Philosophia

Last year I took part in a live discussion on Hamlet for Justin Murphy’s Other Life* community. Hamlet is probably my favorite Shakespeare play, so I jumped at the chance to reread it. As I did so, what struck me most was Hamlet’s resentment: his raging against being while failing to directly act against his enemy, his self-deception, his general reactiveness, the way his expansive consciousness only abets his inaction, his outbursts of cruelty against the relatively innocent. I put forward the thesis that Hamlet embodies Nietzschean ressentiment. Justin somewhat disagreed: for him, Hamlet’s problem wasn’t his inactivity, but that he was too active. He should never have sought vengeance but renounced it like a good Christian—indeed, Hamlet’s problem is really that he is man caught in between a pagan morality he no longer believes and a Christian morality he cannot or will not yet embody. The real, unsung hero of the play, Justin argued—is Horatio, his steadfast, understanding, but totally inactive friend.

Justin’s ideas about Hamlet are in excellent company—no less than the intellectual titan René Girard argued basically the same thing. Unfortunately, though—as I’ll argue later—they’re both wrong. Instead I’ll argue that Nietzsche (far more of a Titan) was right—not only in what he explicitly said about Hamlet early in his career, but also what he would have said about him at the end of it. In brief, Hamlet is Dionysian man, granted a paralyzing insight into the heart of being—but how he interprets it, and that he cannot recover from it—is due to his ressentiment. Hamlet is both Dionysian and Ressentient** Man. And finally, that we love him nonetheless is precisely because we see in him these dangerous propensities we ourselves possess.

Ressentient Man

Ressentiment—the French form of ‘resentment’—is a philosophical term popularized by Nietzsche, who used it to describe the secret feelings of revenge that motivate the morality of those who feel oppressed yet cannot directly fight back.

The slave revolt in morality begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and produces values: the ressentiment of beings to whom the real reaction, the deed, is denied, who can only indulge in imaginary revenge… (Genealogy of Morals, First Essay)

In Nietzsche’s view, this ‘slave revolt’ in morality produces the Christian value system, with its ultimate fruition in modern egalitarianism. But he was not the only one to write about ressentiment: the philosopher Max Scheler also wrote a brilliant analysis of the phenomenon. Though he agreed with Nietzsche that modern egalitarianism was based on ressentiment, he denied that that it formed the core of Christianity. Here is how he described it:

Ressentiment is a self-poisoning of the mind which has quite definite causes and consequences. It is a lasting mental attitude, caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding value judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite. (p. 4)

The negative emotions that plague Hamlet’s soul are apparent from our first encounter with him, at the usurping king Claudius’ coronation. While he limits his comments to disguised sarcasm in the presence of the king and his new wife, Hamlet’s mother, as soon as he finds himself alone he vents his spite, lamenting not only his mother’s hasty remarriage, but his own existence, and the world itself:

O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew, Or that the Everlasting had not fixed His canon ’gainst self-slaughter. O God, God, 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 grows to seed. Things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. (I.ii.129–137)

Here already we find Hamlet’s sorrow and anger grown far beyond their ostensible cause. And at this point he has not yet met the ghost, and has no knowledge of his father’s murder. By Act II, now burdened with this knowledge, he seems to positively delight in denigrating existence, building up beautiful metaphors only to tear them down with spite:

...indeed, it goes so heavily with my disposition that this goodly frame, the earth, seems to me a sterile promontory; this most excellent canopy, the air, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof fretted with golden fire: why it appeareth nothing to me but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapors. What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals; and yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust? (II.ii.305–317)

In Act III, in the famous soliloquy, “To be, or not to be,” he again laments his very existence and seems to long for death—though he knows he lacks the courage even to kill himself. Immediately following this, Ophelia appears, and he vents his resentment cruelly upon her (though this must be exacerbated if he knows that the king and Polonius are spying on the scene). “Get thee to a nunnery,” he tells her repeatedly. “Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners?” Human life is condemned—and women especially, for perpetuating it, and for deceptively attracting and attaching men to it.

In all these speeches, we can recognize the effects of ressentiment. When the direct expression of vengeance is repressed, it poisons the mind: our resentment spreads to encompasses more and more things. First we may denigrate our enemy’s qualities, activities or judgments—all that is closely associated with him. Then it may spread to more distantly related things. Eventually, Scheler notes:

When the repression is complete, the result is a general negativism—a sudden, violent, seemingly unsystematic and unfounded rejection of things, situations, or natural objects whose loose connection with the original cause of the hatred can only be discovered by a complicated analysis. (Ressentiment, p. 21)

The ultimate result of this may be a denigration and rejection of existence itself.

