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Strickland:
Hamlet, Subjectivity and Community in Revenge Tragedy
As Kermode implies, Hamlet is both the best-known example of the genre of Elizabethan revenge tragedy and a play that transcends the genre in a way that no other play comes close to achieving. Elizabethan revenge tragedy played a seminal role in the great flowering of English drama at the turn of the seventeenth century. But revenge tragedies have always been taken less seriously than other tragedies. As a sub-genre, the revenge tragedy gives us heroes who are nearly indistinguishable from its villains and who, for a variety of reasons, end up alienating audience sympathy and engagement. The revenge tragedies, which were arguably the most popular form of drama during Shakespeare's time, are now forgotten and overshadowed by Shakespeare's more "mature" tragedies, notwithstanding the fact that many of these plays incorporate and adapt familiar conventions of the revenge tragedy.
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Revenge heroes conform to a simple pattern. They begin as trauma survivors who have experienced the death by murder of a friend or relative. They experience shock, disorientation, grief, and, eventually, a lust for vengeance. At the beginning of the play the revenger is a victim who evokes the audience's sympathy, by the end of the play he (they are all men) is a sadistic manipulator, engaging in Machiavellian power struggles to achieve revenge. Just as important, while these heroes are obsessed with communication, with expressing their grief, naming their enemies to the world-they communicate their grief primarily to audiences within the play, and only secondarily to the theatre audience. Thus, there is a built-in distance between the theatre audience and the revenge hero. An archetypal pattern of comedy involves the comic hero in a movement from the margins of his community to the center-at the beginning a comic hero is an outcast, under-rated, perhaps--as in the "Roman New Comedy"--a young man of meager means in love with the daughter of a rich family. By the end of the play the comic hero has proven his worth, has demonstrated his innate wit and/or courage, the community has come to accept him, he has married the girl, and all live happily ever after. Conversely, an archetypal pattern of tragedy involves the hero in a movement from the center of his community to the margins. At the beginning the hero is an important man, perhaps the king or a military leader. During the action he is tested by some sort of crisis, often at least partly of his own making. His social power begins to unravel, often because of some flaw that is closely related to the very qualities that made the community admire him in the first place. He is wise but too self-confident, ambitious but too proud, etc. Having begun the action at the center of the community, by the end he is at the margins; blinded and exiled, like Oedipus, or dispossessed, insane and dying, like King Lear. But the revenge hero departs from this pattern. In trying to express his grief, to make his grief shared by a community, the revenger reverses the dominant tragic tendency, which is to isolate the hero with a unique and particular sort of grief or suffering. This is one of the reasons that revenge tragedy has been called a weakened form of tragedy.(1) In fact, I would argue, the chief reason the revenge genre has been dismissed by scholars as not fully tragic has to do precisely with the way the genre typically handles the problems of communication; both communication between characters and between the hero and the theatre audience. As I mentioned above, Shakespeare often incorporates and adapts elements of revenge tragedy in his plays. Perhaps the most interesting example is Hamlet. In Hamlet, I think, Shakespeare intensifies the genre's preoccupation with problems of communication but transcends the attendant problem of audience alienation or distance from the hero's tragic experience. To understand the centrality of communication to the revenge genre one must recognize, first, that revenge is a itself a communicative act. The power struggle between the revenge hero and his enemies is, typically, a struggle to determine which of two conflicting versions of reality will be communicated to a third-party interior audience-the "community" of the play. Typically, the hero's revenge is delayed as a result of some form of communication problem. Either he is uncertain of the identity of his enemy, or he knows but lacks the power or credibility to accuse the villain openly. The typical revenge plot, then, relates the revenger's quest to gain this power and credibility. The actual revenge is always connected with the revenger's desire for communication-in killing the villain the revenge hero expresses his anger and grief and publicizes the villain's guilt. The communicative function of the revenge act is emphasized in revenge plays by the overt theatricality of the revenge scenes: in the prototypical revenge play, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, for example, Hieranimo, the revenge hero, persuades the villains who have murdered his son to act a in a play that he will produce for the entertainment of the court. With the villains' fathers watching, Hieranimo stabs and kills the young men who have killed his own son, thus achieving