The Act of Thinking: The Oxymoric Existence in William Shakespeare's Hamlet

Il faut agir en homme de penser et penser en homme d'action

Henri Bergson, Message au Congrs Descartes, 1937

Writing about Hamlet could be difficult and challenging; nevertheless, undertaking the task is not
impossible. Most claim the definitive interpretation, or, at least, hope posterity will agree. Volumes
of criticism overwhelm, but Shakespeare himself, through King Henry V's speech, hints at going
once more unto the breach1. Paradoxically, works already read and analysed can tell something
new: the great critic Roland Barthes exhorts to start to sing a song of solidarity, rather than to say
that yet all has been said with despair. A new tile can be always added to the incomplete puzzle. The
text deals with truth, according to Walter Benjamin; its nature is always perfectible. Italo Calvino's
likewise definition of classics, un libro che non ha mai finito di dire quel che ha da dire 2, alludes
to unexpected discoveries. From something finite like human interpretation which makes literature
more understandable, infinite chances of perfectibility comes to light. For this purpose, in his essay
The Function of Literary Research: a Reconsideration, Robert E. Spiller affirms that one of the
functions of literary research has always been and always will be the effort to re-create the past so
that its literary product will regain some of the sting of immediacy that it had in its own day.3
In his works, Shakespeare accurately portrays his society, by emphasising its contradictions.
Many critics have debated about conflicts in the Bard's plays, even though few answers remain. The
contrast, for excellence, occurs in mind: the split between 'thought' and 'action' is staged in Hamlet,
the tragedy of tragedies, which still nowadays bursts out an eternal, enigmatic, ambiguous,
1

2
3

William Shakespeare, Henry V, Arden Edition, 1995, Act III, l. 1, from Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint
George!
Italo Calvino, Perch leggere i classici, Oscar Mondadori, Milano 1995, p. 7
Robert E. Spiller, The Function of Literary Research: a Reconsideration, in College English, published by
National Council of Teachers of English, Vol 10, No 4, (Jan 1949), pp. 203-209
1

mysterious fascination, like the gaze of Leonardo's Gioconda; it always inspires lively interests in
everybody, urging to investigate. The tragedy's historic tradition entices people to come; new
interpretations of the play and the deep character development that pulls the audience in have stood
the test of time. Hamlet expertly twists between being traditional and modern.
Many scholars claim that Hamlet's action has not been given adequate motives and that the play
is so far bad. On the other hand, some others discuss about the wrongness of his inaction, such as
Harold Bloom, focusing on the quality of it: he does not delay at all but goes to work as quickly as
the circumstances permit, position defended in modern times. Then, all those Romantic critics who
explain the procrastination by his psychology, the orthodox line of Hamlet criticism, by attributing
the weakness to the shock inflicted by the events preceding and following the opening of the
tragedy; by regarding it as a more permanent condition or extending it to actual insanity. Indeed,
this essay will focus on how Shakespeare presents and explores the question: in which way and why
the Beams of Balance fluctuate between action and thought. From studying the challenging
complexity of Hamlet's character his conflicts a particular light emerges in the mingling of the
two opposites, suggesting new solutions by means of rhetorical devices.
Conflicts in Shakespeare seem to be a world-view, which takes roots, most probably, in the
ancient idea of the shifting balance, a concept likening to Aristotelian golden mean (according to
Hazlitt's biography, Shakespeare studies Greek philosophy in translation at Grammar School). In
Nicomachean Ethics4, Aristotle explicates that the common trait of all virtues is the wishing middle
between two extremes: a climatic point, a height, not a sort of compromise, but a point of balance
extremely delicate, most difficult to reach. Virtue, a kind of perfection, the excellence in everything
one can do is, therefore, concerned with the character of a person because ethic virtues are ordinary
dispositions of man's actions: the wiser, then, rather than wisdom, with his morality, can distinguish
between the good, right or morally correct way and the bad or wrong. Moreover, this is
demonstrated by the double meaning of ethics: the Greek word refers to both manners and 'personal
character' such as 'behaviour' and 'habit'. It deals with an auto-perception: in the rightness of hic et
nunc, the wiser who always seeks and chooses the mean, the rightness synonym of truth, establishes
relative values; this explains the Latin saying: In medio veritas stat. The concept extends also to
politics in which disproportionate elements of the Constitution cause disharmony and difficulties.
The existential being, thus, is determined by the harmonic Dionysian-Apollonian dialectic, two
sides of life as theorised by the Greek philosopher that must be rationally balanced without
opposition. Besides, Socrates applies Aristotle's concept to education in his paideia. The effect of
either an exclusive devotion to gymnastics or an exclusive devotion to music causes a temper of
4

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Hackett Publishing Company, 1999, translated by Terence Irwin, Book II, Ch. 6
2

hardness and ferocity, (or) the other of softness and effeminacy. 5 Instead, teaching both qualities,
he believes, produces harmony, beauty and goodness; for this purpose, he stresses the importance of
mathematics in education to better understand beauty and truth.
On the contrary, conflicts turn out to be an excess or deficiency of one of the two portions of
existence, brought about when, by choice or necessity, man becomes, extremely unilateral, stiff and
overwhelmed by the effort to control the context, with catastrophic consequences leading to death,
as Icarus will show. Neither of the portions is wholly good or bad, imbalance is the only true wrong;
man needs both sides. Everything, then, has an aim, the purpose (telos) for which the thing exists or
has been produced; nothing has nonsense: all forms have their place and their beauty. The
Apollonian-Dionysian framework, then, helps reveal how Shakespeare depicts the contrasting
personality of his characters, giving a deep insight of their conflictual interior, which mirrors the
outside. In his plays and in Hamlet as well, struggle against problems often arises. In contrast with
some comedies ending with a restoring balanced-marriage, in tragedies, heroes will either go away
from the scene of theatre and of life, by dying, or they reach balance themselves. Conflicts originate
just when characters attempt to restore balance, because of the difficult and frail nature of reaching
the mean, definitively present in Shakespeare's view. Characters must search for integration of
people and community, they still believe in an attainable state of balance, unlike modern society
where contrasts will be permanent.
In Hamlet, a web of conflicts emerges. Three kinds of contrasts become known. Hamlet fights
against himself (inner conflicts), against the world-nature (external conflicts) and against other
characters in the tragedy. Those aspects can influence the hero's mind in order to make up decisions
and to act. In Renaissance period, the breakup of absolute concepts challenging society is performed
and exorcised in art through the use of oxymoron. Therefore, rhetoric can be defined as a way to
read the world. In the coincidentia oppositorum lies both the being and the not being in which
excluding contradictions collide, harshly or harmonically, each others, to produce a tertium, an
essential quality which distorts and preserves, at the same time, the primordial heritage. The
common trait of the two different realities has to be lived, experienced, known, communicated;
thus, through thinking about extremes, limits can be overcome and the ontological hybrid perceived.
Language offers the opportunity to organize the opposites as distinct but close realities; especially
theatre is considered as an extreme experience, for showing the double meaning. A sort of Armonia
Mundi, thus, a musically organized world, as Leo Spitzer puts it, which likens to the Elizabethan
ladder, characterised by the Chain of Being, as Tillyard affirms In this order hot things are in

Plato, Republic, Book III, 410D in the translation by B. Jowett, Vintage Books, p. 118
3

harmony with cold, dry with moist, heavy with light, great with little, high with low () 6 It deals
with a vision of the world which conveys the idea of Theatrum Mundi, aiming to gather all
differences on stage, as Jacques in As You Like It asserts, all world's a stage7. The concept occurs
in some Renaissance or Elizabethan lyrics such as Sir Walter Ralegh's poem and Edmund Spenser's
sonnet: Of this worlds Theatre in which we stay 8. According to Tillyard, the theme of double in
poetry has ancient origin: The devine breath used to describe poetry and perfection derive from
Plato. () The perfection is at once that of the Platonic Good and of the Garden of Eden, while
Adam's fall from it is also the measure of the distance separating created things from their Platonic
archetypes. It was then through an intense realization of this double vision that the Elizabethans
could combine such extremes of optimism and pessimism, about the order of the present world.9
Shakespeare is so obsessed by the middle state of souls that makes Hamlet admits: To sleep,
perchance to dream10 and the suffering portrayed by the Ghost are expressions of surging anxiety
and doubt during this volatile period. In the tragic character, the oxymoron is a force intending to
verify an enunciated, but not yet experienced truth and to disguise the multiple nature of those who
he thinks about. Reverberating social environment, intense scrutiny and interrogation put a
tremendous strain on all sections of Elizabethan society and the desire to escape from the claws of
the ruling classes takes place. This period sees a lot of blood due to the insane will of despotic
rulers, like king Claudius. Shakespeare's Hamlet by unearthing the social niceties and faades of
Elizabethan society, constitutes a comment on the wider compass of the human condition,
embodying a society characterized by turmoil and uncertainty: the division of the Church of
England into Catholics and Protestants also divides society resulting in political instability.
Claudius' usurping of the throne and Hamlet's religious questioning Thus conscience does make
cowards of us all (Act III, Sc. I, l. 83), typifies the influence of political unrest in Elizabethan and
Jacobean society. The ideological conditions of the Renaissance period cannot help but seep into
Hamlet. It is the dawn of a new century and the political and social environment is hyperactive,
generating stress for the common population. In 1588, the threat of the Spanish Armada, plots
against Queen Elizabeth and decades of anti-Catholic propaganda cause tremendous anxiety.
Besides, the ruling classes exercise extreme censorship, spying and taking severe measures on
seditious writings documented evidence from 1599 records trials of ordinary people who dare to
criticize the government. Mind and heart cannot bear sorrows any more: the crisis arises.
6
7
8

