A correlative is a thing mutually related to another thing. A subjective correlative is a thing a particular subject thinks is mutually related to some other thing. An objective correlative is a thing which different subjects would, as a matter of 'common knowledge', consider to be mutually related to one particular thing. There is an 'uncorrelated asymmetry' regarding which a 'public signal' exists.
Suppose I like Mary. Subjectively, she is my girl. Sadly, you like her too. To you, she is your girl. Then she marries X. There is now an uncorrelated asymmetry- an objective correlation based on a public signal (viz. a Marriage Certificate) - such that there is only one person whose girl she is and that person is X.
In life, things are not always so cut and dried. Consider Ophelia. She likes Hamlet. Her father wants her to marry Hamlet. Hamlet is not averse to her but then suddenly he is tasked with killing his Uncle the King. His position has changed. He isn't in a position to have a girl. But, suppose Claudius has an accident and dies. Then there is no obstacle to the course of true love.
A dramatic situation is created where the tie between two or more people features a significant discrepancy between subjective and objective correlation. Tom loves Sally. Sally loves Tom. But they haven't been introduced. Tom thinks 'Sally is part of the management team. I am a lowly janitor. The only reason she keeps looking at me and smiling is because she has been brought up to be kind to underlings'. Sally thinks 'Tom is so handsome. Also he donated the kidney which saved my mother's life. I sought him out to thank him but when I looked into his eyes I found I was tongue tied. I wish I could declare my love to him. As soon as I turn 21, I will inherit billions on condition that I am married. Since Tom seems indifferent to me, I suppose I will have to wed Count Bluebeard. True, all his other brides died on the honeymoon night but maybe the 30th time is the charm!'
In this case, subjective and objective correlation can be brought into alignment easily enough. This is a subject for romantic comedy or, at worst melodrama. But, what if the thing is fundamentally impossible- as in Sartre's 'Huis Clos' ? In that case, you may have tragedy of a philosophic kind because underlying it is an 'open' problem in mathematics or physics.
In condensed matter physics, geometrical frustration is a phenomenon where the combination of conflicting inter-atomic forces leads to complex structures because the 'natural' or 'least action' path is not accessible for a structural reason. In Systems or Mechanism design, something analogous might arise by reason of concurrency deadlock or live-lock or a particular type of impredicativity- i.e. one thing, normally the condition for the other thing, has to wait upon it though itself being waited upon. In both cases, an element of indeterminacy is introduced. Will some exogenous shock resolve it? Or will there be a cycling between almost degenerate states such that new and more complex behaviour is emergent?
As Hellenized Judaism crystalized into Christianity, an emergent soteriological aspect of Greek tragedy- e.g. the transformation of savage Erinyes into Civic Eumenides- reappeared in the liturgy of the Eucharist. Oscar Wilde, in De Profundis, wrote - 'it is always a source of pleasure and awe to me to remember that the ultimate survival of the Greek chorus, lost elsewhere to art, is to be found in the servitor answering the priest at Mass.'
Wilde, of course, was wrong. Audience participation in Pantomime productions was a mid-nineteenth century innovation. Moreover, if the Eucharist is Greek then the play must be Euripides' 'Bacchae'.
Still, we must remember Wilde, like Hamlet, was a Collidge man- i.e. a verbose shithead who blighted his own life by twisting, on his too ready tongue, what were actually the journalistic platitudes of a previous age so they might bear the meretricious semblance of antinomian paradox.
Consider the following-
“I know of nothing in all drama more incomparable from the point of view of art, nothing more suggestive in its subtlety of observation, than Shakespeare's drawing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Hamlet is a College graduate who, merely as matter of bon ton, parades a fashionable world-weariness but, when stirred to action, he proceeds expeditiously enough. So does Laertes. They are young men of good families who will soon shake off the affectations of an expensive education. Rosencrantz and Guilderstern are of a different class- sizars, I suppose, we may call them- keen to climb by being of service to those who most hold them in contempt.
Hamlet, it must be said, has the native wit to shake off these undesirable acquaintances in a somewhat brutal fashion. Thus, they end up serving his turn.
They are Hamlet's college friends. They have been his companions.
As Falstaff had been Prince Hal's. But Falstaff had red blood in his veins. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are bloodless. No sin attaches to contriving their deaths.
They bring with them memories of pleasant days together.
