Episode #243 ... Hamlet - William Shakespeare

Introduction

0:00Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Patreon.com slash Philosophize This. Philosophical writing on Substack at Philosophize This on there. I hope you love the show today. So today we're talking about the play Hamlet by Shakespeare. And this being the third episode we've done on his work, I want to do something a little more inspirational this time. See, usually we talk about the events of the play. We give analysis from people who have dedicated their lives to Shakespeare. And both those will certainly be in this episode. But the thing I want to do that's a bit more today is to inspire you to read classic literature like this a bit differently.

0:33I want to talk about reading this play more like a philosopher might be reading it. If part of the job of a philosopher is to take concepts that seem really familiar to us, something like love or justice, and if part of what they do is work through them and show us a whole other side to the thing that can help us see the world in a new way, well, then Hamlet is a very familiar play from classic literature, right? So what if a philosopher reworked an entire play to similarly give us an exciting new way of seeing it that breathes life into the work and makes it even more relevant?

1:04Building on what Nietzsche, Hegel, Benjamin, and others thought about Hamlet as a play, philosopher Simon Critchley and psychoanalist Jameson Webster are going to team up and interpret Hamlet as a play through a much more modern, tragic, philosophical lens than you typically hear about. And while they're not against more traditional takes on the play, they just call them a kind of biscuit box Shakespeare. That's the term they used in an interview one time, meaning it's kind of generic, right? Like there's a take on Hamlet that everybody knows. It's the kind of reading of the play that'll get you an A on your test in school.

1:35There's nothing evil about that. But they do think that Shakespeare should shake something up in people if it can. And the reading of the play they lay out in their book called Stay Illusion, the Hamlet Doctrine, is going to be something that does just that by the end of this episode here today.

Play Events

1:51Anyway, a lot to cover, so let's get right into the events of the play. The play begins at the front walls of a castle in Denmark. Now, the guards of this castle, stationed up in the watchtowers at night, for the last few nights, they've seen something that's been kind of freaking them out a bit. And there's a ghost that's been visiting them on the front platform of the castle, that when it shows up, it just comes up to them, stares them in the face. And when they try to go up to talk to it, it turns around and leaves. Just like everyone in my elementary school. So on this particular night that the play begins, the guards have come more prepared this time.

2:23They brought along a guy named Horatio, who's a scholar. He's a friend of the royal family. And their plan is to show him this ghost, hoping that he'll know maybe what the right thing to do next is. Sure enough, they're standing on this platform on this night. And the ghost shows up again. And as Horatio sees it, he notices something they had warned him about. The face of the ghost looks exactly like the former king of the castle they're guarding that has just recently died. The guards and Horatio decide that the best thing to do is probably to tell the son of the person they thought the ghost just looked like, the young prince of the castle named Prince Hamlet.

2:55Now, as Horatio, his friend, approaches Hamlet to tell him what's going on, we see a character in Hamlet who's clearly a man feeling pretty distraught. I mean, it makes sense. He just lost his father. But more than that, he just recently found out his mother, the queen, has decided to remarry some other guy named Claudius so soon after his father's death. On top of even that, he just gets the feeling lately that something seems kind of off with this whole royal court he's a part of. It's a place he usually sees himself as a pretty important figure in. Not so much lately. So when his friend tells him that the ghost of his dead father was just seen at the front of the castle,

3:30and when that same ghost appears to Hamlet later on that same night, Hamlet's not exactly in the mood for getting even more bad news delivered to him. By golly, does he get some of it anyway. The ghost of his father tells him that he didn't just randomly die that day, but that he was murdered by that guy Claudius that his mom just chose to marry. The implication of all this being, of course, to Hamlet that he has to do something, that the entire court he's a part of is now something that's gone rotten and corrupt, and that society would tell him, if you want to be an honorable son in this situation,

4:01the right thing to do here is to kill this Claudius guy and avenge your father's death. Now, Hamlet, even before any of this horrible stuff ever happened to him, he was already a guy that probably thought a little too much about stuff. But now that he's gotten this news, now the inside of his head has been turned into a veritable snow globe. He agonizes over what the right thing to do is in this situation. After all, sitting back doing nothing about it isn't an option. But also, look, just because society says I should go out and kill this guy, that doesn't mean that's the right thing to do either.

4:33By the way, do I know if this Claudius guy is even guilty? I mean, who did I hear this from? Not exactly the most reliable of sources. A freaking ghost told me about it. How do I even know it's telling the truth? How do I even know the ghost is real? Couldn't it be an evil demon just deceiving me, he says. So he comes up with the plan that he's going to act like he's gone crazy to buy himself some time while he watches Claudius and tries to figure out what to do next. But the more that time passes, the more he ruminates, the more people around him see this weird behavior.

