Abstract
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is an acute depressive who combines shame and disgust in a monopolistic-contamination script. As feelings of self-disgust about his inaction become increasingly toxic, shame intrudes to catalyse decontaminating action. Analysing his personality’s affect-script structure and interactions with others reveals contrasting and often competing aspects of Hamlet, especially in opposition to Claudius’ toxicity, Gertrude’s contamination, and Ophelia’s confusions. Some scholars suggest Elizabethan England and Ancient Athens, two cultures in profound socio-economic and political changes, are the only societies to produce genuine tragedies. Oedipus and Hamlet are often compared. Hamlet is not a pharmakos. The ambiguous pharmakos in Oedipus splits into separate entities of disease and cure in Hamlet. Hamlet feels disgust in response to others’ shameful actions and his own shameful inaction. Like Oedipus, Hamlet is charged with discovering and exposing an unknown social criminal, a contaminant which rots Denmark, but while Hamlet accepts this burden, he is not responsible for the contamination.
Alas, poor Yorrick!….
He hath borne me on his back a thousand times.
And now how abhorred in my imagination it is!
My gorge rises…
Shakespeare, Hamlet.
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Notes
- 1.
That lability has led to a prohibitive mass of Hamlet and Shakespeare criticism, and I am neither an early modern nor Shakespeare specialist. For good surveys of Shakespeare criticism, see Edward Pechter (1995), What Was Shakespeare?: Renaissance Plays and Changing Critical Practice, Richard Halpern (1997), Shakespeare Among the Moderns, and Michael Taylor (2001), Shakespeare Criticism in the Twentieth Century.
- 2.
See Chapter 3, “Theory of Myths,” in Bob Denham’s (1978) Northrop Frye and Critical Method for charts, diagrams, and explanations demonstrating these overlaps.
- 3.
Janet Adelman makes an important observation regarding the inward turn. She identifies a moment in King Henry VI, part 3 (c. 1595), when “we hear—I think for the first time in Shakespeare—the voice of a fully developed subjectivity, the characteristically Shakespearean illusion that a stage person has interior being, including motives that he himself does not fully understand…. Shakespeare creates [Richard’s] subjectivity in effect as psychoanalysis does, by locating the origins of the self in [a] re-imagined past” (1992, 1–2). Hamlet (c. 1600), then, marks a perfecting of the “interior” character.
- 4.
The Paolucci (1962) volume Hegel on Tragedy takes this passage from Osmaston’s translation of Hegel’s The Philosophy of Fine Art. “Ekel” (disgust) is mistranslated as contempt (verachtung): “Die eigentliche Kollision dreht sich deshalb auch nicht darum, daß der Sohn in seiner sittlichen Rache selbst die Sittlichkeit verletzen muß, sondern um den subjektiven Charakter Hamlets, dessen edle Seele für diese Art energischer Tätigkeit nicht geschaffen ist und, voll Ekel an der Welt und am Leben, zwischen Entschluß, Proben und Anstalten zur Ausführung umhergetrieben, durch das eigene Zaudern und die äußere Verwicklung der Umstände zugrunde geht” (Hegel 1970, 559). As discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3, there are significant differences in human affect-emotion life between disgust, dissmell, and contempt.
- 5.
Eissler shows how Lionel Knights , despite denying the validity of psychological character criticism, nonetheless “reaches a point at which he is forced to psychologize, even though this may happen against his will” (1971, 9).
- 6.
Those accounts include: (1) Hamlet experiences no external difficulties that prevent his taking action with “his ‘sword’ or his ‘arm’” (1961, 76); (2) without external difficulties, Hamlet’s delay must arise from an internal conflict. The so-called conscience theory (79) is rejected by Bradley because Hamlet assumes “he ought to avenge his father” (76), even if some commentators suggest a type of unconscious “moral repulsion to the deed” (78); (3) Goethe’s sensitive soul theory is dismissed as a disservice to the character’s complexity because it “turns tragedy into mere pathos” while ignoring “the hardness and cynicism which were indeed no part of his nature, but yet, in this crisis of his life, are indubitably present and painfully marked” (81). Bradley argues that due to the circumstances Hamlet finds himself in, it is “profoundly tragic” that “a soul so pure and noble” should be induced to “embitterment, callousness, grossness, brutality” (82); and (4) the overly intellectual, reflective bias of the “Schlegel-Coleridge theory” (84) is insufficient for ignoring the emotional agitation resulting from Hamlet’s “special circumstances” (86).
- 7.
For detailed surveys of psychoanalytical criticism of Shakespeare and/or Hamlet, see Norman Holland’s Psychoanalysis and Shakespeare (1964), which covers the period up to 1960, Janet Adelman’s Suffocating Mothers (1992), which covers the next 30 years, and Philip Armstrong’s Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (2001), which examines the interdependency of psychoanalysis as a critical practice and Shakespearean criticism as they develop in time and place—Vienna with Freud , Paris with Lacan , and Johannesburg with Wulf Sachs—before turning to thematic lines of investigation in mnemonic and sexual terms.
- 8.
In Mourning and Melancholia, Freud suggests, “Feelings of shame in front of other people… are lacking in the melancholic , or at least they are not prominent in him” (1989, 585), even though melancholics typically display self-diminution, ego worthlessness, self-vilification, expectations “to be cast out and punished” (584), self-reproach, and “delusion of (mainly moral) inferiority” (584). He is suggesting that depressives are not concerned about hiding their depression. Paradoxically, they are not ashamed of their shame, and this is particularly true when self-disgust becomes prominent in the expectations of being, or feeling worthy of being, “cast out.”
