Hamlet in His Modern Guises (review)

"It seems that Shakespeare prepared Hamlet well for an unexpected role in modern history" (70). This sentence concludes the second chapter of Alexander Welsh's book and functions as a hinge for its argument. Two chapters devoted to Shakespeare's preparation for the unexpected are followed by three that explore his hero's resurgence in novels by Goethe, Scott, Dickens, and Melville, ending with a brief abstract and chronicle of Hamlet's modernist guises in Hugo, Mallarmé, Laforgue, Joyce, and Murdoch.

As this summary indicates, the history in question is literary. Welsh places Hamlet in it first by comparing Shakespeare's version of his character and story to those of Saxo and Belleforest. Although the comparison looks back to literary precedents, it is, like the sentence quoted above, anticipatory from the start, centering on the prescience of Shakespeare's innovations. These serve to consolidate the related themes of family and mourning. "As in King Lear," Welsh observes, "the main result of introducing a subplot in Hamlet is to generalize the relations of parents and children, to make it less possible to view the hero's situation as unique" (13). He proves an observant guide, leading us, for instance, from the oppressive meddling of the play's older generation (its parental figures) through Hamlet's telling aversion to courtly "compliance," concluding that "Shakespeare represented a young man not just wronged by his uncle but surmounted by parents" (23). Meanwhile Polonius accents the motif of parental overbearance with so much flair that Ophelia "well may be said to have 'drowned herself in her own defense'" (23).

Turning from the story's ancestry to its generic affiliation with revenge tragedies, Welsh turns as well from the keynote of generational conflict within the family to its antithetical complement, grief extended in mourning. The burden of English revenge tragedy, he observes, is that "grief finds relief in anger, and anger in violence" (39). In violence or, it turns out, in the hypothesis, the fiction, of violence: The Spanish Tragedy, Welsh observes, makes clear "that, where mourning is concerned, the contemplation of revenge is as efficacious as revenge itself" (44). In Hamlet this contemplative impulse dominates as never before, but in doing so, it heightens what was already characteristic of revenge tragedies, their exploration of the relations among grief, anger, guilt, killing, and conscience—heightens it so much that Shakespeare's handling of these themes may have inspired Freud's conception of the superego and his view of the relations between guilt and aggression (69).

Central to this chapter are ideas put forward by Freud in the celebrated essay "Mourning and Melancholia" (his "superior contribution to the study of Hamlet," as opposed to "the classic Oedipal theory" [51]). Unfortunately, the author does not engage critical or theoretical work that stems from poststructuralist readings of Freud. Judith Butler, for example, has rethought the place of Freud's 1917 essay in psychoanalytic theories of ego-formation and, by extension, of gender identity, a development rich in its implications for our reading of Hamlet. The Continental tradition represented in Butler's work has left its mark on Shakespeare studies, but Welsh's generally well-informed references to modern criticism of Hamlet studiously ignore this work: Theodore Lidz, Arthur Kirsch, C. L. Barber and Richard P. Wheeler, Peter Sacks, William Kerrigan, and Janet Adelman are cited, but not Marjorie Garber or Steven Mullaney, whose 1994 essay in Shakespeare Quarterly might have put salutary pressure both on the modernizing bias of Welsh's account and on its theoretical reticence.¹ Consider this observation on the closet scene:

While the family quarrel of Hamlet with his mother rages in the foreground, in the background is a sort of tableau: a crossing between the vertical and the horizontal of the play's two dead fathers. Hamlet contrasts two ways of imagining the dead: the difference between the ways we choose to see, or cannot help...