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Hamlet's Grief Author(s): Arthur Kirsch Reviewed work(s): Source: ELH, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring, 1981), pp.

17-36 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873010 . Accessed: 19/04/2012 01:13
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HAMLET'S

GRIEF

BY ARTHUR KIRSCH

and justly,admiredforits Hamlet is a tragedy perhaps mostoften, intellectual energy. Hamlet's mind comprehends a universe of ideas, and he astonishes us with the copiousness and eloquence and luminousness of his thoughts. But I think we should remember,as Hamlet is compelled to remember,thatbehind these thoughts,and usually theiroccasion, is a continuous and tremendous experience of pain and suffering.We are accustomed to thinking of the othermajortragedies,Lear and Othello especially, as plays whose greatestgenius lies in the depiction of the deepest movements of human feeling. I think we should attend to such movementsin Hamlet as well. As Hamlet himselftells us, it is his heartwhich he unpacks with words, it is against what he calls the "heart-ache" (III.1.62)1 of human existence thathe protestsin his use of the termin that most famous soliloquy (and this is the first sense the OED records),and there are few plays in the canon in which the word "heart" itselfis more prominent. Hamlet is a revenge play, and judging by the prodigious number ofperformances, parodies, and editions ofThe Spanish Tragedy alone, the genre enjoyed an extraordinary popularity on the Elizabethan stage. Partofthe reason forthatpopularityis the theatrical power of the revenge motifitself.The quest forvengeance satisfiesan audience's most primitivewishes forintrigueand violence. "The Tragic Auditory,"as Charles Lamb once remarked, "wants blood,"2 and the revenge motifprovides it in abundance. it gives significant shape to the plot and susEqually important, tained energyto the action.3But ifvengeance composes the plot of its the revengeplay, griefcomposes its essential emotionalcontent, substance. There is a characterin Marlowe's Jew of Malta who, the body ofhis son killed in a duel, cries out in his loss that finding he wishes his son had been murderedso thathe could avenge his death.4It is a casual line, but it suggestsa deep connectionbetween anger and sorrowin the revenge play genre itselfwhich both Kyd At the end ofThe Spanish and Shakespeare draw upon profoundly. Tragedy the ghostof Andrea says, "Ay, now my hopes have end in 17
ELH Vol.48 Pp. 17-36 ? 1981 byThe Johns Press 0013-8304/81/0481-017 $01.00 University Hopkins

theireffects, /When blood and sorrowfinishmy desires,"5and it was unquestionablyKyd's brilliance in representing the elemental power ofsorrow, as well as ofblood, thatenabled the revengegenre to establish so large a claim on the Elizabethan theatrical imagination. The speeches in which Hieronimo gives voice to his grief, "Oh eyes! no eyes,but fountains includingthe famous, fraught with tears;/Oh life!no life,but livelyform ofdeath,"6were parodied for decades after theirfirst so greatwas theirimpact,and performance, the movingfigure of an old man maddened withgrief over the loss ofhis son was a majorpartof Shakespeare's theatrical inheritance. In Shakespeare's play it is Hamlet himselfwho talksexplicitly of sorrowand blood, relating themdirectly to the ghostas well as each otherin the scene in his mother'sbedchamberin which the ghost appears forthe last time. "Look you," he tells his mother,who characteristically cannot see the ghost, howpale he glares. His form to stones, and cause conjoin'd, preaching Wouldmakethem capable.-Do notlookuponme Lest with thispiteous action youconvert Mystern thenwhatI haveto do effects; Willwanttrue for colour-tears perchance blood.

(III.4.125)

These lines suggestsynapses between griefand vengeance which help make the whole relationbetween the plot and emotionalconbut ofmoreimmediateimportance tentofHamlet intelligible, to an ofthe play is Hamlet's own emphasis in thisspeech, understanding his focuson his griefand the profound impactwhich the ghosthas upon it. The note of griefis sounded by Hamlet in his first words in the play, before he ever sees the ghost,in his opening dialogue with the King and his mother.The Queen says to him: Good Hamlet, colour castthy nighted off, Andletthine on Denmark. eye looklikea friend Do notfor everwith vailedlids thy in thedust. Seek for noblefather thy Thou know'st livesmust 'tiscommon-allthat die, nature toeternity. Passing through

(I.2.68)

Hamlet answers,"Ay,madam,it is common.""If itbe, /Whyseems it so particular with thee?" she says; and he responds, 18 Hamlet's Grief

Seems, madam!Nay, it is; I knownot seems. 'Tis notalone myinkycloak,good mother, suitsof solemnblack, Nor customary offorc'dbreath, Nor windysuspiration riverin the eye, No, northe fruitful Nor the dejected haviourof the visage, moods,shapes of grief, Togetherwithall forms, These, indeed, seem; That can denote me truly. play; For theyare actionsthata man might But I have thatwithinwhichpasses showand the suitsofwoe. These but the trappings Though Hamlet's use of the conventional Elizabethan forms of mourning expresses his hostilityto an unfeeling court, he is at the same time speaking deeply of an experience which everyone who has lost someone close to him must recognize. He is speaking of the early stages of grief,of its shock, of its inner and still hidden sense of loss, and tryingto describe what is not fully describable-the literally inexpressible wound whose immediate consequence is the dislocation, if not transvaluation, of our customary perceptions and feelings and attachments to life. It is no accident that this speech sets in motion Hamlet's preoccupation with seeming and being, including the whole train of images of acting which is crystallized in the play within the play. The peculiar centripetal pull of anger and sorrow which the speech depicts remains as the central undercurrent of that preoccupation, most notably in Hamlet's later soliloquy about the player's imitation of Hecuba's grief: thatthisplayerhere, Is it notmonstrous in a dreamof passion, But in a fiction, Could forcehis soul so to his own conceit her working all his visage wann'd; That from in's aspect, Tears in his eyes, distraction A brokenvoice, and his whole function suiting Withforms to his conceit?And all fornothing! For Hecuba! What'sHecuba to him or he to Hecuba, That he should weep forher? Whatwould he do, Had he the motiveand the cue forpassion That I have?