No. Hamlet suspects they have been sent for. Why? He had mentioned them previously. Perhaps they were 'big men on campus'. Equally, they might have been Teacher's pets. If Mum asks who your friends are, these are the names you can safely offer up. When she finds your spank mags and goes to see the Principal, it is those unctuous lads she will name as your corrupters.
At the moment when they come across him in the play he is staggering under the weight of a burden intolerable to one of his temperament.
Whereas a more phlegmatic fellow would take conversations with Daddy's ghost in his stride. Murdering his Uncle, he would fit in between a cricket match and a dentist's appointment.
The dead have come armed out of the grave to impose on him a mission at once too great and too mean for him.
He has to verify the information he has received through what admittedly was a highly irregular channel. The arrival of Rosencrantz & Guildenstern is opportune only because a theatre troupe will soon arrive. Hamlet's sudden enthusiasm for theatre direction can be ascribed to their influence. In other words, Hamlet shows 'kairotic' skill or virtuosity in turning whatever comes to hand to his own advantage. Moreover, he is methodical. First there is verification of Claudius's guilt. But, what if he was led on by Gertrude? Men can be very obtuse in such matters. His own father may be deluded about her loyalty to him. Hamlet, we may say, is a bit of a cad to press so hard upon his Mumsy. But there was the Son of another Father associated with a Holy Ghost who said 'τί ἐμοὶ καὶ σοί, γύναι" thus putting the Blessed Virgin firmly in her place.
He is a dreamer, and he is called upon to act.
This was a German availability cascade originating with Goethe & Schlegel. But Hamlet aint Richard II. He is the trickster hero of English folk-tale under the garb of an insufferably affected 'University wit'.
He has the nature of the poet,
like Sir Walter Raleigh? Back then 'poet' didn't necessarily mean 'big girl's blouse'.
and he is asked to grapple with the common complexity of cause and effect,
No. He proves that a play- as the mimesis of a suspected action- can reveal the guilt of the suspect. He doesn't just understand cause and effect but contrives a complicated cause to bring about the desired effect. In folk-lore, Hamlet was a clever trickster. Goethe & Schlegel & so forth were talking about the plight of the young educated German who, unlike his English counterpart, couldn't get rich and marry his sweetheart or else fuck off to the colonies where it didn't matter if you grew rich and wedding your sweetheart was no guarantee she'd turn into a shrew.
with life in its practical realisation, of which he knows nothing, not with life in its ideal essence, of which he knows so much.
Fuck off! Back then, nobody talked of 'ideal essences'. For Hamlet, his body is a machine.
He has no conception of what to do, and his folly is to feign folly.
How so? He loses nothing by it. On the contrary, he gains time.
Brutus used madness as a cloak to conceal the sword of his purpose, the dagger of his will,
This is the legendary founder of Rome. Brutus means the same thing as Amlethus or Hamlet. Shakespeare reminds his audience of this parallelism.
but the Hamlet madness is a mere mask for the hiding of weakness.
Nope. Like Brutus, he is playing for time.
In the making of fancies and jests he sees a chance of delay.
No. He sees a chance to expeditiously resolve the issue at hand- viz. whether the ghost is telling the truth.
He keeps playing with action as an artist plays with a theory.
No he doesn't. The period of feigned madness lasts about three months. During that period, Claudius has no incentive to have him killed while, as King, he himself remains the target of every ambitious hand.
He makes himself the spy of his proper actions, and listening to his own words knows them to be but 'words, words, words.'
Because Mummy sent him to Collidge not to the Military Camp. 'Hamlet' has pathos, but is primarily political. Its message is- better a soldier for a King than a fucking intellectual. A Kingdom can recover from the crisis of military defeat. Endless intrigue masked by fine words is that debilitating lysis which kills the spirit before the body can decay.
Instead of trying to be the hero of his own history, he seeks to be the spectator of his own tragedy.
That is Richard II saying 'let us sit upon the ground/ And tell sad stories of the death of kings'. It isn't Hamlet whose hamartia consisted of rashly stabbing at 'a rat in the arras', thus polluting himself with the blood of Polonius and, in bitter consequence, that of Ophelia and Laertes. We feel he is fortunate to die alongside that family he had hoped to increase.
Turning from Wilde to Santayana, we find the same insistence on viewing an English play through a gimcrack German lens.
The psychology of Hamlet is like that which some German metaphysicians have attributed to the Spirit of the World, which is the prey to its own perversity and to what is called romantic irony, so that it eternally pursues the good in a way especially designed never to attain it.
