Hamlet as Oedipus according to Freud
It is very tempting to interpret Hamlet in the light of Sophocle's tragedy Oedipus the king, as Sigmund Freud (2013) reads it. Doctor Sigmund Freud uses it to explain the little narcissistic boy's feelings of guilt in wishing to overthrow his father who is blocking the way to the mother's affections. Freud's term for the dilemma is the Oedipus complex (Freud, 1955).
There are scenes in The tragedy of Hamlet which are related to what Freud was doing in his therapy based upon people's dreams. The question he puts in his work The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud 2013) related to Hamlet and the Oedipus complex is: “What is it, then, that inhibits him in accomplishing the task which his father's ghost has laid upon him?” (Freud 2013 p. 86)
Freud argues that it takes quite a while for Hamlet to act and really revenge his father's death and believes it is because Hamlet has scruples [Oedipus Complex], that Hamlet himself is no better than the sinner he will punish. But, is this true? Yes, it would be possible to understand Hamlet's delayed vengeance in the light of the Oedipus complex as Freud claims.
However, one can also look at the matter as a man's ethical dilemma concerning doing right or wrong, “to be or not to be” (3.1.55), in the world of God as a devout Christian, for the time being and for the eternity, “the dread of something after death” (3.1.77). Hamlet wants to be sure when he carries out the vengeance to not end up in a worse misery than he is living for the moment and later in “the undiscovered country”(3.1.78) killing an innocent. Before Hamlet proceeds his work he wants to establish beyond all reasonable doubt that it actually is Claudius who commited the fratricide. The spirit Hamlet met at the platform could be a devil's stage work, an apparition of Hamlet's “weakness and // melancholy as he [the de'il] is very potent with such spirits, abuses me [Hamlet] to damn me” (2.2.536-538). To be able to face God, Hamlet lingers with the revenge because he wants Claudius to reveal his occulted guilt.
The tragedy will run its course no matter how one interprets it. But, there are even separate scenes that support – with, however, some hyper interpretation - Freud's point of view:
Hamnet as the Ghost
“Just as all neuroticsymptoms, like dreams themselves, are capable of hyper-interpretation, and even require such hyper-interpretation before they become perfectly intelligible, so every genuine poetical creation must have proceeded from more than one motive, more than one impulse in the mind of the poet, and must admit of more than one interpretation.” (ibid 86)
The ghost who shouts for vengeance from heaven is'nt it Shakespeare's own son Hamnet? Shakespeare's son who died in the plague at the age of 10, whose name is identical to the main character of the tragedy? Pestilence also affected Oedipus' Thebes whose oracle said the disease would end if King Laios killer was expelled from the country (ibid 85).
It is as if William Shakespeare retells Hamnets and his own inverse Oedipus complex. Hamnets desire to have his mother by himself (which he had because Shakespeare was working in London [Greenblatt 2004]) and the displacement of the father leads to self-reproaches/plague and death. Father William survives his son with strong self-reproaches of having driven his son to death (Shakespeare didn't take part of the important drama; he wasn't present at home; Hamnet had free access to his mothers affections; combatting feelings of guilt towards someone not present – a ghost – is psycho/pathogenic) and now he lets his son haunts the tragedy of Hamlet as a ghost who is shouting for vengeance from the platform, revenge on William who didn't reproach Hamnet face to face about his jealous love towards the mother.
In Sophocle's tragedy Oedipus (2013) stabs out his own eyes at the knowledge he had married his own mother, and was father to their children. In the tragedy of Hamlet, the Ghost [Hamnet] open the very eyes of Hamlet [William] so that he obtains full insight into the horrid committed fratricide [infanticide] in order to dissolve William's feelings of guilt of not being present at home during Hamnet's childhood.
GHOST [Hamnet]:
The serpent [William] that did sting thy father’s [son's] life
Now wears his crown [William's free access to the affections of Hamnet's
mother/his wife]. (1.5.38-39)
Hamlet as Oedipus
Hamlet [Oedipus] kills his uncle [Laios] symbolically in the scene where he lets the theater group act the play-within-the-play with Hamlet's addition about how the fratricide was commited [Oedipus solves the riddle of the Sphinx]. Thereby the way to his [Oedipus] mother's [Jocasta's] closet is open. Once there, he intends to “marry” her but suffers from self-reproaches as the child does when it experiences it is forced to overthrow the father (whom it loves):
QUEEN
Have you forgot me?
HAMLET
And, would it were not so, you are my mother. (3.4.12,15)
Hamlet invites her to sit down [lay down] and he'll show her innermost [completing the act of love]:
HAMLET
Come, come, and sit you down. You shall not budge.
You go not till I set you up a glass
Where you may see the inmost part of you.
QUEEN
What wilt thou do? Thou wilt not murder me –
Help, ho!
POLONIUS [Behind the arras]
What ho! Help! (3.4.17-22)
Through the mother's strong reaction she confirms Hamlet's incestuous thoughts, hence simultaneously giving him patronage and reprieve from the feelings of guilt, a time-out for Hamlet to carry out the act his emotions earlier prevented him from performing.