(11.2.544)

Hamlet then goes on to rebuke himself forhis own inaction, but the player's imitation of grief nonetheless moves him internally, as nothing else can, in factto take action, as he conceives of the idea of staging a play to test both the ghost and the conscience of the King.

ArthurKirsch

19

AfterHamlet finishesanswering his motherin the earlier court scene, the King offers his own consolation forHamlet's grief:
'Tis sweet and commendable in yournature,Hamlet, To give these mourning duties to yourfather; But you mustknow yourfather lost a father; That father lost lost his; and the survivor bound, In filialobligation,forsome term To do obsequious sorrow.But to persever In obstinatecondolementis a course Of impious stubbornness; 'tis unmanlygrief; It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, A heartunfortified, a mind impatient, An understanding simple and unschool'd; For what we know mustbe, and is as common As any the mostvulgarthingto sense, Why should we in our peevish opposition Take it to heart?Fie! 'tis a faultto heaven, A faultagainstthe dead, a faultto nature, To reason mostabsurd; whose commontheme Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried, From the first corse till he thatdied to-day, 'This mustbe so'. (I.2.87)

eventually accommodate himself, but it comes at the wrong time, from the wrong person, and in its essential belittlement of the heartache of grief, it comes with the wrong inflection. It is a dispiriting irony of scholarship on this play that so many psychoanalytic and theological critics should essentially take such words, from such a King, as a text for their own indictments of Hamlet's behavior. What a person who is grieving needs, of course, is not the consolation of words, even words which are true, but sympathyand this Hamlet does not receive, not fromthe court, not fromhis uncle, and more important, not from his own mother, to whom his grief over his father's death is alien and unwelcome. Afterthe King and Queen leave the stage, it is to his mother's lack of sympathy not only forhim but forher dead husband that Hamlet turns in particular pain: 0, thatthis too too solid fleshwould melt, Thaw, and resolve itselfinto a dew! Or thatthe Everlastinghad not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! 0 God! God!

There is much in thisconsolationofphilosophywhich is spiritually and psychologicallysound, and to which every human being must

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Hamlet's Grief

How weary,stale, flat,and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on't! Ah, fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That growsto seed; thingsrankand gross in nature Possess it merely.That it should come to this! But two monthsdead! Nay, not so much,not two. So excellent a kingthatwas to this Hyperionto a satyr;so loving to my mother, That he mightnot beteem the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly.Heaven and earth! Must I remember?Why,she would hang on him As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on; and yet,withina monthLet me not thinkon't. Frailty, thyname is woman!A littlemonth, or ere those shoes were old Withwhich she followed my poor father's body, Like Niobe, all tears-why she, even she0 God! a beast thatwants discourse of reason Would have mourn'dlonger-married withmy uncle, My father's brother;but no more like my father Than I to Hercules. Withina month, Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had leftthe flushingin her galled eyes, She married.0, mostwicked speed, to post Withsuch dexterity to incestuous sheets! It is not,nor it cannotcome to good. But break,my heart,forI musthold my tongue. (1.2.129) This is an exceptionally suggestive speech and the firstof many which seem to invite Oedipal interpretations of the play. About these I do not propose to speak directly, except to remark that the source of Hamlet's so-called Oedipal anxiety is real and present, it is not an archaic and repressed fantasy. Hamlet does perhaps protest too much, in this soliloquy and elsewhere, about his father's superiorityto his uncle (and to himself), and throughout the play he is clearly preoccupied with his mother's sexual appetite; but these ambivalences and preoccupations, whatever their unconscious roots, are elicited by a situation, palpable and external to him, in which they are acted out. The Oedipal configurations of Hamlet's predicament, in other words, inhabit the whole world of the play, they are not simply a function of his characterization, even though they resonate with it profoundly. There is every reason, in reality, fora son to be troubled and decomposed by the appetite of a mother who betrays his father's memory by her incestuous marriage,7 within a month, to his brother, and murderer, and there is surely

