The intricacies of the human mind are so that not even we can understand ourselves completely. No matter how much we try to dissect our faults and our every talent, there are still some aspects we fail to ever grasp.
And let’s face it. We’re pretty simple. Not like a piece of very stale, plain bread, but simple in that we don’t have multiple personalities or a possessed uncle going all Ax murderer on the local neighborhood, which end up affecting us psychologically. Well, some of us.
So the fact that trying to discern every inch of us is termed difficult, imagine trying to suss out the infamous Hamlet, the embodiment of twisted branches and puzzle pieces all wrapped into one persona.
In a brief critique of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe gives us a glimpse towards Wilhelm Meister’s journey in trying to truly capture Hamlet’s character on a stage. This personal account travels through Wilhelm’s thoughts of Hamlet being too complicated and impossible. He endeavored to figure out the young prince’s personality before his dad’s death, endeavoring to “distinguish what in it was independent of this mournful event.”
This seems to be like a very difficult task seeing as the play starts out after Hamlet’s dad’s death and rarely do we find any references to how Hamlet was before hand, if at all. In order to figure out if the death affected him whatsoever we would need to either see some flashbacks, some one speaking of how Hamlet was before, or somehow conjure a way to bring Shakespeare back to life with magical powers and ask him ourselves.
But we don’t and we can’t.
Either way, Wilhem manages to describe Hamlet as a prince born to be king and well aware of it, pure in sentiment and ‘artless in conduct’, and ‘pliant courteous, discreet, and able to forget and forgive an injury.” Apparently, the murdering of his father is no meager injury. God knows how Meister managed to gather up all of this information. It was probably due to inferences taken from passages said later on in the work.
Then he brings up Hamlet’s reaction towards his father’s death as being one of not ambition or happiness in succeeding him in the throne, but of bewilderment. Maybe if he had managed to acquire the throne, the play in itself would not exist. The whole plot revolves around his uncle stealing his place and ergo creating the suspicion that would lead to unravel the unruly plot. He is deprived of what is rightfully his, and instead of seething like a raging lunatic, he is stuck in a state of neediness and degradation. But maybe this is him in a state of shock which later falls away to reveal his inner lunatic.
How poetic.
His mother remarrying just two months after doesn’t help. It’s like, “God, woman, do you have no decency whatsoever? And what is up with your heart? Is it so plastic and fake that it can mold to accommodate to anything that your eyes happen to set sight on?” Jeez. That’s just the cherry on top of a fantastic family tragedy that ends up robbing any hope Hamlet had on a shoulder to cry on. Goethe proceeds to say, “With the dead there is no help; on the living no hold. She also is a woman, and her name is frailty, like that of all her sex.”
The first sentence just ingrains itself into my mind. Maybe because we really can’t find solace in the dead and because we never truly obtain a strong hold on other living people, unless we happen to be old millionaires that sustain gold-digging bimbos who couldn’t manage on their own and ergo follow everything we say and lack any respect. But those are rare cases so let’s just assume this pertains to all of us mere mortals. As to the second part, the guy is basically dissing Hamlet’s mom as well as the female gender in terms of their frailty and weakness, which is kind of biased, let me say. Not every woman is a defenseless damsel in distress. Please.
Then he goes to say that it is after seeing his dad’s ghost that Hamlet grows “bitter against smiling villains and says “The time is out of joint: o cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!” He is not brought on by mere anger but more so the idea for setting things back to how they should be and yet his is a soul that is unfit to perform great action against this injustice. Goethe describes this as an “oak-tree planted in a costly jar, which should have borne only pleasant flowers in its bosom; the roots expand, the jar is shivered. “ This imagery capture the crucial circumstances in which Hamlet seeks t revenge and to make everything better and ends up deeming an unworldly chaos that amounts to unimaginable heights. Disaster.
Hamlet is of a “lovely, pure, noble and most moral nature” whose strife for unburdening himself and finding some sort of peace of mindset actually works to pin him into insanity.
TUN. TUN.TUN (Insert high-pitched screams)
(Curtains close)
Thank you.
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