Hamlet has been described as insane, psychoneurotic and a victim of Oedipus Complex. His self-analysis, expressed in his extensive soliloquies, implies total honesty and reveals a mind whose vision is almost limitless
SHAKESPEAREAN tragedies show a struggle that rends the protagonist’s whole being. Macbeth is consumed by overwhelming ambition, Othello by jealousy instilled by Iago and Romeo by passion. Hamlet is the most complex character of them all. He has been described as insane, psychoneurotic and the victim of Oedipus Complex. Shakespeare portrays him as an extraordinarily complex young man — brilliant, sensitive, intuitive, noble, philosophic, indecisive and a procrastinator. His self-analysis, expressed in his extensive soliloquies, implies total honesty and reveals a mind whose vision is almost limitless.
The play opens when Hamlet is brooding over the recent death of his father, the former king, and the subsequent remarriage of his mother, Queen Gertrude, to Claudius, his father’s brother and now the King of Denmark. His sense that “something is rotten in the state of Denmark” is reinforced by the sighting of a ghost resembling his dead father by his close friend, Horatio. Hamlet meets the ghost who tells him that he indeed was murdered by his brother and makes Hamlet swear that he will avenge his death. The horrible disclosure drives Hamlet to mental imbalance. Or maybe he adopts it as a convenient contrivance to disguise his feelings. Polinius, the Lord Chamberlain and father of Hamlet’s love, Ophelia, ascribes the former’s passion for his daughter as the reason for his madness.
Skeptic as Hamlet is, he is not fully convinced of the ghost’s story. To remove doubts, he arranges to stage a play in the court which has an identical storyline as events narrated by the ghost. Watching the play proves too much for Claudius who orders its stoppage. This convinces Hamlet of the king’s guilt. Soon, the opportunity comes his way to take revenge of his father’s murder when Hamlet finds the king on his knees, praying that Heaven may pardon his treacherous act of murdering the former king. But Hamlet refrains from killing him, reasoning that if the king is killed in the act of praying, he will get absolution. He postpones his indented act of killing the king till such time that damnation follows his death. While confronting his mother, Hamlet kills Polonius, mistaking him for the king. Ophelia, grief-stricken by her father’s death at the hands of the man she loves, goes insane and commits suicide. Laertes, her brother, resolves to take revenge of the death of his father and sister.
Claudius suggests to him to dispose off Hamlet by a fencing match. Unbeknown to Hamlet, the king smears poison at the tip of Laertes’ sword and also offers Hamlet a poisoned cup of wine. The match starts and both Hamlet and Laertes are mortally wounded. But before he dies, Hamlet kills the king. In the excitement of the duel, the queen drinks the poisoned wine and dies. Thus, all the main characters of the play die.
What explains Hamlet’s behaviour — his melancholy, hesitation, indecision and introspection, born of philosophic brilliance? Interpreting Hamlet has probably been the subject of more controversy than any other work of literature. Though some hold the view that the events of the tragedy are such that it is unnecessary and baseless to introduce an Oedipus Complex to explain Hamlet’s behaviour, a large number of critics conclude that the formulation by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) explains it best. Before setting out to analyze Hamlet’s behaviour, recounting of the story of Oedipus Rex as depicted by Sophocles (496-406 B.C.) would be in order.
When Oedipus was born, it was prophesied that he would kill his father, King Laios, and marry his mother, Iokaste. Believing the prophecy, the king left him in a remote place to die. But the shepherd assigned this task took pity on the infant and gave him to a childless couple. When Oedipus grew up and heard about the prophecy, he left home to avoid hurting his parents. Ironically, on his way, he met some strangers, had a fight with them and killed them. Amongst them was his father, King Laios. He reached Thebes, solved the riddle of the sphinx, became the king and married the queen who was actually his mother from whom he fathered four children. Thebes now suffered a plague brought on by the failure of Thebeans to solve the murder of the former king. In an effort to solve the mystery, Oedipus found out that he himself was the murderer, that the victim was his father and that he married his own mother. Oedipus was exiled and went blind.
