice. It is quite consonant with my interpretation of Hamlet’s character for him to have been able to kill the king at this point in the play, and I shall take the position that it was physically possible for Claudius to have been behind the arras.
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© 1991 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Paris, B.J. (1991). Hamlet. In: Bargains with Fate. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6146-4_3
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