5:04Eventually, he starts to think of himself as a coward. And eventually, he even begins to loathe himself for being someone who's failing to be able to make a decision at all. Hamlet becomes someone progressively consumed by this unresolvable internal torture. Now, this is already a great place in the story to pause

Philosophical Analysis

5:20and start talking about some of the philosophy underneath all this. I'll start with the more traditional take, and then we'll get on to Webster and Critchley's take. A common reading of the events of the story so far is that Shakespeare's someone doing his work during the Renaissance, meaning this places him right after the Middle Ages and right before the Enlightenment. And importantly, that makes him someone who, during his time, would have been painfully aware of the collision of ideas he's living in the wake of, where out of this collision came Renaissance humanism. Now, under this kind of reading, Hamlet as a character, you know, in all his moral confusion, in his lack of an ability to choose and make a decision,

5:52many critics will say that this was Shakespeare staging the tension that goes on when earlier medieval forms of moral guidance that are rooted in something like God collide with later Renaissance humanism where these answers aren't as easily available to people and so create people who are stuck in a battle up in their own minds all the time. Hamlet's snow globe of a brain is what happens when we, as people, try to think our way to moral answers all on our own. And the point would be, then, that man does he try really hard to figure out what the right thing to do is in this play, and man does he fear making the wrong decision.

6:24Hamlet, then, under this kind of reading, is a good person that's been put in a bad situation. The take is that Shakespeare writes this play as a very underrated kind of moral psychologist, long before psychology was even a field of specialty. The take is that, ultimately, the character of Hamlet is a work of brilliance because no matter who you are reading it in the modern world, we can all see a little bit of ourselves in Prince Hamlet. We see ourselves when we read his process of ruminating and suffering over deciding what the right thing to do is. And maybe this whole point is seen most clearly in his famous speech

6:57that he gives much later on in the play where he says, To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether it is nobler to suffer life's hardships or to end them. You know, under this reading, this whole speech he gives can be taken as a sort of ultimate representation of this modern person's way of thinking. Where even when it comes to the seemingly easy question of whether or not to continue with our lives, our fate in this new, modern disposition of identity and thought that's emerging is to always be questioning and second-guessing ourselves, never quite knowing what the right thing to do is.

7:29Now, all that said, there's also the possibility here of reading Hamlet as a character who's nothing like this at all. What if we read Hamlet more like a philosopher might approach the play? Friedrich Nietzsche thought something very different can be taken from the character of Hamlet. He writes about it in Birth of Tragedy, but Webster and Critchley quote it in their book. He says, quote, Knowledge kills action. Action requires the veil of illusion. It is this lesson which Hamlet teaches, end quote. See, what if Hamlet is not just a good person

8:00who can't act because he can't decide on what the right thing to do is? What if Hamlet is instead read as someone who can't act because he sees through the entire game of trying to rationalize our own behavior after the fact and then call it moral to make ourselves feel better? If, as Nietzsche says, action requires the veil of illusion, well, Hamlet is someone who can't act because he lacks the moral illusions to justify what he wants to do. For example, when he finds out that his father was murdered, he doesn't have to be confused there.

8:31He can listen to society, do the honorable thing, and just kill Claudius. That's the ready-made answer. It's served up to him, and it would be totally morally justifiable to do in theory. But under this reading, he sees through that option as merely being a story. This whole idea that he can just kill someone and afterwards his hands are going to be morally clean just because he had good reasons for doing it, he knows too much to ever bring himself to believe in something that simple about our actions. He knows that killing someone here runs the risk of killing an innocent person.

9:02He knows there could be a fallout to his actions. It could start a really messy succession war about who's going to rule next. He knows it could drag all sorts of other innocent people into this thing, like he's been dragged into it, not the least of which are the people of Denmark. In other words, To Nietzsche, Hamlet is just someone who sees through this game we play with morality when it comes to every possible choice we make. All many people ever do in practice is just act, then come up with a good moral reason

9:33for why they had to do the thing, and then sit around basking in some illusion about how absolved they are of any of the true complexity and fallout of what they did. Hamlet can't make that same kind of decision because he can't bring himself to live in that kind of an illusion. See, it's in this way that Critchley and Webster describe the character of Hamlet as a bit of an anti-Oedipus. Remember Oedipus from the episodes we've done on Greek tragedy. Real quick, in that story, Oedipus is a king who kills a random stranger, then he marries a widowed queen, he has children with her,

