Hamlet Source Analysis

Throughout Hamlet, William Shakespeare displayed the character of Hamlet in many different lights and situations. As a reader worked through the tragedy of Hamlet, one was compelled to decide: Is Hamlet a good man or is he a bad one, and therefore do I root for him to succeed in the conclusion of the novel? This question is the main focus of the analysis entitled The Morality of Hamlet – ‘Sweet Prince or ‘Arrant Knave? written by Patrick Cruttwell. Patrick Cruttwell believes that to determine whether or not Hamlet was a good man or a bad one, a person must first decide if Hamlet is actually mad and were his actions justified based upon need for revenge caused by the ghost. Cruttwell goes on to state that if person see Hamlet as a good man, they most likely also believe that Hamlet was at least partially mad. He also states that people must remember the position Hamlet was put in by his uncle, and that he was under great stress and emotional strain. In addition, he argues that against all the good a person could see in Hamlet, their view will always be impacted by some of the feigned actions and words of Hamlet, therefore, degrading their view of Hamlet. In his conclusion Cruttwell states, “It is not that he cannot do it [taking revenge] … It is that whole life of action, violence, intrigue and public duty that he is reluctant to enter war. … What he [Hamlet] really is, is a conscript of war.” This means that Cruttwell believes that Hamlet is a blend of good and bad, as a result of all the war and conflict that has occurred within Hamlet’s life.

Cruttwell’s analysis is filled with depth, analyzing Hamlet’s personality, psychology, and cultural life in order to reach his conclusion on whether Hamlet is a good man or a bad one. However, there are several topics void from his discussion. Cruttwell mentions Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, who killed Hamlet’s father and he refers to Polonius, the first man Hamlet kills in the tragic ending of Hamlet. The characters and conflict void from discussion are pertaining to him mother, Gertrude, and his relationship with Ophelia.  Cruttwell states that a person’s view of Hamlet may be impacted by his fictitiousness, and from that he or she may change their mind from viewing Hamlet as a good man to a bad one. However, I think many people, especially women, would agree that Hamlet’s actions towards Ophelia are highly impacting to their view of Hamlet. One could argue that there was no real relationship between Hamlet and Ophelia, and therefore this is nothing to consider, but most would argue that Hamlet played games with her heart. And based upon that conclusion would say that Hamlet was a bad man. With regard to his mother, Gertrude, Hamlet avoided speaking to her. When he did speak to her, Hamlet spoke with hate and pain. One could view this as disrespectful to his mother; however; one could also view this as his way of coping with her infidelity and re-marriage to his uncle following his father’s death. To conclude, Cruttwell gave a full analysis of the men in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but failed to provide a complete analysis of the women within the story. Given Hamlet’s actions towards these women, it is most likely to be concluded that Hamlet was a good man, but was faced with many difficult and strenuous situations all at the same time, and therefore completed the actions of a bad man at various times through the novel.

The Morality of Hamlet—'Sweet Prince or 'Arrant Knave?

"The Morality of Hamlet—'Sweet Prince' or 'Arrant Knave'?," in Hamlet, edited by John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Edward Arnold Ltd., 1963, pp. 110-28.

For Cruttwell, the central question of the play is whether Hamlet is a good or bad man. In the following essay, he considers Hamlet's madness and the nature of his revenge and discusses the various critical responses to Shakespeare's handling of Hamlet's revenge. Cruttwell concludes that the confusion of both Hamletand the critics who attempt to interpret him arises from the "muddle of two moralities": the Christian ethic and the pagan "ethic of revenge."

Was Hamlet a good man or was he a bad one?

I cannot think it illegitimate to ask that simple question (though, of course, the answer need not be simple); it is, I believe, a question which every reader or playgoer 'uncorrupted by literary prejudices' asks himself, and which the play as a whole insists that we should ask. But the answers it has received range no less widely than those given to the other questions which play and characters provoke....