This is misleading. Socrates had spoken of the palinode, which changes direction mid-way, and of categorical thinking as being like using the oars when there is no wind to belly out the sails. Idealism must incorporate the notion that one may row in a different direction to your destination to compensate for the current or that, once a wind springs up, you may find an arc the shortest path between two points. More generally, there is no necessary connection between efficient and final causes. The mysterious economy of the Katechon may forever be concealed even when the veil lifts upon the Eschaton or Apocalypse.
In any case, by the time Santayana wrote this, the Marxists were convinced that only the Bourgeoisie was meant by such strictures. It was the unavoidable destiny of that class that in seeking its own aggrandizement or universalization, it would achieve only its extinction.
In Hamlet, as in them, beneath this histrionic duplicity and earnestness about the unreal, there is a very genuine pathos.
There is politics. Bad politics means lots of people dying. Hamlet's tricks are, if nothing else, 'kairotic', timely, in that they buy time so that an old, decaying order based on pouring poison into the porches of the ear, while Polonius proses on, can, at one stroke, be swept away, and the Crown can pass by election to a worthy successor.
Hamlet was first performed at a time when there were games at Court in which plays- or, indeed, plays within plays within plays- might serve a prudential, if not purgative, purpose.
Such brilliant futility is really helpless and sick at heart.
Hamlet isn't futile. In nine months he brings down the old order. A different Dynasty, untainted by Regicide- that too of a fratricidal kind- can lead the Nation. Such things had happened in England's past and would occur again.
The clouded will which plays with all these artifices of thought would fain break its way to light and self-knowledge through this magic circle of sophistication.
It does so. Hamlet is able to verify the Ghost's testimony. That's the 'objective correlative' of the play- thanks to the play within it.
It is the tragedy of a soul buzzing in the glass prison of a world which it can neither escape nor understand,
and thus not a fucking tragedy at all. Did Santayana weep for goldfish? They don't have the memory span to know that they but flit about a small bowl rather than a vast lake. Buzzing flies, it is true, are notorious for their long memories and eloquent pleas to be released from glass jars. The fact is there is an important lecture on recent breakthroughs in algebraic topology that they are due to give at the Royal Society. It is beyond all comprehension why they should be confined in an empty jam jar by a grinning five year old.
in which it flutters about without direction, without clear hope, and yet with many a keen pang, many a dire imaginary problem,
not imaginary at all. If Uncle poisoned Daddy, what's to stop him doing away with you?
and much exquisite music.
This may be true of a prose poem by Mallarme about the afternoon of a faun who put down Rutgers as his safety school but now wonders whether the grass is safe to eat there. It has nothing to do with a rattling good play featuring a scary ghost and a smashing sword fight.
This morbid indirection of Hamlet's, in the given situation, yields the rest of the play.
Whatever shite it yielded back then wasn't stuff which Mel fucking Gibson would have starred in.
Its theme is a
guy who didn't get to inherit the throne from his Daddy. True the Danish Crown was elective at that period and he himself was abroad. Still, Mummy could have canvassed support for him. Instead she married Uncle. Isn't that against Canon Law? Fuck is going on here?
hidden crime met by a fantastic and incapable virtue.
Hamlet isn't virtuous. He's a sneaky bastard and all the better for it.
The hero's reaction takes various forms:
Nope. The author's depiction of the action of the play takes these forms. Why? This is a political play reflecting on England's recent history. Henry VIII had married his brother's wife. True, he had a Papal dispensation. But this raises the suspicion that 'the bride of Christ' might be no better than she ought to be. At a later point in the Seventeenth century, there was the question of how far the Church must go in submitting to her 'Governor' (i.e. the King). This is the undercurrent to Hamlet's interview with Gertrude.
his soliloquies and reflections, his moody and artful treatment of other persons, his plans and spurts of action.
Politics is 'kairotic'- i.e. everything hinges on timing. True, Hamlet can avenge his Father immediately. But if he ruins his Fatherland as a result, he does not live up to his own name. Some clever trick is expected of him. It may hold some smack of the grotesque- like propping up corpses to make the enemy think you have a big army- but, more importantly, the thing must serve its purpose.
In soliloquy Hamlet is much the same from the beginning to the end of the piece. His philosophy learns little from events and consequently makes little progress.
Philosophy has taught him Agrippa's trilemma on the first horn of which there is an infinite regress of casuistry , whereas the second involves circular reasoning or a cycling through mania, while the third is dogmatic credence accorded to the Logos of an Unholy Ghost.