10:04he curses the murderer of the old king, he launches a full investigation into the crime, only to finally realize that he's actually the guy he's been hunting the whole time. He's the one that killed the former king. Their point is that Oedipus, then, is someone who acts in total ignorance despite not knowing much of anything, and to Webster and Critchley, Hamlet is the anti-Oedipus. He's a man whose knowledge of his father's death and his insights about the moral game most of us are playing prevent him from ever taking action in the first place. This is also, for whatever it's worth,

10:34what they're referencing in the title of the book, The Hamlet Doctrine. It's the name they give to this idea that knowledge and insight, just in practice, has the ability to kill people taking action in the world. Now, building on this, Critchley and Webster offer a very different picture of the situation we're watching unfold in the play. Hamlet is not a good person that's in a bad situation. Hamlet is someone who's stuck in an internal situation that is unsustainable. Because with all his doubt about what's actually happened to his father, he's completely unable to do the normal thing

11:05where he would accept what's happened, integrate it into his life, and try to move on. But at the same time, he's unable to take action and do anything that might be redemptive, you know, move things forward for him, because he sees through the illusion and knows that anything he does will just be rationalizing his actions after the fact. So we have a man here in Hamlet where the better way to describe him is someone who's paralyzed. And Webster and Critchley, all this excess psychological energy that can't be metabolized gets transformed through his behavior in the play into the shame we see,

11:35self-loathing, melancholy about his situation. That just like other victims of a traumatic event often do, Hamlet starts to lash out at all the people around him, at his love interest Ophelia, at his friends and co-members of the court. Once again, Hamlet is not just some guy that can't make a decision. A different way to read this whole thing is that Hamlet is a damaged, often mean, unlikable kind of person who can't change. And so he becomes complicit in everything that starts to play out next in the events of the story. Because once Hamlet adopts

12:05this whole strategy of acting crazy and lashing out at all the people around him, that guy Claudius starts to get a little suspicious of him. He asks, how do I, as the new ruler of this whole place, really use the resources I have to get a read on what's going on with this guy Hamlet? And he comes up with a plan. He's going to take two old friends of Hamlet, ask them to hang out with him, and try to get information about what's making him act so crazy all of a sudden. Their names in the play are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Sounds like a law firm or something. Anyway, they get some information

12:36by spying on him like this. And Claudius and his inner circle develop the theory that what's making Hamlet act so erratic lately must have something to do with the love he has for a woman named Ophelia, who everybody kind of knows she and Hamlet have something between them. So they come up with another plan. Let's set up a meeting and use Ophelia as a kind of bait. She can talk to Hamlet, we can listen in, and we can see if this theory of ours is actually what's going on or if we're just all imagining it. The meeting goes on inside of one of the giant lobbies of the castle. Ophelia's sitting in the lobby.

13:07She's reading a prayer book, standard behavior for her. And Hamlet enters the room and it's at this point in the play that he delivers the famous to be or not to be speech we talked about. After he's done with it, Ophelia tries to talk to him, but this is the moment that he decides to lash out at her. He insults her. He tells her she needs to get herself to a nunnery like real quick, you know, just implying some really horrible stuff about her. She's hurt. Hamlet's screaming at someone yet again and Claudius, who just used Ophelia for his own spying, he now realizes that whatever Hamlet's mad about

13:38really has nothing to do with his interest in Ophelia. So when he has his head spy go and hide in a closet to be able to listen in on another conversation Hamlet's having, and when Hamlet notices someone's in the closet and ends up stabbing the guy, more than ever before, Claudius realizes now, probably a good time to get rid of this guy Hamlet before he becomes even more of a problem for him. And just so we don't kind of interrupt the show at any point beyond this, I want to thank everybody that goes through the sponsors of the show today. This episode is sponsored by NordVPN. NordVPN is a service that helps secure

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Surveillance Theme

16:17Now let's pause again for a moment because all this spying that's been seen in the play so far can be read in a couple different ways that are important to understand. More traditional readings usually see all this spying put in here by Shakespeare as a reflection of the Elizabethan English society that Shakespeare's writing this work in. See, historians will sometimes call this whole period of 16th century England as the birthplace of what we now know as the modern surveillance state. Shakespeare's living in a world here where there's a whole new level emerging of spy networks. There's double agents

16:48being embedded into things by the government. There's code breaking. They would torture and throw priests in jail if they didn't like what they were saying to the public. They would intercept letters and read them before they were delivered. I mean, Shakespeare himself actually, even in his writing, had to have things approved by a censorship office that then on multiple occasions required him to change things in his work if it didn't fit into a certain narrative. So the more traditional reading of the spying of Claudius and his inner circle in the play is that this is a reflection of what's going on in the real world of Shakespeare. What does the world start to look like