Hamlet is one of the handful of literary creations which have turned into something more than simply characters in a novel or poem or play. He has become a figure of myth; and just as Odysseus is the myth-character of the Traveller, Faust of the Seeker, Quixote of the Knight, and Juan of the Lover, so Hamlet has been made the myth-character of the doubting, self-contemplating Intellectual . It is only appropriate, then, that his outlines should be so much hazier than those of the other myth-characters. The haziness is inherent in the myth and in the manner by which the myth has been made, for Hamlet, the puzzled self-contemplator, has been created through the self projections of a long line of puzzled self-contemplators. Everything about him has for long been hazy; and why should we expect an exemption from haziness in the moral judgements which men have passed on him?...

The question to be asked, I repeat, is the question: Was Hamlet a good man or was he a bad one? I shall look at this as it appears in most of the play's major episodes; but underlying it throughout, and decisive for our answer, are two other questions. How do we take his madness —feigned or real, or, if mixed, mixed in what proportions? And how do we take the obligation of revenge laid on him by the ghost—as a true moral duty, recognised as such by the prince himself and to be accepted as such by us, or as a temptation to wrongdoing?

The former is clearly paramount in deciding Hamlet's moral responsibility . When, for example, he says to Ophelia: 'I loved you not', but to Laertes, over her dead body: 'I loved Ophelia'—when he behaves to her as we see him doing in the nunnery-scene but also as she reports him to have done before—then surely the natural and immediate response of most of us is that unless we can allow him a degree of genuine mental disturbance, the only possible verdict is Johnson's 'useless and wanton cruelty' .... (But the 'natural and immediate response' is not always the right one.) And a survey of Hamlet commentators would show, I believe, a certain correlation. Those who like the prince and admire him as a good man will tend to see a part at least of his madness as genuine; those who do not will see it all as feigned . We assume, of course, that in the lost 'Kydian' Hamlet, the hero simply put it on as a trick. But Kyd's own example, The Spanish Tragedy, is enough to show how easily that can slide into something more than a trick: for the 'mad Hieronymo' of the later additions makes an effect dramatically indistinguishable from the effect of the real thing.... Whether an audience thought his madness feigned or real —and remember we are criticising a play, not a treatise of psychiatry—the effect was bound to be: 'This isn't the real Hamlet!' And for such a way of playing, for such violent alternations of behaviour, the text gives ample warrant, indeed specific instructions. From Hamlet's own 'put an antick disposition on' through Ophelia's description of neglected clothes, physical collapse ('pale as his shirt, his knees knocking together'), hysterical gestures and deep sighs, and the king's 'transformation, sith nor the exterior nor the inward man / Resembles that it was', to the Queen's 'mad as the sea and wind when they contend', and in many other places, the text is insisting on an extravagance of behaviour which could scarcely be overacted.... The modern tendency is to present not a Hamlet who is at times perfectly sane and at other times perfectly lunatic, or behaving as if perfectly lunatic, but a Hamlet who is all the time just a trifle and part of the time more than a trifle—neurotic. This, I suppose, in the age of Freud, may be expected....

Right or wrong, it has had a curious effect on the moral issue. If one imagined Hamlet as a real person, outside the theatre and the play, then clearly his moral responsibility would be greatly lessened if he could be thought of as all the time mentally and emotionally disturbed . But the effect of this in the play is to keep him all the time before us as a person behaving, if not quite normally, then at least within sight of normality and therefore within reach of moral judgement; whereas if he is allowed now and then to rant and caper, heave profound sighs and wear his stockings down-gyved to the ankles, we forget, in practice, that this is 'feigning' and simply discount it . If—to take a concrete instance—the scene with Ophelia can be played as Aaron Hill in the early eighteenth century suggested—that is,Hamlet must quite unmistakably 'act mad' when she is watching but look sanely miserable when she doesn't see him —then his behaviour to her becomes perfectly plausible. But no modern actor does play the scene in that way. The reasons are clear. Partly it is that our greater reluctance to accept on the stage a 'make-believe' we would not credit offstage renders an acted madness unacceptable; partly that our greater sensitiveness to mental illness makes the mere idea of pretending to be mad more than a little distasteful. So in the names of realism and sensitiveness, Hamlet is never allowed to behave as practically everyone in the play (including himself) assures us he does frequently behave. And this implies a very different Hamlet. Instead of a man sufficiently in command of himself to sustain for long periods an exceedingly difficult masquerade, and sustain it well enough to deceive everybody, we have someone always on the edge of breakdown and sometimes over it. The former, I believe, is a great deal nearer than the latter to Shakespeare's conception: though I must agree with Waldock that here Shakespeare himself is partly to blame. He has not completely 'assimilated, re-explained' the inherited theme of feigned madness into his own creation....