a very symmetrical revenge. Other examples of this kind of symmetrical theatricality in the revenge scene would include a the carefully staged Thystean banquet in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, or the spectacle of cuckoldry that the dying duke is forced to view in The Revenger's Tragedy (I will recount these stories briefly later). These staged revenge scenes almost always involve one or both of the two kinds of communication with which revenge tragedy is inevitably concerned. First, the revenger successfully counters the villain's lies by revealing a truth of which the revenger has gained secret knowledge. One function of the Thyestian banquet in Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, for example, is to gather together an elite audience before which Titus can effectively expose the lies and the crimes of the Empress and her sons. Second, the revenger communicates his anger and his grief to the villain or other interior audiences, often forcing other characters to experience an injury commensurate with and even similar to that which has caused the revenger's own grief. [insert further elaboration here about the self-conscious inter-textuality of the revenge scenes] Thus, in a nicely complicated variation on the "rape of Philomel" theme, Titus murders the men who have raped and mutilated his daughter, then cooks them and serves them to their mother. It is appropriate to the conventions of revenge tragedy that Titus forces Tamora to suffer, and that her suffering is in some ways parallel to Titus' suffering. A sort of clever irony in accomplishing the revenge is a trademark of the genre, and it is directly related to the revenger's desire to communicate to interior audiences in addition to killing his enemy. In order precisely to convey his tragic experience and insure that his version of reality will prevail over that of his enemies the revenger must control the conditions of communication and the conditions of his interior audience's perception and response. He will leave nothing to chance. Inevitably the revenger resorts to manipulating other characters; he achieves his combined goals of revenge and communication only by adopting villainous tactics and by overcoming the kind of tragic suffering and isolation that evokes the sympathy of the theatre audience. As a result, we are increasingly distanced from his grief and our experience of the play may verge on melodrama. The Spanish Tragedy (click here for a link to a plot summary of The Spanish Tragedy) To see how this alienation comes about, consider for a moment the proto-typical revenge play, Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. Like most later revenge heroes, Hieronimo has trouble with communication. Hieronimo at first doubts the truthfulness of a message identifying the murderers of his son, Horatio. And when he does realize the true identity of his enemies, Hieronimo struggles with the problems of communicating both this knowledge and his grief. Hieronimo is initially unable to express himself to the King and the court because of his madness (Spanish Tragedy, III, xi) and because of the interference of his enemy, Lorenzo (III, xii).(2) But in the play-within-the play at the end of The Spanish Tragedy Hieronimo does not merely achieve revenge for the murder of his son, he also achieves self-expressive communication; he arranges for the fathers of his son's murderers to witness the deaths of their sons. He forces these fathers to experience a loss like his loss. And in his epilogue to the play he publicly exposes the guilt of Lorenzo and Balthazar. Thus, during the course of the play Hieronimo progresses from an innocent victim, inept at communication, to a cunning manipulator, skillfully controlling the perceptions and responses of his (interior) audience. |
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(theatre) audience's response to Hieronimo's tragic suffering will be
directly affected by his progression from failure to success at communicating
his vision of reality to the interior audience. In Act II of The Spanish
Tragedy, Hieronimo's distress evokes our sympathy. Discovering the body
of his son, Hieronimo cries out in disbelief, and his shouts bring his
wife, Isabella, to the garden where Horatio's body has been found. At
first Hieronimo turns to Isabella for solace. But he soon begins to deny
the reality of Horatio's death despite the protests of Isabella and his
servants Pedro and Jacques (Spanish Tragedy, I, v, 46-98). (3) He will
not listen to the reason of his wife and servants, and he cannot persuade
them to accept his false version of reality. Significantly, in this part
of the play Hieronimo begins to speak more often in soliloquy. He cries
out in pain against the injustice of Horatio's unrevenged death (Spanish
Tragedy, III. ii, 1-11) and he expresses his frustration over his inability
to communicate his grief (III. vii, 1-17). These soliloquies emphasize
Hieronimo's isolation; he seems to be trying to express feelings that
cannot be communicated to audiences within the play. He is isolated from
his community. Though he continues to interact with other characters as
he performs his duties within the court, he is always preoccupied with
his own grief, and the contrast between his grief and the general gaiety
of the court is striking. Hieronimo speaks incoherently or mutters to
himself (III. vi, 1-10).