9
10

E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, Penguin, 1990, p. 34

William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Penguin Books, 1994, Act II, Sc. 7, l. 139
Edmund Spenser, Amoretti, Sonnet LIV, l. 1 in Edmund Spenser's Amoretti and Epithalamion: a Criical Edition, by
Kenneth J. Larsen, Nabu Press, 2011
E. M. W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture, p. 30
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, The Arden Shakespeare Edition, edited by Harold Jenkins, 1995, Act III, Sc. I, l. 65
4

Shakespeare witnesses the atrocious treatment given to members of warring religious and political
factions. For this purpose, he takes his writing to another level and portraits human condition, in
which he finds a potential for both tragedy and comedy. He does not force this great variety of
characters into the mould of a single world view, either tragic or Christian; the playwright does not
view people as either fundamentally evil or good. He regards variety as simply part of life. Through
his performances he goes beyond simple optimism and values pessimism.
Therefore, the search for new meanings becomes more and more impelling. The motif of duality,
chiefly, the use of hendiadys, subverts or slants, as Emily Dickinson indicates in her poem 11,
conventional sense to dislocate normal patterns of thinking. By twinning the familiar with the
unfamiliar a new, more powerful significance erupts. But frustratingly, no sooner is the true
meaning seized upon than it flees, ultimately resulting in a denial of closure, reflecting, in this way,
that status of inner imbalance. The new Shakespearean language tends to walk a tightrope between
comprehension and incomprehension. Frank Kermode in his Shakespeare's Language points out
that the doubling in Hamlet can obviously be a means of slowing down the action as well as the
language of the play.12 Indeed, doubling devices appear to wrestle with the human desire to contain
and penetrate the text. The plot depends on linguistic and structural doubles as a delaying tactic to
drive it forward. Duality, then, is a meta-theatrical device for movement and cessation and the
jarring of rhythm has the effect of shattering expectation and increasing a sense of unfamiliarity and
disturbance. Shakespeare highlights the ambiguities between the physical and the idealised world or
subjective and objective reality. He uses conceptual doubling when casting actors as a way to
illuminate themes of doubt, and indecision. While assisting at the performance, audience will recur
to all his imagination and intuition, which implies much more involvement on stage.
Characters' structures are chaotic; the more one tries to analyse, the more they dislocate and
muddle interpretation. Yet, the colliding of two ideas appears to be an alchemical process:
incompatible elements fuse to form a third meaning; literal and figurative aspect of words of
suspicious significance, combine together. They continue to process and to shift register, creating
new ideas. Hendiadys portraying anxiety is, thus, a reflection of the pervasive fear that coursed
through all sections of Elizabethan society. New historicism calls attention to the way in which
ideology interacts with literature. Duality 'situates' within the institutions and social practices of the
period and our inability to establish concrete meaning. Their incompleteness is dramatised in
Hamlet. For this reason, chiasmus is more than a doubled reinforced antithesis: its complex and
perfect regular configuration implies a dramatic action. As regards the Oedipal situation, it can
11

12

Emily Dickinson, Tell all the truth but tell it slant (1263) from The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition,
ed. by Ralph W. Franklin, 1998
Frank Kermode, Shakespeare's Language, London, Penguin, 2000, p. 102
5

reveal psychic mechanisms such as projection or introjection. The chiasmic structure calls up
Dante's Cantos and Canticas, in which lines converse in parallel, like the architectonic structure of a
Baroque cathedral.
However, Shakespeare's decision to represent in this tragedy the contrast between thought and
action, aims at achieving the hard enterprise of reconciliation through the figure of speech. The
oxymoric form allows the two terms of opposition to exchange proper qualities. Thinking, then,
assumes action's attributes and vice-versa, as if it were a personification, most probably a
reminiscence of some typical elements of Medieval representations. Morality Plays13, for instance,
symbolises virtues and abstractions by means of opposite figures with specified and static roles:
good and evil, life and death. By adding the intermingling of contraries, Elizabethan dramatists and
Shakespeare will create new dynamic roles.
In Hamlet, thought becomes, movement, act, kinetic energy, performing exteriority; it is visible,
shaped, if not concrete, irregular like the rhythm of time. In contrast, action appears invisible at first
sight, but not absent, evanescent, ethereal, potential energy, implosive, requiring a process in time
ad space, though it only develops in paralytic and arhythmical pace. On the other hand, action
assumes moral qualities: the sense of rightness originates from the fear of mistakes (reminiscence of
Adam's Fall and a mirror of the misdeeds of Shakespeare's time), which arouses personal
improvements and inner moving. On the contrary, exaggeration causes imbalance. Doctor Faustus,
Hamlet's inverted mirror-like contemporary, a scholar who aspires to limitless intelligence, is a
person who overreaches and succumbs to sin. He chooses evil and, finally, pays the price for his
deeds. He is so swollen with pride and self-conceit that he gambles his soul to feed his ambition of
worldly knowledge. That ambition urges him to be more than a man and incites him to turn to black
magic. Faustus is still a man with his limitation and not an omniscient god. Refusing his own limits
leads to death and dissolution. Dr. Faustus arrogantly silences the voice of conscience and justifies
his deeds. Christopher Marlowe has depicted the character of Dr. Faustus as a person who for lower
values gives up his higher ones. The protagonist answers to Mephistopheles: Nay, and this be hell,
I'll willingly be damn'd14 .
Hamlet rather, takes distances and speaks aloud to his conscience. As in a surviving therapy, he
tells his thoughts to escape anguish and fear. As bad actions occur, the necessity of rightness
increases, rising doubts by thinking on it. When Hamlet is told of the ghost's arrival, he starts
doubting I doubt some foul play () / Foul deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o'erwhelm them,
13

14

For further reading see: S. L. Bethell, Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition, London, Staples Press,
1948 or Alan C. Dessen, Shakespeare and the Late Moral Plays, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1986 or
Glynne Wickham, Shakespeare's Dramatic Heritage, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969
Christopher Marlowe, Dr Faustus, Edizioni La Spiga, 1993, Act II, Sc. 1, 143
6

to men's eyes. (Act I, Sc. II, 256-58). Hamlet's reacts to the conatus agendi imposed by the spectre.
Action, then, is broken down, fragmented, if not immaterial; it is delayed in time and space to
favour the flow of thoughts. Moreover, it is alienated and then projected to other characters. The
mingling of both categories generates a 'theatrical thinking', i.e. the act of thinking, the autorepresentation of thoughts. Hamlet's (presumptuous) madness, out of tune (Act III, Sc. I, l.160) as
Ophelia states, reflects a condemned imbalance, which becomes a condition, such as that of
Hamlet-fool, mirror of himself, being and feigning, at the same time. This attitude could probably
have inspired Carl G. Jung in elaborating his concept of hysteria 15. According to the psychiatrist,
Dionysian symbolism (still surviving in rave parties), inspired to the Greek psychiatric god, the
balancer of upsetting opposites when inflexibility and one-sidedness take place, can help better
understand hysteric pathology. The imbalance of mind and body, which hides social discomfort,
produces theatrical postures: the hysteric body speaks to itself; fantasies can be expressed only in
this way, for the mind is unable to organize them in rational and conscious thoughts.
Significantly enough, Antonio Prete16 in his essay on Leopardi writes about the poet's way of
thinking, defining it a poetical thinking. It clearly calls up Martin Heidegger's definition: poetry is
similar to a revelation of the being, an experience inextricably bound up with truth, which prefers a
form of narration rather than logical reasoning. Originally, gods versify, speaking the language of
signs17. The poet's speech points to interpret signs to transmit them. Hence the poet lies between
gods and humans. Likewise, the Bard to whom Leopardi largely inspires, in deeply analysing
existential anxiety connects poetry to theatre, the latter serving up lively actions to the former, as
the ancient tradition of German poetry and Provence Troubadours testify, in which poems were
performed, by means of other artistic forms such as music. Shakespeare himself has a performing
thought, even his sonnets present a theatricality. Moreover, A. M. Nagler, cited by Keir Elam in
Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse, sustains that, One of the many widespread myths about the
Elizabethan theatre is that the dramatists of the time made up for the lack of illusionistic elements
by more or less poetic description from the mouths of their characters. Poetry, by this theory,
becomes a substitute for scenery.18 Intuition and imagination, then, are the keywords to bring out
the meaning of this theatre. Reversibly, action is thinking action, its inputs lose the name of action
(Act III, Sc. I, l. 88). This kind of exceeding is well known in theatre. It implies to disclose with
beauty, harmony and irony, that antic disposition (Act I, Sc. V, l. 180). It deals with tasting the
15