The obvious solution, at least for the English, since about the time of Roger Bacon, is to focus on verification more particularly a set of independent verifications each confirming the other. That's what Hamlet achieves while throwing Claudius off the scent by babbling all sorts of modish bollocks.
When he has still nothing more portentous to disturb him than his father's death and his mother's marriage,
and his fucking exclusion from the fucking throne! Stuff like that matters. Ask Prince Harry.
he already wishes that his too, too solid flesh should melt, and that the Everlasting had not laid His canon against self-slaughter.
John Donne would publish Biathanatos- a justification of suicide- about seven or eight years later. Still, it must be said, at first blush, Hamlet is indeed the recent graduate affecting great world weariness and disdain for the ancestral Castle and the voluptuous chores imposed on Princes of the blood.
The uses of this world seem to him even then wholly weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable.
Coz Mummy didn't say 'vote for my son not my smelly brother-in-law who, let me tell you, has a really small dick. Why else do you think he doesn't have any sons of his own? My boy on the other hand has a massive shlong. Do you really want Denmark to be ruled by caterpillar-cock-Claudius rather than Hammer-dick Hamlet?'
This remains his habitual sentiment whenever he looks within, but he can meantime be won over at any moment to shrewd and satirical observation of things external. If the funeral baked meats coldly furnished forth the marriage tables, it is, he tells us, but thrift;
It is more. It is politics.
nor is his habit of mind at all changed when, at the point of highest tension in his adventures, he
displays the characteristics of the folk-hero for whom he is named. This is a guy who dug up corpses and dressed them as soldiers and propped them up to intimidate his English enemies. For the Celts, there was a more sinister aspect to this. The 'slogan' or battle cry was that of the crowd of resurrected warriors who joined their descendants when they attacked the enemy. Hamlet is a liminal figure- half brute and thus, like a dog, able to sense the presence of the dead.
Shakespeare, an English patriot who wished to spare his homeland the horrors of Civil War, Social Stasis, or Sectarian strife, makes Hamlet the gateway through which Elsinore steps out of an atmosphere of shadowy intrigue into a sunnier air where swords might flash but poison casts no pall.
stops to consider how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar, nor when, in a lull that precedes the last spasm of his destiny, he versifies the same theme: Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O, that the earth, which kept the world in awe, Should patch a wall to expel the winter's flaw!
That may be true of Caesar. His assassin, Brutus, killed himself. He burns in Hell. 'Winter's flaw' would be welcome there.
This satirical humour, touching melancholy with the sting of absurdity, crops up everywhere. "I am too much in the sun," he says, with a bitter and jocular obscurity.
It isn't obscure at all. By day he is a stepson who, to all appearances, is fondled and indulged. By night he has for father an unholy Ghost.
"He is at supper: not where he eats but where he is eaten; a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him."
As I said, this is a political play. Indeed, for all we know, the play within which it was a play, may have been richer in irony or riper in pathos.
Reason in young men is
either mathematical or meretricious
an accomplishment rather than a vital function, and may be allowed to play pranks with respectable ideas
so long as Daddy pays the College fees
and to seem capricious and even mad; but while enjoying this license and turning, as it were, somersaults in the air, reason remains by nature the organ of truth, and seizes every opportunity which its game affords to prick some sanctified bubble and aim some home-thrust at the foibles of the world
But such pricking is the foible of a cloistered world whose bubble bursts when the College silver is melted down for coin to pay mercenaries and the lead is stripped from the Chapel roof to make canon-balls.
This sort of youthful roguery has a fine sincerity about it;
provided battels are paid.
under the sparkle of paradox it shows a loyal heart and a tongue not yet suborned to the praising of familiar or necessary evils.
Because Daddy is paying your battels. It is a fine thing to be at College if everybody knows you will leave it to take over the family business. What isn't so fine is to leave it and find you have been supplanted. Worse, you have no fucking work skills. You will gather dust as a mere ornament in a utilitarian world. This is the 'objective correlative' of not inheriting your Daddy's job. People may say the new MD will do right by you- but will he?
Some German pedants or poets may have projected their own paltry ego into the speaker of some of Shakespeare's most sublime lines, but that is a subjective correlative of Hamlet of which we can only say that stunted intellects see nothing but their own dwarfishness as in a glass darkly. This is the other side of the coin of 'Adequation intellectus'.
