Analysis of T.S.

Eliot’s Hamlet and His problems

November 16, 2008

Published in 1919, Hamlet and His Problems may be considered an example of “destructive criticism” in
the sense that it challenges the age-old established critical perspectives on a work of art. Eliot puts forward his
contention that much of the critical has been devoted to analysing the character of Hamlet, rather than analysing
the play, which should be the primary business of the critics. He cites the example of two great minds, Goethe
and Coleridge, who also who were not immune to this kind of fallacy and who have substituted “their own Hamlet
for Shakespeare’s”. Eliot alleges that instead of studying it as a “ work of art”, they have imposed their
personalities on Shakespeare’s Hamlet and “made of Hamlet a Werther” and “ of Hamlet a Coleridge”
respectively. Eliot, on the other hand, praises J.M. Robertson and Stoll, who, according to him, tried to shift the
critical focus of Hamlet to a right direction by pointing out the genesis of Shakespeare’s play from his
predecessors: “Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he
could out of the work of his predecessors.” According to Eliot, the presence of anomalies and much of the crude
elements of the play can be attributed to this fact.

In order to establish his contentions, Eliot goes on to examine the play from a historical perspective. He
cites the example of Kyd’s Hamlet Play and Spanish Tragedy and tries to establish the fact that just as Kyd’s
Shakespeare’s play was also made in the tradition of Elizabethan revenge tragedies and was expected to serve the
dramatic purpose of this genre. In this Eliot argues that the revenge-motives in the earlier plays are dramatically
justified, but in the case of Shakespeare’s Hamlet there is a failure in establishing the motive of the character.
Eliot thinks,

‘...there is a motive which is more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly "blunts" the latter;
the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or expediency; and the effect of the "madness"
is not to lull but to arouse the king's suspicion.’

According to him, Shakespeare made certain changes with the play of Thomas Kyd, but those changes are far
from being convincing. Eliot gives some other evidences to establish that Shakespeare adapted his story from
Kyd’s lost play. He strong defends Robertson’s view that

‘Shakespeare's Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare's, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother's guilt
upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive successfully upon the "intractable"
material of the old play.’

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Then Eliot goes on to pronounce his notorious judgement on the play: “far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece,
the play is most certainly an artistic failure.” For, according to him, Shakespeare failed to make proper
arrangement of incidents and impose a dramatic order. He points out that the play is the longest and there are
superfluous and inconsistent scenes with the versification being variable. Not only this, Eliot presents his
assumption that the play must have been written during a period of intense emotional crisis. Even he relates it to
another great production art, Mona Lisa and calls the play "Mona Lisa" of literature, thereby creating another
controversy.

According to Eliot that the failure of the drama lies not simply with the adaptation, plot construction and
versification, but more importantly with the motive of the drama, which Robertson called “the feeling of a son
towards a guilty mother”. Eliot thinks that Shakespeare could not handle the "guilt of a mother" so effectively as
he “handled the suspicion of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus”. Eliot attributes the
failure to Shakespeare’s inability to all-pervasive emotion, found in the sonnets, and argues that Hamlet contains
certain mysterious elements, which “the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.”

Finally Eliot comes to use a term which would draw the attention of the critical community very soon and
goes on to put forward a solution through this. He says that,

‘The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an "objective correlative"... a set of
objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion.’

He cites the example Macbeth and Othello and tries to show how Shakespeare made use of this successfully,
which is, according to him, precisely not the case in Hamlet. Shakespeare could not project any external elements
which would fitfully reflect his inner world and could not present external events or elements which would justify
his terrible mental anguish. According to Eliot, Hamlet’s case is that of over-reaction. For, “Hamlet is up against
the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it;
his disgust envelops and exceeds her.” (Eliot thinks that “Hamlet's bafflement at the absence of objective
equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem.”)

Finally Eliot takes up the case of Hamlet’s Madness and tries to refute conventional view by arguing that Hamlet’s
madness “is less than madness and more than feigned”. That is to say, he is neither fully mad nor is always
feigning. He tries to establish the second case by pointing out his levity, puns and repetitions of phrase, which
point towards a mental disorder. In fine, Eliot assigns the genesis of the drama to an unknown state of mind of
the creator and hopes for explorations on the part of the critics to solve “an insoluble puzzle”.