Shakespeare does show characters who are what we would call neurotic—Don Juan of MuchAdo, Jaques, Angelo, Leontes, Apemantus—and these are truly unbalanced in ways that Hamlet is not. They show it by an alienation from reality which breeds irremovable delusions, violently anti-social behaviour, and above all a tendency to shun and hate their fellow-creatures . In none of them are the easy sociability, the unforced authority, the capacity to love and be loved, which Hamletshows. And as for the disgust for life which Hamlet expresses, isn't this very adequately accounted for by what happens to him? Eliot's famous remark, that 'Hamlet ... is dominated by an emotion which ... is in excess of the facts as they appear', has always, I must confess, filled me with stupefaction; for when I consider the 'facts' as they did 'appear' to Hamlet—the sudden death of a much-loved father, followed immediately by the indecently hasty and incestuous remarriage of his mother to a man whom Hamlet hated and despised and who then proceeded to cheat him out of the throne, this followed in turn by the supernatural reappearance of his late father with the information that Hamlet's stepfather was his father's murderer and the peremptory command that he, Hamlet, should set to work at once on vengeance —when I consider all this, I find it hard to imagine any degree of emotion which ought to be censured as 'excessive' and I am deep in admiration for the high behaviour-standards of those critics who find in Hamlet's occasional outbursts of hysteria evidence that he must be neurotic....

If, then, we conclude that Hamlet is not a neurotic, he is a normal man in a situation of intense strain, what effect will this have on the moral question? It must clearly make Hamlet a good deal more culpable when he misbehaves, at least when we reflect about him afterwards, if not when we are actually seeing him on the stage. We can rescue him only on one assumption—that he has had laid on him a moral duty so stern and undeniable as to excuse any behaviour which is directed to its performance. And this brings us to the question of revenge.

The original Hamlet, there is no doubt, was almost nothing but an embodiment of Revenge.... We cannot tell for how long this Ur-Hamlet held the stage instead of—or together with—his more complex descendant, it looks as if for a time there must have been one Hamlet for the groundlings and another for the highbrows. Waldock seems to me in the right when he suggests ... that in Shakespeare's handling of his inherited story 'the revenge theme has been considerably damaged'; but, damaged or not, it is still very much there. We cannot ignore it, we must not play down its sometimes unpleasing effects—or play them up, given them a quality of moral repulsiveness which may not have been meant—for it is this, more than anything else, which has divided the prince's interpreters. Was he right to take the command 'Revenge!' as a true moral duty? Does the play as a whole insist that we should agree with this—as powerfully as the Choephori, for instance, insists that Orestes must take vengeance for his father's murder? There is a whole spectrum of answers to these questions—of which we may take [Bertram] Joseph as representative of the one end, Knights and Wilson Knight of the other. Joseph, accepting the revenge-ethic as the ethic which governs the play, argues that 'in a revenge play a nobleman was bound to kill Claudius, and many of Shakespeare's first audiences would have expected this in real life as well'.... Knights replies that a ghost who 'clamours for revenge' must be a ghost concerning whom Shakespeare entertains 'grave doubts' and that Hamlet's acceptance of his command is simply a yielding to temptation.... Wilson Knight agrees; the ghost's command was 'devilish', he was 'a portent not kind but sinister'.

