Peripeteia

A thread summarising the arguments developed by Kiernan Ryan in his excellent recent study of Shakespeare's work, Shakespearian Tragedy [2021].

The Stamp of One Defect
‘For centuries critics have tied themselves in knots trying to solve the baffling problem they believe Hamlet poses’. Why doesn’t Hamlet sweep to his revenge? Or what is wrong with Hamlet that he is unable to carry out his duty?

Various critics have diagnosed the prince and proposed different flaws in Hamlet that made him delay. For Goethe, he has a ‘lovely pure and most moral nature’ but was too sensitive and effete a soul to carry out revenge. Coleridge and Schlegel suggested Hamlet thinks too much and thought gets in the way of action: the ‘overmeditative Hamlet’. A.C. Bradley rejects this: Hamlet’s procrastination was not caused by an ‘habitual excess of reflectiveness’ but by ‘a state of profound melancholy’. Meanwhile Ernest Jones suggests Oedipal issues.

All these critics are mistaken, because they ‘proceed on the assumption that the problem lies with Hamlet rather than with the world and the situation in which he finds himself’. The tragedy is taken to be Hamlet’s ‘unfortunate possession’ of a flaw, reducing the play to a ‘case study in failure’.

Hamlet himself sets critics off in this direction with his various self-criticisms. But this line of argument is flawed because the ‘notion that Hamlet’s capacity to act is paralysed by an innate predisposition to think himself out of acting doesn’t square’ with all the actions he takes in the play. Following the ghost, setting the Mousetrap, killing Polonius, battling with pirates etc. Bradley insists that, in fact, Hamlet is a ‘heroic, terrible figure’.

Hamlet also isn’t a moral figure, objecting to revenge on moral grounds. He kills Polonius and shows not a shred of remorse and sends R&G to their deaths without concern, shows no remorse for his parts in Ophelia’s breakdown and suicide, does not apologise to Laertes for killing his father…

Seeing Doubles
These attempts to identify Hamlet’s flaw are doomed because they rest on an ‘uncontested premise that the tragedy springs from Hamlet’s failure to appease his father’s shade’. What happens if we reverse this assumption and see Hamlet’s ‘tormented resistance to performing the role of revenging prince’ not as his fatal flaw ‘but as a heroic virtue that sets him at odds with his world for reasons he can’t comprehend but the play makes plain to us’? What if the flaw isn’t in Hamlet but in Elsinore?

Hamlet’s ‘incompatibility’ with the revenge task is thrown into stark relief via the ‘textbook revengers’ Laertes & Fortinbras; they are the ‘norm to which Hamlet strives in vain to conform’. The contrast foregrounds how ‘out of synch’ Hamlet is with his world. Moreover, the ‘fact that all three find themselves in the same basic predicament also makes it clear that the causes of the predicament are systemic and not specific to Hamlet’. For Hamlet to find revenge unproblematic, he’d have to be like Laertes & Fortinbras and like Claudius.

Indeed, the ‘play repeatedly draws parallels between Hamlet and Claudius’. ‘Hamlet’s involuntary refusal to comply with the revenge code bespeaks a refusal to be Claudius’ counterpart in the revenge scenario and a revolt against the entire ethos the revenge scenario sanctions’.

Ryan reads the actors retelling of the Pyrrhus’ revenge on Priam as parallel to Claudius’ murder of Old Hamlet, with Hecuba equating to Gertrude. But, this is also a projection of what Hamlet wants to do to Claudius. Hence this passage ‘fuses together’ Claudius & Hamlet and points to the real reason for Hamlet ‘recoiling from revenge’. Ryan takes a similar line on Lucianus. Noting that he is the ‘nephew’ to the ‘king’ and not the ‘brother’ to a ‘Duke’, Ryan interprets Lucianus as both a projection of Claudius and of Hamlet. Claudius’ soliloquy also fuses them together: ‘Although his quandary is different from Hamlet’s, the echo of the latter’s deadlock’ is ‘unmissable’. Claudius too feels ‘immobilized by conflicting imperatives’.

So, Hamlet ‘sworn to revenge is the mirror image not only of his fellow revengers, but also of the king on whom he is doomed to wreak revenge’. In other words, ‘the tragedy makes no essential distinction between the character guilty of the deed that demands to be avenged and the character whose duty it is to exact revenge.’ In fact, it actively ‘dissolves the distinction’ because ‘the object of its indictment is the iniquity of the kind of society of which revenge is a symptom’. Killing Cladius is to ‘duplicate the original crime’ and to be ‘complicit in the culture that fosters such crimes.’ ‘Complying with the revenge code means acting not merely as if revenge makes sense and matters, but as if the social order that generates the reasons for revenge makes sense and matters.’

When he finally kills Claudius, Hamlet doesn’t mention his father or say anything about revenge for his father’s murder. That is because ‘it’s beside the point of the play, for which much more than revenge is at stake’.

The Strong Conflux of Contending Forces
To regard ‘Hamlet’ as a play about one man’s flaw is to reduce it to a ‘psychological case study’ and to rob it of its ‘revolutionary vision’. Ryan quotes Swinburne who argued that Hamlet’s indecision or another weakness was not his defining characteristic, ‘but rather the strong conflux of contending forces’. On the one hand are the parts society demands he plays - the role of a royal, an avenging son and the conventional princely thoughts and behavior - on the other, the claims of the ‘disabused human being awoken within him by the realisation that the entire order of things to which he had hitherto subscribed is a despicable charade in which he can no longer collude’.

To kill Claudius would be to ‘act on and endorse the terms of a society whose ethos he rejects’. For Ryan Hamlet’s behavior isn’t inconsistent, unfathomable or indecisive, but has rather ‘everything to do with not wanting to be where he is or who he’s supposed to be, but having to keep pretending, not least to himself, that he does’. He keeps trying to talk himself back into the role of conventionally dutiful avenger, but keeps slipping out of it. Ryan reads the ‘shift in register’ at the end of 1.5 as being into the ‘jocular’ and ‘colloquial’ and takes this to be an indication that Hamlet is already at an ‘ironic distance from the ghost… and its claims on him’.

Hamlet ends the scene not thinking of revenge, but of being born to set the time right. Hamlet has to be prompted to remember his father and the revenge task, quoting John Middleton Murray who noted how ‘the fifth act rises utterly free of the ghost and his influence’ and, as the duel begins, ‘there is no thought in Hamlet’s mind now of revenge upon the king’.