But where is all this coming from? What is the original cause of Hamlet’s ressentiment? We found Hamlet already denigrating existence in the second scene of the play, before he knew that the new king Claudius murdered his father. Did his feelings then stem simply from outrage at his mother’s quick remarriage to her late husband’s brother, combined perhaps with grief over his father’s death? Obviously, hearing from his father’s ghost intensified things considerably, but then—the great puzzle of Hamlet—he hardly rushes to take revenge (we’ll return to this point in a moment).

As Richard Weisberg points out in his article Hamlet and Ressentiment, it is not until the final act that we learn he holds an additional grievance against the king:

Does it not, think thee, stand me now upon— He that hath killed my king and whored my mother, Popped in between th’ election and my hopes, Thrown out his angle for my proper life… (V.ii.63–66; italics mine)

The Danish monarchy was elective; though nearly always hereditary, the succession could be altered by an elective body. Hamlet was crown prince, but Claudius seems to have bought off or otherwise influenced this body to appoint himself king instead. This direct affront to Hamlet may be the original source of his ressentiment. By the very nature of circumstances, he is prevented from responding to it, from unleashing his vengeful feelings. Under Claudius, he is still the crown prince: his eventual succession to the throne will depend on the influential king’s sanction. He is therefore bound to silence: “But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue” (I.ii.158).

His vengeful feelings, therefore, fester. That Hamlet doesn’t mention this direct affront in his first soliloquy, but rather focuses on his mother’s unfaithfulness to his father’s memory and the new king’s unworthiness, might already be the result of the repression and displacement characteristic of ressentiment. The message of the ghost worsens the situation terribly. Its message that Claudius obtained the throne through the murder of Hamlet’s father should spur him, finally, to action. By the aristocratic code of ethics of his station, his action against the king would now be justified, even incumbent upon him. Indeed, he certainly talks like this—but that is all he does, at least until the very end—talks.

Weisberg believes this is the key to Hamlet’s peculiar type of ressentiment, as well as his popularity. Hamlet’s is a literary ressentiment: he continually needs “words, words, words” (II.ii.194) to re-articulate and re-experience his situation, and his gift for words and mental agility fuel this. His verbal productions serve a number of related purposes: they perpetuate his resentment (as one perversely loves to remember painful wrongs against oneself); they allow him to reinterpret it (as it becomes more about his mother’s faithlessness than his own ambition); and, most importantly, they give him the illusory sense that he is doing something about it. The value of words is elevated, however ambivalently, above the value of action—of the action he craves but cannot do.

According to Weisberg, the crux of the play and of Hamlet’s personality can be found in his response to the ghost near the end of the Act I. To the ghost’s parting words, “Remember me,” he responds:

...Remember thee? Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat In this distracted globe. Remember thee? Yea, from the table of my memory I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past That youth and observation copied there, And thy commandment all alone shall live Within the book and volume of my brain Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven! O most pernicious woman! O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd 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. [Writes.] So uncle, there you are. Now to my word: It is “Adieu, adieu, remember me.” I have sworn’t. (I.v.95–112)

Here already, immediately after hearing of his father’s cruel fate and in the very process of vowing to avenge him, we can see Hamlet’s literary ressentiment undoing his resolve. The beginning of this passage promises a new Hamlet, with a mind cleared of all literary and intellectual baggage, intent only on action, on avenging his father. But he instantly begins to build a needless structure around his new resolve: “Yes, by heaven! | O most pernicious woman! | O villain, villain….” He must verbally go over it all again, instead of simply rushing to action. And worse: he actually writes this down in the notebooks he always carries with him, following up this pseudo-action with the phrase, “So uncle, there you are”—as though he had actually done something to him; a phrase far more appropriate for the hero standing over the villain’s bleeding corpse.

From this brief passage, it is clear that Hamlet will not rush to fulfill the ghost’s command, but will interminably delay—and it also predicts the form this delay will take. In speech after speech and play after play (whether the play-acting of his “antic disposition” or the literal plays he stages), he will represent his situation, the need for action, even his own shirking of action—but will not act.

There is a striking example when Hamlet has the perfect opportunity to slay the villainous king as he kneels in an (ultimately vain) attempt to pray: his literary proclivity intervenes once again and he invents a reason not to do it. If the king, he reasons, is killed while repenting for his sins then he goes to heaven, while his father suffers in purgatory—an insufficient retribution. But this is specious; we see through the role of the too-severe vengeful hero that Hamlet casts for himself. In close quarters with the defenseless king, he is repelled from the act by the same factors that have already delayed it, though he hides this from himself and attempts to reinterpret it with words.

These factors need not involve moral repugnance at the act (we will consider this possibility later). They may be as simple as cowardice (will the guards discover him? will he himself be put to death as a regicide?), or just the sheer disconcerting magnitude of the act of taking the life of someone at close quarters—something the young Hamlet is surely unpracticed in. What is crucial here is not so much the nature of his apprehensions as the alternative channel that has already been carved for his energies to run down—i.e. his literary propensity.