16
17
18

Bruno Meroni, Isteria e pensiero teatrante. Una lettura junghiana dell'isteria maschile/femminile, la Biblioteca di
Vivarium, 2010
Antonio Prete, Il pensiero poetante, Feltrinelli, 2006, p. 80
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Harper & Row, 1962, Ch. 17, pp. 107-114
A. M. Nagler, Shakespeare's Stage, Yale University Press, 1958, p. 32 in Keir Elam, Shakespeare's Universe of
Discourse: Language-Games in the Comedies, Syndicate University of Cambridge, 1984, p. 64
7

own and others' limits, by offering infinite possibilities of expressions while 'proceeding' in the
'thing-us', to verify unexpected contiguities, unseen links, 'koini', to alterity which seems to be a
necessity, a desire, an event, through the hybrid eye of the oxymoric polarities in tension. Theatre
and life naturally cross each other, without breaks. Shakespeare invents the aesthetic of the
dramatisation of thoughts.
As a result, actions are not compulsory, unlike those of Greek heroes. Acting appears to be
reflexive, which reminds of the Latin verb flectre signifying 'to bend'. Action subordinates to
thought, just as a confusing shadow in the act of theatrical meeting. In addition, according to
Knowles, Hamlet's thinking is rhetorical, linked to speech, like that of a preacher, 'cause,' 'will,'
'strength,' and 'means' are topics or places or arguments for a deliberative oration on Should I act?
() Public forms of discourse encroach upon Hamlet's subjectivity, his personal experience. ()
The likeness of sleep and death, largely derives from Cicero's Tusculan Disputations by way of
those sententia or 'saws' Hamlet claims to have wiped from 'the table of [his] memory' (). Cicero's
first disputation at Tusculum was the locus classicus, and any educated auditor would have
recognized it and the rhetorical mode of Hamlet's speech.19
Hamlet cannot ignore his inner voice, his deep conscience telling him that his course of action, a
perpetration of errors started from his parents, is wrong, that seeking vengeance amounts to taking
the dark path to moral destruction. His inner promptings do cause him to delay, but he does not
recognize the cause, he only questions on it. His thinking returns on itself, he talks to his soul. He
tragically follows the route to spiritual desecration. It seems as though Hamlet would agree with
Dante's lines: Fatti non foste a viver come bruti, ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza 20, Dante and
Shakespeare share the same traditional Christian vision of human life. By the dramatic portrayal of
Hamlet's transformation along this terrible path for revenge, Shakespeare forces his audience to
experience mistakes, wrongness and failures. Henri Bergson's passage, then, hints at the perfect
balance, an idealistic state seen from a contemporary point of view. It is the perfect state of good
ruling. Yet Hamlet is voluntary imperfect, like the chiasmus which connects his inner world to the
outside (macro-microcosm relation). As imbalance alternates, Bergson's status appears dislocated in
tragedy; it goes beyond the scene and the text, to find another spacial-temporal dimension. This
kind of 'imperfect' artifice allows Shakespeare to create a kind of open 'mirror mirroring', a sort of
convex mirror reflecting tropes of movement and displacement that evoke the multiplicity of
perspectives from which the shifting shape of identity can be known in modes of social exchange,
19

20

Ronald Knowles, Hamlet and Counter-Humanism in Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Winter, 1999),
Chicago University Press, pp. 1046-1069
Dante Alighieri, La Divina Commedia, a cura di Natalino Sapegno, La Nuova Italia ed. Firenze, 1980, (Inf. XXVI,
ll. 119-120)
8

generating in extension an infinite variety of rasp-linked chiasmus 21 and not simply an encapsulated
perfect one. The figure of speech is a powerful language device which reflects the complexities of
the self.
The image reminds no more of the perfect circles of Dante's Canticas, as a mirror of the
Medieval world-view with man at the centre of Universe and God ruling it. Indeed, it is likely that
Shakespeare's plays are differently shaped. They do not describe a circle, as Jan Kott notes in his
famous book22, while studying the historical plays, i.e.The Kings, even though the apparent
sequential repetition of deeds and events could suggest the contrary. The crisis of the shifting
balance induces to think rather of the fluctuating movement of elliptic orbits, inspired by the new
Seventeenth Century scientific discoveries, which revolutionize the concept of space and time.
Galileo Galilei's, Francis Bacon's and the most important Kepler's studies demonstrate the elliptic
shape of the earth's orbit (1608); its movement around the Sun forms a sort of infinite spiral. It is
probable that Shakespeare's works imitate that movement, like Giovan Battista Marino's elliptically
shaped poems. Similarly, Bernini's and Borromini's artistic creations determinate a new movement,
a sequence of spirals, ellipses and broken lines, precisely a complex flux of rough interruptions and
bewilderments which replaces the perfect-ended circle. A new harmony of its own pre-established
order takes place, renewing from its own fragmented imbalance. It means to cross the world in
motion, involving energy, senses, mind and body. Galileo Galilei, who studies heavenly bodies,
believes in a new universal harmony able to go along the pathway of differences and changes.
Reality is perceived as a dialogue between responsibility and indecision, coherence of thoughts and
practical distraction, certainty and hesitation.
A kind of imperfection, similar to the defective glasses in Shakespeare's time, will inspire T.S.
Eliot's famous comment on Hamlet: So far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is most
certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the
others. () he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes () The versification is variable. 23
Paradoxically, all these 'mistakes' make of Hamlet an everlasting masterpiece. Maybe, Shakespeare
would have wished to represent just failure through art. From these imperfections the true portrait of
social reality emerges. Like no other of his contemporaries, the Stratford-upon-Avon dramatist has
the force to let life and history come to light from the depths. He stages mistakes and fallibilities as
fundamental qualities of the human mind, of the world structure, and, by correspondence, of the
play. Although through this act of mirroring the self could be revealed in his truth, by enlarging,
21

22
23

See also: Philippa Kelly, Surpassing Glass: Shakespeare's Mirrors in Early Modern Literary Studies, edited by
Lisa Hopkins, 8.1, May, 2002
Jan Kott, Shakespeare nostro contemporaneo, Feltrinelli, 2002, pp. 5-55
T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode, Faber, London, 1975, Hamlet (1919), p. 47
9

shrinking, distorting dimensions, paradoxically, the mirror reflects the elusiveness of constant
moving and vacillating interiority.
At the play's opening when Hamlet meets the Ghost, his 'imperfect' nature is evident: he tries to
re-act to on-stage events. He observes and comments on them as they happen, without
resourcefulness. He tells his own chronicles as a spectator of his life. Who's there? (Act I, Sc. I,
ll.1, 15, 4). The question about the Ghost's identity in connection to the supernatural arises. He
wants to verify events, but unable to prevent them, he meditates on what the Ghost asked for him.
Shakespeare is thoroughly a master of the mixed motives of human character. The Bard has the
great ability of concentrating on the very deep insight of characters while exploring at once reality
and environment, historical context, and philosophy. Hamlet is a young scholar, he seeks his
essence and identity. Politically, he questions himself about his aptitude for ruling, while feeling his
failure. His thinking puzzles him and procures him a mirrored imbalance. Not only is death the
peculiar aspect of the structural scheme of tragedies, but the thinking of it pervades all the tragedy,
Our state to be disjoint and out of frame (Act I, Sc. II, l. 20), Claudius' first line claims. The Ghost
causes the first displacement of thoughts and uncertainties in Horatio who as a magician announces
the end: In what particular thought to work I know not,/ But in the gross and scope of my opinion,/
This bodes some strange eruption to our state. (ll. 70-73). It is an illusion as Horatio defines it:
Stay, illusion (l.130).
Death breaks the bounds between thought and action; it deals with the end of perception of time
and space. The hero expresses the fear of the unknown Afterlife in the famous lines of his soliloquy,
which puzzles the will, the native hue of resolution/ Is sicklied o'ver with the pale cast of
thought and enterprises of great pitch and movement ()/ lose the name of action (Act III, Sc. I,
ll. 84-8). Hamlet sees his father in my mind's eye. (l. 185). He appears to be rather passive, he
hesitates in decision and he is not bold except for few of his proposals. Yet, paradoxically, he is the
director of his own re-actions, which reveal another oxymoron. Action, then, is reduced and
sacrificed in favour of thought in a sort of paralysis of both. In this way, by exchanging attributes,
action struggles against itself, against its own definition and, as consequence, against thought. The
figure of speech reflects the concept of theatre: action is overshadowed, distanced on stage like the
past memories of those dreadful misdeeds, which calls up Bertolt Brecht's idea of showing through
acts. Hamlet, thus, stages the tragedy of the oxymoric reality which tries to restore harmony.
It seems that Hamlet fights against himself, against fixed roles, imposed by the author and
circumstances, which contribute to increase his dramatically tragic condition, This must be so
(Act I, Sc. II, l. 106), the pre-established order, as Claudius knows very well the genealogy of
fatherless. Hamlet's character lives both inside and outside the world-theatre scene. He is a spectator
10

while playing on stage. In his soul, unlike Aristotle's idea of virtue, there is a sense of inadequacy.
He is not the right person in the right place and time; this is the starting point of his search, his
anxious crisis. In the first Cantos of his Commedia, Dante claims that the impulse to write the
masterpiece is due to love, amor mi mosse (Inf. II, l. 72). For Hamlet, instead, the Ghost's diktat
does urge him to fulfil revenge and to begin his movements of thoughts. The supernatural is similar
to an external projection of his 'voluntas', as well as of his actions. William Hazlitt points out that
His habitual principles of action are unhinged and out of joint with the time.24
Consequently, Hamlet's movement is mainly in thought. By contrast, focusing on thinking,
action is reduced merely to acts. Shakespeare endorses Aristotelian theory of putting form into
substance. In his books Zeta and Eta of Metaphysics25, the philosopher states that the only
remaining candidate for primary substance seems to be form, he calls essence. The theatrical device
'shapes' the flow of thoughts, by pointing to essence, a process similar to the human genetic
heritage, i.e. the functional form of the biological double spiral, which links body to soul and mind.
For the first time in the history of theatre, thought is expressed in lines and staged in soliloquies.
However, there is an evolution in Hamlet's flux of thoughts. The tragedy opens with his thinking of
events. He seems to gloss facts and circumstances as a reporter of his life, Harold Bloom notices
that Hamlet is criticism itself, at once a theatrical interpreter and the perspectivist of his own
story.26 By re-acting to situations, he has to re-invent his existence in terms of others. According to
W. H. Auden Hamlet lacks faith in God and in himself. Consequently he must define his existence
in terms of others, e.g., I am the man whose mother married his uncle who murdered his father. He
would like to become what the Greek tragic hero is, a creature of situation. Hence his inability to
act, for he can only 'act', i.e. play at possibilities.27
In soliloquies, the flowing of thoughts takes its congenial shape, reaching also cathartic
moments. His sorrow for the imminent incest after a parricide grows once again. Mind and heart
collide. Immediately, the terms of the question are clearly expressed: the search for truth, for the
contrast between being and appearing, and for confirmations of what yet discovered. It is a very
hard and sorrowful research, the starting movement of thoughts and doubts. Seems, madam? Nay,
it is. I know not 'seems' (Act I, Sc. II, l. 76) Hamlet answers to his mother while thinking about his
father's death. Because no words can describe his inner sorrows, in contrast with exterior actions:
But I have that within which passes show ( l. 85).
24