Alas, it is the side that Eliot chose to give currency in his 'Hamlet & his problems' which begins with a startling lie
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by
artfully. But all expression is strategic, that is artful. As for emotions, perhaps they are Darwinian algorithms of the mind. But, unlike certain instinctual reflexes, they are exceedingly plastic. Moreover receptors and broadcasters for such expression are likely to obey the law of increasing functional information. In other words, if the thing fulfils a useful purpose, it will be more qualified or nuanced.
finding an “objective correlative”;
No. That has to do with fathoming 'motive' or 'means' or 'opportunity' or, more generally, the underlying structural causal model. It has nothing to do with emotions or the strategic manner in which they are expressed, suppressed or displaced.
Moreover, in art, it is the 'subjective correlatives' which add colour and interest to what objectively is plain enough. Young people have a drive to pair up and reproduce. That is the 'objective correlative' to a love triangle and it isn't very interesting. What is interesting is if X fancies Y & Y fancies Z & Z is devoted to X. Can there be a happy ending?
in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.
Thus, suppose you want Ophelia to express sadness and instruct the actress playing her to sob piteously, the piteous sobbing is the 'objective correlative' which causes the audience to understand that Ophelia isn't happy. The problem here is that emotions aren't objective. They are subjective. Suppose Hamlet is a fat slob. Fortinbras is handsome and has always carried a torch for Ophelia. Also, he is destined to be King. Hamlet is destined to die young. We don't feel grief as we see Ophelia sob. We feel relief. Let her have a good cry and get over her crush. She will find happiness soon enough in the arms of a worthier man.
What of Eliot's insistence that a unique formula- or objective correlative- must always exist. Is sobbing the only way we can get Ophelia to express grief? No. She could sing a song and drown herself or she could laugh hysterically and tear all her clothes off. Better yet, she can smile cheerfully and quit the stage holding her head up high till Hamlet's back is turned and we see it droop as she disappears into the shadows.
Does an emotion have a 'formula'? If so, there would be some unfailing means by which it could be duplicated. It is quite a different thing to say that there are conventional ways to express an emotion. The widow wears black because she is sad her husband has died. Except she isn't. She is happy. The convention has been upheld but the norm associated with it hasn't. This is dramatic. It is the stuff of art.
If you examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact equivalence;
only if you are as stupid as shit.
you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions;
No. It has been hammered into you by the dialogue not to mention your own natural expectations. First there is the interchange between the Doctor and the gentlewoman of the bed-chamber who tells him her Lady, while sleepwalking, is constantly rubbing her hands as if to wash them. Then the woman herself appears and rubs her hands and says- 'out out damn spot!' We understand that she feels polluted by the blood of Duncan.
These are not 'sensory impressions'. They are verbal information backed up by visual evidence. The woman really is trying to wash her hands. Apparently, she thinks there is a spot of blood on one of them. This appears to cause her anxiety. Why? She feels killing Duncan was a wicked thing to do.
the words of Macbeth on hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the series.
No. We agree that 'she should have died hereafter'. After all, her part was good. Something more could have been milked from the 'fourth witch'.
The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion;
Nonsense! We feel that if the King indicated he wanted to see more of the fourth witch, her ghost would have happily obliged.
and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet.
Shakespeare had written history plays and knew that tragedy is more philosophic than history precisely because nothing is inevitable; even the Past can be changed. Hamlet exceeds Macbeth for the simple reason that the Scots, like the Welsh, or the Irish, were supposed by the English to have certain qualities unlike their own. By contrast, in distant Denmark, in a cerebral, University educated, Prince, the intellectually inclined Elizabethan courtier might see an image not merely of himself but of the manner in which the very brilliance of his gifts might conspire against him.
The other aspect of 'Hamlet' which gave it a special interest to its audience was its depiction of a widow marrying her husband's brother- as had Henry VIII. Did a dispensation from a pliable Pope really make a difference? Whichever answer you chose, it had potential for great mischief. Perhaps, the safer course was to say whoever wore the crown was the legitimate ruler. The alternative was factional struggle and periodic Civil War. For this reason, depicting Regicide on the stage was repugnant. Shakespeare finds a clever workaround for this problem in Hamlet and manages to end on a note flattering to the new Dynasty.
Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible,
No. It is too easily expressible, which is why he has to guard his tongue.
because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.
The ghost appears to some people but not to others- e.g. Gertrude. Is it, or is it not an objective rather than a subjective correlative? If it is objective, why does it not appear in open court to denounce Claudius? More to the point, why haunt Hamlet rather than the villain?
