Hamlet and Shakespearean Tragedy

Tragedy and Modern Consciousness.   Shakespeare:
a) Returns the Greek concept of tragedy to the human consciousness (as opposed to both Judeo-Christian perspectives on the nature of existence and human folly, prevalent in the Middle Ages)
 

b) Reshapes Greek tragedy to make it more relevant and, arguably, brilliant
 

c) In so doing reshapes human consciousness: he has either tapped into a profound human truth (about the nature of existence, human consciousness, fate) or he has shaped/created our perceptions of reality and truth – the human condition.  Even if you’ve never read/seen these plays, you cannot help but perceive the world in these terms because they have become a fundamental part of our cultural consciousness.

Greek Humanism

Although the hero is of great status, fails, and falls from a great height, you will and must sympathize with him or her – if these plays don’t give you a some sort of understanding of the events in your own life, you probably won't really "get" them; experiencing artistic/literary tragedy should be just that: an emotional experience, not just an intellectual activity.

Understanding hamartia/tragic flaw – Romeo and Juliette:  the depth, extremity of their youthful love and its massive idealism (vs a more mature vision of love that is  realistic/pragmatic/down-to-earth) is what makes this love so profoundly destructive and yet sublimely beautiful.  Such tragedy (destruction as beautiful) expresses an inherent truth about the experience of young love that we have all experienced – their pain is our pain or the play makes no other sense to us at all.  The same goes for Hamlet’s failure; the play does not critique his inadequacy but rather it expresses it in a manner capturing our own painful struggles.

In other words, at its most profound level, tragedy really makes no rational sense; we can trace the causal events that lead to the tragic outcome, and in the process we will learn deep truths concerning the human condition, but the plays will not lead us to clear conclusions about how people should act.  We are not told what things should be (as in the Bible, epics and Medieval Romances) but simply what things are, what people are.  You do not judge their “sin”; you experience the beautiful pain of being alive in this world as it is. 

So Shakespeare (and other Renaissance artists and writers) return Greek Humanism to our perception of ourselves, each other and existence:  we witness the profound and seemingly inherent destructiveness  of human folly – sexuality, ambition, even love – without judging it: we see our own emotions on the stage and aren’t asked to beg for forgiveness or wear a hair-shirt or cower in fear over some impending moral judgment; the judgment comes from within the action itself: no God or gods visit to re-establish order; either there is no order or we see how action leads to action, and how destructive action leads to destruction.  Or, in Hamlet’s case, how destructive inaction leads there as well.

The Flaw and Fate  
These plots are exciting not because we wonder what will happen – we all know what will happen: the stage will be littered with bodies – but because they speak to our own lives and the way we perceive the plot of our, and our friends’ and families’, lives:  we watch our siblings and best friends (and daughters, sons...mothers?) fall in love and stake their entire lives on a love we all know is fleeting and doomed;  we watch our friends throw away their seemingly perfect marriages;  we see our most brilliant friends fail to hold down jobs; we watch as seemingly pointless divorces shatter entire families; we watch world leaders undone by pride and hubris – and all the while we feel that if we could just intervene and tweak the hero’s choices we could easily solve the conflict. 

We see that the bridge is out and we desperately try to warn the engineer – our child, our best friends, our parents…our presidents…. But we can’t – or we don’t – and the train picks up speed….

Tragedy, Death, and The Absurdities of Existence

Death, the philosophers and poets remind us, renders all existence absurd.  Life is, in the final measure, a tale leading inexorably toward tragedy: an end that litters the stage with our own obliteration.

We must all – both as individuals and cultures  – wrestle with this fact, and you will wrestle with this fact, if you haven’t already, when death comes aknockin’ at your door.

Greek and Shakespearean tragedies both explore and wrestle with this absurdity (as have most everything else we’ve read this semester) but more importantly, Hamlet, as a person, wrestles with this fact, and that is the central motion of Hamlet, the play: a man wrestling with the absurdity of existence, made apparent by his own father’s death, his mother’s treachery, and the fact that action -- any action available to him -- implies transgression: he must commit the Christian sin of murder in order to revenge murder; he must commit treachery (kill the king and thus become the king) in order to punish treachery...or, he must disgrace his father's honor if he does not commit these crimes or sins.

He – as at some point we all will – has slipped out of the clear-cut world of black/white morality and action and into ambiguity, absurdity and moral grayness.

And it is driving him insane.

Or maybe it isn't.

Subjectivity

The key problem with going insane is that one must still act in the world – one must still make choices and act upon them – and in order to be "actors" (as in people who act on their choices) – to be people shaping our own fates – we must trust our own perceptions of the world, trust that we actually separate fact from fiction and realty; and trust that our own motivations are morally pure: we cannot punish the sinful unless we are without sin, or we will have to visit that punishment upon ourselves.

So Hamlet grasps – profoundly, more completely than ever before – that human consciousness is subjective: that we cannot stand outside ourselves to judge the validity of our own thoughts: we all must judge the truth of our own thoughts with our thoughts.   So the insane must judge their own sanity and the criminally immoral must judge their own morality.

And in that moral grayness action becomes impossible.

Free Will

What the Renaissance, and Shakespeare especially, gives the world is a sense that humans are at the center of human fate – a view at direct odds with the ancient and medieval perspective that some supernatural force controls our fate or destiny.  We are all caught up in actions beyond our own personal control, but these are the actions of other humans who are, Shakespeare reminds us, just like ourselves: not omniscient, not entirely sane, not without weakness.  Romeo and Juliette, Hamlet, Macbeth etc. are not punished by fate or a god, but by their own humanity.

In this view, there may or may not be a God or gods, but He or they don’t shape our destinies: we do, alone and with the other people in our lives.  And “fate” is not an order preordained by the gods, but the full press of history on each successive moment; destiny is shaped by the past, by the choices of others and, most importantly, by our own choices.

We are left here, free to will our fates into existence.  And as we learned in the Hebrew Scriptures, whenever man and woman are left alone in the garden, tragedy is just around the corner….