Hamlet 2
Hamlet dares us, along with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to pluck out the heart of my mystery. This mystery marks the essence of Hamlet's character as, in spite of our popular psychologies, it ultimately does for all human personalities. Granting this, we can attempt to chart its origin and outward manifestations. Ophelia tells us that before the events of the play Hamlet was a model courtier, soldier and scholar, The glass of fashion and the mould of form, / Th observed of all observers." With the death of his father and the hasty, incestuous remarriage of his mother to his uncle, however, Hamlet is thrown into a suicidal frame of mind in which "the uses of this world" seem to him "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable." Though his faith in the value of life has been destroyed by this double confrontation with death and human infidelity, he feels impotent to effect any change in this new reality: "It is not, nor it cannot come to good. / But break my heart, for I must hold my tongue." All he can do in this frustrated state is to lash out with bitter satire at the evils he sees and then relapse into suicidal melancholy. It is in this state that he meets the equally mysterious figure of his fathers ghost with its supernatural revelations of murder and adultery and its injunction upon Hamlet to revenge his fathers murder. While this command gives purpose and direction to Hamlets hitherto frustrated impulse towards scourging reform, it also serves to further unsettle his already disturbed reason. Whether or not the ghost was actually a devil, its effect upon Hamlet has been diabolic. In the two months after his meeting with the ghost, he puzzles the court with his assumed madness but does nothing concrete to effect or further his revenge. His inability to either accept the goodness of life or act to destroy its evils now begins to trouble him as much as his outward hysteria and depression does the court. He first condemns his apparent lack...
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