ArthurKirsch

21

more than reason fora son to be obsessed fora time with a father the grave to haunthim. But in any case, I who literally returns from thinkthatat least early in the play, if not also later,such Oedipal echoes cannot be disentangled fromHamlet's grief,and Shakesto peare's purpose in arousingthemis notto call Hamlet's character ofthe natureand intenjudgment,but to expand our understanding For all of these resonant events come upon sity of his suffering. Hamlet while he has stillnot even begun to assimilate the loss ofa seeminglyalone in while he is still freshly mourning, living father, Denmark, forthe death of a King, and their major psychic impact and importance,I think,is thatthey protract and vastlydilate the process of his grief. Freud called this process the workof mourningand described it in his essay, "Mourningand Melancholia," in a way which seems to me exceptionallygermane to this play. Almostall of Freud's ideas on in the vast Renaissance literature can also be foundin some form melancholy, but I think Freud's discussion best suggests the coherence they had in Shakespeare's imagination.8 The major preoccupationof the essay is, in fact,the pathologyof melancholy, or what we would now more commonlycall depression, but in the course ofhis discussion Freud findsunusually suggestiveanalogies between mourning and melancholy.He pointsout, and distinctions of norto begin with,thatexcept in one respect,the characteristics mal griefand of pathological depression are the same, and thatthe two statescan easily be confused-as theyare, I think, endemically, in interpretations menof Hamlet's character."The distinguishing tal featuresof melancholia," Freud writes, are a profoundly ofinterest in the painful dejection, abrogation ofall activloss ofthecapacity tolove,inhibition outsideworld, toa degreethat feelings oftheself-regarding ity, and a lowering in self-reproaches and self-revilings, and culmifinds utterance This picture of punishment. nates in a delusionalexpectation whenwe consider with becomesa littlemoreintelligible that, The fallin are metwithin grief. one exception, thesame traits thefeatures are the is absentin grief; butotherwise self-esteem to the loss of a loved the reaction same. Profound mourning, in the thesamefeeling ofpain,loss ofinterest contains person, world-inso far as itdoes notrecallthedead one-loss of outside to adoptanynew objectoflove,whichwould meana capacity from the sameturning oftheone mourned, everyacreplacing ofthedead. It is withthoughts tiveeffort thatis notconnected thisinhibition and circumscription in theego is easyto see that 22 Hamlet's Grief

the expression ofan exclusivedevotion to itsmourning, which leaves nothing overfor other purposes or interests. Freud remarksthat "though griefinvolves grave departuresfrom the normal attitudeto life, it never occurs to us to regard it as a morbidconditionand hand the mournerover to medical treatment. We rest assured thataftera lapse of time it will be overcome,and we look upon any interferencewith it as inadvisable or even harmful."9 The process by which griefis overcome,the work of mourning, Freud describes as a struggle-the struggle between the instinctive human disposition to remain libidinallybound to the dead person and the necessityto acknowledge the clear realityofhis loss. "The task," Freud writes, is nowcarried through bitbybit, under great expenseoftime and cathectic whileall thetimetheexistence energy, ofthelostobin themind.Each singleone ofthememories ject is continued andhopeswhich boundthelibidototheobjectis brought up and hyper-cathected, and the detachment it acof the libido from this ofcarrying complished. outthebehestofreality Why process bitby bit,whichis in thenature ofa compromise, shouldbe so is notat all easy to explainin terms extraordinarily painful of mental economics. It is worth noting that thispainseemsnatural to us. The factis, however, thatwhentheworkofmourning is completed theego becomesfreeand uninhibited again.10 Freud's wondermentat the pain of griefmust seem odd to mostof us, and I think it may be a function of his general incapacity his writing, throughout includingBeyond the Pleasure Principle,to deal adequately withdeath itself.The issue is important because it is relatedto an astonishinglapse in the argument of"Mourningand Melancholia," which is criticalto an understanding ofHamlet, and which mighthave helped Freud himselfaccount forthe extraordinary pain of griefin termsof his own conception of mental economics. For what Freud leaves out in his considerationofmourning is its normalbut enormouslydisturbingcomponentof protestand anger-initially anger at being wounded and abandoned, but fundamentallya protest,both conscious and unconscious, against the inescapably mortalconditionof human life. Freud findssuch anger in abundance in depression,and withhis analysis of that state I would not presume to quarrel. The salient points of his argumentare that in depression there is "an unconscious loss of a love-object, in contradistinction to mourning,in ArthurKirsch 23

which there is nothingunconscious about the loss," and thatthere is a fall of self-esteemand a consistentcadence of self-reproach which is also not foundin mourning.The key to an understanding of this condition,Freud continues,is the perception thatthe selfcriticismof depression is really anger turned inwards, "that the self-reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shiftedon to the patient's own ego." The "complaints" of depressed people, he remarks,"are really 'plaints' in the legal sense of the word ... everything derogatory thatthey say of themselves relates at bottomto someone else. . . ." All the actions of a depressed person, Freud concludes, "proceed froman attitudeof revolt,a mental constellationwhich by a certain process has become transformed into melancholic contrition."'1Freud's explanation of the dynamicsof this process is involved and technical,but there are two major points which emerge clearly and which are highlyrelevantto Hamlet. The first is thatthere is, in a depressed person, "an identificationof the ego with the abandoned object." "The shadow of the object," he says, "falls upon the ego," so that the ego can "henceforthbe criticized by a special mental faculty like an object, like the forsakenobject. In this way the loss of the object becomes transformed into a loss in the ego. .. ."12 The second point which Freud stresses is thatbecause there is an ambivalent relationto the lost object to begin with,the regressivemovement towards identification is also accompanied by a regressive movementtowardssadism, a movementwhose logical culmination is suicide, the killing in the self of the lost object with whom the depressed person has so thoroughly identified.Freud adds thatin onlyone othersituationin humanlifeis the ego so overwhelmedby the object, and thatis in the state of intense love. Withthese analogies and distinctionsin mind, let us now return to the opening scene at court.As I have already suggested, in his first speech to his mother,"Seems, madam! Nay, it is; I know not seems," Hamlet speaks fromthe very heart of griefof the supervening realityof his loss and of its inward wound, and I thinkthe accent of normal, if intense, griefremains dominant in his subsequent soliloquy as well. It is true thatin thatsoliloquy his mind turns to thoughts of "self-slaughter," but those thoughts notwithstanding, the emphasis of the speech is not one of selfreproach.It is not himself, but the uses ofthe world which Hamlet finds"weary, stale, flat,and unprofitable," and his mother'sfrailty suggests a rankness and grossness in nature itself.The "plaints" 24 Hamlet's Grief

