Thinking about Hamlet

I teach Hamlet frequently, so I certainly agree with the many critics who consider it to be one of the touchstones of literature. Indeed, the play goes to the heart of what makes us human. For example, this review of the new book Stay Illusion!, by Simon Critchley and Jamieson Webster, discusses Hamlet’s impact on Sigmund Freud, who, of course, was also thinking about what makes us human. As its author, Joshua Rothman, blogging for the New Yorker, says:

Watching “Hamlet,” we think that it’s about revenge—a familiar, safe subject. In fact, “Hamlet” is about desire. The real engine of the play is Oedipal. Caught up in Hamlet’s quest to kill Claudius—and reassured by his self-censure—we can safely, and perhaps unconsciously, explore those desires. Freud thought that prudery and denial had for centuries prevented critics from acknowledging the play’s propulsive undercurrent, which, he believed, the new psychoanalytic vocabulary made it possible to acknowledge. “The conflict in ‘Hamlet’ is so effectively concealed,” he wrote, “that it was left to me to unearth it.”

Later, Rothberg adds:

They [Webster and Critchley] incline toward the Freudian reading of “Hamlet,” which holds that Hamlet delays because he feels guilty. Hamlet’s problem, they argue, isn’t really that he’s hesitant about violence. Rather, it’s that the possibility of being violent fills him with shame. In “Hamlet,” they write, shame is pervasive; it has settled on Elsinore like a fog. For Freud, Hamlet’s shame has to do with his Oedipal desires. But for Webster and Critchley it’s more abstract. It has to do with the shame of needing to love, the shame about the emptiness that, they hold, is at the center of the experience of love.