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A summary of an influential essay – analysed by Dr Oliver Tearle

‘Hamlet and his Problems’ is one of T. S. Eliot’s most important and influential essays. It was first published in
1919. In ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, Eliot makes the bold claim that Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, far from being
a triumph, is an artistic failure. Why? Eliot is being provocative with such a statement, but he does provide some
reasons for this position. In this article, we’re going to analyse Eliot’s essay, which you can read here.

In summary, Eliot’s argument in ‘Hamlet and his Problems’ is that Shakespeare’s play is a ‘failure’, but the play
has become so familiar and ubiquitous as a work of art that we are no longer able to see its flaws. This bold
revisionist claim is founded on several points, not least of which is the fact that Shakespeare inherited the original
play-text of Hamlet from another writer (probably Thomas Kyd, who also wrote The Spanish Tragedy). This
earlier play contained many of the ingredients that appear in Shakespeare’s later rewriting of the story of Hamlet,
but is a cruder example of the revenge tragedy. Shakespeare rewrote it and updated it for a later, more refined
theatre audience – but the Bard failed to graft his more sophisticated reading of the character of Hamlet (notably,
his odd feelings towards his own mother) onto Kyd’s more primitive version of the character. Shakespeare’s
Hamlet is too ‘big’ for the plot of the play and the ‘intractable material’ Shakespeare is being forced to work with.
It’s as if a master analyst of the human mind, such as Dostoevsky, tried to rewrite the story of Goldilocks and the
Three Bears as a psychologically complex novel. (That’s our analogy, not Eliot’s.)

So, far from being a literary masterpiece, Shakespeare’s reworking of the Hamlet story fails, according to Eliot,
because Shakespeare attempted to do too much with the character and, as a result, Hamlet’s emotions in the play
seem unclear. There is a gulf between the emotion felt by the character and the way this is worked up into drama
in the play.

Eliot goes on to argue that Coriolanus, a late tragedy by Shakespeare, is, ‘with Antony and Cleopatra,
Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success.’ This is a contrarian view and should perhaps be taken with a pinch
of salt: in 1919 Eliot wanted to stand out as a new critic on the literary scene, and slaughtering sacred
Shakespearean cows is one way to get yourself noticed. Championing a relatively little-read tragedy by
Shakespeare (why not Macbeth, King Lear, or Othello?) is another way of getting people talking about you.
Eliot’s view of Coriolanus continues to be one of the more famous things about the play. A recent review of
Ralph Fiennes’ film adaptation of Coriolanus even quotes from Eliot’s essay, showing how his critical
pronouncement has endured.

Eliot justifies his analysis of Hamlet – and the play’s problems – by referring to what he calls the ‘objective
correlative’ of the play: the ‘only way of expressing emotion in the form of art’, Eliot tells us, is by finding an
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‘objective correlative’. He defines this as ‘a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula
of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are
given, the emotion is immediately evoked.’ Eliot provides an example from another Shakespeare play, Macbeth,
arguing that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep is ‘communicated to [the audience] by a
skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions’. There is an air of ‘inevitability’ about Lady Macbeth’s
fate, thanks to the careful accumulation of images, stage-effects, and emotional details which precede her death.

This idea of the ‘objective correlative’ (Eliot did not invent the term, but he made it his own with the above
definition of it) would prove to be hugely influential on mid-twentieth-century criticism, which was often
concerned with interpreting the symbols and images employed by writers to convey the emotional ‘life’ of a
character.

Can we analyse T. S. Eliot’s own poetry in light of the idea of the ‘objective correlative’? Think about the images
of ‘ragged claws’, the ‘yellow fog’, or the ‘patient etherised upon a table’ in his own ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock’, all of which are outward and visible signs of an inward feeling or mood. So the patient on a table at
the start of ‘Prufrock’ conveys J. Alfred Prufrock’s own attitude to the sunset – it evokes in him torpidity and
inaction, as if he himself is barely conscious. The image of the ‘yellow fog’ and the ‘pair of ragged claws’ are
continuations of this mood.

‘Hamlet and his Problems’ is not without its problems, not least because it remains difficult to pin down precisely
how T. S. Eliot sees the ‘objective correlative’ working (or not working) in great literature. Nevertheless, his
analysis of Hamlet and his thoughts about how writers can successfully convey internal moods and emotions
remain worthy of study and analysis in their own right.

The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough
University. He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through
Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.