joanna bujes <joanna.bujes at ebay.sun.com> wrote:
At 01:50 PM 12/19/2002 -0500, you wrote:
>He'd
>rather be a student in Wittemberg. That IS in the
>text. jks
Right. But that would still not solve the disconnect between a feeling consciousness and action...which the play turns around.
I argued that this is not so. There is no unreasonable delay in killing Claudius. Unless he's going to do it on the Ghost's say so, which he distrusts, he needs evidence, He stages the play to get it. Then he passes up the chance to kill Claudius praying, but not be nice; he wants him to go to Hell. He kills Polonius in his mother's chambers, thinking him to be Claudius, then he's sent abroad. The next change he get's the duel with Laertes, where he does it. Now, itr's true that there's the speech he makes while watching the Norwegians march to war with the Poles, which appears to support the standard view, but the action of the play does not fit with the idea of thought-paralyzed Hamlet. So that speech need a different reading.
A comparison with Macbeth is helpful: what Macbeth does is acknowledged to have broken the natural order, and when he dies that order is restored: his mode of ambition and his too-eager interpretation of the witches prophesy is his problem, not that of his society as a whole. In Hamlet, as I said before, there is no natural order to revert to.
I'll buy that, about Hamlet anyway. Lear too, incidentally, where the theme is the smashing of the natural order without any hope of return. I'll have to think about whether the natural order exists or is restored in MacBeth.
As for Gertrude, I do think we are meant to find her lacking; her actions/character are implicitly contrasted with Ophelia's who actually dies as a result of her double bind -- between her love for Hamlet and her due obedience to her father.
Oh, I agree that she's lacking. Everyone in the play is, even Hamlet. But she's no self-satisfied sink of sensuality. She's smart if not very reflective woman. In fact, she's too tough minded to break the way Ophelia does.
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