25
26
27

William Hazlitt, Lectures on the Literature of the Age of Elizabeth and Characters of Shakespeare's Plays, London,
George Bell and Sons, 1900, pp. 73-81
Aristotle, The Metaphysics, Penguin Classics, 1999 translated by Hugh Lawson-Tancred, Book Zeta and Eta
Harold Bloom, The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, Princenton University, November 15 and 16, 1995, p. 171
W. H. Auden Genius & Apostle, in The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays, London, Faber & Faber, 1975, pp. 433-55
11

It may be that meta-theatricality prepares the revolution of modernity. In this light, Shakespeare
is the forerunner of Romanticism and especially of The Theatre of Absurd. The process of thinking,
very similar to the Erlebte Rede of Hamlet's consciousness, anticipates James Joyce's stream of
consciousness, rather than Virginia Woolf's interior monologue, for its reasoned discourse, the free
registered flow of thoughts and his associations of verbal disclosure with the digging-out of interior,
facing the outer mask. Shakespeare's presence in Joyce's works is wide, extending in many different
levels: cultural, structural, lexical and psychological. The artistic creation and above all the form of
soliloquy could have considerably inspired Joyce. During his trip to Trieste, Joyce has a cycle of
lectures on Hamlet's themes between 1912 and 1913. It is also evident the Shakespearean
masterpiece goes through the Joycian Ulysses till its central chapter, The National Library or Scilla
and Cariddi, focused on Shakespeare and Hamlet and the Chapter of Circe, very important for the
intricate development of the book. And many other references to Shakespearean tragedies and
comedies continually appear in the text; and many parallels such as fatherhood in ShakespeareLeopold Bloom28. Hamlet himself could have worked in and for Joyce.
Like an existentialist hero, Hamlet tries to find his true, authentic self; he suffers from the
anguish of freedom. The theme of authentic existence is common to many existentialist thinkers.
What is meant by authenticity is that in acting, one should act as oneself, not as one acts or as one's
genes or any other essence require. The authentic act is one that is in accordance with one's
freedom. The role of facticity in relation to authenticity involves letting one's actual values come
into play when one makes a choice (instead of, like Kierkegaard's Aesthete, choosing randomly),
so that one also takes responsibility for the act instead of choosing either or without allowing the
options to have different values, as Laertes suggests to Ophelia just before his departure: He may
not ()/ Carve for himself, for on his choice depends/ The sanity and health of this whole state
(Act I, Sc. III, l. 19-21). Hamlet is condemned to the ontological oxymoron, made up of the same
substance of reality, which becomes the linguistic mirror of an existential condition, as Giorgio
Melchiori affirms.29
Despair in existentialism is more specifically related to the reaction to a breakdown in one or
more of the defining qualities of one's self or identity. Hamlet's first thought is his self-nihilation, he
lacks freedom; towards death he re-acts with his own death, O that this too too sullied flesh would
melt,/ Thaw and resolve itself into a dew,/ Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd/ His canon 'gainst
self slaughter. (Act I, Sc. II, 129-132). He is conscious of the dread of something after death, of
28

29

For further readings see: VV. AA., Joyce/ Shakespeare, edited by Laura Pelaschiar, Syracuse University Press, 2015;
Klaus Reichert, Shakespeare and Joyce: Myriadminded Men in Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century: The
Selected Proceedings of the International Shakespeare Association World Congress, Los Angeles, Associated
University Press, 1998, pp. 103-112
Giorgio Melchiori, Shakespeare, Roma-Bari Laterza, 1994
12

mysterious and unseen surrounding man on all sides: There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio; than are dreamed of your philosophy? Yet he agrees with Hamlet when he says, To die;
to sleep, no more. This denial of life after death, the feeling that this life is the end all and be all,
persists in the whole play. Like a circle, death and the Afterworld appear at the opening with the
Ghost; it is evoked by Hamlet as to procrastinate that moment and then accomplished at the end, the
only dramatic action that Hamlet can take. Claudius and Hamlet have killed fathers. These two
completely different characters deal with the same problem in different ways. Hamlet exclaims:
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable/ Seem to me all the uses of this world!/ ...'tis an unweeded
garden/ That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature/ Possess it in nature. (ll. 133-137). This
kind of senselessness before death pervades all the tragedy and gives birth to Hamlet's condition
which will probably inspire the Existentialist Twentieth Century theatre. The theatre of Absurd
handles the notion of inertia, a state of not wanting to do anything to change a situation. Man does
not have the motivation to change a situation in a world directed by absurdity. His efforts in any
action are futile because they have no chance of being successful; man, thus, does not see a reason
to act. Since almost nothing is in the control of man himself, all his actions seem to be purposeless
and vain.
Slight differently, Hamlet is burdened with this sense of futility. All his exertions to set the things
right prove to be futile. His pessimism makes him to pin all his thoughts to avenge his father's
death, yet his actions are arrested and he ends up leaving himself to the fate. The truth that Hamlet
comes to realize, perhaps unconsciously, is that death defines existence, an answer for which
Hamlet searches throughout the play and the succinct description of his internal trouble. In the
relationship between macro and micro cosmos, senselessness reflects on the outside world which
appears upside down.
Renaissance philosophy marks the beginning of a new thinking. During the Seventeenth Century
manhood believe in their unquestionable certainties: a privileged position of perfection at the centre
of the world. Truth is the human dimension, appearance is not contemplated, not seen. During the
Baroque period man changes his place yet occupied and falls into the hard reasoning of the
Seventeenth Century which leads to the psychological development of modern man, who has no
certainties on reality and on himself. Truth is multiple, continually changeable, indecipherable in
appearance or reality. Don Quixote, for example, lives in his own reality made up of appearances,
he cannot distinguish the truth even when he runs into it. And it seems that when appearance wins,
tragedy is inevitable. For this reason before dying, Hamlet invites his friend Horatio to tell the truth
about his life and his actions. He, on the contrary, goes to ruin because of his indecision between
reality and imagination. Reality must win.
13

As for the Absurdists dealing with the concept of nihility in man's life, stressing existential
meaninglessness since all values are groundless, nothing rings true for Hamlet who questions
himself and yet, to me what is this quintessence of dust? (Act 2, Sc. II, l. 308). He can neither
avenge his father's death nor console himself for a better future. Being at the heart of a stalemate, he
does not give importance to anything in his life and he does not take pleasure in anything. He feels
greatly depressed in a world that does not support him. His vacillating mood swings are
unproductive and achieve nothing. He has no genuine faith in or dream about the future; time works
as a destructive force by bringing him closer to death, thinking is implosive and, as consequence,
the only action is death. He dies of his thought and passions as Polonius underlines in the Second
Act: Whose violent property fordoes itself/ and leads the will to desperate undertakings (ll.103-4).
While seeking for the answers of such essential questions, absurdist characters are struck by the
harshness of the kind of existence they experience. They are all surrounded by the darkness of the
unknown and uncertain aspects of life, which generate their alienation and isolation from their
environment. They struggle in vain to find a meaning to their existence, but all their actions prove
to be futile and irrational, and nothing makes any sense at the end.
The search for truth needs confirms. Hamlet questions himself about a knowledge not given from
the ghost, even though he invites him as in a disparate cry Let me not burst in ignorance (Act I,
Sc. IV, l. 46). His perception of himself is severe, A dull and muddy-metted rascal, What an ass
am I! (Act 2, Sc. II, ll. 562, 578), when he hesitates between the imposed duty of revenge and his
plan of revealing the guilt of his uncle. He is the critical searching conscience. Mind examines
thoroughly other answers without reaching the goal through reasoning. In an interview on her last
book, oxymorically entitled Di vita si muore, Nadia Fusini30 argues that Shakespeare studies the
chiasmus of the imagination, that mysterious, creative, force generating impulse and human
relationships. Yet that force makes the hero's mind goes wrong, like the books Don Quixote reads.
In fact, the knowledge of fancy causes the Mancego hero become fool; both knowledge and
imagination produce sorrowful crisis. When Hamlet follows the ghost, Horatio notices: He waxes
desperate with imagination (Act I, Sc. IV, l. 87). In this light, the two heroes try to match opposites
which separate and unify them, causing intense contrasts, as Beniamino Placido 31 describes in his
article; they symbolize two extremely opposite if not complementary figures of modernity. Hamlet
is insecure, he is very doubtful and sceptic the main cause of his imbalance. As in a mirror, doubt
provokes Ophelia's death when Polonius firstly doubts of his love for her: Do not believe his
vows (Act I, Sc. III, l. 127). It likens to a disease which spreads throughout the environment and
30

