Papai Patra,
Research Fellow,
Centre for Translation and Literary Geography (CTLG),
University of Calcutta
For years, Shakespeare has been a matter of huge literary debate. So many critical pieces caused a great havoc to the coast of academia since the emergence of Shakespearean study. In the true sense, Shakespearean canon is not a single piece to swallow. Those 38 dramas had created a special literary field which is still being studied by the Scholars today. Now to draw the Kind attention towards Shakespeare’s tragic character modulation, I should prefer to mainly four tragic heroes from his four world famous, epoch making tragedies, namely Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear. Shakespeare can be addressed as an ‘Androgynous mind’ by Coleridge, but he was a true zeitgeist. By the deep impact of socio-political and socio-economic situation of the Elizabethan England, Shakespeare was paralysed with a literary craving to write. Each of his plays hints at those societal situations. He moulded each of his tragic heroes with a supersensitive touch of ‘Experience’, be it Macbeth, King Lear or Othello. But interestingly in the case of Hamlet he did not do so.
Hamlet is probably Shakespeare’s longest tragedy. In the creation of Hamlet, the character, Shakespeare probably changed the mould. The aspect of committing a murder or any crime takes a special twist here. Have you ever thought why the world famous ambivalent situation is present in Hamlet ?
“To be, or not to be, that is the question.”
During the murder, Macbeth was not in a situation like this. He successfully killed Duncan. In the case of killing somebody he was never in an ambivalent state rather he was so in the case of gaining the crown, the prophecy of three witches. Othello took the same Land here. When he was killing Desdemona on the bed, he was not in a state of mind like ‘to be or not to be’, he just killed her. Rather, he told himself that, “Where Othello should go?” Also for King Lear, Lear was not in a situation like Hamlet. He judged his three daughters, Goneril, Cordelia and Regan in a parameter and distributed his property between them. Though he did some unknown injustice. So in the case of killing somebody these three characters or tragic heroes were never in a situation like ‘To be or not to be.’ Macbeth had the experience of battles, Othello was so and King Lear was likely to hold the same experience. Only Hamlet was projected through a different lens. T.S Eliot rightly commented on Hamlet, the character and Hamlet, the creation in his 1919 essay ‘Hamlet and His Problems’ that it is not a masterwork but an ‘artistic failure.’ The play is quite confusing and causing uneasiness in a number of ways. Hamlet becomes so because of Hamlet, the character. Some believed ‘Hamlet’ to be ‘Shakespeare’ himself and some not. But it is very much true that Hamlet is an artistic failure because Hamlet couldn’t articulate his own problems. The work lacked something called ‘Objective Correlative’, a term that Eliot coined and popularized to a great extent. For example, the famous ‘Sleepwalking scene’ in Macbeth philosophies the action to relate but in Hamlet, audience didn’t find anything like that.
Again, many people may have thought Hamlet, a work of art because it is interesting. But it was T.S Eliot who addressed the play as the ‘Mona Lisa’ of literature. The play is intractable in the words of Eliot. The comparison went to the zenith’s height. As the greatness of da Vinci’s masterpiece lies in Lisa’s mystifying gaze and strange smile, Shakespeare’s Hamlet too is mystifying and unusual. From a critical perspective, Eliot is ‘impudent’ in his approach towards Hamlet because he found out the problem but didn’t provide any resolution for the same. The exact thing for Hamlet is with the exceptional Shakespearean mould. Shakespeare projected the character ‘Hamlet’ like a schoolboy, like you, like me, like us who didn’t have any previous experience of killing somebody like Macbeth, Othello or Lear. He simply found out the information regarding his father’s death and so acted upon the events accordingly to take the revenge. Here Shakespeare gave birth something called ‘the motif’ that takes the entire thrall of an innocent subject to make it experienced. Interestingly, Hamlet’s action was to take a revenge but still it is not a revenge tragedy rather it is a critique of revenge tragedy in a way. The gullibility of a school boy like Hamlet led Shakespeare to create an artistic failure subject. Probably Shakespeare planned to do so otherwise he couldn’t articulate his own literary problem that is the emergence of the famous philosophical statement like “To be, or not to be, that is the question.”
