the failure of the law, uncertainty, multiple murders, and the avenger’s death52—Shakespeare creates a complicated hero whose inner psyche contains both the ancient duty to take revenge and the modern repulsion toward it.53
In the characters of the ghost and Laertes, Shakespeare represents, in different ways, the idea central to heroic societies that taking revenge is requisite to a loving relationship. The ghost of Hamlet’s father demands, “If thou didst ever thy dear father love … / Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.”54 The naturalness and even appropriateness of revenge is woven throughout the play in that line and others such as, “If thou hast nature in thee, bear it [the murder] not.”55 King Hamlet, a good and noble man unjustly betrayed and murdered (we “shall not look upon his like again”)56 speaks these lines, not a murderous villain in a Kydian treatment. Because they are spoken by someone we are supposed to admire, we are instructed to take this sentiment seriously and, like Hamlet, to turn it over in our mind. This ghost does not demand the excess characteristic to contemporaneous dramatic versions of revenge that left the stages littered with corpses of the innocent and guilty alike. Instead he admonishes Hamlet to restrain himself (“Taint not thy mind”),57 and limit his bloody revenge to Claudius alone. Speaking of Gertrude, he advises, “Leave her to heaven.”58 The convention of the ghost demanding revenge, borrowed from Seneca59 and familiar to revenge dramas of Shakespeare’s time, is a variation of the Furies of Aeschylus, creatures from another world insisting that the unjustly murdered be avenged. The dignified and honorable ghost of King Hamlet approaches the image sought by Aeschylus of the Furies at Wisdom’s side, a far more complex and ambiguous image than the polarized revenge and justice, passion and reason, of lesser plays. As Charles and Elaine Hallett note, “The Ghost in Hamlet … symbolizes that justice which is naturally intuited by the individual psyche.”60
In Laertes, Shakespeare personifies the ancient, uncomplicated response to a wrong committed against a family; Laertes sees his course clearly. Hamlet has killed Laertes’s father, Polonius, and driven his sister, Ophelia, to madness and suicide; Laertes will have his revenge. His course is so direct that he is easily used by Claudius for Claudius’s own, less nobly inspired, ends. Claudius pointedly questions, even goads, Laertes: “Laertes, was your father dear to you? / Or are you like a painting of a sorrow, / A face without a heart?”61 If Laertes really loved his father, in Claudius’s schemed version, he must act. If he does not act, it is evidence he did not love his father. In the understanding of the old dispensation, love for a slain family member requires bloody revenge. Moreover, in Claudius’s view (which aligns him with the revenge-seeking villains of contemporaneous plays), “Revenge should have no bounds.”62
On the other hand, Shakespeare, influenced by Elizabethan ethical teaching that insistently condemned revenge,63 endows Hamlet with a more modern resistance to private revenge.64 At first Hamlet reacts to his father’s demand for revenge with predictable emotion: “I, with wings as swift / As meditation or the thoughts of love, / May sweep to my revenge.”65 He hesitates to sweep, of course, and his hesitance causes him to despise himself: “O, vengeance! / Why, what an ass am I! This most brave, / That I, the son of a dear father murdered, / Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, / Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words.”66 Hamlet believes that replacing action with ruminating language is weak and unmanly. Despite his private eloquence in the famous soliloquies, Hamlet is suspicious of language. He cannot unpack his heart with words to anyone (except the audience); when he speaks to other characters in the play, he feigns madness and dissembles. He actually disavows the possibility of speaking and requires the others who have seen the ghost also to be silent, to “still your fingers on your lips.”67
Hamlet, educated at a German university, embodies the competing drives: the ancient impulse to avenge a loved one’s murder and the more civilized realization that private revenge-seeking destroys a society. Hamlet’s rational Wittenberg-student self wars against his more instinctive and passionate Danish self. He desires fully the appropriate and measured familial revenge his father demands: an eye for an eye, a death for a death. At the same time, he has the more modern understanding of the destructiveness of private revenge and the threat it poses to the stability of the state. Like Orestes, he is trapped between conflicting impulses, between two “goods,” but no Athena, no dea ex machina, appears to resolve his dilemma. Instead, for him, “Denmark’s a prison.”68
Like some scenes in the Iliad and the conclusion of the Oresteia, Hamlet portrays the internal contradictions of the human psyche: the need to avenge a loved one and the knowledge that such vengeance leads to destruction and suffering. If Hamlet acts as his father desires, Denmark is threatened. And he cannot turn to the state to enact his revenge, because Claudius, the murderer, is the state. The central authority cannot play its assigned role, and when such a failure occurs, even the most civilized and educated among us may be driven to private revenge: “Man seems to take justice into his own hands when God or secular authorities fail.”69 The ghost of Hamlet’s father, like the Furies of the Oresteia, has been driven underground only to emerge when he has no vengeance.
It is the ghost’s parting words, “Remember me,”70 that most obsess Hamlet. After the ghost departs, Hamlet repeats the words until they become a kind of litany:
Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone will live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. Yes, by heaven!….
“Remember me.”
I have sworn’t.71
Violent revenge collapses into “remember.” How is Hamlet to remember his father? His Wittenberg education has told him that violent revenge is wrong but has given him nothing to take its place if the state cannot or will not act for him. Hamlet struggles to imagine an alternative, and he fails.
Yet it seems to me that the play itself provides an overlooked alternative in its final act. Like The Spanish Tragedy and other similar but lesser plays, in the final scene of Hamlet the stage is covered with bodies of the guilty and innocent alike. Eight deaths occur—Polonius, Ophelia, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, and Hamlet are all dead by the time the play ends. But before he dies, Hamlet entreats his friend Horatio “To tell my story”:
O God, Horatio, what a wounded name,
Things standing thus unknown, shall live behind me!
If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart,
Absent thee from felicity for awhile,
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain,
To tell my story.72
Hamlet has never spoken truth to power; he has instead “put an antic disposition on.”73 He has forgone any opportunity to remember his father with language. And he has been unable to react with the comparable violence demanded by the old order; he never does decide to take revenge. The multiple killings at