against his motherwhich occupy the majorityof this speech are conscious and both his anger and ambivalence towards her fully makes a mockjustified.Even on the face ofit,her hastyremarriage memorythatintensifiesthe real pain and loneliery of his father's ness of his loss; and if he also feels his own ego threatened,and if there is a deeper cadence of griefin his words, it is because he is already beginning to sense that the shadow of a crime "with the primal eldest curse upon't" (III.3.37) has fallen upon him, a crime a which is not delusional and not his, and which eventuallyinflicts punishmentupon him which tries his spiritand destroyshis life. The last lines of Hamlet's soliloquy are: cometo good. It is not,norit cannot I mustholdmytongue. for myheart, Butbreak, These lines show Hamlet's prescience, not his disease, and the instanthe completes them,Horatio,Marcellus and Barnardoenter the ghost which is to tell him of the apparitionof his dead father, of our own cona been has part which and hauntingthe kingdom the very outset of the play. sciousness from Hamlet's subsequent meeting with the ghost of his fatheris, it and psychic nexus ofthe play. The seems to me, both the structural natureof its impact to us thatthe extraordinary scene is so familiar on Hamlet can be overlooked,even in the theater.The whole scene upon onlythe last partof deserves quotation,but I will concentrate it. The scene begins with Hamlet expressingpityforthe ghostand the ghostinsistingthathe attendto a more "serious" purpose: Ghost. List,list,0, list! lovedearfather Ifthoudidsteverthy Ham. 0 God! murder. Ghost. Revengehis fouland mostunnatural (I.5.22)

to Hamlet's propheticsoul that"The serThe ghostthen confirms pent thatdid stingthyfather'slife/Now wears his crown,"and he and his own murproceeds to describe both Gertrude'sremarriage der in his orchardin termsthatseem deliberatelyto evoke echoes of the serpent in the garden of Eden. The ghost ends his recital saying: horrible! most 0, horrible! 0, horrible! If thouhastnature in thee,bearit not; be bed ofDenmark Let nottheroyal and damnedincest. A couchfor luxury ArthurKirsch 25

But, howsomeverthou pursuestthis act, Taint not thymind,not let thysoul contrive Againstthymotheraught; leave her to heaven, And to those thornsthatin her bosom lodge To prickand stingher. Fare thee well at once. The glowwormshows the matinto be near, And gins to pale his uneffectual fire. Adieu, adieu, adieu! Rememberme. [Exit.]

(1.5.80)

Hamlet's answering speech, as the ghost exits, is profound, and it predicates the state of his mind and feeling until the beginning of the last act of the play:

o all you host of heaven! 0 earth!What else? And shall I couple hell? 0, fie! Hold, hold, myheart; And you, mysinews, grow not instant old, But bear me stiffly up. Rememberthee! Ay,thou poor ghost,whiles memory holds a seat In thisdistractedglobe. Rememberthee! Yea, from the table of my memory I'll wipe away all trivialfondrecords, All saws of books, all forms, all pressurespast, That youthand observationcopied there, And thycommandment all alone shall live Withinthe book and volume of mybrain, Unmix'dwithbaser matter. Yes, by heaven! o mostperniciouswoman! o villain,villain,smiling,damned villain! My tables-meet it is I set it down That one may smile,and smile, and be a villain; At least I am sure it may be so in Denmark. [Writing.] So, uncle, thereyou are. Now to my word: It is 'Adieu, adieu! Rememberme'. I have sworn't.
This is a crucial and dreadful vow for many reasons, but the most important,as I think Freud places us in a position to understand, is that the ghost's injunction to remember him, an injunction which Shakespeare's commitment to the whole force of the revenge genre never really permits either us or Hamlet to question, brutally intensifies Hamlet's mourning and makes him incorporate in its work what we would normally regard as the pathology of depression. For as we have seen, the essence of the work of mourning is the internal process by which the ego heals its wound, differentiatesitself from the object, and slowly, bit by bit, cuts its libidinal ties with the one who has died. Yet this is precisely what the ghost forbids, and

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Hamlet's Grief

forHamlet's griefwhich witha lack of sympathy moreover, forbids, is even more pronounced than the Queen's. He instead tells Hamhe should rememberhim; he let that if ever he loved his father, tells Hamlet of Gertrude's incestuous remarriagein a way which makes her desire, if not the libido itself,seem inseparable from he tells Hamlet to kill. Drawing upon murderand death; and finally the deepest energies of the revenge play genre, and crystallizing with him in his sorrow the ghost thus enjoins Hamlet to identify and to give murderouspurpose to his anger. He consciously compels in Hamlet, in otherwords, the regressivemovementtowards the unusually constitute and sadism which together identification conscious dynamics of depression. It is only afterthis scene that Hamlet feels punished with what he later calls "a sore distraction" (V.2.222) and thathe begins to reproachhimselfforhis own nature and to meditateon suicide. The ghost,moreover,not only compels this process in Hamlet, like much of the world of the play, he of his appearance and behest to Hamlet is incarnatesit. The effect to literalize Hamlet's subsequent movement toward the realm of death which he inhabits, and away fromall of the libidinal ties "all trivialfond which nourishlifeand make it desirable, away from all pressures past." As C. S. records,/All saws of books, all forms, Lewis insisted long ago, the ghostleads Hamlet into a spiritualand psychic region which seems poised between the living and the that Hamlet is subsequently described in dead.'3 It is significant too, images that suggest the ghost's countenance14 and significant as we shall see later, that Hamlet's own appearance and state of mind change, at the beginning of Act V, at the momentwhen it is possible to say thathe has finallycome to termswiththe ghostand with his father'sdeath and has completed the work of mourning. I thinkShakespeare intends us always to retaina sense of intensified mourningratherthan of disease in Hamlet, partlybecause Hamlet is always conscious of the manic roles he plays and is aland feelings ways lucid with Horatio,but also because his thoughts turnoutwardas well as inwardand his behavior is finallya symbiotic response to the actuallydiseased world ofthe play. And though that diseased world, poisoned at the root by a trulyguilty King, eventually represents an overwhelmingtangle of guilt, its main The emphasis,bothforHamlet and forus, is the experience ofgrief. essential focus of the action as well as the source of its consistent pulsations of feeling, the pulsations which continuously charge both Hamlet's sorrowand his anger (and in which the whole issue Kirsch Arthutr 27