- 9.
Impunitive: resignation toward frustration and characterized by blaming neither oneself nor others unreasonably. Intropunitive: blaming oneself unreasonably rather than other people or events for intense feelings of responsibility for frustration. Extrapunitive: reacting aggressively to frustration and characterized by unreasonably blaming other people or events. See H. A. Murray’s Explorations in Personality (Oxford: Oxford UP, (1938) 2007).
- 10.
This finding was statistically confirmed in empirical testing by Tomkins and Miner , Michael Nesbitt, and J. Vasquez. See “Ideology and Affect” (138–159) in Exploring Affect. See also Tomkins and Miner , The Tomkins-Horn Picture Arrangement Test (New York: Springer, 1957) and PAT Interpretation (New York: Springer, 1959).
- 11.
This echoes interestingly with Palmer’s definition of tragedy as “a dramatic form that stimulates a response of intense, interdependent, and inseparably balanced attraction and repulsion” (1992, 11).
- 12.
This is not a definitive list. Tomkins implicitly invites others to create new models as necessary. One promise of script theory is that new labels and descriptions might be created ad infinitum.
- 13.
In his early writings, Tomkins uses “theory” to represent what he later calls scripts. All individuals “write” theories for any and all aspects of affect: “After much cumulative experience, information about affects may become organized into what we term ‘theories ,’ in much the same way that theories are constructed to account for uniformities in science or in cognition in general. An affect theory is a simplified and powerful summary of a larger set of affect experiences. Such a theory may be about affect in general, or about a particular affect” (1963, 2: 230).
- 14.
Traditional psychoanalysis favours continuity via unconscious and repressed motivation, thereby limiting itself to monopolistic-snowball models that oversimplify the complex relations in many subsystems comprising the human.
- 15.
Martha Nussbaum (2004) picks this idea up, though not explicitly with deference to Tomkins with her book Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law. Her argument does not align with my book’s concerns, but I just don’t find it coincidental that she chose those two “affects” as a pair in a discussion of crime and punishment. Nussbaum does recognize Tomkins’ “major contribution to the literature on shame in the area of cognitive psychology” (183), but she also only cites volumes one and two of Affect Imagery Consciousness. She also has a different definitional starting point for the affect-emotions in question. “Disgust… is very different from anger, in that its thought-content is typically unreasonable, embodying magical ideas of contamination, and impossible aspirations to purity, immortality and nonanimality, that are just not in line with human life as we know it” (14). Thought she acknowledges disgust’s “valuable role in our evolution” (14), her emphasis is to the cognitive side rather than the biological. She also, in contrast with Tomkins , suggests that shame “arrives on the scene earlier in human life” (15) than disgust. Disgust needs “at least some linguistic capacity” (15) before children acquire it, which again emphasizes the cognitive over the biological.
- 16.
Ophelia belongs within the “love” field of Gertrude, though she is the specific focus of Hamlet’s erotic passion, so I will not discuss her in detail. His disenchantment with her is analogous to that of Gertrude and is therefore a script magnification of his existential state of disgust rejection. Alfred Harbage understood this idea in terms similar to my argument: “Perhaps the disillusion, suspicion, and disgust engendered in him by the conduct of his mother has rubbed off on all women including Ophelia, so that she both attracts and repels him; or perhaps he wished to divorce her for her own sake from his own cursed life and the infectious world” (1963, 323). Adelman , although she maintains the erotic content of Gertrude, comes to a similar conclusion, saying that Ophelia “becomes contaminated in his eyes, subject to the same ‘frailty’ that names his mother” (1992, 14).
- 17.
Most children and youth find the idea of their parents’ sexuality disgusting, but with maturation of their own sexuality, that disgust may become tempered. Hamlet is a well-matured 30-year old, not the adolescent that many readings imply. See Bradley’s (1961) “Note C: Hamlet’s Age,” Shakespearean Tragedy, 344–346.
- 18.
On the topic of Gertrude’s incest as culturally specific, see also Schücking (1968, 38–9).
- 19.
Examples: Hegel, Bradley , Steiner , Figes , and Terzakis . See Palmer’s (1992) Tragedy and Tragic Theory.
- 20.
The affect fear-terror is an emergency response to an imminent threat. During the twentieth century, Tomkins felt anxiety became “debased and over-generalized to include all negative affect” and “lost the original intensity which Freud meant to express” (1963, 2: 556). In psychoanalysis, anxiety is understood as an “unconscious” relation to danger, versus fear which consciously recognizes “external and realistic danger” (Moore and Fine 1990, 24).
- 21.
Leprosy is infection by Mycobacterium leprae, which damages the skin and peripheral nerves (Oxford Reference Encyclopedia) that manifests as a sort of rotting of living flesh. It connotes disgust triggered by disease and deformation. Spurgeon’s Shakespeare’s Imagery gives an effective if brief account of images of sickness, disease, and medicine in Hamlet that indicate the “unwholesome condition of Denmark morally” (1935, 316).
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Lucas, D.A. (2018). Case Study Two: Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In: Affect Theory, Genre, and the Example of Tragedy. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94863-8_5
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