Hamlet Psychology Essay, Research Paper

Hamlet dares us, along with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to "pluck out the

heart of my mystery." This mystery marks the essence of Hamlet’s character

as, in spite of our popular psychologies, it ultimately does for all human

personalities. Granting this, we can attempt to chart its origin and outward

manifestations. Ophelia tells us that before the events of the play Hamlet was a

model courtier, soldier and scholar, "The glass of fashion and the mould of

form, / Th’ observed of all observers." With the death of his father and

the hasty, incestuous remarriage of his mother to his uncle, however, Hamlet is

thrown into a suicidal frame of mind in which "the uses of this world"

seem to him "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable." Though his faith

in the value of life has been destroyed by this double confrontation with death

and human infidelity, he feels impotent to effect any change in this new

reality: "It is not, nor it cannot come to good. / But break my heart, for

I must hold my tongue." All he can do in this frustrated state is to lash

out with bitter satire at the evils he sees and then relapse into suicidal

melancholy. It is in this state that he meets the equally mysterious figure of

his father’s ghost with its supernatural revelations of murder and adultery and

its injunction upon Hamlet to revenge his father’s murder. While this command

gives purpose and direction to Hamlet’s hitherto frustrated impulse towards

scourging reform, it also serves to further unsettle his already disturbed

reason. Whether or not the ghost was actually a devil, its effect upon Hamlet

has been diabolic. In the two months after his meeting with the ghost, he

puzzles the court with his assumed madness but does nothing concrete to effect

or further his revenge. His inability to either accept the goodness of life or

act to destroy its evils now begins to trouble him as much as his outward

hysteria and depression does the court. He first condemns his apparent lack of

concentration on his revenge as the sign of a base, cowardly nature. The advent

of a company of players, however, gives him an idea for testing the truth of the

ghost and the guilt of Claudius. He plans to have the players perform a play

which reproduces Claudius’ crime and observe Claudius’ reaction to it, thereby

dispelling his own doubts as to the proper course of his action. Having

momentarily silenced his shame at his inaction, however, he immediately relapses

into his former state; he meditates upon suicide and then lashes out with

satiric cruelty at Ophelia. The performance of the play is successful in

revealing Claudius’ guilt to Hamlet, and Hamlet reacts to this proof with wild

glee. His old friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who had returned that day to

Elsinore to help further Claudius’ investigation into Hamlet’s disorder and had

thereby alienated Hamlet’s affections, enter with a message from Hamlet’s mother

that she wishes to see him immediately. His coming visit with his mother

inspires him with a murderous rage appropriate to the hellish time of night.

Once more in the power of hell, he accidentally comes upon the praying figure of

Claudius but does not take this opportunity for revenge because of the devilish

rationalization that such revenge would not damn Claudius’ soul. But the truth

seems to be that Hamlet’s murderous rage is misdirected at his mother rather

than at Claudius, even though Hamlet is now fully convinced of his guilt. Coming

to his mother’s room with the intent to punish her with verbal daggers for her

unfaithfulness, her unwillingness to listen to him releases his murderous

impulse against her. In a moment of temporary insanity he manages to exercise

enough control to deflect the blow designed for her to the direction of an

unexpected sound, killing the hidden figure of Polonius. In the ensuing scene he

all but forgets the body of Polonius in his urgency to arouse his mother’s guilt

for her treatment of his father and injury to his own trust. All he knows is

that his mother’s behavior has contributed to wrenching the time "out of

joint" for him, and that he has been fated "to set it right."

Once he is reconciled to his mother, the whole of reality appears to him in a

different light. Where before his will was "most incorrect to heaven,"

the "Everlasting" seeming to be the creator of sterile farces and

imposer of harsh laws, he now can accept heaven’s purposes and ally himself with

them as heaven’s "scourge and minister." If Hamlet’s nausea with life

as well as sex seems to the modern intelligence to have a hidden psychological

basis, Hamlet raises the discussion of his nature to the ultimately more

profound level of religious existential confrontation. Seeing the hand of heaven

in his accidental slaying of Polonius as well as in the exile to England which

will result from it, he is able to accept this turn of events with new

confidence in his ultimate success. Though Hamlet does not appear outwardly

changed, as witnessed by his contemptuous treatment of Polonius’ body, continued

obsession with the horror of death and with the obligations of honor, the change

in attitude begun in his mother’s room continues to develop while on shipboard

and is responsible for his actions there. Inspired by his restlessness, he

rashly discovers the letter ordering his death, forges a new commission which

substitutes for his death the deaths of Claudius’ accomplices, Rosencrantz and

Guildenstern, returns the commission unknown, and, in a sea fight with pirates,

manages to free himself from the Danish ship. In all of this he sees

"heaven ordinant" and this teaches him that "There’s a divinity

that shapes our ends, / Rough – hew them how we will." Recognizing by this

that humanly conceived plots are doomed to fail, he places himself completely in

the hands of Providence. Nonetheless, his first actions upon his return do not

seem to indicate any real change in his nature from our last view of him in

Denmark. He is still overly sensitive to the decomposition of the body after

death and, in his treatment of Laertes at the funeral he so rudely disrupts, he

still shows a cruel insensitivity to the feelings of anyone he believes to have

wronged him. This insensitivity also extends to his lack of any qualms about his

murders of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, as was also true of his earlier murder

of Polonius. If Hamlet had once been a model human being disillusioned in life

by the double blows of his father’s death and mother’s remarriage, his

oversensitivity to these evils of existence has warped his nature into an

equally extreme insensitivity to all those whom he suspects of impurity. He

cruelly torments his mother and Ophelia, bitterly mocks Polonius, Rosencrantz

and Guildenstern and then wantonly kills them without a qualm and with the

attempt, in the last two cases, of ensuring their eternal damnation, and he

refrains from killing Claudius for this same evil reason. In terms of vindictive

cruelty and wanton slaughter, he stands far more condemned for evil than

Claudius and in danger of his own eternal damnation. This warping om a sensi i s

nat re into ane cspable of inhuman evil is perhaps the clearest proof of the

evils of existence, though Hamlet must now be numbered among the evils to be

punished by cosmic justice. But if Hamlet’s actions condemn him to death, his

growing perception of reality finally redeems his soul in our eyes. Though

Claudius has planned Hamlet’s destruction and Hamlet has proof of this, he has

returned to Denmark without any plan for his revenge, even warning Claudius

rudely of his approach. In "perfect conscience" now about the sin of

regicide.