31

Nadia Fusini, Di vita si muore, Intervista a Nadia Fusini a cura di Anna Banfi, Engramma rivista, n. 96, gen-feb
2012
Beniamino Placido, Don Chisciotte e Amleto eroi moderni, La Repubblica, 4 luglio 2004, p. 38
14

the characters.
Hamlet expresses a relativist idea when he talks to Rosencrantz: there is nothing either good or
bad but thinking makes it so (Act 2, Sc. II, ll. 249-50). The thought that nothing is real except in
the mind of the individual finds its roots in the Greek Sophists, who argue that since nothing can be
perceived except through the senses, and all men feel and sense things differently, truth is entirely
relative. In this way, there is no absolute truth. This same line of Hamlet's also introduces theories
of existentialism. A double-meaning can be read into the word is, which introduces the question
of whether anything is or can be if thinking does not make it so. This is tied into his To be, or not
to be speech, in which to be can be read as a question of existence. Hamlet's contemplation on
suicide in this scene, however, is more religious than philosophical. He believes that he will
continue to exist after death. This is the uncertainty between thought and action, the double
oxymoric twist of the Elizabethan world order, which distresses also contemporary man, living in
existential doubts about what is wrong or right, appearing or being. Hamlet is perhaps most affected
by the prevailing scepticism in Shakespeare's day in response to the Renaissance's humanism.
Humanists living prior to Shakespeare's time had argued that man was godlike, capable of
anything. Scepticism towards this attitude is clearly claimed in Hamlet: this goodly frame the earth
seems to/ me a sterile promontory, this most excellent canopy/ the air, look you, this brave
o'erhanging firmament,/ this majestical roof fretted with golden fire, why, it/ appeareth nothing to
me but a foul and pestilent/ congregation of vapours. What a piece of work is a man,/ how noble in
reason, how infinite in faculties, in form/ and moving how express and admirable, in action/ how
like an angel, in apprehension how like a god:/ the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals/
and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (Act 2, Sc. II, ll. 303-8). Shakespeare loves the
beauty of human nature and its creation. Scholars have pointed out this section's similarities to lines
written by Michel de Montaigne in his Essays: Who have persuaded [man] that this admirable
moving of heavens vaults, that the eternal light of these lampes so fiercely rowling over his head,
that the horror-moving and continuall motion of this infinite vaste ocean were established, and
continue so many ages for his commoditie and service? Is it possible to imagine so ridiculous as this
miserable and wretched creature, which is not so much as master of himselfe, exposed and subject
to offences of all things, and yet dareth call himself Master and Emperor.32
The misdeed, then, is expressed through action itself. Hamlet is trying to demonstrate, which
implies the importance of the word 'theatre', the guilty of his uncle. Nevertheless, as a projection of
an imperfect chiasmus, he reflects, by contrast, his inability to take actions as well as the tragic role
32

Michel de Montaigne, Essays, Renascence Edition, University of Oregon, 1999, translated by Florio, Book II, XII,
p. 258; sig. 23v
15

he has to play. It clearly calls up the role-playing of destiny, the inexorability of history and the flow
of the sameness of time, a concept similar to Greek hamartia, in which the hero has no fault in
missing the mark. This tragic flaw is due to Fate, because of human limits; thus, man can play both
active and passive roles, as the phrases' medio-passive construction suggests. For Shakespeare, Fate
is the general state of sin, a vision similar to that of the Existentialists, which could probably take
roots in Protestant predestination33. Significantly enough, this is a path for acquiring knowledge, a
sort of discovery not only of the truth of the enunciating facts, but of the character of Hamlet for
whom it is very hard to reach the truth of himself, enveloped as he is, in his crisis of identity. He
lacks of self-confidence; he defines himself: A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak/ Like John-adreams, unpregnant of my cause,/ And can say nothing no, not for a king,/ Upon whose property
and most dear life/ A damned defeat was made. (Act II, Sc. II, ll. 562-566). Then, he examines his
cowardice; the discourse will go on in the next soliloquy: Am I a coward? he dialogues with his
conscience, and he tries to justify his sense of guilt through rhetorical questions. He adds:
Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be/ But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall/ To make
oppression bitter, or ere this/ I should ha' fatted all the region kites/ With this slave's offal. Bloody,
bawdy villain!/ () Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave,/ That I, the son of a dear father
murder'd,/ Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell,/ Must like a whore unpack my heart with
words/ And fall a-cursing like a very drab (ll. 572-582).
To highlight contrasts and Hamlet's suffering soul, it is likely that Shakespeare introduces first
the pars destruens, that is the character's melancholy and his auto-destruction and, then, the pars
construens, when the tragic hero 'reconstructs' himself in order to organize his own play. The dualminded character appears to be agent and victim at once, an infinite kaleidoscopic reflection on
other figures, for nothing is entirely good or evil, according to Hamlet. Hence Shakespeare takes
distance from Morality Plays characterised by the standard personifications of virtues, by inventing
characters shaped as similar as possible to human mind and soul. His poetics adopts the technique
of doubt to reveal contrasts.
Hamlet doubts of the ghost, I doubt some foul play (Act I, Sc. III, l. 256). In his Hamletica
Massimo Cacciari, studying the relationship between being and doing, believes that: Il pensiero
cerca le ragioni dell'agire, e questa ricerca implica indugio e dubbio, produce l'angoscia che soffoca
piuttosto che risolutezza e decisione.34 Hamlet thinks that it is that Devil who takes him on for his
weakness and his melancholy, his self seeks protection. For this reason, he tries to analyse his
33

34

For further readings see: Ivor Morris, Shakespeare's God: The Role of Religion in the Tragedies, London,
Routeledge Library Editions, 1972; Jan H. Blits, Deadly Thought: Hamlet and the Human Soul, Lanham, Lexington
Books, 2001
Massimo Cacciari, Hamletica, Adelphi, 2009, p. 27
16

reality by logical reasoning. As a modern researcher, he makes up his mind to reveal the guilt of his
uncle: I'll observe his looks;/ I'll tent him to the quick. If a do blench,/ I know my course. (ll. 592594). The spirit of Shakespeare's period emerges: Francis Bacon draws especial attention to
experiences considered as a peculiar aspect of the scientific method, first theorised by Aristotle in
Book II, Ch. 6, par. 1: Again, of all the things that come to us by nature we first acquire the
potentiality and later exhibit the activity (); but the virtues we get by first exercising them, as
also happens in the case of the arts as well. For the things we have to learn before we can do them,
we learn by doing them, e.g. men become builders by building and lyre players by playing the lyre;
so too we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave
acts.35 Shakespeare will elaborate this last chiasmus: bad and good actions are not absolute, but all
is generated by thinking.
However, Francis Bacon argues against Aristotelian logic based on abstractions and unable thus
to interpret concrete reality. Science instead must point to action, to influence reality, by producing
innovation useful for mankind. In Novum Organum (1620) his method, like Galileo's, hints at
wisely combining experience and reasoning. It privileges qualitative and formal analysis to
quantitative studies of phenomena, which is one of the most important aspect of modern science.
Nevertheless, as a sort of collecting-data naturalist, Bacon feels the necessity of experiments, to
control observation. To improve knowledge is not necessary great intelligence, but only to proceed
with method, with the help of a working group, as he affirms: Recte enim Veritas temporis Filia
dicitur, non Authoritatis36.
Shakespeare's hero adopts a scientific-like method, based on the accurate notice of behaviours.
The Mousetrap is the proof for Claudius' guilty and the truth of the Ghost. Thus, Hamlet and
Horatio improve their skills in verifying the lack of something. However, Hamlet's method for
discovering truth is, for paradox, disguise, theatre itself, his own action, which is not demanded by
the duty of revenge (his father's and Claudius' death, the final duel), nor by the angry input to kill
(Polonius' death), nor by the impulse to save his threatened life (Rosencrantz's and Guildenstern's
put-to-death).
In the third soliloquy, his tragedy of thought and despair reaches the climax, as soon as he
obtains the confirm of Claudius' murder. He fails to recognize that living implies also the principle
of contradiction, suggesting the union of contraries. Therefore, the To be, or not to be (Act III, Sc.
I, l. 56) line testifies that he is unable to conceive that existing means at once to be, and not to be,
the Shakespearean chiasmus, likening to a Chaucerian mise en abme. The exclusive conjunction
35
36

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, Book II, Ch. 6, par. 1

Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, in The Instauratio magna Part II: Novum Organum and Associated Texts, edited
and translated by G. Rees, Oxford, 2004, p. 132
17

used to indicate an alternative does not include other possibilities, but only joins them through slight
uncertainty and indefiniteness. It also defines a logical link, the start of reasoning, the impelling
choice. Hamlet fights against overwhelming ordered destiny, glimpsing man's freedom, but he ends
to be lonely, enclosed in his contradictory inner self; he suffers from paralysis by seeing the world
and his self with detachment and coolness, feeling the upsetting void that throws him off balance.
Yet, he realises that reason is impotent to deal with the depths of human life, which will be one of
the central assertions in Existentialism. Indeed, Hamlet does go temporarily insane in Act I, scene
II, and it is during this time when he is able to act out of pure sensation, with no thoughts about the
consequences of what he says or does.
Nevertheless, Hamlet's thought evolves: it becomes more and more refined, of high quality and
morality. Once again, he thinks of death as if anticipating his own. The fear of the Unknown, The
undiscover'ed country (Act III, Sc. I, l. 79), the Afterlife, puzzles the will and breaks down the
action leaving it uncomplished, making feel him coward: And thus the native hue of resolution/
() And lose the name of action (ll. 84-88). This kind of thought generates itself without evolving
in heroic action. Differently, in Don Quixote the unknown urges to act and to discover. Probably,
with Shakespeare will fade the idea of clichd gestas; the Bard creates a character much more
human. Hamlet is the expression of his weakness, kindness and intelligence; living his condition of
human being, he achieves his personal development. In this light, he is a renewed hero, in soul and
mind. Hamlet's excess is abandoning himself to logic, he reads the world by using it as both object
and instrument, without feeling perception, intuition, lightness, imprisoned as he is in his
monodimensional thoughts, notwithstanding their high quality. Shakespeare offers him the
possibility to be in life, to be on stage, but his unsafe dilemma leads him to the unresolved empasse.
He does not need great gestas because he learns from his experience that great deeds are the most
horrible and tricky, like those of his uncle.
Hamlet's high self-consciousness reaches the climax in the last soliloquy, when the tragedy
comes to an end: he remains the Western hero of consciousness 37, Harold Bloom observes.
Hamlet's interior development is a kind of Bildung. His heroism is interior, the heroic gestures of
his thoughts. Again Harold Bloom The hint is that Hamlet could tell us something he has learned
about the nature of representation, because he has learned what it is that he himself represents.38
Complementarily, action, then, takes thought's characteristics. Thinking of action, teaches how to
act. Hamlet reflects on ethics, on good and evil, on foul deeds (Act I, Sc. II, l. 257). Ethics
implies to seek for the right control of freedom. According to Aristotelian Ethics, we praise the
37