He draws his erected sword and, in the protection of, and through, the arras - which in this context has two meanings, partly it is a mother's virtue / love / hymen and partly it is the mask that depersonalizes anyone acting; the action is an archaic inheritance of the human psyche and not tied to the person (Freud 2013) - he finally penetrates the arras and kill someone (hurt badly).
HAMLET
How now! a rat! Dead, for a ducat, dead!
[Kills Polonius.]
POLONIUS
O, I am slain!
QUEEN
O me, what hast thou done?
HAMLET
Nay, I know not. Is it the King? (3.4.21-24)
Now, Hamlet has, by his act of displacement, his mother by himself and can overwhelm her with his love, free from jealousy, and reproach her everything that rages within him.
But, as Freud soberly notes:
“It can, of course, be only the poet's own psychology with which we are confronted in Hamlet // the drama was composed immediately after the death of Shakespeare's father (1601)- that is to say, when he was still mourning his loss, and during a revival, as we may fairly assume, of his own childish feelings in respect of his father.” (Freud 2013 p.86)
Hamlet & Ophelia, Mourning and Madness
Prince Hamlet mourns openly his namesake and father, the deceased King, with his whole being. The succeding King Claudius and Queen Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, find it honorable to grieve, but not at the extent Hamlet mourns. They think he should restrain his grief. Hamlet, by himself, is disgusted of how soon his mother has been able to remarry, moreover her late husband's brother and Hamlet's uncle. Claudius has not only ascended the royal throne but also Hamlet's mother. Hamlet tastes incest. It makes, as I understand, his existential anxiety to grow, but later on he uses it in order to reveal a fractricide.
There is no public perception in claiming that Hamlet is mad, everyone in the royal court has his own personal opinion about Hamlet's conduct. Polonius insists to emphasize, up to his death that Hamlet's madness is unrequited love:
“But yet do I believe
The origin and commencement of his grief
Sprung from neglected love.” (3.1.175-177)
The Queen thinks actually Hamlet is crazy, after seeing him in her closet, killing Polonius and talking about a ghost:
“Alas, he’s mad!
This the very coinage of your brain.
This bodiless creation ecstasy
Is very cunning in” (3.4.103, 135-137)
Claudius is suspicious and believes it is other than sadness and unrequited love behind Hamlets transformation.There's something in his soul:
“O'er which his melancholy sits on brood;
And I do doubt the hatch and the disclose
Will be some danger – // (3.1.164-166)
What in fact has happened is that Hamlet and some guards in a apparition has been told that his father was murdered by his brother. Hamlet has asked those present to not breathe a word if they later on are seeing him behave strange and not to disclose his behaviour. Hamlet seems to imply having an intention with it, but does not tell why.
Then he plants and acts his theatrical arts of tricky wordplays and adopts a confused look and a careless dress style among people in the King's service to make them believe that he, Hamlet, is crazy in order to let it be known to Claudius. Hamlet [William Shakespeare] knows that Claudius knows that the holy fool in Christian tradition is a protected character that can call out things publicly on royal court with impunity. (Shakespeare 1997; Saward 1980) Hamlet knows that it makes Claudius doubtful about his own safety and could get him to reveal his crime.
Hamlet had Guildernstiern Rosenkrantz killed in a very sophisticated way, such a premediated murder does not match a fool's brain!
Now, how come Hamlet is the only one seeing the ghost of his father in the Queen's closet? Previously it has been seen twice by Horatio and some sentinels, out of which Hamlet was present once. But, this time it is just Hamlet who is seeing it. His mother believes it is his sick imagination seeing and speaking to a bodiless creation. She says, as to herself, that he is crazy. Then she asks how it is with him. She makes comments about his bewildered behaviour and says she notices him talking and gazing into nothingness. She says, what there is to see, she sees, nothing but themselves, as if she is the true measure of what Hamlet lacks.
The folly he has used up to now turns suddenly against him. He notices her not listening to what he is talking about - which he insistently wishes - but just how he expresses himself; in her world his crazy exterior obscures his words, he is speaking to deaf ears; she isn’t able to hear what he actually is saying. Hamlet perceives her comments as reasons to not listen to his speech. It gets him to pull himself together. He tells her a reasonable story about how he spots the occurrences concerning his father's death. There is something in Hamlet's litany that makes her suddenly start listening, receiving the garment of his madness to dispel. He requires her not to reveal his truth. She replies that she will not breathe a word about his acting mad and his ideas about the late king's decease.
Hamlet doesn't need the fool anymore, when he knows of Claudius' crime. He feels that he finally has his dear mother's undivided attention. If the ghost had appeared again that moment even she would have seen it. But, the ghost's exeunt is forever; Hamlet doesn't need it no more. The mission of the spirit is completed.
Ophelia is Hamlet's trump card in his acting of madness; he is her beloved, thanks to the love affair they had; she is the one who best and most clearly may confirm the inner circle of the royal court the changes Hamlet has gone through on all human levels: it is Ophelia, Hamlet sacrifices to get the most out of his dissimulation; but in his narcissim he does not comprehend that she is badly mistreated by his posture.
OPHELIA
O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!
// quite, quite down!