of delay is subsumed) is the actualityof conscious, not unconscious loss. For in addition to the death of his father in this play, Hamlet suffersthe loss amounting to death of all those persons, except Horatio,whom he has mostloved and who have mostanimatedand given meaning to his life. He loses his mother,he loses Ophelia, and he loses his friends;and we can have no question thatthese losses are real and inescapable. The loss of his motheris the most intense and the hardest to discuss. One should perhaps leave her to heaven as the ghost says, but even he cannotfollowthatadvice. As I have already suggested, Hamlet is genuinely betrayed by her. She betrays him most diI think, rectly, by her lack of sympathy forhim. She is clearlysexually drawn and loyal to her new husband, and she is said to live almost by Hamlet's looks, but she is essentially inert,oblivious to the whole realm of human experience through which her son travels. She seems not to care, and seems particularly not to care about his grief.Early in the play, when Claudius and othersare in hectic search of the reason forHamlet's melancholy,she says with bovine imperturbability, "I doubt it is no otherbut the main,/His father'sdeath and our o'erhastymarriage"(II.2.56). That o'erhasty and incestuous marriage,of course, creates a reservoirof literally grievous anger in Hamlet. It suggests to him the impermanence upon which the Player King later insists,15 the impermanence of human affection as well as of life,and it also, less obviously,compels him to think of the violation of the union which gave him his own life and being. It is very difficult, in any circumstance, to think precisely upon our parentsand their relationship without causing deep tremors in our selves, and for Hamlet the circumstancesare extraordinary. In addition marriageitselfhas a sacramentalmeaning to him which has been largely lost to modern sensibility.Like the ghost,Hamlet always speaks reverently ofthe of maritalvows, and the one occasion on which he mocks sanctity marriageis in factan attackupon Claudius's presumptionto have replaced his father. As he is leaving forEngland, Hamlet addresses Claudius and says, "Farewell, dear Mother." Claudius says, "Thy loving father, Hamlet," and Hamlet answers, "My mother:father and motheris man and wife; man and wife is one flesh; and so, my mother" (IV.3.49). Behind the Scripturalimage in this ferocious attackupon Claudius, it seems to me, is both Hamlet's memoryof his father's true marriagewith his mother, a memorywhich has an almostpre-lapsarianresonance,and a visualizationofthe concupis28 Hamlet's Grief

cence throughwhich his motherhas defiled that sacrament and made Claudius's guilt a part of her own being. This same adulterated image of matrimony,I think, lies behind his intense reproaches both against himselfand Ophelia in the speech in which he urges Ophelia to go to a nunnery: Get thee to a nunnery. Whywouldst thoube a breederof sinners?I ammyself indifferent honest, butyetI couldaccusemeof suchthings that itwerebetter mymother hadnotborne me: I am veryproud,revengeful, ambitious; withmoreoffences at my beck thanI have thoughts to put themin, imagination to give them shape,ortime toactthem in.What shouldsuchfellows as I do crawling betweenearth and heaven? (111.1.121) Some of Hamlet's anger against Ophelia spills over,as it does in this speech, fromhis rage against his mother,but Ophelia herself gives him cause. I don't thinkthereis any reason to doubt her own word,at the beginningofthe play, thatHamlet has importuned her to his speech ... Withalmostall the holyvows ofheaven" (I.3.110); and there is certainlyno reason to question his own passionate declarationat the end ofthe play, over her grave,thathe loved her deeply. I loved Ophelia:forty thousand brothers Could not,withall their quantity oflove, Make up mysum.
"with love /In honourable fashion. . . And hath given countenance

(V.1.262)

Both Hamlet's griefand his task constrainhim fromrealizing this love, but Ophelia's own behavior clearly intensifieshis frustration and anguish. By keeping the worldlyand disbelieving advice ofher brother and father as "watchman" to her "heart" (I.3.46), she denies the heart's affection not only in Hamlet but in herself; and both denials add immeasurably to Hamlet's sense of loneliness and loss-and anger. Her rejection of him echoes his mother'sinconstancyand denies him the possibilityeven ofimaginingthe experience of loving and being loved by a woman at a time when he obviously needs such love most profoundly;and her rejection of her own heart reminds him of the evil court whose shadow, he accuratelysenses, has fallen upon her and directlythreatenshim. Most of Hamlet's speeches to Ophelia condense all of these feelings. They are spoken froma sense of suppressed as well as rejected love, forthe ligamentsbetween him and Ophelia are very ArthurKirsch 29

