The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [389]
The tragedy is now firmly into its Nightmare Stage, during most of which we do not even see the hero, because he is in England. The image which most chillingly conveys this sense of nightmare, simultaneously betraying what is really going on in Hamlet's inner kingdom, is the heart-rending spectacle of the deranged Ophelia, driven mad by her father's casual murder at the hands of the man she had once loved and hoped to marry. She then drowns as she sings, her flower-strewn body carried away on the stream. Hamlet has lost his soul. Two of the three aspects of his psyche are dead. The only one left is his Alter-Ego.
Laertes is now Hamlet's mirror. Both are young men returned from studying abroad. Both are sons whose fathers have been murdered. Both have lost the feminine other half they loved: except that only one of them has been guilty of her death. And Shakespeare highlights the way in which Laertes has now become Hamlet's `light rival' in a strange little episode, the significance of which can easily be overlooked. Between Ophelia's `mad scene' and the news of her death, Claudius and Gertrude are left alone when a messenger bursts in to announce that something akin to a revolution has broken out. Laertes is outside, at the head of an angry mob proclaiming him as king: `Laertes shall be king. Laertes himself then bursts in, with some of his followers, to address Claudius as `O thou vile King'.
What makes this particularly significant is that, in the original story, there is no Laertes-figure. The character whom the people acclaim as king is Amleth himself, after he has slain his stepfather. Shakespeare has thus deliberately split the hero into two, with Laertes as Hamlet's `light alter ego. Only now does Claudius tempt Laertes into his own web of darkness, by offering him the chance to avenge his own father, and this makes the equivalence between Hamlet and Laertes complete.
As Act Five begins, with Hamlet returned from England, the two rivals fight in Ophelia's open grave, grimly foreshadowing how the drama is about to end. Having overcome his conscience and yet realised that he is not going to achieve his purpose, Hamlet is now resigned to his fate. Never has he been more wittily mocking than in the scene where he sends up the hapless Osric, the courtier sent by Claudius to convey the challenge to the fencing match which is to be his downfall. But by now Hamlet and Laertes, who has been in training with `Lamord' ('La mort'), the finest fencing teacher in Europe, have been wholly transformed into each other's `dark Alter-Ego. So far is the distorting power of darkness now in the ascendant, so unable is anyone now to `see whole', that everything goes as wrong as it possibly could. First Hamlet and Laertes swap their foils, so that both are fatally wounded by the poison intended only for Hamlet. Then Gertrude drinks the poison intended for Hamlet and dies, prompting Hamlet at last to kill his treacherous stepfather. Laertes dies, already repenting of his part in this villainy (as soon as Claudius dies, he begins to move back towards the light). Finally Hamlet follows. The son-hero Prince has killed his `Dark Father'. But in working towards this he has killed off all those aspects of himself which, if he could have remained at one with them, might have enabled him, had he been `put on' as king, to have `proved most royal'.
What we are thus left with is a spectacle unique in storytelling. We have seen a hero setting out to do something which, for so many other heroes, is a natural precondition to their arriving at a happy, light ending. But here this involves him in becoming so possessed by the state of darkness that it destroys him. The intelligent, funny,