And I, of ladies most deject and wretched,
//
Now see that noble and most sovereign reason,
Like sweet bells jangled, out of tune and harsh;
Blasted with ecstasy: O, woe is me,
To have seen what I have seen, see what I see! (3.1.149-160)
Her own perception beats however back at her with full force, it makes her bewildered, especially after her father's tragic death; now she is alone in the world, even Hamlet has abandoned her, as she perceives it. Ophelia knows she is a lost soul, displaced and doomed to loneliness because she has lost her virtue and thereby offended her honor, her father's name and origin. That shame goes over her head and she loses herself and goes under:
OPHELIA
“You must sing 'a-down a-down', an you call him
'a-down-a'. O how the wheel becomes it. It is the false
steward that stole his master’s daughter.” (4.5.165-167)
Body Count: Hamlet v.s. A Midsummer Nights Dream: 6 - 0
The Tragedy of Hamlet Body Count; documented civilian deaths from violence; liquid & metal: 6
A Midsummer Night's Dream Body Count; " ; " : 0
[Hamlet] MARCELLUS: “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” HORATIO: Heaven will direct it.” (1.4.90-91)
[AMD] THESEUS: “Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments; Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth;” (1.1.12-15)
The tragedy of Hamlet is just to end and two noble families in the inner circle of the Danish court, a total of six people, are dead and destroyed by Hamlet; the bodies are still warm of life that a moment ago pulsed through their veins, now molested and dead, now the deepest tragedy and sorrow. The heavens have finally meted out the punishment Horatio pronounced on the condition Marcellus claimed reigned in the state of Denmark. Two entire families are wiped out, leaving behind an empire that overnight has lost its legitimacy. And Prince Fortinbras of Norway, by the gates, has nosed them up, embracing his fortune with sorrow and claiming his rights to the devastated terrene.
In A midsummer night's dream the play ends with a beautiful reconciliation and thirst of love, four couples reconciled to begin, or recover dear dealings, the full moon is huge, there is desire, lust for life, love and joy, it sparkles.
Hamlet's Polonius control his children with an instructive paternity leading his children to death, neither Ophelia or Laertes can manage on their own when they are alone in the world. Claudius and Gertrude can not master their child and they are very cautious in giving him advice. Hamlet lives his life of his own, taking his own decisions, free from parental involvement in how to act in the world.
What initially unites Ophelia and Hamlet in their respective family is that they each have lost a parent, she, her mother; he, his father. Regarding the difference, we never hear Ophelia talk about her loss, but we hear Hamlet the more talk about his. When she then loses her father she loses herself in a loss greater than the one Hamlet experiences, she disappears with all her being in her grief, so great that she loses herself, fades away and dies. Hamlet's grief strengthens him in his efforts to gather force for his war on one man, an attack when it is over will leave a veritable battlefield of dead bodies behind.
The ghost's appearing in Hamlet is radically different from those fairies buzzing around in AMD; revenge, blood and death, versus reconciliation, love potions, and life. The ghost seems to move with difficulty and reluctance in the visible world without the power to intervene itself and set things right, kill what is evil; the fairies act with ease and are playful, eager to help lovers making peace. Now, they are from two different worlds, one dead, the other alive. However, the revengeful ghost has far more difficulties to perform his power than the life-affirming fairies.
Shakespeare's Hamlet, a milestone in the history of human thought.
Shakespeare lets his character of Hamlet perform soliloquies as if he was trying out his thoughts loud and writing them simultaneously; reflections on being and acting in the world: he is weighing the pros and cons, he is hypothesising. Hamlet expresses his soliloquies, his lines in conversations, with an exceedingly refined literate finesse where a plausible thinking is pictured, a way of introspection based on a well acquired literacy, on the technologization of the word, as the late professor Walter J. Ong gently would have put it.
A number of times Hamlet confuses his interlocutors in literate twisting of words, entries and reflections; the illiterate ones lose the plot and believe Hamlet is crazy. They do not understand that it is their own illiteracy that is haunting them. Shakespeare never lets Hamlet lose his direction, but deepens his being in the play he continually is composing, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark.
Without the existence of the art of writing man would not think the way he does, not only when he is busy writing, but also mostly when he is in the process of gathering his thoughts in oral form. The art of writing has more than any other single invention transformed human consciousness. That is why Hamlet seems so innovative; why he delivers his state of mind so focused, his puppet master Shakespeare lets him orally perform the development of Shakespeare's art of writing.
Through Hamlet's speech Shakespeare is paying his debt of gratitude to literature as the source of literacy acquisition.
REFERENCE LIST
Saward, John. Perfect Fools: Folly for Christ's Sake in Catholic and Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980. Print.
Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, Eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2005.
Shakespeare, William, King Lear, [New ed.], Nelson, Walton-on-Thames, 1997
Freud, Sigmund, and Rudolf Allers. The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis. Chicago, Ill: Gateway Editions, 1955. Print.
Greenblatt, Steven. “The Death of Hamnet and the Making of Hamlet”
OCTOBER 21, 2004 http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/stephen-greenblatt/ Web. 11 March 2013.
Ong, Walter J., Orality and literacy: the technologizing of the word, Routledge, London, 2002
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