Hamlet and Society

Despite the distracting use of the opposition of of “authenticity” and “responsibility,” Terry Eagleton has some thoughtful observations on the tragic dilemma in Hamlet ( Shakespeare and Society , 1967).

Hamlet’s is a society of “reciprocal human definitions,” that is to say, a man’s identity is mirrored to him by society, and this social reflection of identity may be quite different from his own self-conception. What to do? Eagleton suggests there are three options:

1)accept the social definition, also but find one’s self at margins of society in non-official activities;
2)give one’s self wholly to public definition, so that he becomes as he is valued (Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and other hollow men); or
3)assert one’s authentic life and risk destruction at hands of society.

Hamlet attempts this last way.

Hamlet is attempting to escape the definitions that society offers. Hamlet doesn’t allow Polonius to assert mastery or to define him. He “carves for himself all the time”: “by evading the formal definitions society lays on him, by cutting through expected behaviour and approaching Ophelia with a directly personal appeal after the shock of the Ghost’s announcement, he is acting counter to the patterns prescribed for him: his ‘authentic’ and ‘social’ selves, his own sense of himself and the way others see him, are at odds.”

Society attempts to impose controls on Hamlet’s authenticity, demanding that, for example, he surrender his desire for Ophelia, but he refuses to be a puppet. This leads to a “delight in resisting any kind of definition” which is “socially irresponsible, a merely negative response.” This is the tragic tension of the story: to be individual means to be put on a collision course with the society.

Hamlet cannot find it in himself to kill Claudius despite the social responsibility of revenge, so he fails to act. But the “real tragedy” is that he is “unable to find self-definition within formal society patterns” and “can preserve his identity only in opposition to these patterns.” As a result, his identity becomes unreal. Hamlet thus “is described in terms of diffusion” and he becomes ghostlike. This is a tragic stance, since even though society is false and its definitions “distorting,” yet “it is still the only available way for a man to confirm himself as real, to objectify and know himself in public action.” He is caught in a contradiction between “authentic” and “responsible” action. Being true to oneself, Eagleton concludes, may prove false to others.

Reading Eagleton on Hamlet suggests the possibility of a Foucaultian spin: Hamlet lives in a literal panopticon, where spying and surveillance are the stuff of daily existence. “Denmark is a prison” – and more than thought makes it so. He is noble in his effort to escape detection and defintion, but that noble effort is doomed because the surveillance is inescapable.