Jon:
(I'm working backwards in replies, though I've been lurking.)
> Everything Mark Weiss says about Hamlet is reasonable and correct; I'd
only
> add that none of it necessarily rules out other interpretations.
Yes -- I'd agree with both Mark's post, and your qualification. (Myself,
I'd have a Jungian take on the text, especially the sea voyage.)
> it's striking how often Hamlet is
> called "Hamlet." The obvious explanation is that "Hamlet" is in fact his
> name, and this explanation is of course correct. But Shakespeare didn't
> have to make Gertrude call him "Hamlet" (and not, for instance, "my son")
> four times in this short scene, or to make "Hamlet" the first and almost
the
> last word out of her mouth,
[SNIP]
> it doesn't rule
> out the possibility (which I of course think is more than a possibility)
> that Shakespeare is here pointing up the identity of Hamlet with the
> previous man she called "Hamlet" in her bedchamber.
There's also the moment when Hamlet, having stumbled into Ophelia's funeral,
identifies himself: "It is I, Hamlet the Dane". Well, he's pretty
obviously Danish, as was his dad, so why that phrasing?
He's saying (for the first time in the play) that he's the legitimate king
of Denmark. (Later in conversation with Horatio, not long before the duel,
he talks of Claudius' wrongs and sins as, among other things, having "popped
in between the election and my hopes".)
Hamlet is the legitimate king, but only acknowledges this as such after the
sea-voyage. (Or at least this is the first time the play stresses it.)
Claudius, like Macbeth, is illegitimate, there being the tenet in English
common law (Danish too? Arni?) that a murderer may not profit from his
crime. (Which along with the civil and canon law prescriptions against
remarriage to a deceased husband's brother, further invalidates Claudius'
marriage. In the Bedroom Scene, Hamlet stresses both aspects -- murder and
incest -- to his mother, in an attempt to bring her to recognise the nature
of her state. With a rather heavy-handed dramatic irony, it's just when he
seems to be succeeding that Daddy produces his ghostly intervention, in an
attempt that he, purgatorial and therefore with no claim to any absolute
knowledge or authority, sees as "saving" his wife. Only to give Gertrude a
get-out (not seeing him) to decide that her son is simply mad, and continue
in her incestuous (with Claudius) courses. "Adulterous villain" -- even if
Claudius weren't her ex-husband's brother, his relation with Gertrude would
still be adulterous as the marriage was invalidated by the prior murder.
So part of the resonance of the name "Hamlet", both father and son, is "king
of Denmark".
> Remember too that when
> Claudius appears in the play the first thing he does is to remind everyone
> that the old king was also called "Hamlet," which was also true but which
> also, I think, allows for an explanation beyond that fact that it was
true.
Cf. above.
... but I'd agree, Jon, as you say above, that one interpretation doesn't
necessarily pre-empt the other.
My own overall take on the play is that it's about revenge vs. justice, with
a bit of politics thrown in. The triumvirate of Hamlet, Laertes, and
Fortinbras, all with dear slaughtered dads but with very different ways of
of engaging with their situation, shows a bit of this.
Cheers,
Robin
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