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Wednesday
For my weekly report on Angus Fletcher’s Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature, I look at what he says about Hamlet, the current focus of my faculty reading group. As Fletcher sees it, Shakespeare’s play invented a new way to grieve.
In fact, if the play proved the most popular of Shakespeare’s tragedies in the 17th century—and if it continues to pack a punch today—it’s because (Fletcher says) it aids us in this most challenging of all emotions.
Fletcher begins his discussion of Hamlet as a “Sorrow Resolver” with a look at previous plays that grappled with grief. Foremost of these are many of the great Greek tragedies. As he notes,
Greek tragedies revolved around characters who’d lost parents, siblings, children. And although those bereaved characters responded to loss in different ways, a common pattern quickly emerged: mourning took the form of a plot.
Greek audiences, Fletcher notes, especially liked the revenge plot.
I am put in mind of the words of Beowulf after watching Danish king Hrothgar lose himself in despair after Grendel’s Mother kills his best friend. “It is always better to avenge dear ones than to indulge in mourning,” he declares, before setting off to confront the monster in her underwater lair. Greek tragedy appeared to agree as it came up with elaborate revenge stories. For instance, there’s Agamemnon, where Clytemnestra lures her husband “into a bathtub, entangles him with a net, and then drops an axe upon his head.” From then on, Fletcher says, revenge plots “grew steadily more elaborate”:
A quarter century after the Oresteia, Athenian audiences were introduced to Euripides’s Medea, a barbarian princess who delivered comeuppance to her unfaithful Greek lover by stabbing his two sons, assassinating his new wife with a poisoned wedding gift, and finally , escaping in a dragon chariot hijacked from the gods.
The theater of Shakespeare’s time was in love with revenge plays. As Fletcher notes,
There were plots where avengers tricked their victims into kissing venomed skeletons. There were plots where revengers surprised their victims with lethal stage props. There were plots with hobnail hammers, scalding cauldrons, and falling trapdoors. There were plots and plots and plots and plots.
Shakespeare even put his hand to the genre with the gruesome Titus Andronicus. So when Shakespeare’s audience was greeted with Hamlet for the first time, it fully expected a traditional revenge tragedy. Claudius has killed Hamlet’s father so now it’s payback time.
But Shakespeare, Fletcher believes, had good reason to deliver a play that would go deeper into the mourning process than anything the world had seen. Three years earlier he had lost his son Hamnet—a name, at the time, interchangeable with Hamlet—so this play was personal. And even though three years had passed, that doesn’t mean that he had gotten over it. In fact, watching Hamlet’s response to his father death, it seems clear that Shakespeare hasn’t.
That’s because he may have been suffering from “complicated grief,” which is
a grief that doesn’t resolve itself naturally over time. Instead, it persists and even deepens, triggering psychic disturbances such as depression, detachment, and rage. These disturbances are what entangle Hamlet, inciting him to brood, to drift, and to lash out. And in Shakespeare’s play, as is typically the case in real life, the source of complicated grief is guilt.
The guilt is over feeling that what we do for our lost loved one is not enough. Fletcher notes how, from the very first, Hamlet attacks others for trying to move on with their lives. They, meanwhile, chastise him for being stuck in his grief, which his mother sees as not “common” and Claudius regards as “peevish.” Hamlet runs around the castle clothed in black, and he swears to his father’s ghost that he will do nothing other than remember him, pushing aside all other concerns:
Remember thee!
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there;
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmix’d with baser matter: yes, by heaven!
The play, as Fletcher sees it, finds several ways to deal with complicated grief. First, it dispenses with plot which, like Beowulf, deals with the problem of grief by doing something. But the point is that more action doesn’t end grief. Therefore Hamlet, unlike previous revenge tragedies, had “a plot that seemed to be no plot at all.” As Fletcher notes, we see Hamlet wandering around the castle with a book while delivering long soliloquies. He raves about his inner doubts and he vents his disgust at life. When the ghost tries to get him back on track with the revenge plot, Hamlet botches it. Fletcher points out,
Instead of getting revenge, he disposed of an innocent man in a stairwell, tricked two casual acquaintances into getting royally butchered, and then jumped inside a grave: “Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, a fellow of infinite jest.”
Although it breaks revenge tragedy conventions, however, the play does important grieving work. First of all, it acknowledges the depth of the hurt and how inadequate are our responses, including the revenge response.
It also points out the inadequacy of public testimonial, the testimonial being in this case the theatrical scene that Hamlet composes and has the players perform. As Hamlet observes, and as Shakespeare knew as well as anyone, writing a play will get you only so far in your grieving. Everything about play acting seems fake, Hamlet thinks as he watches players performing emotions—in this case, Hecuba weeping for Trojan king Priam:
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?
As we watch a tormented Hamlet realize that neither revenge nor a public performance will assuage his grief, we feel grateful to Shakespeare. He understands the depth of our own grief.
And this recognition is what finally brings relief, how Hamlet works as a “sorrow resolver.” When we realize that others are suffering as we are, something lifts. Hamlet himself comes to this realization when watching Laertes, who after all has lost both father and sister. “For the first time since his father’s death,” Fletcher writes, “Hamlet acknowledges that someone else can feel like him”:
[A]lthough Hamlet initially accuses Laertes of feigned grief, he soon comes to grasp that the young knight’s suffering is genuine: “By the image of my cause, I see the portraiture of his.”
This is what happens, Fletcher says,
when we see our grief mirrored back by other people. The mirroring reveals that we’re not alone in our sorrow; there’s a wider public that understands what it is to lose someone who can never be replaced. And with their understanding, that public helps not only support us through our bereavement, but also to relieve our anxiety that we haven’t done enough to commemorate our dead.
And so, with his dying words, Hamlet tells Fortinbras to tell the story of his own death:
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart
Absent thee from felicity awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.
To which Horatio responds with what is, to my mind, the most beautiful farewell in all of literature. In the play W;t, Vivian’s former professor turns to the second line when Vivian succumbs to her cancer:
Now cracks a noble heart. Good night sweet prince:
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!
Now it is up to us to tell Hamlet’s story, which we return to century after century. We have found time to grieve in its “drifting, eddying, dilating story” and we have recognized our own disdain, dismay and even anger at “clichéd funerals and formulaic condolences”—and in doing so, we have been both able to honor “the uniqueness of the life departed” and found a way to move on.