Near the end of the third act, however, Hieronimo begins to emerge from the isolation of madness and to communicate his grief to other characters. In Act III, scene xii and in Act III, scene xiii Hieronimo tries to express his grief first to a painter, Bazardo, and then to an old man, don Bazulto. Significantly, like Hieronimo, each of these men grieves for a murdered son. They represent a potentially sympathetic audience for Hieronimo, in contrast to the insensitivity and lack of awareness of Hieronimo's grief in the Spanish royal court in general. Still, though, Hieronimo is unable to achieve a precise and satisfying expression of his sense of loss. Eventually, however, Hieronimo begins to gain control of his interactions with other people by manipulating them. An opportunity for revenge presents itself. Hieronimo is well-known for his skill as an organizer of courtly entertainments. Lorenzo and Balthazar, the murderers of Horatio, are so confident that Hieronimo doesn't suspect them that they ask him to help them put on a play to entertain the court. Hieronimo agrees. He enlists Lorenzo and Balthazar to act roles in which their characters are stabbed to death by Hieronimo at the end of the play. Then, with their fathers watching, Hieronimo stabs them literally, killing them in full view of their parents. In manipulating other characters to control their perceptions Hieronimo has become inhumanly powerful. Furthermore, by making public his secret knowledge of Horatio's murderers and by forcing their fathers to suffer as he has suffered Hieronimo forfeits his archetypal status as a tragic hero suffering in isolation. At the end of The Spanish Tragedy an audience may be amused by Hieronimo's cleverness, an audience may applaud his success as an instrument of justice, but it will not be emotionally engaged in his tragic suffering; his death will not be experienced as a tragic release or catharsis. This pattern by which the audience is increasingly distanced from the revenge hero as he succeeds in his revenge is found in virtually all of the Elizabethan revenge plays spawned by the success of The Spanish Tragedy. In the early revenge plays, such as The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus (both printed in 1594), the revenge hero suffers in isolation, at least initially, upon discovering the murder which will evoke the revenge. The motivation for revenge is heavily emphasized and unquestionably just, and the revenger does not begin sucessfully manipulating other characters and communicating his version of reality to the interior audience until late in the play. .. . In later revenge plays, however, the revenge hero may be involved in manipulative schemes from the very beginning of the play. Such revengers typically become so caught up in their schemes that they themselves become irredeemably villainous in their pursuit of villains. The line of distinction between the revengers and their enemies is blurred and the potential for tragic isolation is diminished. Vindice, the hero of Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), is this kind of revenger. Here's the plot synopsis for the play from a recent film adaptation:
Vindice's motive is suppressed; his wife has been dead for several years and we never really see him grieving for her. And Vindice begins successfully manipulating other characters very early in the first act. He never suffers in isolation or struggles to communicate his grief. He practices a dissembling, deceitful kind of manipulative communication, aimed at punishing his enemies, and he frequently gloats over his successes. His skill and delight in manipulating other characters are conventional characteristics passed down from the allegorical "vice" character of medieval drama, and this association further disqualifies him as a tragic hero. Vindice is clever, capable, entertaining, and yet ruthless and inhuman in his pursuit of revenge. (5) Hamlet In Hamlet there is a paradoxical mixture of the initially frustrated communicators of the early revenge tragedies and the always capable communicators of the later revenge tragedies. (6) From the beginning of the play it is obvious that Hamlet is isolated from the rest of the court at Elsinore. No one else shares his uneasiness over his father's death and his mother's hasty remarriage. And, like Hieronimo and Titus Andronicus, Hamlet's personal grief leaves him psychologically vulnerable to the manipulative schemes of his enemies. On the other hand, unlike Hieronimo and Titus Andronicus, Hamlet is never inarticulate. As Claudius observes, his speech, though it "... lack'd form a little,/ Was not like madness" (III.i, 163-4) From the beginning of the play Hamlet