There are times where he seems to regret his slipped opportunities to kill the king. For instance, in his soliloquy right before he leaves for England: “How all occasions do inform against me | And spur my dull revenge!” (IV.iv.32–34). This points to a final purpose of his continual literary productions: to rouse himself to action. As Weisberg says:

The play as a whole may be seen as an unsuccessful effort on Hamlet’s part to purge himself of the delusion that his pen or his tongue are suitable replacements for his sword. (p. 332)

Indeed, that soliloquy ends with the rousing words: “O, from this time forth | My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” But thoughts, and words, are passive—and can never, of themselves, cross the chasm that separates them from action. Again and again Hamlet uses his overdeveloped capacity for words to avoid and/or rouse himself to deeds. But what comes of this?

On the voyage to England, it is true, Hamlet seems to act bloodily and decisively. He discovers Claudius’ secret commission to the King of England to have him killed, and replaces it with one demanding the deaths of his friends-turned-informers, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Although not explicitly stated, it seems highly unlikely that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were aware of the sealed contents of the letter (why would the king entrust them with this knowledge when he didn’t have to?). Apart from this, their only crime is to have attempted to find out what was afflicting Hamlet’s spirit and to alleviate it—at the secret behest of the king, yes, but a king they could not know was a murderous usurper, and for the sake of a friend who was deliberately pretending to be out of his mind. The cruelty of Hamlet’s action seems out of all proportion to the situation.

We see something similarly excessive in his treatment of Ophelia, whom he apparently loved. At best, he realizes she is being used by the king and Polonius, and this seeming betrayal fuels his wrath against her. Shakespeare hints at this. But even then, does he assume her intent is to harm him? She knows as little about the king’s true nature as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

Hamlet lashes out against those he can lash out at—anyone who has some association with the real object of his anger, whom he never utters a clear and direct word of rebuke to until the very end. His explosive resentment wounds the mind of his beloved and takes the lives of his friends. The nearest he comes to actually revenging himself on Claudius, it is in a sudden moment of passion, stabbing a man behind a curtain—who turns out to be Polonius. Because he avoids the justified act of retribution, and despite his resort to words, words, words, Hamlet wreaks much tragic and avoidable havoc.

Dionysian Man

It was Nietzsche who coined the term ressentiment, at least in the sense it’s used here. And he also had something to say, quite explicitly, about Hamlet—though what he wrote might seem to be in a certain tension with what I’ve claimed so far. This is what he wrote in The Birth of Tragedy, after describing the Dionysian state of ecstatic intoxication:

For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of existence contains, while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experiences of the past become immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will-negating mood is the fruit of these states.

In this sense the Dionysian man resembles Hamlet: both have once looked truly into the essence of things, they have gained knowledge, and nausea inhibits action; for their action could not change anything in the eternal nature of things; they feel it to be ridiculous or humiliating that they should be asked to set right a world that is out of joint. Knowledge kills action; action requires the veils of illusion: that is the doctrine of Hamlet, not that cheap wisdom of Jack the Dreamer who reflects too much and, as it were, from an excess of possibilities does not get around to action. Not reflection, no—true knowledge, an insight into the horrible truth, outweighs any motive for action, both in Hamlet and in the Dionysian man. (Section 7; p. 59–60)

Thus Hamlet feels the futility and absurdity of all particular things, of all particular actions. He has sensed beyond our myriad self-protective social illusions the one vast and boundlessly violent will of nature. His brilliant intellect perhaps once led him to this realization, or his passionate heart intuited it. Perhaps it was his love of music or of tragic plays. In any case, it was confirmed by the senseless death of his father and his senseless replacement by his uncle—on the throne of Denmark and in the bed of the queen. Hamlet knows it is not this specific time that is out of joint, but time itself. The world of ordinary human experience, in which the cosmic will is painfully divided and feeds on itself—this is the fundamental problem, and a problem that seems to admit of no solution within life. One can only ask: “To be or not to be—”

But this unbounded nausea at existence seems a little different from Hamlet’s individual resentment against Claudius for usurping his father and him. In fact, Nietzsche says that the Dionysian man sees truly into the essence of things. Indeed, ‘Dionysian’ is generally a very positive term in Nietzsche’s writing, standing in contrast to the highly negative term ‘Christian.’ Does Nietzsche’s stated view of Hamlet contradict my Nietzschean interpretation?

It’s not so simple here, though: The Birth of Tragedy was Nietzsche’s first book, and in it his philosophy was not yet fully developed. For a start, he had not yet developed his notion of ressentiment. The book was primarily concerned with explaining ancient Greek tragedy as the combination of Apollonian (dreamlike, form-giving) and Dionysian (intoxicated, form-dissolving) tendencies. In it, it is the combination the two that is affirmed; each by itself has its problems. Nietzsche’s translator Kaufmann notes that in his later work the term ‘Dionysian’ signifies something different: namely, the life-affirming combination of Dionysian and Apollonian, in contrast to the life-denying Christian tendency which is alien to it (p. 20).

