Hamlet

I re-read Hamlet after 15 years. Now, with some additional accumulated wisdom, I was able to see glimpses of why this is considered to be Shakespeare’s magnum opus.

When Achilles slaughters Hector, he is consumed by vengeance and glory. Divine punishment or suffering in the afterlife had little meaning for him. The Homeric Greek heroes believed in a soul, but not in a moral afterlife like that in Christianity. In contrast, Hamlet is deeply preoccupied with the fate of his soul, guilt, and divine judgment. Hamlet, thus, is a deeply Christian tragedy. He self-sabotages the only opportunity he gets to have his revenge when he realizes that Claudius would have ended up in heaven as he was praying at the moment. This indecision leads to 8 deaths in the play – Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Claudius, Laertes, Ophelia, Gertrude and Hamlet himself. (Prof. Paul Cantor in his lectures on Shakespeare and Politics, covers the Christian aspects of the play in great detail).

Poor Hamlet is in no-man’s land where he is unable to take his life for fear of eternal damnation, indecisive in avenging avenge his father’s murder, bewildered by his mother’s sexuality and hasty remarriage, emotionally unresponsive to Ophelia’s love, tormented by the ghost of his father who demands justice, and constantly shadowed by the evil Claudius.

As Bloom explains that if Lear and Macbeth have a cosmological element in their angst, where they converse with the elements of nature, Hamlet on the other hand, grapples with the interiors of his mind and the human condition.

Freud’s take on Hamlet is one of the most famous psychoanalytic interpretations of literature. Anyone who has read even a bit of Freud, can see this as a classic case of the Oedipal complex. As he writes in his ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’

Hamlet is able to do anything — except take revenge on the man who did away with his father and took that father’s place with his mother, the man who shows him the repressed wishes of his own childhood realized.

The political undercurrents of the play, as in much of Shakespeare’s work, are hard to miss. Set in Denmark, with Norway poised to strike and later marching on Poland, the narrative is shaped by a broader European backdrop. England and France play crucial roles in the unfolding plot, while Hamlet himself is a student at the University of Wittenberg — the very place where Martin Luther sparked the Protestant Reformation in 1517.

As has been the case with this reading project, I watched a few adaptations of the play. Kenneth Branaugh’s 1996 version is the complete line by line adaptation with a star-studded cast featuring Kate Winslet, Gerard Depardau. Robin Williams, Richard Attenborough etc and having a runtime of four hours! This YT interview of Branaugh is worth checking out to get a sense of his passion for the play. (He was 36 when he directed and acted out the role!)

Mel Gibson’s 1990 version is okayish and I’m midway through it.

Vishal Bharadwaj’s Haider, which I re-watched after more than a decade, is still refreshingly fresh. To adapt this complex play from its Danish setting to Kashmir of the mid 1990s is a feat of imagination. Bharadwaj also bravely explores the Oedipal angle here – brilliantly essayed by the inimitable Tabu and Shahid Kapoor. The gravedigger’s dark humour and commentary on death gets adapted by Bharadwaj as a catchy number with Gulzar’s haunting lyrics (which I appreciated thanks to the subtitles):

The 2018 movie Ophelia re-imagines the play from the point of view of Ophelia. The movie is streaming on YouTube. I loved the liberties it took explain the plot from her eyes.

Cavafy’s poem ‘King Claudius’ is also a quirky take on the plot. What if Hamlet just hallucinated seeing his father’s ghost? And what if the whole plot was just an elaborate lie told by his friend Horatio? Does politics have any meaning if it’s guided by revelation and the otherworldly?

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The Shakespeare Project so far: Macbeth | The Tempest | The Merchant of Venice | Twelfth Night | As You Like It | Much Ado About Nothing | King Lear