demonstrates a cagey self-composure and a remarkable skill in fashioning and carrying out his own manipulative schemes. Though he suffers in isolation like a tragic hero, he manipulates interior audiences like a true revenger. This coexistence of revenger and tragic hero characteristics is revealed in Hamlet's mixed performance as a communicator. Thought he is generally articulate, there is always something that Hamlet cannot quite express, and that he finally realizes is impossible to express. Hamlet's soliloquies underscore his difficulty in communicating his perception of reality and emphasize his isolation from the rest of the characters in the play. At the same time, the soliloquies diminish the distance between Hamlet and the theatre audience. They allow the audience to share his thoughts, and the problems he wrestles with engage us in a tragic situation. But he also uses the soliloquies, vice-like, simply to inform the audience of his revenge plans: "The play's the thing/Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King!" In the soliloquy after his encounter with Fortinbras' captain, for example, Hamlet delivers a skeptical and fatalistic argument against the foolishness of fighting for a worthless cause. The soliloquy exhibits the kind of clear-headed reasoning one expects from a tragic hero whose suffering has given him an acute insight into human vanity or frailty. Yet Hamlet speaks the soliloquy in the tone of a calculating revenger, and he concludes by again reproaching himself delaying revenge: "O, from this time forth,/My thoughts be bloody, or nothing worth" (IV. iv, 65-6). The contradictory signals of Hamlet's soliloquies indicate that something is tragically wrong, but Hamlet's deepest feelings cannot be precisely communicated to other characters within the play, and perhaps not even to the theatre audience. Another important dramatic strategy by which Shakespeare directs Hamlet's attempts at communication toward the real audience and isolates Hamlet's experience of tragic suffering is his use of Horatio as a confidant. Even though Hamlet appears to have in Horatio a sympathetic ear for communicating his grief, Horatio's understanding is clearly limited. Thus, the ultimate impossibility of communication is stressed and the theatre audience is more deeply engaged in Hamlet's tragic situation. Hamlet's conversations with Horatio perform two practical dramatic functions; they announce details pertaining to the revenge plot, and they relate Hamlet's struggle with his tragic suffering to the audience. In both respects Hamlet's conversations with Horatio are essentially extensions of the soliloquies. Though Hamlet speaks to Horatio of his innermost feelings, Horatio never discusses the subject of Hamlet's grief at any length. In most of their scenes together, Horatio is merely a polite interlocutor, a sort of rhetorical stage device, interjecting a brief question or assent when Hamlet's speeches require a respite or a turn. Hamlet does not so much share his tragic suffering with Horatio as he shares it with the theatre audience. Yet, Hamlet's close rapport with the theatre audience is not gained at the expense of failing to communicate to interior audiences. Like Vindice, and unlike Hieronimo and Titus Andronicus, Hamlet is generally poised and discreet in public. And like Vindice, he manipulates other characters and communicates to interior audiences from the beginning of the play. On the other hand, Hamlet is also the subject of manipulation at various times during the play, and in Hamlet there is less of a clear progression from the protagonist as a distressed victim to the protagonist as a manipulating communicator-revenger, than one finds in the other revenge heroes. In Act I Hamlet is at first subjected to Claudius' manipulative reinterpretation of his replies. In Hamlet's interview with Claudius, in Act I, scene ii, Claudius is setting the terms and controlling the boundaries of their dialogue. Hamlet is certainly attempting to express his discontent, with his melancholic and sarcastic comments, but there is no indication that Claudius or Gertrude or the court audience is receptive to Hamlet's complaints. Hamlet's interview with the King is a battle of wits between two highly-skilled communicators. Claudius skillfully contrives for his audience of courtiers a scenario representing himself as a secure and benevolent ruler who is genuinely and lovingly concerned about the prolonged depression of his nephew-son-heir, Hamlet. Claudius attempts to draw Hamlet out with leading questions such as: "How is it that the clouds still hang on you?: (I. ii, 66). But Hamlet responds by stubbornly and skillfully expressing his discontent in punning double-talk: "Not so, my lord, I am too much in the sun" (I. ii, 67). Gertrude is rather more successful in drawing Hamlet out, and indeed she seems to be the intended primary audience for Hamlet's statements. Still, his responses to her are expressions of discontent, thought not as curt as his responses to Claudius. But Claudius' skill and determination to control the impression left by this inerview on the interior audience of courtiers is clearly formidable, as his preemptive manner of ending the interview demonstrates:
