An Ache in the Heart

In order to appease pub­lish­ers and the gen­eral public—I can only assume—many con­tem­po­rary writ­ers have let go of cer­tain aspects of their prose. Per­haps edi­tors have deemed cer­tain pas­sages, or entire chap­ters, as super­flu­ous or con­vo­luted and muddy, and have struck those pieces to man­u­fac­ture a final, lin­ear prod­uct. This process of com­mer­cial­iza­tion must be some­what tax­ing on the writer. He must aban­don some of his impetu­ous ideas to revi­sion, and in an obscure way, his book loses a bit of its truth—or at least a part of the entire truth the writer seeks to con­vey. His deep­est thoughts may be the most con­tra­dict­ing, or con­fus­ing, or pecu­liar, but that the writer felt the urge to put them to paper should sig­nify that some­thing important—congruous with the essence of what the writer means to say—lies between those lines of text. In the end, the writer may assent, and toss out “the rub­bish”, but he does so with a heavy heart.

Many of our grand­est ideas come to us in brief moments of ecstasy. To some of us, these thoughts—or often in this case, a sin­gle coher­ent thought—crash down upon our minds like a great wave; to oth­ers, these thoughts buzz about our heads like flies, and we are unable to make sense of them—let alone one—unless we are for­tu­nate enough to catch and slowly fos­ter them to com­pre­hen­sion. Despite the means by which those thoughts come to us, at these pin­na­cles of rev­e­la­tion, we become absolutely over­whelmed with passion—an emo­tion that knows no bounds or lim­its, an emo­tion “that cries out in the soul, throbs inces­santly in the mind” and excites the heart. It is a pas­sion that leaves us hun­ger­ing for more, a pas­sion that com­pels us to progress, but to leave noth­ing behind. It is this pas­sion that is cen­tral to both Shakespeare’s forg­ing of Ham­let and the char­ac­ter of Ham­let him­self.
In the wake of our bursts of pas­sion, we are often left in a fran­tic, disheveled mess. And in writ­ing Ham­let, Shake­speare included this raw, per­haps untouched mess. Shake­speare cre­ated Ham­let, a char­ac­ter who, of his own accord, pushes him­self into mad­ness. Ham­let believes he under­stands things that no other char­ac­ter can grasp: he is enraged that no one real­izes that Claudius is his father’s mur­derer; and he is aghast at his mother’s inces­tu­ous behav­ior. Unable to accept his state, Ham­let assumes the appear­ance of mad­ness so that he can exist and func­tion in a world that he sees in some ways as mad—in that the peo­ple around him are either obliv­i­ous or accept their despi­ca­ble con­di­tion. I believe Ham­let will­ingly gives him­self to the chaos and unpre­dictable nature of mad­ness. Afflicted by a humanly pas­sion to set things right, Ham­let thrusts his neck into the unknown and lets what hap­pen, hap­pen. Ini­tially, he attempts to slowly lower him­self into the pool of dis­or­der, but see­ing that he is unable to get close to Claudius and above all, act, Ham­let lets go of all hope of return­ing to his orig­i­nal state. This is appar­ent in Hamlet’s con­fronta­tion with Ophe­lia, when he unex­pect­edly spits, “Get thee to a nun­nery” and “I loved you not”, to the aston­ished Ophe­lia and hid­den King Claudius and Polo­nius. Although Ham­let only explic­itly states that his mad­ness is irre­versible in the final scene—“Heaven make thee free of it”—he is always cer­tain that his sub­mis­sion to an over­whelm­ing pas­sion shall be his destruc­tion. Aware of this exis­ten­tial truth, Ham­let pro­claims, “Give me the cup. Let go! By heaven, I’ll ha’t” as he accepts his death.

Though Ham­let is arguably the san­est of all, his appear­ance of insan­ity could not have been por­trayed in any other way. Shake­speare could not have devel­oped the con­tents of Ham­let in a log­i­cal man­ner and kept Ham­let mad. There­fore, Shake­speare for­mu­lated an illog­i­cal plot—full of seem­ingly capri­cious solil­o­quies, the “play within the play”—so that Ham­let could retain some of his san­ity. Shake­speare posited a decay­ing, intol­er­a­ble world, so that Ham­let could exclaim, “the time is out of joint; O cursed spite, That ever I was born to set it right!”. Hamlet’s appear­ance of mad­ness is man­i­fest in the appear­ance of an almost mad­ness in the struc­ture of Ham­let. Had Shake­speare betrayed Ham­let to a log­i­cal plot and pro­gres­sion of the play, he would have cre­ated a pro­tag­o­nist who is indeed insane. But by forc­ing the reader to ques­tion many aspects of the play’s phys­i­cal construct—such as the mere longevity and sim­ple inclu­sion of a num­ber of scenes—Shakespeare allows the reader to empathize with Ham­let and allows Ham­let to retain a sense of san­ity amidst a world devoid of appar­ent meaning.

In order to bet­ter assess the role of pas­sion in Hamlet’s mad­ness, we must exam­ine other authors and lit­er­ary char­ac­ters who deal with the same epi­demic. Like Fyo­dor Pavlovitch Dos­to­evsky, Ham­let is bur­dened by pas­sion. Both share an insa­tiable won­der of why things hap­pen for the rea­sons they do. Dos­to­evsky and his char­ac­ters in The Broth­ers Karamazov—most namely, Mitya—break the con­fine­ment of log­i­cal, lin­ear exis­tence and life on Earth, and act with­out appar­ent coher­ence (Dostoevsky’s act being that of pro­duc­ing a novel that goes in all direc­tions). He weaves together a fab­ric of extra­or­di­nar­ily com­plex char­ac­ters that are bound by a pas­sion for human exis­tence, for life. Mitya, like Ham­let, can’t endure his world—a spite­ful father indebted to him and a void that was once filled by his love, Grushenka. Mitya runs about with reck­less pas­sion, unaware of his con­se­quent fate. Ham­let, although steam­ing with that same pas­sion to set things right, is wary of his sub­mis­sion to pas­sion in that “he vac­il­lates between undis­ci­plined squads of emo­tion and think­ing too pre­cisely on the event”. He errs on the side of cau­tion, con­scious of “how eas­ily action can be lost in ‘action’”. There­fore, he does not avenge his father’s mur­der and kill Claudius imme­di­ately. He waits, but the longer he waits, the more embroiled he becomes in his pas­sion, and reaches the apex of his “mad­ness”. Ham­let can­not act because he is aware of his con­di­tion. He knows that the mur­der of Claudius would not improve his state nor aid in the recon­struc­tion of his depraved world. He is torn between the two and is painfully aware: “What should such fel­lows as I do crawl­ing between earth and heaven?” Ham­let never exclaims “I have a long­ing for life, and I go on liv­ing in spite of logic” as Ivan does; rather, he is torn by the piv­otal ques­tion, “to be or not to be”. It is this dis­tinc­tion that makes Ham­let such a trou­bled char­ac­ter, even for Shake­speare, who evi­dently grap­pled with pre­sent­ing a story that could give Ham­let an aura of both supreme san­ity and insan­ity simul­ta­ne­ously. And it is such a pow­er­ful pas­sion that con­sumes Dos­to­evsky, Shake­speare, Ham­let, and Mitya that they should search the Heav­enly stars, and Earthly forests but find, all of them, seem­ingly dif­fer­ent answers, if any at all.

• Photo by Grant Mitchell / Used with Per­mis­sion