Hamlet the hero

A colleague, Jayson Grieser, pointed me to Paul Cantor’s little book on Hamlet a few months ago, but I have only recently been able to look at it. It’s superb. Cantor argues that the play dramatizes a conflict between the classical heroism revived by the Renaissance and the Christian constraints on revenge and violence that all Renaissance humanists continued to affirm.

The Ghost seems generations removed from the courtly world of Claudius. In demeanor, diction, behavior (single combat) and dress, Hamlet Sr. comes from a chivalric and heroic world, where revenge is a duty. This is not the world his son inhabits, and the clash between the two occurs not only in Denmark but in Hamlet himself, who struggles between the demands of classical heroism, expressed in vengeance or suicide, and Christian charity and belief in an afterlife.

The conflict comes to pointed expression in the scene where Hamlet refuses to cut Claudius’s throat while he’s at prayer. As a Christian, he cannot just take vengeance and rest satisfied that his victim has gotten what he deserves. His specifically Christian belief in a life after death brings him up short. Hamlet’s speech about Fortinbras’s invasion of Poland expresses the same tension: Hamlet admires the bold bravado of the effort, while simultaneously recognizing that Fortinbras fights for nothing more than an egg shell.

Cantor’s book joins those of Cedric Watts and J. Dover Wilson on my short-list of studies of Hamlet. Ernest Jones can be safely skipped, and Coleridge on Hamlet has more about Coleridge than Hamlet.