Reading Human Nature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice

7. Intentional Meaning in Hamlet: An Evolutionary Perspective

Common Wisdom and New Knowledge Can an evolutionary perspective advance on the common wisdom of the critical tradition? One way to approach this question is to look at an actual example. Hamlet is convenient for this purpose, partly because it is so important and so well known, and partly because it has already attracted considerable attention from evolutionary critics. Robert Storey, Michelle Scalise-Sugiyama, Daniel Nettle, John Knapp, Brian Boyd, and John Tooby and Leda Cosmides have all used Hamlet to illustrate theoretical principles about literature , and Boyd and Knapp have made more detailed interpretive comments on it. After outlining a model of interpretive criticism from an evolutionary perspective, I shall summarize their efforts, compare them with traditional humanist readings, and offer my own interpretive commentary on Hamlet. Offer my own interpretive commentary on Hamlet? Adding to the thousands or tens of thousands already produced? The heart grows faint; the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, almost. What can be said about Hamlet within the common idiom, having no systematic recourse to extraneous theories, has most assuredly already been said. So far, the efforts to devise new readings by invoking extraneous theories—Freudian, deconstructive, Marxist, Foucauldian, and feminist, among others—have on the whole done less to illuminate the play than to elaborate their own preconceptions. Hamlet’s erotic passion chapter 7 , Intentional Meaning in Hamlet An Evolutionary Perspective 123 124 Reading Human Nature for Gertrude and secret complicity with Claudius in getting the castrating Hamlet senior safely underground (Jones); Hamlet as the Phallus (Lacan); the ghost as the transcendental Signified (Adelman; Garber); Hamlet’s revolt against Claudius as a nascent impulse of proto-proletarian class consciousness (Bristol); Polonius as the embodiment of the Panopticon, peeping on everyone (Neill); Gertrude as the embodiment of anarchic feminine sexuality demonized by the Patriarchy (Adelman)—all such fancies have served as Procrustean beds, distorting the common understanding of the play.1 If there is a “deep structure” to Hamlet, we will not get to it by violating the folk psychology implicit in the common idiom. We will get to it only by developing analytic concepts congruent with the common idiom but encompassing the common understanding within a more systematic and integrated body of causal explanations . Shakespeare holds a mirror up to nature.2 So must we. By repudiating the very concept of “nature,” postmodern theory has moved off in a direction that could not possibly advance on the common understanding. Is it possible to formulate a set of theoretical principles distinct enough to offer real explanatory leverage but broad and flexible enough to give a just rendering of the thematic and tonal structure of the play? I think it is. We can integrate evolutionary concepts of human nature with the common understanding embodied in the best of traditional humanistic criticism. Using that conceptual structure as our interpretive framework, we can ask basic questions about the meaning of the play and provide reasoned answers. Those answers can of course have no claim to absolute validity; they are speculative, discursive, and rhetorical, not empirical and quantitative . They are not here tested and decisively falsified or confirmed by controlled experiment. They can nonetheless make claims to cogency based on common experience and the empirical validity of the concepts to which they appeal. Previous Evolutionary Commentaries on Hamlet Storey, Scalise-Sugiyama, and Boyd all comment on Laura Bohannan ’s essay on Hamlet.3 (Oddly, though writing several years after Storey, making many of the same points, and using sometimes nearly identical phrasing, Scalise-Sugiyama does not cite Storey or include his book in her bibliography. Boyd cites both Storey Intentional Meaning in Hamlet 125 and Scalise-Sugiyama.) Bohannan is an ethnographer who in the sixties lived among the Tiv, a nonliterate Nigerian tribal people, and recorded their ways. She told them the story of Hamlet, and they responded volubly, commenting on the play, criticizing the actions of the characters, and interpreting the events in accordance with their own customs and beliefs. For instance, the Tiv do not believe in ghosts, so they assumed that Hamlet’s vision of the ghost was the result of witchcraft, in which they do believe. They felt it was wrong for Hamlet to seek revenge himself instead of asking for help from older relatives. Marrying a deceased brother’s wife is obligatory for them, so they see no reason for Hamlet to...