Hamlet Psycho Analysis Essay, Research Paper

Hamlet

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%2

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