"If you reflect upon life and its variations,
you realize that death is just a kind of killing,
whenever the times produce a stick
Man wraps around it a blade"
These two verses, along with many other verses in Al-Mutanabbi’s poetic repertoire, amount to contemplation into humanity and the conditions of the world. However, Al-Mutanabbi’s contemplative phrases are nonetheless mere verses that are often followed by others that lead us elsewhere. Moreover, if we stripped the meaning of the verse of the meter and rhyme that wrap it, much of the affect and impact it engenders would be lost.
With William Shakespeare, we are confronted with something different that builds and expands over the entirety of the poetic play. Shakespeare, With the states and feelings he draws (ambition, greed, love, justice, revenge, hatred, regret, forgiveness, sympathizing with the tragedy, and the relationship between power with madness...), cuts across space and time, while man is drawn, two centuries before the “Enlightenment,” as a unitary concept and indivisible ideal.
Some scholars of Shakespeare saw more: he, certainly without having intended to, contributed to overcoming an old philosophical question: should priority and precedence be given to the hand/labor or the mind/thought?
Indeed, his heroes (Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello...) did not necessarily materially exist as individuals, but their impact and presence in human life, behavior, and sentiment outweigh the impact and presence of any actual person exerts.
Inspired by an old Scandinavian story narrated by the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus about a child named Amleth, who saw his uncle killing his father, “The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark,” was written between 1599 and 1602. Amleth had seen his uncle kill his father, so he feigned madness to reassure his uncle, and when he grows up, Amleth kills his uncle with his father’s sword.
However, Hamlet does not kill his uncle with ease - not only because of his young age, but also because he has not seen the crime with his own eyes. And so, the Shakespearean ambiguity and perplexity that permeate and shape the course of the entire play creep in.
Hamlet returns to the town of Elsinore after his father’s death, and only a few months would pass before his mother Gertrude marries his uncle Claudius, who takes hold of the kingdom that Hamlet was supposed to inherit. However, the latter soon becomes a prisoner of the past and its mixed shadows: he is repeatedly visited by a ghost claiming to be the spirit of his father returning from the grave, and that he had been the victim of a demented crime committed by Hamlet’s uncle Claudius, who not only usurped the throne but also stole the heart of his mother, Queen Gertrude.
As the young prince’s grief morphs into anger and he begins planning his revenge against the new king, his plans appear conflicting, jeopardized by doubt and hesitation. Hamlet thus becomes an irascible and unstable man. However, he also becomes the most humanized of Shakespeare’s characters, in the sense that he puts those who are perplexed, burdened with questions, and think more than they take initiative, in contrast with those who are decisive, haunted by a single poor answer, and take initiative without thinking. Engrossed with flipping things on their head, Hamlet’s questions breed more questions and the contradictions stemming from visits of the ghost/the father accumulate. Meanwhile, he continues his monologue that personifies his existential dilemma and being shattered between thought and action.
In order to remove his doubt, Hamlet pretends that he himself is deranged. He then stages a soiree and a play during which Claudius confesses to what he had done. However, certainty of this fact does not imply certainty of all facts. Indeed, the events then unfold in quick succession - from Hamlet’s exile to the suicide of Ophelia, with whom he shares a dubious love affair, to her brother Laertes becoming furious with Hamlet, and finally, Claudius organizing a sword duel between the two, poisoning Laertes’ sword and the wine of Hamlet, who decides that time to kill Claudius has come. However, after Hamlet is stabbed, the mother, Gertrude - aware that it had been poisoned - drinks the wine before giving it to her son in order to foil Claudius’ plan, preventing him from becoming the one to murder her son after having murdered her husband.
The bitter experience ends with many dead, wounded, and poisoned; everyone drowns in a puddle of blood and death. Only Hamlet’s close friend, Horatio, survives to tell the new king, Fortinbras, the truth of what had happened.
Indeed, the eternal cycle of violence that marks tragedies of revenge dates back to the stories of the ancient Greeks. As for the desire for revenge, it does nothing but corrupt the avenger himself, who, like the others, ends up dead.
However, since Claudius remains preoccupied with building an army to seize Norway throughout the play, Denmark oscillates between being at war and not being at war. As usually happens, the rulers, under the pretext of external enemies, become preoccupied with looking for enemies within, and the town of Elsinore becomes a society in which everyone conspires against the other and everyone watches everyone. As for Hamlet, in addition to constantly watching Claudius, he also observes and questions himself with a pressing apprehension that multiplies his psychological states and his conflicting and creative moods.
It seems that the criticism of Denmark (Elsinore) conceals Shakespeare’s criticism of the England of his time - the England of Queen Elizabeth that became famous, alongside its artistic and literary ingenuity, for the prevalence of spying and intrigue between Protestants and Catholics. At the time, Elizabeth I had established an expansive network of informants to expose her opponents, on whose necks the guillotine descended. As for the ghost of the father caught between life and death, it was also tied to politics and religious conflict: Elizabeth’s strict Protestantism abolished, among other things, the Catholic narrative about “purgatory” - the stage in which sinners are tortured and purified before ascending to heaven. Thus, when it was officially banned, purgatory turned into figures of speech and poetic images, which often fit into the Shakespearean world embellished with perplexity and ambiguity, as well as conflicting psychological states and the pain and suffering that come with them.
The play has been debated extensively. Among its popular interpretations was Freud’s reading, which linked the long time it took Hamlet to reach his decision to kill Claudius to his repressed Oedipus complex and how he felt about his mother, whom he hated seeing going “to his uncle’s bed.” Many agree that Hamlet is the most compelling testament to the fact that literature is about ideas before anything else. More numerous are those who consider it Shakespeare’s most important work, and they count Shakespeare himself, who named his son “Hamnet,” among their ranks.