deep in the play. It is she who firstreports on his melancholy transformation, "with a look so piteous in purport/ As if he had been loosed out of hell /To speak of horrors" (II.1.82); it is she who remains most acutely conscious of the nobilityof mind and form which has, she says,been "blasted with ecstasy" (III.1.160); and it is she, afterHamlet has gone to England, who mostpainfullytakes up his role and absorbs his griefto the point of real madness and Rosencrantzand Guildensternare less close to Hamlet's heart, and because theyare such unequivocal sponges ofthe King,he can release his anger against them without any ambivalence, but at least initiallythey too amplifyboth his and our sense of the increasing emptiness of his world. We are so accustomed to treating Rosencrantzand Guildensternas vaguely comic twins thatwe can the greatwarmth forget with which Hamlet first welcomes themto Denmark and the urgencyand openness ofhis plea forthe continuation of their friendship."I will not sort you with the rest of my servants,"he tells them, to speakto youlikean honest for, man,I am mostdreadfully attended. But,in thebeatenwayoffriendship, what makeyouat Elsinore? Ros. To visityou,mylord;no other occasion. Ham. BeggarthatI am, I am even poorin thanks; but I thank you;and sure,dearfriends, mythanks aretoodeara halfWereyounotsentfor? penny. Is ityouowninclining? Is it visitation? a free withme. Come, Come,come,deal justly come;nay,speak. Guil. Whatshouldwe say,mylord? Ham. Why anything. Buttoth'purpose: youweresentfor; and thereis a kindof confession in yourlooks,whichyour modesties have not craft enoughto colour;I knowthe goodKingand Queen have sentfor you. Ros. To whatend,mylord? Ham. Thatyou mustteachme. But let me conjure you by the rights ofourfellowship, by theconsonancy ofouryouth, ofourever-preserved bytheobligation love,andbywhat moredear a better can chargeyou withal, proposer be evenanddirect with me,whether orno? youweresentfor (II.2.266) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, of course, cannot be direct with him,and Hamlet cuts his losses withthemquite quickly and eventuallyquite savagely. But it is perhaps no accident thatimmediately followingthisexchange,when he mustbe fullyrealizingthe extent 30 Hamlet's Grief
suicide.

alone in Denmark to which, except forHoratio, he is now utterly a voice which includes and his task,he gives thatgrief withhis grief imaginationa conspectus of in its deep sadness and its sympathetic Renaissance thoughtabout the human condition. "I have of late," he tells his former friends, I knownot-lost all mymirth, all cusforgone -but wherefore withmydispositomofexercises; and indeedit goes so heavily seemstome a sterile promframe, theearth, thisgoodly tionthat canopythe air,lookyou,thisbrave thismostexcellent ontory; withgolden thismagestical roof fretted firmament, o'erhanging no otherthingto me thana fouland it appeareth fire-why, is man! ofvapours. Whata piece ofwork congregation pestilent in faculties! in form and How noble in reason!how infinite how expressand admirable!in action,how like an moving, oftheworld! howlikea god!thebeauty angel!in apprehension, Andyet, tome,whatis thisquintessence ofanimals! theparagon ofdust? (II.2.295) "In grief,"Freud remarksin "Mourning and Melancholia," "the world becomes poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself."16I thinkit should now be evident that during most of the four action ofHamlet we cannot make this distinction.For the first acts of the play, the world in which Hamlet must exist and act is characterizedin all its partsnot merelyas diseased, but specifically forHamlet,as one which actuallyis being emptied ofall the human relationshipswhich nourishthe ego and give it purpose and vitality.It is a world which is essentially defined-generically, psychically, spiritually-by a ghost whose very countenance, "more in sorrowthan in anger" (I.2.231), binds Hamlet to a course of grief It is a world of which is deeper and wider thanany in our literature. At the beginning of Act V, when Hamlet returnsfromEngland, that world seems to change, and Hamlet with it. Neither the spirit countenance of the ghost nor his tormentedand tormenting seem any longer to be present in the play, and Hamlet begins to alterin stateofmind as he alreadyhas in his dress. He standsin the which visually epitomizes the play's preoccupationwith graveyard associate with Adam's death, a scene which the clowns insistently sin and Hamlet himself with Cain's, and he contemplates the "chap-fall'n"skull ofthe man who carriedhim on his back when he was a small child. His mood, like the scene, is essentially sombre, but thoughthere is a suggestionby Horatio thathe is still considArthurKirsch 31
mourning.

ering death "too curiously" (V.1.200), there is no longer the sense that he and his world are conflated in the convulsive activityof grief.That activityseems to be drawing to a close, and his own sense of differentiation is decisively crystallizedwhen, in a scene reminiscent of the one in which he reacts to the imitation of Hecuba's grief, he responds to Laertes's enactmentofa grief which seems a parody of his own: Whatis he whosegrief Bearssuchan emphasis, whosephraseofsorrow Conjures thewand'ring stars, and makesthemstand Like wonder-wounded hearers. This is I, HamlettheDane. (V.1.248) It is an especially painful but inescapable paradox of Hamlet's tragedy thatthe finalending ofhis grief and the liberationofhis self would be co-extensive with the apprehension of his own death. After agreeing to the duel with Laertes thathe is confident of winning, he nevertheless tells Horatio, "But thou wouldst not think how ill all's here about myheart;but it is no matter"(V.2.203); and when Horatio urges him to postpone the duel, he says, in the famous speech which signifies,if it does not explain, the decisive change of his spirit:
it will be now; ifitbe notnow, yetit will come-the readiness is

