25/1/07 - English Literature - Hamlet and Scepticism

The play is compelling to scholars, possibly due to its sequence of events and its reflection of the deepest uncertainties of the time.

"nothing reaches us except as altered and falsified by our senses. When the compasses, the set-square, and the ruler are askew, all the calculations made with them and all the structures raised according to their measurements, are necessarily out of true and ready to collapse. The unreliability of our senses renders unreliable everything which they put forward."
[Montaigne, An Apology for Raymond Sebond. Trans. M. A. Screech. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987, p. 184]

Montaigne voices Renaissance scepticism, which Shakespeare also uses within the play. Hamlet's traditional theatrical structure of revenge tragedy allows scepticism to be explored. The nature of the play is otherwise problematic, and full of conundrums.

In its centre, Act 3 Scene iii, Hamlet meets his enemy Claudius at prayer, defenceless. The meeting comes after the 'Mouse-Trap' intended to provoke Claudius, so Hamlet has uncovered the truth about his father's murderer. Everything so far has led up to this moment of resolution and climax. First, Hamlet speaks a conditional "How might I do it." He doesn't go through with it. Instead, he begins to exercise reason: Claudius will go to heaven if he is killed during repentant prayer, unlike Hamlet's father. Hamlet wishes to kill Claudius during sin so that he will go to hell. However, the moment of opportunity has gone forever.

In Act 3 Scene i, in the "To be or not to be" speech, Hamlet exercises reason, the fear of afterlife and the unknown keeps him in this life. In Act 3 Scene iii, Hamlet believes Claudius will go to heaven. He must be confused, because both can't be true. Hamlet says the dead can't speak, yet his own dead father has already came to speak with him; he can't believe in both things. At the end of Act 3 Scene iii Claudius reflects that his prayers are empty and have not gone to heaven; it is an ironical blow for Hamlet.

There are contradictions throughout the play, between resolution and reflection. It explores the channel that humanism opened and problematises it. Scepticism challenged the concept of what humans are and what the world is. Hamlet embodies this issue. Shakespeare allowed scepticism to enter revenge tragedy, a place where it doesn't belong, for in the end, Hamlet is prevented from taking his revenge. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy was influential to Shakespeare, particularly with Hamlet and Titus Andronicus: they both explore revelation, revenge, and the making of a revenger.

Hamlet begins traditionally, with the disclosure of a secret, usually from a ghost. This changes the avenger's relation to the world (through revelation). In traditional revenge tragedy, we go through what this does to the avenger, who is submitted to terrible things as a result of the revelation. The revenger tries to secure evidence on which to act. He devises a plot, through disguise or wit. There is a process of transformation through insight and outrage. However, there is no room for scepticism in revenge tragedy, which often offers a more comprehensive understanding of the truth. This convention is pervasive in Hamlet. The 'Mouse-Trap' shows that Shakespeare will not conform to conventions.

Renaissance scepticism was a method of doubting conceived perceptions of humans and the world, and questioning whether people will ever be able to comprehensively understand themselves and their world. Luther argued that the Catholic Church cannot offer understanding, that we must return to scripture. This overthrew a millennium of Catholic teaching. There was difficulty in finding stability. It was believed that the only way to arrive at certainty is to overthrow all other methods.

Montaigne's response to the struggle for truth (above) is absurd. He says that reason is vanity of the ego; doubt and suspension of judgement should be used. "What can we know?" Our judgements vary all the time, truth is false the next moment. Can we trust our senses? No. There may be other senses. Our passions and wants determine the way we see the world. Our view of the world is an illusion. Montaigne uses doubt to explore the issues of humanism. The truth is that humans are not up to the task of discovering the truth. One must have humility. How is this relevant in revenge tragedy? Such scepticism is not usually compatible with revenge tragedy, but in Hamlet it is.

Hamlet's soliloquies allow us to hear his reflections, and they slow the play down. We can see into Hamlet's mind. So he is himself the object of sceptical scrutiny. The way he sees the world is not often the way that we see it. He considers experiences and practises as well as form. Hamlet questions political authority, sexual hierarchy and the patriarchal world of the court. How does the power of scepticism affect the play?

It all begins with the moment of revelation, with the speech of his father's ghost.

"If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not;
Let not the royal bed of Denmark be
A couch for luxury and damned incest.
But howsomever thou pursuest this act,
Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive
Against thy mother aught. Leave her to heaven,
And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge
To prick and sting her. Fare thee well at once:
The glow-worm shows the matin to be near
And 'gins to pale his uneffectual fire.
Adieu, adieu, adieu. Remember me.
[1.5.81-91; emphasis added]

The ghost asserts that Hamlet should act against unnatural things, then prohibits Hamlet from harming his mother. Why is the ghost afraid of the daylight? Why should Hamlet "remember" him? Hamlet's experience of tragedy is flawed at once - the speech is a conundrum of contradictions, not a certainty.

Hamlet contradicts himself in his soliloquy of Act 4 Scene iv.

How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;
'Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour's at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
[Shakespeare, William, Hamlet. Ed. Harold Jenkins. London and New York: Methuen, 1983.4.4.-66; emphasis added]

Hamlet says that one should stir to action only if there is good reason, then says that it should take action if it is for one's honour. Limits in one idea are shown by limits in another idea.