“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”
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Amongst the vast array of characters from Edmund in King Lear to Portia in The Merchant of Venice Hamlet is often regarded by critics as the most intelligent and complex character. Hamlet as a character in itself invites innumerable debates whereas beyond the character of the Prince the play in its totality continues to bewilder scholars. I wonder how far our understanding of this particular play is limited by our presumptions and assumptions about the author himself and the age and drama in general.
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For over a year now, I have mostly approached the play through the lens of its age and history, trying to focus on the Prince as well as mostly trying to anchor Ophelia and Gertrude. On first reading, readers have complained that Shakespeare’s representation of women characters in this play seems sketchy on stage but on analysing they turn out to be the ones where most of the play’s conflicts come to rest or (seemingly) end. In a play that blurs the line between madness and sanity the women characters voice clarity albeit briefly.
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Often the play is read under the light of the late-Renaissance climate. Each character is understood a bit better when compared with different characters of Shakespeare’s plays as well as when viewed from the perspectives of his contemporaries via their works. With Hamlet, it is mostly John Webster and his plays that I end up comparing and contrasting with!
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Even as the play “raises all sorts of questions about the boundary between speaking and doing,” it simultaneously deals with ideas and themes of justice, revenge, murder, love, forgiveness, and trust which by the final scene are just entangled with each characters’ ulterior motive (barring Ophelia). The gravedigger scenes not only brings into the forefront the existential questions that had been running through Hamlet’s conflicted frame of mind, but it also questions every aspect of dichotomy that underlies the psychological angst of the Prince as well as of other characters.
As Hamlet tries to slip in and out between the world of what is and what was, “his dilemma is essentially the dilemma of the modern European intellectual: his ideas and values are deeply at odds with his actions.”
A stranger in his own home haunted by the ghost and deeply insecure about the future, the play poses questions about moral ambiguity and sanity as it continues to pervade our cultural consciousness.
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“My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”