Disagreement could hardly be more absolute. It is part, of course, of a wider disagreement. Joseph sees the character relatively, in terms partly historical, Knights and Wilson Knight absolutely, in terms entirely moral. My own verdict inclines to agree with Joseph, mainly, I think, because this reading seems to stay more scrupulously within the play itself and within the framework of time and form in which the play was made. Knights's reply to this is that he is seeing the play within a 'framework'—and the framework is that of Shakespeare's other plays written in the same period as Hamlet. These, he thinks, enforce a morality which exposes the inadequacy, the wrongness of the revenge-ethic ; and would Shakespeare, at about the same time, write a play to the opposite effect? But this, I believe, falls into two errors. It minimises the difference between an imaginative artist and a moralising arguer, and it is based on selective reading. We may be entitled to draw from Isabella's pardoning of Angelo and Cordelia's of Lear the message that forgiveness is better than vengeance; but surely it is equally true that the whole moral weight of Macbeth is behind the personal and bloody vengeance which Macduff vows and takes on the man who has killed his wife and children, and the whole moral weight of Lear is no less behind Edgar's challenging and killing of Edmund.... This reluctance to believe that Shakespeare could possibly have conceived a character who was 'represented as virtuous', in Johnson's words, but who also pursued revenge as a moral duty —and even greater reluctance to believe that Shakespeare could have thought such a character right to do so—springs, to my mind, from the very powerful quasi-pacifist emotions of many twentieth-century liberal intellectuals and especially of those literary critics whose preoccupations are more with morality than with history. They hate the use of physical force; they are enormously suspicious of what were once called the 'military virtues'; they do not like the idea that a poet whom they admire could have admired a fighting-man.... [It] is this which I detect in Knights's phrase the murder of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern'.... Murder? Well, yes, in a sense I suppose it was; but I fancy that most readers, when they come to that word, are brought up with a shock—a shock of spontaneous disagreement—which, if they reflect on it, they will explain in words like these: 'Knights has forgotten something. He has forgotten that Hamlet is at war. ' Shakespeare did his best to remind him, with pointed use of military imagery —'the enginer / Hoist with his own petar' and 'the pass and fell incensed points / Of mighty opposites', both of which refer directly to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—but I suspect that these signposts failed to show the right way because, for this critic, 'war' and 'murder' are emotionally synonymous. They were not so for Shakespeare; nor for Hamlet. And revenge, in effect, was a private war....

But could it not still be argued that even if Hamlet, and even if the play of Hamlet, accept revenge as a moral duty, nevertheless its execution, and the nasty things that must be done on the way to it, do in fact degrade and contaminate the prince? This is Kitto's argument.... Hamlet, he thinks, is paralysed and 'left prostrate' by 'his comprehensive awareness of evil' and 'the destructive power of evil'. Knights finds this inadequate. Part of the corruption is in Hamlet himself, not all in the world around him, and the play 'urges' us to question and criticise 'the attitudes with which Hamlet confronts his world'.... Does it? I wish I could see just where theplay is 'urging' this.... [The] overall tone of the play is urging us very strongly to admire this prince, and to sympathise with him, at least, all through. Denial of this implies, of course that the ending of the play must be totally ironic: not merely Horatio's elegy—which I suppose may be discounted (though against the emotional grain) as the words of a deeply moved friend—but also the verdict of the uninvolved Fortinbras:

For he was likely, had he been put on,

To have proved most royal ... [V. ii. 397-98]

He could never have said that of Knights's Hamlet.

Nor can I believe, in any case, that Elizabethan minds would accept the proposition that a man who pursues a cause just in itself can be corrupted by the pursuit of it. Their minds were more theological than ours, more closely keyed to an ultimate destiny of total black or white, damned or saved.... If then we accept, as I have argued we must, Shakespeare's acceptance in Hamlet of the ethic of revenge, we must accept also that the man who follows this ethic with courage and responsibility cannot be doing wrong, whatever mistakes or inevitable damage to others may befall him on the way. And Hamlet does show responsibility, when he doubts the bona fides of the ghost and arranges that its story shall be tested. (If only Othello had tested Iago's story with as much responsibility—!)

