by Nils Peterson
Something about Hamlet makes us want to love him, some mysterious quality of his being. I was maybe 15 or 16 when I first met the Prince and sitting next to Boots Schneider at the Olivier movie which had just opened in New York. Yet Hamlet held my attention even more than her hand because somehow he was saying things I had always wanted to say, but not only did I not know how to say them, up to that moment I didn’t know I wanted to say them. What I wanted to say had something to do with authority, something to do with those large figures who hold in their hands the powers of the world, something to do with the joy of saying to Polonius “Excellent well, you are a fishmonger,” and some kind of recognition of Hamlet’s deep sense of betrayal. This is the Prince’s dominant emotion, the feeling that lacerates his being, and his perception of the world is accurate; he has been betrayed.
There are the human betrayals: his uncle usurps his throne; his mother marries with that uncle so fast, so fast; his girl withdraws her presence; his young friends come and, for a moment, he looks to them for comfort, but it is soon clear that he is their stepping stone to royal favor. He is betrayed by the old as well, by what they have learned to call wisdom and how they are satisfied with it – for surely it is true that for the first part of the play Hamlet’s real opposite is Polonius. What is more opposite to the philosopher than the philosophizer?
There are the non-human betrayers. As he is betrayed by Wisdom, he is betrayed by Vocation. He is called to be a king and yet he is not king. He is betrayed by Death who has carried his father away (and by his father who has allowed death to carry him off – for is that not one of the great betrayals? Our parents die and leave nothing, no barrier, no guard for us between this world and the next). And as fearful as this is, when his father returns, there is a worse betrayal, for his father wants revenge, and what worse thing can a parent do to a child than to make that child live out or finish up the parent’s destiny and not urge the child to find his own own? Revenge would be the completion of the older Hamlet’s life, not the growth of a life out of the seeds of the young man’s own being. Some too have suggested that Hamlet is betrayed by his own five wits.
To list in another way the nature of Hamlet’s non-human betrayal – he is betrayed by Kindred, Fellowship, Goods [“And what so poor a man as Hamlet is….” “Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks….”], Knowledge, Beauty [“Pale as his shirt, his knees knocking each other/ And with a look so piteous….”], Strength [Is not his death in the duel a betrayal by his strength?], Discretion [“Oh what a rash and bloody deed is this…”], as well as Five-Wits. The reference here is clear enough, but I am not in this paper attempting to allegorize Hamlet, to turn him into Everyman, as, indeed, others have done [“‘Such fellows as I’ does not mean ‘such fellows as Goethe’s Hamlet, or Coleridge’s Hamlet, or any Hamlet’: it means men creatures shapen in sin and conceived in iniquity – and the vast, empty vision of them ‘crawling between earth and heaven’….” (“Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem,” C.S. Lewis, reprinted in the Norton Critical Edition of Hamlet, ed. Cyrus Hoy, p. 218.)] but rather to point out exactly the nature of Hamlet’s betrayal – the nature of which would have been clear to every thinking man in the the Middle Ages, but the nature of which was blurred, misunderstood, or refuted in the Renaissance – as Chaucer says at the end of Troilus and- Criseyde – “Swich fyn hath false worldes brotelnesse.” Hamlet is betrayed by the world, by life itself. Chaucer and his contemporaries would have understood quite well the function of such betrayal. It existed to drive men towards spiritual transformation.
For us, what does it mean that life betrays? Or to ask the question psychologically – what is the function of betrayal in the human psyche where betrayal really lives – or, again, what is the function of the archetype of betrayal? How does it relate to the meaning of Hamlet’s life which may help us with the meaning of Hamlet? To explore this issue, I will use as a tool James Hillman’s article “Betrayal” published in a collection of his essays called Loose Ends (Spring Publications, 1975, pp. 63) – I will begin with the central section of the article in which Hillman discusses the dangers of having been betrayed – the dangers not of the act itself – but the dangers to the psyche as it responds to that act. The first of these dangers is the danger of revenge: “Revenge is natural for some,” says Hillman coming immediately and without question.” “It may be cleansing,” – so, Laertes has a place here and why somehow his ability to cut a throat “i’th’ church” does not taint him. He lives in the physical and social reflexes of his young body. He does not stop to think, he acts instead. But this kind of action produces nothing but “counter-revenging and feuding” as is illustrated in the ongoing conflicts between the family Hamlet and the family Fortinbras. Once, however, revenge is delayed – when it “turns into plotting, lying low and waiting your chances,” then “it begins to smell of evil, breeding fantasies of cruelty and vindictiveness.” It can become “obsessional.” Hillman concludes that the worst of revenge, psychologically, is its mean and petty focus, its shrinking effect on consciousness.” Certainly one of the central questions of the play can be stated this simply – at the end of Hamlet, has the consciousness of the Prince grown or shrunk?
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