So when Nietzsche talks about Hamlet as the ‘Dionysian man’ in Birth of Tragedy, it is far from an unconditional endorsement of Hamlet’s perspective. Hamlet has something that the more superficial men around him lack, a certain insight into the essence of reality; but he lacks something too, something that renders his insight more dangerous than beneficial.

In his late work Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche writes:

...judgments and valuations of life, whether for or against, cannot be true: their only value lies in the fact that they are symptoms; they can be considered only as symptoms – per se such judgments are nonsense. (p. 11–12)

How could one estimate the value of life? Nietzsche says the person who would try to do so “is a contending party, or rather the very object in the dispute.” The condemnation of life says more about the person who makes that judgment than it does about life itself. Even the Dionysian insight doesn’t have to lead to life-denial; it could instead lead to the greatest affirmation of life. For Schopenhauer, who had a very similar insight and whose philosophy heavily influenced Nietzsche, it indeed led to the condemnation of life. But even for the early Nietzsche of Birth of Tragedy, the same insight had the opposite significance (indeed, the book can be seen as his breaking with Schopenhauer). How this could be became, in a sense, the whole Nietzschean project.

The book asks: how were the ancient Greeks able to affirm life so well, while having “looked boldly right into the terrible destructiveness of so-called world history as well as the cruelty of nature, and being in danger of longing for a Buddhistic negation of the will” (p. 59)? And it answers: because of their art; and preeminently, because of their art of tragedy.

Nietzsche believed there was great significance in the fact that the art of tragedy—that magnificent complex of music and drama—arose out of a simple chorus cast as satyrs. Satyrs were jubilant, playful, sexually potent creatures, part-human and part-animal, devotees of Dionysus. In the presence of this chorus, says Nietzsche, “the Greek man of culture felt himself nullified”:

...the gulfs between man and man give way to an overwhelming feeling of unity leading back to the very heart of nature. The metaphysical comfort—with which, I am suggesting even now, every true tragedy leaves us—that life is at the bottom of things, despite all the changes of appearances, indestructibly powerful and pleasurable—this comfort appears in incarnate clarity in the chorus of satyrs, a chorus of natural beings who live ineradicably, as it were, behind all civilization and remain eternally the same, despite the changes of generations and of the history of nations. (p. 59)

The actual drama of the tragedy—the words and action that occur on the stage—evolved as an Apollonian projection of the ecstatic Dionysian music of the satyr chorus. Even when choruses were no longer cast as satyrs, their function remained. Their song was an implicit affirmation of being, generating images and words that were beautiful in their very terribleness. It is in this condensation of Dionysian force into Apollonian form, combined with the fundamentally affirmative tone of the chorus, that the art of tragedy is healing rather than destructive.

“Art saves,” says Nietzsche (p. 59). To the Dionysian man nauseated with existence, “art approaches as a saving sorceress, expert at healing. She alone knows how to turn these nauseous thoughts about the horror or absurdity of existence into notions with which one can live: these are the sublime as the artistic taming of the horrible, and the comic as the artistic discharge of the nausea of absurdity” (p. 60).

So we can, at least potentially, know what Hamlet knows and say yes to the flux of becoming, to time perpetually out of joint, to life which in one sense is futile but in another sense “indestructibly powerful and pleasurable.” The artistic perspective, the Greek tragic perspective, brings us to this. We can therefore act, can decisively play our part in existence.

Now, Hamlet loves art—and in particular, it seems, tragedies. In an article titled Dionysus in the Mirror: Hamlet as Nietzsche's Dionysian Man, Timothy Pyles argues that Hamlet finds in art the healing that allows him to affirm life and finally act. When he sees the actor weeping for the Trojan queen Hecuba, he realizes Hecuba is just as fictive or illusory as the world in general and that:

…the only way to genuinely participate in such a fictive world, the only way to act in such a world of illusion, is to in essence play along. In order for Hamlet to take action and escape his Dionysian paralysis, he must learn to play his role in this world of appearances; he must convert his thoughts and actions, his very self, into an Apollonian representation. And it is the stage that affords this recognition, and thus, ultimately, this comfort. For, in the end, ‘What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba?’ [II.ii.569]. Why, nothing more than Hamlet’s father is to him, or he to his father; all such relationships, because all are grounded in individuation, are illusory. (A136)

For Pyles, the play Hamlet pivots around the play-within-the-play, The Murder of Gonzago or The Mousetrap that Hamlet stages to catch Claudius’ conscience. Pyles claims that in this artistic representation of his own situation he is finally spurred to action. His first action following the play is to confront Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, “directly, accusing them of lying and of debasing him” (A138). And yet, I would say, it’s not so direct after all: he continues to feign madness, and uses a metaphor (“You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops…”) rather than explicitly accusing them.

