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Is Hamlet the tragedy of moral idealism, or the tragedy of reflection?
Is Hamlet the tragedy of moral idealism, or the tragedy of reflection?
Name:
Gujarati Krishna V
Roll no.: 20
Paper name:
1:- The Renaissance Literature.
Topic name: Is
Hamlet the tragedy of moral idealism, or the tragedy of reflection?
Submitted
to: Dilipsir Barad
Department of English
M.k. University, Bhavnagar
Q.Is Hamlet
the tragedy of moral idealism, or the tragedy of reflection?
The term tragedy or tragic drama is broadly applied specifically to literary and especially to dramatic representations of serious action, which eventuate in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist (the chief character). More precise and detailed discussion of the tragic form properly begins with – although they should not end with – Aristotle’s classical analysis in the ‘Poetics’. Aristotle based his theory on introduction from the only examples available to him, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides.
In
the subsequent two thousand years and more, many new artistically effective and
serious plots ending in a catastrophe have been developed – types that
Aristotle had no way of foreseeing. Many major tragedies in the brief following
time between 1585 and 1625 by Marlowe, Shakespeare, George Chapman, Webster,
Sir Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher deviate radically from the Aristotelian
norm.
In
the narrowest sense of the term, Shakespeare took no trouble to be original.
However, it would be misleading to say that he has summed up the tradition. Of
him we can say what T.S.Eliotspeak
in his essay, ‘Tradition
and Individual Talent’,
“The most individual part
of work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors assert their
immortality … vigorously.”
It
is evident that, in writing ‘Hamlet’, Shakespeare to some extent adopted the
drama tradition of the Senecan Tragedy, which is also known as the Revenge
Tragedy or the Tragedy of Blood. This type of play derived from Seneca’s
favourite material of murder, revenge, ghosts, mutilation and carnage, but
while Seneca had relegated such matters to long reports of offstage actions by
messengers, Elizabethan dramatists usually represented them on stage
to satisfy the apatite of the contemporary audience for violence and
horror. Thomas Kyd’s ‘The Spanish Tragedy’(1586) established this
popular form and received its significant after-effect in its own time, most
famously in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, a play that adapted the revenge play
conventions and turned them inside out. Says Rebecca Bushnell, in his ‘Tragedy, A
Short Introduction’,
“Hamlet is a revenge
tragedy that questions every aspect and convention of the revenge tragedy plot
while it reproduced them.”
The popular
view of hamlet is that it is a tragedy of reflection because, the first
impression we get is that hamlet is given to too much thinking; and that is
why, he could not make up his mind and obey the command of the Ghost and fulfil
his duty of taking revenge for the murder of his father immediately. Broadly,
the impression is right; for, hamlet is something of a philosopher. Even the
first soliloquy- “O, that, this too, too sullied flesh” gives us an impression
of his intellectual nature. Ha may be debating the question of suicide, or he
may scan his own conduct, or he may spare the king; In all this soliloquies, we
find him revolving the question, trying to see it from all sides. He would
“scan” his action- whether he should kill the king, there and then, or whether
he should take better and thorough revenge, as the code of revenge required.
Hamlet continues to be the philosopher in the grave-diggers scene,
thinking curiously on the base use to
which our dust may return. But, in the last episode, he is rather a fatalist.
“There is a special providence in the fall of sparrow- the readiness is all”,
And, then he acts, when it is too late. Thus, the tragedy is due to excessive
reflection-due to the fact that hamlet would not act promptly and decisively
when he should have acted. So, here, the delay, which is the cause of the
tragedy, is due to his reflection.
But,
however apparently true such an impression may be, and though parts of the text can be quoted in
support of it, it does not explain all facts. Particularly, the view seems to
hold before us a Hamlet, so lost in thought, that any action would be too
difficult for him. Whereas, we find Hamlet action promptly and decisively on
many occasions: e.g. when the ghost beckons him, and his friends want to hold
him back; in arranging the play; and on the voyage to England. All this
impression- of Hamlet, normally as a man of action, and not as a dreamer-is
more or less, contradicted by this view.