Hamlet is a scholar. He understands that Truth is the agreement of thing and intellect (adequatio rei et intellectus). The problem is, not everybody has the same high level of nous or prohairesis- i.e. the predisposition to be receptive to the truth. Thus there can be no 'common knowledge' or 'Aumann agreement' or 'Muth Rational' solution to Denmark's problem. This is the 'geometrical frustration' built into politics. It is the driver of the hysteresis that makes for History. Brilliant-too-brilliant Princes were a cure worse than the disease. A plain speaking soldier might resolve matters in a manner that laid unquiet spirits to rest more effectually.
And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent to his feelings
the objective equivalent is knifing Uncle. That's not baffling at all.
The trouble is Hamlet is educated enough to know Agrippa's trilemma. Either he surrenders to an infinite regress of ratiocinative eloquence, or he continues to cycle in mania, or he places dogmatic faith in a particularly unholy Ghost who claims him as his son.
is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face of his artistic problem.
The problem was 'suspension of disbelief' or, more drastically, the boredom of the audience who might want Hamlet to just get busy with his knife already. What solved it was superb dialogue and soliloquies.
Hamlet is up against the difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for it;
The obvious question is whether she egged on her lover to the ghastly sin of fratricide. It turns out, she didn't. Also, nobody seems to have heard about the Canon Law forbidding a widow from marrying her brother-in-law. The other point is that had she not married again, Hamlet's claim to the throne would be stronger as, effectively, his Uncle would have been his Regent while he was studying abroad.
his disgust envelops and exceeds her.
I suppose Eliot is referring to Hamlet's seeming aversion to Ophelia. But, that is mere seeming. Hamlet's hamartia, his tragic flaw, is vehemence in verbosity which inevitably leads to a rash stabbing at 'rats'. Still, we understand that a Polonius- who would be an ornament to a City guild or Counting House- is out of place in Court. Rather than advancing his children there, he dooms them along with himself. Ophelia should not have looked so high for a groom. Laertes, educated in Paris, should not have thought he could shake the foundations of the State. It is obvious that Claudius will dispose of him after he disposes of Hamlet.
It is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action.
Hamlet is in the position of Orestes who went mad after killing his mother. Hamlet merely feigns madness because, absent the act, his Erinyes are imaginary.
None of the possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him.
Nope. The 'frustrated geometry' of Hamlet is resolved neatly enough. The problem of showing regicide on the stage is removed because Gertrude dies and, it may be, Claudius's claim to the throne dies with her. Hamlet kills an arrant traitor before himself dying. The country gets the king it needs- a plain speaking man of action rather than an intriguer or an intellectual.
The mythopoeic element, for the English, in Hamlet has to do with the story of how, as an invader, he had used the ruse of propping up his own dead soldiers on the battlefield so as to appear to command a larger army. This resonates with ancient ideas of long dead warriors rising up again. The word 'slogan'- from the Gaelic for 'battle-cry'- was, it is said, originally the roar of the horde of the undead. When raised, your ancestors materialized to fight at your side. But such resurrections and final battles belong to the Eschaton. What the Nation needs is the invisible hand of Commerce, the 'mysterious economy' of the Katechon. Shakespeare's Hamlet cannot wholly dispose of unholy ghosts or atavistic slogans or the eternal recurrence of zombie wars.
But it sends a clear message. Trust not in philosopher-kings or brilliant-too-brilliant Guardians or Lord Protectors. Kings should not think too much. They should be resolute. A War lost or won resolves matters. Better a brief crisis, then a long, degenerative, lysis.
And it must be noticed that the very nature of the données of the problem
i.e. the data. If this is 'common knowledge' would there be an 'objective correlative'? The notion of 'Aumann agreement' says yes- if you have common Bayesian priors, you must agree. Eliot had been indoctrinated in an Idealist version of this thesis.
precludes objective equivalence.
Nonsense! There is an equivalence between Fortinbras, who is named for his father as Hamlet is for his, and who asserts his rights in the traditional way. War, after all, is the sport of Kings. It establishes a pecking order and reduces 'rent contestation'.
One might say, the proper way for Hamlet to proceed would be to call for a joint session of the Three Estates and present evidence of the King's crimes. But this assumes a more advanced type of Society with a professionalized standing army and civil administration. Even then, there are sound pragmatic reasons why the King should be above the law.