His next decisive action, says Pyles, is the murder of Polonius:

...it is this act—this ecstatic, brutal, Bacchic act—that finally and totally redeems his Dionysian mind. This is an action so decisive, so extreme and deliberate, that it is impossible to imagine Hamlet having committed to it before this moment; that is, before his experience observing the performance of the players. Hamlet has been unshackled by the representation of his state, on the stage, to finally act. (A139)

But it is not a decisive, deliberate act, to which Hamlet ‘committed,’ precisely because it is ecstatic, brutal, and Bacchic. In a sudden rage he kills a man behind a curtain, and doesn’t even know who he is killing. Moments earlier (though still after the play) he lets his opportunity to deliberately kill the king slip. Pyles is mistaken: this is just the same Hamlet as before.

So why does art not cure Hamlet of his nausea at existence and his inaction? Perhaps this is because it depends, ultimately, on the individual will. Just as thoughts and words of themselves can never cross the chasm separating them from action, art can soothe and inspire but never of itself cause the individual to affirm life and act within it. In fact, because of its soothing and inspiring qualities, it can actually distract from this. Hamlet uses art like he uses words—as a substitute for life and action. The Mousetrap probably is just as much for his own immediate benefit as it is a means for catching out Claudius: he must see his tragic and senseless situation aesthetically—made sublime—and see also, perhaps, how it is avenged. But as we have seen, it doesn’t suffice to stir him to decisive action. His pessimism and despondency remain, he avoids killing the king, and the events of the play Hamlet only accelerate due to his hasty and confused slaying of Polonius. Perhaps he could have used the The Mousetrap’s inspiration to take a more affirmative and proactive stance—but chose not to.

But why would he choose not to? Here we again encounter Hamlet’s ressentiment. The Dionysian man is nauseated by particular action because of a true awareness of being; but Hamlet also resents existence because of his very particular situation. His resentment against being is not simply due to some ecstatic intuition, but stems from the poison of personal frustration—at the unacknowledged core of which is his own shunting from the kingship by Claudius. Hamlet wants revenge, and this thwarted desire finds an outlet in denigrating existence in general, which in turn paralyses him further—if existence is essentially horrible, unfair and absurd, what is the point of a particular act of retribution?

In short, it is Hamlet’s ressentiment that fuels and perpetuates his Dionysian paralysis. He could move beyond it into an artistic–affirmative stance which denies nothing of the Dionysian insight into being, but to do this he would have to sacrifice his resentment against being, acknowledge the nature of his resentment against Claudius, and overcome whatever cowardice he has.

Man Unlimited?

Harold Bloom saw it differently. In his books Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human and then Hamlet: Poem Unlimited he praises Hamlet to the skies. “Consciousness is his salient characteristic,” says Bloom in the first book. “He is the most aware and knowing figure ever conceived” (p. 404). And a little later:

Hamlet, as a character, bewilders us because he is so endlessly suggestive. Are there any limits to him? His inwardness is his most radical originality; the ever-growing inner self, the dream of an infinite consciousness, has never been more fully portrayed. (p. 416)

I wouldn’t argue against Hamlet being a character of great consciousness and inwardness; he clearly is. But I believe these qualities are intertwined with his ressentiment, and because of this, have very definite limits. He uses awareness, even self-awareness, as he uses art and words—all of these are (apart from the value they have in themselves) an evasion of action and a substitute for it. And his ressentiment warps his consciousness; exactly how self-aware is he? As mentioned before, his first soliloquy is silent about what must have then been his main complaint against Claudius: that he stole the throne from him. Likewise, his ressentiment warps his view of Ophelia and his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, so that he ends up treating all of them with shocking cruelty.

Yet he certainly has some self-awareness. Thus he continually berates himself for avoiding what he swore to do. With sometimes more, sometimes less acuity, he knows that action is needed, the nature of that action, and that he is avoiding it. And this, I think, is why he never gives way to that full-blown value-inversion that Nietzsche talked so much about. A slave revolt in Hamlet’s aristocratic values would look something like this: I should not kill or depose the king; I do not want to be king and do not want retribution; instead, I will remain passive victim, innocent and harmless and unresisting—and thus be morally superior to him, thus get the better of him! But it never comes to this. If Hamlet distorts the natural order of values, it is by elevating words above action, rejecting his love for Ophelia, and denigrating the splendor of existence.

And yet, there does appear a strange transformation in his character in Act V, when he returns to the Danish court after escaping the English execution arranged for him by Claudius (and knowing full well of it):

By returning, he has no options beyond killing or being killed. The same mob that followed Laertes could more readily be summoned by the prince, beloved of the people, according to Claudius’s earlier, rueful admission. Yet Hamlet entertains no such prospects. Power is there, whenever he chooses to take it, but he no longer desires to be king. (Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, p. 86)

And yet it is in the midst of Act V, right before he is challenged to the duel with Laertes, that Hamlet repeats his intention to kill the king (“to quit him with this arm”) and at last explicitly admits that he has “popped in between th’ election and my hopes” (V.ii.65). Hamlet still desires to be king.

