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It is a strange fact that although Hamlet has spoken with unique force to the most diverse audiences for over three centuries, and has been so incorporated into our lives that it is, as the joke goes, a patchwork of quotations, yet the majority of contemporary critics agree with T. S. Eliot in finding it essentially incoherent. Mr. Eliot, says, “Here Shakespeare tackled a problem that was too much for him… Nothing that [he] can do with the plot can express Hamlet for him.” Another critic concurs: “The spirit of the tragedy is … imperfect in its clarity of conception“; and another: “The dramatist never succeeded in finding a dramatic form that could completely express his idea“; another: “What is seen is a series of pictures, vivid, brief, isolated“; another: “No play, doubtless, is so ill constructed … and all efforts to reduce it to unity fail.”
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- Copyright © The Tulane Drama Review 1959
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1 It is only on the fringes of the violent central action that Shakespeare observes the gesture in shapes less doomed. There is, for example, Fortinbras, a royal youth in quest of honor, who refuses to accept the fate which provides him no field in which to seek that honor. Fortinbras moves with his armies against “a little patch of ground / That hath in it no profit but the name,” exposes “what is mortal and unsure / To all that fortune, death and danger dare, / Even for an egg-shell“—here, too, a gesture of “treason gainst fortune's state,” and irrational enough; but one, the suggestion is, appropriate to youth, and promising well enough of him.
There is also Horatio, whose refusal to be “a pipe for fortune's finger to sound what stop she please” amounts to a kind of stoic endurance: he takes “with equal thanks … fortune's buffets and rewards.” His reliance is not upon reason (indeed, he does not believe in inquiring “too curiously” into matters), but upon simple faith. When Marcello declares, “There is something rotten in the state of Denmark,” Horatio answers him, “Heaven will direct it.“
These two alone of the important characters in the play survive in the end.