Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [85]
So much has been made of Hamlet’s indecisiveness—even seventh graders routinely write term papers on the topic—that it is widely regarded as his defining trait. But this wasn’t always the case. As the critic Harold Jenkins has observed, for at least the first 150 years of his literary life, Hamlet was generally viewed as “vigorous, bold and heroic”—a victim of his circumstances, not his psyche. But then, in the eighteenth century, the writer James Boswell remarked on “that irresolution which forms so marked a part of [Hamlet’s] character,” and the description stuck. Over the next hundred years, and with help from additional commentary by the likes of Goethe and Coleridge, the Hamlet we know today was born: a man so paralyzed by indecision that he is unable to take action.
If it’s true that every generation gets the Hamlet it deserves, it would be interesting to figure out why eighteenth-century British theatergoers suddenly required such a paralyzed and doubt-ridden prince. What was it in the political and cultural climate of the moment that suddenly made action and conviction, thought and doubt such transfixing issues? Whatever it was, it is with us still—just as Boswell’s characterization of Hamlet has yet to be convincingly supplanted by any other. The prince who lives in our modern consciousness, the one who fascinates us and drives us crazy, is the man of (in Coleridge’s words) “everlasting broodings.”
In this now-standard reading, doubt is Hamlet’s tragic flaw, responsible for both his inner anguish and the external calamities of the play. But there’s something strange about this interpretation of Hamlet, and of Hamlet. For starters, the prince tries to kill Claudius two acts earlier than he succeeds. That he accidentally kills Claudius’s trusted counselor Polonius instead is a failure of execution, not a failure of conviction. Nor did Hamlet hesitate to arrange for the murder of his two school friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, when he learned that they were spying on him—hardly the action of the man one critic deemed “Prince Pussyfoot.”
Still, Hamlet does struggle with doubt. Even if he is more a man of action than we generally allow, he is also clearly a man of contemplation—alive to contradiction and complexity, and troubled by the possibility of error. We know that he believes that our powers of reflection are not meant to “fust in us unus’d,” and we watch him bring those powers to bear not only on the question of whether to murder his uncle but also on the merits of ending his own life (“to be, or not to be”), and on the meaning of life and afterlife more generally.
Clearly, then, that the capacity to doubt is part of Hamlet’s disposition. What is less clear is why that characteristic has struck so many critics as such a profound defect. It’s not as if the prince dillydallies for fourteen scenes over whether to order the BLT or the chicken salad. This is someone who has been asked to commit murder. And not just any murder, but one that is both a regicide and a virtual parricide: the deliberate assassination of a man who is at once his sovereign, his uncle, his stepfather, and his mother’s husband. One assumes that any reasonable person would be given pause by such a situation. (And such was the interpretation of Hamlet pre-Boswell: that of a reasonable man in an unreasonable position).
As if this ethical, political, and familial predicament weren