Characters on the Couch
The Romantics' reinvention of Hamlet as a paralyzed Romantic was their single most influential critical act. - Jonathan Bate, The Romantics on Shakespeare, Penguin,London, 1992. p.2. |
In his lectures on Hamlet, given in London (1819), Samuel Taylor
Coleridge spoke of a new kind of "character criticism" that
was necessary to begin to fathom the complexity of the play's central
character. He advocated applying the new advances in psychology to the
understanding of Hamlet, and spoke of this new technique for literary
character study using a term of his own invention - "psycho-analysis."
Hamlet was just one of a variety of central characters (mostly young
men) admired by the Romantics for their rich, complex, and confused
inner life. It was as if their psychological complexity and personal
intensity separated them from the normal society which formed a background
and a foil for their specialness.
Interestingly enough, it became popular for literary critics to explore their own psychological affinity to Hamlet; as if the penetration of this stage character's mind also served as microscope for penetrating their own psyche. At the time, anyone studying Hamlet was at risk for a case of "arch Hamletism" themself. The antic disposition was contagious. It was almost as if a critic could improve his credentials by claiming a personal understanding of this complex character. Here are a few examples: |
"I have a smack of Hamlet myself, if I may say so...." - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Table Talk", in Coleridge's Writings on Shakespeare,Capricorn, New York, 1959. p. 140 He thought it essential to the understanding of Hamlet's character, that we should reflect on the constitution of our own minds. - Samuel Taylor Coleridge, lecture notes, The Romantics on Shakespeare, Penguin, London, 1992. p. 134. "Hamlet's heart was full of such Misery as mine is when he said to Ophelia 'Go to a Nunnery, go, go!' Indeed I should like to give up the matter at once -- I should like to die. I am sickened at the brute world which you are smiling with." - John Keats, Letters, in Reinventing Shakespeare, Oxford, 1989. p. 103
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Although new to the Romantics, this style of personal psychological association
with Hamlet has managed to remain popular to this day. A contemporary satisfaction
garnered from exploring a character of such depth and complexity is the
added self-understanding that comes from it.
In the Prince of Denmark, I see much of myself. It is not to Hamlet's nobility of mind that I refer, not to the "courtier's, soldier's, scholar's, eye, tongue, sword" or to "the glass of fashion and the mold of form," but to his hesitations, his vacillations, and above all his egregious eagerness to play the antic. In this mirror that he holds up to nature, I see my own reflection. And of course, like me, Hamlet recognizes Purpose (which he, in a Christian century, calls Providence) even in the "fall of a sparrow." - Alan Isler. The Prince of West End Avenue, Penguin, London & New York, 1994. p. 44. |
I was having dinner with the actor, monologist and storyteller Spalding Gray one evening in 1995. We hadn't seen each other for some time, and had some "catching up" to do at the beginning of the conversation. Spalding asked me what I had been doing recently, and I replied that I had been studying Hamlet.
A pause ensued, then Spalding asked me in an amazed tone that suggested that the coincidence was just too great, "Hamlet, did you say?" I nodded. Another pause. "I am Hamlet!"
It turned out that Spalding was, at that time, at a particular juncture
in his life when he was forced to make some major decisions, and he found
himself pulled toward two poles, and suspended somewhere between them. Unable
to make a clear choice, he found himself particularly associating with that
paragon of conflicted characters; Hamlet.