17:19when we make surveillance like this commonplace about how people do business with each other? Ah, but then there's the reading of Critchley and Webster that takes this whole reading and then intensifies it into something else entirely. They say, See, again, what if we read Hamlet a bit more like a philosopher might read it? What if we interpreted the surveillance in the play

17:49as something that goes beyond people, you know, just spying on each other in a closet or something? What if surveillance is actually a structural condition of the play itself? Something crucial to be able to understand how everything in it comes to pass? Well, let's try to make a case for it. I mean, first of all, obviously, there's the fact that many of the major events of the play do center around some kind of espionage that's going on. That's just true. But Critchley and Webster say even more than that. Hamlet's whole internal experience, you know, his constant self-analysis,

18:21the constantly looking inward as his primary way of interfacing with the world, what if this is a tendency he has that emerges out of the way his whole external world is structured? What if it just makes sense to constantly live in surveillance of yourself when the environment you live in is something that watches you and tracks you at a level that gives you no free space to just be? I mean, even in just a self-preservation sense, why not relentlessly track my own inner experience so that I can make sure I'm not going to face problems when it's being tracked by others?

18:52Now, if this were true, then one question we can ask here as we're reading Hamlet is what if external surveillance like this produces a kind of neuroticism in people? And, you know, given the world we live in now, often called a digital panopticon that no one can really escape, how do all the varying forms of tracking and surveillance that we live immersed in every day, how do these affect people's behavior in ways that aren't obvious to us? Ways that show up in polite conversation oftentimes as simply personality quirks. Webster and Critchley even say at one point

19:22about all this that if you were to read Hamlet in this way, and if the world continues to progress into this direction of more and more surveillance, there could honestly come a day where if the authorities became aware of this messaging in the play, instead of Hamlet being a play that's really common for students to read when they're in school, Hamlet could actually become something that students are banned from reading for fear that they'll start considering how they're living in some kind of a police state similar to the tactics used by Claudius. But all that said,

Ophelia Character

19:49what comes next is arguably the most important scene in the entire play and it involves Ophelia, which if you remember from before was the woman Hamlet screamed at and said she needs to check herself into a nunnery. See, in one of those scenes from before when Hamlet was getting spied on, it ended with Hamlet stabbing someone who was hiding in a closet behind a curtain. Well, to clarify, that man that Hamlet stabbed there was named Polonius and not only was Polonius the head of Claudius' spy network, but he also happened to be the father of Ophelia.

20:20This moment in the story marks a pretty significant turning point for the meaning of everything going on in it. Because while Hamlet before her was just pretending to be losing his mind as a tactic, Ophelia now, given the significant costs she's had to pay so far, she's actually someone who's starting to lose her mind. Think about what she's gone through. She's used by the royal court as part of their grand scheme to save themselves and spy on Hamlet. Then in her forced involvement in all that, she is brutalized and rejected by Hamlet, who she cared a lot for. And then her father hides behind a curtain

20:51in a closet and gets killed by that very same guy that just said all those really nice things about her. So it's not shocking. We then cut to a scene in the play with Ophelia where she shows up and something's obviously going very wrong when it comes to her mental health. She's speaking to people in these weird fragments and riddles. Sometimes she's kind of rambling to herself. She's singing songs, but only bizarre parts of the songs. She even starts handing out these flowers to people where as she does it, there's obviously some symbolic meaning to her giving them out

21:21that apparently everybody around her is supposed to know about. Nobody really does though. She's not in a good spot in other words. And fast forward just a couple scenes later in the play and Hamlet's mother bursts into the scene and she informs everyone that Ophelia was just found dead floating in a river, flowers all around her. That she had apparently fallen out of a willow tree nearby the river. And whether this was accidental or on purpose is never explicitly said by anyone, but, you know, again, this is a tragedy and there's plenty of readers out there that treat her death as though it was on purpose.