38

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, Riverhead Books, New York, NY, 1998, p. 408 quoted by
Huw Griffiths, Shakespeare-Hamlet, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, p. 131
Harold Bloom, William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Chelsea House, Broomall, PA, 1996, p. 5
18

rational principle of the continent man and of the incontinent, and the part of their soul that has such
a principle, since it urges them aright and towards the best objects. 39 The relationship between
Hamlet and Horatio likens to Albert Schweitzer's ethical humanism: The first step in the evolution
of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.40 Action seems to be dislocated, if not
projected on other figures such as the two other revengers, Fortinbras and Laertes who stress the
contrast with the protagonist. Also action is organized in chiasmic mirrors. Distanced in time and
space, it reveals Hamlet's escape from duty and royal laws, because of his lack of complete
freedom. If action is not taken someone else or the Fate decides for man. It is inevitable, like in
Greek tragedies and in Senechian tradition. Motionless actions without intentions become merely
behaviours. In the courtroom conflicts, he cannot take actions against his mother How in my words
somever she be shent,/ To give them seals never my soul consent. (Act III, Sc. II, l. 390). For the
second time Hamlet is overheard. He knows that could be the King, he hopes so, but it is Polonius
O, I am slain. (Act III, Sc. IV, l. 23) and he acts as quickly as in a raptus. The cycle of personal
revenge imposed by the ghost seems to follow the infinite chain, as the parallel scene of Laertes
revenging his father demonstrates. The concept of private parental revenge is a Medieval-Feodal
heritage. From 1598 till 1608, in France and in Europe fights for revenge kill much more people
than civil wars. In 1637 Corneille's tragicomedy Le Cid represent characters entrapped in parental
revenge fight, signing the end of private justice. Even if Hamlet finds out the wrongness,
overwhelmed by the chain of horrible deeds, he cannot resist; his answers reveal the oxymoric
conflict: but heaven hath pleas'd it so,/ To punish me with this and this with me; he must be cruel
only to be kind. (Act III, Sc. IV, ll. 175-6, 180). Death is also Claudius' punishment, sending him to
England to be put to death. For Claudius, the prince is like a disease that must be cured with
elimination. But Hamlet re-acts rashly (Act V, Sc. II, l. 6) to save his threatened life, he discovers
his uncle's order and, for necessity, he exchanges his own 'fate' with that of Rosencrantz and
Guildenstern. Hence the hero is a borderline figure, like theatre itself.
At the centre of the tragedy, the play within the play reveals his transformation (Act II, Sc. II, l.
5). He can intermingle thought and action and, by reflected contrast, unmask Claudius. He becomes
actor and master-director of his life, of his own story. Hamlet as a 'transitional figure' of his age,
torn between medieval and modern thought, depicts the humanistic, and rather existential idea of
selflessness; the lack of a set role for man. While he is reluctant to play roles directed by others, the
other characters play roles and take it for granted that human beings have always a mask or two in
their social intercourse. The tragedy opens with Hamlet's father's ghost who frightens him because
39
40

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics., Book I, Ch. 13

Albert Schweitzer, The Teaching of Reverence for Life, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965, p. 9
19

he is afraid of becoming an agent of an ambiguous director. It troubles him to hear of the apparition.
Ironically, he who always wants to be the director and not a role-player is himself an actor and his
life is directed and concluded by play-acting. Indeed, the play is plays-within-the-play. Unlike the
others who always wear a theatrical mask, Hamlet believes he is too much i'the sun (Act I, Sc. II,
l. 67). The characters of the play try to discover the real Hamlet; to unmask him, buy the fact is that
there is no real determined Hamlet. There is no real face behind the seemingly various masks they
believe he wears. All their pictures of the protagonist are their own selves projected to him.
Hamlet arranges the play following the strategy of theatrical 'mirroring', by means of empathic
devices which can combine emotions with reasoning, mind with heart and soul. According to Andr
Green, In the theatre, a play within a play seems to both reveal the illusion and make the first level
of dramatic unreality more real (). The first actors are confronted with actors playing the parts of
actors. The presence of these second-degree players makes us forget that the first ones were actors
and brings them a semblance of reality, the illusion of theatre taking refuge in the Players. 41
Therefore, like many meta-theatrical devices in Shakespeare's plays, it can disclose illusion as well
as it makes drama more real, such as the discover of the truth, even though all is ironically a fiction.
In Don Quixote's Puppies scene, the protagonist as a spectator of Mastro Pietro's representation,
believes that he cannot only watch, without playing a role; in this way, he 'jumps' on stage and
fights against the enemy42. Hamlet, on the contrary, considers that he must stay on stage playing the
role that the fate and Shakespeare, the author, give him. In Thoughts on Art and Life, Leonardo Da
Vinci advises that: He who thinks little errs much 43. Both represent Aristotelian imbalance: on the
one hand, activity, on the other, passivity in enterprise and indecision. But in The Mousetrap,
Hamlet has the chance to enter on stage, to take possession of it. During the time of kairs, he can
conciliate thought and action. The only way that Hamlet can attempt to close the gap is through
theatre itself; the play allows him to elaborate something else, a tragedy in a tragedy. The purpose of
The Mousetrap, in Act III, aims at producing something that will catch the conscience of the king.
But, as Hamlet is acutely aware and, one naively presumes, that enigma we call 'Shakespeare'
lurking in the wings is even more acutely aware of this a play is nothing, at least nothing real, but
can have some effects on it. It is, rather, a fiction... a dream of passion. (Act II, Sc. II, l. 546)
Theatre is all for nothing. (l. 551) Hamlet seems to suggest that the fictional ground of theatre is
the only vehicle in which the truth might be presented.

41
42
43

Andr Green, 'Hamlet' et Hamlet, Paris, Balland, 1982, p. 84

Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, translated by John Ormsby, The University of Adelaide Library, 2014
Leonardo Da Vinci, Thoughts on Art and Life, translated by Maurice Baring, The Merrymount Press, Boston, 1906,
Section 111, p. 42
20

The play-within-the-play develops in concentric actions. Only through theatre thought and action
seem to find a common pathway. The impulse to act dies before performing on stage. The
performing action finds its telos: discovering the truth by re-enacting Claudius' murder. It seems to
mirror Polonius' trap to display Hamlet's transformation (Act II, Sc. II, l. 5), which reveals
another projection of actions in the sequence of events. His role-taking allows him to organize the
play, he writes the lines to be acted. To act means improving oneself, becoming much more frank
than impulsive.
Shakespeare invents another oxymoric projection, which produces Chinese-boxes effects.
Hamlet who is not willing to act is the one who arranges the play. Behind actors, Shakespeare tips
through them; he sometimes participates directly in the play, like Don Quixote in the Puppies scene
who lives out of reality and cannot see it from inside, loosing its perception. A Cervantes' scholar
comments non soppesa le conseguenze n l'utilit delle sue azioni, because gli manca la capacit
di commisurarle alla realt44. Complementarily, Hamlet lacks what Don Quixote has and
represents. He learns the bitter reality that men are not always sincere, there is deception in life;
because of his vacillation the protagonist believes in the intentions he sees reflected in the words
and appearances of others. That is why not confiding in the first-sight impression, but it is necessary
a farseeing reckoning. Nevertheless, if man in reality is a delusion, ironically actors on stage could
represent a chance, they can mirror the true image of man: if you delight not in man, what/ Lenten
entertainment the players shall receive from/ you. (Act 2, Sc. II, ll. 314-16). Theatre mirrors the
world; the stage reflects the outside. Hamlet's treatise on the art of playing, the first document in
modern drama, shows aesthetic knowledge and measure. Jacques in As You Like It, observes All
world's a stage, and Hamlet explicates as 'twere the mirror up to nature (Act III, Sc. II, l. 22).
Hamlet-Shakespeare receives the welcome actors at Elsinore court. They stage the Priam's
slaughter (l. 444), the same play-within-the play motiv previously performed in A Midsummer
Night's Dream in which the art of playing is a vigorous and flexible expression of feelings and
situations with probably 'no-Bottom'. Hamlet, poet and playwright, thus. The dramatisation of
conscience shows itself, which could force his soul so to his own conceit (l. 547) because The
play's the thing/ Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King (Act 2, Sc. II, ll. 600-1). A new
world order seem to arise at the horizon, based on justice rather than on personal revenge, on
freedom of consciousness and responsibility rather than on imposed will and tyranny, which
juxtaposes to the old without a solution of continuity, causing disjunctions.
Shakespeare rejects Aristotle's definition of tragedy as an imitation of an action that is serious,
complete, and of certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament,
44

