Hamlet's Clashing Ideals

About the Book

As a boy, growing up in Stratford, Shakespeare would have seen travelling players put on some of the old morality plays, where a young man, or in one, “Everyman”, was pulled back and forth by the personified forces of virtue and sin. The tempted young man in those plays knew what the right way was; his only challenge was to resist temptation. In writing Hamlet, Shakespeare created a more complicated character: a young man who isn’t sure what he should do, who has mysteriously mixed feelings about his clashing ideals. The naive young Hamlet starts out full of an angry confidence that he’s on the side of the angels, and that he knows perfectly well what he thinks and feels: “I know not ‘seems’.” Then he’s plunged into a situation where his ideals, of what is “nobler in the mind”, begin to clash. Shakespeare gives Hamlet different roles to play, roles that call for opposing courses of action, but courses that are not obviously all right or all wrong. He’s like an actor in a bad dream, who’s been cast in several parts, and then finds out that more than one of his characters have to be onstage at the same time. Though the part has been played by men in their seventies, Shakespeare casts Hamlet, from the first mention of him as “young Hamlet”, in the role of a young man, with all the sexual and aggressive urges and energies that come naturally to a young man. He makes him, at the same time, a particular type of young man: an idealist, who wants to do what is noblest in the mind, if only he can figure out what that is. As the Prince of Denmark, Hamlet also feels a special duty to preserve “The sanity and health of this whole state.” Besides being a young, idealistic prince, Hamlet shows in his first scene that he’s also a Christian, who can’t kill himself, he says, because “the Everlasting” has “fix’d his canon ’gainst self-slaughter.” The clash comes when Shakespeare then casts this young, idealistic Christian prince in the role of a son, the son of “a dear father murder’d”, whose duty is to take revenge for that “damn’d defeat”--while leaving his mother “to heaven”. As Hamlet the young Christian prince goes off to fulfill his vow of revenge, he begins to realize, painfully, that even he has sin in his heart: he can’t help being contaminated by “our old stock”. Through the central valley of the play, sexual purity appeals to Hamlet as a symbol of moral purity. At least with sexual purity the goal, chastity, is clear. His other ideals, in contrast, turn out to be maddeningly complex and contradictory. He can envision sexual purity but not moral purity. The command to revenge, above all, taints his mind, because it splits apart his ideal of purity, and confronts him with the problem of Hamlet’s clashing ideals. This book tries to show how the Hamlet´s ideals--their impossible attainment symbolized by the impossible ideal of sexual purity--split apart into three. Under the pressure of the command to revenge, what seemed like a single ideal, of what is “nobler in the mind”, splits into three separate, though overlapping, ideals: the heroic ideal, the patriotic ideal and the Christian ideal. The heroic ideal, incarnated by the ghost, stands for family loyalty, honor, and above all, in Hamlet’s situation, for revenge. Clashing with this heroic ideal, and pulling Hamlet away from revenge, the patriotic ideal stands for justice, reverence for the king, and upholding the order of the state. Finally, the Christian ideal sees personal revenge, especially on a king, as a mortal sin.

About the Author

David Bishop lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, teaches at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, and participates in the Great Books discussion group at the Cambridge Public Library. He believes it’s time to put the humanity back into the humanities.