Nota whit, we defy augury: there is a specialprovidence in the fallofa sparrow. Ifitbe now,'tisnottocome;ifitbe nottocome,

all. Since no man owes of aughthe leaves, whatis't to leave betimes? Let be. (V.2.211) The theological importof these lines, with their luminous reference to Matthew,has long been recognized,but the particularemphasis upon death also suggests a psychological coordinate. For it seems to me that what makes Hamlet's acceptance of Providence finallyintelligible and credible to us emotionally,what confirms the truth ofit to our own experience,is our sense, as well as his, that the great anguish and struggleof his griefis over, and thathe has completed the work of mourning.He speaks to Horatio quietly, almost serenely,with the unexultantcalm which characterizesthe end ofthe long, inner struggleof grief.He has looked at the face of death in his father's ghost,he has endured death and loss in all the human beings he has loved, and he now accepts those losses as an inevitable partofhis own condition.He recognizes and accepts his 32 Hamlet's Grief

own death. "The readiness is all" suggeststhe crystallization ofhis awareness ofthe largerdimension oftime which has enveloped his tragedyfrom the start, including the revenge drama of Fortinbras's grievances on the outskirts of the action and that of the appalling griefsof Polonius's familydeep inside it,17 but the line also most specificallystateswhat is perhaps the last and mostdifficult task of his own readiness to die. mourning, The ending of Hamlet's mourningis finallymysteriousin the play, as the end ofmourningusually is in actual life,but it is made at least partiallyexplicable by the very transfusion of energy between him and the other charactersthat constituteshis griefto begin with. Early in the play he seems to absorb into himselfthe whole body ofthe world's sorrowand protest, as laterin the play he seems to expel it. The ghost,I think,he partlyexorcises and partly incorporates. He increasingly gives expressionto much ofitsvengeful anger-most definitively, perhaps, when he uses his father's signetto hoist Rosencrantzand Guildensternon theirown petarbut at the same time he therebyeventually frees himselfto internalize the "radiance" ofhis father's memory rather thanthe ghost's shadow ofit.18 His motherherselfcannotreallybe transformed, but he makes her feel the force of his griefeven if she cannot understandit,and in the closet scene at least, he succeeds in transferring some ofthe pain in his own heartto hers.To Claudius he transfers a good deal more. By means ofthe play withinthe play, includinghis own interpolatedlines on mutability, Hamlet at once acts out the deep anger and sorrowof his griefand transmits the feverof their energyto the guiltyKing in whose blood he thereafter rages "like the hectic" (IV.3.66).19But perhaps mostimportant, not so much in effecting Hamlet's recoveryas in representingits inner dynamics and persuadingus ofits authenticity, are the transformations which Ophelia and Laertes undergo duringthe period Hamlet himselfis on his voyage to England. Ophelia, as we have seen, drains offstage offHamlet's incipient madness and suicidal imaginings into her own "weeping brook" (IV.7.176) of grief,and she begins to do so precisely at the momentHamlet leaves the stage forEngland. She enters"distracted" (IV.5.21), singingsongs which signify not only the consumingpain of the loss of her own father but also the selfdestructivesexual repressionwhich has afflicted Hamlet as well as her. At almost the same moment, Laertes enters the stage, and while Hamlet himselflaterexplicitlysees in Laertes's predicament an analogue of his own, Laertes's sorrow and anger are quickly ArthurKirsch 33

corrupted; and his poisonous allegiance with the King simultaneously dramatizesthe most destructive vengefulenergies of grief and seems to draw those energies away from Hamlet and into himself. This whole movement of energy between Hamlet and the other characterssuggests the symbioticrelation between the protagonist and the secondary characters in the medieval morality drama as well as the unconscious processes of condensation and displacementwhich are representedin dreams,and its resultis our profoundsense at the end of the play that Hamlet's self has been reconstituted as well as recovered. That sense is especially perspicuous in Act V in Hamlet's own entirely conscious and generous relationto Laertes, the double who threatenshis life but not his identity, who presents an "image" of his "cause" (V.2.77), but never of the untaintedheroic integrity of his grief. Hamlet's generosity to Laertes at the end ofthe play is especially I think, significant, because it bringsto the surfacethe underlying inflectionof charitywhich makes Hamlet's whole experience of griefso humane and so remote fromthe moral or psychological pathologyforwhich many critics,including Freud himself,indict him. In the only mention he makes of Hamlet in "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud remarksthatthe melancholiac oftenhas access to exceptionallydeep insightsand that his self-criticism can come verynearto self-knowledge; we onlywonder whya manmust becomeill before he candiscover truth ofthiskind. Forthere can be no doubtthat whoever holdsand expresses to others suchan opinionofhimself-onethatHamletharboured ofhimself and all men-that manis ill,whether he speaksthetruth oris more or less unfair to himself.20 In a footnote Freud cites as evidence of Hamlet's misanthropy and sickness his criticism of Polonius: "Use everyman after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?" (II.2.524). What Freud misses, of course, and it is to miss much, is not only thatHamlet becomes all men in his grief, but thathe does so in the image of charity which this very line evokes. For the premise of Hamlet's statement, like Portia's in The Merchantof Venice, is "That in the course ofjustice none of us I Should see salvation," and thattherefore "we do pray formercy,/And thatsame prayerdoth teach us all to render/The deeds ofmercy"(IV.1.194). Hamlet's line, to be sure,does nothave this explicit emphasis, but in its contextthere is no question that the motive of his statementis to have Polonius use the players 34 Hamlet's Grief