Nevertheless, it would be absurd to argue that Shakespeare's Hamlet—prince and poem—can yield a moral effect as simple as that of The Spanish Tragedy or, we may presume, of the original Kydian Hamlet. Waldock and Joseph are right, I believe, when they point out ... that there are no signs from Hamlet of conscientious scruples about undertaking the task of revenge, and no other expressions of such feelings in the play: but is it not strange that there should be none? For both play and character are notably Christian . The ghost's speech about Purgatory; the wonderful lines of Marcellus describing the miracles at Christmas; the King at prayer; the burial of Ophelia; Hamlet's references to Christian doctrine on suicide : these give the play terms of reference much more specifically Christian than those of the other tragedies. And yet the completely anti-Christian ethic of revenge is never, as it were, tested by, never even brought up against, this Christian world in which it lives. It is this which makes the moral effect so much more ambiguous than that of a play which is revenge-play and nothing else, such as The Spanish Tragedy; for in that the moral universe is completely pagan, and the fact that the story is supposed to be set in Christian Spain is simply forgotten. This, too, invalidates Kitto's reading of Hamlet as a 'religious drama', one which shows 'the natural working-out of sin' and the 'operation of the divine laws'.... Such words would apply only to dramas where the religious basis was clear-cut and single; but what we have in Hamlet is an extraordinary muddle of twomoralities, one avowed, the other not avowed but both playing heavily and continuously on the central character. This, I believe, is very largely responsible both forHamlet's own confusions and for the confusions of his critics ; it is certainly responsible for one or two crucially ambiguous episodes—and above all for that in which Hamlet spares the King at prayer because he thinks that if he kills him then, his victim will go straight to heaven.... [The] irony is that Hamlet is here behaving as he does because he is a Christian, convinced, as most believers then were, of the vital importance of 'dying well'. The pagan revenger could have taken his vengeance then and there—the only vengeance available to a pagan, the bringing to an end of bodily life—if he were not also a Christian believer.

How aware was Shakespeare of this moral muddle at the core of his play? And how aware was Hamlet that his behaviour as revenger and his beliefs as Christian were scarcely compatible? We shall never be able to answer these questions; but it is a fact that in the Renaissance the Christian ethic which says: 'Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord; I will repay' and the ethic of personal revenge co-existed side by side not merely as ways in which men actually behaved but as accepted, one might almost say respectable, moralities. (They continued to do so, of course, till much later: revenge became duelling, a narrower code but recognisably the same.) Whether the play intends this or not, the curious spectacle it presents of two rival moralities going their ways apparently without noticing each other is no bad representation of the actual contemporary state of affairs outside the theatre; and Hamlet himself, morally divided so perfectly that he does not seem aware of the division, may have seemed to many young men of the early 1600s a remarkably penetrating analysis of a young man like themselves....

Hamlet, then, was a very 'contemporary' character. But this character Shakespeare put in a setting almost as incongruous as he could have found. Whether he did this knowingly or not, no one can say. I should say not; it was rather the inherent effect of taking over an old story for new times. But I am sure that it is here, in this continuous incongruity between central character and setting, that the clue lies to the moral problems which play and character present. For, first of all, he is made a prince, heir presumptive to the throne; the would-be scholar, the quick-witted affable talker, is put in a position where tradition required of him gravity, haughtiness, aloofness. (Of which expected distance Polonius's warning-off of Ophelia is a symptom: 'Lord Hamlet is a Prince, out of thy star' [II. ii. 141].) And then he is placed, this fastidious hater of debauchery and lover of the theatre, in a court peculiarly sombre, sordid and tasteless; and there, against his expressed desire, he is forced to remain. There comes to him next a direct supernatural intervention —one which he must and does believe in (for under his flippant wit he is a believing Christian ) but which shocks him with doubts and questions as it would not have shocked the credulity of earlier ages or simpler types. And finally, there is imposed on him the demand of Revenge . This he accepts as a moral duty, for he has enough in him of the inherited concept of a prince's and a gentleman's honour, but though his reason and his conscience tell him Yes, his nerves tell him No . It is not that he cannot do it; he can, and knows he can. Nor is it that he does not want to through some delicate reluctance to kill in general or some Freudian reluctance to kill his 'father-uncle' in particular . It is the whole life of action, violence, intrigue and public duty that he is reluctant to enter; he would rather be in Wittenberg, with his books. What he really is, is a conscript in a war . He has done things, as we all do in wars, he would rather not have done; but he believes it to be a just war, and all in all, he has borne himself well. That this was how Shakespeare saw it, the ending of the play convinces me; for why else should

The soldier's music and the rite of war
Speak loudly for him? [V. ii. 399-400]