Turning from Political theory to Philosophy we may well ask, does Shakespeare solve Agrippa's trilemma? Yes- in so far as it can be solved. Hamlet obtains independent verification of the King's guilt from three different sources
1) the play 'the mousetrap' causes Claudius to evince every sign of guilt. However, prayer may have restored him to a state of grace which would defeat Hamlet's purpose of revenge.
2) the plot to have Hamlet killed in England shows that even if Claudius has repented killing his brother, he is not in a state of Grace. This is further confirmed by
3) Gertrude's death which may be said to remove 'such divinity as doth hedge a king' from Claudius, as well as the public testimony Laertes' offers in articulo mortis.
To have heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet;
it would have made him Orestes
it is just because her character is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of representing.
No. Shakespeare gives her good enough lines. Indeed, played by Glen Close, Gertrude outshines the fat Prince.
The “madness” of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare’s hand;
it was part of folk mythology. Shakespeare had a son named Hamnet who died young. Apparently, he also played the Ghost in the play. Joyce made a meal of this.
in the earlier play a simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the audience.
It could be turned into a great bit of stage business.
For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned. The levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief.
Which is what the theatre was in those perilous times.
In the character Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion
paralleling the blasphemous Trinity of Father, Son & Unholy Ghost
which can find no outlet in action;
the right outlet. The problem with rebellion or regicide is that it dilutes the uncorrelated asymmetry of 'divine right' and thus undermines a highly Eusocial 'bourgeois strategy'. Killing the King may give rise to more and more 'rent contestation' and 'dissipation'. It is one thing to avenge your father. It is another to impoverish or imperil your fatherland.
in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he cannot express in art.
Yet, this is what he does and the odd thing is that it isn't buffoonery at all. Why? We all have some vague of intuition of what physicists call 'geometrical frustration'.
The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of sensibility has known;
Kant would say the thing is 'monstrous'- but that's what makes it a monstrance, a spectacle, worth viewing. But the heavy lifting is done by things we might term 'Agrippa's trilemma' & 'geometric frustration. But these are the sort of constraints which have always arisen in politics. Hamlet reflects not merely on the history of the previous century but is prologue to the bloody Regicide and Revolutions of its own.
it is doubtless a subject of study for pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence:
I suppose, a few decades back, we would have spoken of 'double-binds'
the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feelings to fit the business world; the artist keeps them alive by his ability to intensify the world to his emotions.
I suppose Shakespeare- a successful businessman- was an ordinary enough Englishman. He didn't want Regicide. He didn't want Revolution. A King who was a 'learned fool' was one thing, but a brilliant-too-brilliant Prince could blight England to its very core. Empiricism means verification and intellect expended in securing better methods of verification is seldom expended wholly in vain.
The Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent;
one as insignificant as its author- or so History has judged
the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse.
He faces a constrained optimization problem but can't take the tack of the School of Salamanca because England was behind Spain in Rational Choice theory at that time.
We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too much for him.
Hamlet should simply have tricked Rosencrantz into poisoning Claudius before convening Parliament with a view to instituting incremental reforms in Fiscal and Monetary policy.
Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle;
Why would a dramatist want to write a really great play? Why not, like Eliot, write shitty ones instead?
under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his biography;
so much for 'impersonality'
and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II, xii, Apologie de Raimond Sebond.
Boring shite
We should have, finally, to know something which is by hypothesis unknowable,
hypotheses can be wrong
for we assume it to be an experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts.
a wrong assumption about a thing that is known does not render it unknown or unknowable. As for facts, everything which gives rise to them exceeds them- to the best of our knowledge.
We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.
But we do understand very many such things. Sadly, stupid theories- e.g. that of 'objective correlatives'- may cloud that understanding and compel us to babble moronic shit.
Hamlet works so well because it is a 'concrete model' of geometric frustration or concurrency deadlock or a particular, impredicative, type of symmetric game whose solution arises only from exogenous verification or evaluation yielding an uncorrelated asymmetry and thus a superior correlated equilibria. It is a mark of Shakespeare's mastery of his craft that his play doesn't flag though four hours long. Its purple passages, as Nabakov has one of his characters say, invite us to roll upon them as does 'a grateful mongrel on a spot of turf fouled by a Great Dane'. But even without its wordy music or moody worldliness, Hamlet has a structural quality which relates directly to open problems in mathematics and materials science. Thus, it is and will remain, philosophical.
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