Yet there is something changed about him. Bloom calls this “a stance that is indescribable: call it quietism, disinterestedness, wise passivity, or what one will” (ibid., p. 141). We see this as he departs for the duel, knowing he may very well be going to his death.

Horatio. If your mind dislike anything, obey it. I will forestall their repair hither and say you are not fit.

Hamlet. Not a whit, we defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now, if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is’t to leave betimes? Let be. (V.ii.220–225)

Bloom understands this as a kind of Nietzschean affirmation of fate, the creative transformation of time’s “It was” into “Thus I willed it!” (see Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Pt. II, Of Redemption). But the imagery is Christian, referring to the words of Jesus: “Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father” (Matthew 10:29).

Hamlet’s transformation is, I think, neither Nietzschean nor Christian, but really just a continuation of his ressentiment in a different mode. He still has no plan for deposing the king, and yet, at the very end, he does kill him. He dies neither an innocent lamb nor a bold and decisive hero. What has changed is his self-conception, his words, his language. Commenting on these lines, Weisberg observes:

Rather it seems to me probable that the speech signifies a continuation of ressentient inactivity, a replacement of one literature for another in Hamlet’s persistent desire to be mediated by literary norms in dealing with Claudius […] Hamlet is not choosing faith, any more than he is choosing action. He is merely investing a new set of words with the responsibility to motivate him to a vengeance which he has long considered proper. This new vocabulary, this transposition from Greek to Christian metaphor is no more than literary ressentiment re-articulated. (335–336)

Even the act of finally killing the king is basically reactive and prompted by words:

...he seems in the end to drift into the vengeance, needing even in the midst of the duel scene’s ensuing carnage the shock of Laertes’ dying words (a final literary mediation?) “The King, the King’s to blame” to stumble toward the long-awaited deed. (336)

In appearing to embrace passivity, the Hamlet of Act V comes closer than ever to an inversion of his noble values. But in the final scene, paradoxically, we see flashes of his native nobility. He apologizes to Laertes, then forgives him as he lies dying. He fights honestly, valiantly, and, true to Claudius’ prediction, never inspects the foils. Indeed, his very return to Elsinore is heroic—he could easily have fled elsewhere when he learned of the king’s first plot to kill him. He strives to act yet resists this at the same time; all the while his resentment burns within him and warps his consciousness—however vast it grows.

Man of Conscience?

So far, I’ve assumed that some form of retributive action against Claudius is good, is the right thing to do. It certainly accords with the ethos of his noble upbringing and position. In this case, his hesitation can only be viewed as a failure. However, in his article Hamlet’s Dull Revenge, René Girard disputes this: Hamlet’s reluctance to avenge his father is really his great virtue; his failure is that he doesn’t go far enough and renounce revenge completely.

According to Girard, Hamlet is a play split against itself: on the surface it is a revenge tragedy, providing thrill and catharsis for common theatergoers rooting for revenge; on a deeper level, however, it is a denunciation of the whole genre and reality of revenge. In his reading, Hamlet’s intended revenge against his father’s killer would just be one link in a long chain of revenge killings. It would not only be destructive, but futile. At the same time, it is absolutely what is expected of him by his social milieu—and by his audience. Hamlet half-consciously intuits the evil and futility of revenge and struggles against his play to avoid it.

But at the same time, he seeks it. He cannot give it up completely. And so Hamlet himself is split against himself. This leads to his “dull revenge”—the sick revenge within him, whose symptoms:

…always resemble that unnameable paralysis of the will, that ineffable corruption of the spirit that affect not only Hamlet, but the other characters as well. The devious ways of these characters, the bizarre plots they hatch, their passion for watching without being watched, their propensity to voyeurism and spying, the general disease of human relations make a good deal of sense as a description of an undifferentiated no man’s land between revenge and no revenge in which we are still living. (p. 296)

We are in this situation due to the “Judeo-Christian ferment” begun by the Bible, which ultimately rejects violence and revenge and exposes the dynamics of victimization, by which the innocent Messiah was put to death. Even as secular people, we cannot shake this awareness, and yet we cannot definitively renounce revenge. Given this dilemma, Hamlet resorts to ‘strategy’:

Thanks to the notion of strategy, men can postpone revenge indefinitely without ever giving it up. They are equally terrified by both radical solutions and they go on living as long as possible, if not forever, in the no man’s land of sick revenge. (p. 297)

‘Sick revenge,’ I would say, looks a lot like ressentiment. But while the latter stems from weakness or cowardice, the former stems from genuine moral awareness. Both rob us of the release of poisonous feelings through direct action. The question is: which of these does Hamlet suffer from?