Here Claudius has the upper hand, and he deftly recasts Hamlet's laconic reply into a form of propaganda for his court. Soon, however, Hamlet begins to practice a similar manipulation--censorship. At the end of Hamlet's first meeting with the Ghost, he takes considerable pains to ensure that Horatio and Marcellus will not interfere with his plans for revenge. Having exhorted them, with the Ghost's assistance, to sear a vow of silence, Hamlet' concludes by carefully spelling out the kinds of implicit communicative acts that will be unacceptable:
And by the time Hamlet prsents his "Mouse-trap," he is confidently controlling the perceptions of his interior audience. As Claudius reinterprets the dialogue in Act I, scene ii, in Act III, scene ii Hamlet makes certain that his audience gets the right message by providing a running commentary on his play-within-the-play. Hamlet baits Claudius skillfully and purposefully:
But here, as in Act I, Hamlet is also expressing his disgust and anger at his mother for marrying his uncle. Ophelia often serves as a surrogate for Gertrude as the target for Hamlet's outbursts of disgust with female infidelity, as in his following comments:
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the "Mousetrap" scene, in a sense, Hamlet and Claudius have
exchanged position since the beginning of the play. Hamlet is now orchestrating
their battle of wits and Claudius is reacting in an off-balanced way.
Hamlet is no longer a grief-stricken melancholic, powerless and strikingly
alone in his mourning habit, surrounded by a gay and busy court. This
is not quite the same Hamlet who contemplates suicide in the "To
be or not to be" soliloquy. He is now much less a victim and more
a scheming manipulator. This development is apparent in Hamlet's glee
over the success of his "Mouse-trap." At that moment (III. ii,
271-95) Hamlet seems to have forgotten his grief; he is caught up in the
excitement of revenge and he is communicating effectively to an interior
audience rather than to the theatre audience. And the absolute zenith
of Hamlet's career as a conventional revenge hero comes shortly after
the "Mouse-trap" in the famous prayer scene. (8) Here, as Claudius
kneels in prayer, Hamlet prepares to kill him, then is stayed by the thought
that Claudius will go to heaven if he dies while praying. Ironically,
at the point when he is most nearly the conventional vicious revenger,
Hamlet vindictive attitude causes him to delay the revenge.
It is somewhat unwarranted, then, for the Ghost to appear shortly after this scene to charge Hamlet with negligence. (9) When the Ghost appears, Hamlet has just killed Polonius, mistaking him for Claudius. And Hamlet shows little sign of remorse or misgiving. In one sense, however, the Ghost has good cause for concern. When the Gost appears Hamlet is railing at his mother in fairly harsh terms, and, indeed, he seems to be more interested in expressing his displeasure with her than in pursuing his mission of revenge. This is ironically emphasized by the Ghost's initial instructions to leave Gertrude alone and by the fact that the Ghost reappears to interrupt Hamlet's tirade against her during the closet scene. Hamlet's obsession with communicating his disgust, or his sense of betrayal, to his mother places an exaggerated emphasis on communication to an interior audience. It is a conventional element of revenge tragedy exaggerated so that it will not quite fit into the conventional pattern. Through Hamlet's obsession with communicating to his mother Shakespeare calls attention to the fact that self-expression and communication of the revenger's grief are really more important than the actual killing in revenge tragedies. Thus, when Hamlet rails at Ophelia in the "nunnery" speech (a scene which is, more than anything else, a dress rehearsal for his later performance in Gertrude's closet) his antic disposition seems less a manipulative ploy to disarm suspicion than the genuine distraction of tragic suffering. So, even at his most revengeful, Hamlet is somewhat more than a revenge hero, and his motives are not completely in line with the Ghost's instructions. Soon, in fact, the Ghost's fear that Hamlet will neglect his revenge is realized. Hamlet's pursuit of revenge is moderated, at least temporarily, after the closet scene, and at the same time he seems to develop a new understanding of the nature of communication. The change is evident in comparing his responses to Claudius' questions about Polonius in Act IV scene iv to his interview with Claudius in Act I. In Act I Hamlet displays an attitude of sarcasm and bitterness in the underlying meanings of his puns. Here, by contrast, he seems resigned to the general human condition of corruption, and less concerned about communicating his perspective to Claudius:
