a word from our sponsors
See the new shakespeare.com. This feature, while it still provides useful information, is no longer maintained.
Replies | Post Reply | Shakespeare Queries From Genuinely Interested Students 4.2.97: Top | Help
is what he is creating in the short run, in the longer run, order. In this interpretation he could be seen as the key to the country's purgation. The artist, it has been said, must destroy in order to create. And the essence of Hamlet's communion with the father-spirit is a vision of the corruption of an ideal. The only way to restore that ideal is to first clean out the corruption, which Hamlet sees as all-pervasive. Looking at the record, notice how many artists have been self-destructive, as if their vision of the world drove them to destroy those closest to them and ultimately themselves. I personally believe that Shakespeare is exploring the source of this creative/destructive paradox. And according to Shakespeare's artistic vision it's source is the artist's inability to reconcile the ideal (the spirit-father, Hyperion), with the real (Claudius, the murderer). Admittedly, this interpretation requires viewing the whole play as an allegory of sorts, but Elizabethan drama did have some roots in the mystery plays, and this was a time when those with a metaphysical bent stemming from the neoplatonists were in conflict with rationalists. For example, Yates also believes that "The Tempest" might very well have been Shakespeare's reply to Marlowe's "Faust". But to get back to the creative/destructive Hamlet's conflict and why he is instrumental in destroying those he loves the most as well as the others. The previously stated conflict between his idealistic nature and the sordid reality which is confirmed by the vision throws him so off-balance by his emotions that he projects his own love/hate conflict (read narcissism) onto others around him. Most loved and most hated by him (other than himself) is his mother--the source of life, which he sees as having been corrupted, and Ophelia, the source of his love, which he sees as another potential source of corruption, "a breeder of sinners," who, like himself, are a plague to the world. I think such narcissistic self-love/self-loathing is essentially the conflict which the artist finds himself intensely absorbed in, and this conflict is a catalyst for creation as well as destruction. When he ultimately does resolve the conflict on the pirate ship ("...in my heart there was a kind of fighting that would not let me sleep."), it's too late. When he arrives back in Denmark, he's regained his balance but the wheels of fate have been set into motion and can't be stopped. All he can do is accept his mortality and his fate. In the end his vision destroys him and the entire power structure of the kingdom, and all that is left is his tale, the creation in which he has literally invested his life, to be publicized by Horatio. A logical extension of the allegory might be to see Horatio as the one who is possessed by Hamlet's creative spirit and who might, therefore, represent the mortal part of the artist that survives the holocaust to tell the tale a la Ancient Mariner. So in that sense the play could be seen as didactic, though not in the manner described in the first question.Posted by Mak on April 15, 1997 at 07:24:49
In Reply to "Catharsis" posted by A C Bradley on April 15, 1997 at 05:38:39
Replies | Post Reply | Shakespeare Queries From Genuinely Interested Students 4.2.97: Top | Help