Young Alexander of Macedonia (later known as Alexander the Great) and at another time young Octavian in Rome (later known as Caesar Augustus) had been groomed their entire lives to become warriors in their teenage years -- and each of them did become a warrior as a teenager and a leader of warriors. So as a teenager, young Prince Hamlet has in effect been groomed to follow their example when the time comes for him to become the warrior-king of Denmark.
But Prince Hamlet has been a student at Wittenberg, the place where Martin Luther became famous. So the Lutheran reformation is in the background in Shakespeare's play, which means that the Roman Catholic Church against which Luther rebelled is also hovering in the background. More than once, Critchley and Webster refer to this larger historical context that is in the background in Shakespeare's play.
As Shakespeare's play opens, we learn about the appearance of the ghost of the deceased King Hamlet. The ghost of King Hamlet calls on Prince Hamlet to avenge his foul murder. In this way, Shakespeare calls to mind revenge tragedies.
But Prince Hamlet freezes at the ghost's injunction. Today we speak of our fight/flight/freeze reaction. Hamlet freezes. Because he freezes at the idea of avenging his father's supposedly foul murder, Prince Hamlet is not a teenager action-hero as Alexander and Octavian were.
Because action-heroes like Alexander and Octavian are staple figures in action movies today, we should pause a moment here to consider the possible merits to Prince Hamlet's freezing. President George W. Bush famously told us that as the president he was the decider. Decide he did. He decided to launch wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. With respect to these two decisions, he was an action-hero in the tradition of the teenage Alexander and the teenage Octavian. As an exercise in fantasy, we might wonder if he should have taken flight from those advising him to undertake those two wars, or perhaps had Prince Hamlet's freeze reaction and had delayed and given the matter further thought.
The fight/flight/freeze reaction was clearly involved in how young Tayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman in Sandford, Florida, in 2012, when he was 17 years old -- roughly the age of young Alexander and young Octavian and young Prince Hamlet. As a result of being stalked by George Zimmerman, young Trayvon Martin decided to stand his ground against George Zimmerman and fight him. In terms of his fight/flight/freeze reaction, he decided to fight. As a result of the fight, George Zimmerman shot and killed him -- and claimed that he did so in self-defense because he feared for his life during the fight. He was acquitted of charges of second-degree murder and of manslaughter. As the dead man's mother recently pointed out, had the young man taken flight and run home for safety, his unknown stalker would then have learned where he lived. And how was the young man to know what his unknown stalker would have done then?
As a result of freezing, Prince Hamlet puts on his thinking cap, instead of undertaking immediate action to avenge his father's supposed foul murder. He thinks that he can find out the truth about his father's supposed murder by having a play staged for King Claudius to watch. King Claudius is the brother of the dead King Hamlet and the uncle of Prince Hamlet and the current husband of Prince Hamlet's mother, Queen Gertrude. (Remember that Freud, the father of psychoanalytic theory, wrote about the family romance.) In any event, the play's the thing through which Prince Hamlet hopes to catch the conscience of King Claudius.
Let's step back for a moment. Here we have the playwright Shakespeare writing a play in which we are going to have a play within the play which will catch the conscience of King Claudius. But isn't this an idealization of the play within the play? After all, how many plays in Shakespeare's time caught the consciences of Queen Elizabeth or, later, King James? Or is this apparent idealization supposed to hint at the consciences of the larger audience of the plays in Shakespeare's time? If plays in Shakespeare's time were able to catch the consciences of at least some people in the audience, wouldn't those people be in danger of experiencing the kind of catharsis that Aristotle writes about in his POETICS?
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Thomas James Farrell is professor emeritus of writing studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD). He started teaching at UMD in Fall 1987, and he retired from UMD at the end of May 2009. He was born in 1944. He holds three degrees from Saint Louis University (SLU): B.A. in English, 1966; M.A.(T) in English 1968; Ph.D.in higher education, 1974. On May 16, 1969, the editors of the SLU student newspaper named him Man of the Year, an honor customarily conferred on an administrator or a faculty member, not on a graduate student -- nor on a woman up to that time. He is the proud author of the book (more...)
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