Hence
Dr. Bradley would explain the psychology of Hamlet on a different hypothesis.
He would reconstruct, for our correct understanding of the psychology of
Hamlet, Hamlet as was, before he received the first shock- that of his mother’s
overhasty marriage- to his moral idealism. He is quite right in holding that
Hamlet belonged to the “melancholy type”-know and so well defined. So, when he
received the first shock to his moral idealism-as we see it very clearly in the
first soliloquy “o, that this too too sullied flesh..” a sort of torpor was
induced.
He had
idealized his father; and also he must have thought highly of his mother. But,
the marriage coming so quickly-in less than two mo nths after the death of his father-and that, too,
with his uncle-his father’s brother, but no more like him than he to Hercules,
reveals depths of human nature, of the animal in man too gross to contemplate.
So, the tendency to reflection, which was a part of his mental makeup,
aggravates the situation. One, less given to thought and to generalize, or one,
without a high moral idealism, would not have felt the shock so much.
What made the shock worse was that he had to keep quite.
“But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue."
Now,
such a man would have been roused out of his melancholy by a shock, or a call
to action. Such a call seem to come to him, when he hears from Horatio that the
spirit of his father is seen. So, when the Ghost makes the revelation of the
adultery and of the horrible details of the murder, and lays the double duty on
Hamlet, the seems for a while to stir out of his melancholy.
The tragedy is not due exclusively reflection, and the tragic sense of
fat comes to us when we realize that Hamlet, at any other time, would have been
equal to the task, but, in the peculiar
circumstances, he would not cope with it. Had he not received the first
shock to his moral idealism, there would not have been the tragedy. But, as he
was suffering from it, and had lost interest in life, and was rather inclined
to suicide, the duty proves too much for him.
As
Dr. Bradley points out, the melancholy theory fits the text: it alone accounts
for the fact of ‘oblivion’, and also for Hamlet’s own inability to understand
why he delays, and for the sudden bursts of action. At least, psychologically,
there is no difficulty in understanding Hamlet.
Hence,
he holds the view that the play can, with much justice, be looked upon as a
tragedy of moral idealism. The reflective habit aggravates the shock. It is, one of the symptoms of
melancholy, and then, one of its causes.
It
may also be stated that Hamlet is not a pure tragedy of revenge. If it were,
the question of moral idealism would not be so prominent. But, as it is,
Shakespeare has introduced the theme of the effect of a mother’s guilt on her
son. Thus, the theme is weighted: it becomes double. The Ghost lays a greater
burden on Hamlet: he is not only “to revenge the foul and most unnatural
murder”; but he is also not to his mother.
But
Hamlet is so far carried away by his emotion, that he was on the point of
revealing to his mother that her lover was a murderer and a villain. So, the
Ghost makes its sudden appearance. Its object is twofold to save the Queen from
the unnecessarily painful revelation, and also “to whet” Hamlet’s “almost
blunted purpose”. The words would become cler, when we remember that Hamlet’s
mind was eased when he reclaimed the Queen. His purpose to take revenge on
Claudius would now be almost blunted; and hence, the Ghost must come to whet
his almost blunted purpose of taking revenge on Claudius.
To Conclude, the salient of the
tragic drama ‘Hamlet’ are, I do not claim, common to all Shakespearean Tragedies.
To end with A.C.Bradley
from his ‘Shakespearean Tragedy’,
“When
Shakespeare writes tragedy he is an artist imposing an order and form upon the
raw material of experience. Each of his characters is carefully moulded to fit
an intellectual conception which the play in its totality is designed to
embody. Every one of the tragedies is a separate attempt, if not finally to
answer the great problem of man’s relation to the forces of evil in the world,
at least to pose it in such a way that new facts may be freshly illuminated in
terms of human experience. If no two tragedies are exactly alike, it is because
the questions with which they deal are themselves so complex and many sided,
and because Shakespeare’s insight into human experience is of infinite range.
He approaches the great issue of human life from many angles, with different
hypotheses and we have a resulting diversity in his plays.”
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