Freud chose to name his formulation after the protagonist of the play because of the latter’s resolve to reveal the hidden truth resembled the process of psychoanalysis. In search of the truth, ironically, Oedipus exposed himself as the murderer.
Explaining the Oedipus Complex, Freud stated that it is a group of unconscious wishes, feeling and ideas focusing on the desire to possess the opposite-sexed parent and eliminate the same-sexed parent. For healthy psychological life, the resolution of the complex is imperative. However, if it remains unresolved, it gives rise to a variety of neurotic fixations, sexual aberrations, debilitating guilt feelings and conflict.
Conflict is the predominant characteristic of Hamlet’s behaviour. It is in the nature of what psychologists call an approach-avoidance conflict. This type of conflict is manifested when a person is both drawn and repelled by the same goal. Hamlet’s goal is to avenge the death of his father by killing his murderer. He undoubtedly wants to achieve this goal, but keeps avoiding it. Firstly, he doubts the veracity of the story the ghost has told him. Then, when he double-checks it by the behaviour of the king at the performance of the play and king’s own admission while praying, he postpones it on the abstruse and hypothetical assumption that, if killed in the state of prayer, the king will be atoned of his sin. His indecision, born out of the conflict, is eloquently and cogently portrayed in Hamlet’s famous soliloquy “To be or not to be”, where he asks if it is better to suffer and wait or to put an end to his life. At the end of the soliloquy, he decides to postpone.
Even before the ghost’s revelations, Hamlet is filled with hatred for his mother for remarrying shortly after the death of his father. On a superficial observation, it would appear that Hamlet was in love with his father. Analyzing it in the light of the Oedipal situation, however, psychologists explain that the hatred arose out of his own frustrated desire to possess his mother.
Interpreting a piece of literature, psychologists do not take into account only what the author consciously intended. They try to tell us what the work reveals, whether or not the author was aware of the meaning, which is found not in the surface of the content of the work but in the author’s unconscious. A psychologist and a follower of Freud by the name of Ernest Jones adopted this mode of interpretation in his book Hamlet and Oedipus. According to his interpretation, Hamlet delayed killing King Claudius because he had done exactly what Hamlet himself wanted to do. For Hamlet to kill Claudius would be to kill himself.
Shakespeare’s depiction of the psychological complexity of the other character, too, is sticking. Gertrude and Ophelia, who might have become stereotypical mother and girlfriend, become astonishingly complex by virtue of their struggle to understand Hamlet. Gertrude is torn between her loyalty to her husband and her love for her son. Ophelia owes her allegiance to her father, but loves Hamlet. The conflict between her love for her father and her love for the person, who murdered him, drove her to insanity and, finally, suicide.
Claudius, as depicted by Shakespeare, is not an unalloyed villain. He, too, is a complex character combining merit and evil. He is capable and intelligent who succeeds in gaining support from Danish nobility to be elected king after the death of the former king. Though he is treacherous and ruthless, he is not a self-deceiving hypocrite, as his prayer speech proves. Though power-loving, his desire to become the king was not the only motive for the murder. His love for Gertrude was also the reason for his dastardly act.
The psychological dimension of Hamlet was a mark of wonder for centuries before psychology because of an accepted science. Ernest Jones, as noted before, painted Hamlet as a victim of the Oedipus Complex. When we reflect on Hamlet’s passionate rejection of his mother’s new husband and his behaviour towards his mother, one begins to think that Jones has an argument.
Even if we do not subscribe to Freud’s interpretation of Hamlet being a victim of Oedipus Complex, the psychological dimension of the play is so powerful that theatregoers come away with a considerable insight into the human condition. For more than four centuries, audiences have been baffled and mesmerized by the Shakespearean depiction of human emotions and drives presented in their glorious complexities. This fact of the play explains the widely dissimilar interpretation by the generations of psychologists and literary critics. At one point in the play, Hamlet, addressing his friend, remarks:
There are more things in heaven and earth, Haratio
Than are dreamt in your philosophy.
This remark could as well be made for human emotions, impulses, mutually antagonistic motives and conflicting pieces of behaviour depicted by Shakespeare in Hamlet.
