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... Moreover, to hold or appeal to the Elizabethan audience, Shakespeare may produce plays which reflect or are implicated with an Elizabethan social and cultural ideology that is “a system of illusory beliefs – false ideas or false consciousness –which can be contrasted with true or scientific knowledge” (Williams 55) or the form of social consciousness that exists at any particular moment. That is to say, ideology is imaginary or an image of reality forced by “the interest of the ruling class” (Elster 168) for the majority of people within a given culture. ... ]” (145), and Shakespeare as an author is “both less in control and more active than this expressive realist ideology would have it. ... Furthermore, his plays may question everything about Elizabethan ideology and disturb the Elizabethan audience. ... In other words, Shakespeare’s plays, like other literary works, spring from an ideological conception of the world; at the same time his authorial role can transform, resist, and reproduce ideology. Shakespeare suggests his mimesis of the play with Hamlet’s voice, “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” (3. ...
From this view Hamlet can be seen as struggling with the Elizabethan ideology between social identity and self, between traditional social order and emergent social order, and between public untruth and private truth. This is to say, “Hamlet is embedded in ideology in a variety of roles” (Hawkes 312). I shall base my analysis of Hamlet on the complexity of his rhetoric and of his action, which results from a contrast between Hamlet’s vision and Hamlet’s world. The world whose realities are murder, incest, and usurpation is not what Hamlet sees it to be. Andrew Mousley suggests that Shakespeare may dramatize Hamlet as “the failure of ideologies fully to interpellate or precisely to ‘speak through’ the individual” (68). Individualisms, which are not yet contracted to any particular class ideology, resist social identity which society offers. Here we may also see that Hamlet’s dilemma is caused by and reflects Elizabethan society and culture; it appears as his melancholy and madness or “antic disposition.”
Yet, the psychological critics diagnose Hamlet’s dilemma and hesitation as Hamlet’s propensity for melancholy; Hamlet is too sensitive, too shy, too melancholy, and too sexually confused to act. More interestingly, Janet Adelman argues that Hamlet’s dilemma comes from the struggle “to free the masculine identity both father and son from its origin in the contaminated maternal body” because “if the father’s death leads to the mothers sexualized body, the mother’s sexualized body leads to the father’s death” (261). The psychological approach, indeed, tends to limit Hamlet’s problems to aspects of his personality, neglecting his political attitudes or his view on social causality. By contrast, I will here show that not only Hamlet but also the Elizabethan audience is caught in ideology that his society projects rather than in the Freudian conception of false consciousness that is “an idiosyncratic complex of beliefs and attitudes caused by a unique set of experiences” (Elster 169). In other word, Hamlet’s psychology is a social product.
Hamlet, the son of the late king Hamlet and the nephew and stepson of the present king Claudius, desperately leaves the last words, “Horatio, I am dead, / Thou livest. ... Why is Hamlet so anxious about his justifications? ... To understand Hamlet’s suffering and dilemma, we need, first and foremost, to briefly look at Elizabethan society, which is strongly bound to her religion. ... Shakespeare expresses the conception of order with Hamlet’s vision of man, and also he seems to challenge it with Hamlet’s self-contempt and self-seeking:
What [a] piece of work is a man, how noble in
reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving, how express and admirable in action, how like an angel in apprehension, how like a
god! ... This is projected on the potential crisis of legitimization between Claudius, a new monarch, and Hamlet, the legitimate heir, after King Hamlet’s death. In spite of the fact that Hamlet is the rightful heir of King Hamlet, Claudius, the brother of King Hamlet, succeeds to the throne by the new politics of absolute monarchy. ... Claudius practices his authority as a new king, political head of the Demark, to limit public mourning for his dead predecessor with the odd mingling celebration of the dead king’s funeral and his marriage to the widowed queen:
Though yet of Hamlet our dear brother’s death
The memory be green, and that it us befitted
To bear our hearts in grief, and our whole kingdom
To be contracted in one brow of woe,
Yet so far hath discretion fought with nature
That we with wisest sorrow think on him
Together with remembrance of ourselves. ... 71-72), as Claudius, “uncle-father,” also tries to reintegrate displaced Hamlet into the society; he compares “the mortality of a king as a specific human being with the immortality of his office” and affirms that “the continuing vitality of society is independent of the transience of contingent individuals” (Bristol 352). ... On the other hand, Claudius seems to see Hamlet’s grief not only as for his father’s death, but also for losing the position of king: “You are the most immediate to our throne” (109). Yet, Claudius explicitly fails to coax Hamlet, son of the dead king, to identify with “Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son” (117). Instead, Hamlet is irreconcilable to the social and cultural order. Moreover, in politics, Hamlet is alienated from society and court “by the usurpation of power by representatives or delegates” (Elster 181). Therefore, Claudius’ authority is Hamlet’s alien.
Ophelia calls Hamlet “The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword” (3. ... Now Hamlet obviously becomes melancholy because he is tremendously shocked by his mother’s incestuous marriage with his uncle in “most wicked speed”(1.
Approximate Word count = 5123
Approximate Pages = 20.5
(250 words per page double spaced)
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