Significantly, Hamlet openly taunts Claudius with his inverted riddle of how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar and his overt implication that Claudius is not fit for heaven. Hamlet gives the answer to his riddle first, and, ironically, Claudius is confused. It is not the actual meaning of Hamlet's riddle that confuses Claudius, rather it is Hamlet's carefree attitude. Hamlet is now unconcerned about how or whether Claudius comprehends his meanings. He confronts Claudius openly and spontaneously, without the typical revenger's care to ensure that his enemy responds in a predetermined way to his communication. And at the end of this interview Hamlet allows Claudius to send him to England without any sign of concern for his own safety. On board the ship bound for England and his appointed death, Hamlet chances to intercept his death warrant. The inadvertent quality of this discovery is a significant departure from the typical revenge tragedy pattern. At this stage in the typical revenge play, the revenger is growing more certain in his control of other characters and situations. But Hamlet's interception of this message is providential, as he will later remark to Horatio. His success does not result from his own manipulative schemes. The revelation of discovering Claudius's letter reinforces the change in Hamlet's attitude toward control and manipulation of events after he has confronted his mother about her re-marriage and after he has killed Plonius. Hamlet retains some traits of the revenge hero; he dispatches Rosencrantz and Gildenstern to their deaths without a second thought. But he seems to assume a new attitude of openly daring fate. He abandons such indirect techniques of communication as his punning double-talk and his Mouse-trap. Now he openly challenges Claudius with a letter announcing his return. Claudius' reaction to this letter is revealing in terms of the change in Hamlet's attitude toward communication. Earlier in the play, when Hamlet is dissembling and manipulating, Claudius is not really fooled. He understands the real threat behind Hamlet's puns and "mad" tirades. After the nunnery speech scene, for example Claudius discounts Polonius's theory that Hamlet is mad for love:
And Claudius obviously understands Hamlet's threat in the Mousetrap, in addition to being stung with guilt by viewing Hamlet's play. But when Claudius reads Hamlet's announcement that "You shall know I am set naked on your kingdom" he seems nonplussed, for once:
Of course, he should be surprised that Hamlet has survived his murder plot. But beyond that, I think, Claudius is genuinely confused by Hamlet's straightforwardness. This is not the enemy that Claudius has faced before. It is one indication that, unlike other revenge heroes, Hamlet is not growing progressively more like his enemy, Claudius. Claudius remains a Machiavellian manipulator of people and events, as his handling of Laertes demonstrates, but by foregoing the strategy of manipulation, Hamlet has placed himself outside the sphere of Claudius' comprehension, and perhaps outside the sphere of Claudius' control. And, in turning his attention away from interior audiences, he has reestablished his rapport with the real audience. The shift in Hamlet's attitude toward communication is also evident in comparing Hamlet's description of the letter that he forged during his sea voyage to this letter written to Claudius. The sea voyage letter, first of all, was a forgery; a manipulative communication designed to trick the King of England into beheading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern while thinking that Claudius had requested it. Hamlet describes this style of letter as a distasteful sort of diplomatic double-talk:
With this forged
letter Hamlet ironically arranges for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to
suffer the fate that had been intended for himself. This is an excessively
manipulative gesture; an unnecessary exercise in deception. It is the
typical sort of behavior one expects of a manipulating communicator-revenger.