Gonzalo Santa Maria, La libert, Sancio..., in Tracce, n. 7, luglio/agosto 2005

21

the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative;
through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.45 Action, maybe, is thought
in an inefficient way; it is not the time of decision to act, because time is out of joint. Once again
Hamlet excludes other possibilities because of imbalance; for this reason he acts in chiasmus,
throughout his on-stage life, reaching the climax when a character stands in for another: he kills
Polonius, while he thinks he is Claudius; and indirectly, he kills Ophelia. When he takes his
revenge, he contrives his actions in time and space. In fact, in the last Act, the machine of fate leads
Hamlet to act when another chiasmus appears, as in a retrospective mirror: who kills is killed; the
play turns back to the opening, life in death and death in life, natural in supernatural and vice-versa.
The time of quality differs from that of quantity: the time of thinking well distinguishes art from
science: The time is out of joint. The image suggests a displaced or broken bone it must set or
healed. He casts himself in the role of spiritual physician challenged to remedy worldly time's
natural workings, the burden to live in this era 46 O cursed spite,/ That ever I was born to set it
right. (Act I, Sc. V, ll. 196-8). Hamlet is standing at the kairs moment, but unable to understand
its phenomenological power. Like a good Renaissance man, convinced that man is indeed the
measure of all things, he cannot get outside of himself, nor ex-ist, he cannot understand that what
is happening is not about him. He is unable to take the right distances. He struts about the stage,
lamenting his destiny and considering the possibility of suicide as if his suicide would have any
meaning beyond his own existence. He never understands that at the kairs moment his death or life
is meaningless. But the remedy for the sorrow and pain of life is, paradoxically, to live. According
to Martin Heidegger, kairs represents the ability to allow oneself to be appropriated by the
phenomenological world; the ability to suit circumstances and opportunities. It deals with a
knowledge of the contextual meaning, a multiple perspective as a result of the conciliation of
opposites. The oxymoron produces the discordances of giving the right merit and quality to each
thing and not the same for all unit. Herein lies Hamlets principle failing he shares with most
modern men. Hamlet is so caught up in his rational and pseudo-rational analysis of the situation that
he cannot allow events to appropriate him. Like Hamlet 47, Brutus, a parallel Shakespearean
character, is haunted by the ghost of Julius Ceasar. His commitment to principle repeatedly leads
him to make miscalculations. Brutus' rigid idealism is both his greatest virtue and his most deadly
flaw. He does ignore events, situations and advises; he threatens his frail friendship with other
characters, Cassius-Anthony-Ceasar, appearing contradictory. Even though he fashions his
45
46

47

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, par. 2

Baumlin, James S., Baumlin, Tita French, Chronos, Karos, Aion. Failures of Decorum, Right-Timing, and Revenge
in Shakespeare's Hamlet in Rhetoric and Kairos. Essays in History, Theories and Praxis, State University of New
York Press, Albany, 2002
For further reading see: Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001
22

behaviours to fit a strict moral and ethical beliefs like Hamlet he has been at war 48 with himself,
his action appears to be unconsciously hypocritical when he becomes involved in the plot to commit
murder. His last lines clarifies the chiasmic synthesis: Caesar, now be still: I kill'd not thee with
half so good a will. (Act V, Sc. V, ll. 51-2).
Living well, then, is fundamentally a performative, rather than a contemplative, exercise. Kairs
is the human time in contrast with the two absolute temporal dimension, Ain and Chronos; its loss
causes the failing of relationships, justice, medicine, teaching and theatrical art. The only way to be
actualized is engagement, whose highest form can be reached through art. Hamlet searches for
kairs during the flow of Chronos. New discoveries in Renaissance leads to rethink the concept of
time and space, producing crisis and chaos metaphorically expressed through the recurring idea of
madness (in Greek mythology, Kairos is pictured with an off-balanced balance). Hamlet lives in the
on-stage kairs which tries to enlarge his space of existence, consenting him to act. However, the
ghost's appearance alludes to eternity, the time of Ain; when the historicized experience, entrapped
by repeated misdeeds does not give rise to movement (kinesis) nor to transformation, determines the
death of kairs. The Aristotelian meaning of time's quality, that is the decisional space for action to
achieve its tlos, lacks in Hamlet, causing stasis.
Harold Bloom explains this aspect as a sort of contemporary nausea; nonsensical words and
ideas endlessly repeated and permutated, become platitudinous, trite, meaningless which step
back into paralysis49, as Harold Pinter depicts his world. Montaigne's experiential man, Bloom
adds, avoids Dionysiac transports as well as the sickening descents from such ecstasies. Nietzsche
unforgettably caught this aspect of Hamlet in his early The Birth of Tragedy, where Coleridge's view
of Hamlet () thinks too much is soundly repudiated in favour of () Hamlet thinks too well. For
the rapture of the Dionysian state, with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of
existence contains () a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become
immersed. This chiasmus of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian
reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with
nausea: an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states. In this sense, the Dionysian man
resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained
knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal
nature of things; () Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the
doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it

48
49

W. Shakespeare, Giulio Cesare, testo a fronte, a cura di Agostino Lombardo, Feltrinelli, 2007, Act V, Sc. V, l. 48
Harold Pinter, Writing for the Theatre in Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-2005, London, Faber and
Faber, 2005, p. 23
23

were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. 50 Thinking action remains in its
potential process, without energy in becoming. Action does not generate kinesis, nor
accomplishment. By contrast, Fortinbras seems to express opposite qualities: his resolution does not
pale with thought. This suggests that Hamlet's inner conflict could find an outer correspondence
in the counter-action of Fortinbras which fills his deficiency, while stressing it.
For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Hamlet has great, enormous, intellectual activity, and a
consequent proportionate aversion to real action. Because the equilibrium between the real and
the imaginary worlds () is disturbed: his thoughts, and the images of his fancy, are far more vivid
than his actual perceptions, and his very perceptions, instantly passing through the medium of his
contemplations, acquire, as they pass, a form and a colour not naturally their own. () Hamlet is
brave and careless of death; but he vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, and
loses the power of action in the energy of resolve. () The effect of this overbalance of the
imaginative power is beautifully illustrated in the everlasting broodings and superfluous activities of
Hamlet's mind, which, unseated from its healthy relation, is constantly occupied with the world
within, and abstracted from the world without, giving substance to shadows, and throwing a mist
over all common-place actualities.51 A sort of strangeness pervades him. As a distant witness he has
the full consciousness of future potentialities.
Some other critics believe that Hamlet's 'problem' is that he lacks any significant obstacle for
action. In fact he suffers from the anxiety of a fairly vast freedom of choice, because of his frailty
nature or, as Kierkegaard describes it, as the dizziness of freedom. This anxiety, represents
freedom self-awareness; it is the psychological precondition of the individual's attempt to become
autonomous, a possibility that is seen as both alluring and disturbing 52. A similarity with the theatre
of the absurd demonstrates that anxiety and despair spring from the recognition that man is
surrounded by areas of impenetrable darkness, that he can never know his true nature and purpose,
and that no one will provide him with ready-made rules of conduct. However, Hamlet's thought is
necessary for knowledge, even though thinking on it seems be a sort of play within the play;
according to Harold Bloom Hamlet rarely speaks without a kind of contempt for the act of
speaking had made us see and think what we could not have seen or thought without him. Hamlet
emphatically is not life, but more than any other fictive being Hamlet makes us think what we could
not think without him. Hamlet, more than any philosopher, actually makes us see the world in other
ways, deeper ways, than we may want to see it. () Shakespeare persuades us that we know
something in Hamlet that is the best innermost part of him, something uncreated that goes back
50
51
52

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 740

Ibidem
Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd, pp. 425-6
24

farther than our earliest memories of ourselves.53 Hamlet acquires wisdom. But the price is death.
There is no logical link between thought and action. There are probably many 'Hamlets' how the
events are. He represents humanity fighting for life and coherence; he intends to reconstruct the
disconnected and fragmented sense of the being.
Nearly all readers, scholars, commentators and critics agree in thinking that it is Hamlet's duty to
kill Claudius, that he ought indeed to have killed much sooner than he does. His delay is, they say,
a weakness, and disaster.54 Yet, noted Shakespearean experts such as Louis B. Wright and Virginia
A. LaMar of the Folger Shakespeare Library state that Hamlet, possessed of a finely trained
intellect, is a man with a philosophic approach to life. He has studied at the University of
Wittenberg, where he has engaged in the subtleties of intellectual speculation. By training, such a
man learns to analyse problems, and his responses are never automatic because his decisions come
after contemplation rather than impulse. They further point out that, If Hamlet's methods of
working out his problems are indirect and time-consuming; he is merely following the pattern of
behaviour of the thoughtful and speculative type of thinker. 55 He can act with convenience, but he
breaks the chain of traditional revenge schemes; thinking about Afterlife, he finds a more horrid
hent (Act III, Sc. III, l. 88). Hamlet's intellect is the reason of his being slow to action; he carefully
thinks and analyses every situation completely before he should act. He studies the event of his
father's death, all possibilities and it is not until he is completely sure of himself that he actually
moves to action: a well organized and calculating person who is seeking and waiting for the best
moment for his revenge. Harold Bloom believes that, The fundamental fact about Hamlet is not
that he thinks too much, but that he thinks too well. His is simply the most intelligent role ever
written for the Western stage; indeed, he may be the most intelligent figure in all the world of
literature, West or East. Unable to rest in illusions of any kind, he thinks his way through to the
truth, which may be a pure nihilism, yet a nihilism so purified that it possesses an absolute nobility,
even a kind of transcendentalism.56
Hamlet, thus, seeks rightness. The usurper shows himself to be guilty of the murder of his
brother as presented in the mirror scene of The Mousetrap. Consequently, Hamlet prepares for
revenge. En route to his mother's room, the prince passes Claudius kneeling in prayer in the chapel,
but refrains from killing him because, I, his sole son, do this same villain send to heaven. (Act III,
53
54