kindlyand thatthe ultimateburden of his thoughtis, like Portia's, the verse, "Forgive us our trespasses as we forgivethose who trespass against us." If the great anger and sorrowof Hamlet's grief make his own experience of these trespasses tragicallyacute and painful,the same combinationof feelings eventually expands his them. capacity to understand,if not forgive, of grieflie close to the heart and integrity I thinkthis generosity and the play's. Hamlet is an immensely both of Hamlet's mystery complicated tragedy,and anythingone says about it leaves one haunted by what has not been said. But precisely in a play whose to suggestivenesshas no end, it seems to me especially important remember what actually happens. Hamlet himself is sometimes most preoccupied with delay, and with the whole attendant metaphysicalissue of the relationbetween thoughtand action,but as his own experience shows, there is finallyno action thatcan be not even the killingof a guiltyKing, commensuratewith his grief, and it is Hamlet's experience of grief,and his recoveryfromit, to which we ourselves respond mostdeeply. He is a young man who comes home fromhis universityto find his fatherdead and his mother remarried to his father's murderer. Subsequently the woman he loves rejects him, he is betrayed by his friends,and he is betrayedby a motherwhose mutafinallyand mostpainfully, In the midstof bilityseems to strikeat the heartofhuman affection. these waves of losses, which seem themselves to correspondto the who places he is visited by the ghostof his father, spasms of grief, upon him a proofof love and a task of vengeance which he cannot refusewithoutdenying his own being. The ghost draws upon the emotionaltaprootofthe revenge play genre and dilates the natural sorrowand anger of Hamlet's multiple griefsuntil they include all in their protestand sympathyand touch upon the human frailty deepest synapses of griefin our own lives, not only forthose who have died, but forthose, like ourselves, who are still alive. of Virginia University
FOOTNOTES
1 All references to Shakespeare's texts are to Peter Alexander's edition (London, 1951). Drama (New York, 1950), p. 78. 2 Cited in Alan S. Downer, The British 3 I assume throughout this argument that Shakespeare essentially accepts and draws nourishment fromthe conventions of the revenge drama and that the ghost represents Hamlet's tragic predicament rather than a moral issue. Shakespeare clearly sophisticates Kyd's conception by conflating the ghost of Andrea and the

ArthurKirsch

35

figure ofRevenge and by bringing the ghostdirectly intothe worldofthe play and intoHamlet'sconsciousness;butthereis neveranyquestion,eitherby Hamletorby us, thatHamletmusteventually obey the ghost'sinjunction to takerevenge.In later dramaslike The Atheist'sTragedyand The Revengeof Bussy D'Ambois, the ghosts themselvesremindthe heroes that revenge belongs to God, but it is hardlyan accidentthatthose plays are neither tragicnor particularly compelling.The whole issue ofthe ethosofrevengeinHamlet is discussed quite decisively,itseems to me, by Helen Gardnerin The Business of Criticism(Oxford, 1959), pp. 35-51. 4 Ed. Van Fossen (Lincoln, Nebraska,1964), III.2.13. 5 Ed. Caimcross (Lincoln,Nebraska,1967), IV.5.1. 6 Caimcross,111.2.1. 7 The definition ofincestbetweena manand his brother's wifein theElizabethan period was essentiallya legal one-the relationship was prohibited by canon and civil law-but Claudius's actual murder of his brother suggeststhe deeper psychic implications of incestas well. 8 For the mostilluminating recentdiscussionof the literary treatment of melancholy in Renaissance England, see BridgetGellert Lyons, Voices of Melancholy (New York, 1971). Lyons'sanalysisofHamlet'smelancholy (pp. 77-112)is especially rich,and I found it suggestiveformy own argument, thoughmy emphasis and methodare different from hers. The relevance of modernpsychoanalytic ideas of to Hamlet is touched upon by Paul A. Jorgenson, mourning "Hamlet's Therapy," HLQ, 27 (1964), 239-58,and is discussed in moredepth,though in waysthatquickly become remotefrom the play, by Jacques Lacan, "Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet," Yale FrenchStudies, 55/56(1977), 11-52. 9 Translated by Joan Riviere, in Freud: General Psychological Theory, ed. Philip Reiff (New York,1963),p. 165. Riviere'stranslation is moreeloquent,I think, than thatof the Standard Edition, trans.and ed. James Strachey, XIV (London, 1957), 243-58. 10Riviere'stranslation, p. 166. 11Riviere'stranslation, pp. 166, 169-70. 12 Riviere'stranslation, p. 170. 13 "Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem," Proceedingsof the BritishAcademy,28 (1942), 138-54. 14 See Lyons,p. 81. 15 Whatto ourselvesin passion we propose, The passion ending,doththe purpose lose. The violence of eithergrief orjoy Their own enactureswiththemselvesdestroy. Wherejoy mostrevels grief dothmostlament; Grief joys,joy grieves,on slenderaccident. This worldis not foraye.... (III.2.189) 16 Riviere'stranslation, p. 167. 17 See Northrop Frye,Fools of Time (Toronto,1967), pp. 38-39. 18 I borrow thisformulation, whichdescribesa reversalofthe processof identificationin depression, from KarlAbraham, who does nothimself applyitto Hamlet.In commonwith manymore recentpsychoanalytic Abrahamargues thatan writers, essential partof the resolution of griefconsistsof an unambivalent and beneficent oftheloved personintothemourner's introjection own psycheto compensate for the conscioussense ofloss. See his Selected Papers, ed. ErnestJones(Loncontinuing, don, 1949),pp. 442 and 438. 19 The therapeutic value of thiskind of aggressivetransference was accentuated and made quite explicitby Marstonin The Malcontent;see Lyons,pp. 96-97. 20 Riviere's translation, pp. 167-68.

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Hamlet's Grief

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