In his article, Girard notes:

It cannot be without a purpose that Shakespeare suggests the old Hamlet, the murdered king, was a murderer himself. […] However nasty Claudius may look, he cannot look nasty enough if he appears in a context of previous revenge; he cannot generate, as a villain, the absolute passion and dedication demanded of Hamlet. The problem with Hamlet is that he cannot forget the context. (p. 283)

But what is this context? I cannot find where Shakespeare suggests the old Hamlet was a murderer. He was a warrior, in which capacity he “smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.” He fought the King of Norway in single combat, openly and lawfully, and won. His ghost must walk the night and fast in fires (i.e. endure purgatory) until “the foul crimes done in my days of nature | Are burnt and purged away”—but are these crimes murders? Does one go to purgatory and not to hell for unrepented murders?

And in any case, what had he done to Claudius? Shakespeare gives no indication King Hamlet had harmed him, except by being the rightful king and Gertrude’s husband. Where, then, is the long chain of revenge in which the younger Hamlet will be just another link?

With this, I think, Girard’s reading of Hamlet falls apart. Hamlet’s sickness started before he learned about his father’s murder: it is present in his first soliloquy, when Claudius’ only crime against him is to have been elected king instead of him, just as the elder Hamlet’s only crime was to have been king instead of Claudius. But, as Hamlet learns from the ghost (and as is confirmed for us by Claudius’ prayer)—Claudius murdered King Hamlet and usurped the throne. From the moment he knows this, he knows he is justified in acting, that it is in fact his duty to act.

He tries various means to rouse himself to this. One thing I agree with Girard about is the importance of mimesis. Hamlet repeatedly tries to catch enthusiasm for his cause from others. One wonders to what extent his attempt to turn Gertrude against Claudius is because her shift in attitude would strengthen his own resolve. A more obvious example is Laertes, outraged son of a slain father. Hamlet’s imitation of his grief reaches an absurd pitch at Ophelia’s grave, and shortly after he accepts Laertes’ invitation to duel. One is driven to mimic one’s enemy. Weisberg suggests that Hamlet also envies Claudius—not just because he is king, but because he can act decisively, and is a better actor than him (he plays his part better than Hamlet can play his). He maintains it is not only his resentment, but also this repressed envy, that poisons Hamlet’s mind.

Conclusions

For Girard, Hamlet represents all of us, in the midst of a long and awkward transformation from a pagan to a truly Christian moral consciousness. As Justin Murphy remarked, Hamlet is man ‘in-between’ pagan and Christian, torn in two, unable to properly avail himself of the virtues of either.

Hamlet has a strange relationship with Christianity. On the one hand, the play is steeped in it: it provides the basis for the purgatorial ghost of Hamlet’s father (or the demon masquerading as him, if we prefer to read it this way); Claudius prays, and tries—but fails—to repent; Hamlet quotes scripture in the final scene. On other hand, Hamlet seems to drift beyond it. He continually espouses or assumes a kind of nihilism. Despite having spoken with a spirit that was witnessed by others, the notion that death might not be oblivion occurs to him during his ‘To be, or not to be’ soliloquy only as a second thought: “To sleep—perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub” (III.i.65; italics mine). When he is dying, his words are stubbornly unreligious.

I propose that, rather than being pre-Christian, Hamlet could just as easily be seen as post-Christian. Rather than being stuck between a pagan ethos he’s abandoned and a Christian ethos he hasn’t fully embraced, we can see him as stuck between a Christian and Nietzschean view of reality, as sunk in that nihilism that marks the transition from the one to the other. As Nietzsche suggested, he sees the futility of all things—not just of revenge—and this paralyzes him. He cannot embrace his role in life, or forge himself a new one. He cannot play a part in an existence that seems ultimately meaningless. This fuels his resistance to his surroundings and himself; it fuels our sense that he resists the very play he is in.

My thesis is that it’s ressentiment—not genuine moral rejection of revenge—that leads Hamlet to this impasse. Instead of taking action against Claudius and relieving himself of his toxic feelings, he lets these feelings poison his view of the world, until he comes to see all being as pointless and evil. It’s his ressentiment that leads him to the Dionysian realization and that colors his experience of it. For the fact that everyday life in the world is dwarfed by the vast heedless force of the cosmos itself is amenable to multiple interpretations. For a Schopenhauer, it can imply the ultimate negation of life’s value; for a Nietzsche, its ultimate affirmation. Hamlet could have gone the Nietzschean route, avenging his father (or decisively taking any other stance) while affirming life as a joyful and sublime, ultimately tragic play. But, I propose, it’s his ressentiment that stops him. He wants to be embittered; his ressentiment has progressed so far that he wants to convict life itself. To embrace life and act decisively would be to let this go, to realize his own will to power and the extent to which its frustration has warped his awareness.

