Final Thoughts on Hamlet

A few more wise words from Shakespeare's "Hamlet":

"Conceit in weakest bodies strongest works."

"When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions."

"Thou find'st to be too busy is some danger."

This is worth contemplation in our modern society. One of the situations we often see in school is the high-achieving student who is over-scheduled and over-involved. We see students who have every moment of their lives scheduled: as soon as the school day ends they have sports practice for three hours, then they have twenty minutes to get across town to their dance/piano/underwater basket weaving lessons, before going to play practice from 7-10. Somewhere in there they grab some fast food, and then they get home at 10 and start their homework and don't get to bed before midnight or 1 AM. Then we wonder why they're exhausted in school and why they don't start projects and papers until the night before.

Under their living conditions they don't have time to slow down and consider things or plan for the future. They just triage, and go from one event to the next, never stopping to think, wonder, consider, explore, daydream, etc. One of the very unfortunate consequences of the rapidly accelerating pace of life in 21st century US is what some of my colleagues and I call "The Over-Scheduled Student": students who are involved in so many activities that they have no down time, no free time, no opportunities for surprise. Einstein once said, "Creativity is the residue of time wasted." Many young people need more "wasted time" in their lives.

Hamlet: What's it worth to you?

Hamlet: "To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?"

This quote always reminds me of another by the famous British classicist, HDF Kitto, who said, "Often, the things most worth having, can only be had at the risk of life itself."

Hamlet stands faced with a daunting choice: confront his uncle, revenge his father's death, and risk his own life OR remain silent, let the treachery pass, and try to live with the "sea of troubles". Ultimately, of course, Hamlet decides to fight, because this is at the heart of his nature as a tragic character. But for most of us, our decisions are not this dramatic. Shakespeare is using hyperbole here to make clear the tension we all feel between that question of: "How bad is this situation? Can I live with this? If so, for how long? Or must I do something about it, even if it costs me?"

I think everyone has situations in his or her life that can be described as a "sea of troubles" thrust upon them by "outrageous fortune": the employee who is tormented by his or her boss, the student who is bullied by his or her classmates, the person who is diagnosed with cancer, the pregnant woman who miscarries, etc. (I'm not saying, by any means, that all these examples are comparable to one another, and hold equal weight. These are merely all examples of people who have unfortunate situations thrust upon them by the whim of fate, by no fault of their own.) And how does each of us deal with such a situation? When work is miserable, do we accept it, and deal with it, or do we try to fix the problem, even if it costs us our job in the end?

I think Shakespeare is trying to get us all in touch with our own life struggles through Hamlet's difficult situation, which is really the root of all great literature: it is grounded in our experience in our own lives. I may not have an uncle who killed my father, married my mother, and stole my crown, but I have my own minor tragedies in life (as do we all), and great tragedy puts me in touch with the tragic elements of my own life, and reminds me that sometimes I must "take up arms against a sea of troubles".

Hamlet on Subjectivity

Hamlet: "For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so;"

This is one of the great polarities of philosophy: subjectivity vs. objectivity. Do things have an objective, knowable nature of their own, independent of what I think about them, or is the essence of the thing assigned by my thinking it, and each of us is left to our own determinations (even though they be mutually exclusive)? For the purposes of this post, I shall avoid the broad and absolute debate on the ultimate nature of things, over which so much ink has been shed. Rather, I would like to focus on this quote in its context.

Hamlet here is talking with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and he says that Denmark is like a prison to him, but they say it is not so, and he says that for them, it is not then. Many things in life fall into this strange category of things that can be good to one person and bad to another. I say strange, because if you think about it, logically, something should be either good or bad. But many things are, as is often said, a matter of perspective. Let us take something as simple as a sporting match with two opposing teams. Only one team can win. If team A scores a goal, then it is both good for team A and bad for team B. This is undeniable.

Likewise with our variable human personalities and dispositions, one person may find a given place good and another find it bad, each for their own reasons. And when Hamlet says that Denmark is like a prison, or someone says that a certain place (a certain city for example) is "bad" for him or her, what does that person really mean? I think that rather than making a qualitative judgment about the location, the person ultimately is saying more about him or herself. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have no problem with Denmark; Hamlet thinks of it as a prison because of the recent events of his life and his position within the country. He is really making a statement more about himself than about Denmark.

I think this is often true when we talk about things with a fixed character. Certain things (well-established places, genres of music, books, dead authors, dead artists, etc.) are fixed in time and don't change. For example, Plato's "The Republic", isn't going to change. Throughout history various people have engaged "The Republic" intellectually, and have considered it (and the ideas within it) good or bad according to their disposition (NB I do not say "taste"; this is more than an opinion. An educated person's like or dislike of the text is based not on "feeling", but rather on how well the author has argued his point and how well the reality described by the author lines up with what the reader experiences in his or her daily life.). What people have to say about "The Republic", and how they judge it, sheds more light on those individuals and their beliefs, backgrounds, ideologies, and philosophies, than it does about "The Republic" itself.

Keep reading friends! We're closing in on the end of the school term here, so my posts should pick up soon!

Hamlet

Ah, good old William Shakespeare! My students put on a production of Hamlet last weekend. It was so good, it actually inspired me to re-read the original text, and I've been having a ball comparing my reading to the performance and discussing it with my students. Here are some initial random thoughts:

First of all, have you ever noticed how much Shakespeare likes to use actors/fools as a foil in his plays? It struck me while I was watching Hamlet, how essential the acting troupe is to revealing Claudius as Hamlet's father's murderer, and thus propelling the action of the play forward toward its inevitable tragic end. Shakespeare uses the character of the Fool in King Lear for much the same purpose, and of course in A Midsummer Night's Dream the acting troupe plays a central role to the plot. What a curious invention! And I can't help but wonder if Shakespeare himself in Hamlet's speech to the players gives us some meta-analysis of his own craft:

"Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure."

Secondly, how many wonderful one-liners Shakespeare has crammed into this one play! A sampling:

"Brevity is the soul of wit."
"Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice;"
"Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment." (by censure, Shakespeare meant here, "measure")
"For the apparel oft proclaims the man."
"To thine own self be true."
"It is a custom more honour'd in the breach than the observance."
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
"Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him Horatio! A man of infinite jest!"
"Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;"
"If thou wilt needs marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them."

In some following posts, I'll examine some of the more philosophically profound quotes from Hamlet and try to dig deep.