In contrast, the letter to Claudius represent a shift to open and straightforward
communication. In announcing his return Hamlet is exposing himself to
danger and trusting to fate for his success. |
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he arrives in Denmark Hamlet continues to take such risks. He leaps into
Ophelia's grave with Laertes, eager to voice his grief at Ophelia's death
and unconcerned about the possible danger of exposing himself. In this
scene Hamlet emphatically insists upon the sincerity of his grief to the
other mourners gathered at Ophelia's grave:
Hamlet's insistence that his suffering is equal to or greater than that of Laertes is credible. Hamlet and Laertes are both griefing for a murdered father, and they are both grieving for Ophelia. The potential exists in this scene for the kind of sharing of grief that occurs between Hieronimo and Bazulto. Instead, Hamlet is further isolated in his tragic suffering. Laertes responds to Hamlet's assertion of grief with a curse, "The devil take thy soul" (V. i, 272). As might be expected, this cold reception further isolates Hamlet and drives him to an even greater frenzy in expressing his grief:
This outburst apparently isolates Hamlet even from Gertrude; though she may be especially sympathetic towards Hamlet's suffering after the closet scene, she simply cannot understand his problem. She passes off the speech as a moment of "mere madness," which, significantly, she hopes will give way to silence:
At the end of the scene Hamlet's isolation is emphasized as he leaves the stage before the other mourners. Before he leaves, Hamlet reproaches Laertes for not acknowledging his grief:
Then, having called attention to the missed opportunity for reconciliation between himself and Laertes, Hamlet leaves. The King sends Horatio after Hamlet and turns to Laertes to remind him of their plot. While Hamlet suffers in isolation, Laertes is being drawn into a manipulative scheme of revenge. In the duel scene, at the end of the play, Hamlet's communicative-revenge mission is technically fulfilled. It is Hamlet's version of truth that will pass current in the court of Denmark as well as with the theatre audience. But Hamlet's success results from the failure of Claudius' manipulative scheme, not from Hamlet's own scheming. Unlike any other revenge hero, Hamlet does not exert manipulative control in finally achieving his revenge. And Hamlet's is a limited success. Significantly, Hamlet dies before he is able to communicate his secret knowledge to the interior audiences of the court of Denmark. He is so far from exerting manipulative control of the situation at the end of the play that he must trust Horatio to deliver his message of Claudius' guilt. Horation will be depended upon to tell Fortinbras, as Hamlet says, "… th'occurents more and less/ Which have solicited-the rest is silence" (V. ii, 257-8). Horatio will be able to relate the events that led to the bloody revenge scene now before them, but for the "rest," the disturbing source of Hamlet's melancholic isolation, that "is silence." Hamlet has been unable to express those feelings and he dies recognizing that he cannot expect Horation to express them for him. Like Hieronimo's death, Hamlet's death is marked by a meaningful silence. After telling his audience that Lorenzo and Balthazar have killed his son, Hieronimo bites out his own tongue, literally and emphatically refusing to say anything further. But Hieronimo's silence is that of a successful communicator who has made his grief communal, while Hamlet's silence is the transcendental silence of one who has given up on his obsession to communicate and who recognizes the impossibility of sharing his innermost feelings or of controlling absolutely the conditions of interaction with other people. Even if one becomes a master of manipulative communication, controlling one's audiences' perceptions and responses as Hieronimo and other revengers do,, and as Hamlet has done in the Mouse-trap, there remains something within which cannot be communicated. If, in trying to
make his grief communal, the typical revenge hero reverses the dominant
tragic tendency to isolate the hero with a unique or particular kind
of grief or suffering, in Hamlet Shakespeare does just the opposite.
He reverses the dominant revenge tragedy tendency to resolve the tragic
dilemma through communication. As a communicator Hamlet is as skilled
as any revenger, but he is unlike any other revenger in his realization
that complete communication is impossible. Thus he remains emphatically
and uniquely isolated from the rest of his community at the end of the
play. By creating a revenge hero who technically succeeds in revenge
and self-expression, yet remains tragically isolated and frustrated
in a deeper, personal sense, Shakespeare has managed to create an ultra-conventional
revenge play that both examines the conventional limitations of the
concern with communication in revenge tragedy and transcends those limitations,
engaging the audience in genuine tragic suffering and revelation. |
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