Critical Hamlet Analysis - Essay Example

Critical Hamlet In “On the Value of Hamlet”, Stephen Booth makes the argument that the text as weknow it today is not necessarily true to the actual text as it was written and presented by Shakespeare. Rather, he argues that the play as we know it today has been altered significantly through various means and interpretations to such a degree that there is probably no definitive text existing that we can claim was Shakespeare’s actual intention in terms of explaining or not explaining the discrepancies in Hamlet’s behavior throughout the play. In introducing the reason for his argument, Booth indicates that critics can’t help but sometimes hold onto a preconceived notion regarding the play that may not be valid in considering the portions of the play we have left to us. Through his article, he works to prove that these elements of the text that we have today may have accidentally led critics to alternate interpretations of the play that were never intended nor included in the original script. To accomplish this goal, he first works to look at the play in terms of what it does as opposed to what an analysis of it shows it to mean. According to Booth, the mood of the play is immediately set up in the first scene as being one of consistently throwing the audience off step with the action. Booth shows how this is done through a step by step discussion regarding the dialogue that takes place between the sentries, complete with explication on how the audience is both thrown off and brought back into the action of the play. By introducing concepts that are not directly pertinent to the play, Booth says the audience is thrown off, such as the observation by Fernando that he feels ill. But at the same time, the play keeps the audience balanced by providing it with the cues it needs to understand the play is about a threat to the castle and presents a relaxed discussion that explains the current situation in Denmark. Citing numerous other examples in which this same pattern is repeated, Booth says, “This particular variety among the manifestations of simultaneous and equal propriety and impropriety in Hamlet occurs over and over again. Throughout the play, the audience gets information or sees action it once wanted only after a new interest has superseded the old” (147). This structural analysis of Scene 1 is carried out for the remaining scenes of the play, showing how the structure of the play itself serves to communicate its importance. While Scene 1 is analyzed to show the means by which it keeps the audience interested and involved yet still in the dark, Scene 2 is shown to establish the order and structure that has been desired as a result of the king’s presence. Yet, despite this seeming order, Booth argues that the scene introduces its own brand of uneasiness for the audience in the overly formal and oppositional nature of the king’s words. “The excessively lubricated rhetoric by which Claudius makes unnatural connections between moral contraries is as gross and sweaty as the incestuous marriage itself. The audience has double and contrary responses to Claudius, the unifier of contraries” (149). This pattern is interrupted by the presence and finally the spoken words of Hamlet, which Booth shows to be both unifying with the audience and disruptive to the court in that he doesn’t fit in with the rhetoric of the king which verifies the audience’s uneasiness with the oppositional forces being presented. Comparing the play with other revenge genre plays as well as with Western films that were created for specific audiences, Booth makes the point that Hamlet breaks most of the rules for such dramas. This is because of the play’s consistent habit of switching moral value systems, never allowing the audience to wholly identify with either its Christian element or its chivalric element. “The audience moves from one to another system of values with a rapidity that human faith in the rational constancy of the human mind makes seem impossible” (155). At the same time, the audience is never given the type of special privilege often provided, that of having knowledge superior to that of the protagonist, allowing it to make predictions and assumptions regarding what should come next. Booth demonstrates that throughout the play, although the audience is privy to the scheme hatched by Hamlet to play mad, it is never superior to him in knowing more about what’s about to happen than Hamlet knows himself. And, at no point in the play, is the audience provided with enough information to make guesses that are any less foolish than the guesses made by Polonius in his assumptions about what is happening in the king’s court. Like the structure of the opening scenes, this constant surprise element of the play keeps the audience in a crisis of understanding that is unequaled in other plays. Finally, Booth argues that the nature of the phrases themselves serve to introduce to the audience the same sense of madness and nonsense that has become the subject matter of the play. Through oppositional phrases and dialogue that starts in nonsense and ends in sense or vice versa, Booth demonstrates how the play works to keep the audience off balance in word as well as deed. “The audience finds itself trying to hear sense in madness; it suddenly undergoes experience of the fact that Polonius’ assumptions about cause and effect in life and language are no more arbitrary and vulnerable than its own. The audience has been where it has known that the idea of sanity is insane, but it is there very briefly; it feels momentarily lonely and lost – as it feels when it has failed to get a joke or when a joke has failed to be funny” (163). Going nearly line by line through Hamlet’s famous soliloquy, Booth shows how the use of particular phrases and associations in the play serve to force the audience into a direct experience of the emotions and actions that are represented by it. “The soliloquy, the last scene, the first scene, the play – each and together – make an impossible coherence of truths that are both undeniably incomparable and undeniably coexistent” (171). By making these three main arguments, Booth is careful not to disparage other critics’ approaches to the play, but suggests that no other approach is really necessary to a full understanding of how the play works. The structural element of the play in which each scene serves to both verify and negate what the audience expects is consistent with the actions of the play in which the characters are sane yet insane which is further consistent with the phrases used in dialogues and speeches that both make sense and do not make sense. It is through this very careful balance of opposites that Shakespeare has created a world in and of itself, in which the audience is made to feel a part and in which it is possible for them to accept the conjoined opposites as being capable of co-existence. “In Hamlet the mind is cradled in nothing more than the fabric of the play. The superior strength and value of that fabric is in the sense it gives that it is unlimited in its range, and that its audience is not only sufficient to comprehend but is in the act of achieving total comprehension of all the perceptions to which its mind can open” (175). In the end, the play is prey to critics, Booth says, precisely because its sense exists almost exclusively within the play itself and not elsewhere. Works Cited Booth, Stephen. “On the Value of Hamlet.” Selected Papers from the English Institute. Norman Rabkin (Ed.). New York: 1969. Read More