21:52Now, it's said by many that the character of Ophelia is actually the tragic hero of this play, despite the fact that Hamlet is in the title and he's the main character. More traditional readings of Ophelia will treat her character as someone that Shakespeare wanted to include in this play to symbolize a kind of lost innocence. That Ophelia is the tragic cost that societies and families have to pay when the people in them get too caught up in their own ego-driven corrupt nonsense, much like the royal court in the play. This kind of reading will say that if Hamlet

22:22is somebody who lost his father and then eventually finds himself imploding in a very internal way, then Ophelia can be read as someone who loses her father and acts as a sort of foil to Hamlet. That to Shakespeare, this is yet another way that a person can externally crumble. All of this as a result of when we allow for political or moral decay to spread and go unchecked. And this is a perfectly fine reading for whatever it's worth. But of course, again, there's another way altogether we could be looking at the character of Ophelia. Honestly, an entire episode could be done just on the character of Ophelia

22:53and the ways different philosophers have interpreted her over the years. But because we're talking about who we are today, Critchley and Webster would ask, again, what if Ophelia is actually where we see most of the classic ambiguity that makes a tragedy like this what it is? What if she's the true tragic hero of this play? Consider her character for a moment, they might say. She's a person in the play who loves someone, Hamlet. She gets used by everybody around her, her father, brother, other members of the royal court. Through the events of the play,

23:24she gets pushed to her own limits as someone caught up in all this that's going on around her. And then she takes her own life in what Critchley and Webster call her only real language of exchange, meaning the only thing she really has left to express her position after everything else has been taken away from her. In other words, they say it's useful to first think of Ophelia as a character that's pretty similar to someone like Antigone from earlier Greek tragedy. Real quick, just so we can understand what they mean by this point, Antigone is a story of a woman who's denied by a king to be able to give her brother a proper burial. The king says she can't bury him,

23:56that her brother was a traitor, his body has to be left out on display as a message to everybody else not to be a traitor, and Antigone refuses to abide by this. She says she has a duty to her brother and to the gods that's far more important than anything a king ever had to say. So she goes out and buries him anyway, and after doing that, the king locks her in a cave, leaving her for dead. And instead of waiting there in the cave, crying out for help, help, waiting for someone to come and save her life, she instead decides to take her own life while trapped in the cave as one of her only remaining acts

24:26of true solidarity. Now again, Webster and Critchley draw a comparison here between Antigone and Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet. Consider the similarities. Ophelia also had something she strongly desired and tried as hard as she could to give it to someone. She also was treated completely as an object by a king, not to mention by all the other men around her. I mean, she essentially became an instrument for whatever the whim of the day was for all these guys that are coordinating stuff. And then she also, when she meets the end of the world that she finds herself trapped in,

24:57she ends her life in what she sees as a final act of expression. Point is, as a member of this royal court that treats her entirely as a pawn in their own rationalizing and calculating of everything, Webster and Critchley call her death a sort of love act, that her madness and her death become a kind of heroic truth in the play because they expose what the world has worked so hard to produce her to to this point, nothing. In fact, it's one of the several reasons they say in their interpretation of the play that Hamlet is ultimately a story

25:27that's about nothing. It's not about a prince named Hamlet that has to make a tough decision. No, in some very important sense, they say it's a play that's about nothing. Nothing in the form of nihilism, that is. Hamlet is reduced to nothing because he's trapped in a state of paralysis where he can't accept and can't move forward. Ophelia's reduced to nothing by the men and the schemes that use her that are all around her. Even most of the cast of the play is reduced to nothing in that pretty much every main character other than Horatio just dies at the end of it. And this is the important

25:59difference to understand between Hamlet and Ophelia if you want to consider how Critchley and Webster see the deepest parts of their character. Ultimately, what makes Ophelia so different from Hamlet is that Ophelia is someone who is actually capable of love. To help make their case for this, they work in a famous quote here about love from Dostoevsky. We talked about this quote when we did our series on him. He said, quote, hell is the inability to love, end quote. And to Critchley and Webster, that quote is pretty much the core of Hamlet's entire existence

26:29on this planet. They say the first thing to understand here is that love is something that is always built on a kind of lack. They're building off a Lacan with this point. Whenever we want to be loved by another person, we love because we have needs or because we're incomplete. And more than that, to truly love someone else always requires a kind of vulnerability that Hamlet, as a character, just doesn't allow into his life. Every time love gets close to Hamlet in the play, he has to run away into his head, into some commentary

26:59that involves either humor, social performance, cruelty he even uses at times. And he does all this just so he never has to show anyone else any sort of need that he may be having. To spend your whole life endlessly thinking up in your own head, needing a rational explanation for everything just because you're scared of what it would mean for you to not have answers, there is one word to describe that sort of life that fits here. Hell. Hell is the inability to love. And Hamlet's about as close to that as a character in a play can actually get.

27:31He has to control everything but can do nothing. Now, notice how Ophelia, though, is in many important ways the inverse of all this. She does find a way to act and do things in the world, but she often has very little control over what she actually gets to do. She represents for Webster and Critchley what Hamlet never finds a way to become, a person who's genuinely capable of vulnerability