Hamlet seems to have an ever-growing consciousness because this is where ressentiment flows when it cannot find an outlet in action. Thoughts and words and representations. He resonates with us and seems to represent us because we (many of us) share in his affliction. The person given to intellectual pursuits has a similar propensity to escape into thoughts and words rather than asserting himself in the world. This can be okay, if we are free of envy and vengeance toward the world, or at least recognize and deal with that which we do have. But it can be disastrous if we let it spiral into ressentiment. Weisberg concludes that we love Hamlet because “of the articulation by him of every literary individual’s peculiar problems in a political world” (p. 337). I’m reminded, too, of Justin’s remark that Horatio is the real unsung hero. For Bloom, “actually we are Horatio, Hamlet’s perpetual audience, which is why Horatio is in the play” (Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, p. 13).

This has been a rather Nietzschean interpretation of Hamlet. I should say that I’m not fully wedded to all of it. I’m not sure the Dionysian insight has been rightly characterized, either by a pessimist like Schopenhauer or a vitalist like Nietzsche, or that it even represents the final truth. I’m not sure that Christianity necessarily leads to nihilism or that nihilism yields to Nietzschean life-affirmation. And I wouldn’t simply identify Christianity with ressentiment, as Nietzsche does. There has been an overtly ‘noble’ Christianity—this is, indeed, the Christianity of when and where Hamlet is set. And even the self-giving radicalism of the earliest Christians can be seen as a noble generosity flowing from a felt superabundance, as Scheler pointed out in his book on Ressentiment.

I don’t think Girard is wrong to lament endless cycles of revenge, or the violence of unjust victimization. But to lament all violence? This becomes problematic because, as is obvious from the slightest acquaintance with it, biological life is constituted by violence (I’ve explored this problem more fully elsewhere). To accept or reject violence in this maximal sense thus quickly becomes ‘to be or not to be?’

The right question therefore seems to be: what violence is justified, and when? And with this I turn to the final topic I want to explore: what should Hamlet have done?

The most obvious option is kill Claudius—strike him down in retribution for his unjust murder of Hamlet’s father. Perhaps in secret, as he almost did when Claudius was praying. But this is not the only option. Hamlet could also, potentially, depose the king and put him on trial. Upon hearing of his own father’s death, Laertes is able to summon a mob and successfully storm the palace. Hamlet, adored by the people, would presumably be even more successful. Is there no evidence of Claudius’ crime? But there must be some; the play doesn’t show us Hamlet running around, making inquiries. Did Claudius tell no one of his plot? Did no one witness it, or its preparation? If he won Gertrude before the murder, did no one know of her adultery? Even to accuse the king, before the court and the people, even without deposing him—this would be an action noble, decisive, and just. And finally, if he has no other options, he may flee Claudius’ tyranny and return with a liberating army, as Malcolm does in Macbeth.

And he may, of course, freely renounce retribution and forgive. Though strictly speaking, if Claudius never repents, Hamlet can never forgive (what is one doing if one ‘forgives’ someone who isn’t even sorry?). Nevertheless, he may renounce retribution. But what would be motivating this? It’s actually surprising, given the Christian background of the play, that Hamlet doesn’t appeal to a Christian renunciation of revenge to avoid his duty. If motivated by his unacknowledged ressentiment, this would simply be its full fruition into an inversion of values. If he acknowledged his ressentiment and felt himself fully capable of taking vengeance and still renounced it out of love for something higher—that is a different story. That too is a genuine option.

But Hamlet does none of these. Though he gets his retribution in the end, it is at the cost of his own life and six others—deaths that could have been avoided had he acted with prudent yet decisive courage, one way or another. He could have justly purged the state of the evil Claudius and reigned long as a wise and just king. Even at the revenge-renouncing extreme, he could have lived (however long), wise and just, purged of his ressentiment, blessing the world rather than cursing it.

But, on the other hand, all that would have robbed us of a marvelous tragedy. In the end when the bold young Fortinbras arrives to claim the kingdom, as the bodies are removed and the guns blast their final salute—we can perhaps hear the immortal laughter and song of the satyrs.

References

Bloom. H. (1998). Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. Riverhead Books.

Bloom, H. (2003). Hamlet: Poem Unlimited. Riverhead Books.

Nietzsche, F. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner (1967 W. Kaufmann translation). Random House.

Shakespeare, W. The Tragedy of Hamlet, King of Denmark (1963 Signet Classic edition). New American Library.

Footnotes

* If you’re an independent writer or thinker, I’d highly recommend joining this! There are regular live discussions on the Great Books, and unlimited opportunities to exchange ideas (theoretical and practical), inspiration, or work with others.

** This is a neologism, the adjective for ressentiment, used in Weisberg’s article and by Friedenberg and Gold before him (see his footnote 16).