55

56

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, p. 427

Harold Goddard, Hamlet: His Own Falstaff, in Modern Critical Interpretations: Hamlet, ed. Harold Bloom, New
York, Chelsea House Publishers, 1986. Rpt. from The Meaning of Shakespeare, Chicago, IL, University of Chicago
Press, 1951, p. 12
Louis B.Wright and Virginia A. LaMar, Hamlet: A Man Who Thinks Before He Acts in Readings on Hamlet, ed.
Don Nardo, San Diego, Greenhaven Press, 1999. Rpt. from The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, ed. Louis
B. Wright and Virginia A. LaMar, Pocket Books, 1958, p. 64
Harold Bloom, William Shakespeare's Hamlet, p. 5
25

Sc. III, ll. 77-78). In Hamlet: A Man Who Thinks Before He Acts, L. B. Wright and V. A. LaMar
explore the causative connection between the prince's mental and emotional states: A part of
Hamlet's agony results from the very fact that he has a keen and alert mind that sees the implication
of any potential action. When he finds Claudius at his prayers, he does not take his revenge by
stabbing him but delays for a more fitting time. Had he reacted automatically, as the choleric
Laertes would have done, he would have killed Claudius and realized too late that he had slain him
in a moment of repentance and given him the rewards of heaven. 57 He wishes punishment in the
Afterlife, in another dimension. But the frustration, which this forced wait imposes on Hamlet's
psyche, puts his emotions more on edge, to the point where, when he is conversing with his mother,
he runs his rapier through the arias and kills Polonius. Gertrude complains of his bloody deed
(Act III, Sc. IV, l. 26), but Hamlet is too lost in despondency to accept the comment level-headedly:
A bloody deed. Almost as bad, good mother, / As kill a king, and marry with his brother. (ll. 2728). The killing of Polonius, plus the suspicion of Claudius that Hamlet knows the truth, cause
Claudius to send the prince by ship to England where he will be put to death. When it seems that the
ghost's wishes will go unfulfilled, Hamlet laments: 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? (Act IV, Sc. IV, ll. 32-35). Harold Bloom comments: Unable to rest in illusions of any kind,
he thinks his way through to the truth, which may be a pure nihilism, yet a nihilism so purified that
it possesses an absolute nobility, even a kind of transcendentalism.58
In Shakespearean period harmony has been lost. Hamlet's thoughts appear disarticulated,
fragmented; they rash suddenly without any apparent reason, fluctuating like emotions. His being in
the world is unsuitable. Denmark's prison (Act 2, Sc. II, l. 243), Hamlet states while talking to his
old friends Guildenstern and Rosencrantz. Thus, the contrast between reality and dream comes to
light: I could be bounded in a nutshell and count/ myself a king of infinite space were it not that
I/ have bad dreams. ( Act 2, Sc. II, ll. 254-6). Reconciliation can be reached in another spacialtemporal dimension: in the 'unreal' theatre and in the Afterlife. He cannot go beyond the
unchangeable Fate of the Chain of Being. He is unable to exit from that prison which is still his
world, his hic et nunc of everyday life littered with death which first obliges man to kill, and then,
requires to be killed. Hamlet cannot resist to the force of the past, he is incapable to go through his
self. Massimo Cacciari claims that: Non baster sapere-sentire la catastrofe per rimettere il mondo
in sesto. () L'impossibilit di trovare un fondamento per il proprio purpose non porta

57
58

L. B. Wright, V. A. LaMar, Hamlet: A Man Who Thinks Before He Acts, p. 65

Harold Bloom, William Shakespeare's Hamlet, p. 5
26

all'inazione, ma all'incapacit di tagliare la continuit del tempo, di 'compiere' un'epoca e iniziarne

una nuova.59
Then, illusion is a shadow like dreams, as the Midsummer's characters teach. Hamlet believes to
live in a distracted globe (Act I, Sc. V, l. 97). The displacement is inside the name: to an
immediate level of soundly intuition, 'Hamlet' puns with 'Home-let', precisely someone who has left
home. Hamlet comes back home from Wittenberg and his father from the battle. The hero embodies
displacement; he identifies with displace, according to the Greek tradition of speaking names,
(Shakespeare largely uses the expedient, 'Fortinbras' is another example). New concepts of
ontological spaces take life, inspired also by Leonardo's study of the Vitruvian Man. By fusing
artistic and scientific objectives in his studies of proportion, he provides one of his simplest
illustrations of a shifting centre of magnitude without a corresponding change of centre of normal
gravity. Leonardo attempts to relate man to nature: through his anatomical drawings he envisages
the Vitruvian Man as a cosmografia del minor mondo (cosmography of the microcosm). The
scientist believes the workings of the human body to be an analogy of the universe. Hamlet
explores the geography of mind; his thinking develops dynamically, during the course of dramatic
actions.
The paroxysm of the compulsory sequence, disregarding Aristotelian rules of unity, time and
space, appears in the last two acts, ending with the cathartic destruction. As a catalyst, these scenes
accelerate plot's time. Fortinbras' arrival makes Hamlet think of blood, I do not know/ Why yet I
live to say this thing's to do; O, from this time forth/ My thoughts be bloody or be nothing worth.
(Act IV, Sc. IV, ll. 43-4, 65-6). Some other events happen: Ophelia's madness and her drowning,
Laertes' return from France and the organization of the duel against Hamlet: events ruled by Fate
must happen; show must come to an end, like life. Hence life and theatre identify on a metaphorical
level and Hamlet can proffer his last words let it be (Act V, Sc. II, l. 343), a prayer with which
Hamlet commits his life, story, thoughts and actions to Horatio to be redeemed from oblivion. In his
vain efforts to reconcile opposites, Hamlet's fall represents the real tragedy of his dilemma,
concluding with the phrase's infinitive structure which unifies past deeds, present acts and future
actions through the act of thinking. Horatio, the just man (Act III, Sc. II, l. 54) and Fortinbras will
'transmit' future knowledge to posterity. In the scene, time, space and action are mixed up in a
symphonic turmoil, before silence falls to the rest. Claudius dies victim of his own stratagem. Time
is short and Hamlet is now ready to fight, like a machine he starts to work, Does it not, think thee,
stand me now upon (Act V, Sc. II, l. 63), full of a tow'ring passion (l. 79).

59

Massimo Cacciari, Hamletica, pp. 32-33

27

At the end, Hamlet has reached maturity. He has changed; according to Harold Bloom the
Hamlet of Act V is a changed man: mature rather than youthful, certainly quieter, if not quietistic,
and somehow more attuned to divinity. Perhaps the truth is that he is at last himself, no longer
afflicted by mourning and melancholia, by murderous jealousy and incessant rage. Certainly, he is
no longer haunted by his father's ghost. It may be that the desire of revenge is fading in him. 60 He
has gained the light of knowledge, instead of the darken of ignorance. Being in becoming, reveals
an inexhaustible energy. 'Being' is the essence, that part of the soul that can be found during the
inner travel in the dream of an infinite consciousness 61. Hamlet does not feel part of a community.
He has no idea of totality and as consequence of the revolution of the concept of space and time. He
is the pioneer of a transitional period from Middle Age to Renaissance which imposes to revalue the
concept of kingdom and ruler to make up decisions. The sense of responsibility spreads throughout
the tragedy, Giorgio Melchiori underlines this aspect: responsabilit dell'uomo in posizione di
autorit o dotato di una pi acuta coscienza rispetto ai suoi simili e ai suoi sentimenti privati.62
Shakespeare wishes man would improve his world-view. By understanding the multifarious reality,
visions can be enlarged and enriched both in quantity and quality in order to perceive the
complexity.
In final analyses, thought stands in for action and vice-versa, through shifting balance. This
process needs particular time and space, on stage and in life as well. Action separated from thought
leads to foolishness, as Hamlet, a piece of man in the complex world, testifies. The two entities do
not seem to pull against each other, the former annulling the possibility of the latter, but they try to
match each other in a common ground; each one hinges on the other. The attempt reaches the
climax with death, which, like in all tragedies, puts an end to the conflict, prospecting another hic et
nunc. Hamlet ends up his dilemma with the solution of abandoning himself. Only death can put an
end to the incurable contrast reducing him to silence. Therefore, nothing definitive can be
concluded from this poetic device; these are only brief and reductive glimpses into the
Shakespearean tragedy. However, it is certain that Hamlet's story will be re-produced all over the
world, influencing most writers and thinkers still nowadays.
Henri Bergson, a contemporary philosopher, sees man in his totality trying to find truth. He
believes in man's experiences, in his ability to understand other dimensions through the lan vital.
Bergson's opening chiasmic formula, then, discloses his will to overcome the crystallised form of a
close society based on obedience and on unchanging dogmas; he proposes, instead, an open society,
which will inspire Popper, extended to all humanity, promoting freedom and creating new values in
60
61
62

Harold Bloom, William Shakespeare's Hamlet, from Introduction, p. 1

Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: the Invention of the Human, p. 416
Giorgio Melchiori, Shakespeare: politica e contesto economico, Roma, Bulzoni, 1992, p. 14
28

place of the older. Hamlet's society imposes man to identify with its rigid values. He imagines a
new world order founded on individual freedom and justice. The Twentieth Century literaryphilosophical expressions go on to elaborate Shakespeare's suggestions.

Elisa Faiulo
Sapienza University of Rome
December, 2015

29

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